Ireland, India, and the Poetics of Internationalism

By: Gauri Viswanathan (Columbia University)

By the time of home rule agitation in both Ireland and India, anti-Bcolonial movements blended into a more internationalist vision then beginning to emerge in the years following the First World War. To extreme nationalists, internationalism was a complete anathema, a more refined term to prolong the evils of colonialism indefinitely under the guise of a universal humanism. However, to those who still considered themselves nationalists but believed they had a responsibility that extended far beyond the immediate goal of liberation from colonial rule, internationalism was the only solution to a world totally sundered by ethnic fratricide. The frightening reality of states at war with each other threatened to engulf with equal devastation those states aspiring to newfound independence. Therefore, when the Indian poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore raised his voice in India on behalf of the “expanding soul of humanity,” the language of universalism that underlined his appeal for “some spiritual design of life” earned him brickbats from his compatriots, who mocked his views as hopelessly romantic and beguiled.¹	1
Incidentally, Tagore was a puzzle not only to his own countrymen. He equally intrigued those in other countries who looked to Indian anticolonialism as a potential model for combating racism in their societies. For instance, a short but cryptic letter by Tagore to The Crisis, a periodical devoted to African American issues that was at the time edited by W. E. B. DuBois, raised eyebrows among African American readers. They were rightly stunned that Tagore, “a colored man,” should so strike a universalist note even while experiencing the most humiliating forms of racism.² Tagore’s call to Indians and other oppressed subjects to break out of the “forced seclusion of our racial tradition” astounded those who were trying to recover all that had been suppressed by centuries of white oppression. Tagore’s declaration that “we must show, each in our own civilization, that which is universal in the heart of the unique” appeared to reintroduce the colonial logic of universal humanism, just as his appeal to fellow subjects to harmonize their growth with “world tendencies” seemed to place the center of their cultural development outside themselves. Yet as DuBois admitted, in a moment of total agreement with Tagore, the struggle against racism in the African American community was falling victim to the same provincialism that had given the defining strokes to European colonialism and American white supremacy.	2
Tagore’s isolation, especially in India, was all the more pronounced because his stance on internationalism as the political philosophy of the future appeared to converge with that of Europeans then residing in India. Indeed, internationalism appeared to many to have become the cultural priority of European émigrés in India who, neither sympathetic to the continuance of British colonial rule nor keen on seeing a violent takeover by extremist nationalists, favored a more spiritual successor to the inevitable demise of empire. Movements with a global reach, such as theosophy, gained strength during the same period, advocating a “brotherhood of man” as a metaphysical counterpart to a British commonwealth destined to supersede empire. From our own perspective as critics of the discourses of both nationalism and colonialism, the real challenge lies in evaluating the motives and intentions of those advocating internationalism. Were they simply continuing colonial rule in a different form? Or were they genuinely crafting a worldview that sought an ideal meeting point as much between philosophy and politics as between a narrow, provincial nationalism and rank colonialism?	3
Among Tagore’s most avid supporters was the Irish poet James Cousins. Born in Belfast in1873, he left a flourishing poetic career in Dublin and settled in India at the behest of the theosophist Annie Besant, who invited him to be the new literary subeditor of her newspaper New India. Though Cousins’s views on theosophy were fairly unexceptional, virtually alone among theosophists he developed a perspective on war, violence, and fratricide that allowed for a creative synthesis of spirituality and politics and brought him much closer to post-nationalist forms of thinking about decolonization—views that were highly suspect at the time.³ His sympathy for Tagore was sparked by the hostility shown by many Indians to the latter’s internationalism, to which they opposed their own nationalism as the only viable response to the oppressions of British rule. To Cousins the distinction ill served the nationalist aspirations of the vast majority of Indians. He joined his voice to Tagore’s to argue that, by imposing narrowness and exclusiveness on its aims and methods, Indian nationalism proved that its true enemy was not the British but, rather, itself. Describing nationalism as an “act … of national selfishness,” but without quite dismissing it as false consciousness, Cousins maintained that the emerging anticolonial sentiment in India was producing a new racialism, the “enlargement of consciousness beyond mere personal interest towards the realisation of a corporate life in the geographical or racial groupings called nations.”⁴ Like Tagore, he maintained that nationalism’s self-centeredness cut it off from world unity, turned creative energy into destructive fever, and set up antagonisms generating more antagonisms.⁵ Cousins reiterated in forum after forum that the enemy of Indian nationalism was not internationalism but an alien self-absorption. Needless to say, to Indian intellectuals such statements had the inflammatory power of a “red rag to a bull,”⁶ and they saw both Tagore and Cousins as hijacking the agenda for freedom from British rule and turning it into a more benign form of colonialism.	4

Literary Migrations
James Cousins’s advocacy of internationalism marked the culmination of a poet’s career split between Ireland and India. In his native Ireland Cousins had built an established literary reputation as a prolific author of numerous collections of poems and plays, and he was at the helm of literary activities involving Ireland’s cultural renewal. His standing in the Irish literary revival was undisputed, yet his name drops out of the canon on his departure from Ireland to India in1915. Though Cousins continued to publish poetry in the four decades he spent in India, this work, along with his voluminous output of literary criticism, has received little if any critical attention even in India where, on the other hand, his work in education and public service is fondly remembered and celebrated. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, Cousins was a failed poet who had sacrificed whatever talent he had by migrating to India and throwing his lot in with an esoteric movement more interested in occult happenings than literary achievements. In a strange admixture of condescension and compatriot feeling, Padraic Colum describes his efforts to see Cousins published in America as doomed to failure from the outset. Colum writes, referring to himself somewhat pompously in the third person, “The year was 19—, and James Cousins was then on a tour of the United States. So too was Padraic Colum, but Colum already had a substantial following and was the toast of the lecture-circuit. By contrast, Cousins wore a more anonymous face, acquiring the vague appellation of the ‘Irish Poet from India,’ a title conferred by William Rose Benét writing for the Saturday Review of Literature.”⁷	5
Padraic Colum’s comradely but dismissive comments about Cousins’s work might appear not unwarranted under the circumstances. After all, the market for poetry is never a certain one, especially the poetry of a man who could not be placed in any single, comprehensible tradition of writing. How were Western critics to deal with the work of a man who fused Irish mythological heroes and Hindu deities, or whose sense of poetic location was a blur between Dublin and Madras? Yet, until Cousins left Ireland permanently in 1915, he was widely regarded as an accomplished poet who held great promise in rising to greater heights. The poetry he wrote prior to 1915 was included in a number of significant anthologies of Irish verse, such as the Dublin Book of Irish Verse, 1728–1909 (1909), the Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse (1916), Anthology of Irish Verse (1948), 1000 Years of Irish Poetry (1949), and the Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1958). And though disparaged by Yeats and Joyce as a mere versifier, Cousins was a respected member of Irish literary and intellectual circles and stood at the forefront of a movement to revive Irish arts. And indeed even Yeats’s and Joyce’s contempt for his poetic talents was not entirely on aesthetic grounds, since it was also laced by a nervous apprehension about his popular reach. James Joyce, for instance, carped at Cousins for being favored by publishers who at one time rejected Joyce’s work and published Cousins’s poetry instead. In a string of biting doggerel stanzas Joyce lampooned what he considered his rival’s contrived poetical ear.⁸ Yet for all the sneering by Yeats and Joyce, there was no denying the active involvement of both James Cousins and his wife Margaret in all aspects of Irish political and literary life, the full range of which is measured by their embrace of a curious blend of scientific and antiscientific interests. They were involved in such diverse topics as astrology, theosophy, occultism, vegetarianism, agricultural cooperatives, mythology, the promotion of the Gaelic language, the revival of Irish drama, women’s suffrage, anti-imperialism, reincarnation, and antivivisection. Whatever the perspective in writing about the central figures embracing this range of interests and heterodoxies in Dublin in the early twentieth century, it was a fact that, as one critic observes, “the same name (Cousins) drops again and again.”⁹	6
How then did it come about that James Cousins’s name virtually vanished from the Irish literary canon, allowing Padraic Colum to demote Cousins unceremoniously to the ranks of a marginal, indeed unknown, poet? Acknowledged in Ireland at one time as a promising writer and committed intellectual, Cousins remained in other people’s shadows all his life, perhaps achieving some measure of personal recognition only in India, where, on the other hand, he was better known for his contributions to education and social service than for his poetry and literary criticism. Certainly Cousins’s name does not even enter as a passing whisper in any of the recent books on Irish studies, some of them justly acclaimed for their revisionist, postcolonial insights.¹⁰ The relegation of James Cousins to poetic oblivion is accepted with stoic resignation in the following comment by Alan Denson, a compiler of Cousins’s published record who was evidently on a crusade to save him from oblivion: “Words written or spoken by James Cousins or his wife Margaret E. Cousins were published widespread over three continents and at least eight countries, for almost sixty years. If at all, they are remembered now only in India.”¹¹ Yet, as the same editor notes in an unabashedly partisan burst of indignant protest against the poet’s neglect, “whilst [Yeats and Joyce] lived out their lives in service to their own self-centered ideals, Cousins devoted his best energies and his subtlest intellectual powers to the education of the young and the welfare of the poor and the oppressed.”¹²	7
One important reason for Cousins’s marginalization is his own tenuous position within the Theosophical Society, as well as in India under British rule. Though Annie Besant recruited him from Ireland to run her newspaper New India, she abruptly dismissed him when he wrote a series of trenchant articles on the Easter Rising of1916. As a result of these fiery articles, Cousins was closely monitored by the British authorities, who regarded him as a subversive radical threatening to extend support to Indian insurgents.¹³ Though James Cousins remained scrupulously loyal to Annie Besant, his wife Margaret felt no such compulsion and lambasted Besant for her hypocrisy and political cowardice.¹⁴ Out of a job and adrift in India, Cousins subsequently accepted a teaching position in Madanapalle College, several hundred miles north of Madras. Removed from the main center of activities in Madras, where the Theosophical Society was located, and discouraged by the daunting challenges of teaching English poetry in the provinces, Cousins felt acutely marginalized, but never without purpose. He turned his position to good advantage by immersing himself in the educational reconstruction of India, while at the same time fusing his developing theories of education with sustained work in literary and art criticism. A visiting professorship in Japan during the heyday of Japa-nese modernism in art and literature clarified his own thinking about the potential models India needed most as it struggled to emerge from under the shadow of the West and assert its own distinctive voice. While in Japan, he met numerous artists, pacifists, and intellectuals, such as Kakuzo Okakura, Nuguchi, Tami Koume, and Paul Richard, who were all trying to find a pan-Asian alternative to the incursions of Western civilization. His exposure to the convulsive debates in Japan on the attractions of Western modernization convinced him that India could not go the way Japan did in its uncritical embrace of the West as the source of its own artistic experimentations. He saw in Japan a country that had turned its back on the richness of its own traditions, sacrificing creative inspiration for a hollow imitativeness. This view was to stay with him in his exploration of indigenous alternatives to the legacies of Western culture as India emerged from colonial rule, even as he resisted nationalism as a viable political philosophy.	8
Cousins’s marginalization in Ireland after 1915—the year he sailed to India—must also be related to the momentous event in Ireland that occurred less than a year later. That event, of course, is the Easter Rising of 1916, which profoundly affected the ways that Irish intellectuals, writers, and artists henceforth approached the question of Irish nationalism. The catastrophic aftermath of the armed struggle for Irish nationhood, the executions of civilians, and the doomed heroism of the Irish insurgents all combined to throw Irish nationalism back into the post-Parnellite factionalism of earlier, bitter days. Yeats was provoked to write to Lady Gregory: I had no idea that any public event could so deeply move me—and I am very despondent about the future. At the moment I feel that all the work of years has been overturned, all the bringing together of classes, all of the freeing of Irish literature and criticism from politics.¹⁵	9
Yeats’s disappointment at the intrusion of politics into literature is a telling commentary on the shattering impact of the Easter rebellion. The conviction that Irish writers could no longer indulge in pure romance would have in itself contributed to marginalizing someone like Cousins, who long after 1916 believed that the solution to world problems could emerge only outside a political framework. However, though Cousins may have already left Ireland by 1916 and was therefore out of the immediate circle of debate and discussion, it is quite another matter to say that his work had become dated because it could not engage directly with this pivotal event in Irish nationalism. Indeed, I have already referred to his New India articles on the Easter Rising, which caused his dismissal as literary subeditor and put him under the watchful eyes of the British in India.¹⁶ Furthermore, though he did not directly allude to the bloodshed of1916 in his poems, he did write a poem, “To Ireland, Before the Treaty of December, 1921,” that, in lines such as “for your night of agonies, / I give dark songs I cannot sing,” reflects his silent participation in a world no longer his. Numerous references to civil warfare in other poems reveal how disillusioned he had become by the violence unleashed by the movement for Irish home rule. The most outstanding of these poems is Cousins’s moving tribute to his friend and associate, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, with whom he had collaborated in publishing the newspaper The Pioneer in Dublin. Sheehy-Skeffington was, as Cousins describes him, “the first sacrificial victim in the Irish struggle at Easter, 1916,” who was shot without trial even though he was trying to restrain the people from disorder when arrested. “In Memory of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington” includes these sorrowful lines: When with dark wrongs we waged our strife, … You in the clash of iron powers Should fall, and, falling, shake the world.Cousins’s lament for the death of his close friend valiantly strives to balance the destructive consequences of the Irish revolt with the heroic impulses from which it arose.¹⁷	10
But Cousins expressed his most sustained response to the events of 1916 through his literary criticism. In several books on poetics and criticism published in India long after he left Ireland, he passionately argued that Ireland’s civil strife was symptomatic of a deeply flawed idealism existing at the core of the Irish literary renaissance, to which he directly traced the failed promises of the Irish political struggle. He maintained that the heady idealism of Ireland’s nationalists was compromised by a “self-centered realism” never able effectively to ground politics in a goal beyond itself. If the Irish literary renaissance, like the Irish political struggle, fell far short of its aims, Cousins was convinced it was because of the movement’s ineffective resolution of the opposing pull between romance and realism. Although this dissatisfaction was not his alone, what was distinctive is that the Easter Rising functioned in his critical writings as a tragic counterpoint to a more fruitful, alternative model that he found in the Aryan heritage of modern Indian nationalism. In the process of setting up an antithesis between the differential paths of Irish and Indian nationalism, Cousins reintroduced a language of race that, significantly and ironically, he made it the sole goal of his criticism to transcend.	11

Searching for Ireland in India
Before I unfold the full scope of Cousins’s complex and contradictory racial argument, let me briefly outline his path to this position. However much his cultural criticism may have grown out of his need to provide a corrective to the alignment of the arts with functionalism and pragmatism, he was all too aware of the political realities that informed his public role as critic and educator. The substantial body of his work published in India represents his attempt to work through issues of realism and idealism in art by applying theosophical principles, or what he typically called “deeper unities in literature.”¹⁸ Cousins claimed that his discovery of theosophy led him to a discovery of Ireland itself. But the discovery is made less on the principle of connection than on an awakened perception of the scale of both theosophy and Ireland. Whereas he had earlier learned about theosophy primarily from “small manuals,” as he contemptuously described them, just as Ireland too was dimly perceived as a place confined to the known and the familiar, subsequently Cousins came to understand place through metaphysical elaboration, mysticism, and esotericism. The gain in perspective partly resulted from his tendency toward dialectical thinking, which projected the density of place as a product of metaphysical abstraction.	12
However, his early Irish poems, which were starkly naturalistic rather than abstract, showed him having gone in a different direction. He claimed that A. H. Leahy’s new edition of the myth of the goddess Etain, Heroic Romances of Ireland (1905), had set his imagination alight with the vision of an embodiment of perfection captured by the goddess Etain, whom he imagined as descending from her original state as consort of the King of Fairyland to become the wife of the King of Ireland. Cousins’s interest in a legend whose trajectory of incarnation is from universal imagination to geopolitical reality was driven by the will to turn mythological fantasy into national possibility. He wrote, “Here was matter to my taste, the circle of the cosmic life completed in a single story, and with a nearness to the details of nature and of human psychology in its earthly phase that excited the imagination with the anticipated delight of recreating the beauties of the temporal on the background of the eternal.”¹⁹ Cousins’s compulsion to contain infinite planes of meaning within the recognizable limits of linear narrative was part of his attempt to reconcile the conflicting claims of idealism and realism in his representation of Ireland.	13
At the time that Cousins was at work on his poem “Etain the Beloved” (1912), he was also writing a book titled The Geography of Ireland, intended for publication by Oxford University Press. The book was never completed, but the two projects crystallized in his mind as a common one: he described the writing of Ireland’s geography—with its own national unity—as less a process of cartographic empiricism than of imaginative selection. Written over five summer vacations, each time in a different part of Ireland, “Etain the Beloved” blended the scenery from the various provinces with such control that the details of nature never went beyond those of Ireland: as Cousins phrased it, “no lion roared, no parrot shrieked.”²⁰ He disciplined his imagery never to exceed the bounds of Ireland and so delineated the geographical outlines of the nation through principles of selectivity and synthesis of remembered details dispersed across provinces. In “Etain the Beloved” he wrote the geography book that he never completed as a scholarly project, yet in form it combined the deepest impulses of geography, mysticism, and anti-imperialism. Filled with local details, the poem nonetheless connected in ever-expanding circles to incorporate other scales of existence that defined, for Cousins, the imaginative yet controlled possibilities of an emergent Ireland.²¹	14
The search for the reality behind the external Ireland led Cousins, through historical circumstances, into the folkloric bases of Irish Catholicism. Although, as he himself noted, a number of the reigning writers such as Yeats, AE, Douglas Hyde, and Samuel Ferguson were Protestants, he was convinced that, notwithstanding the Protestant domination of the arts, Irish civilization and culture lay elsewhere, but he was not prepared to say it resided in Catholicism. Rather, he argued that the sectarian divide prevented Irish culture from being fully captured by either Catholicism or Protestantism and so left its preservation in a pre-sectarian memory intact. If, for Cousins, organized Irish Protestantism had turned its back on Ireland, organized Irish Catholicism manifested a split consciousness: “Religiously it turned towards Rome, but it had eyes and sentiment for indigenous legendary remembrance.”²² Enveloped by anti-Catholic sentiments all around him and taught that all Catholicism is superstition and paganism, Cousins was transformed by the realization that superstition had a literary dimension, or, as he described it more poetically, that superstition was “rooted in the silt of a long stream of traditional imagination.”²³ That discovery creates a new understanding that anterior memories exceeding the history of sectarian conflict inhabit his own Protestantism. This realization marks the beginning of Cousins’s turn to difference as constitutive of Irish culture. In the long run, it prepared him for the discovery of India as both Ireland’s other and true self, even as it displaced the need to acknowledge Catholicism as Protestantism’s “other.”	15
Cousins’s attendance at a lecture given by Annie Besant on 1 October 1908—”a red-letter anniversary in my calendar”—literally changed his life.²⁴ Instructed as were most young Irishmen of the time that Besant was an agent of the devil, especially because of her long-time intellectual partnership with the atheist Charles Bradlaugh, Cousins might have been predisposed to dismiss her influence. But he had himself been driven closer to atheism at the time Besant arrived in Dublin, his readings in “sixpenny Rationalism” being more than a casual interest. Not only had he begun to read seriously about theosophy, but he had also turned to the heterodox sermons of those like the Rev. Frederick Robertson of Brighton, who “put Truth in a position in front of its utterance in the Bible.”²⁵ At any rate, by the time Annie Besant delivered her lecture on “Theosophy and Ireland” on that fateful day, Cousins was open to thinking about God and nation in different ways: “I gathered the idea that clairvoyance, or revelation, or both, declared a long process of racial and cultural evolution out of which Ireland was ultimately to emerge as the spiritual mentor of Europe, even as India had long ago been to Asia.”²⁶ The dialectical association of spirituality with race—and with the evolution through various species and subspecies—offered Cousins one point of entry into working through the problems of idealism and realism in his work. Even as a poet in Dublin, Cousins had begun to reject romanticized reveries about the Irish past and, under the influence of Huxley and Darwin, was drawn to intellectual agnosticism and scientific determinism. Soon becoming interested in mystical experience, he turned to India for inspiration, but not merely because he associated the land with mysticism. Rather, he found India to be the practical site of a resolution between romance and realism that had long eluded him. The poetry and criticism published in India marks Cousins’s engagement with as well as departure from the romanticist preoccupations of his fellow Irish poets, particularly Yeats and AE, as he sought out satisfactory models to deal with the pressing questions of decolonization and home rule, especially against the backdrop of European civil strife. I knew it would be suicidal for me to attempt to intimidate my imagination with either the personality or the poetry of AE or Yeats, though much of their early work had a permanent place in my memory. Mine must, to have any authenticity, be mine own, even if an ill-favoured thing. There was something to be sung, and a way of singing it. These should be at the highest.²⁷	16
Though eventually Cousins came to see India as the source of a spiritual revival throughout the world, it is also evident India first offered him a way of working through problems of a narrow nationalism in Irish literature—problems he could not resolve simply by mythologizing the Irish past.²⁸ While, like many Anglo-Irish writers of the early 1900s, Cousins, too, participated in the Irish dramatic movement writing romantic verse plays based on Celtic myth such as “The Sleep of the King” and “The Racing Lug,” he rejected mythological romance as too local and narrow. He found himself drawn to the larger project of establishing the common foundations of Irish-Indian culture as the first step toward the overthrow of colonial rule in both countries. In India he rewrote some of his earlier Celtic plays, reworking Hindu themes and legends into his new material in plays such as The King’s Wife (1919), a poetic drama based on the life of the Hindu female poet-saint Mirabai. Such changes were not well received by Cousins’s critics in Ireland who were prone to describing Cousins’s project of establishing Irish-Indian foundations as basically a “pagan” impulse. They saw such forms of experimentation as an expression of the fashionable anti-Christian feelings then running rampant, which, to his critics’ minds, self-consciously reproduced the tendencies against modernity, progress, rationalism, and materialism perceived to reside in the non-Western world.	17
Cousins’s move to India during the heyday of the home rule movement enabled him to do more than merely participate in the Indians’ agitation against British rule. By migrating to India from Ireland, he also sought to shape the literary expression of Indian nationalism by importing into India the concerns of the Irish literary renaissance. But while the importation would prove salutary in some respects, it resulted in a peculiar situation where Cousins’s remythologizing of the Irish past delinked him from Ireland and left him curiously removed from the realities of both place and time. The continuing use of Irish mythology in Cousins’s Indian poems, sometimes with an Indian twist, leads one to ask whether Cousins was as interested in recreating the Ireland of his remembered past as in evoking a different sense of place altogether. In this evocation “Ireland” is produced not as a real place but rather a literary, philosophical, and political concept, just as India, too, for Cousins had a connotation that far exceeded its geographical limits.²⁹ By leaving Ireland Cousins did not lose his place in the Irish literary canon so much as dislocate the canon itself. Everything that he wrote in India in continuation of his poetic career in Ireland was displaced and truncated, vitiating any claim that he might have had to a place in either Irish or Indian letters. His Irish work was carried over into the Indian context, but only imperfectly and discontinuously. Indeed, it is telling that his most lasting contributions were in the area of commentaries on Sanskrit poetics, a field he virtually remade his own as if to compensate for the diminished returns on the cultural capital he had invested in Ireland.	18
If, on one hand, Cousins was able to widen the nationalist net to include the parallel histories of two colonized societies, on the other his attempt to reinvent a mythology of cultural identity that could accommodate both Irish and Indian histories paradoxically deracinated him from one place while rooting him even less firmly in another. His muse may have remained Celtic, as he wrote, but that could not alter the fact that “nothing was quite right with the world for the purposes of a sensitive poet.”³⁰ The attempt to universalize the shared colonial histories of Ireland and India had the reverse effect of leading him to the recognition that local experience was too powerful to allow for such a category as human experience. Cousins realized this only when he tried to transfer the Christian concepts of atonement and incarnation first to Irish mythology and then to Hindu philosophy. He claimed that he had long suspected the doctrine of the Atonement because of its narrow interpretation of an event (the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ) for which both uniqueness and universality were claimed by the rival sects of Christianity. Yet he also felt that, under the “strange mixture of human disobedience and celestial bad temper leading to delegated crucifixion,”³¹ there lay some imperfectly expressed mystery of the universe and life. This became clearer when, in his studies in the old Celtic mythology, he came upon the legends of Cuchulain who, like Jesus, had a “reputed” father, the earthly Prince Sualtam, and a “real father, Lugh, the God of Light and Master of all Arts.” Cousins writes, “I came to realise that the localisation of universal truth was, in human conditions, an inescapable condition of expression; that all such expression everywhere had therefore to be interpreted by the intuition and imagination; and that any attempt to treat the local expression of universal truth as in itself final and universally obligatory was a fundamental error.”³²	19
It is evident in this statement how disparaging Cousins was of Christian Eurocentrism, but at the same time he resisted submitting to the view that all truth was relative. Though totally rejecting the imperialist belief that truth was “an entirely territorial and racial affair,” while also contesting the “dry-rot of Christian thought and experience”³³ as the only witness of spiritual truth, he attributed an exemplary power to Eastern thought that probably went too far in the other direction. Cousins’s sole logic in going this way was the simple one that, if Christianity’s claims to universal truth were based on the sense of its own “racial ascendancy,” then when other religions based their claims on nonracial grounds, their “truth” must be given greater credence. Therefore, when the hold of racial logic was broken, he believed it was possible to assert universal truth without submitting to the hegemonic control that racialism premised.³⁴ What is distinctive in Cousins’s argument is that, instead of adducing a relativist position from a Voltairean rejection of Christianity, he retained a universalist emphasis by detaching race and so he could assert the claims of non-Western religions to the status of truth. In a contradiction that was to unravel his argument, race is the central category underpinning his assessment of whether truth is relative or universal. Just as clearly, spirituality—and the internationalism that it promised—was impossible as long as the rhetoric of race continued to dominate the aspirations of both colonialists and nationalists. We can see here how closely Cousins’s views mirrored Tagore’s. Both their views depended crucially on distinguishing between what they believed was a contingent notion of truth and an idea of truth unshackled from hierarchical relations of power, privilege, and patronage.	20

Race and Spirituality
In making such distinctions, Cousins trapped himself in a web of contradictions that only showed the shifting connotations of spirituality in the nineteenth century. In his own usage, spirituality had associations with race, as I noted earlier when I cited his references to Irish spirituality as a product of racial evolution. In one of his most significant works, The Wisdom of the West: An Introduction to the Interpretive Study of Irish Mythology (1912), Cousins describes the resurgence of Irish literary pride as the discovery of a common Aryanism. He emplots literary history in terms analogous to Annie Besant’s and other theosophists’ deployment of a racial scheme,³⁵ tracing the culture of the Celts to an originary source in Asian religions. Subdivided into Aryan, Semitic, and Mongolian, these religions, he declares, had moved into Europe centuries before the birth of Christianity. Cousins cites Henry Maine’s Ancient Institutions to argue that the “cultural tendencies” left by these older religions included Brehon laws, which, he claims, had striking affinities to Vedic laws. Like Vedic laws that were challenged by English law, Brehon laws and institutions were contested and ultimately overthrown by the Roman law of England in the seventeenth century. The intertwining of Brehon and Vedic laws, like the interweaving of Irish and Indian cultures, provided racial continuity to their common struggle against British colonialism. In a remarkable passage Cousins writes: So subtly, however had the Aryan influence intermingled with the culture of Ireland that when, once again, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the ancient Asian spirit touched Ireland through the philosophy of India, as conveyed to it through the works of Edwin Arnold and the Theosophical Society, there was an immediate response. Two poets (AE and Yeats) found their inmost nature expressed in the Indian modes. They found also the spiritual truths that Asia had given to the world reflected in the old myths and legends of Ireland; and out of their illuminations and enthusiastic response arose the Irish Literary and Dramatic Revival whose influ-ence at its height was purely spiritual.³⁶The most striking aspect of Cousins’s description of ancient Hindu influence on the Celtic renaissance is how much at variance it is with prevalent accounts of Irish-Indian cultural influences. Far from understanding this interest in terms of the Orientalist scholarship available to Irish nationalist writers, Cousins insisted on a preexisting religio-racial mixture of Celt and Aryan. This unique mixture prepared the ground for the “discovery” of Asia’s spiritual truths. The mythologies of the past are preserved and reproduced by what Cousins clearly regarded as a racial imagination. Hence he could argue that the literary revival of his time was an awakened memory of what had, in epi-genetic terms, been suppressed by colonial rule.	21
Drawing on Sanskrit poetics in an attempt to find a unifying principle of human experience that surmounted the exigencies of colonial control, Cousins’s aesthetic theories anticipated and indeed even shaped attempts to construct a confederation of nations as a successor to Indian decolonization. Predicated on the Sanskrit principle of samadarshana, or synthetic vision, Cousins’s notion of internationalism had an aesthetic character that was little understood even by his own fellow theosophists. He took an avid interest in Indian art, challenging Walter Pater’s dismissal of Indian art for its “overcharged symbols.” What Pater saw as symbolic excess leading to vagueness and indeterminateness, Cousins interpreted as the capaciousness of samadarshana for overlapping meanings. Interestingly, Cousins saw the trend in contemporary European art verging toward the principle of samadarshana: postimpressionism and cubism were essentially concerned with overlapping and enfolding visions. Taking note of Virginia Woolf ‘s response to the first exhibition of postimpressionist paintings held in 1910 as evidence of how human consciousness had itself undergone a revolutionary change, Cousins was totally convinced that the literature of the twentieth century would be indelibly marked by these changes in perception and understanding. Indeed, he argued that it was largely through literature and art, andnot through the political order, that the new internationalism was being forged. Predicated on unity and composite vision, the aesthetic principles of Sanskrit literature were resurfacing in the Western poetic thought of the early twentieth century. The point of connection was synthesis, which Cousins claimed was the fundamental business of poetry. His preference for the poetry of the achieved vision rather than the analytic process of vision marked his search for a deeper unity in literature, rendering the antithesis between idealism and realism a false one. The complex delight in the process of exploration that the modern poets seemed to celebrate allowed for the unregulated, unpatterned search for unity that Cousins saw as a principle enshrined in samadarshana.	22
By describing himself as an inheritor of the intellectual legacies of Sanskrit poetics, English romanticism, and theosophy, Cousins fell back on a romanticist conception of bringing the creative intuition of the East and the critical intelligence of the West into a synthesis. Philosophically, his interest in Indian thought reflected his inner concern for the recovery of wholeness by civilizations that had forsaken spiritual growth for material progress. Politically, however, he felt such wholeness could be achieved only when colonialism was dismantled. And here resides an intractable problem in his thought, since even when he acknowledges the necessity for the dismantling of imperialism, Cousins insisted on seeking solutions outside a political framework. While internationalism was a goal of his work, both critical and creative, his attempt to realize world unity by reviving Indian nativism established a clear-cut polarity between Eastern spirituality and Western materialism. This polarity linked him perhaps self-evidently with English Romanticism. Yet at the same time, his own turn to romanticism grew out of his profound revulsion from the horrors of World War I, which filled him with determination to replace narrow national prejudice with a philosophy of internationalism—a philosophy with an aesthetic content but a political objective.	23

Internationalism, “Synthetic Vision,”and the New Romanticism
The central paradox is that Cousins’s internationalism was mediated by his avid interest in Indian nativism, and it is in this incessant move between national and international interests that Cousins expressed the impulses of a new romanticism. Devoting himself to the recovery of indigenous literary traditions with greater energy than even the Indian nationalists of the time, Cousins was committed to the rehabilitation of Indian ideals in the fields of art, literature, and education, but less so for the sake of engendering a mood of patriotism. Confident that what he called the “unitive” vision of Indian culture and philosophy could provide an answer to world problems, he saw India—the “mother of Asian culture”³⁷—as the focal point of a new world reconstruction. In a formulation borrowed from the famous axiom of the Japanese intellectual Kakuzo Okakura, who declared in The Ideals of the East that Asia is one, Cousins wrote, “In Asia all roads lead to India—or rather, all roads lead from India.”³⁸ Cousins’s pan-Asian faith was accentuated as much by his theosophical belief as by his study of the works of contemporary Western pacifists and writers such as AE, Edward Carpenter, Paul Richard, and Romain Rolland, all of whom affirmed that Asia could be the savior of the war-ridden West. The undermining of European imperialism therefore lay in a new romanticism whereby India’s spirituality would save Europe from self-destruction and undo the effects of its sustained imperial depredations. Imperial dismantling was thus conceived less as a cataclysmic gesture of political liberation than the timely inauguration of a new era of pacificism, internationalism, and romanticism.	24
At this point it is useful to elaborate Cousins’s very important concept of samadarshana, or synthetic vision, adumbrated most comprehensively in his work Samadarshana (Synthetic Vision): A Study in Indian Psychology (1925). This work best demonstrates Cousins’s deft deployment of his skills as a literary and art critic in the service of world reconstruction. It reveals a carefully considered, if decidedly idiosyncratic, theory about the Indian renaissance. Against the grain, Cousins argues in this work that nationalism was not the driving goal of India’s literary revival, as it was in the Irish. Because of a different motivation, the Indian literary renaissance followed exactly the opposite path of the Irish revival, with more fruitful results. While both movements were driven by a common spiritual orientation, Irish spirituality in Cousins’s view had become essentially compromised by the impulses toward a “material and self-centered realism.”³⁹ The result was a vicious internecine war whose level of violence was made possible, paradoxically, by the driving idealism of Irish nationalism.	25
India, on the other hand, was not hobbled by such contradictory impulses tearing between realism and idealism. What makes Cousins’s argument so intriguing, and at the same time so troubling, is that he attributes India’s escape from the fate of Ireland’s failed idealism to the continuing vitality of its Aryan heritage. For Aryanism, in his view, had the distinct ability to turn diversity into a form of unity, a term that he also comes to accept as interchangeable with similitude. In a rather remarkable statement, he observes that “the renaissances of India have been the recurrent protests of the apprehension of unity against a too elaborate diversity.”⁴⁰ Thus, for Cousins, the Indian renaissance is not a moment of political awakening, but instead the timely reassertion of racial unity against an all-consuming diversity. In short, the literary renaissance is a recapitulation of the Aryan experience in India, a symbolic reenactment of the Aryan conquest of pre-Aryan India.⁴¹ One should take note of the fact that Cousins avoids any association of the Indian literary renaissance with nationalism but rather identifies it with a movement toward aesthetic and philosophical unity. This fundamental difference between the Irish and the Indian renaissances explains for Cousins the differential path of internationalism in the two contexts. To the West, internationalism is a condition of release from political tyranny, “an event subsequent to the victory of the chained Titan over the tyrant Jove.”⁴² But to the East, he argues, internationalism is an existential condition, existing here and now; it is not bound by or dependent on a linear time frame for the attainment of political freedom, but has a repetitiveness and cyclical quality releasing it from world-historical trajectories. In the ultimate analysis, the spiritual East’s understanding of internationalism would have to be taken as the “measure and test of all movements that take to themselves the sacred name of freedom.”⁴³	26
And what is the nature of internationalism in Eastern thought, as Cousins understands it, and why is it a yardstick for evaluating liberation movements elsewhere? In a formulation that scrupulously avoided assigning political meanings altogether, Cousins described the struggle for freedom as essentially an expansion of consciousness.⁴⁴ Where such inner growth could be accommodated by external conditions, as at certain periods in history such as the Sung era in China between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, aesthetics and politics coexisted in perfect synchrony. During such times, human propensities for violence and coercion were kept in check as a matter of course by the refinements of cultural expression through literature, music, and art. On the other hand, where external circumstances (such as bureaucratic reason) resisted or opposed the expansive consciousness, the insistent demands of internal growth could be met only by violence. Cousins’s cautionary example is the French Revolution. The violence associated with the French Revolution best exemplified for him the fraught consequences of the pursuit of liberty, equality, and fraternity, when its motivating idealism had to contend with those communitarian pressures that were essentially opposed to removing all restrictions on individual development and creating the autonomous individual. Under the weight of such pressures, the tendency to respond “with the instinct of the self ” rather than by “abstract and universal thinking” compromised the possibilities of realizing the world ideal, which became in effect a group demand, an expression of tribalism, “with a tendency to return to the primitive assertion of individual freedom.”⁴⁵	27
The result of the friction between world idealism and political realism was the self-centered nationalism that Cousins anathematized as an aberration from the true course of human history. The French Revolution was history’s prime example of the reduction of the ideal to the assertion of local, narcisstic needs. In Cousins’s eloquent phrase, the demand for liberty, relieved of the logic of the complete ideal, fell “from the level of universal human speech to that of racial and national vernacular.”⁴⁶ He was so convinced that the rhetoric of racial belonging thwarted the attainment of world unity that he saw his main challenge as that of asserting the world ideal without submitting to a political framework. For when the quest for freedom is presented in political terms—or in terms of a world-historical model of progress, as it was in the case of the French Revolution—he believed it could only be expressed in the language of domination and subordination, and that in turn in the language of racialism. Thus, it is easy to see why the gains of European humanism and the European Enlightenment have consistently occurred at the expense of non-Europeans. Cousins quotes the nineteenth-century poet Francis Thompson to the effect that the “spacious century,” which was born with the cry of “Liberty” in its ears and on its lips, boasted of having “… seen the Western knee / Set on the Asian neck, / And dusky Africa / Kneel to imperial Europe’s back.” Under these circumstances, “equality” mapped out for itself a single hemisphere of the globe, the Western, and assumed a single complexion, the white. Likewise, “fraternity,” with unseemly literalness, remained confined to masculinity until the new order of politically minded women in the early twentieth century challenged their exclusion from the electorate. As an era of “stultified idealism,”⁴⁷ the nineteenth century had relegated aesthetic culture to a matter of taste and refinement, rather than regarding it as a means and expression of human freedom.	28
The First World War, however, rudely shattered the expected fulfillment of the promises of liberal humanism. Employing a religious vocabulary, Cousins described the world war as a punishment for the ills of colonialism, as the world stretched out in supplication for some attitude to life, turning to the proverbial wisdom of the East to revoke the legitimacy of colonial tyranny. And indeed from this perspective imperialism is just as bad for the colonizer as it is for the colonized, imposing on the dominating group “false and selfish preoccupations that stand in the way of its attention to the natural evolution of its own national genius and pull it from the path of open rectitude into the twisted byways of dishonest thought, speech and action in the artificial defence of a false position.”⁴⁸ Swayed by the power of liberal angst perhaps a little more than he may have realized, Cousins gave room for the articulation of a nationalist consciousness among the colonizers, while vehemently denouncing that same nationalist feeling among the colonized. Whatever the sources of such liberal guilt, it certainly led Cousins to believe that the cause of the world war was not confined to immediate actions of belligerence, but rather was a world cause with world responsibility in varying degree. In this reading, war is symptomatic of the “world malady” introduced into the world by colonialism, for which a “world remedy” had to be sought.⁴⁹	29
As one of the most ardent exponents of internationalism, James Cousins urged that the horrors of the world war necessitated a model of world unity. But in developing such a concept philosophically he believed it was necessary to distinguish between a (negative) world unity forged by the domination of some countries by one master country and a more positive unity genuinely expressive of the principle of spiritual oneness. The positive notion of internationalism eschews domination as the principle of relations between nations. It offers a more egalitarian philosophy in which political freedom is attainable as a quest of the spirit. In this reworking, culture is the free space beyond religion and politics, the arena of “truth.” In elaborating theosophical principles of oneness to incorporate a view of nationalism as internationalism, Cousins gave expression to theosophy as a fulfillment of Romanticism.⁵⁰ Fused with Tagore’s strictures on the dangers of bureaucratic rationality, ⁵¹ Cousins’s theosophy recapitulated the romanticist condemnation of nation-building at the expense of the “elastic and expansive” spirit of humanity. In Tagore’s theory of nationalism Cousins found the most potent answer to the malaise spawned by the world struggle, “the point which would banish from criticism of his utterances the false antithesis of nationalism and internationalism.”⁵² The real struggle at every stage of human history, whether between or within nations, has been, Tagore tells us, “between the living spirit of the people and the methods of nation-organising; between the expanding soul of humanity (Indian or English) and mechanical limitations that refuse to adapt themselves to that expansion.”⁵³ While this sounds very close to what I have described as Cousins’s historical analysis of violence, Tagore was much less interested in probing historical causes for the clash between consciousness and administrative rationality. Indeed, Tagore was far more vague in his descriptions and resorted to metaphor and synecdoche to replace historical explanation, as when he described (false) nation-building through the symbol of red tape and organic nationhood through the symbol of the elastic band.	30
Cousins’s fundamental challenges as a critic were two in number. The first goal was to detach the concepts of oneness, unity, and the common origins of all humanity from racial understandings; the second was to reassert these notions—newly defined—outside of race. Rhetorically, it required him persistently to distinguish between two concepts of internationalism—as he did between two renaissances, two nationalisms, and so forth. On one level, such differentiation allowed him to distance internationalism from its imperial moorings. It further permitted him to expose cultural movements and migrations as a masquerade for imperialism, which, despite the pretense of forging a unity of nations, was solely driven by the impulse to dominate and appropriate. But at another level, the critique of imperialism’s universalizing impulse included even Cousins’s own migration to India and his attempt to import the concerns of the Irish literary renaissance into another, apparently parallel setting. Cousins’s autocritique is set against the backdrop of the historical course of imperialism, which clearly shows that the “plantations” of English settlers in Ireland and the coming of the East India Company were not international movements, but rather predatory excursions from the “lair” of nationalism intended to bring back as much prey as could be seized. Cousins’s questioning of his own status as a cultural emigre fuses with his critique of imperialism’s claims to internationalism.	31
But ultimately Cousins’s vision of a post-romantic internationalism failed him because the new, animated literary spirit that he hoped to see prevail was clearly marked in racial terms—the very terms that he claimed produced a false unity. By wishing to take the literary renaissance outside purely nationalist concerns, Cousins reintroduced Aryanism as a principle of creative change, thereby substituting one set of hierarchical relations with another. The interchangeability of philosophical unity with racial continuity may have been motivated by Cousins’s overwhelming desire to prevent the appropriation of humanism by imperializing intentions. But it could not forestall the return to a hierarchical mode of cultural production, in which diversity is flat-tened out and replaced by sameness and oneness—all in the name of world reconstruction. “Realism” for Cousins came to mean narrow, local, narcisstic needs: it was an expression of a divisive ethnicity whose principle of difference militated against attaining the world ideal. “Idealism,” on the other hand, was too rooted in conditions of temporality and political possibility to have any real meaning for Cousins. In his reading of Indian history as an ongoing repetition of the Aryan experience—of the reassertion of unity against an all-consuming diversity—he found a way of getting beyond the limitations of realism and idealism as he had himself defined these terms. But by shifting spirituality back into the category of race (as had Ernst Renan and Matthew Arnold before him)—even though it was the very category he sought to dispel—Cousins drove his own work into oblivion, as other models of internationalism that were more overtly political and economic gained ascendancy. If today internationalism signifies economic globalization rather than spirituality, it is a measure of the acute difficulties Cousins faced in developing an aesthetics that could accommodate politics without being subordinated to it.	32
Notes¹ï¿½ See Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (London: Macmillan and Co., 1917).²ï¿½ “A Message to the American Negro from Rabindranath Tagore,” The Crisis 36, no. 10 (1929).³ï¿½ Cousins’s most sustained work on this subject is War: A Theosophical View (London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1914).⁴ï¿½ James Cousins, Modern English Poetry: Its Characteristics and Tendencies (Madras: Ganesh and Co., 1921), p.202.⁵ï¿½ See Tagore’s Nationalism for the poet’s most sustained and impassioned argument against nationalism.⁶ï¿½ James Cousins, Samadarshana (Synthetic Vision): A Study in Indian Psychology (Madras: Ganesh and Co., 1925), p.61.⁷ï¿½ Alan Denson, James H. Cousins and Margaret E. Cousins: A Bio-Biographical Survey (Kendal: Alan Denson, 1967), p.14. Benet’s article appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature 8 (4 June1932): 772.⁸ï¿½ In his1912 broadside “Gas from a Burner,” Joyce wrote: “I printed the table-book of Cousins / Though (asking your pardon) as for the verse / ‘Twould give you a heartburn in your arse.” The Essential James Joyce, edited by Harry Levin (London: Penguin Books), p. 349.⁹ï¿½ John Wilson Foster, “The Interpreters: A Handbook to AE and the Irish Revival,” Ariel 11, no.3 (July 1980): 69. Quoted in D. C. Chatterjee, James Henry Cousins: A Study of His Works in the Light of the Theosophical Movement in India and the West (Delhi: Sterling, 1985), p.17.¹⁰ï¿½ Among the most significant works in Irish studies that have appeared in recent years are David Lloyd, Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), and Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993); Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); Seamus Deane, Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). All are fine critical studies; none of them, however, makes any mention of James Cousins.¹¹ï¿½ Denson, p.14.¹²ï¿½ Ibid., p.16.¹³ï¿½ There were precedents for British apprehensions: Charles Johnston (1867–1931) was a key figure in the Dublin Theosophical Society who came to India as a member of the Indian Civil Service. But he was forced to leave India because of his suspected political sympathies for Indian nationalists. As D. C. Chatterjee notes, the Dublin Theosophical Lodge was a primary channel of Indo-Irish interaction (James Henry Cousins: A Study of His Works in the Light of the Theosophical Movement in India and the West [Delhi: Sterling, 1985], p. 153).¹⁴ï¿½ James H. Cousins and Margaret Cousins, We Two Together (Madras: Ganesh and Co., 1950).¹⁵ï¿½Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London, 1954), p. 613; quoted in Seamus Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (London: Hutchinson, 1986), p. 158 (emphasis added).¹⁶ï¿½ The most hard-biting of these articles included “Patriot Bards and Ballad Makers: A Page from the History of Freedom by an Irish Home Ruler,” New India, 11 January 1916, and New India, 15 January 1916; “The Irish Impasse and Its Lessons,” New India, 29 January 1916; “Nationality and Art,” New India, 8 April 1916; “The Irish Leaders,” New India, 4 May 1916; and “The Irish Revolt,” New India, 10 May 1916.¹⁷ï¿½ James H. Cousins, Collected Poems, 1894–1940 (Madras: Kalakshetra, 1940).¹⁸ï¿½ James Cousins, New Ways in English Literature (Madras: Ganesh and Co., 1920), p. 14.¹⁹ï¿½ Cousins, We Two Together, p. 217.²⁰ï¿½ Ibid., p. 218.²¹ï¿½ See Catherine Nash, “Geo-centric Education and Anti-imperialism: Theosophy, Geography, and Citizenship in the Writings of J. H. Cousins,” Journal of Historical Geography 22, no. 4 (1996): 399–411, for an illuminating discussion of Cousins’s involvement in geographical education. As Nash points out (p. 400), Cousins’s interest in geography was driven in part by a need to find a common meeting point between local pride and global unity. He saw the study of geography as an excellent way of teaching students to resist Euro-centric values, while avoiding xenophobic nationalism through a discipline that encouraged an imaginative rather than separatist identification with places.²²ï¿½ Cousins, We Two Together, p. 49.²³ï¿½ Ibid.²⁴ï¿½ Ibid., p. 75.²⁵ï¿½ Ibid.²⁶ï¿½ Ibid.²⁷ï¿½ Ibid., p. 216.²⁸ï¿½ The role of one country as the site for the working out of problems presented in another underlies the sentiment of interparty head John Costello, who announced in1948 that Ireland had become a republic: “As an Irishman, I have pleasure in recalling that many of my race encouraged and were encouraged by the magnificent efforts of Indians to realise the national aspirations of our own great country.” Quoted in Sarmila Bose and Eilis Ward, “‘India’s Cause Is Ireland’s Cause’: Elite Links and Nationalist Politics,” Ireland and India: Connections, Comparisons, Contrasts, edited by Michael Holmes and Denis Holmes (Dublin: Folens, 1997), p. 70.²⁹ï¿½ It is also the case that Cousins justified the imaginative view of India by saying that the toiling masses had become alienated from their own land not only because of colonialism but also because of colonialism’s effacement of the Idea of India.³⁰ï¿½ Quoted in William Dumbleton, James Cousins (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980), p. 105.³¹ï¿½ Cousins, We Two Together, p. 68.³²ï¿½ James H. Cousins, The Renaissance in India (Madras: Ganesh and Co., 1918), p. 8.³³ï¿½ Ibid.³⁴ï¿½ Cf. “[Christian Europe] cannot regard a presentation of truth in another land and through other instruments of revelation, together with its resultant culture, as other than outside its own circumference. The impact of eastern thought has to meet the opposition of the old spirit of racial ascendancy, which can only exist on the illusion of the exclusive possession of a universal truth.” Cousins, The Renaissance in India, p. 8.³⁵ï¿½ See my Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998) for a discussion of Besant’s deployment of racial rhetoric in her delineation of universal brotherhood and a commonwealth of nations.³⁶ï¿½ James H. Cousins, Cultural Unity of Asia (Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1922), pp. 7–8.³⁷ï¿½ Ibid., p. 133.³⁸ï¿½ Ibid. See Kakuzo Okakura, The Ideals of the East (Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1922); see also Kojin Karatani, The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, trans. Brett de Bary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993) for a provocative critique of Okakura’s pan-Asianism and its subsequent effects on Japanese modernism.³⁹ï¿½ Cousins, Samadarshana, p. 7. See also James H. Cousins, Modern English Poetry: Its Characteristics and Tendencies (Madras: Ganesh and Co., 1921) for an equally devastating critique of the flawed purposes of Irish revivalism.⁴⁰ï¿½ Ibid., p. 9.⁴¹ï¿½ Thomas Trautman has demolished this myth in Aryans and British India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).⁴²ï¿½ Ibid., p. 61.⁴³ï¿½ Ibid.⁴⁴ï¿½ James H. Cousins, The Path to Peace: An Essay on Cultural Interchange and India’s Contribution Thereto with a Prefatory Note on “Modern India” (Madras: Ganesh and Co., 1928), p. 16.⁴⁵ï¿½ Ibid., p. 17.⁴⁶ï¿½ Ibid., p. 18.⁴⁷ï¿½ Ibid., p. 19.⁴⁸ï¿½ James H. Cousins, Heathen Essays (Madras: Ganesh and Co., 1925), p. 69.⁴⁹ï¿½ Cousins, Path to Peace, p. 19.⁵⁰ï¿½ James H. Cousins, Bases of Theosophy: A Study in Fundamentals Philosophical, Psychological, Practical (London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1913), p. 24.⁵¹ï¿½ Cf. Tagore: “You must know that red tape can never be a common human bond; that official sealing-wax can never provide means of human attachment; that it is a painful ordeal for human beings to have to receive favours from animated pigeon-holes, and condescensions from printed circulars that give notice, but never speak.” Rabindranath Tagore, Creative Unity (London: Macmillan and Co., 1922), p. 109.⁵²ï¿½ Cousins, Samadarshana, p. 65.⁵³ï¿½ Ibid.

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