Radical Note

Marshalling many a writer, thinker and philosopher, Pankaj Mishra tries to make sense of the world around us in the era of Trump and Brexit.

- Shougat Dasgupta

Decrying 2016 as that most disastrous of years for liberals has become a meme, as columnists, public intellectuals and pop culture celebrities line up to bemoan a worldwide reversion to fear, distrust, anger and hatred culminating in the election of Donald Trump, an orange alert if ever there was one. “Something is rotten in the state of democracy,” Pankaj Mishra wrote in a recent column in the New York Times. “The stink first became unmistakable in India in May 2014,” he added, “when Narendra Modi, a member of an alt-right Hindu organisation inspired by fascists and Nazis, was elected prime minister.” It was a line calculated to cause umbrage. Cudgels were duly taken up against Mishra in the comments, with one disgruntled supporter warning American readers not to “go by this Marxist portrayal of Modi. Its [sic] full of lies and fabrications... People like Pankaj Mishra are involved in Maoist terrorism in India. That is Mishra’s ideal system, a communist revolution”. Down a phone line from Myanmar, it’s difficult to discern what dastardly plot the soft-spoken, painstakingly precise Mishra has in mind. He is not forthcoming about the details. Rather than the overthrow of Modi, what Mishra wants to talk about is his forthcoming book, Age of Anger, published in India in handsome hardback by Juggernaut Books, which addresses the electoral shocks of Brexit, Trump, and the defeat, at least momentary, of “Enlightenment humanism and rationalism”, to quote Mishra quoting the Canadian historian and former politician Michael Ignatieff. Some might see in such pronouncements, or in the assertion that ‘demagogues’ such as Modi “have tapped into the simmering reservoirs of cynicism, boredom and discontent”, further evidence of Mishra’s de haut en bas condescension. Does one have to be a bored, irrational, envious cynic to have voted for Modi?