SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2013

Pankaj Mishra's From the Ruins of Empire offers a surprising, gripping narrative depicting the thinkers whose ideas shaped contemporary China, India, and the Muslim world.

A little more than a century ago, independent thinkers across Asia sought to frame a distinct intellectual tradition that would inspire the continent's rise to dominance. Yet this did not come to pass, and today those thinkers-Tagore, Gandhi, and later Nehru in India; Liang Qichao and Sun Yat-sen in China; Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Abdurreshi al Ibrahim of the Ottoman Empire-are seen as outsiders within the main anticolonial tradition.

But as Mishra demonstrates in this enthralling portrait of like minds, Asia's revolt against the West is not the one led by faith-fired terrorists and thwarted peasants; rather, it is rooted in the ideas of these once renowned intellectuals.

Now, when the ascendency of Asia seems possible as never before, From the Ruins of Empire is as necessary as it is timely-a book indispensable to our understanding of the world and our place in it.

'Arrestingly original ... this penetrating and disquieting bo