Pankaj Mishra

Mishra was born in Jhansi. His father was a railway worker and trade unionist after his family had been left impoverished by post-independence land redistribution.[2][3]

Mishra graduated with a bachelor's degree in commerce from Allahabad University before earning his Master of Arts degree in English literature at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.[4]

In 1992, Mishra moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, 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), 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 Allahabad. A large part of the novel, including its end, is set in Varanasi. Gradually, he realizes that the city is a site for mystery.[5] In his quest for knowledge, Samar moves from place to place, but in the closing section he comes back to the city for the last time. Thus, the narrative ends where it had begun. His 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. Mishra's book From the Ruins of Empire (2012) examines the question, he says, 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."[6]

Mishra's anthology of writings on India, India in Mind was published in 2005. His writings have been anthologised in The Picador Book of Journeys (2000), The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature (2004), Away: The Indian Writer as Expatriate (2004), and A History of Indian Literature in English (2003), among many other titles. He has introduced new editions of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (Modern Library), E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (Penguin Classics), J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (NYRB Classics), Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Penguin) and R. K. Narayan’s The Ramayana (Penguin Classics). He has also introduced two volumes of V.S. Naipaul’s essays, The Writer and the World and Literary Occasions.

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.[4]

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.[7] In November 2012, Foreign Policy magazine named him one of the top 100 global thinkers.[8] In February 2015, Prospect nominated him to its list of 50 World Thinkers.[9]

In 2011, after Mishra accused Niall Ferguson of racism in a review of his book Civilisation: The West and the Rest in the London Review of Books, Ferguson threatened to sue for libel.[10][11]

In March 2014, Yale University awarded Mishra the Windham–Campbell Literature Prize.[1]

In an article published on March 19, 2018 in the New York Review of Books titled “Jordan Peterson & Fascistic Mysticism,” Mishra came under fire for using the phrase "romancing the noble savage" to describe Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist and best-selling author, perceived the phrase as an insult towards his friend Charles Joseph. Mishra wrote that Peterson’s friendship with Charles Joseph, a native member of the coastal Pacific Kwakwaka’wakw tribe in Canada, “may seem the latest in a long line of eggheads pretentiously but harmlessly romancing the noble savage.” [12] Peterson’s response via Twitter, which included a threat of violence towards Mishra, went viral. Mishra has remained silent on the article.

• Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995)
• The Romantics (2000)
• An End to Suffering: the Buddha in the World (2004)
• Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond (2006)
• From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia (2012)
• A Great Clamour: Encounters with China and Its Neighbours (2013)
• Age of Anger: A History of the Present (2017) ISBN 9780374274788

• Kashmir: The Case for Freedom (2011)

• India in Mind, edited by Pankaj Mishra (2005)

• Mishra, Pankaj (June 28, 2007). "Impasse in India". The New York Review of Books. 54 (11): 48–51. Reviews Nussbaum, Martha. The clash within : democracy, religious violence, and India's future. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press.
• — (November 25, 2013). "Land and blood : the origins of the Second World War in Asia". The Critics. Books. The New Yorker. 89 (38): 121–126.
• — (August 4, 2014). "The places in between : the struggle to define Indonesia". The Critics. Books. The New Yorker. 90 (22): 64–69.
• — (March 19, 2018). "Jordan Peterson & Fascist mysticism". NYR Daily. The New York Review of Books.
• Mishra, Pankaj. "The Invention of the Hindu." Axess Magazine 2 (2004).