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No Razor's Edge
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Do not look for deep meaning and do not get heated up in this book, though it is a pretty accurate view from the perspective of a bourgeoisie writer, looking upon the tragedy of poverty in India.
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MOST young people living in Delhi, and studying in one of the four universities in Delhi, tend to buy themselves at least one religious book, like the Penguin Dhammapad, if not Tiruvalluvar. Pankaj Misra is no different. All men seem to admit that their spiritual yearnings metamorphise with the loss of "one Helen" ... the masthead of their ambitions in later decades. Pankaj is like those dilettantes one reads about in Somerset Maugham, who fear boredom more than old age, death, poverty or mendicancy.
This book is no Razor's Edge (Somerset's ode to Maharishi Ramana of Tiruvannamalai), nor does it have 10 pages on Hell, as in Joyce's Portrait of An Artist. The book Mishra writes is about Pankaj Mishra, so to take it more seriously than that, and look for scholarship's accuracy, would be self-annihilating. Read this book if you're recovering from news of fatal illness and don't know much about Buddha and Mishra, or going on a holiday and don't want to strain your brain, or if you like pop-art! Do not look for deep meaning and do not get heated up. It's best appreciated if you're the type who says "What were the four noble truths?" It is a pretty accurate view from the perspective of a bourgeoisie writer, looking upon the tragedy of poverty in India. As bourgeoisie perspectives go, this is more honourable than saying that socialism is an unnecessary pedagogic device!
`Startling cliches'
It is written for those friendly foreigners who leave books in hotels, after having read them. They are generally intelligent and indiscriminate readers who lug Ishigaro, Marilyn French and Rabelais with an equal enthusiasm on backpack travels. I'm sure Pankaj's new book will sell very well — he is a foreign publisher's delight, an Indian reviewer's puzzle and the readers always make up their own mind, and never take any advice ... otherwise very few of us could continue to write. The text does have startling clichés like "The Indian Fig, or Pipal, is a big elegant tree. Its leaves are heart shaped... " Its obviously not written for us, who have pipals growing in the crevices of our walls and out of our water cisterns in the terrace!
What I liked about the book was its placidity, which leaves one curious about the nature of the craft. If Mishra is so keen to assert he is some kind of village yokel, the anguished son of a displaced small landowner actually) then how come he is so precise in the reading and writing of English? Those "stern nuns" in hill side schools must have something to do with it. All those injunctions to tie our shoe laces and walk straight and not drop pencils or misplace articles in grammar! That training he seems to have well in place, (he's one of our best known critics and journalists) but the discipline of writing with foot-notes, (due to absentee landlordism in one of our finest universities) has escaped him completely. If all fiction is autobiography, then we must suggest that perhaps all autobiography is fiction. The book is not boring like his novel was. It has an honesty, which is a little piffling sometimes, and school boy sneaky, but he's at home in India: the Buddha is a Bodh Gaya Bihari, and the last details of the scuffle and dirt of what consititues maya is written about in the peacefulness of an orchard and house in Mashobra. Finally, Mishra wrote this book because he likes writing, and he doesn't much care whether you want to read it or not ... his pension is apparently sufficient already, and he is only in his 30s.
SUSAN VISVANATHAN
An End to Suffering, Pankaj
Mishra, Picador, London, 2004, p.422, Rs. 495.
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