Pankaj Mishra Quotes About Past
-
Once you get past the grand normative claims made in the West for literature, especially the novel, in the post-Christian era - that it is a secular substitute for religion, hallmark of modern civilization, a priori liberal and cosmopolitan, with authors appearing to implicitly embody such pious ideals - you encounter a less agreeable reality: parochialism, blinkered views, even racial prejudices of the kind the bourgeoisie have held everywhere.
→ -
The recent past is full of diverse examples of writers - Mahfouz in Egypt, Pamuk in Turkey, and more interestingly, Pasternak in the Soviet Union - who have conducted their arguments with their societies and its political arrangements through their art in subtle, oblique ways. They didn't always have the license to make bold pronouncements about freedom, democracy, Islam, and liberalism, but they exerted another kind of moral authority through their work.
→ -
When I first decided to be a writer, that meant dealing with preoccupations and concerns that took little account of Indian traditions. I saw India's past as part of an antiquity rendered irrelevant by modernity, which with its science, nation states, free enterprises, and consumer societies was supposed to have solved all problems.
→ -
We, especially those of us in depoliticized and pacified societies, need to cast a colder eye at our self-perceptions, now and in the past, as sentinels and embodiments of Enlightenment virtues of reason, dissent, and skepticism.
→
Related Authors
-
Arundhati Roy Author -
William Dalrymple Historian -
Salman Rushdie Novelist -
Tariq Ali Writer -
Kathryn Schulz Journalist -
Liang Qichao Journalist -
Niall Ferguson Historian -
Wendy Doniger Scholar -
Aminatta Forna Writer -
Aravind Adiga Writer -
Gautama Buddha Founding Figure -
V. S. Naipaul Writer -
Perry Anderson Historian -
Nadeem Aslam Novelist -
Vikram Seth Novelist -
Amitav Ghosh Author -
Ian Buruma Writer -
Upamanyu Chatterjee Author -
Suketu Mehta Film writer