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Postliberalization Indian Novels in English

Politics of Global Reception and Awards

Wimbledon Publishing Company

A MAVERICK SCHOLAR: THE WRITINGS OF PANKAJ MISHRA

A. N. Dwivedi

One of the relatively recent signatures in contemporary Indian English writing. Pankaj Mishra, shot into the limelight with his work in fiction and nonfiction. Not much attention has been paid to him in the academic world for very long; in this paper my attempt has been to address this gap. But for a few reviews appearing in newspapers and literary journals (as the endnotes reflect), and the critical articles of Rahul Gairola (2003), Padmaja Challakere (2004), Jill Didur (2009) and Dwivedi (2009), no sustained efforts in the form of a book have been made to throw light on Mishra's works and achievements. These reviews and articles evoke a mixed response to his writings. More critical attention is called for because Mishra happens to be an author of the postliberalization period. But for his Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1985), all his works appeared after 1991 – once the process of liberalization and globalization in India had begun, the resonance of which was particularly felt in metropolitan cities.

Pankaj Mishra was born in the small town of Kannauj, Uttar Pradesh, in 1969. He did his undergraduate course at the University of Allahabad, which had been a centre of attraction for his maternal family: 'Three generations of my mother's family had gone to the University in Allahabad.' Having spent three years at Allahabad (1985–88), Mishra proceeded to Benares in the winter of 1988 for an intensive self-guided reading. He describes Benares as 'the holiest city of the Hindus, where people come either ritually to dissolve their accumulated "sins" in the Ganges, or simply die and achieve liberation from the cycle of rebirths'. He started attending the library of the Benares Hindu University where he discovered Edmund Wilson and his books, many of them being 'collections of reviews of books'. He avidly read them along with several thought-provoking works by other authors, like Schopenhauer, Turgenev and Flaubert.

Mishra then shifted to Delhi to pursue his graduate studies at the School of Languages, Jawaharlal Nehru University. In the meantime, he began publishing insightful reviews of Indian fiction in English and Western fiction on India in The Pioneer, a daily from Delhi. Mishra completed his MPhil and then took up a travel writing project, which resulted in Butter Chicken, a travel book, mapping his journey across several North Indian small towns. Rahul Gairola posits that Butter Chicken is Pankaj Mishra's first novel, but the brief biography of Mishra published in The Romantics (1999) mentions this as his debut novel. The Romantics is a predominantly autobiographical work and the protagonist Samar represents the author to an extent. Mishra was offered $450,000 as an advance from Random House for the novel – the second largest 'monetary nod' for an Indian writer in English, according to Robert Marquand in the Christian Science Monitor.

Two books by Mishra came out in quick succession: first, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (2004) – a memoir about his experience researching the life of Gautama Buddha, the Enlightened One – and second, Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond (2006) – a travelogue taking him to some historically and politically significant cities in India, and later through Kashmir, to Pakistan and Afghanistan, culminating in a visit to Nepal and Tibet. Mishra's essays and reviews have been appearing at regular intervals in national and international journals as well as periodicals of repute, including the New York Review of Books, the New Statesman, Granta, the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian and Outlook.

The Romantics, written over a period of about nine weeks, is the only fictional work that Mishra has produced to date. It narrates the story of a 20-year-old university student called Samar, who studies at the University of Allahabad and later shifts to Benares to pursue the works of Edmund Wilson and other Western philosophers. He regards Wilson as his 'own Guru, long dead but [...] more real than anyone I actually knew during that winter'. To him, Wilson's was 'an extraordinarily cohesive sensibility'. Another great influence upon Samar is that of Gustav Flaubert and his A Sentimental Education (1869). According to Jill Didur, Flaubert's disaffected protagonist, Frederic Moreau, serves as 'a partial model for Mishra's narrator, Samar'.

At the Benares Hindu University, Samar meets Rajesh, a politically active Brahmin student leader recommended by another student leader named Vijay of Allahabad. Samar is drawn to Rajesh because both of them are keenly interested in Wilson. The theme of the East–West encounter comes out vividly in The Romantics. While the ancient city of Benares struggles to cope with the modern India, Samar comes into contact with a number of people, both Indians and non-Indians: the old Panditji and his beleaguered wife living in separate rooms for the past 15 years, their son Arjun and his wife Sitadevi, their servant Shyam, Miss West, Mark, Debbie, Sarah, Catherine and her exploitative Indian boyfriend Anand. Of these, Samar draws closer to Miss West and Catherine, especially to the latter. Whereas his relationship with Miss West is one of friendliness, his relationship with Catherine is one of infatuation. Commenting on the ending of the novel, Jill Didur observes, 'Mishra's novel concludes with Samar in a secular, exilic mode, eschewing belonging and ready to begin a contrapuntal accounting of the past and his place in the nation.'

Butter Chicken focuses on small towns (not in the popular tourist destinations) like Murshidabad, Muzaffarnagar and Kottayam. In undertaking his travels, Mishra has no real itinerary or planned route. He is not so much interested in sights as in observing the transformation of Indian society under the myriad new influences affecting the country. There is much in this book about the effect of television, fast-food restaurants, rapidly expanding multistorey hotels and newer means of transportation. Though he may not be as sharp in wit as Paul Theroux or as ponderous as V. S. Naipaul in his observations, Mishra connects with the locals and he is funny and thoughtful with an ironic style.

In his itinerary, Mishra comes to Kottayam and meets, among others, Mary Roy, principal of the Corpus Christi School. He carries an introduction from a casual acquaintance, Arundhati Roy, who is Mrs Roy's daughter now living in Delhi in an illicit relationship with a Hindu man. Here it may be noted that Mishra's acquaintance with Arundhati Roy might have been 'casual' in 1985, but later it grew deep and he did his best to promote her novel, The God of Small Things (1997), which eventually earned for her the Booker Prize in 1997. In the acknowledgement section of The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy has expressed her indebtedness to Mishra for 'flagging it off on its journey into the world.' However, the unusual interest shown by him in the international promotion of the novel cost him dearly – he was fired from his position at HarperCollins in India.

Butter Chicken evoked a mixed response from readers and reviewers. Some of them consider it as a work of 'sharp insight' that endeavours to discover 'the huge and diverse land that is India', but the same review also criticizes it as 'somewhat lacking in focus and direction'. Mishra, too, remains queasy about his work: 'It is a fake book, a dishonest book by a dishonest writer. I completely suppressed some part of myself, the part that belongs to small town India in order to mock at it. I borrowed a voice, and maintained a constant distance between myself and the experience.'

In An End to Suffering, Mishra agonizes over the rise of religious extremism and its offshoot, majoritarianism. He thinks that the disappointment of the postcolonial Indians is due to 'the uneven distribution of modernity's promises.' To illustrate this, Mishra narrates the story of his visit to his college friend Vinod's family home in rural North India in the late 1980s. He meets Vinod there and then recounts the young man's feeling of bitterness over his failure to shine in the colonial education system, which would have enabled him to get out of his family's feudal, Brahminical way of life. Vinod exclaims with sorrow, 'I went with such high expectations', but he finds utter chaos and confusion on the campus. He is appalled to discover a miserable situation there: 'Teachers not showing up for classes, the exams being delayed for months, sometimes years. Criminals roamed the campus with guns and homemade bombs.' Disappointed, Vinod becomes one of 'the Hindu nationalists who were then rising to power on a wave of anti-Muslim violence across North India'. An End to Suffering makes, in a way, an ironic interpretation of caste-based politics and modernity that 'provides young men like Vinod, self-identified with Hindu majoritarian culture, extra leverage in the increasingly global capitalist environment fostered by economic liberalization in India during the early nineties'. Though Mishra seems to be identifying himself with Vinod and his situation, he maintains a distance from the Hindu majoritarian thinking because this kind of thinking only accentuates the suffering of those who live on the margins of modernity. Mishra tries to explore, through this memoir of sorts, the source of his own sense of 'futility and doom', of fear and disenchantment in the postcolonial Indian society, suggesting thereby the truth that the 'end to suffering' will come when the benefits of modernity are equally distributed across the social spectrum.

Temptations, unlike Butter Chicken, is notable for its range and scope. It focuses not only on some cities of India but also on Kashmir, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Tibet. In his foreword, the author emphatically declares, 'Western ideologies, whether of colonialism, or of communism and globalization, have confronted the countries I visited – India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Tibet – with the same challenge: modernize or perish.' And Benares bears 'the most garish symbols of the entrepreneurial energies unleashed by the liberalization of the Indian economy, which would transform Benares in the way they had already transformed other sleepy small towns across India'. As a travelogue, Temptations presents a first-hand account of various places, persons and events within and beyond India. Mishra's previous attempts at travelogue writing have obviously made him more focused and mature. As a result, Temptations is anything but 'a fake book'.

Apart from being a distinguished novelist and travel writer, Mishra is also a prolific writer of insightful essays, such as 'Edmund Wilson in Benares', 'A New, Nuclear India', 'Death in Kashmir', 'Behold the Good European' and 'A Sepulchral Chill in the Soul'. Of these essays, the first three appeared in the New York Review of Books and the last two in the New Statesman. 'Edmund Wilson in Benares' shows Mishra's attraction towards Wilson while living in Benares and his intensive reading of his books. 'A New, Nuclear India' critiques India's (then) recently acquired nuclear capabilities and its possible ramifications, while 'Death in Kashmir' charts out the breathtaking landscape of Kashmir, later besmeared with religious fanaticism and bloodshed. 'Behold the Good European' is a reflection on the manners, behaviour and culture of a good European, whereas 'A Sepulchral Education in the Soul' brings out the coldness of Flaubert's Frederic Moreau. Reviewing a revised edition of this work, Mishra comments on Moreau: '[He] dreams a great deal but nothing comes of his grand plans for success in art, business, journalism and politics. His shallow love affairs peter out.'

The resonance of the open door policy and the economic liberalization of India in the early 1990s is repeatedly felt in Mishra's works. In this context, The Romantics and Temptations come immediately to one's mind. In The Romantics, Samar finds the city of Benares old and dusty in the initial stage, but he notices a gradual transformation. Modern concrete and glass hotels are seen in the new parts of it, and the 'new middle-class prosperity has at last come to Benares'. Under the impact of liberalization, some palpable changes have taken place. Mishra hits the mark as he details the discontents of globalization: 'those ghostly fast-food places and beauty parlours and so-called Italian restaurants and the hotels with discotheques'. In Temptations, an identical description of the city of Benares is found: 'a rash of fast-food outlets, video-game parlors, and boutiques, the most garish symbols of the entrepreneurial energies unleashed by the liberalization of the Indian economy'. Speaking of Ayodhya, Mishra suggests that this city, after the demolition of the Babri Masjid by the Hindu karsevaks (zealots) in December 1992, is now ready for 'new lucrative connections to the global economy', and is an exemplar of 'the profound modernity of religious nationalism'. The incident of demolition coincided with the upsurge of nationalistic sentiments and economic liberalization in India, instilling a ray of hope in Mishra for the future prosperity of the city of Ayodhya.

We live in times when critical reception of any work of art is determined by publishers and an army of media strategists. Book writing is more of a media event than a literary one, and in some instances we even witness Bollywood personalities launching books of new, and sometimes well-known, writers. Mishra, however, largely remains untouched by such publicity shenanigans. Perhaps due to this conscious avoidance of hype, the reception to his works has often been a mixed one. A case in point is the reception of Butter Chicken. The Romantics was more fortunate. Reviewing it for The New York Times Book Review, Akash Kapur remarks, 'For all the poignancy of the moment, there is something labored about Mishra's language, its explicitness suggesting a first-time author too insecure to let the story speak for itself. This is a recurring problem in The Romantics. Although Mishra has a wonderful capacity for detail and psychological portraiture, his narrative is cluttered with thematic elucidation and explanations, many of them as dry as that "emanation [...] from unknown ancient times."' Kapur's review of the novel praises Mishra's 'wonderful capacity for detail and psychological portraiture' but calls in question his laboured language and cluttered narrative. Commenting on The Romantics, which went on to win the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, Margery Sabin remarks, 'He shares the revulsion of many radical intellectuals for the greed and callousness of the new global consumer economy that has left the vast majority of the subcontinent's population in the same impoverished misery as before.'

Sabin's review evidently appreciates Mishra's concerns for 'the vast majority of the subcontinent's population' (i.e. poor Hindus). The opinion of Shirley Chew about the novel is also worth quoting here: 'Mishra's writing has a lovely potency [...]. [A] subtly layered and compelling first novel. 'Likewise, Temptations was favourably received by many. The reviewer of the Observer found it, 'Thoughtful, intelligent and rigorous [...] a deep, insightful study of the very notion of modernity.'

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Excerpted from Postliberalization Indian Novels in English by Aysha Iqbal Viswamohan. Copyright © 2013 Aysha Iqbal Viswamohan. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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