Pankaj Mishra (पंकज मिश्रा) is a noted Indian essayist and novelist. In broad, deep, dramatic chapters, Mishra tells the stories of these figures, unpacks their philosophies, and reveals their shared goal of a greater Asia. 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. But Pankaj Mishra shows that it was otherwise in this stereotype-shattering book. A surprising, gripping narrative depicting the thinkers whose ideas shaped contemporary China, India, and the Muslim worldĪ 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.Īsian 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.
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