India, China: The past and future

Sheldon Pollock, the well-known scholar of Sanskrit, and Benjamin Elman, who is an expert on China, have edited an ambitious volume that seeks to analyse the recent histories of India and China

The past 500 years and more have been the history of the spread of European dominance across the world. In our own century, this dominance has incorporated the later extensions of the European order to North America and Australia, thus becoming the modern “West".

It should come as no surprise that non-European cultures and thought systems were subjected to interpretations and analysis through intellectual categories developed in the West. These formed the prism through which the non-West was evaluated and its “backwardness” exposed and compared to the modernity of the West, its mastery over science and philosophical thought. Sheldon Pollock, the