Pankaj Mishra

The Flailing Superpower

The spectacle of America on the global stage

Gaza, Israel, and the American Left: October 7 One Year Later

When the Barbarians Take Over

Uwe Wittstock’s new account of writers considering whether to flee or to remain in Germany during Hitler’s rise to power sheds light on the choices faced by many writers in India and Russia today.

Writing the Other America

Class divisions inflict lifelong scars in Elizabeth Strout’s fiction, especially when the psychic damage is not acknowledged.

Grand Illusions of the West

It’s time to abandon the intellectual narcissism of cold war Western liberalism.

A Long & Undeclared Emergency

India for the last five years has been in a state of internal siege.

The Culture of Cruelty

India is undergoing a process of dehumanization. More ominously, this moral calamity in the world’s largest democracy is part of a global rout of such basic human emotions as empathy, compassion, and pity.

Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism

It is imperative to ask why and how this obscure Canadian academic, who insists that gender and class hierarchies are ordained by nature and validated by science, has suddenly come to be hailed as the West’s most influential public intellectual.

God’s Oppressed Children

Sujatha Gidla’s ‘Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India’

The Cult of Personality

The politics of narcissistic identification, of fanciful private bonding with the famous, set us up for, first, the disappointment with Obama, and then, the appalling shock of Trump.

Which India Matters?

Asia: ‘The Explosive Transformation’

Three new novels examine the perils and fantasies of capitalism in contemporary Asia

Indians Against Democracy

Growing up in India in the 1970s and 80s, I often heard people in upper-caste middle class circles say that parliamentary democracy was ill-suited to the country. Recoiling from populist politicians who pandered to the poor, many Indians solemnly invoked the example of Singapore’s leader Lee Kuan Yew. Here was a suitably enlightened autocrat whose success in transforming a city-state into a major economic power was apparent to all: clean, shiny, efficient, and prosperous Singapore, the very antithesis of squalor-prone India. Such yearnings for technocratic utopia may seem to have little in common with the middle class protests against “corruption” that recently gained much attention before abruptly losing steam at the end of the year. In fact, all along, there was little about Anna Hazare and his conspicuously middle class followers that suggested support for greater democracy.

‘No Truck With Pakistan’

Pakistan’s Writers: Living in a Minefield

A New Cold War in Asia?

Is Asia about to enter a new cold war? Accusing the United States of undervaluing the dollar, China has, after its mainly “peaceful” rise, recently assumed an aggressive posture toward its neighbors.

Kashmir: “The World’s Most Dangerous Place”

In New Delhi last week the Foreign Secretaries of India and Pakistan met for the first time since the terrorist attack on Mumbai in November 2008; the official talks concluded with both sides arguing over what they should talk about. India demanded that Islamabad prosecute the Pakistani militants responsible for the Mumbai attacks more vigorously. Pakistan insisted that the core issue between the two countries remains the India-held Muslim majority valley of Kashmir, where, out of a population of some 7.6 million people, more than 80,000 people have died since an insurgency supported by Pakistan began in 1989.

Afghanistan: The India & Kashmir Connection

Afghanistan: The Forgotten Conflict in Kashmir

Obama’s long speech on Afghanistan did not refer even once to India or Kashmir. Yet India has a large and growing presence in Afghanistan, and impoverished young Pakistanis, such as those who led the terrorist attack on Mumbai last November, continue to be indoctrinated by watching videos of Indian atrocities on Muslims in Kashmir. (Not much exaggeration is needed here: an Indian human rights group last week offered evidence of mass graves of nearly 3000 Muslims allegedly executed over the last decade by Indian security forces near the border with Pakistan.) Another terrorist assault on India is very likely; it will further stoke tensions between India and Pakistan, enfeebling America’s already faltering campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda.

The Palestinian Poet Who Came Back