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The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
September 2012
On Sale: September 4, 2012
368 pages
ISBN: 0374249598
EAN: 9780374249595
Kindle: B0071W4UH4
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction History
A surprising, gripping narrative depicting the thinkers
whose ideas shaped contemporary China, India, and the Muslim
world A little more than a century ago, as the Japanese navy
annihilated the giant Russian one at the Battle of Tsushima,
original thinkers across Asia, working independently, sought
to frame a distinctly Asian intellectual tradition that
would inform and inspire the continent’s anticipated rise to
dominance. Asian dominance did not come to pass, and those
thinkers—Tagore, Gandhi, and later Nehru in India; Liang
Qichao and Sun Yatsen in China; Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and
Abdurreshi al Ibrahim in the ruins of the Ottoman Empire—are
seen as outriders from the main anticolonial tradition. But
Pankaj Mishra shows that it was otherwise in this
stereotype-shattering book. His enthralling group portrait
of like minds scattered across a vast continent makes clear
that modern Asia’s revolt against the West is not the one
led by faith-fired terrorists and thwarted peasants but one
with deep roots in the work of thinkers who devised a view
of life that was neither modern nor antimodern, neither
colonialist nor anticolonialist. In broad, deep, dramatic
chapters, Mishra tells the stories of these figures, unpacks
their philosophies, and reveals their shared goal of a
greater Asia. Right now, when the emergence of a greater Asia seems
possible as at no previous time in history, From the
Ruins of Empire is as necessary as it is timely—a
book essential to our understanding of the world and our
place in it.
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