Portrait of Pankaj Mishra
Reading List
Pankaj Mishra
Essayist and Novelist
Pankaj Mishra is an Indian essayist and novelist who writes on Asia, empire and the intellectual history of the modern world, chiefly for the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books and Bloomberg Opinion.
Butter Chicken in Ludhiana (1995) travelled through small-town India; An End to Suffering followed the Buddha. From the Ruins of Empire (2012) told the story of Western dominance through the Asian thinkers who responded to it, and Age of Anger (2017) traced present-day resentment back to Rousseau and the nineteenth century.
His novel The Romantics appeared in 2000, and Run and Hide in 2022.
Field Notes on Democracy
Listening to Grasshoppers
by Arundhati Roy
“These are not immediately apparent in a place like China, where poverty and inequality are not so visible. In India, they are part of the disquieting experience of a foreign visitor. Roy’s book actually helps you understand that experience, it explains why these grotesque inequalities exist, and why India today, in addition to being a vibrant democracy and booming economy, is also an extremely violent place.” — via Interview, March 2011
The Argumentative Indian
Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity
by Amartya Sen
“There is a lot of defective and persisting Western knowledge about pre-colonial India, which makes it seem like a setting for Oriental despots and superstitious and irrational people. Sen wants to overturn these clichés. He resurrects people from ancient and medieval India, such as Emperor Ashoka and Akbar, and shows how liberal and pluralist in temperament and practice they were.” — via Interview, March 2011
Modern South Asia
History, Culture, Political Economy
by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal
“It also covers, impartially and clear-sightedly, how India and Pakistan, the nation states, came into being, which is the big, important question if one wants to understand anything about politics in India today, or in Pakistan or indeed what is happening in Afghanistan. And I think the fact that Ayesha Jalal is a Pakistani historian of South Asian Islam means she is able to bring her own valuable insights to this.” — via Interview, March 2011
In Light of India
by Octavio Paz
“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.” — via Interview, March 2011
India: A Million Mutinies Now
by V. S. Naipaul
“The book that comes closest to having the narrative energy of a work of fiction on my list is India: A Million Mutinies Now by V S Naipaul, which is why I chose it, in part. There’s this idea of the ‘Great American Novel’, which is deeply flawed because we know there isn’t one America. There are many, many Americas and no novel can hope to capture them all. This difficulty is even more pronounced in India.” — via Interview, March 2011