Author2Author: Paul Elie & Pankaj Mishra, pt. 3

Paul's curiosity about Pankaj's development as a writer both immersed in and setting himself apart from modern Indian culture continues to spark discussion, following yesterday's revelations about Pankaj's beginnings...

Paul Elie: I was struck by how strongly An End to Suffering seems to go against the grain of writing about India, or at least against the books about India that are best known to American readers. Those books (think Midnight's Children and A Fine Balance) are about India’s cities; yours is about the windswept and lightly populated Himalayas. Those books (A Suitable Boy, The God of Small Things) are about families; yours is profoundly solitary. Those books (The Moor's Last Sigh, The Satanic Verses) are fictional, and in them everyday life is lushly embroidered even when its laws are not put in patchwork suspension; your book is emphatically factual, in that it restores to history a story that is typically told as if it were fiction--and magical realist fiction at that. Those books are told from the vantage point of expatriation or estrangement from the home land; your book, it seems to me, is an account of your gentle refusal to resolve the question of identity in any simple way, or even to make that question the question. Instead of identifying yourself in terms of where you have chosen to settle, India or the West, or in terms of your refusal to settle--instead of falling into that snakepit in which old dualisms shed their skins for a new age, you go out “looking for the self” in the terms of western humanism, turning at once West to the Enlightenment and East to the Enlightened One for answers to the questions about the nature and destiny of man.

All of these renunciations--if they can be called that--make your book appealingly ascetical and hard-won, a pushing past the obvious to something original and fresh. Even a comparison with V.S. Naipaul breaks down, in that yours is not a story of triumph or emancipation--what Orwell, who seems to me to stand in relation to Naipaul as Naipaul does to you, called “getting one’s own back.” Can you tell me how deliberately you sought to write against conventions and go your own way? I know that I did, and that I was energized by it.

Pankaj Mishra: I think a certain kind of book--metropolitan, packed, or 'teeming' with colorful characters--has dominated other literary representations of India in the west, partly because audiences here usually like the unfamiliar only if it is framed by what is familiar to them: the experience of modern urban life. As for the more personal or existential inquiry, it tends to be framed by the westernized Indian writer around familiar questions of identity: Am I Indian or western, or a hybrid; is fluidity and hybridity better than a sense of belonging? and so on. One of the things I found fascinating about Buddhism is how it sees the need for identity itself as an illusion, a creation of the ego that ought to be undermined. One of its most penetrating insights is how we live most of our lives vicariously, by defining itself by association with this or that readymade affiliation with a person, vocation, class, nation, and intellectual doctrine. Buddhism extends this suspicion of identity to even itself; thus the well-known saying, "If you meet the Buddha, kill him."

Looking at modern literature from the perspective of Buddhism, it becomes apparent how much of it is emotionally and psychologically the product of a certain kind of bourgeois society that developed in Europe in the late eighteenth century, with the beginning of the industrial revolution, and how it reflects a certain need for individual identity and security within a society that is faced with mass standardization. I suppose the difference of An End to Suffering you remark on comes from the particular open-ended nature of my experience of pre-modern India in my Himalayan village, Mashobra--by which I mean a kind of India which is not part of the everyday world organized around work and production and consumption, which still lives psychologically in a different time, and where people have several, overlapping identities and are not self-conscious about them or feel the need to privilege one over the other.

V.S. Naipaul is of course an interesting figure here because he has chosen to break from that world, calling it backward and sterile (by which he means unreflective and unproductive), and stake his claim in the modern world where a fixed identity as a writer who has made it despite all odds becomes important. I think this idea he has of himself has limited him, has made him dwell for too long on this narrative of what you call 'triumph and emancipation.' Although he has offered us a valuable personal perspective on how the West remade radically non-western cultures in the last two hundred years, he has been too attached to the modern western ideas of self and self-making to discover much that is valuable and now almost lost in the older cultures he came out of.