In Light of India
The Mexican poet's reflections on India after six years as ambassador, written across two traditional societies.
Octavio Paz spent six years as Mexico’s ambassador to India, resigning in 1968 after the Tlatelolco massacre. This late book gathers what that time left him: essays on Indian religion, caste, the Mughal inheritance, poetry and erotic art, written by someone constantly measuring one syncretic post-colonial civilisation against another. Paz reads India through Mexico and Mexico through India, and is candid that the resulting portrait is a poet’s, not a specialist’s.
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Pankaj Mishra
Paz comes from a society which has had a somewhat similar experience to India – in terms of dealing with an extremely conservative-minded colonialism, and coming out of that and trying to construct a modern nation state. His is also a deeply traditional society and if you read his The Labyrinth of Solitude you’ll find some really interesting similarities between the experience of Mexico and that of India.
Interview · March 2011
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