Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power (32 page)

Herein is the essential Tagore. War may be necessary but it is so pitiful that no monuments should be built to it. War, military glory, and the like are worse than wrong; they are, like nationalism, “unaesthetic.” Beauty, that is to say, is moral and universal. And anything that is not moral and universal cannot be beautiful.

Tagore was truly a visionary in the sense that his lifetime (1861–1941) corresponded with the age of nationalism, even as he went beyond it and saw a larger solidarity group above the state, that of humanity. He was not opposed to nationalism or patriotism, only to nationalism or patriotism as the highest good. He understood the yearning that led to patriotism, just as Saint Augustine understood the yearning that led to tribalism, which in the late classical age served to unite large groups of people peacefully. But both men knew these longings as stepping-stones to larger unions.

Tagore was the ultimate syncretist, a constant blender of cultures and peoples in his work and thoughts. There is no beautiful Bengali landscape in his view, only the glorious “Earth.”
¹²
As such, he was an inveterate traveler and pilgrim, writes the Harvard scholar Sugata Bose: to Iran, Iraq, Southeast Asia, Japan, and so on. Like Curzon, Tagore thought of a greater India. But whereas Curzon and latter-day Indian nationalists have had a monolithic political and strategic vision, Tagore had an
inter-woven cultural one, seeing, for example, the “lineaments of a universal brotherhood of Sufi poets bridging the Arabian Sea.”
¹³
Tagore’s mental map of Asia was a seamless tapestry of overlapping nationalities and cultures in which, for instance, a greater India dissolved into a greater Persia and into greater Malay and Balinese cultures, in the same way that Hinduism and Islam dissolved into each other in the rural eastern Bengal that he knew so well. There were no borders in Tagore’s worldview, only transition zones. He would smile knowingly at discussions about a future Kurdistan, Sunnistan, Pashtunistan, Greater Azerbaijan, and other variations to the current cartography of the Near East, for Tagore thought of the world in terms of a holistic, multidimensional map. For him, a place like Kurdistan has always existed, layered atop Turkey, Iraq, and Iran rather than in contradiction to those states. This is why Tagore could talk about having a “blood relationship” as an Indo-Aryan with the Iranians, without coming across as racist or ethnocentric.
¹⁴
Blood relationships are easily acknowledged if one’s worldview celebrates all blood relationships, as well as cultural and spiritual ones, as he did.

Nevertheless, Tagore was not a globalist, if that means giving up one’s national or ethnic identity. He grasped intuitively that to appreciate other cultures one had to be strongly rooted in one’s own. He understood that the “universal” could be implanted only in many rich and vibrant localisms. He was, in other words, a perfectly enlightened man for the early twenty-first century who, as Sugata Bose suggests, encapsulated the spirit of the Indian Ocean world.

In a “poem-painting” signed “Baghdad May 24, 1932,” during a trip to Iraq, Tagore writes:

The irony is that for the neo-Curzonian vision to succeed, Tagore’s must also, for it is only by getting beyond the narrowing perspective of nationhood that India can gain the trust of its neighbors, in order to organically expand its own sphere of influence. Politics must follow geography and culture in this regard. As Raja Mohan put it to me in conversation, “Kolkata will always be Lhasa’s closest outlet to the sea. The goal, then, is make that geographical fact linking Tibet and India a reality, through thinking big enough to overcome borders.” Realpolitik with a conscience is what India, and the West, too, require, for in the broader competition with China, the power with the most benign and cosmopolitan vision will ultimately have the upper hand.

I
stood in a vast wasteland of upturned soil stretching miles to the horizon, as long convoys of trucks moved earth uphill on switchback trails from one part of the construction site to another, with Chinese foremen in hard hats directing the operation in the terrific heat and dust. A deep, man-made canyon with a flat and yawning valley floor was emerging; as well as two jetties, one of which was ten football fields in length. This massive dredging project—literally the creation of a new coastline farther inland—would soon be the inner harbor of the Hambantota seaport, near Sri Lanka’s southern extremity, a point close to the world’s main shipping lanes where more than thirty thousand vessels per year transport fuel and raw materials from the Middle East to East Asia.

By 2023, Hambantota is projected to have a liquefied natural gas refinery, aviation fuel storage facilities, and three separate docks giving the seaport a transshipment capacity, as well as dry docks for ship repair and construction, not to mention bunkering and refueling facilities.
¹

It was a fifteen-year construction project about which the Sri Lankans were both proud and sensitive: proud that their country could eventually move beyond being a byword for ethnic conflict to emerge as a strategic node of global maritime commerce; sensitive because it was not they, but the Chinese, who were both building and financing the seaport. Thus, access to the site was strictly regulated. To see the enormity of the project I had to trespass into a secure area and ended up under arrest. I was detained in the Hambantota police station for seven hours until charges were dropped.
*

Like Gwadar in Pakistan, the Hambantota region constitutes a stunning seascape of thundering surf, poised to be a twenty-first-century place-name. This would be in keeping with the town’s situation in antiquity, when as part of the Kingdom of Ruhuna it formed a branch of the maritime silk route. The present-day town of twenty thousand constitutes only a few streets of bustling storefronts, with wooden fishing boats stacked four abreast at the little harbor, as well as jammed onto the beach in low tide. (In many cases, the boats are owned by Muslims of Malay origin).
^†

The beachfront hotel where I stayed had a truly deserted, edge-of-the-earth feel with only two other guests. It had been reconstructed on the ruins of the hotel destroyed during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which had also destroyed all the boats on the beach before new ones were built with aid from the international community. The tsunami killed 35,000 people in Sri Lanka and made 400,000 homeless. Indeed, Hambantota constitutes a visual shorthand for the Indian Ocean during the current phase of history, a victim of the tsunami and a beneficiary of China’s rise as a great power.

Before the start of the seaport project, Hambantota had been a backwater of Sri Lanka, known only for the time at the beginning of the twentieth century when the great English man of letters Leonard Woolf had been an assistant government agent here. Woolf, later the husband of Virginia Woolf and the director of the famous Hogarth Press, used his time in Hambantota to gather material for a brilliant novel about the cruelties of rural life in this corner of Ceylon,
The Village in the Jungle
, published in 1913. In fact, just behind the town there still lurks the dry-zone, scraggily palm forest with its putty red soil reminiscent of the book.

Azmi Thassim, head of the local chamber of commerce, who proudly told me the story of Leonard Woolf in Hambantota, insisted that the seaport project was a Sri Lankan and not a Chinese one. He noted that
Hambantota’s strategic maritime position and deep depths close to shore had made it an ideal place for a new port for decades; in fact, the Canadians had been involved for a time in the drawing-board phase before the Chinese and Sri Lankans initialed their far-reaching deal in 2007. “We lack the funds and expertise, and, therefore, looked for foreign support.” Hambantota, he said, also had plans for a conference center and a new airport in which the Chinese likely would not be involved, just as once the seaport was completed, the Chinese probably would not be the ones operating it.

The chamber leader is right in an important sense. China’s move into the Indian Ocean constitutes less an aggressive example of empire building than a subtle grand strategy to take advantage of legitimate commercial opportunities wherever they might arise in places that matter to its military and economic interests. China is adroitly riding a wave of economic history rather than plotting it out in the first place. As in Gwadar, where the Port of Singapore Authority will be managing a Chinese-built port, China will have at least one layer of separation between its goals and ground-level reality. China does not need to run any harbor. It requires only state-of-the-art port and bunkering facilities for its merchant fleet and possibly its warships in places where Beijing works hard to maintain excellent diplomatic and military relations. Hambantota and other such ports will constitute flow-through centers where vast quantities of Chinese manufactured goods destined for Middle East, South Asian, and Southeast Asian markets can be temporarily stored. Thus, Hambantota is emblematic of China’s budding yet exquisitely elusive empire, built on soft power.
²

In the world of late antiquity, Ceylon—strategically located at the hinge between the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea—was the entrepôt between China and the Middle East. As George Hourani writes, Chinese ships used to sail as far west as Ceylon, and from Ceylon westward trade was in the hands of the Persians and Axumites (from present-day Ethiopia).
³
Chinese admiral Zheng He broke that pattern by using Ceylon as a base for sailing as far west as the Horn of Africa, making two trips to the island. He erected a trilingual tablet here in 1410 that was unearthed exactly five hundred years later near Galle, close to the southernmost point of Sri Lanka and the Indian Subcontinent. The message inscribed in Chinese, Persian, and Tamil invoked the blessings of the Hindu deities
for a peaceful world built on trade. The year before, the Chinese had invaded Ceylon and made their way as far as the Buddhist hill capital of Kandy, where they captured the Sinhalese king and queen and members of the court as retribution for not handing over a sacred relic—a tooth of the Buddha—some years earlier.
⁴

The Chinese occupied Ceylon for thirty years in the fifteenth century. This was before the European assault that would include occupations by the Portuguese, Dutch, and British, a historical epoch that ended only in the mid-twentieth century. The fact that the Chinese got here before the island fell under western tutelage makes China’s current policy in Sri Lanka and the Indian Ocean compatible with local history, and the expensive commemoration in Beijing of Zheng He’s voyages demonstrates that is how the Chinese themselves view it.

China’s activities in Sri Lanka reveal that China, in the words of one Indian naval officer, is ready to “drop anchor at India’s southern doorstep.” China is involved in building a billion-dollar development zone in Hambantota that features the deepwater harbor that I saw being constructed, in addition to a fuel-bunkering facility, oil refinery, and other infrastructure that the chamber leader did not mention.
⁵
The complex may one day be used as a refueling and docking station for China’s navy as it patrols the Indian Ocean and protects Chinese supplies of Saudi Arabian oil. Amid the Indian Ocean’s key sea lines of communication, Hambantota is in the same part of the island near where Zheng He’s fleet landed six hundred years earlier. With India constrained in providing military assistance to the Buddhist Sinhalese government in the capital of Colombo because of the political sensitivities of its own Hindu Tamil population, China, along with Pakistan, has been filling the gap. China has supplied Sri Lanka with fighter aircraft, armored personnel carriers, anti-aircraft guns, air surveillance radar, missiles, and rocket-propelled grenades. China’s aid to Sri Lanka jumped from a few million dollars in 2005 to $1 billion in 2008; by comparison, the United States gave only $7.4 million. The U.S. suspended military aid in 2007 over the human rights abuses of the Sinhalese government in its civil war against ethnic Tamils; China, which is also involved in gas exploration here, as well as the building of a coal power plant at a cost of $455 million, has had no such moral qualms.
⁶