Book review: The subtle perils of Eurocentrism

Mihir Sharma on Pankaj Mishra's From the Ruins of Empire

Few events have so up-ended the established order as Japan’s crushing victory over the Russians at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905. This, the first salvo in the long war to push back the subjugation of the East by the West, was heard around the colonised world; and it is where Pankaj Mishra begins From the Ruins of Empire, which purports to be a history of the ways in which the East imagined that war. Sadly, the glaring flaws that populate Mishra’s book, reducing it even from pop history to puerile polemic, begin there, too. Misleading quotes, for example: he says Gandhi responds by recognising it was “self-respect” that won Japan the battle, except most of Gandhi’s writing on Tsushima actually praised Japan’s patriotism and national unity, a considerably more inward-looking and less reactive claim.

Mishra’s treatment of attitudes to Japanese ambition, in fact, is just one instance of the double standards – which match those of the most devoted apologist of empire -- that riddle this book. The Russo-Japanese war was a battle of empires for land in Manchuria; but throughout, Mishra insists on describing the horrors of Japanese imperialism as “but a reaction”. So, too, could the British Empire be a “reaction” to the Spanish Empire, and the German Empire a “reaction” to the British. But white people are granted agency by Mishra, and people of colour are not – one of the many, many ways in which this book fits squarely into the Eurocentric, mentally colonised framework which Mishra wants us to believe he is helping us escape. Later on in the book, the moral blindness that comes with such double-standards is hideously exposed in his description of Japanese expansionism, where the Rape of Nanking is hastily glossed over, and that empire’s brutality against fellow-Asians is excused as “revenge for decades of racial humiliation.” Indeed, he goes on to say essentially that the occupied should be thankful for this good, Asian, empire: it allowed them to imagine what freedom from the West would be like.

Mishra does not want From the Ruins of Empire to be seen as a reaction, or a polemic. It is difficult, however, to see how any reader will think otherwise. His idea is, of itself, interesting: to get into the heads of those theorising methods of resistance against the West. This is a profoundly conservative, “great man” book of history, a paean to a “small group of thinkers” who he imagines helped chart the destiny of the East. Mishra deduces from their lives, apparently without self-consciousness, a glib logic that moves from a sense of cultural inferiority to a wholesale rejection of anything “modern” as offensively stinking of the West. These “marginal men” were “sensitive to change” and made “great physical and intellectual journeys” before they discovered how to “regain parity and dignity in the eyes of the white rulers of the world.” Mishra modestly does not name these giants’ latter-day heirs. In one of the moments when he stands at the brink of the abyss of self-awareness, he recognises “modernisation shifted the locus of power within any society, and invited resistance from old elites that felt ignored or slighted.” 

This book is a sympathetic account of those intellectual elites and their centuries-long embrace-cum-wrestle with the West, told very much from within the whale. In presenting to the East a new indigenous heritage for half-baked ideas from an American university’s anarchist student group website or Westerners’ biographies of Asian figures , Mishra is quite tone-deaf to the real problems of cultural imperialism – but expects, apparently, his ideas to be greeted as liberators nonetheless.

In his attempt to create, out of whole cloth, an intellectual history for his own opinions, Mishra turns especially to two figures: one who claimed to be Afghan, and one Chinese. (Any link between his choice and current challenges to the United States reside, no doubt, only the reader’s imagination.). Liang Qichao is a much more interesting, observant and admirable figure; but the story of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani is much more fascinating. Mishra follows him from Afghanistan to India to Persia to Turkey to Egypt to Paris to London and back, recording his opportunistic transformation from conspirator to public intellectual to theologian, pushed at each point by ambition and the duplicity of his allies. It’s a great story, and Mishra writes it well. It is only on a second reading that the subtle distortions, elisions, and editorialising becomes clear. Al-Afghani, one of the earliest pan-Islamists, spoke always about restoring the glory of Islam; yet Mishra insists on selling his career as a “global theory of resistance”. 

Most amusingly, he keeps on producing variations of “al-Afghani was not a fundamentalist, but...” and then reporting a statement that’s breathtakingly fundamentalist or exclusive. It happens so often that one is forced to wonder if Mishra’s comprehension is at fault, or his honesty. Similarly, when al-Afghani meets Randolph Churchill to argue for India’s Muslims, rather than speak broadly of the Raj’s iniquities, he states his (oddly current) grievances as poor maintenance of Wakf properties and salaries for imams. Yet, for Mishra, this is “informed by an earlier absorption of the larger terrors of imperialism.” Indeed. 

Read the full review: http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/the-subtle-perilseurocentrism/484140/