In Temptations of the West and From the Ruins of Empire, Pankaj Mishra explored the political, social, and religious conflicts arising in Asia as a result of European imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the relentless spread of global capitalism in the 20th and 21st. Mishra, a former editor for HarperCollins in New Delhi (where he published Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things), grew up in semirural India, which gave him a firsthand view of the trauma induced by the destruction of traditional ways and the bitter perception that the benefits of modernity were reserved for a privileged few.
There was a time when such traumas seemed exclusive to the developing world, but current events in the West have caught up with Mishra—not that he’s particularly happy about it. Age of Anger, his latest book, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in February, was conceived in 2014 after the Indian election that brought to power the Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi—whom, as the author bluntly puts it, “many in India consider to be a criminal, even a murderer.”
Donald Trump entered the presidential race in the United States as Mishra was beginning to draw parallels in his manuscript between the alienated, frustrated young men who committed terrorist acts across Europe at the turn of the 20th century and their historical descendants wreaking similar havoc at the beginning of the 21st. He finished the book in the same week that Great Britain voted to leave the European Union. “Each of these earthquakes,” he writes in the preface to Age of Anger, “revealed fault lines that I felt had been barely noticed over the years.”
“The feeling of being excluded and marginalized is widespread today, and not just in poor countries like India and China,” says the 47-year-old writer, who speaks to me in his London home. “People in relatively rich nations also feel that a tiny minority has won the race for wealth and power, and they have been left behind. Whether you are a bearded Muslim ranting on YouTube or a disenfranchised working-class white man in Rust Belt America, you basically inhabit the same world and many of your frustrations arise from common sources.”
The two examples Mishra gives would be unlikely to affirm their kinship, he acknowledges. “Everyone has invested so much in this idea of difference, that we are all people from a particular tradition with a particular history and geography and race and religion and ethnicity, but I think for a writer and critic it’s best to stay away from such moralizing distinctions. I think we have to use a very worn but still very important phrase: ‘our common humanity.’ ”
The breakdown of this notion, Mishra believes, is linked to a social breakdown with disturbing political ramifications. “People have been told that they are all essentially individual entrepreneurs; if you lose your job you can retrain yourself,” he says. “The individual is supposed to be this incredibly flexible figure constantly adjusting to new situations, but family and community infrastructures are declining, intermediate institutions don’t exist, politicians are not representative anymore. Democracy is in crisis, and I don’t think we have understood what an extraordinarily radical experiment it has always been. I invoke Tocqueville frequently, because he realized that for this experiment you need all kinds of supporting infrastructure. Take away the supports, and the project of individual liberation becomes very fraught. People feel powerless and get seduced by authoritarian leaders.”
“That’s what we are seeing today,” Mishra continues. “How else can one explain that a plutocrat with the most plutocratic cabinet ever is going to be the next president of the United States, elected by people who thought they had been left behind and persecuted by Barack Obama? Rationality means very little in this instance. People are seeking scapegoats, and those can be anyone: immigrants, Jews, women.”
Women, Mishra says, have borne the particular brunt of global anger, subject to every variety of control and persecution, from domestic violence to sexual slavery in war zones: “As I was writing this book, I realized that in many instances what I was describing was a prolonged crisis of masculinity. I think it’s really important to understand that what we see in the world today is largely confined to young men and this whole frustrated promise of individual empowerment. That frustration makes them turn on the weakest people around them, who tend to be women. And of course the more women become prominent in public spaces and in work spaces, the more they seem like insults to these frustrated men. That explains why, in places like India, there is this explosion of violence against women, both in private and in public places. I’ve only covered this superficially in the book, but I think there is a real need for a feminist examination of modern history through this lens.”
In Age of Anger, Mishra paints a grim picture of modern history and offers no solutions beyond a closing plea for “some truly transformative thinking about both the self and the world.” It’s not for him to provide answers, he notes. “I don’t want to indulge in this very arrogant game of prescribing to people how they should live, but to engage in criticism, which I think is the first duty of the writer. All the books I have written have come out of the process of exploring history, philosophy, and sociology as means of defining your place and your country’s place in the wider world, because if you grow up in India there are no ready-made definitions of what you or your country are.”
The theme of searching for one’s place in the world has been central to Mishra’s work since his first (and so far only) novel, The Romantics, in 2000. “I like to think that I still think as a novelist while I’m writing nonfiction,” he says. “I’m less concerned with abstractions like Marxism or conservatism than with flesh-and-blood individuals and how they respond to conditions in their lives, which is how a novelist works. So my initial training has helped me all through the writing of these nonfiction books, but I really desperately want to go back to fiction. I realize I have still wandered too deeply into the realms of abstraction, and I need to come back and write something more intimate and personal, something more directly about the human experience and the human condition.”
The place that fosters that kind of writing for Mishra takes him back to his roots: “When I was 21 years old, I found this village in the mountains north of Delhi where people still live a premodern life. I may have been trying to recover my very leisurely childhood, which was spent reading and daydreaming, and miraculously that’s the life that I was able to lead there for a long time; it has provided me with my writerly capital. I now live in London most of the year but still go back and cherish every second I spend there. It has given me so much to think about, so much space, so much freedom to read and write.”
