From the Ruins of Empire. By Pankaj Mishra

From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia

Pankaj Mishra

Allen Lane. First published 2012

Though more scholarly than his previous works, this book is as good and satisfying a read as I expect from Mishra. It makes an excellent attempt to identify and explain the major intellectuals in Asia who tackled the obvious asymmetry in the interactions of the West with the East in the last few centuries. This asymmetry continues to this day, though it appears to be gradually, very gradually, running out of steam. All the same the intellectual, economic and political superiority that the white man has built up over all the other races (South Asian, Chinese, African, Native American, Polynesian...) is unlikely to disappear any time soon into the kind of rough equality that existed about a millennium ago. The asymmetry is not directly addressed by Mishra. He talks about the Asian (not African or Native American) thought leaders of the last 150 years or so, who wrestled with, and tried to understand and rationalize the vast cultural differences, and their apparently unfortunate consequences for the East. I say 'apparently' because it sometimes seems to me that some of the things we take for granted as good and necessary - democracy, egalitarianism, freedom of speech, human rights - have just been imported from the West. Would they have developed here in the East, in India and China, if the white man had not borne 'his burden'? I can say nothing about other cultures, but when I look at the havoc that the caste system (that great indigenous contribution to sociology) continues to play in India, I confess I find it difficult to imagine that without the Raj, and without the example of USA and France, we would have had as progressive a constitution as we do now.       

Mishra however steers clear of direct engagement with these considerations. He does discuss them occasionally, and mostly in the context of how they were addressed by his protagonists. He picks out three main figures, two of whom I had not heard of previous to reading this book. The first is Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who was born in Persia in 1858,  lived, preached, wrote and held forth in Afghanistan, India, Egypt, Europe, Persia and Turkey.  In all these places and wherever he traveled and thought, he spoke about a pan-Islamic response to the West, trying to formulate a religious response to a political problem. He was initially a votary of Westernisation, and believed that the Eastern, in particular Islamic society should modernize, and adopt scientific, rational and secular thought as the foundation of its policies. As he came against European resistance to the application of their own ideas of essential human equality to non-white peoples, he tended more and more towards a response based totally on the culture of the Islamic people. He began to preach that society could be arranged around the principles enunciated in the Koran and the Shariat. His ideas did not lead directly to any strong resistance or overthrow of the West, and the first independent nations, Turkey (which replaced the decrepit but once-powerful Ottoman empire with democracy), Persia, India were organised on secular, democratic principles. It is only later, with the Iranian revolution in 1979, and then with Zia in Pakistan, that Islam began to be considered a system of social organisation equal to, or better than, liberal Western ideas. The Taliban in Afghanistan took it to extremes, and threatens to do so again, despite fierce American intervention, but even Malaysia and Indonesia, and now the countries undergoing the 'Arab Spring' (Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Tunisia...) are all turning towards what may be called 'Islamic democracy'. The underlying rhetoric and formulations of these revolutions can, according to Mishra, be traced to the enunciations of Al-Afghani, by the way of several intermediary philosophers, polemicists, statesmen and just plain rabble rousers (like Osama Bin Laden). 

Mishra then considers the ideas put forth by Liang Qichao, who is introduced as China's first iconic modern intellectual. Reacting to Japanese reformation, westernisation and modernisation, and to the European domination of China, Liang harks back to China's ancient, continuous and well-ordered society. Even recent China, in the 17th and 18th centuries, was economically powerful, with a robust culture of small industries and trade. However a century of economic and cultural humiliations followed the opium wars, and Chinese intellectuals, with Liang among the foremost, re-evaluated their own ancient civilisation and began to formulate appropriate responses. Initially they put forth ideas of building a modern society around Confucian principles. But soon Liang argued for a more vigorous and westernised response, based on his view of social Darwinism being the chief organizing principle of the world. He was in part driven to such view by his travels to America, where he became disillusioned with 'democracy' and 'western civilisation'. He wrote: 'The American Declaration of Independence says that people are born free and equal. Are blacks alone not people?' This famous Declaration, I might add, was formulated and signed, with breathtaking hypocrisy, by a group of white men, of whom many, including Thomas Jefferson, were slave owners. Liang suggested that a benign autocracy, and not the republican revolution that Sun Yat-sen was organising, was the way to build a strong unified Chinese state, which could confront the West on equal terms. Though the Koumintang tried to establish a liberal democratic state on western principles, in the process sweeping away all the ancient Chinese cultural ideas - Confucianism, Taosim - this experiment was short-lived, and the intellectual and political leaders, led by Mao, moved to the adaptation of another idea that originated in the West - communism - that also rejected ancient China in building a modern nation-state in the European mould.

The third major intellectual that Mishra describes is Rabindranath Tagore. Like Gandhi, Tagore did not think much of European civilisation, and again like Gandhi, rejected the militarism and violence that appeared inherent in Western idea of a nation-state.  His pan-Asian ideals, and his advocacy of a gentle, humanistic, non-violent response to the thrusts of the West, and of the establishment of nations without state power, were rejected out of hand by Chinese, Japanese and even Indian leaders, who believed that such reaching back to an imagined past would only serve to repeat the cycle of subjugation Asia was slowly coming out of. 

Mishra does not write only about these three. He describes the varied responses to the West from Asia. (He does not talk about African or about Native American responses.) He sees a common thread in the struggle to formulate an indigenous answer that would at the same time incorporate the clearly desirable principles of egalitarianism and freedom which the white man had established so strongly within his own race, though denying it to other races.   Such denial, as by Woodrow Wilson after WWI, and the British Empire in South Africa and India, was frequently the beginning of a formulation of ideas that often lead to a complete rejection and overthrow of Western rule. 

This book, unlike Mishra's others, is written not as a personal memoir, but as a scholarly thesis. It is illuminating, and adds a great deal to my own intellectual furniture. It is easy to read, and Mishra's language is smooth and fluent. It deserves a closer and more thorough reading, and better note-taking than I have given it here.