TEMPTATIONS OF THE WEST: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond
by Pankaj Mishra
Picador ₤16.99, 247 pages
In March 2000, Bill Clinton became the first US president in a generation to go to India in what became a triumphal state visit. Just before he arrived, a bloody incident occurred in the divided state of Kashmir in which 35 Sikh villagers were taken out of their homes and shot. Clinton condemned the massacre, which New Delhi said had been carried out by Pakistan-backed militants.
A few days later the Indian authorities released pictures of the corpses of the five alleged culprits, who had apparently been killed in a shoot out. The timing of the incident, and Clinton’s implicit endorsement of New Delhi’s account of it, helped to solidify what is now seen as a critical turning point in US-India relations.
So far, so straightforward. Except that a number of sceptics, including Pankaj Mishra, a London-based writer who arrived in the village the following morning, rejected New Delhi’s account. Assisted by a court order that the five bodies be exhumed, local activists proved that the deceased were innocent local Muslims who had been picked up by the authorities, dressed in battle fatigues and then killed in cold blood.
Unusually, none of the various Kashmiri separatist and terrorist groups claimed responsibility for the first massacre. Mishra, an Indian national, is clearly in sympathy with Amnesty International and others who allege that Indian security forces staged both massacres to drive a point home to Clinton.
We will probably never know the full truth in a case that remains officially unresolved. But in a conflict where the reporting of journalists is usually coloured by the “national interest” bias of their respective countries, it is refreshing to find that Mishra does not wear those blinkers.
Temptations of the West is more of a collection of essays than a single book. But what threads it together is Mishra’s fascination with the religious fundamentalisms of the region.
Brought up in a small town in north India, Mishra is unusual among English-language travel writers on India in coming from a relatively unprivileged background. This gives his observations a grittiness in a genre often tinged with a kind of obligatory dreaminess. It is clear he disdains the Hindu nationalists who have done such damage to India’s secular democracy. But he does not feel correspondingly obliged to downplay the Islamist threat. Such “liberal pieties”, he says, come more easily to those who have never lived in small-town India. In an essay on Pakistan, Mishra admits that he began to “sense something hard and fierce in even the simple devotion of the skull-capped men half-prostrate, on chilly evenings, on the streets of Peshawar”. Elsewhere, he admits to a “deeper anxiety about Muslims I began to acknowledge to myself only after I had left Pakistan and felt safe again in India”.
It is hard to dispute Mishra’s assertion that both Hindu and Islamic fundamentalism are specifically modern movements that have emerged in reaction to liberalism and secularism. It is not as easy to agree that only Buddhism - of all the world’s religions and philosophies - is capable of assuaging what Mishra sees as the “dissolute capitalism” and “aggressively secular materialism” of the modern world.
His writing is strongest when he is describing actual situations and real people. In places - a withering aside or an acute detail - there are clear echoes of V.S. Naipaul, Nobel-prize winning author. Unlike Naipaul, however, Mishra conveys genuine empathy for other people.
Edward Luce’s book “In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India” will be published by Little, Brown on August 24.
