Looking East, Looking Toward China: Bhashani and His Visit to China

This article centers on Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani’s visit to China in 1963. It shows how and why Bhashani formulated Afro-Asia as a new spatial imagination that rejected the territorial bounds of the nation-state. It seeks to add to the expanding historiography on people-to-people South Asia–China engagements in historical context. During his visit in China, he met with several figures, such as the last emperor of China. Bhashani’s bonds of affectivity with the last emperor of China, Puyi, were based on a politics of anti-imperialism in which China was afforded a central and a leading role and which was also based on a notion of a shared past between South Asia and China. Focusing on a lesser-known itinerant can help to decenter our understanding of the Cold War and broaden our perspective beyond that of superpower competition. Also, it highlights alternate imaginations at a time in which the nation-state was the most dominant one.