What made Pankaj Mishra turn to fiction after a gap of two decades?

Out with a novel after two decades, Mishra tells Ritwik Sharma that fiction may be able to tell the important truths far more than fact-based narratives

Nobody can perhaps appreciate work-from-home better than a solitary writer. As we log in on Zoom, Pankaj Mishra enquires where I stay and where my office is. Then he says I must be happy to be working from home. I smile.

I am meeting the essayist and novelist over tea/coffee: tea for me late afternoon in New Delhi; morning cup of coffee for him in London. His second novel, Run and Hide (Juggernaut), which hit the shelves recently, whetted my appetite to pick the author’s brains about how we’ve arrived in the India of today. Run and Hide portrays the transformation of India in the past couple of decades, told through the lives of three men who graduate from IIT, and the moral costs of the pursuit of or collusion in a new India consumed by a quest for power and wealth.

I begin by asking the obvious: what made him turn to fiction after a gap of two decades?

He confesses that most writers write about essentially the same things all their lives over and over again. Mishra is wearing a mustard green round neck sweater and thick-rimmed specs, with lightly tousled salt-and-pepper hair, and leaning back on a couch under the glow of a lamp behind him next to a stacked-up bookshelf. He gets up briefly as he is interrupted by a voice message, silences it, and returns to elaborate.

He has been consistently writing non-fiction — several books and many more literary and political essays and opinion pieces on India, Asia, beyond and globalisation — for 20 years. But he realised he’d not been able to address large aspects of human experiences through non-fiction.

“I’d not been able to write about the inner lives of people who are undergoing this transformation, who are moving from living in very poor villages to living in big cities,” he says, adding that only fiction offered that scope.

Paradoxically, he says, fiction may be able to tell the more important truths far more than fact-based narratives.

The resulting new novel is also a nostalgic ode to an older India that has been left behind by the transformative decades post-liberalisation. I ask him about the moral fallout of it and his reflective narrator’s veering towards Buddhism at the end of the story.

Mishra, who was born in Jhansi in 1969, feels his generation, which includes the three characters in his novel, has known the India that existed before the arrival of the ideology of the new India. “That was an India that was much slower, that offered you opportunities for contemplation, lots of opportunities for idleness and boredom, and I think that makes for a different way of engaging with the world.”

Although everyone wanted to improve their material conditions, and people typically wanted their children to become engineers and doctors and fetch stable government jobs, he can’t recall anyone in his neighbourhood, school or college speaking of India becoming a global superpower or all of us becoming fabulously wealthy. “The old India, with all its faults, did still offer you a different way of being in the world. One that did not involve ambition, one that involved a more spiritual or intellectual existence.”

Invoking Buddhism in the book is Mishra’s way of identifying a mode of existence that is attractive to middle-income or affluent people who are bewildered by the pace of change in their lives and tend to seek out answers from gurus.

According to him, a vaguely spiritual and contemplative mode of existence has been systematically denied to two generations that have been brought up on ideas of competition and success.

It also means the denial of a proper childhood. “What is childhood if not an opportunity for play, if not an opportunity for free play of the imagination, if not an opportunity of idleness? For centuries, that is what childhood has been. In our pursuit of a better life and ambition, we’ve sacrificed childhoods to an unprecedented degree,” he rues.

At this point, I thank him for the note of complicity in the narrator, who he wanted to not speak from a place of innocence or moral superiority but confession.

Mishra, whose father was a railway employee, had a peripatetic childhood that would inject a lifelong love for travel — especially train rides— and later inform a part of his writing. He has lately realised and is still trying to fathom the extent to which his early years in small towns impacted him. “Perhaps in one way it made me partial to a life of freedom, a life in which I was not going to be bound to a desk in any office,” he says.

True to form, after completing his MA in English literature at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, Mishra decided to live in the village of Mashobra in Himachal Pradesh. His parents were perplexed by his choice, he laughs, but incredibly understanding in retrospect as back in the ’90s his peers were tapping into newfound opportunities of a fat cheque early in their careers.

“And having lived that life of freedom and having managed to continue it over several years, I still yearn for it,” he reveals, a choice he is denied by his professionalised life as a writer who is accountable to many.

Mashobra made him the writer he is. It gave him an extraordinary and affordable location at a critical age, and — as he realised only much later — a subject, which is the life of the village or an immersion in a community that every writer needs. He, therefore, feels that writing on rural life is a big gap that needs to be filled.

Until the pandemic began, he used to visit India at least four-five times a year, but in the last two years he has managed to travel only twice. He still rents a place in Mashobra, and post-Covid he’s also grappling with a period of forced separation from close people there who have witnessed deaths.

Does his distance from India give him a safe haven to write from, considering that he has commented on the rise of Hindutva as a threat to writers, and does his writing thereby cater to a more global readership?

“I certainly feel a much greater degree of freedom in whatever I’m writing, and I don’t feel intimidated by this regime. Maybe it has to do with my physical location, at least partly. But I’ve never felt afraid of any government, and I was also critical of previous governments,” he says.

He adds that literature has always been a cosmopolitan enterprise, and argues that we pay far too much attention to writing in English when we should pay far more attention to writing in Indian languages.

When I ask him about V S Naipaul, who is a character in Run and Hide, he says the Nobel laureate was bullish and gung-ho about India. “He mistakenly thinks that Hindutva has unleashed a kind of redemptive, historical consciousness among Indians at large, and Indians need that desperately,” he says, and adds that we have to separate the personality from the work, for which he has high regard.

For Mishra, taking an “adversarial position” and being at the receiving end of criticism for being “unhealthily obsessed with the negative side of things” has been exhausting. And yet, it has kept him creatively and intellectually alive.

And he points out that he was not the only naysayer in the context of an emerging India 15-20 years ago.

“I think the corruption, the megalomania, the extreme nationalism, the grandiose dreams of wealth and power, all of that was in evidence a while ago and it was also clear to many of us that those dreams will not be realised and the frustration would unleash terrible political consequences,” he says.

The point people such as him were making was that “if you are not going to educate people properly and if you are not going to invest in public health, how do you hope to have even a moderately successful economy?”

As it were, the pandemic made people view the calamity as an opportunity to reset in all kinds of ways — personal priorities, life goals, national priorities, Mishra says. His life as a writer hasn’t changed because he works from home and lives an isolated life.

“But I think,” he adds, “the very personal experience of watching loved ones pass away has confronted us with our own mortality and all kinds of questions that can be described as philosophical but really should be a part of our everyday questioning.”