Leela wants their anti-colonial agitation to be grounded in Indian-and to her mind, Hindu-symbolism Nash has her attention, but like many of the student travelers on this list, not quite the wherewithal to articulate what he’s learned from where he’s been until it’s much too late.
Leela, the villain-protagonist, faithfully read and responded to his letters while he was in Japan, but after he returns, she wants him to go back to being who he was.
Japan, meanwhile, has recently triumphed over Russia in the Russo-Japanese war, and foreign students in Japan are instrumental in the formation of a new pan-Asian solidarity that will not cohere for decades yet. Though Nash is from India, he’s still a British colonial subject. Nash is an Indian student studying abroad in Japan, a position that has several international resonances in the early 1900s when the novel is set. One of my favorite characters to write in my novel Where the Sun Will Rise Tomorrow was Nash, the kid who returns from study abroad and will not shut up about it.
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