From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra

There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the 'human holocaust' of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. They were critics of the West, “revitalizers of tradition” and often religious purists, and their ideas would catch fire in such avenues as the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and modern Salafism.Ī perfect springboard for many necessary ideas and historical characters to be studied in depth.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. All well-traveled, these thinkers observed the West’s moral bankruptcy, such as America’s treatment of blacks, huge inequality in wealth and restriction of immigration to Japanese, and developed a transformation of consciousness. They include Persian-born Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who developed a virulent hatred of imperial powers while moving among Afghanistan, India, Turkey, Egypt and Persia, stressing the need to form a Pan-Islamic front to resist Western incursions Liang Qichao, a reform-minded journalist who escaped from arrest in China and found in cosmopolitan Japan a refuge and model for resistance and national survival and Rabindranath Tagore, a Bengali who founded experimental schools and preached rural harmony against urban aggressiveness, rejected “mindless imitation of the West,” and urged Eastern spiritual wisdom as a replacement for Western venality. Mishra focuses mostly on three thinkers in the Asian world less well-known than Gandhi or Mao, but whose ideas and writings influenced them hugely. The author touches on defining historical moments in terms of galvanizing Asian self-consciousness and nationalism-e.g, Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Boxer Rebellion, the Russo-Japanese War, the founding of Turkey on Ottoman ruins and Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Mishra ( Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond, 2006, etc.) asserts that the intellectual and political awakening of Asia as it moved into the modern world forms one of the great themes of the 20th century.

A widely researched, ambitious study of several important early agitators against Western domination in India, China and the Muslim world.

From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra