An enlarged global public society, with its many dissenting and corrective voices, can quickly call the bluff of lavishly credentialled and smug intellectual elites. Pankaj Mishra More Quotes by Pankaj Mishra More Quotes From Pankaj Mishra Certainly, imperial power is never peaceably acquired or maintained. Pankaj Mishra imperial certainly never power As an Indian, you feel easily connected with certain histories in places like Indonesia, where one sees, because of the presence of the Hindu-Buddhist past, Hindus still living there or Muslims performing rituals that are instantly familiar. Pankaj Mishra feel you living past Indonesia is hardly immune to catastrophic breakdowns, as the anti-Communist pogrom showed. But, like India, it has been relatively fortunate in evolving a mode of politics that can include many discontinuities - of class, region, ethnicity, and religion. Pankaj Mishra like india politics religion In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Japan had put forward a proposal to guarantee racial equality at the League of Nations, but Woodrow Wilson overturned it in the face of majority support. Pankaj Mishra face equality support peace As a young man in South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century, Gandhi developed satyagraha, a mode of political activism based upon moral persuasion, while mobilizing South Africa's small Indian minority against racial discrimination. Pankaj Mishra small beginning man discrimination National independence, and the preceding political struggles, helped create the space for literary creation in many post-colonial countries. Much of modern Indian or Chinese literature is inconceivable without the political movement for freedom from foreign rule. Pankaj Mishra independence freedom political space Ordinary Muslims in Europe, who suffer from the demoralisation caused by living as perennial objects of suspicion and contempt, are far from thinking of themselves as a politically powerful, or even cohesive, community, not to speak of conquerors of Europe. Pankaj Mishra community powerful speak thinking Happily, financial capitalism and free trade have not done away with national languages and literatures, as Marx rather too blithely hoped. Pankaj Mishra free capitalism financial done Many Indians and Israelis seem set to elect, with untroubled consciences, those who speak the language of torturers and terrorists. More disturbingly, these corrupted democracies may increasingly prove the norm rather than the exception. Pankaj Mishra more prove language speak Just as China achieved much more than India in the realm of public health and education under an austere Communist regime, so its economic growth under a capitalist-friendly government strikes a visitor from India as nothing less than spectacular. Pankaj Mishra growth health government education The Turkish, Arab and Chinese nationalists who built new nation-states out of the ruins of old empires scorned their old, decrepit rulers as much as they did the foreign imperialists who imposed free trade through gunboats. Pankaj Mishra old new free trade The idea that modernisation makes for enhanced national power and rapid progress and helps everyone achieve greater happiness has its origins in the astonishing political, economic and military successes of western Europe in the 19th century. Pankaj Mishra progress political power happiness Tanpinar presciently feared that to embrace the western conception of progress was to be mentally enslaved by a whole new epistemology, one that compartmentalised knowledge and concealed an instrumental view of human beings as no more than things to be manipulated. Pankaj Mishra view new progress knowledge In a typically contradictory move, globalisation, while promoting economic integration among elites, has exacerbated sectarianism everywhere else. Pankaj Mishra globalisation integration economic As the 19th century progressed, Europe's innovations, norms and categories came to achieve a truly universal hegemony. Pankaj Mishra norms universal achieve europe
