Honorary Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies of Delhi
Octobre 2019 à juin 2020
Brij Tankha was born in Lucknow, India and studied in St. Stephen’s college, Delhi University and went on to teach at the Department of East Asian Studies where he became Professor of Modern Japanese History. He served as Head of Department and retired in 2012. Tankha has been awarded research fellowships and been visiting professor in Tokyo, Waseda, and Ryukoku University in Kyoto where he held the Chair of Indian Studies of the Indian council of Cultural Relations (ICCR) in 2012. He also taught courses in Jvyaskula University, Finland and in Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy.
At present he is Honorary Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies of Delhi, an independent think tank, and on the board of directors of Chirag, an NGO active in education and developmental work. His research interests in modern Japanese history have focused on alternative ways of thinking about Japan’s modern transformation and locating Japanese history in a wider Asian and global context. He contributes occasional articles on current affairs to newspapers on Japan and East Asia.
"Japans contested roads to the Modern"
The dominant image of Japan continues to be of a successful modernizer adroitly balancing tradition and modernity. This view is still widely prevalent but current research that locates Japan not as an exception but in a wider context and brings in developments in Japanese colonial empire, provides a more nuanced and productive way of thinking about Japanese modern history.
The project moves away from the binaries of Western and Japanese, or Japanese and Asian, to look at how the global flow of ideas created diverse political and intellectual currents and how these debates and contestations shaped the contours of modern Japan.
The project examines the intellectual and political strategies of some key individuals, such as Tanaka Shozo, Minakata Kumaguzu, and Arishima Takeo. It studies their questioning of state sponsored capitalist industrialisation as well as their attempt to realise democraticy to create a balance between the public-secular and the inner-“spiritual” world, between the city and the “rural”; and finally their questioning of the nation-state as the sole political form for modern growth.
TANKHA, Brij. "Monks in Modern Dress: The Dilemma of Being Japanese and Asian", in Fashion, Identity and Power in Modern Asia (PYUN, Kyunghee & WONG, Aida Yuen), Palsgrave Macmillan, 2018.
TANKHA, Brij. "Exploring Asia, Reforming Japan: Otani Kozui and Ito Chuta", in Japan on the Silk Road: Encounters and Perspectives of Politics and Culture in Eurasia (ESSENBEL, Selcuk), Leiden, Brill, 2017.
TANKHA, Brij. "Religion and Modernity: Strengthening the People", in History at Stake in East Asia (CAROLI, Rosa & SOUYRI, Pierre-François), Libreria Editrice Cafoscarina, Italie, Libreria Editrice, 2012, pp. 3-20.
TANKHA, Brij. "Japan, Asia and Religion: Otani Kozui", in Otani Kozui and His Team of Explorers in an International Perspective (JOJIN, Shirasu), 2011.
TANKHA, Brij. Kita Ikki and the Making of Modern Japan: A Vision of Empire, translation from Japanese to English, Global Oriental, London, 2006.
TANKHA, Brij. An Outline for the Reconstruction of Japan (IKKI, Kita), translation from Japanese to English, Kolkatta-New Delhi, Sampark, 2003.