Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra (born 9 February 1969) is an Indian essayist, novelist, and socialist. His non-fiction works include The World After Gaza, Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond, along with From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, and A Great Clamour: Encounters with China and Its Neighbours, and he has published two novels. He is a prolific contributor to periodicals such as The Guardian, Harper's Magazine, the New York Times, The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books and was previously a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His writings have led to a number of controversies, including disputes with Salil Tripathi, Niall Ferguson, and Jordan Peterson. He was awarded the Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction in 2014 and the Weston International Award in 2024.

Early life and education

Mishra was born in Jhansi, India. His father, A.K. Mishra, worked as a track maintenance manager for Indian Railways and was active in the trade union movement. He came from a once-prosperous Brahmin family that was impoverished by post-independence land redistribution.

Mishra graduated with a bachelor's degree in commerce from the University of Allahabad before earning his Master of Arts degree in English literature at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

Career

In 1992, Mishra moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan town in Himachal Pradesh, India, where he began to contribute literary essays and reviews to The Indian Review of Books, The India Magazine, and the newspaper The Pioneer. His first book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995), set in Ludhiana, Punjab, India, was a travelogue that described the social and cultural changes in India in the context of globalization. His novel The Romantics (2000), an ironic tale of people longing for fulfilment in cultures other than their own, was published in 11 European languages and won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction. This novel, with some autobiographical strains, is a bildungsroman. The narrative begins with the nineteen-year-old protagonist Samar coming to the city of Varanasi from Prayagraj. A large part of the novel, including its end, is set in Varanasi. Gradually, Samar realizes that the city is a site for mystery.

Mishra's book An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (2004) mixes memoir, history, and philosophy while attempting to explore the Buddha's relevance to contemporary times. Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond (2006), describes Mishra's travels through Kashmir, Bollywood, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, and other parts of South and Central Asia. Responding in The Guardian to an article by Mishra in connection with this work, Salil Tripathi criticised Mishra's defence of Indian and Chinese economic policies from the period 1950–80, claiming that they had stifled economic growth. Mishra's 2012 book, From the Ruins of Empire, examines the question of "how to find a place of dignity for oneself in this world created by the West, in which the West and its allies in the non-West had reserved the best positions for themselves."

Mishra has written literary and political essays for the New York Times, where he was a Bookends columnist, the New York Review of Books, The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and The New Yorker, among other publications. He is a columnist for Bloomberg View and the New York Times Book Review. His work has also appeared in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Boston Globe, Common Knowledge, the Financial Times, Granta, The Independent, The New Republic, the New Statesman, the Wall Street Journal, n+1, The Nation, Outlook, Poetry, Time magazine, the Times Literary Supplement, Travel + Leisure, and the Washington Post. He divides his time between London and India, and is currently working on a novel.

He was the Visiting Fellow for 2007–08 at the Department of English, University College London, UK. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008. In November 2012, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the top 100 global thinkers. In February 2015, Prospect nominated him to its list of 50 World Thinkers.

In 2011, Niall Ferguson threatened to sue Mishra for libel after Mishra published a review of his book Civilisation: The West and the Rest in the London Review of Books. Ferguson claimed that Mishra accused him of racism.

In March 2014, Yale University awarded Mishra the Windham–Campbell Literature Prize.

In an article published on 19 March 2018 in the New York Review of Books titled "Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism", Mishra wrote that Canadian clinical psychologist and author Jordan Peterson's activities with Charles Joseph, a native member of the coastal Pacific Kwakwakaʼwakw tribe in Canada, "... may seem the latest in a long line of eggheads pretentiously but harmlessly romancing the noble savage." Peterson perceived Mishra's use of the phrase "romancing the noble savage" as a racist insult to his friend Joseph, and his response via Twitter, which included a threat of violence to Mishra, went viral.

Run and Hide, Mishra's first novel in 20 years, was published in 2022 to a generally positive reception, with Allan Massie in The Scotsman concluding: "This is a wonderfully rich and enjoyable novel. It is very much, and disturbingly, of our time.... Intellect, observation memory, sympathy and imagination are all happily here. The novel can be read quickly for sheer pleasure. It is a work for our time and one that will surely be read many years on for what will then be its historical interest. So: a novel built to last."