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Versus Niall Ferguson and Jordan Peterson ... a set of essays from a writer who excels at calling out intellectual vapidities but now needs to ask new questions
In 1988, Pankaj Mishra was a would-be writer in Varanasi, north India, whiling away his days reading the American critic Edmund Wilson. In books such as Axel’s Castle and To the Finland Station, Mishra detected a temperament he could aspire to: erudite, self-assured, swiftly able to read between the lines of a book into the author’s worldview and the wider social and historical milieu, “a man wholly devoted to reading and thinking and writing”. But years later, trying to write on Wilson, Mishra realised that he had nothing new to say about his hero. “It hadn’t occurred to me,” he wrote, “that a separate narrative probably existed in my private discovery of Wilson’s writings in a dusty old library in the ancient town of Benares [Varanasi].”
The story of his “private discovery” of Wilson was published in the New York Review of Books 20 years ago and marked a breakthrough moment for Mishra. It was boom time for South Asian writing in English at the turn of the millennium. Arundhati Roy’s The God Of Small Things had just come out; Vikram Seth’s million-dollar advance for A Suitable Boy was much talked about; the New Yorker devoted an entire issue to Indians writing in English. Mishra transformed the NYRB article into a novel called The Romantics, but he blossomed more as a critic and essayist. His dispatches from all over Asia – Kashmir, Tibet, China, Indonesia, Nepal, Japan, Afghanistan – made perceptive connections between local events and precedents in other parts of the world. His best-known books are subversive histories, reviewing the contexts in which individuals in different places and eras have arrived at remarkably similar ideas; he has traced outlines of continuity between the Buddha and Oscar Wilde, Rousseau and Trump. Continue reading...