Ambushed by modernity

 

Reading Pankaj Mishra’s Temptations Of The West leaves one with a feeling of pathos but with a strange void at its centre. It’s not unlike what one might feel after encountering those Bollywood hopefuls he describes in the book — young men from the back of beyond who hang around the big city homes of famous directors for an eternity, awaiting a nod that might never arrive. They haven’t aged, but they also haven’t lived, having chosen suspended animation over suffering the erosions of time and loss.

 

Modernity as a motif is a huge temptation for any writer. But Mishra would rather safely crystal-gaze at it than risk getting caught up in its contradictions. As someone who combines travel writing with critical reflection, his work could be seen as occupying the safe middle ground between the authentic whiff of sulphur that trails a Pico Iyer and the bracingly profane, unbuttoned meditations of a Jonathan Franzen.

 

Mishra travels through the diverse milieus of South Asia and reports on them. In these places, the imports of the West — democracy, city-centric economic models — are in various stages of malfunction and decay and he diligently records the voices of the elites as well as those condemned to the margins. But ultimately all his peregrinations, and the narratives they generate, have a disembodied feel about them, because more often than not he talks of big, abstract things like the ‘State’ and ‘Globalised Islam’ with their conspicuous lack of inner life. 

 

He could have more effectively exposed the entrails of Hindutva or evoked the deadly cocktail of drugs and militancy in Peshawar by dipping into quotidian recesses, by focusing on the stories of ordinary people dealing with grief, love and everyday life. Intimate situations and individual realities are, if dealt with appropriately, as good a can opener as any to crack civilisational questions and the geopolitical scene.

 

Again, one is saddened by the tantalising leads he provides but then, surprisingly, fails to pursue.  For instance, what did the poet Iqbal’s (who first propagated the two-nation theory in 1930 which was adopted by Jinnah 17 years later) rejection of the West and turning to Islam really signify? Was it because he divined how the West, from Hegel through Marx to Foucault, always recognised the power of the Other (the unfamiliar, the Orient, etc) in constituting its own identity but simultaneously tried everything in its means to offset this power?

 

Two chapters are, however, refreshing. One is ‘Learning to read’, where the confessional tone and the personal references make it a lively read; the other is where Mishra painstakingly reconstructs the Chitisinghpura massacre of Sikhs in the Kashmir valley a few days after (still) unidentified men — military or militants? — carried out the killings.

 

Finally, given how he never really challenges received notions of modernity, will it be too harsh to query if Mishra, who in a way made his name with that famous rant against Rushdie, is himself not succumbing to the pitfalls of writing in a language which is not your mother tongue and which today is fast becoming the language of globalisation with its attendant perils of homogenisation and discouraging dissent?