Terms of engagement
Pankaj Mishra likes to write in Mashobra, a village in Himachal Pradesh, where he works at his desk, where distraction is minimal. To see him at work would involve a long journey for him and me. Besides, when he writes in London, it is often on the electronic devices he carries, and he sometimes even writes in a cab, which too wouldn’t make the most convenient location to interview him.
So breaking a ground rule of this series, I invited Mishra to my place, where we sat in my dining room, and after a meal of tomato and basil soup with garlic bread and vegetarian risotto that I had made, with a bottle of Spanish Rioja keeping us warm company that cold night in London, we sat down to talk—he relaxed on my weather-beaten, two-decade-old sofa as I typed on my Mac, facing him. Edited excerpts:
When did you know that you wanted to be a writer?
I think it started with my life as a reader. If you think of India in the 1980s there weren’t many writers in English around. The ones that were there, Amitav Ghosh or Vikram Seth, were living abroad or publishing from abroad. Indian writing in English by then had also become linked to robust expressions of intellectual confidence and linguistic inventiveness, and I wasn’t part of any metropolitan network—St Stephen’s, Ivy League, or Oxbridge—it seemed to emerge from. So the idea that someone could be a writer in English, without leaving India or being educated abroad, seemed way ahead in the future. Only in the 1990s did that become a possibility, after Arundhati Roy’s novel (The God of Small Things). Now of course the ambition to write is not only widely available, it is quite quickly realized.
Is that a good thing, or has it become too easy?
Yes, a very good thing. It has extended people’s possibilities of what they could do.
How did ‘Butter Chicken in Ludhiana’ happen?
I grew up in small towns in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra—places like Akola, Betul, Wardha, Jhansi; I thought the rise of provincial India would be an interesting subject to tackle. I travelled intensely for six months. I took notes all the time. Once I finished travelling, I went back to my place in Himachal and finished my first draft in six months, working non-stop, day after day. I have been dismissive of that book, but its subject—the arrival of capitalist modernity in India, the unleashing of new political and entrepreneurial energies and cultural ambitions—really in a way has formed the basis for my journeys in other societies, without my realizing it. The first book provided me with the equipment to understand what was happening elsewhere.
What made you feel you could make it as a writer?
And I was lucky to discover avenues and platforms abroad—The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) and The New Statesman in the UK, Prospect had just begun at that time, and then The New York Review of Books (NYRB). In those days, a single piece in the NYRB could sponsor an entire year in Mashobra.
There has been one novel, ‘The Romantics’. Other than that, you have focused on serious non-fiction. Are there more novels likely?
Definitely, there will be more novels. I got directed to writing non-fiction partly by the pressure of events. In 1998 I wrote my first long non-fiction piece on India’s nuclear tests for the NYRB. I had sensed, as did many others, that India’s political culture, and journalistic and intellectual culture, were being transformed drastically. Many young Indians today have little sense of the dramatic way India began to change after economic liberalization in 1991 and the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. For many of us, the nuclear tests in 1998 were proof that these disturbing changes were here to stay, and ranged us early against those who in the 2000s loudly claimed that India is Shining and will forever shine. So I became more interested in politics, and how it intersected with literature—the world of culture in general. And subsequent events in a way pushed me to long-form reportage pieces and essays that seemed to capture what was happening more precisely and urgently than a piece of fiction could.
Fiction allows you to imagine things; non-fiction requires accuracy. By choosing non-fiction did you make your task harder?
I wasn’t thinking of it as a fundamentally different challenge from fiction. You travel, report, meet people, gather experience, and put them in a narrative. While writing about Kashmir, it was clear to me that there was very little honest reporting on the subject—little that was not influenced by government or intelligence agencies. That made my job easier.
Still, people like us were only parachute journalists, day-trippers, no matter how much time we spent there. The true account of Kashmir could only be written by a Kashmiri. So in that sense, my pieces were only a small contribution. They certainly upset a lot of people. But they did not change the tenor of Indian reporting. Now Basharat Peer writes, Mirza Waheed writes, more Kashmiri writers are emerging, and it is very difficult to deny what they are saying.
The Hay Festival in Dhaka quoted ‘The Economist’, which described you as the Edward Said of our generation.
That’s nonsense.
But you have tackled ambitious themes and connected ideas to which others haven’t paid much attention.
I am reluctant talking about my own work in this way; it makes you sound pretentious. Basically, I think of fiction and non-fiction as different ways of engaging with the world. You reach a point where you feel you have said all you possibly can, in reportage or a review essay or a reflection on history, which From the Ruins of Empire was. Now I feel it may be time to turn to a novel, which can accommodate all the other forms. But it is the same engagement, assuming different literary forms.
How do you choose an essay to write? Take the recent essay about the novel in the ‘Financial Times (FT)’. Does it happen organically? Do you have a planned theme in mind? Do you connect dots, as in ideas?
The FT essay was the product of pondering over several years this question: What is the post-colonial novel? Its definition was first proposed in the 1980s with a somewhat limited idea of “the empire writes back”, embodied by the work of Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Timothy Mo and Kazuo Ishiguro. Now if you look at the post-1997 era, the influence of The God of Small Things is comparable to Midnight’s Children and may even outlast it. Then, writers today living far away from their ancestral homelands can return and participate in their present the way V.S. Naipaul and Rushdie could not do with India. You see that different relationship in writers like Tash Aw, Nadeem Aslam, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Kamila Shamsie—and then there are writers like Amit Chaudhuri, whose preoccupations demand a different category..
Your latest book, ‘A Great Clamour’, is about India’s near-abroad, by which I mean India’s immediate neighbourhood—it has had deep, old cultural ties with these countries, but they have been submerged under the weight of colonial experience. What drove you to that topic?
What drove me was what I shared with most Indians—my total ignorance of the near-abroad. We grow up reading about England, America, Europe and its history and literature—and know infinitely less about China, let alone Indonesia or Malaysia. And you wonder—why do I know next to nothing about these societies, with whom we share a lot more than we do with, say, Spain or Italy? That drove me to travel to these places and to read as much as possible and take on projects that could engage me with those places, more seriously and intensely. I am still half-amazed and disappointed that we don’t pay attention to the neighbourhood we are in. We are very solidly West-centric.
Where do you write?
All my books are written in Mashobra. I should say that (the software programs) Evernote and Dropbox have transformed my writing life. All my research notes are now at my fingertips. It doesn’t matter where I am. I can access the London Library, any electronic library, from Mashobra. Or I can get someone to send the relevant materials to me.
Do you have a set routine in Mashobra?
It is pretty straightforward—at 5.30-6am I wake up; then work all day. I don’t cook; the food is supplied by a family in the village. I get a lot done if I work 8-9 hours uninterrupted. During that time I try not to respond to emails.
The digital revolution is a great boon. While working on previous books I took my notes in longhand and they would be scattered over several places. Now tags and searchable notes have halved my non-fiction writing time. There is a dictation program, Dragon—I have used that too. It gets 90% of what I say right. I could dictate a note while driving up in a cab to your house. This is very crucial since I travel so much, and have to work hard to keep my brain from being fractured by jet lag.
Do you go to many literary events or parties? Do you like literary festivals?
The sheer number of literary festivals in India is now overwhelming. True, England also has many festivals, but they supplement a literary and intellectual culture which is primarily conducted through periodicals and magazines. But we don’t have Indian versions of the The Spectator or the London Review of Books and TLS. Even the books pages of newspapers have disappeared or shrunk, so literary festivals have become substitutes for the real thing. The festivals are an occasion for writers to talk to their audiences and meet each other. But they cannot create a culture of reflection by themselves.
A monthly conversation on the craft of writing.
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