Reviewed by Jonathan Baskin
8.17.07

In the prologue to Pankaj Mishra’s newest collection of non-fiction essays, Temptations of the West, the author details his discovery, as a 20-year old university graduate, of the American literary and culture critic, Edmund Wilson. Self-consciously avoiding the world of work and responsibility—that is, the middle class life—to which he feared he would shortly be consigned, the young Mishra was especially attracted to a passage in an essay Wilson had written about Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education:

Flaubert’s novel plants deep in our mind an idea which we never quite get rid of: the suspicion that our middle-class society of manufacturers, businessmen, and bankers, of people who live on or deal in investments, so far from being redeemed by its culture, has ended by cheapening and invalidating all the departments of culture, political, scientific, artistic, and religious, as well as corrupting and weakening the ordinary human relations: love, friendship, and loyalty to a cause—till the whole civilization seems to dwindle.

Wilson may seem a peculiar place to begin a collection of essays on the perils of modernism in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Afghanistan and Tibet, but the sentiments expressed in the above passage are fundamental to Mishra’s narrative. Part travelogue, part political commentary, part cultural dispatch, Temptations of the West attempts to tell the story, through a series of interrelated anecdotes, historical renderings and character sketches, of the weakening of the ordinary human relations in a given time and place, and the dwindling of a civilization.

That story is relevant to Western readers for many reasons, some obvious, some less so. On the surface, Mishra’s collection provides back-story and context for the ideologies of terror that have grown up in opposition to the West. In Pakistan, India and Kashmir, we learn how globalization has separated society into a striving Westernized middle-class (for which Mishra reserves a perhaps disproportionate contempt—in many ways, they come in for worse treatment than the terrorists), and a disenfranchised underclass, often educated but hopeless, destitute, and with no secure place in the modern world. These are the people, Mishra argues, “whose frustration and rage over their many deprivations could easily be appropriated into ideological crusades…the men who formed the faceless mobs, who were in charge of the dirty stuff, of the necessary lynchings and destruction.”

In tracing the life stories of would-be jihadis like the penniless Rahmat, around whom Mishra’s Afghanistan narrative revolves, Mishra makes the familiar point that the terrorist foot-soldier will likely rise out of circumstances suffused with deprivation and shame. But he also drives home another, less obvious point; in countries such as India and Pakistan, he suggests, the Taliban and groups like it promise perhaps the most credible escape for those unwilling to submit to the steady advance of the West. The at times confusing web of political narratives Mishra weaves into his reportage about Pakistan and India eventually coalesce into a lesson about the abject failure of local politicians and parties to offer an attractive alternative to Western-style capitalism and materialism. “Even the most extreme Hindu ideologues did not, in the end, wish, like the jihadis, to challenge or reject the knowledge and power of the West,” Mishra writes. “They were content to take the world as they found it, dominated by the West, and then find a niche for themselves in it; they were, above all, sly materialists.” Such capitulation produces the bitter irony that Gandhi’s ambition—“to form a society as different as possible from the one in the West” is “now amplified best by the radical Islamists of Pakistan” and Afghanistan.

But Mishra does more than help us know our adversaries. He begins with Wilson, whose greatest book, To the Finland Station, made heroes of Marx and Lenin for imagining an alternative to consumer Capitalism, in part to draw a subtle parallel between the East’s confrontation with modernity and our own. For one need flip through only a few pages of Das Kapital to be reminded it is not only Pakistanis who have experienced modernization as a “dwindling of human possibilities and the steady grinding of individual lives.” Perhaps, in America, too many generations have passed since our capitulation for us to be able to comprehend the reactionary rage of a Mohammed Omar, or, for that matter, the desperation of a Karl Marx. Here, we are no longer burdened by the values and customs, the ties to family and land, and God, which predated the final triumph of industrialization and once motivated millions to found utopian societies or devise intellectual systems in hopes of escaping that which for them was primarily a source of disorientation and pain. That this is not yet the case in India, Pakistan, and especially Tibet, where Mishra concludes his story, accounts for the bitter urgency at the heart of Mishra’s chronicle, and also its latent, if veiled, idealism. For when Mishra reflects on the upper-middle class Indians—the “rich young Hindus in Benetton T-shirts and Nike sneakers”—who throng the big cities and consume the cable channels and newspapers spewing news about “fashion designers, models, former and current Miss Worlds, theme parties, new clubs and champagne tasting sessions,” he is really exercising an idealism largely obsolete in the West. In the India he knows, it is still possible to recognize these things as fraudulent imposters; that is, there remain at least the tattered remnants of some competing ideology to oppose them.

At times, Mishra is so cynical about alternatives to a narrative in which consumer capitalism will sweep away all vestiges of an older, and, in Mishra’s view, more humane world, that the reader may come to feel South Asia’s only chance died with Gandhi. Staring at a white-bearded old man asleep on a silk-wrapped bundle in Pakistan, Mishra has the “fleeting but exhilarating [sense] of the greatness of the old global civilization of Islam, the glory and splendor of the once-famous and now-devastated cities—Herat, Balkh, Baghdad—of the whole life and world the religion had once created.” But Mishra’s apprehension of such a world is chased immediately by his sober consideration of its imminent extinction: “That world was now in turmoil; it had been broken into by the invincible modern civilization of the West. From the outside it seemed capable only of producing fanaticisms…and it was hard not to be repelled by it.”

It comes as a relief, then, when in his final chapter on Tibet, Mishra finds some excuse for hope. There, shrouded in isolation and mystery, he discovers “a civilization where religion and tradition were a living force and whose peoples radiated a serenity and gentleness long extinct in the frantically modern and aggressive societies of Europe and America.” Mishra describes how, in that place, charms and prayers and mantras had failed to halt a succession of imperialist invaders—the British in 1904, the Manchus from China in 1910, the Chinese Communists in 1950—and yet, the people of the country remained resistant to the destructive ideologies of the West. Even on the far side of stereotypes painting Tibetans as “apogees of loving-kindness and nonviolence,” Mishra tells of a civilization “whose achievement lay not in imposing monuments and museums but in the refined personal culture—the humanity and warmth—of its men and women.”

Of course, Mishra does not leave out that Tibet is besieged by tourists, and increasingly exploited by a rapidly industrializing China. The Temptations of the West are many, and multiplying. One emerges from Mishra’s collection with a new appreciation for just how difficult it will be for this fragile people to hold out.