Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj Mishra is a notable Indian author and essayist, born in 1969 in northern India. He studied Islamic history and colonial literature at Allahabad University and earned a master's degree in philosophy from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Mishra gained prominence as a chief editor at HarperCollins India and as a freelance writer, publishing influential articles on literature and the effects of Westernization in major publications like The New York Review of Books. His debut work, "Butter Chicken in Ludhiana," is a travelogue that examines the challenges faced by small towns in India due to modernization and globalization.
Mishra's fiction includes "The Romantics," a novel that explores the contrast between Western expatriates and local political activists in Varanasi. His nonfiction works often critique the implications of Western influence in postcolonial South Asia, as seen in "An End to Suffering" and "Temptations of the West." Over the years, he has received several accolades, including the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding and the Windham–Campbell Literature Prize. Mishra continues to engage with contemporary issues through his writings and academic roles, bringing a keen analysis of cultural dynamics in the region.
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Subject Terms
Pankaj Mishra
- Born: February 9, 1969
- Place of Birth: Jhansi, India
Biography
Pankaj Mishra was born in north India in 1969. Precocious in his primary education, he attended the prestigious Allahabad University (the fourth oldest university in India), where he studied Islamic history and colonial literature, and went on to complete his master’s in philosophy from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He found immediate success in publishing, joining HarperCollins in India and quickly rising to chief editor for its subcontinent operations. He established a reputation for the excellence of his freelance magazine articles on Indian literature and the wider cultural collisions with the impact of rapid Westernization, work which began to appear in The New York Review of Books as well as The Times (London) Literary Supplement, thus securing Mishra, only in his mid-twenties, international acclaim.
In 1995, Mishra published a most unconventional travelogue, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India, essays in which Mishra chronicles a rail and bus tour through remote cities across the Indian subcontinent, measuring the impact of modernization and globalization on ancient communities. With the wary voice of a critical outsider (despite Mishra’s own Indian heritage), the essays forsake nostalgic sentiment and offer hilarious and, at times, unflattering portraits of grimy backwater towns struggling with economic deprivation and technological ineptness.
Stung by criticism that he lacked compassion for his own people, Mishra (who by this time had relocated to London) turned his attention to fiction. In 2000, he published The Romantics: A Novel, in which a university-educated Indian (a graduate, like Mishra, of Allahabad University) prepares to take the Civil Service examination that will place him in his career. The novel centers on the Hindu holy city of Varanasi, where the young man moves between two strikingly different groups: Western expatriates, materialistic and over-educated, who have come to India looking for spiritual renewal and/or an exotic adventure, and indigenous political radicals agitating for national integrity and traditional Hindu identity. The young man, cautious and intellectual, falls disastrously in love with a Frenchwoman and ends up accepting a teaching post in a remote village, determined in his exile to forsake the catastrophic impulses of the heart. The novel, although coolly received in India, won critical plaudits from the international press, including the Los Angeles Times Prize for First Fiction.
Mishra returned to nonfiction, completing a wide-ranging inquiry into the tenets of Buddhism in the contemporary world (An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World) and a gathering of essays that collectively offer a scathing indictment of the impact of Westernization throughout postcolonial south and central Asia, Temptations of the West. In this book, Mishra evokes the tensions and the violence of the volatile region as he examines the political, economic, and supremely religious strife in a thoroughly readable style that avoids polemics and brings together both vivid descriptions of the region with unflinching personal outrage.
Mishra continued publishing prominent books into the 2010s, including A Great Clamour: Encounters with China and Its Neighbours (2013) and Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017). His 2012 book, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, earned him the 2014 Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding. Also in 2014, Mishra won the Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for Nonfiction and the Premi Internacional D'Assaig.
At the same time, Mishra published a number of articles in such publications as the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker, and worked as a visiting professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and University College in London. He released his ninth nonfiction work, Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire, in 2020, and, in 2022, published Run and Hide, a novel.
In the tradition of R. K. Narayan and V. S. Naipaul, both influences Mishra has acknowledged, Mishra’s work brings the critical eye of the outsider and the narrative authority of the uncompromising cultural anatomist to the complex conditions that face the vast subcontinent in its postcolonial era.
Bibliography
"About." Pankaj Mishra, 2023, www.pankajmishra.com/about/. Accessed 16 Oct. 2024.
"Books." Pankaj Mishra, 2023, www.pankajmishra.com/books/. Accessed 16 Oct. 2024.
Mishra, Pankaj. "The Liberal Order Is the Incubator for Authoritarianism”: A Conversation with Pankaj Mishra." Interview by Francis Wade. LA Review of Books, 15 Nov. 2018, lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-liberal-order-is-the-incubator-for-authoritarianism-a-conversation-with-pankaj-mishra/. Accessed 16 Oct. 2024.
"Pankaj Mishra." Windham Campbell Prizes, Yale University, 2014, windhamcampbell.org/festival/2014/recipients/mishra-pankaj. Accessed 16 Oct. 2024.