The Korean War, which China entered on the side of North Korea, fixed Mao’s image in the United States as another unappeasable Communist. – Pankaj Mishra
To Westerners, the students at Tiananmen may have given an impression of a solid and energetic consensus against dictatorship and for democracy, but they were an egotistical and fractious lot, riven by disagreements over tactics and money. – Pankaj Mishra
German writers in the late 18th century were the first to uphold a prickly, literary nationalism, in reaction to the then dominance and prestige of French literature. – Pankaj Mishra
It turns out that globalisation, while promising sameness through brand-name consumption, was fostering, through uneven economic growth, an intense feeling of difference. – Pankaj Mishra
In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Japan had put forward a proposal to guarantee racial equality at the League of Nations, but Woodrow Wilson overturned it in the face of majority support. – Pankaj Mishra
In a typically contradictory move, globalisation, while promoting economic integration among elites, has exacerbated sectarianism everywhere else. – Pankaj Mishra
An enlarged global public society, with its many dissenting and corrective voices, can quickly call the bluff of lavishly credentialled and smug intellectual elites. – Pankaj Mishra
As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people – writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics – who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories. – Pankaj Mishra
Happily, financial capitalism and free trade have not done away with national languages and literatures, as Marx rather too blithely hoped. – Pankaj Mishra
Governments everywhere that are unable to guarantee equitable growth and social welfare have suffered a fatal decay of legitimacy. – Pankaj Mishra
National independence, and the preceding political struggles, helped create the space for literary creation in many post-colonial countries. Much of modern Indian or Chinese literature is inconceivable without the political movement for freedom from foreign rule. – Pankaj Mishra
The White House tapes, the recordings that Nixon made of his conversations in office, have long been recognized as a marvel of verbal incontinence. – Pankaj Mishra
I think subsuming political and economic conflicts into some grand ‘clash of civilisations’ theory or ‘the West versus the rest’ binary is a particularly insidious form of ideological deception. – Pankaj Mishra
The Dalai Lama can claim the sanction of the Buddha, who is said to have altered his teachings in order to reach a diverse audience. – Pankaj Mishra
Many writers from the suburbs of history, such as Ireland and Argentina, produced more original work than their counterparts in the United States; they still seem to. – Pankaj Mishra
Political elites look increasingly interchangeable: Blair, Brown, and Cameron have all tried to provide cover for the surrender of sovereignty to foreign investors with invocations of ‘British’ values, and, more opportunistically, anti-immigrant rhetoric. – Pankaj Mishra
Tiananmen Square in early 1989 attracted many dreamers like Ma Jian, who returned from Hong Kong to a one-room shack in Beijing in order to join the student protests. – Pankaj Mishra
I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form. – Pankaj Mishra
I think there is no reason for us to bring to Islamism or political Islam the fear and ignorance of Western commentators and their hysterical vocabulary. – Pankaj Mishra
The idea that modernisation makes for enhanced national power and rapid progress and helps everyone achieve greater happiness has its origins in the astonishing political, economic and military successes of western Europe in the 19th century. – Pankaj Mishra
A free and rooted society ought to consist of a web of moral obligations. We have the right to ignore them, but we ought to be actually obliged not to let other people starve or to let them lapse into destitution. – Pankaj Mishra
The Sino-Indian War in 1962 has fundamentally shaped and distorted Indian attitudes towards China. It also obscured a great deal of what has happened in China since 1962. – Pankaj Mishra
For boys like me, in north Indian railway towns in the ’70s and ’80s, where nothing much happened apart from the arrival and departure of trains from big cities, the Soviet Union alone appeared to promise an escape from our limited, dusty world. – Pankaj Mishra
As the spiritual leader of six million people, the Dalai Lama can be credited with a significant renunciation of the authority of tradition – of the conventional politics of national self-interest as well as of religion. – Pankaj Mishra
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 briefly disrupted celebrations of a world globalised by capital and consumption. – Pankaj Mishra
If your writing collides with the conventional wisdom, there’s going to be some kind of friction. – Pankaj Mishra
Ordinary Muslims in Europe, who suffer from the demoralisation caused by living as perennial objects of suspicion and contempt, are far from thinking of themselves as a politically powerful, or even cohesive, community, not to speak of conquerors of Europe. – Pankaj Mishra
Tanpinar presciently feared that to embrace the western conception of progress was to be mentally enslaved by a whole new epistemology, one that compartmentalised knowledge and concealed an instrumental view of human beings as no more than things to be manipulated. – Pankaj Mishra
The British Empire passed quickly and with less humiliation than its French and Dutch counterparts, but decades later, the vicious politics of partition still seems to define India and Pakistan. – Pankaj Mishra
