From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra

His enthralling group portrait of like minds scattered across a vast continent makes clear that modern Asia's revolt against the West is not the one led by faith-fired terrorists and thwarted peasants but one with deep roots in the work of thinkers who devised a view of life that was neither modern nor antimodern, neither colonialist nor anticolonialist.

But Pankaj Mishra shows that it was otherwise in this stereotype-shattering book. Asian dominance did not come to pass, and those thinkers - Tagore, Gandhi, and later Nehru in India Liang Qichao and Sun Yatsen in China Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Abdurreshi al Ibrahim in the ruins of the Ottoman Empire - are seen as outriders from the main anticolonial tradition. He lives in London, Shimla and New York.A little more than a century ago, as the Japanese navy annihilated the giant Russian one at the Battle of Tsushima, original thinkers across Asia, working independently, sought to frame a distinctly Asian intellectual tradition that would inform and inspire the continent's anticipated rise to dominance. He writes principally for the Guardian, The New York Times, London Review of Books and New York Review of Books. Pankaj Mishra is the author of Butter Chicken in Ludiana, The Romantics, An End to Suffering and Temptations of the West. 'Subtle, erudite and entertaining' Economist, New Delhi

retains the power to shock' Mark Mazower, Financial Times 'Provocative, shaming and convincing' Michael Binyon, The Times a rich and genuinely thought-provoking book' Noel Malcolm, Sunday Telegraph deeply entertaining and deeply humane' Hisham Matar 'A riveting account that makes new and illuminating connections. this penetrating and disquieting book should be on the reading list of anybody who wants to understand where we are today' John Gray, Independent Pankaj Mishra re-tells the history of the past two centuries, showing how a remarkable, disparate group of thinkers, journalists, radicals and charismatics emerged from the ruins of empire to create an unstoppable Asian renaissance, one whose ideas lie behind everything from the Chinese Communist Party to the Muslim Brotherhood, and have made our world what it is today. As the British gunned down the last heirs to the Mughal Empire or burned down the Summer Palace in Beijing, it was clear that for Asia to recover a new way of thinking was needed. Viewed in the West as a time of self-confident progress, the Victorian period was experienced by Asians as a catastrophe. Pankaj Mishra's provocative account of how China, India and the Muslim World are remaking the world in their own image - shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2013

From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra