(A review of Pankaj Mishra’s “Ruins of Empire.” Published in The National, 15 September 2012)

In 1988, Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping promised his Indian counterpart Rajiv Gandhi that the next century would be the “Asian century”. The claim may have seemed risible to many in the West but subsequent decades of economic transformation in China and India have turned the narrative in Deng’s favour. Asia, we are told, is very much on the rise. With the endorsement of barrages of statistics, business punditry and insistent animal metaphors (tigers and pandas, elephants and dragons), Asia’s giants lumber onto the international stage. The phrase “Asian century” is now a feature of Sino-Indian bilateral relations, underlining not so much an aspiration but a description of the world both countries believe they are in the process of making.

But have we already lived through an “Asian century”? According to the Indian essayist and…