Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj Mishrais an Indian essayist and novelist and a recipient of the 2014 Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionNovelist
CountryIndia
equality face forward guarantee japan league majority paris peace proposal racial wilson
In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Japan had put forward a proposal to guarantee racial equality at the League of Nations, but Woodrow Wilson overturned it in the face of majority support.
agreements bullied centuries compelled eroded force india japan modern national threat trade virtual
In 1853, American warships bullied Japan out of centuries of virtual isolation and into the modern world. The threat of force compelled Japan, like India and China before it, to accept trade agreements that were economically ruinous and eroded national sovereignty.
age cultural describe essential experience grown harder larger require task writers
The cultural decoding that many American writers require has become an even harder task in the age of globalisation. The experience they describe has grown more private; its essential background, the busy larger world, has receded.
colonial dutch keen mainly preserve threw
The Indonesian nationalists, mainly Javanese, who threw the Dutch out - in 1949, after a four-year struggle - were keen to preserve their inheritance and emulated the coercion, deceit, and bribery of the colonial rulers.
achieve economic enhanced europe greater happiness helps military national origins power rapid successes western
The idea that modernisation makes for enhanced national power and rapid progress and helps everyone achieve greater happiness has its origins in the astonishing political, economic and military successes of western Europe in the 19th century.
altered claim dalai diverse lama teachings
The Dalai Lama can claim the sanction of the Buddha, who is said to have altered his teachings in order to reach a diverse audience.
dream rights creating
Once you empower people and say,' Here you are, now you get to dream the great dream of becoming a full citizen with equal rights and radical improvement in your living situation,' you are creating an illusion which will break one day.
thinking views land
To think that land reform is going to somehow automatically create an equitable system, I think that's just wrong. It's a very technical view of the world.
reading writing emotional
Most of what I read is for reviewing purposes or related to something I want to write about. It's slightly utilitarian. I definitely miss that sense of being a disinterested reader who's reading purely for the pleasure of imagining his way into emotional situations and vividly realized scenes in nineteenth-century France or late nineteenth-century Russia.
ideas consciousness judgmental
I suppose I've become less judgmental about individuals leading lives according to false ideas and false consciousness, because sometimes entire societies are prey to false ideologies and national delusions.
crush successful careers
I've never really felt that being part of a literary community is all that important. It can be extremely detrimental to a writer. It can damage successful writers by giving them an exalted sense of what they've done, and it can crush less successful writers by infecting them with envy and malice at an early stage in their careers.
reading writing years
I wrote for many years without showing my writing to anyone, because I was constantly comparing it to what I was reading. You have to compare yourself to the best and feel totally inadequate.
reading writing people
The people who encouraged me weren't necessarily writers or readers themselves. They were people who were just pleased to see me devote my life to reading and writing.
anxiety india selling
There is a lot of anxiety in India about writers selling out to foreign audiences, but I'm neither flattering the Indian audience nor the American audience. I'm uneasily somewhere in the middle.