Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012) ("The contemporary world first began to assume its decisive shape over two days in May 1905 in the narrow waters of the Tsushima Strait. In what is now one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, a small Japanese fleet commanded by Admiral Togo Heihachiro annihilated much of the Russian navy, which had sailed half way round the world to reach the Far East.... For the first time since the Middle Ages, a non-European country had vanquished a European power in a major war; and the news careened around a world that Western imperialists--and the invention of the telegraph--had closely knit together." Id. at 1. "Bullied by the Western powers in the nineteenth century, and chastened by those powers' rough treatment of China, Japan had set itself an ambitious task of internal modernization from 1868: of replacing a semi-feudal shogunate with a constitutional monarchy and unified nation-state, and creating a Western-style economy of high production and consumption...." "Already by the 1890s, Japan's growing industrial and military strength was provoking European and American visions of the 'yellow peril', a fearful image of Asiatic hordes overrunning the white West...." "For many other non-white people, Russia;s humiliation seemed to negate the West's racial hierarchies, mocking the European presumption to 'civilize' the supposedly 'backward' countries of Asia...." Id. at 3-4. "What Tsushima could not immediately reverse was the superiority of Western arms and commerce which had been impressed upon Asia and Africa for much of the nineteenth Century.... The West was not to relinquish physical possession of its Eastern territories form many more years. But Japan's victory over Russia accelerated an irreversible process of intellectual, if not yet political, decolonization." Id. at 6. "This book seeks to offer a broad view of how some of the most intelligent and sensitive people in the East responded to the encroachments of the West (both physical and intellectual) on their societies. It describes how these Asians understood their history and social existence, and how they responded to the extraordinary sequence of events and movement--the Indian Mutiny, Anglo-Afghan Wars, Ottoman modernization, the Chinese Revolution, the First World war, the Paris Peace Conference, Japanese militarism, decolonization, postcolonial nationalism and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism--that together decided the present shape of Asia." "The book's main protagonists are two itinerant thinkers and activists: Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-97), a Muslim who pursued a long career in trenchant journalism and political exhortation in the Middle East and South Asia in the latter half of the nineteenth century; and Liang Qichao (1873-1929), perhaps China's foremost modern intellectual, who participated in many events that led to the destruction of his country's old imperial certainties and its subsequent re-emergence, after many horrors, as a major world power. Many of al-Afghani's and Liang's ideas ultimately became major forces for change. These early modern Asians stand at the beginning of the process whereby ordinary resentment against the West and Western dominance, along with anxiety about internal weakness and decay, was transformed into mass nationalist and liberation movements and ambitious state-building programmes across Asia." Id. at 9-10.).
Pankaj Mishra, The Romantics: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2000) ("The world constantly renews itself, and when you look at it that way, regret and nostalgia seem equally futile." Id. at 3. "[T] past was too much a part of the present to be categorized in a strict historical sense." Id. at 65. "The world is maya, illusion: it was one of the very first things my father told me. But it is a meaningless idea to a child, and the peculiar ordeals of adulthood take you even further away from true comprehension. New deprivations and desires continually open up within you, you keep learning new ways of experiencing pain and happiness, and the idea of illusion, never quite grasped, fades." "The world you find yourself in then becomes the supreme reality--the world you have to go on living in, with or without your private griefs." Id. at 201. "People are people all over the world, in America or anywhere else, and they really all want one thing and little else: love, which is really lacking in life as we live it today." Id. at 221.).
Pankaj Mishra, Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006) ("The autocrat's search for unqualified loyalty usually ends within her own family. Indira's closest colleague in the seventies was her younger son, Sanjay Gandhi; while holding no official position, he had by the time of the Emergency was declared in 1975 become the de facto ruler of India. Like many other undereducated scions of third world dynasties, Sanjay had a weakness for cars. In the late sixties he abandoned his apprenticeship at the Rolls-Royce factory in England, where he was regularly arrested for speeding, and came back to India with the ambition to make small cars for Indian consumers. Indira's government awarded his new company a license despite competitive applications from Toyota, Renault, and Citroen. The nationalized banks advanced him generous loans; government officials bullied car dealers into placing large cash orders. No usable cars ever emerged from Sanjay's factory. Nevertheless, banks and industrialists continued to fund his company, and Sanjay diversified into equally bogus 'consultancy services' in order to channel the incoming money into his personal accounts." Id. at 45. "English in India can be a deceptive medium. Even when the language is used well, as it is by an elite minority among the country's two hundred million-strong middle class, the undertones can be confusing. Moods and gestures are hard to figure out. Irony and humor are often perceived but rarely intended." Id. at 118. "Our modern fantasies of a simple and whole past are fragile. Perhaps, that's why we hold on to them so tenaciously. In Tibet, I sought to confirm everything I had imagined about it, and for the first few days at least, I was not disappointed." Id. at 306.).
