A Greater Asia

In 2011, the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei exhibited 12 bronze animal heads representing the signs of the Chinese zodiac outside the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. The heads were enlarged replicas of a set designed in the 18th century by two European Jesuits for the emperor Qianlong and displayed in the gardens of the Yuanmingyuan, the emperor's Old Summer Palace. At the time of the exhibition, Ai had disappeared into detention in China. The political controversy overshadowed the work itself, which posed its most searching questions not to the Chinese government, but to the West.

In 1860, during the Second Opium War, the Old Summer Palace was ransacked and torched by French and British soldiers. In “From the Ruins of Empire,” his timely and important history of Asian intellectual responses to Western colonialism, Pankaj Mishra quotes one looter who said that to describe “the splendors before our astonished eyes, I should need to dissolve specimens of all known precious stones in liquid gold for ink, and to dip it into a diamond pen tipped with the fantasies of an oriental poet.” The zodiac heads were among the spoils, which disappeared for generations into European art collections. The destruction of the Old Summer Palace, all but forgotten by its perpetrators, still excites shame and anger in China, where it is seen as a symbol of Western imperial brutality and a reminder of the consequences of national military weakness.

Mishra, the Indian essayist and novelist, shows how, like their European and American counterparts, Asian intellectuals of the 19th and 20th centuries responded to the colonial encounter by constructing a binary opposition between East and West. From Ottoman Turkey to Meiji Japan, writers struggled in the face of the humiliating experience of subjugation. The superior technology and organization of the imperial powers were self-­evident. What was the correct response? Could new innovations and modes of production be grafted onto existing social structures, or did cherished ways of life and thought have to be abandoned? The question of what to accept, what to adapt and what to reject from “the West” remains central in contemporary Asian politics; “From the Ruins of Empire” reveals much - not just about why a Chinese artist would erect replicas of stolen national treasures in a Western city, but about the ideological underpinnings of the Iranian revolution and India's dogged pursuit of scientific and technical excellence.

Mishra tells this story through the biographies of three public intellectuals: the itinerant Persian-born agitator Jamal al-Din al-Afghani; the Chinese reformer Liang Qichao; and Rabindranath Tagore, poet and Nobel laureate, vaunted as the embodiment of traditional Eastern wisdom. Al-Afghani (1838-97) claimed to be a Sunni Muslim from Afghanistan but was actually a Persian Shiite. He traveled to India and by the age of 28 was in Kabul, trying to play off the British against the Russians in the “Great Game.” A man of flexible political allegiances and fond of the Koranic maxim “God does not change the condition of a people until they change their own condition,” he became an early apostle of pan-Islamism. He hoped to restore authenticity to a religion he saw as fundamentally rational, open to change and innovation, but which had become corrupt. After his expulsion from Kabul he traversed the Muslim world, from the mosques of Cairo to the drawing rooms of Istanbul, wher e he importuned the sultan to launch Muslim resistance to the West.

Liang Qichao (1873-1929) sought a middle way for China between the intellectual sclerosis of the Qing imperial court and the destructive transformation sought by the Communists. In 1898, having caught the ear of the 26-year-old emperor Guangxu, he and his friend and mentor Kang Youwei tried to initiate a rapid process of reform. It lasted only about 100 days before the dowager empress, in retirement at the Old Summer Palace, “took it upon herself to squash her little nephew.” Liang ­barely escaped with his life, and revolution, Mishra writes, became “inevitable.”

Kang and Liang were instrumental in the formulation of a decisive new category in Chinese political discourse: “the people.” Traditionally, popular opinion was considered irrelevant. Now they proposed that the state needed the consent of an educated citizenry to govern. Kang even believed that such reforms as mass education and free elections could realize the Confucian notion of ren (benevolence), a “utopian vision of an inevitable universal moral community, where egoism and the habit of making hierarchies would vanish.”