Pankaj Mishra
The mid-late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century was a period dominated by Europe and later, America, and much of humanity’s narrative in that period has, as always, been written by the victor. The victors also did much to enforce their way of life and thinking on to their subject audience, which, seeing its own set of institutions crumbling against this onslaught, began admiring and aping their masters, or at least silently suffering.
What Pankaj Mishra does in this book, is give us a perspective shift – a view from the ‘first-generation’ thinkers of the time. Though their approaches and line of thinking were different, courtesy the varied milieu they lived in, their narratives had a couple of commonalities – an aversion for the West, and a recognition that they needed to build an indigenous renaissance to break the shackles and rise again.
Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Liang Qichao and Rabindranath Tagore are the ones chosen by Pankaj Mishra to structure the flow of the narrative. Together, their ‘footprints’ cover Afghanistan, Persia, the Ottoman empire including Egypt, China, Japan and India and the other areas these collectively influence. Their ideas traverse everything from Pan-Islamism, Nationalism, Pan- Asianism and revolution in politics to Confucianism and Hinduism in spirituality. Across time, we are able to see the rise of colonialism, America as the (soon fallen) icon of liberty, world wars, and the change of the world map since.
The book gives an amazing sense of (to use two phrases I picked up from it) historical continuity and enables to see at least a faint gradient of transformation across time and place. A shift in worldview that owes as much to the West as it does to original (or revived) thought. Though I am not really someone interested in geo-politics, it helped refine perspectives and understand the reason for the ways nations are – be it China, Japan, Iran, Egypt or even us. It also made me realise that history indeed repeats itself though its manifestations might seem different.
Ironically, something that each of the above inherited from the West was the concept of the nation state – a device that I have found to be one of best tools of manipulation in this age. In that context, I must thank Pankaj Mishra for reintroducing me (had first come across it in Amartya Sen’s “The Argumentative Indian”) to Tagore’s critique of the nation state and for advocating a more universal ideology that encompasses humanity as a whole. In fact, given the way the world has been acting recently on its chosen path of progress, this concept and its associated materialism driven approach seems ill equipped to handle the scarcity of resources and other constraints that we will soon face.
A fantastic read that throws light on not just geo-politics, political philosophies and ideologies and history per se, but even questions the paths of progress that we, as a civilisation, have taken, and where it might lead us.
