blind fanatics (pankaj mishra)

Pankaj Mishra’s collection of essays is a takedown of both liberalism and its bastard offspring neo-liberalism. The essays span a number of years and some are extended book reviews. Nevertheless, the book as a whole offers a comprehensive alternative slant on the history of the past 300 years. In particular the way in which the Anglo-American model, incorporating a ‘democracy’ which can be exported using force, has been of devastating harm to all those societies it has exploited rather than served. The curious element of Mishra’s commentary is that he appears to do as more of an insider than an outsider. He has read all the figures who have participated in the intellectual construction of the late twentieth and early twenty first version of Anglo-American/ European hegemony. Writers in the US as wide-ranged as Mark Grief or Ta-Nehisi Coates, or the ubiquitous Jordan Peterson. On the Anglo front, he skewers the Amis, Hitchens axis, showing how it has a direct lineage to Imperialist racism, particularly in tis attitude towards Islam. Mishra recognises that political actions are fertilised by intellectual standpoints and that there is a cross-fertilisation which benefits the writers and thinkers whose prose backs up established attitudes. The higher up the food chain you go, the more weight a magazine like The Economist, The Spectator or The Atlantic has. People who write for these publications are writing to speak to and with the elite, those who will decide whether it’s permissible to bomb or to turn a blind eye to genocide. So many critiques of ‘the system’ appear to come from people who have no idea of how the system really works, or how insulated it is. Mishra’s coherent grasp permits his critique to be more comprehensive and telling. Whether we are entering the death throes of the Anglo-US-European age and embarking on a new Asian age is another matter, but the iniquities of liberalism are well and truly skewered in these essays. 

the romantics [pankaj mishra]

This book has an unlikely history. I'm talking about this particular book, not Mishra's book, although this is obviously a sentence which could provoke a Platonic debate. It was purchased via Amazon in London and brought to Monvtevideo in August 2010. (i don't know its history before it reached me, it may be that that too was unlikely.) In Montevideo it was, initially, not read. Rather it became a star of the stage. In the version of Pinter's Betrayal I was working on, the character Emma reads a book whilst she's in Venice through the course of the scene wherein her husband, Jerry, confronts her with the revelation that he knows about her infidelity with his best friend. The book selected was this edition of Mishra's The Romantics. Not because of its content or its title. Rather, because as a solid, red-clothed hardback, it had a suitable anonymous weight. It had sufficient presence to signal Emma's attempt to remain engaged with its pages in spite of where she suspects the conversation is headed and at the same time was suitably anonymous not to draw the spectator's attention away from the actors or the action. In this day and age, of course. she would have been more likely to have been reading a Kindle. When the run of the show came to an end the book was reclaimed and went to live on the Costa de Oro for a while, before finally returning to the Barrio Sur in Montevideo in 2012. Where I am now living, and where the book has been, at long last, read.

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One of the downsides of being well-connected is that it means you are able to get that first novel, which should probably have remained in a drawer, published. Pankaj Mishra is an intelligent and informed non-fiction writer. He has ascended to one of those pan-global lives only enjoyed by sports stars, celebrity chefs or DJs or high powered cultural commentators, flitting between India, New York and London. He has, according to Wiki, been described as the next Edward Said. And good luck to him. But in a week where the conflicts latent with the 'new' India have come to the fore, (and one has little doubt that he has written on the issue), this is a tome from the past. Dealing with vapid Westerners mingling with innocent, Flaubert-addicted natives, breaking their hearts and corrupting their world views. In theory a book that drifts between Varanasi, Dharamsala and Pondicherry should have plenty to offer, but in practice there's something tired and uninspired about this maudlin tale, which lives up to its slightly preposterous (late Bertolucci) title. Had Mr Mishra not managed to make himself so well connected, with the clear backing of a powerful UK publisher, there's little doubt the novel would never have seen the light of day, and no-one would have been any the wiser. As it is, in spite of the fact that he has intimated in interviews that he would like to write another novel, one suspects that the author would be best off sticking to his undoubted strengths.

temptations of the west [pankaj mishra]

Last Autumn, in Kashmir, we sat and listened to Jimmy, who looked after us on the houseboat, as he talked about the suffering endured by local Kashmiris, and the people of his village in particular. In spite of the vast military presence, and a sense of melancholia that seemed to hang over the (always male) residents of Srinigar we met, the full extent of this suffering remained concealed. There was a sense of the need to move on, to convince the Western tourists that things were improving, that there was nothing to worry about.

Of course, as a visitor, the reality of a society is hard to grasp. This is part of the reason we need journalists, who can delve deeper and reveal what's really going on within a society. To do this, the journalist needs to get out there and talk to people on the ground. Even then, his or her impressions will be nothing more than partial, but at least they can begin to help the layman to understand the things the eyes cannot immediately see.

Mishra's book does just this. As such, it seems like an almost mandatory read for anyone visiting India, Kashmir, Afghanistan or Pakistan. (The sections on Nepal and Tibet are more discursive, and lack the detail of the other chapters.) Mishra is driven by a curiosity to find out about what's going on in his part of the world, but also to trace the way in which a society he thought he knew as a child was more complex than it seemed, and how it has evolved as a result. His writing on the often frightening changes to Indian culture, after speaking to film stars and politicians, visiting Hindu strongholds and Muslim havens, constantly explores the frayed edges of a new India, where tolerance and pacifism are in increasingly short supply. When he writes about the bombastic Bollywood film LOC Kargil, the whole caboodle of religious divide, Hindu nationalism, the mythic role of Kashmir and Bollywood are brought together.

Because so many people visit India, and because the colonial heritage with regard to India and Pakistan is still so great, there tends to be an assumption that we in the UK know something about that part of the world. Mishra's astute observations help to plug the vast gaps in our knowledge, skewering the way in which these societies are struggling to come to terms with modern materialism whilst maintaining a conviction in the importance of the four great religions that dominate South Asia. In the process he helps to show how Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, as well as explaining why the Kashmiri crisis might well be one without end.

In the last two months, things have taken a turn for the worse in Kashmir, and one wonders how the people we met, Jimmy, Shaquil and co are getting on. I wish I'd read Mishra's book before I visited. The tourist's ignorance, marvelling at an exotic beauty, is all very well, but in the end, if we want to be more than mere than just economic, part-time colonialists, there remains some kind of imperative to make the attempt to be conscious of those places we choose to explore when we find ourselves taking time out from our endlessly busy lives.