Imperial Europe extended its colonial claws over Asia?s kingdoms, dynasties and home-grown empires starting from the middle of the 16th century, uprooting established social structures, beliefs and economic systems. By the time the natives woke up and wisened up, Asia was crawling with the British, the French, the Dutch and the Portuguese. Besides shattering existing structures and redistributing power, trade brought with it foreign tongues, science and education. In the 19th century, an Asian intellectual wave rose up and pushed back, exhorting their compatriots to rise up against the West. They largely failed to meet their objectives, but cast their influence across space and time, inspiring statesmen and demagogues who later led China?s communist revolution, Iran?s Islamic revolution and Turkey?s secular revolution. Pankaj Mishra?s From the ruins of Empire: The revolt against the West and the remaking of Asia tells this story?the story of Asia?s intellectual response to colonialism.
The failed heroes of Mishra?s Ruins are Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Liang Quichao, two peripatetic thinkers who were also part-courtiers, part-rabble rousers and part-fundamentalists. Born in 1838 as a Persian Shia, al-Afghani passed himself off as an Afghan Sunni Muslim to his gaggle of followers. Educated in India, which was already under multiple colonial boots, al-Afghani panicked at the western tsunami rising over Asia. He travelled across Afghanistan, Turkey, Iran, Russia and Egypt and wrote extensively, pouring a writer?s venom on the barbarous West. Al-Afghani worked tirelessly to swing the opinion of kings and subjects and impel them to revolt before it was too late. However, the very countries he hoped to make base camps in an epic battle against the West spied on, arrested, imprisoned or exiled him. The weak, effete or complicit sultans of the day?usually a combination of the three?could not stand up against an enemy far more powerful in terms of politics, trade, business, science and military. Scrambling for an intellectual focal point to base the push-back against colonialism, al-Afghani swung wildly across anti-Islamism and pro-Islamism, fundamentalism, nationalism and pan-Islamism. Obsessed with driving out the White West, he also briefly flirted with the idea of dragging Russia into a war with England in Asia. None worked. Al-Afghani died a frustrated man.
Quichao, (China?s foremost modern intellectual, in Mishra?s words) was born in 1873, four years after Mahatma Gandhi. Instead of joining the Chinese civil services as planned, Quichao took the al-Afghani route, calling upon the rulers and subjects of subjugated nations to throw out the West. The domestic empire struck back before the foreign one, sending him scurrying abroad. Quichao was appalled by the state of India and continued his anti-West tirades from various cities of the East. Like many others of his time (like Gandhi, Nehru and Tagore), Quichao, too, cheered when Japan trumped Russia in the battle for Tsushima Straits, the first time an Asian military routed a western rival. However, what initially appeared to be a model for an Asian response to colonial masters was only a curtain-raiser to the horror show that followed. In the next few decades, Japan would outperform the West in empire-building, sweeping across Asia, driving out Europeans and butchering millions. Japan?s Asian intellectual admirers were appalled by the imperialism which arrived carrying the flag of pan-Asianism. Not surprisingly, Quichao, too, died an unhappy man, realising reality had drifted far from his revanchist fantasies. Tagore saw his ideals of universal humanism ridiculed by China and stamped out by Japan. Disappointment, naturally, would follow.
The ideologies cherished by the heroes of Ruins contrasted not only each others? but also their own. Mishra?s thinkers hopped across Islamism, nationalism, spirituality and pan-Asianism with the single aim of defeating colonialism. While they were united in their hatred for the West, they differed on the means to this end. Their last days were largely similar, when recognition dawned that the West couldn?t be beaten with their hotchpotch remedies.
Ruins is engaging reading for those fascinated by the intellectual response to European colonialism. However, after a while, extensive quotes by al-Afghani, Quichao, Tagore and a multitude of Asian voices sound thematically repetitive. In fact, several of their quotes show them up not quite as revolutionary thinkers but myopic, anglophobic and hopelessly romantic. Frequent criticism of ?aping the West? quickly loses bite, especially since the author admits later that Asia revived largely because it took the West?s own prescriptions. Do not mistake Ruins for a dispassionate study of the Asian Uprising. The author?s anti-West spurs are evident from the beginning. The tone of writing is scornful of the white and wicked West, congratulatory at the rise of Japan and triumphalist at the empire?s retreat.
Asia has risen from her slumber and the purring kittens of the past are the roaring tigers of today. China, India, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Indonesia have powered ahead, selectively assimilating western features. However, Mishra?s sadness is over something else, what he calls an ?immense intellectual failure?: The resurgence of Asia itself vindicates the West?s inventions?capitalism, socialism, nationalism, secularism and industrialisation ? leaving no universal intellectual counterweight to the western civilisation. How could that be?
Mishra would hate to admit it, but the biggest moral victory of the West was not when it ruled over distant lands but after it left, when it got the ?natives? to follow in its footsteps. Thus, the ?remaking of Asia? ends up as a project of shaking off the shackles of the West to become ?more like West?.