David Shulman asks some tough questions on Pankaj Mishra's much-praised book
From The Ruins of Empire [Amazon
US,
UK], on Rabindranath Tragore, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Ling Qichao the intellectual roots of "Eastern revival":
Are these men, then, among the major “intellectuals who remade Asia”?
One thing is clear: all three are fully modern figures, their
consciousness shaped primarily by the terms of the modernist crisis and
debate. But can we even speak of a broad “Asian” response to the West
and the newfangled technologies and concomitant power equations that the
West brought to the East—“printing presses, steamships, railways and
machine guns,” as Mishra lists them? Living in Jerusalem and traveling
often to India, I find it hard to think of Asia as a cultural unit with
any integrity. There is, however, one experience that was indeed shared
by the Islamic world, India, China, and Japan in the nineteenth
century—that of predatory intrusion and sustained economic violation by
the Western powers. The forms this intrusion took varied from place to
place, but its traumatic effects were common to all the great Asian
states and cultures.- The Arabist
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