Against the Brahmins: An Interview with Pankaj Mishra

Interviewed by Wajahat Ali

Boston Review - ONLINE MAY 2, 2013

Pankaj Mishra enjoys upsetting the alleged status quo. The 43-year-old Indian writer has become a leading critic of Western imperialism, globalization, and abuses of power among the political and intellectual upper crust. He charges India’s privileged class with manipulating the democratic process for self-preservation and profit. He publicly blasts peers, such as Salman Rushdie, whom he accuses of choosing to “amplify the orthodoxies of political and military elites.” and Niall Ferguson, whom he condemned as a cheerleader of “neo-imperialist wars.”

Born and raised in Northern India, Mishra was expected to join the civil service after graduating from university. Instead, he moved to a small village in the Himalayas for five years and wrote literary reviews for the Indian press. In 1995, he published his first book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India, a travelogue populated by colorful and diverse characters living at the intersection of globalization and Indian tradition.

Since then, he has written numerous essays, edited an anthology, and published a novel and three books of nonfiction, including last year’s From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia, which was just short-listed for the 2013 Orwell Prize, a prestigious British award for political writing.

In From the Ruins of Empire, Mishra crafts an epic narrative interlinking the lives of three 19th-century revolutionary protagonists: the pan-Islamist Jamal al-Din Afghani, Lian Qichao of China, and Bengali writer and Nobel Prize–winner Rabindranath Tagor. Independently, these intellectual upstarts sought to create an empowered Asian identity rising from the humiliation of colonization and Western imperialism. Their attempts left an influential legacy for modern Middle Eastern and Asian communities struggling to achieve political, economic, and intellectual dignity and autonomy in an age of declining and shifting empires.

In this email interview, Mishra discusses modern South Asian identity; the consequences of democracy, modernization, and religious extremism in India; the role and responsibility of intellectuals; and the question of whether global power is shifting from the West to the East.

—Wajahat Ali

Wajahat Ali: Reflecting on recent events, could an argument be made that the disastrous Iraq War and the 2008 financial crisis have shifted the axis of power from the United States to rising Asia?

Pankaj Mishra: I don’t think Asians and South Asians have much cause for celebration if power is indeed shifting to the East due to the disastrous blunders of the United States. One still has to ask, whose power? And to whom is it shifting and who in Asia will it eventually benefit? We Asians have shown ourselves very capable of making the same kind of mistakes. I write from Japan, which has its own history of militarism and imperialism, and where the ghost of nationalism is yet to be exorcised. And we know about South Asia’s inability to defuse its toxic nationalisms or provide a degree of social and economic justice to its billion-plus populations.

WA: Your book focuses on late 19th-century cosmopolitan intellectuals, such as Jamal al din Afghani, Liang Qichao, and Tagore, who were early resisters to Western imperialism and colonialism. Do their lives and ideas inform and relate to the dissidents of today, such as the protestors in Tahrir Square, the revolutionaries in Syria, or civil society groups in Malaysia?

PM: People like al-Afghani, Liang, and Tagore were responding, in another era of globalization, to the growing predominance of a mode of political economy vindicated by the great power of the West and to the increasing violence and suffering of non-Western societies as they scrambled to organize themselves for life in the new, ruthless world of international relations. They were at the beginning of the process that we now seem more clearly in places like Egypt, Syria, or Malaysia—the formation of unwieldy and unviable nation-states over multicultural mosaics, the invocation of religious-ethnic solidarities (Malaysia), or the creation and eventual collapse of pro-Western military dictatorships (Egypt) to sustain and legitimize the rule of local elites. I think al-Afghani in 1890s Iran or Liang in early 19th-century imperial China would have recognized the daunting backdrop to ordinary struggles for freedom and dignity today—the general political fragmentation, the loss of the state’s legitimacy everywhere, and the rise of transnational elites who owe primary allegiance to themselves.

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