As a fearless critic of imperialism, Pankaj Mishra has made his mark as one of the most important essayists of our times. Blending chutzpah with magnificence, he has been hailed as a force to be reckoned with in Britain’s fractious literary scene. A few years ago, the Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the top 100 global thinkers.
His commentary on Niall Ferguson’s book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, became a sensation in the global literary and media circles, resulting in a much-talked about public spat between the two thinkers. Mishra’s novels Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995) and The Romantics (1999) both earned him critical acclaim.
The author’s non-fiction work, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West, and The Remaking of Asia, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in the UK, won the Crossword Book Award for nonfiction in India, and is the first book by a non-Western writer to win the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding.
Were you a good literature student?
Not at all. I flunked most of the time. I liked reading, of course, but the appropriation of texts for a purpose other than pleasure didn’t appeal.
How do your books come into being? Where do they start? Where do you write your fiction?
A book can spend a long time in gestation. And they can have the strangest beginnings. And fiction more so than non-fiction.
China continues to fascinate you. Your latest book A Great Clamour is about China and its neighbours. You have written about the country in your previous works An End to Suffering and From the Ruins of Empire. Do you have a thing for China?
I am not sure how one cannot be fascinated by the greatest phenomenon of recent decades — the emergence and assertion of the world’s biggest country, and its reshaping of the world’s economic and geopolitical map. I think the next few decades will be even more interesting in what they reveal to us about this reshaping.
What according to you constitutes Asian modernity?
One whose form hasn’t settled yet. It lies in the future, perhaps ahead of the disasters and blunders we commit working with other ideas of modernity.
Simple-minded comparisons are often drawn between India and China. As someone who has travelled in the area, how do you see this distinction?
One has to first part company with the utterly philistine business press view of India and China — as places where much money can be made. This is hardly the way to assess the past, present and future of the world’s two most ancient and complex societies. Of course, there are older links between the two countries, cultural and religious, but what binds them together now is their recent experience of anarchic forms of capitalism, the emphasis on private-wealth creation, the loss of the state’s legitimacy, and how this process has dissolved the distinctions between democracy and authoritarianism.
In a famous essay How Well Does Contemporary Fiction Address Radical Politics? that you wrote for the New York Times, you said that fiction by women is much more sensitive to the variety, ambiguities and contradictions of radical thought and action than fiction by men. What makes you think so?
I would like to avoid all gendered discussion, but this is how it strikes me. Don de Lillo once wrote about a novelist who thinks he is in competition with terrorists — people who can draw attention to their cause more easily than any novelist. Could it be that women writers don’t seem to have these very male anxieties? I don’t know. I am just speculating.
Can fiction address radical politics?
Yes, of course, it can, and it has, successfully, from the earliest. Think about Dostoevsky’s The Devils or Turgenev’s Virgil Soil. It is an Anglo-American conceit — the conceit of fully modern, hyper-organised and imperial societies — that fiction should stay away from politics of all kinds. It’s not relevant to societies that have yet to find their own way of being modern, where much political institutions, cultural forms remain to be settled, and radicals of all sorts proliferate in times of chaos, and even otherwise.
Why have we not seen extreme political ideas in fiction by Indian authors writing in English?
There have been some attempts, but you’ll have to go to writing in Indian languages for fuller depictions of radical ideas. This deficiency has to do with the prison of class and caste in which writing in English finds itself.
Talking about India, how do you see the emergence of radical new political forces like the Aam Admi Party (AAP)? Are they anarchists or is this a new form of participatory democracy?
Participatory democracy can easily feel like anarchy, especially when most democratic institutions are in an advanced form of decay, and most political parties look compromised. One must welcome a movement like AAP while at the same time being extremely suspicious of it. Anything new and popular shakes up the political scene, opens up new possibilities, and in that sense AAP has already done its job, by introducing new ideas of political participation among the masses and urging a less elitist demeanor on politicians.
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