Ideas - The Role of Nonfiction in a World of Contested Truths: Writer Pankaj Mishra

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

Award-winning writer Pankaj Mishra argues that self-serving narratives of Western countries have masked agendas of imperialism and exploitation, resulting in widespread suspicion of liberal democracy itself. He is the winner of the 2024 Weston International Award, which he received in September. After delivering a talk, Mishra joined IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed onstage to have a conversation.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Throughout the West and the Global South alike,

millions of people have lost patience with liberal democracy. And they're taking it out on immigrants, elites, the marginalized, and the political establishment. And in many cases, they're embracing leaders with autocratic, xenophobic intentions. It's a bewildering, nerve-wracking time for people who've taken liberal democracy for granted, and for anyone who's believed itself evidently the only sure way to freedom and prosperity. But the danger of doing that kind of thing

intellectually, rhetorically, is you start believing in your own semi-fictions. So you start overrating your own side and your own ideology. You become blind to its problems. Indian writer Pankaj Mishra saw this coming, though. In fact, he says, it's been clear for a long time to the non-Western world that the triumphalist narrative of Western capitalism and liberal democracy was full of holes. In his internationally celebrated books like Age of Anger, Blind Fanatics, and From the Ruins of Empire, Pankaj Mishra has documented the many contradictions of Western liberal democracy, how Western countries became strong, prosperous democracies through imperialist exploitation and slavery, contradictions to which the West has been blinkered by disregarding

or erasing other perspectives. And I don't understand why so many people, so many people in senior positions in journalism, in academia, in other intellectual communities remain so stubbornly ignorant of the histories of the non-West. Pankaj Mishra is the 2024 winner of the Weston International Award, a prize worth $75,000 for a non-fiction writer's body of work. He was presented with the award by the Writers' Trust of Canada at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, where he delivered this talk. In the beginning was the press, and then the world appeared. This is something an Austrian writer

and probably the first great media critic, Karl Krauss, wrote in 1921. He was really living through early 20th century, late 19th century, through an apocalyptic era. And he had very strong reason to believe that journalism had moved from being a neutral filter between the popular imagination and the external world. Journalism had taken charge of creating reality itself. And his critique had assumed sharper focus during the First World War, during the First World War, when he began to see how newspapers were deepening the disaster they were meant to be reporting on. How is the world ruled and led to war, the question he asked. He argued quite provocatively that the origin of the 20th century's seminal calamity, the First World War, that origin lay in a continent-wide collapse triggered by the press of cognitive and

imaginative faculties, something that allowed European nations to blunder into a war they could not anticipate, nor could they find a way of stopping it. Through decades of practice, Krauss wrote, the journalist has produced in mankind that degree of unimaginativeness which enables it to wage a war of extermination against itself. But today, as ferocious wars rage unstoppably in Europe, third year now of the war in Ukraine, and of course, the Middle East, all these wars, treading wider walls, and of course,

rending the social fabric of several societies, this critique of Krauss of the fourth estate, the so-called pillar of democracy, not only becomes more pertinent, it resonates as a broader analysis of the decay of democratic institutions around the world, especially in the West. Now, this fragility of democratic institutions was evident long ago to the Asian and African subjects of European powers. Mohandas Gandhi, who saw democracy as literally the rule of the people, kept insisting that democracy is merely nominal, as he put it, in the West. It had no reality because in his eyes, so long as the white gulf exists between the rich and the poor, so long as the voters take their cues, and this is a direct quote, the voters take their cue from the newspapers, which are often dishonest, there can be really no democracy. An equally blunt assessment today would conclude that a large part of the digital media is now systematically

dishonest, trafficking in fake news and conspiracy theories. The mainstream press maintains its pretensions to political and ethical responsibility, claiming to be a beacon in the darkness where democracy supposedly dies. But the evidence of its inadequacy and even corruption has accumulated rapidly during my own three decades in journalism. My career as a writer of literary nonfiction really began with the war on terror, the seminal calamity of our own century, which devastated large parts of Asia and Africa and eviscerated civil liberties in the West. Early in 2001, I had traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan and published long articles for Granta and the New York Review of Books. Now, these articles appeared soon after 9-11,

and many in the European and American media came to see me as some kind of a terrorism expert. I didn't really reject this absurd label as vehemently as I should have, because there were, back then, some of you might remember, very few writers of non-Western origin in the Anglo-American press. And I really felt oppressed by a sense of responsibility. I recoiled from this label, terrorism expert, and this, you know, idiotic question, why do they hate us?

But I wanted to do whatever I could to resist the further brutalizing of already deeply brutalized countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. And of course, the demonizing of religious ethnic minorities here in this part of the world. I could only look on incredulously as the BBC screened a documentary on primetime about how wonderful the British Empire was. In my own writings, I felt under a lot of pressure to not depart too much from the broad consensus, which was that the simultaneous invasion of multiple countries was just, righteous, and necessary. These invasions were aimed at liberating their population, especially women, from cruel oppressors, and they were meant to advance democracy. The most respectable parts of the Western press not only egged on a war that we now know was based on fraud, but large parts of the Western press

also helped heavily racialize this particular war on terror. And it's astonishing to remember the things that were said back then. It's time to think of torture, Newsweek declared a few weeks after 9-11. Focused brutality. This was in Time magazine. In the New York Times magazine, Michael Ignatieff urged Americans not only to embrace their imperial destiny and invade Iraq, he also defined how black and brown bodies could be subjected to forms of sleep deprivation and disorientation, like keeping prisoners in hoods. This article, by the way, appeared inconveniently just as the first pictures of hooded prisoners in Abu Ghraib emerged. We hear rhetoric today from Donald Trump and his vice presidential candidate about Haitian immigrants and are startled by the cruelty and malice. But I think this particular cruelty,

malice, mendacity received public sanction long before the arrival of Donald Trump. I remember as the invasion of Iraq got underway, because that's when I cancelled my subscription, the Atlantic laid out the advantages of torture lights in a cover story. The New Yorker published a report by Jeffrey Goldberg detailing non-existent links between Al-Qaeda and Iraq. Today, of course, the war on terror is widely accepted as a military and geopolitical failure. I don't think it's still fully understood as a massive intellectual and moral fiasco, a doomed attempt by the Western media, as well as the political class, to forge reality itself. And partly because this disaster was unacknowledged, editors and writers pushing false narratives and cheerleading violence and brutality,

that disaster is being reenacted today in the Western media's coverage of Israel's war on Gaza, another war that has ignited probably a much bigger bonfire of international and legal norms and deadened and perverted consciences. The historian Umair Bartof, major historian of the Holocaust, has pointed out that Israel, ostensibly responding to an unprecedented and brutal terrorist attack from Hamas, strip uninhabitable and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the country. Moreover, the liquidation of Gaza has been live-streamed by both its perpetrators and victims. Nevertheless, that evidence is daily obfuscated, if not denied altogether, by the main organs of the Western media. Palestinians and Arabs have known for decades the many hidden red lines constraining discussion of Israel's trajectory. In garish contrast to the clear identification of Russian barbarity in Ukraine, the passive voice is the preferred mode in reports of Israeli atrocities, making it harder to see who is doing what to whom and in what circumstances. a BBC report which was about Israeli soldiers unleashing an attack dog on a disabled Palestinian

and then leaving him to die. The headline of this report was, The Lonely Death of a Gaza Man with Down Syndrome. The report on a very grim landmark in the New York Times, the killing of 30,000 people, was headlined, Lives Ended in Gaza. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of such headlines and reports out there. There are these unverified reports, eventually exposed as false, of beheaded babies, given huge prominence by journalists who have together drawn a veil of silence over the multiple documented reports of rape and torture in Israeli prisons. The Atlantic has even argued, after the murder of thousands of children in Gaza, that it is possible to kill children legally. This latest account by the Western media of

Israel's self-defense yet again exposes the radical and increasing discrepancy between what is said by mainstream journalists in the West and what the rest of us can see happening in the world today. An old question, is it still possible to enlarge cognitive capacity within this dwindling kingdom of Western journalism, for me, an enchanted realm and in which I have actually spent profitably most of my own life. It's a question worth asking because we do inhabit a much, much bigger world than the one inhabited by Karl Krauss in early 20th century Vienna, with infinitely greater variety of experiences and perspectives available to us, could these intellectual moral debacles of journalism be avoided by a less conformist climate of opinion and an openness to different experiences and viewpoints, perhaps.

But the first step in this direction is to acknowledge the formidable obstacles ahead. We live in a very confusing time, and it's particularly confusing and bewildering for an older generation of Western journalists and commentators. They came of age in the decades after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism, when Western-style democracy and capitalism seemed to define the future of the entire world. This was the moment post-89 when so many people in senior positions were intellectually formed and emotionally formed. The problem is that each one of the assumptions that underpinned Western policymaking and journalism after the end of the Cold War

lies shattered today. We live in a world where the future of democracy is not assured. Even in Europe and America, Western-style capitalism has generated far too much inequality and now engenders a vicious backlash. Today, Trump. Today, J.D. Vance. Who knows who will replace them tomorrow? Demagogues and despotic leaders are everywhere in the ascendant. Most disturbingly, white nationalism is yet again, after a long break, the central ideology of mainstream political parties on both sides of the Atlantic. The main economic ideologies of endless growth and global prosperity have come up very sharply against environmental constraints and technological innovation, as well as built-in limits and look unsustainable. Now, editors and writers in our hallowed legacy periodicals were never mentally

prepared for the collapse of their ideology of capitalist globalization. They were never prepared for this rapid diminishment of Western power, legitimacy, and prestige. They were too attached by national and class origin and training to the intellectual assumptions developed during the unchallenged hegemony of the West. Personally, they are too implicated in the death agonies of the old world. They cannot now feel the birth pangs of the new world. Indeed, they struggle to comprehend their own societies as these drastically change around them. A greater problem, of course, is that intellectual as well as political elites in the West

have very few means to understand the rest of the world. We know that we are in the midst of an ongoing world historical transformation, the rise of the global majority, the rise of the global south. We inhabit a world that differs radically in all its political mentalities and emotional outlooks, as well as economic structures. It differs radically from the world that existed just two decades ago. There is a different narrative that this global narrative has long subscribed to, a different story about the world, a different story in which they place themselves, in which they measure their potential in the future. And that story is of decolonization, which is a central event of the 20th century for a vast majority of the human population. The word was, of course,

first used to describe a historical process that began in the 1940s when the so-called darker peoples began to liberate themselves from direct and indirect Western rule in Asia and Africa. But today, decolonization denotes more than just world historical shifts of political and economic power for many people living in this part of the world, it also serves as a shorthand for describing the way many non-white peoples, including many African Americans, immigrant populations, locate themselves in a longer historical continuum. This is why Western leaders and commentators who were too absorbed by the post-89 fantasy of the end of history are called upon to understand not only a crucial historical dynamic, the rebalancing of Western power that was originally built through imperialism, they're also called

upon to understand the different ways, cultural ways, psychological ways, in which that rebalancing is being manifested today. This is a tall order to understand all this, because even some rudimentary facts of global history, imperialism or decolonization, are not so easily discovered. They languish in darkness behind these brilliant and grand Plato to NATO narratives about Western civilization. When I started publishing in the 90s in Europe and America, writers and journalists commonly presented their countries as spiritual heirs of Athenian democracy, Renaissance individualism, and Enlightenment rationality. They wrote a great length about the crimes of

Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, but were weirdly oblivious to the long centuries of genocidal violence and dispossession that made Europe and North America so uniquely powerful and wealthy. This ignorance, which was once an affordable luxury, would be fatal today for a younger generation of journalists, writers and commentators. They confront a global order where democracy and liberalism or even ordinary political stability are not a given. They are required to see the world as it is without the imperative, which was very strong during the Cold War, to prettify one's side, they are in one sense forced to accurately chart our fragmented geopolitical and cultural landscape and to recognize its multiple histories and geographies. A lot of this recognition would mean recognizing that what

united the disparate struggles of the wretched of the earth was a shared conviction that racial privilege should no longer underpin the global order. We see this heightened consciousness today in the furious rejection by the non-Western world of the violence in the Middle East. That violence is yet again demonstrating to great rage in different parts of the world the ease with which black and brown bodies can be seized, broken, and destroyed outside all norms and laws of war. But even before the war erupted, people of non-Western ancestry were making urgent demands to decolonize Western systems of knowledge.

Decolonization really, in some sense, lives today in demands for a change in the self-image of the former empires that enforced white supremacy. This involves an overhaul of public cultures from replacements of place names, statues, museum holdings, to refining of academic curriculum, journalism, and political rhetoric. Understandably, this makeover is unacceptable to many people, and their response is to double down on failed ideas and assumptions and scramble to reinforce the structures of inequality that benefited them for a long time. White nationalism in politics has come to have a sinister counterpart in the cultural realms that seeks to stamp out intellectual

diversity, even while playing lip service to demographic diversity. We've seen this despotic power at work in the attempt by many in Western political corporate media classes to suppress scholarly and artistic explorations of racism and imperialism. We see this extraordinary spectacle of Toni Morrison being banned. We see it now in the crackdown on ordinary political dissent. A lecture that I was scheduled to give on Israel, Gaza, and the West for the London Review of Books was preemptively cancelled by its host, the Barbican Centre in London. Coming to Canada, I've discovered more instances of people who are trying to resist

the enforced depoliticization of literature and the arts, and who then find themselves ostracized. In 2018, the New York Times called Wanda Nannybush one of the most powerful voices for indigenous culture in the North American art world and then she was disappeared, ominously reminiscent of the way even very powerful people used to be airbrushed out of public life in totalitarian societies. I wrote in late February that we are seeing some kind of collapse in the free world. The intellectual incompetence and moral corruption of the fourth estate was predicted right from the time Karl Krauss warned against what he called the intellectual self-annihilation

of mankind by means of its press. Gandhi predicted that even the states that are today nominally democratic are likely to become frankly totalitarian, since a regime in which the weakest are supposed to go to the wall and a few people thrive cannot be sustained except by violence, either veiled or open. Václav Havel, the Czech writer, eventually the president of his country, who celebrated as an anti-communist dissident in the West, actually argued in 1984, when communism was still in power in his country, that totalitarian systems in Eastern Europe represented the future of the Western world. He warned against the power that operates outside all conscience, a power grounded in an omnipresent ideological fiction which can rationalize anything without ever having to brush against the truth.

It's hard to avoid despair when we see ideological fictions rationalize everything, even a mass slaughter of children. I certainly feel less confident after Gaza about the possibility of recovering from the post-truth age, but I cannot fail to recognize at the same time. How urgently we need fresh ideas about how to rethink our past and how to chart our way out of the present into a livable future. As our polycrisis, inescapable wars, climate disasters, political earthquakes, as this polycrisis deepens, our longings for a vivid and fair description of the world will become even more irrepressible, and many of us will feel compelled to fulfill that desire. There are many writers and journalists who won't join us in this essential task. These are the more than 100 writers, nearly 200 at this point, writers, academics and journalists, killed by the IDF in Gaza.

Increasingly, it seems that, as Arundhati Roy pointed out, the only moral thing Palestinian civilians can do, apparently, is to die. The only legal thing the rest of us can do is to wash them die and be silent. If not, we risk our scholarships, grants, lecture fees, and livelihoods. Today, I must join those trying to break the inhuman stranglehold on our minds and souls and our consciences. I dedicate this prize to the memory of writers murdered in Gaza. Thank you. Thank you. Kaj Mishra, delivering his talk after winning the 2024 Weston International Award for Nonfiction. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, on World Radio Paris, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas.

Find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you got to know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you

listen on a run through your neighborhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. Much of Pankaj Mishra's writing is a splash of cold water in the face of Western assumptions, an admonition to face up to its delusions about being an exemplar of liberal democracy and the suffering, resentment, and turmoil those delusions have caused. Mishra, who now lives between London, England, and the Indian village of Mashobra, has written well-received novels, but it was his body of non-fiction work that won him the 2024 Weston International Award.

Fiction, he says, can be more truthful than non-fiction. But in these times when public discourse is so murky and distorted with misinformation and disinformation. Nonfiction has an essential purpose. I think, you know, at least restore some dignity to the idea of truth. After he delivered his talk at the Royal Ontario Museum, I joined him on stage and began our conversation by asking about his decision to give part of his $75,000 prize money to Palestinian writers. It's a sort of recognition that writers like myself, who belong to a network

that continuously rewards us for our efforts and keeps us in a state of bourgeois contentment, and we can continue to inhabit that state over a long period without necessarily feeling exercised about what is happening in different parts of the world, the gross violations of human rights and the cruel injustices suffered by peoples around the world. It's very easy to belong to that world, and I have belonged to it for a long period. And it's very easy to belong to that world. And I have belonged to it for a long period. And I think in India, I'm intensely aware of people who don't have those privileges because, you know, it's a society where most people write on the side and most people really

cannot make a living of writing. So they're dependent on fellowships, of which there are very few. They are dependent on all kinds of different modes of patronage, which they don't really receive. But in conditions like Palestine, and I remember going there many years ago to a university in the West Bank, and meeting these aspiring writers and being moved to tears by their determination to record their experience in a variety of fictional and non-fictional forms. And I remember breaking down after that encounter. It was an incredibly intense visit anyway, for all kinds of reasons.

But meeting young people, meeting young writers in particular, and to see how blocked their horizons were really sort of stayed with me and sort of, in a way, always motivated me to engage with the subject and to, at least in my writing, seek some kind of clarity about it. So it was, you know, in these circumstances, you know, I received an advance for my next book, which is also something I'm going to give away because I don't need the money as much as these other people do. It's as simple as that. So there is the matter of money, but there's also the matter of motivation and desire to write. So, you know, I was very struck

by what you said about the fact that you are less confident after Gaza about the recovery after this post-truth world. What are the lesser, you know, as you say, lesser privileged journalists around the world, not just in Gaza, but elsewhere to think, if you have arrived at that point, what are they to think? Well, I think, you know, I have a lot of trust and a lot of faith in a younger generation, both here in this part of the world and people that I see elsewhere, because, you know, I think they have gone through an experience that has taught them a great deal already, that has educated them so rapidly and so deeply. Unlike generations which lived through a relatively stable, relatively untroubled politically,

economically period. And so they don't really have the means, they don't have the spiritual resources, they don't have the intellectual resources to understand even what is going on today. Young people, when you think about people born in the 90s, you know, what have they already undergone? You know, the 9-11 attacks, the failed war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina. I mean, it's just financial crisis, arrival of Trump, Brexit. One disaster after another has educated them in a way that I don't think generations in the West have been educated since the Great Depression, since the Second World War. So there's a big gap, really, in perception, in sensibility,

between this young generation and their elders. That's where I feel very strongly hopeful. So when I talk despairingly about journalism, I really am talking about my generation. Her generation. And, yes, and thinking that, you know, perhaps it should step away. And my own sort of intention is to step away and create spaces idea that since the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 89, you know, that the West has held up liberal democracy as the political system that will

irresistibly spread around the world and to all people. How much of your nonfiction still is a kind of desire to provide a retort to that, a counter narrative to that triumphalist sort of Western way of thinking? No, I think if I'd stayed in India, if I'd spent all my life writing for Indian periodicals, doing literary journalism for them, I probably would never have reckoned with this question. But because I moved in a context where I was constantly encountering ideas, assumptions of this kind, the post-Cold War, end of history, a kind of triumphalist mood, I was almost obliged to, you know, challenge it. And that became my role in a way to kind of keep saying those things. And again, as I said,

there were hardly, you know, any people with my kind of background, with my kind of training in those realms back then. So all you had were people who'd gone to the same kind of university, same kind of school, saying the same kind of thing. It was a kind of extraordinary group thing, which still prevails. It was a product of a certain moment, of a certain class, of a certain kind of training. And you felt really quite sort of daunted by it. I mean, just the sheer presence of it everywhere. Now, of course, it's been checked by events. It's

not actually been checked intellectually. It's just been exposed as false and unsustainable by political earthquakes. You know, that's what's shattered those assumptions. But in that way of thinking, you know, liberal democracy is synonymous with prosperity and progress. And the idea was that economic growth was supposed to be twinned with equality. I wonder, when you write about this today, to you, is it actually what we had thought it was? Or was it a sham from the beginning? No, it wasn't a sham. I think, you know, what happens in any given context, you adhere to a particular ideology, especially in the context

of something like the Cold War, where you are fighting an ideological battle against a very formidable enemy. And you have to constantly keep insisting that your system is better than theirs. And of course, you know, liberal democracy and liberal capitalism were 10,000 times better than the system they had in Soviet Union and China. There's no question about that. But the danger of doing that kind of thing intellectually, rhetorically, is you start believing in your own semi-fictions. So you start overrating your own side and your own ideology. You become blind to its problems. I mean, I sometimes think that the biggest problem with communism was it was so lousy that it allowed people to feel superior too easily, too quickly, as it actually existed in places

like the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. And that created a kind of complacency. The historical role of socialism was always to temper the most greedy, exploitative sides of capitalism. And that's a role it successfully performed from the 19th century onwards. And we have social democracy as a result of those socialist ideas. But communism, I think, by, again, claiming the ultimate truth, made it too easy for its opponents to claim victory and then to think, oh, now this is going to spread all over the world, not realizing the different points of

view, perspectives that had been developed through the 19th century, through the early 20th century, in the process of anti-colonialism. During that whole struggle for sovereignty and self-determination, people had come up with their own ideas about what kind of societies they want for themselves. They didn't necessarily want the American version or the European version. In one of your best-known books, Age of Anger, you trace the history of Western liberalism and those who rejected it as a kind of an extended argument between Voltaire and Rousseau. And I wonder if you could speak to how that is

and also whether that continues today. You know, I think something that I've always been very interested in is the role of humiliation in public life and in private life, too. The two are related. The word resentment comes up a lot in your writing. Very much so. You know, I've never thought of myself as a social scientist, as a historian or a sociologist. I started out wanting to be a novelist. And, you know, that's really what I really still want to do. And so I look at these, you know, historical events or look at historical figures. I look at them, I think, fundamentally with the perspective of a novelist, you know, looking at individual souls and their

contradictions and especially their feelings and their motivations. And in a figure like Rousseau, you see very clearly this is a man from the provinces who feels deeply humiliated by this metropolitan class in Paris. In responding to what he perceives as their snobbery, as their intellectual arrogance, he devises various ideas, including, you know, I think he's a sort of originator of the idea of nationalism. So out of his personal resentments, he creates, you know, the basis for the modern ideologies. And in so many ways, we are still playing, enacting that particular drama. So the backlash against metropolitan classes today, the metropolitan elites, and demagogues emerging to channel the anger and resentment against them, this is a drama that

just goes on again and again. But how do you explain the omnipresence of resentment, not in such disparate political arenas and in different parts of the world and all kind of culminating in a rage, you know, in so many different parts of the world? Well, I mean, I think there are several ways to answer that. It's also what asking whether people in the past felt the same degree of resentment and malice towards their fellow citizens. I think the answer would be that they didn't because there were various other things in play. There were certain ethical commitments, there were certain religious commitments which kept them from feeling hyper-competitive with their fellow citizens.

Societies were instructed in a way that encouraged ostentation or vanity or the pursuit of wealth or the pursuit of success and fame. So all of those things were relatively absent back then. But modern society places a premium on those things. It is so much about consumption. It's so much about defining yourself through your wealth, through your fame, through your success. And that creates a hyper-competitive realm where people are constantly really battling with each other. It's a sort of low-intensity civil war that's going on, which has been erupting politically now. You grew up and were educated in India, and you're clearly exhaustively well-read in the Western canon, and yet you bring this knowledge from the global south, and you live

between these two worlds. You spend your time between rural India and England, and I wonder if you could speak a little bit about how that shaped your perspective as a writer. Oh, I think hugely, because I think I would have been a very limited writer had I stayed in one place. I came of age just when globalization was beginning to happen, late 80s, early 90s. So, you know, I have this very ambivalent relationship with this whole process. I'm very critical of it. But at the same time, I know it has made me the writer that I am. It gave me a perspective. It put me in the, you know, sort of this very hectic space, the flow of ideas, of ideologies, and was, you know, really equipped me to see this rapidly changing world. You know, I didn't really leave India until I was 25 years

old. And I'd already published a India until I was 25 years old. And I'd already published a book before I left India. And I could have just continued with my career there. But I think it would have been an incredibly limited range for me. And I think going to Europe and then to the United States in the 90s was really in many ways an eye-opening experience for me. It just brought me face to face with a society, a way of being. There was just so much to learn, so much

to think about. And then to compare and contrast, you know, so much of the strongest intellectual and creative work happens when you do that. Have you ever found it hard to be, as a writer, not to be sucked into a quote-unquote Western narrative? Well, you know, I think fortunately that narrative is now so fragmented that one can dispense with that anxiety. I've always felt that I was not part of that narrative, and I was certainly made to feel that way. There was always a little bit of a pointed tone in many of the responses I used to receive, which is that, why is he so critical of us? Because the general assumption was that you would want to be part of this narrative and to benefit, really, because there were so many benefits to be had from

joining the right think tank, from joining, you know, the right kind of magazine and writing in a particular way. Fortunately, the temptation was never strong enough for me to be part of that narrative. Right. What is, do you think, the responsibility of nonfiction when we live in this world that we live in now? Misinformation runs amok, you know, truth is so contested. What is, what should be the main role of nonfiction? I think, you know, at least restore some dignity to the idea of truth, you know, while, while recognizing, while recognizing that it's, you know, one person's truth may not be someone else's truth. Well, that's the question. Whose truth?

So someone who we never really think about in this context, but who was thinking about our post-truth age was Gandhi. He said, we are going to inhabit a time when all of us will have very different conceptions of what the truth is, because we will have different experiences and perspectives. We'll come from different historical backgrounds. This is a man who spent time in South Africa. He's been in England. He's been in India. He's known multicultural societies, pluralist societies. So he knows what he's talking about. He's talking about something like truth being in trouble because, you know, the old homogenous societies have cracked and people have multiple different visions of the same reality. And so his way was,

okay, let's, you know, try and reconcile these different versions non-violently through a process of dialogue, which he calls satyagraha, a process of moral persuasion. While we acknowledge difference, while we acknowledge, you know, that your truth may not be the same as ours, but we still, you know, at least sort of acknowledge that plurality creates these particular visions. And only thing is that, you know, you have to draw the line at deliberate distortion, which is what, you know what we are seeing today on digital media. You ask in the lecture, could the continuing intellectual and moral debacles of journalism be avoided by a less conformist climate of opinion and of openness to different viewpoints? Well, I think, you know, the case for diversity is so evident.

You know, again, I would emphasize not demographic diversity, which is important in itself, but we need intellectual diversity. It's not enough to have people from different historical or ethnic, racial, religious backgrounds. If you still have the same kind of groupthink, if you have the same broad, complacent consensus everywhere, We need to really think about how can we create a kind of contested but stable consensus. You know, I think the idea that we can go back to recreating communities of truths, of communities believing in one thing, and, you know, I think we have to move past that particular fantasy. You talk a lot, not just tonight, but at other times,

about the enforcement of a regime of intellectual inequality. You know, how thinkers and writers from the Global South, their ideas and thoughts are closed off, effectively. What are some of the ideas or perspectives that we in the West should be most urgently tuning into? Well, it seems very obvious to me. You know, until I was in my mid-30s when I started to explore China and Chinese literature, Chinese history, Chinese philosophy. And I felt so ashamed of my ignorance.

You know, here was India's big neighbor. And I knew absolutely nothing about it. And it took me a long time. I mean, you know, I'm still studying, I'm still learning, 20 years have passed. And I don't understand why so many people, so many people in senior positions in journalism, in academia, and, you know, in other intellectual communities, remain so stubbornly ignorant of the histories of the non-West. If you're a writer in India, if you're a journalist in India, there is no way that you can remain ignorant of the history, the literary traditions, philosophical traditions of Europe and America. This is something you just

have to know. Why is that not an obligation? So that's what I mean by intellectual inequality. You know, we talk about social equality, economic inequality. We never really think about intellectual inequality. And it's a well-established, well-entrenched regime everywhere. You know, and you feel that constantly. I felt that during my three decades in journalism. Most people I'm working with have absolutely no idea what the history of India is, or what my references are, what my cultural references are.

And really, in today's world especially, there is really no excuse for that kind of ignorance. The other place you advise us to go, or at least you tell us you go a lot, is fiction. And so you make frequent references to novelists like Dostoevsky and Zola and Pushkin. How much do you find that fiction comes closer to the truth sometimes than nonfiction? You know, I actually returned to writing fiction because I felt that perhaps truth is best approached in fiction. that perhaps truth is best approached in fiction, and that in many ways nonfiction or journalism was in the business of distorting. It had become in the business. And the complexity of an experience, and particularly the individual experience, because I think nonfiction deals mostly with collective experience, deals with abstractions.

But I felt ultimately the truth is to be found in the human soul, and fiction is the best window on it. It's to be found in the many contradictions and ambivalences and ironies and ambiguities of our everyday behavior. ironies and ambiguities of our everyday behavior. You can resort to any number of abstractions, sociological, historical abstractions, but I think it still won't beat fiction as an extraordinary resource for understanding the human mind and soul. Your most recent book is called Run and Hide, and it is a novel. I wonder also how much in writing that you were mounting a protest. I was definitely writing against myself. There's a character in it, and I use that character to mock myself and mock my faith in nonfiction in many ways,

and to kind of also show up the inadequacies of nonfiction. I mean, going back to fiction was a great release for me. It was a great release from a certain kind of obligation to address a particular audience, to explain things to them. Here I could row free without those kinds of burdens and those kinds of obligations. I think also I felt certainly closer in the vicinity of truth there, much closer than I felt in my non-fiction. That said, I've now gone back to non-fiction and probably I'll never go back to fiction. You know, I think you really cannot

truly control your fate. In times past, it has always been a question among writers and artists and non-fiction and fiction alike of what the role that they play is in times of turmoil. As we watch authoritarianism on the rise, as we watch democracy, as you say, weaken, what is the responsibility of writers, artists, doesn't matter what type, what is the main responsibility? Well, I think to be true to their experience, because I think placing too many expectations on writers and journalists, especially writers of fiction, would be extremely unfair because, you know, I think they are part of a society where moral responsibility, political responsibility has been assigned to other actors. It's been assigned to politicians,

it's been assigned to journalists, it's been assigned to the judiciary. Of course, in times of crisis like this, when the US.S. Supreme Court is full of, you know, unsavory people, when, you know, the presidential candidates are really unbearably crude with absolutely zero sense of ethical responsibility, we come to expect writers to stand up and assume those responsibilities. to stand up and assume those responsibilities. But again, it's an unfair expectation because, you know, their responsibility really is to be true to their experience and to render it as accurately as possible in prose. It's something that we come to automatically assume and expect, but it's because, as I said, because of the breakdown of those other institutions. but it's because, as I said, because of the breakdown of those other institutions. Those are my questions for now but I understand that there's some questions from the audience that, right, there we go, thank you. So we're going to do a lightning round very quick so but these are big, big questions. Who are your primary intellectual influences?

Too many to name, actually. Name a couple. I would say, we have Snipoll, Tolstoy. Okay. Those are good to start with. What have you learned, if anything, from your critics? For example, it says example from Niall Ferguson or Michael Ignatieff. I've learned to be gracious.

Okay. Quick question on India. India has undergone a major change since 2014 when the BJP government led by Modi swept into power. Can it overcome the challenges? You know, the biggest problem is unemployment, religious intolerance, and polarization. Can it overcome these challenges to become a better country or is the shadow of empire still looming over it? I'm confident that it would. I think India as a society is a very resilient society, both spiritually and intellectually. Last thing is, given the many issues with liberal democracy,

what kind of system do you think is worth aspiring to in a country like Canada to create a better world for all? I think liberal democracy is definitely worth aspiring to. It's a terrific idea. We should work towards realizing it and not assume it already exists. Unfortunately, that's all the time we have. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you, Ajmishra. Really a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Pankaj Mishra. It's really a pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much. Pankaj Mishra is the author of Age of Anger, Bland Fanatics, and From the Ruins of Empire. And he's the 2024 winner of the Westin International Award for Nonfiction. Special thanks to the staff at the Royal Ontario Museum and to David Leonard and Amanda Hopkins of the Writers' Trust of Canada. This episode was

produced by Chris Wadskow. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Thank you.