If you’ve been following along for a while, you’ve probably figured out that I like books that look at familiar history from another point of view. (For example, here, and here, and here.) It should be no surprise that Pankaj Mishra’s latest book caught my eye.

In From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, Pankaj Mishra returns again to the intersection between Asian and Western cultures that informed his earlier work, Temptations of the West.

Misra begins with the statement that the intellectual and political awakening of Asia was the central event of the twentieth century for a majority of the world’s population. That event came about as a result of a new class of western-educated Asian elites. As a group, they typically rejected their traditional heritage in favor of western modes of thought, then later re-embraced their native traditions, transforming those traditions in the process.

Instead of concentrating on well-known Asian historical figures, Mishra centers his book on the intellectual journeys of three men who are important historical figures in their own cultures but largely unfamiliar to most Westerners. Journalist and political activist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-97) was a founder of Islamic modernism. Chinese intellectual Liang Qichao (1873-1929) inspired a generation of young Chinese activists with his calls for reform. Indian poet and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a leaders of the Bengal Renaissance.

Over the course of the book, Misra shows how his characters are shaped by and respond to the familiar events of European imperialism in Asia, giving those events a new perspective for the Western reader. His stated goal is not to replace a Euro-centric view with an “equally problematic Asia-centric one”, but to look at both the past and the present from multiple viewpoints. For the most part, he succeeds

This reviewe appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers