A leading thinker chooses five books about his or her field of interest. This month the topic is India, with books chosen by Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra.
India: A Million Mutinies NowV 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. No novel can really capture the different textures of life there. But A Million Mutinies Now does an excellent job of describing the lives, the hopes and aspirations and frustrations of a diverse cast of Indians who have lived through the last 60 years.
In Light of IndiaOctavio Paz
If one were to put these books into an order in which they should be ideally read, I would actually put the In Light of India as number one. This is easily the most accessible and stimulating introduction to India that you can read. It is very briskly done, with a kind of poet’s brevity, and covers astonishingly wide regions of politics, art, literature and the economy.
The book is also important because it offers a perspective that is very rarely found in books about India, which are mostly written by Europeans and Americans. 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.
Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political EconomySugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal
I think if you read the Paz first, this history book should be number two on the list. You’ll notice there isn’t any mention of India in the title—the book takes India, Pakistan and also Bangladesh and deals with all those experiences together. Yes, you could study the history of India in isolation, but intellectually it’s not a very interesting or rewarding thing to do, because ‘India’ really referred, before 1947, to that entire region. There was a geographical idea of India before it became a name for a nation state, and that area included even parts of Afghanistan. And there is no way you can even consider the history of India, the nation state, in isolation from the history of Pakistan. The countries have fought three wars and India’s entire post-1947 evolution has been marked by the relationship it has with Pakistan—not to mention what’s been happening in Afghanistan and, for instance, the connections a place like Kashmir has with Afghanistan. So you have to look at the region as a whole, and this book does it brilliantly.
The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and IdentityAmartya Sen
This book is actually a collection of essays, which sounds very dull. But if you read these books in this particular order, you’ll find that suddenly new avenues of thinking and experience open up to you. It helps you to understand a lot of things that may surprise you in India when you go there for the first time—or even after you’ve been many, many times. I’ve spent most of my life there and am still surprised and bemused by the place. The book does a tremendous job of giving you a sense of the many, many layers of history, of identities, that constitute this society. It goes back way into the past: it talks about medieval India, it talks about Islam in India, it talks about Buddhism, it talks about the Indian calendar. There’s an article on how India has many different calendars. Different people, different communities have had a very different sense of time. It really attests to the particular character of Indian society that it can accommodate within itself people living at very many different levels time-wise.
The broad thesis that Sen offers is that there is a particular philosophical tradition, in fact not just one tradition but many traditions, in India that really stress the idea of discussion, of consensus-building through argumentation. He goes back to various philosophical discourses, various conversations that are part of Indian philosophy and part of Indian history, to stress this notion that the whole construction of what we now know as India, the modern nation state, the world’s largest democracy, isn’t something that’s just happened in the last 50 to 60 years. There are traditions going back hundreds and hundreds of years, sometimes all the way back to the Buddha, who was alive in the 5th-6th century BC. Democracy is not just something India borrowed from the British; rational and scientific thought is not a preserve of the West.
Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to GrasshoppersArundhati Roy
The idea of India that has gone around recently, particularly in Europe and America, has been of this great, vibrant democracy with a booming economy, full of English speakers like us, with the same kind of aspirations to a consumer lifestyle. Broadly speaking, there is a lot of truth to this picture. India’s democracy is indeed very vibrant in certain areas. In other areas, it’s not so vibrant. Just in terms of numbers, there is a very large part of the population that aspires to a certain kind of European and American middle-class lifestyle and the same kind of consumption patterns. That fact makes businessmen in the West very excited, because these are potentially big markets. If, out of 1.2 billion people, 200 million were to start living at the same level as the American and European middle classes, that opens up a huge new market. But this focus leaves out the fate of the other India, so to speak—although it’s not really ‘other’ because it is in fact the majority of India. It’s the 800 million people living in villages who are close to destitution, and even those living in urban areas. Most people living in Indian cities are still living in what, by any definition of the term, would be called a slum.
Arundhati Roy’s book is an antidote to all the current fashionable prejudices and notions about India. The book will certainly be shocking and disconcerting and depressing to a lot of people who look at India from the great heights of Davos and Aspen, or know it from the pages of The Economist and The Wall Street Journal. But it’s very salutary in the end. As a visitor, one is immediately struck by these aspects of India—the extreme poverty, and the fear and hate the rich feel toward the poor. 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 a booming economy, is also an extremely violent place.
Interview by Sophie Roell
Read this interview in full at The Browser's FiveBooks section
India: A Million Mutinies NowV 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. No novel can really capture the different textures of life there. But A Million Mutinies Now does an excellent job of describing the lives, the hopes and aspirations and frustrations of a diverse cast of Indians who have lived through the last 60 years.
In Light of IndiaOctavio Paz
If one were to put these books into an order in which they should be ideally read, I would actually put the In Light of India as number one. This is easily the most accessible and stimulating introduction to India that you can read. It is very briskly done, with a kind of poet’s brevity, and covers astonishingly wide regions of politics, art, literature and the economy.
The book is also important because it offers a perspective that is very rarely found in books about India, which are mostly written by Europeans and Americans. 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.
Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political EconomySugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal
I think if you read the Paz first, this history book should be number two on the list. You’ll notice there isn’t any mention of India in the title—the book takes India, Pakistan and also Bangladesh and deals with all those experiences together. Yes, you could study the history of India in isolation, but intellectually it’s not a very interesting or rewarding thing to do, because ‘India’ really referred, before 1947, to that entire region. There was a geographical idea of India before it became a name for a nation state, and that area included even parts of Afghanistan. And there is no way you can even consider the history of India, the nation state, in isolation from the history of Pakistan. The countries have fought three wars and India’s entire post-1947 evolution has been marked by the relationship it has with Pakistan—not to mention what’s been happening in Afghanistan and, for instance, the connections a place like Kashmir has with Afghanistan. So you have to look at the region as a whole, and this book does it brilliantly.
The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and IdentityAmartya Sen
This book is actually a collection of essays, which sounds very dull. But if you read these books in this particular order, you’ll find that suddenly new avenues of thinking and experience open up to you. It helps you to understand a lot of things that may surprise you in India when you go there for the first time—or even after you’ve been many, many times. I’ve spent most of my life there and am still surprised and bemused by the place. The book does a tremendous job of giving you a sense of the many, many layers of history, of identities, that constitute this society. It goes back way into the past: it talks about medieval India, it talks about Islam in India, it talks about Buddhism, it talks about the Indian calendar. There’s an article on how India has many different calendars. Different people, different communities have had a very different sense of time. It really attests to the particular character of Indian society that it can accommodate within itself people living at very many different levels time-wise.
The broad thesis that Sen offers is that there is a particular philosophical tradition, in fact not just one tradition but many traditions, in India that really stress the idea of discussion, of consensus-building through argumentation. He goes back to various philosophical discourses, various conversations that are part of Indian philosophy and part of Indian history, to stress this notion that the whole construction of what we now know as India, the modern nation state, the world’s largest democracy, isn’t something that’s just happened in the last 50 to 60 years. There are traditions going back hundreds and hundreds of years, sometimes all the way back to the Buddha, who was alive in the 5th-6th century BC. Democracy is not just something India borrowed from the British; rational and scientific thought is not a preserve of the West.
Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to GrasshoppersArundhati Roy
The idea of India that has gone around recently, particularly in Europe and America, has been of this great, vibrant democracy with a booming economy, full of English speakers like us, with the same kind of aspirations to a consumer lifestyle. Broadly speaking, there is a lot of truth to this picture. India’s democracy is indeed very vibrant in certain areas. In other areas, it’s not so vibrant. Just in terms of numbers, there is a very large part of the population that aspires to a certain kind of European and American middle-class lifestyle and the same kind of consumption patterns. That fact makes businessmen in the West very excited, because these are potentially big markets. If, out of 1.2 billion people, 200 million were to start living at the same level as the American and European middle classes, that opens up a huge new market. But this focus leaves out the fate of the other India, so to speak—although it’s not really ‘other’ because it is in fact the majority of India. It’s the 800 million people living in villages who are close to destitution, and even those living in urban areas. Most people living in Indian cities are still living in what, by any definition of the term, would be called a slum.
Arundhati Roy’s book is an antidote to all the current fashionable prejudices and notions about India. The book will certainly be shocking and disconcerting and depressing to a lot of people who look at India from the great heights of Davos and Aspen, or know it from the pages of The Economist and The Wall Street Journal. But it’s very salutary in the end. As a visitor, one is immediately struck by these aspects of India—the extreme poverty, and the fear and hate the rich feel toward the poor. 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 a booming economy, is also an extremely violent place.
Interview by Sophie Roell
Read this interview in full at The Browser's FiveBooks section
