ESSAYS
Flashes of brilliance
UMA MAHADEVAN-DASGUPTA
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The stories of nations caught in the vortex of change cannot always be simplified into a few thousand words.
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Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond; Pankaj Mishra, Picador, Rs. 525.
PANKAJ MISHRA'S first book Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, which appeared in the mid-1990s, marked the arrival of a fascinating new voice in travel writing about the subcontinent.
Writing with sympathy and affectionate detail, Mishra described the changing landscape of small towns across the vast and suddenly globalising country.
Mishra's personal trajectory had led him from Allahabad to Delhi. In 1992 he moved away from what he calls "the squalor of Delhi" as well as his small-town upbringing, to the Himalayan setting of Mashobra, from where he began to write literary essays and reviews. During a stint as an editor, he famously discovered the novelist Arundhati Roy. His own first novel, The Romantics (2000), was the story of a friendship between a young Indian man and a group of Westerners drifting between cultures.
Much travelled
Writing long essays and travelogues for American and British publications such as the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books, Mishra began to travel across India and outside. His next book The Buddha in the World: An End to Suffering continued in the Naipaulian style of writing as much about himself and his travels into the world of ideas, as about the relevance of the Buddha in the contemporary world.
Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond brings together a set of essays written over several years. It takes us through Mishra's travels in India (Kashmir, Ayodhya, Allahabad, Bollywood) as well as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Tibet. The prologue, "Learning to Read", is set in Benares in the late 1980s just before economic liberalisation was to transform the Indian landscape. The 20-odd pages tell the story of a struggling young man in small-town India who becomes a paid killer. But like Mishra's best essays, it is about many more things. It is about reading Flaubert, reading Edmund Wilson on Flaubert, discovering a Guru — and another young man trying to enter the world of ideas through books discovered in a dusty university library.
Mishra finds ordinary people caught in the painful subcontinental struggle for change, and gets them to talk about their actual, lived experiences. Rajesh in Benares chooses violence as a career; Rahmat, in Pakistan, takes it up as a philosophy. Meanwhile, in rural Uttar Pradesh, while the juggernaut of electoral politics rolls through the dusty landscape, a Muslim village of 3000 people, nearly all of them illiterate, survive by skinning cows killed in road accidents. At his best, Mishra has a gift for the sudden, illuminating detail.
It is essential to interrogate the breathless narrative of a glittering India, and Mishra's is one of the important voices engaged in this effort. Nevertheless, his stances are not always nuanced. Although he has personally benefited from globalisation — "I knew security and stability for the first time in my life," he writes about moving to London, rather over-emphasising his lower middle-class beginnings — others who have benefited, including those who make up the growing Indian middle class, are viewed less sympathetically.
Interrrupted narrative
One effect of his writing for a clearly Western audience is that he is always interrupting his narratives with explanations that border on summaries - a technique that inevitably leads to simplifications. The topics that he writes about, including entire nations, are often too vast to be contained within the space he gives them. The stories of nations caught in the vortex of change cannot always be simplified into a few thousand words.
Not only his readings but also his facts are occasionally incorrect. Sometimes it is a small detail: it was Nikhil Advani, not Karan Johar, who directed "Kal Ho Na Ho" (Johar wrote the story and produced the film). Sometimes he trips up on much larger issues, such as his unconvincing take on the Chitisinghpura killings.
Concern with self
And at the heart of everything is a concern with himself — or rather, with his provincial beginnings — that has now begun to sound tediously self-indulgent. In "Jihad Globalized", his Pakistan travelogue, he writes about December 1992, the destruction of the Babri Masjid, and his disconnect with the crisis that was enveloping the nation, for which he offers an explanation: "I had my own anxieties to deal with; the university degree I was working towards was only the first stage in what then seemed a long slow climb out of the relative poverty my family had lived in for much of my childhood."
Now that he lives in London, we can only hope that the "long slow climb" to financial security is now complete — and that he will move on from recycling small-town memories.
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