Turning the Mirror: A View From the East - A Conversation with Pankaj Mishra

Howard Burton

• Publisher: Ideas Roadshow
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781771700757
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Central Asian History
• Index: History

This book is based on an in-depth conversation between Howard Burton and award-winning writer Pankaj Mishra.They discuss several of Pankaj's books, including From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia and An End To Suffering: The Buddha In The World, and his motivations behind them. This carefully-edited book includes an introduction, The Weight of History, and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter: I. A Different Perspective - Unknown intellectuals and overlooked worldviewsII. Demanding a Response - Reacting to an existential challengeIII. Inseparable Factors? - Capitalism, imperialism and modernityIV. East and West - A meaningful distinction?V. Discovering Buddhism - Transcending false stereotypesVI. Personal Examinations - Growing up Western in the EastVII. At an Impasse - The end of an experimentVIII. Learning From the Past - The benefits of increased historical understandingAbout Ideas Roadshow Conversations Series: Presented in an accessible, conversational format, Ideas Roadshow books not only explore frontline academic research featuring world-leading researchers but also reveal the inspirations and personal journeys behind the research.

The Conversation

I. A Different Perspective

Unknown intellectuals and overlooked worldviews

HB: There were three distinct impressions that I had after reading From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia. The first was a sense of being confronted—in a rather unpleasant and yet captivating way—with my own ignorance. I found myself reading about people whom, quite frankly, I had never heard of before. I like to think of myself as a reasonably cultivated person, yet here’s this book that’s talking about the profound influences of various Asian intellectuals who were completely unfamiliar to me.

I had never heard of Liang Qichao or Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani before I read your book. I had heard of Rabindranath Tagore, but only the name—I had no real sense of who he was or what he had done. At any rate that was my first reaction.

The second reaction I had was related to the whole issue of colonialism. If I’m honest, I’d say that I hadn’t thought about it very much beforehand. I suppose my thinking was that there were good and bad aspects associated with colonialism: a certain level of infrastructure was laid down, while clearly, at the same time, a considerable number of moral transgressions occurred. All in all I didn’t have terribly strong views on the matter. But I came away from reading your book with a much stronger sense that this was just an egregious moral wrong—there was no more any level of ambiguity whatsoever for me: this was a really crappy thing that human beings have done to one another.

My third reaction was a certain queasiness about what all this means today and where we can, and should, go from here. Hopefully we’ll get back to this later on in our discussion.

But I’d like to start off by asking you about my first response that I just mentioned, about being swamped with feelings of ignorance. Was this a common reaction? Were there others who felt, Gosh, I really should have known more about this, or, It’s quite embarrassing that I didn’t know anything about the history of this part of the world at this point in time? Did other people come away with that sense too—or am I, somehow, the only one?

PM: Actually, a lot of people said that—this was a very common reaction. And an important point to make here is that even me, the author of the book, knew very little about these characters before I started out.

Had you asked me, six or seven years ago, who Liang Qichao was—China’s foremost intellectual of the late 19th and early 20th century—I would have said “no idea.” I simply wouldn’t have had any name recognition. This, then, is a measure of the level of ignorance that even someone who grew up in India, in the part of the world we call Asia today, has about an immediate neighbour, about the culture and history of China, one of the most important countries today.

This is a manifestation of how our knowledge systems are structured—the way we think of ourselves and the world—which is a way almost entirely framed by Western social science and the way in which history has been taught in academia for the last 150 years or so. So that whether you are in Toronto or France or London, there is a certain kind of history you grow up reading. And that history excludes so many, many different aspects of our common experience of the last 150 years or so, because they’re all kinds of nationalist histories. And if they’re not nationalist histories then they tend to be imperial histories, and imperial histories exclude even more than nationalist histories.

So I think that level of ignorance you mentioned is fairly common; and actually one of the reasons why I wrote that book was to address, very specifically, that ignorance. That was one of the impulses behind that book.

The other impulse was of course to excavate certain ideas, certain ways of life, certain worldviews that we have tended to neglect if not suppress or ignore altogether.

HB: Such as?

PM: Well, to look at what, say, Chinese intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were thinking when they confronted this enormous challenge of Western imperialism or Western capitalism—the kind of challenge that was really existential.

Mind you, I am not a professional historian. My book is really about individuals at particular stages in history, looking at the world around them, seeing existential challenges everywhere. They were very much characters in an existential situation. That is really what the book is about: How can we hold on to the society we’ve had, hold on to our literary and cultural traditions that have been around for a very long time, and also live with dignity in the wider world?

So imperialism becomes a very important factor for all of these people, because whether you’re in India—which is occupied by British imperials—or in China or the Ottoman Empire—which are not physically occupied—you nevertheless feel this enormous pressure from the West to radically transform your society, completely overhaul it to become strong enough to survive in the wider world. Otherwise your lands, your territories, your cultures, will be even more dominated by the West than they already are.

That is a challenge that I wanted to describe in this book—How did people respond to it? What did they say, in the first instance? The book is almost entirely about the first generation of Chinese, Indian, Turks, Iranians, Egyptians, and so forth.

HB: But you draw links between them, over time.

PM: Yes, I do, because they looked at each other. They were not only looking at the West but they were also looking at other countries, other societies. They were looking at Japan, most importantly.

So it’s important to examine that particular world of cosmopolitan exchanges and travels across Asia into Europe and America. We’ve become so accustomed to the West looking at non-Western societies, but we’ve really had no idea of how people from non-Western societies have looked at the West over the last 150-200 years. That was another motivation.

HB: There is this sense, then, of turning the mirror in the other direction.

PM: Absolutely, yes.

Questions for Discussion:

1. Do you share Howard’s sense of ignorance of prominent 19th and early 20th century Asian intellectuals? If so, do you find it embarrassing or understandable—or, somehow, both?
2. How have your views on colonialism evolved? Do you think that there are positive aspects of the legacy of colonialism that should also be mentioned alongside the negative ones?

II. Demanding a Response

Reacting to an existential challenge

HB: There’s also the question of what it means to be Asian or Eastern. Can one even talk coherently about “Asian values”? That’s a question that I’m grappling with.

At the beginning of From the Ruins of Empire you talk about these major intellectuals who are responding to the West, or thinking about responding to the West, in three separate ways.

One approach is to say, “We have to revert back to our own values”. This approach is manifested in movements like pan-Islamism, where there is a belief that, “Our set of values is going to be triumphant and we shouldn’t give in to Western thinking”.

Another approach, meanwhile, is a belief that these values should be tweaked som...