Professor Wang Gungwu , University Professor, National University of Singapore speaks on ' cultural Transfers in History'at the Global Education Summit at Presidency University, last year..

Professor Wang Gungwu.

He started by saying that as a historian he loved historic occasions and the 200^th bicentenary  of Hindu College/ Presidency College ,at which he was  now speaking, was a historic occasion.  He said he was especially drawn to Presidency, which was linked to the name of Raja Rammohun Roy, as the first great institution of learning in modern India. This moment provided him with an opportunity to look back at his own past and recall that he had been taught by Mr Sengupta in his primary school and how he had learnt from his teacher about the University of Calcutta, which his teacher had told him, was the greatest university in Asia. Mr Sengupta would speak of the achievements of the Bengalis and about Netaji. Professor Yang Gungwu declared that he had grown up he had heard several references to India, but his sense of the country was ‘modulated’ by this ‘very early experience of being told about the University of Calcutta’.

He said that he had been requested by Professor Sugata Bose and the Vice Chancellor to speak on the ‘future of education’ as a ‘historian’. He said that one can dream and plan for the future but it is ‘uncertain. However, the past is also ‘uncertain’. Professor Gungwu went on to say that history or the past is ‘constructed’ and that historians used the past ‘selectively’. He too in this lecture was going to use the ‘past selectively’   to speak about the ‘uncertain’ future, and in the process ‘help present generations construct something that may be useful to them’.

In 1991, at the Centenary of the University of Chicago, there was a Swiss Professor who spoke on the history of universities  and posited that the idea of the university was inevitably European and that the spread of universities throughout the world was nothing but the ‘Europeanization’ of the world.  It is ‘true that behind great civilizations there are great universities’, Professor Gungwu said, but he was really shaken by this historian’s statement, because he was working in a modern university of Asia (Hong Kong university), considered it to be a big step forward, and to be told that all universities derived their structures from Europe, and this structure had been provided by the ‘culture of Greece and Rome’, invalidated the achievements of the modern Asian university.  Being ‘competent’ within this system simply meant how well we had adapted to the ‘culture of Greece and Rome’.  He also wondered if it was possible to take the lessons that the European model could teach and make it innately Asian.

He said that he was from South East Asia. He was born in Java, grew up in Malaysia, studied Eastern civilizations in China, was Vice Chancellor of Hong Kong University and was now at the National University of Singapore. He went on to say that in Southeast Asia, the ‘origins of culture’ are ‘very closely linked to that of India’.  The ‘degree and intensity’ of the cultural influence of India cannot be denied, yet there are no proper records of origins, and no definitive conclusions either, about how it actually came about.  Professor Gungwu posited that in recent times Tagore was certainly central in cementing cultural ties between South East Asia and India.

Professor Gungwu went on to say that there must have been some element in the ‘local, indigenous genius’ of South East Asia that looked towards India for ‘inspiration’, assimilated it and modulated and ‘transformed it ‘according to its own cultural imperatives.  South East Asia took ‘ideas’ ,’situations’ ‘values’, art and architecture and recreated it in temple structure and architecture like Angkor Vat and Borobodur,which is distinctively South East Asia  and not India.  In these moments of original influence or cultural transfer, the Professor said, there was no ‘violence’ or ‘war’.  It was ‘a cultural transfer that was entirely peaceful, took a long time and internalized’ by the people of Java, Cambodia and Champa.  The people of these islands felt ‘inspired by Indian values’. It was like those islands that today comprise South East Asia, saw into the ‘soul and spirit’ of India.  It was a cultural transfer ‘without any goal’ on India’s part, and based on ‘sympathetic understanding’ between two groups of people with different ethnicities and racial differences.

Another cultural and spiritual influence that was perhaps tied to this phenomenon is the travelling of Buddhism from India to China. Again, this cultural transfer which the Chinese people  assimilated and accepted, because it profoundly appealed and resonated somewhere deep in their being,  was not ‘systematic’ , nor was there any attempt to ‘convert’ . It was very ‘peaceful’ and an ‘extraordinary transfer’, whereby the Chinese people integrated the ‘wonderful treasures’ of Buddhism, and made it their own.  There ‘were no wars, no fighting, and no compulsion’. As Indian Buddhist monks had initially gone to China, to spread the message of the Buddha, Chinese monks alternatively came to Nalanda in India, took manuscripts back and ensured through such visits that they had understood the Buddha’s message correctly.  Many of these monks also passed through South East Asia on their way back and forth, and Buddhism also took root in this area. As early as the 7^th century, the Sutras were already to be found in Srivijay. The culture of Srivijay dominated South East Asia between 8^th C.E—12 C.E.

After the ‘cultural transfer’ of Buddhism, other religious communities also tried to introduce a sphere of influence in China—the Zoroastrians, the Syrian Christians and Islam. However, they hardly succeeded in having much impact. As far as the islands of South East Asia were concerned the starting of what one would call the ‘Modern Age’, and the growth of the empires of Europe, Christianity (Catholicism) came to the islands. Islam also took deep root in Indonesia. The days of Hinduism and Buddhism were over. Hinduism had survived for a 1000 years. Christianity came with the Spaniards. A Christian world started growing up in the heart of South East Asia. However, it was a process which was linked with the ‘might and power’ of the Christian/Catholic Church.  It was linked to the ‘military consolidation’ of power’. ‘Power brought the West to South East Asia’.

Referring to 1817, the year that saw the founding of Hindu College, Professor Gungwu declared that at that time, Singapore was a swamp.  He next referred to the watershed year of 1857 when the three universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were established.  He added that these universities were established within the ‘context of British wealth and power’. Even if we do not, he said, go into the question of which part of ‘British wealth and power’ appealed to the Indians, this education movement which culminated in the founding of these three universities was led by British academics and theoreticians of education. Indians certainly accepted the educational practices of what was then considered the most ‘modern’ country of the world.

Professor Gungwu then went on to say that 20—21 years later, Japan established the University of Tokyo on the Western model  (12^th April, 1877)because it felt that the West’s political and material superiority was based on the superiority of their university models. In short Japan linked the power and wealth of the West to its universities. Japan wanted to achieve what the West or Europe had achieved There was national consensus in Japan that they wanted prosperity along the Western model and to develop their nation along the lines of prosperity that the west stood for, reflected the ‘national purposefulness of the Meiji restoration’.  This ‘restoration’ was the ‘idea of gaining wealth and power for Japan after years of being second to China’.

Eventually, it was again, the promise of ‘wealth and power’ in the Japanese model of the university that prompted China to borrow the Japanese model.  At the end of the 19^th century there were 2 universities in China which were modelled on the University of Tokyo. China perceived that Japan had taken the western model and drawn true benefit out of it and made it work for the needs of Japan. China realized that they would have to take the Japanese model if they had to stand up to Japan in the future.  Professor Wang Gungwu reiterated once more that it was the desire for ‘wealth and power’ that motivated China to imbibe the Japanese model, much in the same way that Japan took the Western. Of course, the thirst for ‘knowledge’, the desire for ‘well-being’ and the belief that the ‘university was a force for progress’, also drove the formation of universities, but the paramount objective was the attainment of wealth and power and the need to make each country strong to not only protect themselves from each other but also from the West.

After speaking of how the university emerged in East Asia, Professor Wang Gungwu next spoke of  the emergence of  university education in South East Asia. He said that the entire stretch of land here, with the exception of Thailand, had been colonized. Thailand too had undergone British and French influence. The first universities that were set up in this region were at Hong Kong and Rangoon, which was of course, then part of India, and under British rule.

In the Philippines there was a  Catholic universitiy which could not be considered ‘modern’. Later on America took over this university and transformed it according to the American model. In the other British colonies there were universities set up to train people for the Services. In 1949, the British set up the University of Malaysia, on the eve of their departure from this country, and I was a freshman at this university at that time. Today this university is the National University of Singapore. In the case of all these universities however, there was no ‘cultural transfer’. There was undoubtedly ‘technological transfer’ whereby the countries of South East Asia imbibed the technological practices of the West, assimilated the know how and joined the race for ‘wealth and prosperity’. Over and over again, the Professor asserted that it was because we wanted the power that the West had that Asia emulated the Western model.

He then said that he would like to address the question that the Vice Chancellor had put to him: how does one get funding to do what one/the university wants to do? Without answered the question directly he said, that Professor Gungwu seemed to imply again, that it was the ‘wealth and prosperity’ dimension of ‘modern knowledge’ and the ‘role of the university’ in this, that had seemed of paramount importance in East Asia and South East Asia. Each country wanted to be a nation state, and this model of the university seemed the most congenial.

He also added that Singapore’s recent example of incorporating the Liberal Arts as part of national curricula in the universities was a heartening example, because it seemed to posit that not only would the universities benefit from such an alteration of syllabi, but also the nation. The fact that Humanities education was ‘national policy’ now in Singapore reinforced the value of the Humanities in aiding the productivity of Singapore as a nation, and syllabi had been prepared by looking at examples at Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, China and Japan. Thus Singapore had considered the Arts necessary in order to prepare students to face the future and in this there was some indication of what the ‘future’ of Higher Education may lie in.

Coming to the final part of his talk, the Professor then said that if asked to answer the question as to where the ‘future’ of Higher Education in India lay, he would find that a difficult question to answer, simply because India seemed like so many ‘nation states’ put together. Each state he said, referring to Mohandas Pai’s lecture earlier on in the day, had its own pace of development, its own cultural practices and idioms. He said he was not sure whether there should be one university, or universities or a variety of universities. He posited that he was trying to ‘find something in the past’ that would help him ‘imagine’ the future.

Professor Gungwu went on to say that he knew that there were many alternatives in India, Liberal Arts Colleges, purely technology oriented institutions and he said that he knew that there were efforts to integrate this vastly diversified and ‘complex’ system to ensure that educational institutions did not function in ‘isolation’. However, he said, that given the desire for ‘wealth and power’ one would have to see how much of the West to take, and how much to leave untouched. He emphasized that it was important to keep something of one’s roots and one’s spiritual and ethical values, because a purely ‘materialist’ culture was leaving many young people in states of identity crisis and anxiety and uneasiness. It was not clear at this point whether Professor Gungwu was speaking of Indian contexts or that of Asia or the world, in general. He concluded by asking the philosophical question as to whether we were getting ‘anywhere’ by emulating the Western model without reference to our own cultural values?

Professor Charles Bailyn added valuable comments. He said that when the Yale/ Singapore University collaboration was first floated of which he was an integral part for five years, many of his colleagues were opposed to the idea because they had a distaste for what Singapore stood for. However, Bailyn convinced them that wealth and prosperity should be used for the growth and development of intellectual and philosophical culture.  He said that the greatest challenge for universities was in striking the ideal balance between emphasis on intellectual culture and that on framing syllabi that would lead to material prosperity.  Professor Gungwu replied in part by saying that recent examples proved (and perhaps he was referring to Yale’s collaboration with SNU) that it was only when wealth and security was earned  that countries felt that they could think of the rest of the world.