Temptations of the West: How to be modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond
By Pankaj Mishra
Picador
***1/2

Reviewed by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

Indians grow up with the idea of leaving India, a famous Indian writer once remarked. The sought-after destinations are the US, Canada and UK. 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 notable US and UK 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 centered on a back-of-the-beyond region and 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: a simultaneous pre-occupation with, and rejection of, what it denotes. His analyses of India and Pakistan, forming eighty percent of the book, are cogent, the rest being consigned to the ‘Beyond’ of the title.

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. He follows Mr. Joshi, a minister who had attempted to revise Indian history as a continuous battle against idol-breaking Muslims, on his election campaign. How many bombs should we build? Mr. Joshi quizzed the audience before informing he had told Pakistan, “If you provoke us one more time, we’ll smash you to pieces.” With wry wit Mishra recounts a lab experiment – distillation of the holy liquid, cow urine, to make dental powder. It is a quest by RSS, a party of Hindu nationalists, for an alternative route to western modernity by substantiating Hindu superiority.

Ironically, this idea of a Hindu nation had historically emerged as a response to British rule. Indian nationalists, upper-caste Brahmins mostly, fighting the scourge of colonialism, melded amorphous Hinduism into a defined religion that would aid in the creation of an independent nation. Decades later, they were still attempting to unite Hindu society by invoking real and imagined threats such as militant Muslims, Al-Qaeda, evangelical Christians and American imperialism.

In Bollywood Mishra meets a director who claims, “Hindu fundamentalism will destroy the nation” and has, in a televised debate, insisted on his right to watch pornography. His protégé is a young actress, Mallika, who has created history with her first film, Murder, by kissing the male lead seventeen times. What she really wanted was to work abroad, with auteurs like Pedro Almodovar and Roberto Rodriguez who made ‘real’ films. When Murder turned out to be the most successful film of the year, she said, “I have worked like a Viagra when the market was so down.”

Meanwhile, Pakistan, a nation created on the basis of a shared faith failed early on in its attempt to reconfigure the diverse regional and linguistic communities into a new nation. Army officers wrecked Pakistan’s nascent democratic structures and the US leveraged the Islamic zeal of its rulers to rouse the Muslims of the world against the Godless communists. Afghanistan provided the pretext. “Now, we can give the Soviet Union its Vietnam War,” said President Carter’s security adviser. Twenty-two years later, life came back a full circle: the US was sponsoring ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ to flush out its nemesis, Al Qaeda, whom they had previously bankrolled.

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