Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond

Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond

by Pankaj Mishra

Picador, HK$195

Indians grow up with the idea of leaving India. The sought-after destinations are the US, Canada and Britain. The temptations of the west are too many and Pankaj Mishra should know, having grown up in provincial India and being based in London, from where he writes for American and British publications.

Mishra has leveraged his intimacy and understanding of the hinterland well. His first book dealt with his travels in small-town India, his novel centred on a back-of-beyond region. Now, in his fourth book, Temptations of the West, he leads us on a journey into the Asian subcontinent, whose people are forever gravitating towards the west.

The book comprises nine essays (part memoir, part historical narrative, part travelogue), which deal with five countries - India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Tibet - bound beyond geography by a shared, to varying degrees, colonial past. Mishra threads this past with recent history, resurgent religion and changing economy to develop insights into the baffling relationship each country has with the west.

India is his starting point, a sputtering democracy whose politicians have jettisoned secularism, enshrined in the constitution, for vote banks created from a complex linguistic-cultural-religious-caste identity matrix.