Author2Author: Paul Elie & Pankaj Mishra, pt. 2

Yesterday, Paul Elie talked about finding connections with Catholic intellectual role models as a recent arrival in New York. Today, Pankaj Mishra reveals the origins of his own career as a writer...

Paul Elie: I tried to give a personal sketch of my book’s origins akin to the sketch that is found in your book. Your sketch has a strong sense of “fitness” to it: It seems right, and even inevitable, that you followed the path you did: going away from the city, away from the hothouse of ambition and expectation, and into a place where, out of an ambition of a deeper sort, you could read in the mornings. In a sense yours began as the classic pattern of a sentimental education, then turned into something else: having arrived in a city from your home village, you then pushed onward. The fitness of your account might obscure just how much trouble you had to take to go your own way, and it would be easier for the American reader to assume that what you did is just the sort of thing a young writer in India might do in his twenties, when the truth, I suspect, is quite different. So I wonder if you could tell me more about the roads not taken. Can you suggest the direction your life might have taken had you not gone to the Himalayas, so that I might have a better sense of just how distinctive and hard-won your experience is?

Pankaj Mishra: It may seem obvious to many people here in America, but I am always surprised to see how writing in America or England has become this highly organized activity--almost a kind of mini-industry. There are agents, publishers, and magazines; talent is often quickly recognized and rewarded. This wasn't the case in India when I decided to find a place in the hills and be a writer. There were no agents, no creative writing schools or retreats where talent could be identified and nurtured and exposed to publishing opportunities. There was little institutional support for writing in terms of publishers or magazines hospitable to short stories or pieces of reportage; there were only a handful of bookshops in the major cities. A novel in English priced at $2.50 that sold 2,000 copies was seen as a success. In any case, you couldn't trust most publishers and their royalty statements. Penguin, who really changed the face of English-language publishing in India, were only four-five years old in India when I went to Mashobra; they had a small backlist and gave tiny advances (I got an advance of $125 for my first book, a travel book).

Now I had decided very early on, in my early teens, that I wanted to be a writer. It was a strange ambition for someone from my small-town background. My parents, who were Hindu and high-caste but not well to do at all, had sent me to a provincial university because it had the reputation for training people to aspire in government jobs. When I went to a much better university in Delhi, it was not much different, in the sense that most students were there to get into jobs of some sort or other. No one I knew wanted to be a writer. I knew few writers, mostly poets, and all of them had day jobs as academics or journalists; no one I knew made a living as a fulltime writer. The Indian writers in English that I knew of--Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth--had studied at Oxford and Cambridge and now lived abroad, addressing large metropolitan audiences in the West, and also a small but loyal audience in India. But they seemed very remote and inaccessible to me. Generally, Indian writing in English was and has largely remained an elite preoccupation--not only because the well-off in a mostly poor country have more leisure to read and write but also because you can learn to write good English prose only in elite schools and colleges. (There are a few exceptions of course but they tend to prove the rule.)

All this makes my decision to move from Delhi and to live in a Himalayan village seem reckless. But I had only one other option while I was spending my parents' hard-earned money at university in Delhi, which was to do what everyone around me was doing: get a half way decent job and then think about writing. I did not even want to think about this for a second, and I guess I liked very much from the very beginning the small basic life I had in Mashobra. Above all the anxiety of how I was going to survive, what I was going to write about, there was the exhilarating freedom of the freelance writer's life. I remember my time in Mashobra as a time of naivety, ignorance, foolishness, but also as a time of great happiness. Reading in the morning of course, and also watching the light change on the hills, listening to music, taking walks through the nearby forest. And it was there, in the early 90's, that I began to think about writing a book on the Buddha--not out of any great curiosity or interest in the Buddha but out of a simple ambition to get started as a writer, and to write my first book with (preferably) a worthy subject.

Location played a role--just as it did for you, living in New York, passing the places your subjects had known. I traveled a great deal in the areas bordering Tibet where a form of Buddhism had survived. And the discovery of the Buddha for me was in many ways a personal discovery of India, particularly North India, where I had spent much of my life, and about whose old civilization I knew little or was dismissive about.