Don't blame it on the Buddha
John Gray enjoys Pankaj Mishra's thought-provoking account of European influence, Temptations of the West
John Gray Saturday June 10, 2006 Guardian
Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond by Pankaj Mishra 247pp, Picador, £16.99
... What distinguishes this from other accounts of the problems of Asia is Mishra's sceptical view of the west. He takes it as given that the era in which the world could look to western models is now definitively over. While American neo-conservatives and their followers in Britain dream of crusades for "western values", the world's centre of gravity is shifting to countries that reject the west's universal claims. China and India differ in many ways, but they are at one in insisting on modernising on their own terms. However, as Mishra shows, there is an irony in the rise of Asia. If India and China are now able to challenge western hegemony - in the realm of culture as much as in geopolitics - it is partly because, despite themselves, they have emulated some of the west's more dubious achievements.
In a brilliant chapter Mishra observes that one of the central aims of India's 19th-century anti-colonial movements was to invent Hinduism as a religion. As part of building a modern Indian nation that could resist and overthrow British rule, the Hindu elite simplified and remoulded India's unfathomably rich inheritance of beliefs and practices into something resembling a western creed. ... The result has been to exacerbate sectarian divisions, and create them where they did not exist before. ...
<http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329500806-110738,00.html>
Carl