A GREAT CLAMOUR
Pankaj Mishra
Hamish Hamilton
324 pages; Rs 499
Ever since the internet came along, the question has sometimes bothered me: has it become easier to write a travelogue now?
In the old days you had to travel a lot and for a long time to get enough material to fill 250 pages. I mean, think of al-Beruni, Hiuen Tsang, Marco Polo and all those guys - or, more recently, Somerset Maugham and, even more recently, Paul Theroux and Alexander Frater or even Pico Iyer who used to write such nice books once upon a time.
But now you can whizz down to countries on planes, and through them on superfast trains and cars that go at 150 km per hour. As Anthony Sampson wrote 30 years ago in that wonderful book of his on airlines, Empires of the Sky, it all looks the b****y same.
The travel done in a jiffy, you have the internet to help you fill the pages with some potted politics, economics, history, sociology, culture, defence policy and the rest of that flim-flam. You meet some people and take down what they are saying and bung it all into the book and presto! you have got yourself a travel book.
This book by Pankaj Mishra is a perfect example of the modern travelogue. I am sure he is a gifted thinker and he did all the reading beforehand. But I searched in vain to see how many weeks or months he actually travelled in China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea. Two weeks? Two months? Two years? None of the above?
People - and a pox be on them - don't want gyan in a travelogue. They want a quirky eye that is not recording some profound thoughts but merely some interesting details of life as others live it. They want to get a sense of the thrill of new places, the pungency in their smells, the flavours in the food and the zing in their booze. They want to know how their women dress and whether, when their men are making fools of themselves, they have their own unique style or is it all much of a muchness.
This is the central problem with this book: A travel book that has turned into a treatise on East Asia and its problems. Perhaps it takes off from his previous ambitious, but ultimately unconvincing, book on the Asian response to the Western intellectual onslaught of the 19th century. But, as my sons sometimes say to me "Yo, Man! Lighten up."
Thanks but no thanks
Lest what I have written above conveys the wholly false impression that the book is unreadable, perish the thought. It is a very good read indeed - good reads can be bad books and vice versa, in case you have not noticed. Mr Mishra is a very good writer and he does manage to sometimes recall the real purpose of the book and sneak in some nice travel-related nuggets and insights.
He has an easy style that, as one starts turning the pages with increasing alarm, one wishes he would use to tell stories as other travel writers do rather than offer opinions which don't really matter - you know, in these days of blogs when every opinion is as good the every other one.
But if you are looking to know if the taste of Mao Tai in China has improved, or if the shark fin soup called 'Buddha Jumps over the Wall' can still entice Buddhist monks to eat a non-vegetarian soup thinking it is vegetarian, or why kimchi and soju have become so bland, or why the Japanese in spite of their demographics (or is it because of it?) are so addicted to porn, you will be disappointed.
Mr Mishra is more concerned with things like the idea of "alternative modernity" in China, the New Left there and Japan's future. Though Mr Mishra has been keeping on about Asian ways of thought, it seems to escape him that he is using Western categories to figure out the inscrutable East.
Besides, anyone can write about the problems - as they appear to be, at least, to minds trained in Western ways of looking at things. The newspapers and blogs are full of them. But do the natives see them as problems?
Let me say this, then: This is the perfect book to carry on a flight because it will give you some idea of contemporary China, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and so on. You can finish it in a couple of hours, which is great - and, even better, you won't miss it if you leave it behind in the seat pocket in front of you.
