Book description
From Pankaj Mishra, author the successful Temptations of the
West and Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, comes a provocative
account of how China, India and the Muslim World are remaking the
world in their own image.
The Victorian period, viewed in the West as a time of self-confident
progress, was experienced by Asians as a catastrophe. As the British
gunned down the last heirs to the Mughal Empire, burned down the
Summer Palace in Beijing, or humiliated the bankrupt rulers of the
Ottoman Empire, it was clear that for Asia to recover a vast
intellectual effort would be required.
Pankaj Mishra's fascinating, highly entertaining new book tells the
story of a remarkable group of men from across the continent who met
the challenge of the West. Incessantly travelling, questioning and
agonising, they both hated the West and recognised that an Asian
renaissance needed to be fuelled in part by engagement with the enemy.
Through many setbacks and wrong turns, a powerful, contradictory and
ultimately unstoppable series of ideas were created that now lie
behind everything from the Chinese Communist Party to Al Qaeda, from
Indian nationalism to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Mishra allows the reader to see the events of two centuries anew,
through the eyes of the journalists, poets, radicals and charismatics
who criss-crossed Europe and Asia and created the ideas which lie
behind the powerful Asian nations of the twenty-first century.
Pankaj Mishra
is the author of
Butter Chicken in Ludiana, The Romantics, An End to
Suffering
and
Temptations of the West
. He writes principally for the
Guardian, The
New York Times, London Review of Books
and
New York Review of Books
. He lives in London, Shimla and New York.
