PANKAJ MISHRA
Born in Jhansi, India, Pankaj Mishra is best known as an influential essayist and sharp literary critic who has charted the collapse of the globalist post-imperial consensus more incisively than most. He is the author of ten books, and the recipient of many literary awards including the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for non-fiction. His second novel, Run and Hide, his first in over 20 years, was recently published by Hutchinson Heinemann. Following a group of friends from their times as fresh undergraduates at an elite Indian university to the global stage, the book represents a prescient and unflinching study of the costs of globalisation at the level of the individual and the local.
Interview by Masoud GolsorkhiPortrait by Maya Mishra
Masoud Golsorkhi What took you back to fiction after such a long time? Was it the lockdown?
Pankaj Mishra I had written most of the book before the pandemic erupted, but it did give me the space to work, which was indispensable. The fact that I wasn’t travelling, which is always a big disruption, meant I was able to stay very close to the narrative, to its emotional core.
MG That emotional core of the book seems very close to yourself, and there are aspects of your personal history that come in and out of frame all the time.
PM The characters in the novel are mostly composites, but certainly I have been writing about the themes and the subjects all my life: what does power do to individual human beings? Does the pursuit of power, happiness and contentment in the ways prescribed by the modern West bring any kind of fulfilment? What does it mean that countries like India have undergone enormous transition, from being relatively poor and community-based to being these wealthy but also increasingly atomised, individualistic societies? I have grappled with these questions in my non-fiction and then had to deal with them in my fiction, too, which means that obviously there’s a strong autobiographical element running throughout. Certain things, like a fascination for mountains and for the Himalayas, in particular, is something I share with the narrator. You’re always surprised at what comes out of you, which is never the case with non-fiction. Writing fiction connects to your deepest memories and transforms that experience without your being fully aware of it or fully in control of the process. That makes it quite magical and fulfilling to do.
MG Some authors approach fiction without any idea of what they are about to do, almost like a tourist visiting a foreign country; others are methodical planners and have a clear sense of structure and the shape. What is your approach?
PM It’s not methodical in any way. In most cases I start with an image or something someone is saying, and then I follow where that takes me. The two novels I’ve written aren’t plot driven, so I don’t worry a great deal about weaknesses in the plot. I just work on making the scenes vivid, making the dialogue clear, focusing on character.
MG What do you think is unique about the way Indian subjectivity has changed as a result of the globalisation process?
PM Primarily, the timing. A lot of countries hoped to join the modern West to become as powerful and consumption-oriented as Europe and America, but it was the peculiar fate of countries like India and China to do that just when globalisation was happening. There was this opportunity to break out of a stagnant economy, society and culture, and to embrace what the modern West had to offer. In the UK and America in the late 1980s, the dominant ideologies were those of Thatcher and Reagan. Individualism was particularly revolutionary and emancipatory for many people in India who lived in conservative orthodox communities, always beholden to the community at large, always being told to behave in certain ways and to respect the wishes of the collective. This radical notion of individualism that arrived from the West was a revelation for many Indians.
MG And remains so. In the book, the inception of the story is Arun’s arrival at an elite university, one that holds the inherent promise that anybody who attends will be guaranteed an amazing life.
PM It became that way back in the 1980s, or perhaps even earlier, in the 1960s and 1970s. People went to those institutions, in many cases travelling to the United States, and became very powerful and wealthy very quickly. The famous case mentioned in the book, Rajat Gupta, went from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi to being the first foreign-born managing director of McKinsey & Company, and a hugely important figure on Wall Street. Individual successes like his became a template in the 1970s, and by the late 1980s you were pretty sure to have a good life if you managed to get into IIT. The competition for getting into those institutions became much fiercer, and something that’s not written about is how literally tens of millions of Indian children had their childhoods destroyed for the sake of getting into these institutions, for the sake of material progress. What does it do to their inner lives and their sense of self? What happens to human beings when a vital stage in their growth and upbringing disappears completely?
MG That is the immigrant’s way, isn’t it? I live in Edgware Road, densely populated by recent immigrants from Iraq and Syria, and one of the first businesses to thrive is a private after-school tutorial college. The parents offer their meagre resources and their firstborn to the altar of success in a new country. What has been the experience of being that investment and what has been the return?
PM What people didn’t realise back in the 1980s is that it’s a Faustian pact: you’re going to be materially successful, but you’re going to have to make a clean break with your past, because the world you’re entering has absolutely no use for it; in fact, your past is a burden, hence the importance of what Naipaul says in the novel. The relationship between children and parents has become extremely fraught. The parents have made what they consider to be great sacrifices, but they didn’t really expect that their children would live thousands of miles away. The parents have grown up in a system where children look after their parents, but now you have this large number of stranded parents who live separately from their children and from the community at large, completely isolated and quite desolate. There is money, but there isn’t the same kind of life.
MG The elephant in the room is the Modi phenomenon, which in a sense is an organised form of disillusionment with modernity and a retreat into traditional forms of identity, but which also projects an image of being pro-business, modern and open to the world. How do those two aspects square with each other?
PM A large part of his appeal to many Indians, especially young Indians, lies in his promise to deliver modernity, which is something that all previous leaders have failed to do. The big distinction he makes is that you don’t have to trample on your past to get there; that’s where his difference lies from previous leaders. You can be proud to be a Hindu, and you can combine being a nuclear physicist with a belief in the therapeutic value of cow urine. You can embrace your culture – or culture as he and his party define it – and at the same time be a part of the modern world and possess nuclear weapons and bullet trains. This is why he has proven to be such a seductive figure in India.
Pankaj Mishra, The Romantics, Picador, 1999
Pankaj Mishra, Run and Hide, Hutchinson Heinemann, 2022
There are other aspects to that; for example, India is a country full of absent fathers who are at work or far away, or are dead, sick or infirm, so to a lot of young Indians, and males particularly, Modi is the missing father who consoles and comforts. No political leader has ever met these deeply felt psychological needs or even imagined those needs existed. He’s a genius at communication, a genius of the heart. He really gets through to many unhappy, frustrated, deprived Indians today.
MG Retaining tradition and embracing modernity was also a Gandhian promise.
PM The Gandhian promise was very limited; the Nehruvian promise of modernity was much more substantial, but it involved a renunciation of India’s religious and spiritual traditions and was too alienating for many people. Note the intensity and ferocity of Modi’s attacks on Nehru, the prime minister who is described as an Anglophile who knew more about Britain than he knew about India, who had more British friends than Indian friends. Some of these things are actually true or half-true; his most intimate friends were indeed foreigners. The depiction of Nehru as a rootless cosmopolitan is very much part of the package that Modi is offering, that the price that Nehru was asking you to pay was intolerable, which was, “Stop being a Hindu, stop your superstitious practices and embrace the spirit of science.” Well, you can embrace the spirit of science and still worship the snake. That’s the big shift from the promises that Gandhi and Nehru made. Ahmadinejad [in Iran] is probably doing the same, speaking of science not as something alien or foreign but something that has always existed. Modi makes claims like plastic surgery was first conducted by ancient Indians or the evidence for nuclear fission exists in our Vedas. A very powerful part of the appeal is that what seems to you alien, unfashionable and sinister is in the next moment familiar and completely tame.
MG The literary device of the letter has a long heritage. Why did you choose to make it such a fundamental part of the novel?
PM It gave the novel a degree of ambiguity, so the person to whom the book is addressed slowly comes into view. It was also important for the narrator to be traumatised into speech: the narrator isn’t at first very eloquent. Throughout the novel, it’s not in his habit to hold forth on subjects. The reason for him to speak so eloquently had to be found in the way this particular character has been wronged. He wrongs the character, and in the end, he finds that Alia has also been abused by a close friend of his. Addressing the book to her is a kind of explanation also of a life that she failed to grasp in her own book. There is an implicit critique of the certain kind of journalism that Alia practises, which can never get very deeply into these tormented psychological complexes that he’s describing. That kind of journalism can only deal with the external events – that many million stolen or that many people arrested. The true anatomy of a scandal like that can only really be provided by the narrator.
MG Maybe Alia should write her own novel.
PM That would be my next book. ◉