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 More Quotes by Pankaj Mishra More Quotes From Pankaj Mishra In India, love often follows marriage. I know many people who are still very deeply in love with their wives, who they barely knew before they were married. In America there's this idea that "how could someone get married without being deeply in love with each other?" but in a lot of these cases feelings of love and affection actually grow after they've been legally and formally brought together. Pankaj Mishra wife america ideas Incidentally, I am intrigued by how many European and Latin American writers expressed their political views in the columns they routinely wrote or write in the popular press, like Saramago, Vargas Llosa, and Eco. This strikes me as one way of avoiding opinionated fiction, and allowing your imagination a broader latitude. Similarly, fiction writers from places like India and Pakistan are commonly expected to provide primers to their country's histories and present-day conflicts. But we haven't had that tradition in Anglo-America. Pankaj Mishra latin writing country Once you get past the grand normative claims made in the West for literature, especially the novel, in the post-Christian era - that it is a secular substitute for religion, hallmark of modern civilization, a priori liberal and cosmopolitan, with authors appearing to implicitly embody such pious ideals - you encounter a less agreeable reality: parochialism, blinkered views, even racial prejudices of the kind the bourgeoisie have held everywhere. Pankaj Mishra christian reality past I think that Indian writing in English is a really peculiar beast. I can't think of any literature - perhaps Russian literature in the nineteenth century comes close - so exclusively produced by and closely identified with a tiny but powerful ruling elite, the upper-caste, Anglophone upper middle class, and dependent for so long on book buyers and readers elsewhere. Pankaj Mishra powerful writing book We, especially those of us in depoliticized and pacified societies, need to cast a colder eye at our self-perceptions, now and in the past, as sentinels and embodiments of Enlightenment virtues of reason, dissent, and skepticism. Pankaj Mishra eye self past I think a more complex idea of fiction - and the human self's relationship with the world - emerges when we abandon this philistine equation between literature and liberalism and human goodness, and pay some attention to the darker, ambiguous, and often muddled energies and motivations that shape a work of art. If we do this, we can appreciate a writer like Céline or Gottfried Benn without worrying whether they conform to existing notions of political incorrectness. Pankaj Mishra motivation art thinking Today, practically every country outside the West is undergoing an intellectual, political, and cultural churning, from China to Bolivia, Egypt to Indonesia, but we haven't really had, after the 1960s, a major oppositional culture in Western Europe and America. The Occupy movement was so startling and welcome partly because it was the first such eruption of mass protests in decades. Pankaj Mishra egypt country america We need a more complex understanding of writers working under authoritarian or repressive regimes. Something to replace this simpleminded, Cold War-ish equation in which the dissident in exile is seen as a bold figure, and those who choose to work with restrictions on their freedom are considered patsies for repressive governments. Let's not forget that most writers in history have lived under nondemocratic regimes: Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Goethe didn't actually enjoy constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of speech. Pankaj Mishra government rights war Writers in the nineteenth century - people like George Eliot and Flaubert - were accustomed to addressing particular communities with which they shared not only linguistic meanings but also an experience and history. Those communities have progressively split in the twentieth century, and grown more heterogeneous, and writers emerging from minority communities have found themselves addressing audiences closer to their experience and history - a phenomenon derided by conservative white men as identity politics and multiculturalism in the arts. Pankaj Mishra identity-politics men art Our tolerance of the intolerable found a low threshold as early as the late 1950s with the grotesque excesses of McCarthyism, which destroyed so many honest lives, and then with the insane nuclear arms race and confrontations. Pankaj Mishra tolerance insane race What happens when we examine the claims made for Western liberalism as a universalizing ideology of tolerance, human dignity, equality, and compassion is the fact that the patron saint of modern liberalism, John Stuart Mill, thought that barbarian peoples like the Indians were unfit for self-rule. Pankaj Mishra tolerance compassion self I think overtly political novels - those that never transcend or contest their author's conscious intentions and prejudices - are problematic. This is not just true of the innumerable unread books in the socialist realist tradition, but also of novels that carry the burden of conservative ideologies, like Guerrillas, Naipaul's worst book, where the author's disgust for a certain kind of black activist and white liberal is overpowering. Pankaj Mishra white book thinking I think our conception of literature should accommodate not only apolitical writers but also those whose political opinions we find unpalatable. Fiction after all comes from a different, less rationally manipulable side of the brain. I am personally very attached to reactionary figures like Dostoyevsky, Hamsun, and Céline. Pankaj Mishra political-opinions brain thinking The asymmetries of power that have shaped relations between the West and the rest of the world also exist in the realm of literary criticism. Pankaj Mishra asymmetry criticism world The recent past is full of diverse examples of writers - Mahfouz in Egypt, Pamuk in Turkey, and more interestingly, Pasternak in the Soviet Union - who have conducted their arguments with their societies and its political arrangements through their art in subtle, oblique ways. They didn't always have the license to make bold pronouncements about freedom, democracy, Islam, and liberalism, but they exerted another kind of moral authority through their work. Pankaj Mishra egypt past art Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee great literature. Pankaj Mishra freedom-of-speech literature guarantees It is this capacity for relentless self-criticism that should be - everywhere - the true measure of intellectual freedom and cosmopolitanism, not the entrenched cultural power and self-congratulatory moral rhetoric of some people in countries long accustomed to telling other societies what to do and how to behave. Pankaj Mishra self long country Despite all the boosterish talk of globalization breaking down barriers, most writers in Anglo-America are still working within the nationalist assumptions of their traditionally powerful societies. Pankaj Mishra assumption powerful america Whether you are in the West, the East, the North, or the South, we should all feel pressured to attempt more, find new ways of outwitting ourselves, in our writing and thinking. Pankaj Mishra east writing thinking Dickens didn't have access to any other epistemologies other than those prevailing in Britain. But a novelist today cannot plausibly claim ignorance of his society's manifold connections with the wider world, the fact that prosperity and security at home, for instance, often depend on extensive violence and exploitation abroad. Pankaj Mishra novelists ignorance home
