Pankaj Mishra > Quotes

“The hope that fuels the pursuit of endless economic growth – that billions of consumers in India & China will one day enjoy the lifestyles of Europeans and Americans – is as absurd & dangerous a fantasy as anything dreamt up by Al-Qaeda. It condemns the global environment to early destruction & looks set to create reservoirs of nihilistic rage & disappointment among hundreds of millions of have-nots – the bitter outcome of the universal triumph of Western Modernity, which turns the revenge of the East into something darkly ambiguous, and all its victories truly Pyrrhic.”
― Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia

“For, to be woken up at five in the morning by the devotional treacle of Anup Jalota, Hari Om Sharan and other confectioners, all of them simultaneously droning out from several different cassette players; to be relentlessly assaulted for the rest of the day and most of the night by the alternately over-earnest and insolent voices of Kumar Sanu, Alisha Chinoy, Baba Sehgal singing 'Sexy, Sexy, Sexy', and 'Ladki hai kya re baba', 'Sarkaye leyo khatiya' and other hideous songs; to have them insidiously leak into your memory and become moronic refrains running over and over again in your mind; to have your environment polluted and your day destroyed in this way was to know a deepening rage, an impulse to murder, and, finally, a creeping fear at one's own dangerous level of derangement. It was to understand the perfectly sane people you read about in the papers, who suddenly explode into violence one fine day; it was to conceive a lasting hatred for the perpetrators, rich or poor, of these auditory atrocities. (on why he left Varanasi after a few days)”
― Pankaj Mishra, Butter chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in small town India

“Postcolonial nation-building was an extraordinary project: hundreds of millions of people persuaded to renounce – and often scorn – a world of the past that had endured for thousands of years, and to undertake a gamble of creating modern citizens who would be secular, enlightened, cultured and heroic.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“They encourage the suspicion – potentially lethal among the hundreds of millions of people condemned to superfluousness – that the present order, democratic or authoritarian, is built upon force and fraud; they incite a broader and more apocalyptic mood than we have witnessed before. They also underscore the need for some truly transformative thinking, about both the self and the world.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“Islam, however inadequate, was the only source of ethics and stimulus for political mobilization. And al-Afghani also presciently saw that a totally secular society- the dream of nineteenth-century rationalism- was doomed to remain a fantasy in the West as well as in the Muslim world. As he concluded in his response to Renan:
The masses do not like reason, the teachings of which are understood only by a few select minds. Science, however fine it may be, cannot completely satisfy humanity’s thirst for the ideal, or the desire to soar in dark and distant regions that philosophers and scholars can neither see nor explore.”
― Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia

“For Rousseau, ‘the word finance is a slave’s word’ and freedom turns into a commodity, degrading buyer and seller alike, wherever commerce reigns. ‘Financial systems make venal souls.’ Their secret workings are a ‘means of making pilferers and traitors, and of putting freedom and the public good upon the auction block’.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“In other words, in 1919 relatively few people could become disenchanted with liberal modernity because only a tiny minority had enjoyed the opportunity to become enchanted with it in the first place. Since then, however, billions more people have been exposed to the promises of individual freedom in a global neo-liberal economy that imposes constant improvisation and adjustment – and just as rapid obsolescence.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“The Great Transformation (1944) that ‘the utopian experiment of a self-regulating market will be no more than a memory’. In the 1980s, the decade of deregulation and privatization in the West, however, this experiment was revived. The collapse of communist regimes in 1989 further emboldened the bland fanatics, who had been intellectually nurtured during the Cold War in a ‘paradise’, as Niebuhr called it, albeit one ‘suspended in a hell of global insecurity’. The old Hegelian-Marxist teleology was retrofitted rather than discarded in Fukuyama’s influential end-of-history hypothesis.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“Muhammad Iqbal, who had spent three rewarding years as a student in Europe in the first decade of the twentieth century, now wrote of it in the satirical tradition of the Illahabadi:
The West develops wonderful new skills
In this as in so many other fields
Its submarines are crocodiles
Its bombers rain destruction from the skies
Its gases so obscure the sky
They blind the sun’s world-seeing eye
Dispatch this old fool to the West
To learn the art of killing fast- and best
On his previous trips to the West, Liang, like Tagore and Iqbal, had been a qualified admirer. During his longest sojourn there, he began to develop grave doubts about the civilization that had so blithely thrown away the fruits of progress and rationalism and sunk into barbarism. The ‘materialist’ West had managed to subdue nature through science and technology and created a Darwinian universe of conflict between individuals, classes and nations. But to what effect? Its materialistic people, constantly desiring ever-new things and constantly being frustrated, were worn out by war, were afflicted with insecurity, and were as far from happiness as ever.”
― Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia

“By 1900, a small white minority radiating out from Europe would come to control most of world’s land surface, imposing the imperatives of a commercial economy and international trade on Asia’s mainly agrarian societies. Europeans backed by garrisons and gunboats could intervene in the affairs of any Asian country they wished to. They were free to transport millions of Asian labourers to far-off colonies (Indians to the Malay Peninsula, Chinese to Trinidad); exact the raw materials and commodities they needed for their industries from Asian economies; and flood local markets with their manufactured products. The peasant in his village and the market trader in his town were being forced to abandon a life defined by religion, family and tradition amid rumours of powerful white men with a strange god-on-a-cross who were reshaping the world- men who married moral aggressiveness with compact and coherent nation-states, the profit motive and superior weaponry, and made Asian societies seem lumberingly inept in every way, unable to match the power of Europe or unleash their own potential.”
― Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia

“How could, it was felt, people be so opposed to modernity, and all the many goods it had to offer to people around the world: equality, liberty, prosperity, toleration, pluralism and representative government.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“Twenty thousand troops drawn from several countries, including Japan, marched to Beijing to relieve the siege and loot the city. Among the British contingent was a north Indian soldier, Gadhadar Singh, who felt sympathetic to the anti-Western cause of the Boxers even though he believed that their bad tactics had ‘blanketed their entire country and polity in dust.’ His first sight of China was the landscape near Beijing, of famished Chinese with skeletal bodies in abandoned or destroyed villages, over whose broken buildings flew the flags of China’s joint despoilers- France, Russia and Japan. River waters had become a ‘cocktail of blood, flesh, bones and fat.’ Singh particularly blamed the Russian and French soldiers for the mass killings, arson and rape inflicted on the Chinese. Some of the soldiers tortured their victims purely for fun. ‘All these sportsmen,’ Singh noted, ‘belonged to what where called “civilized nations”.”
― Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia

“Responding to Fukuyama’s thesis in 1989, Allan Bloom was full of foreboding about the gathering revolts against a world that ‘has been made safe for reason as understood by the market’, and ‘a global common market the only goal of which is to minister to men’s bodily needs and whims’.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“The most uniform and conspicuous feature of the towns and cities you travel through in North India, and also the most serious menace to civilized life in them, is noise. It accompanies you everywhere – in your hotel room, in the lobby, in the elevator, in the streets, in temples, mosques, gurdwaras, shops, restaurants, parks – chipping away at your nerves to the point where you feel breakdown to be imminent. It isn’t just the ceaseless traffic, the pointless blaring of horns, the steady background roar that one finds in big cities. It is much worse: the electronics boom in India has made cassette players available to anyone with even moderate spending power. Cassettes too are cheap, especially if you buy pirated ones.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India

“Norbu rejects the Western stereotype of Tibetans as an innately nonviolent people, a romantic notion which he thinks gratifies many Western people discontented with the aggressive selfishness of their societies but obscures the political aspirations of the Tibetan peoples and the variety of means available to them to achieve independence. In 1989, he published a book about one of the Khampa warriors of eastern Tibet, who fought the invading Chinese Army in 1950 and then initiated the bloody revolt against Chinese rule that eventually led to the Dalai Lama's departure for India.
"We are ordinary Tibetans," Norbu told PBS. "We drink; we eat; we feel passion; we love our wives and kids. If someone sort of messes around with them, even if they're an army, you pick up your rifle.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

“Why should Christianity compensate for its torture of the Jews during the past two-thousand years from the pocket of Islam? Why should the West pay for its crimes from the empty pockets of the Middle East nations?”
― Pankaj Mishra, The World After Gaza: A History

“As Sharar pointed out, a large part of Europe's power consisted of its capacity to kill, which was enhanced by continuous and vicious wars among the region's small nations in the seventeenth century, a time when Asian countries knew relative peace.

'The only trouble with us,' Fukuzawa Yukichi, author, educator and prolific commentator on Japan's modernization, lamented in the 1870s, 'is that we have had too long a period of peace and no intercourse with outside. In the meantime, other countries, stimulated by occasional wars, have invented many new things such as steam trains, steam ships, big guns and small hand guns etc.' Required to fight at sea as well as on land, and to protect their slave plantations in the Caribbean, the British, for instance, developed the world's most sophisticated naval technologies. Mirza Abu Talib, an Indian Muslim traveller to Europe in 1800, was among the first Asians to articulate the degree to which the Royal Navy was the key to British prosperity. For much of the nineteenth century, British ships and commercial companies would retain their early edge in international trade over their European rivals, as well as over Asian producers and traders.”
― Pankaj Mishra

“It has been the strange fate of Tibet, once one of the most isolated places on earth, to function as a laboratory for the most ambitious and ruthless human experiments of the modern era: the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and now a state-imposed capitalism. After having suffered totalitarian communism, Tibetans now confront a dissolute capitalism, one that seeks arrogantly, and often violently, to turn all of the world's diverse humanity into middle-class consumers. But it seems wrong to think of Tibetans, as many outsiders do, as helpless victims of large, impersonal forces.
It is no accident that the Tibetans seem to have survived the large-scale Communist attempt at social engineering rather better than most people in China itself. This is at least partly due to their Buddhist belief in the primacy of empathy and compassion. And faced with an aggressively secular materialism, they may still prove, almost alone in the world, how religion, usually dismissed, and not just by Mao, as "poison," can be a source of cultural identity and moral values; how it can become a means of political protest without blinding the devout with hatred and prejudice; how it can help not only heal the shocks and pain of history- the pain that has led people elsewhere in the world into nihilistic rage- but also create a rational and ethical national culture, what may make a freer Tibet, whenever it comes about, better prepared for its state of freedom than most societies.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

“Bollywood's economic workings are more mysterious. It still exists in what was known as the informal and high-risk sector of the Indian economy. Banks rarely invest in Bollywood, where moneylenders are rampant, demanding up to 35 percent interest. The big corporate houses seem no less keen to stay away from filmmaking. A senior executive with the Tatas, one of India's prominent business families, told me, "We went into Bollywood, made one film, lost a lot of money, and got out of it fast," adding that "the place works in ways we couldn't begin to explain to our shareholders."
Since only six or seven of the two hundred films made each year earn a profit, the industry has generated little capital of its own. The great studios of the early years of the industry are now defunct. It is outsiders- regular moneylenders, small and big businessmen, real estate people, and, sometimes, mafia dons- who continue to finance new films, and their turnover, given the losses, is rapid. Their motives are mixed: sex, glamour, money laundering, and, more optimistically, profit. They rarely have much to do with the desire to make original, or even competent, films.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

“we all share the same fate: we carry within us more love, and above all more longing than today’s society is able to satisfy. We have all ripened for something, and there is no one to harvest the fruit … Karl Mannheim (1922)”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“The solidity of the building, its quite interiors, the monumental presence of its white facade in the middle of the city- in all its deliberate order and calm, the hotel underlined its separateness from its setting. Its effect was felt most keenly by the menial staff, who traveled each day from their homes in the flood-threatened outskirts of Allahabad and approached their place of work with something like awe. They looked very ill at ease in their green uniforms and were obsequiously polite with guests, calling to mind the Indians who had come to serve in the new city of Allahabad built by the British after the rude shock of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the city whose simple colonial geography was plain from my sixth-floor hostel room, the railway tracks partitioning the congested "black town," with its minarets and temple domes, from the tree-lined grid of "white town," where for a long period no Indians, apart from servants, could appear in native dress.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

“In the age of democratic nationalism, imperialism needed deeper self-justifications:
The idea that despotism of any kind was an offence against humanity, had crystallised into an instinctive feeling, and modern morality and sentiment revolted against the enslavement of nation by nation, of class by class or of man by man. Imperialism had to justify itself to this modern sentiment and could only do so by pretending to be a trustee of liberty, commissioned from on high to civilize the uncivilized and train the untrained until the time had come when the benevolent conqueror had done his work and could unselfishly retire. Such were the professions with which England justified her usurpation of the heritage of the Moghul and dazzled us into acquiescence in servitude by the splendour of her uprightness and generosity. Such was the pretence with which she veiled her annexation of Egypt. These Pharisiac pretensions were especially necessary to British Imperialism because in England the Puritanic middle class had risen to power and imparted to the English temperament a sanctimonious self-righteousness which refused to indulge in injustice and selfish spoliation except under a cloak of virtue, benevolence and unselfish altruism.”
― Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia

“The two pigeons killed had just given birth. And now the baby pigeon doesn't know who he is. He is going through an identity crisis.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Butter chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in small town India

“For those who live in Kashmir, the expectations of justice, rarely fulfilled in the Indian subcontinent, are more than optimistic; they belong to fantasy. It makes it all the more difficult for the victims to bear their human losses. At Dalal's house, the once carefully tended plants and hedges were already running wild just a few weeks after his murder, the fish in the pond were mostly dead, and few men sat slumped on the floor in a bare hall under the Islamic calendar of mourning. His mother, persuaded by her male relatives to emerge from the dark room where she had taken to since her son's death, broke down as soon as she noticed the photos of Dalal I had been studying. The pictures showed a young man in dark glasses and trendy clothes, a happy, contented man, someone who had managed to find, amid the relentless violence of the insurgency, a new style and identity for himself, and when Dalal's mother, still crying, while her mother, Dalal's grandmother, sat beside her, quietly wiping her tears with the frayed end of her headscarf, asked what was the point of talking to the press, of speaking about her son to me- he was gone and wouldn't come back; the people who had killed him were too powerful- it was hard not to feel pierced by the truth of what she was saying, hard not to be moved by her grief, and the pain, amid the great human waste of Kashmir, of her helplessness.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

“I was to see Helen again, in another place and time. But now I was settling into my new self – the self that had travelled and imagined that it had learnt much. I didn’t know then that I would use up many more such selves, that they would arise and disappear, making all experience hard to fix and difficult to learn from.”
― Pankaj Mishra, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World

“the modern religions of secular salvation have undermined their own main assumption: that the future would be materially superior to the present. Nothing less than this sense of expectation, central to modern political and economic thinking, has gone missing today, especially among those who have themselves never had it so good. History suddenly seems dizzyingly open-ended, just as Henry James experienced it when war broke out in 1914 and he confronted the possibility that the much-vaunted progress of the nineteenth century was a malign illusion – ‘the tide that bore us along was all the while moving to this as its grand Niagara’.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present

“THE WESTERN IDEA OF history can be so seductive, with its promise of adding an extra emotional and spiritual dimension and validation to our limited life; with its ability to brighten the future and the past. It is especially attractive when you imagine yourself to be on its right side, and see yourself, in the way Jacquemont, Moorcroft and de Körös did, as part of an onward march of progress. To have faith in one’s history is to infuse hope into the most inert landscape and a glimmer of possibility into even the most adverse circumstances.”
― Pankaj Mishra, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World

“It was easy to denounce that American vision of endless space and well-being and leisure as a deception; to accuse it of obscuring the inner cities and drugs and violence, and the ruthless suppression of remote and near enemies. But to people from tormented societies, America was the country whose nation-building traumas seemed to lie in the remote past, and where many individuals could afford to look beyond the struggles for food, shelter and security that still weighed upon people elsewhere.”
― Pankaj Mishra, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World

“He wrote an angry summing-up of the manifold ways in which the West subjugated weaker countries; caustically titled ‘On the New Rules for Destroying Countries,’ it could just as easily have been written by al-Afghani. Liang described the endless subtle ways in which European merchants and mine-owners had progressively infiltrated and undermined many societies and cultures. The essay detailed these methods, which included cajoling countries into spiralling debt (Egypt), territorial partition (Poland), exploiting internal divisions (India), or simply overwhelming adversaries with military superiority (the Philippines and the Transvaal). ‘To those who claim,’ Liang wrote, ‘that opening mining, railroad and concessionary rights to foreigners is not harmful to the sovereignty of the whole, I advise you to read the history of the Boer War.”
― Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia

“Herzl wrote The Jewish State, his path-breaking manifesto of Zionism, in 1895 under the influence of Wagner, one of the nineteenth century’s most notorious anti-Semites.”
― Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present