#Pankaj Mishra

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

We find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. Never before have so many witnessed an industrial-scale slaughter in real time. Yet the prevailing callousness, timidity and censorship disallows, even mocks, our shock and grief. Many of us who have seen some of the images and videos coming out of Gaza – those visions from hell of corpses twisted together and buried in mass graves, the smaller corpses held by grieving parents, or laid on the ground in neat rows – have been quietly going mad over the last few months. Every day is poisoned by the awareness that while we go about our lives hundreds of ordinary people like ourselves are being murdered, or being forced to witness the murder of their children.

Pankaj Mishra, The Shoah after Gaza

[literary-illuminati]

Okay look I know you know who Attaturk was. You mentioned him like half a chapter ago.

[judgingbooksbycovers]

The World After Gaza: A History

By Pankaj Mishra.

Design by Darren Haggar.

[impromptu-manifesto]

The Shoah after Gaza (a long read by Pankaj Mishra, in the London Review of Books)

[bookcoversonly]

Title: Run And Hide | Author: Pankaj Mishra | Publisher: Penguin (2023)

[last-tambourine]

"This screaming gave us goose pimples. They were the screams of thousands of people being murdered. It travelled through the silent spaces of the city from among a red glow of fires, under indifferent stars, into the benevolent silence of gardens in which plants laboriously emitted oxygen, the air was fragrant, and a man felt that it was good to be alive. There was something particularly cruel in this peace of the night, whose beauty and human crime struck the heart simultaneously. We did not look each other in the eye."

-Czeslaw Milosz

From The World After Gaza, A History, by Pankaj Mishra

[newsmix443]

ED Seizes Rs 3 Crore Cash from Heera Bhagat, Aide of Hemant Soren’s MLA Representative

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Friday seized approximately Rs 3 crore in cash from the premises of Heera Bhagat, a close aide of Pankaj Mishra, who is the MLA representative of Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren.

According to sources, the bulk of the cash, approximately Rs 2 crore, is believed to be linked to the ongoing mining scam investigation. The counting of the seized amount is still underway.

Pankaj Mishra, who is alleged to be involved in the illegal stone mining business, has close connections with the Chief Minister's office. This seizure follows a series of coordinated raids conducted by the ED across 18 locations in Jharkhand earlier in the day, as part of a money laundering probe into Mishra and his associates.

The raids were carried out under the criminal sections of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) and targeted locations tied to a tender scam in areas such as Sahibganj, Berhait, and Rajmahal.

The ED’s investigation focuses on allegations related to illegal mining operations and financial irregularities involving Mishra and his network. This is a developing story, and further details are awaited as the investigation continues.

[radiogornjigrad]

Pankaj Mishra: Svijet poslije Gaze (Odlomak)

Odlomak iz nove knjige „The World After Gaza / Svet posle Gaze“, Fern Press, februar 2025. Pokajanje i radikalno samopročišćenje Nemačke, odgovorne za smrt miliona Jevreja u Drugom svetskom ratu, sprovedeno je pod neumoljivim nadzorom savezničkih sila. Ali strmoglavi uspon od nulte tačke podrške Jevrejima 1945. do današnje nemačke bezuslovne podrške Izraelu – prevazišao je sva očekivanja. Nemačka…

[townpostin]

Press Club of Jamshedpur Demands Justice for Assaulted Journalist

Delegation calls for immediate action against attackers of Basudev Karan in Baharagora. A delegation led by President Putul Singh of the Press Club of Jamshedpur visited Baharagora today to address the recent assault on journalist Basudev Karan. JAMSHEDPUR – The Press Club of Jamshedpur, led by President Putul Singh, paid a visit to Baharagora today to have a discussion about the unfortunate…

[asg-stuff]

In 1980, the Israeli columnist Boaz Evron carefully described the stages of this moral corrosion: the tactic of conflating Palestinians with Nazis and shouting that another Shoah is imminent was, he feared, liberating ordinary Israelis from ‘any moral restrictions, since one who is in danger of annihilation sees himself exempted from any moral considerations which might restrict his efforts to save himself’. Jews, Evron wrote, could end up treating ‘non-Jews as subhuman’ and replicating ‘racist Nazi attitudes’. (via The Shoah after Gaza | London Review of Books)

See also Adam Shatz · Vengeful Pathologies (lrb.co.uk)

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

In 1982, shortly before Reagan bluntly ordered Begin to cease his ‘holocaust’ in Lebanon, a young US senator who revered Elie Wiesel as his great teacher met the Israeli prime minister. In Begin’s own stunned account of the meeting, the senator commended the Israeli war effort and boasted that he would have gone further, even if it meant killing women and children. Begin himself was taken aback by the words of the future US president, Joe Biden. ‘No, sir,’ he insisted. ‘According to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war ... This is a yardstick of human civilisation, not to hurt civilians.’

Pankaj Mishra, The Shoah after Gaza

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #27 – From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia by Pankaj Mishra

Yet another work of nonfiction I picked up because an intriguing-sounding quote from it went viral on tumblr. This was the fifth history book I’ve read this year, but the first that tries very consciously to be an intellectual history. Both an interesting and a frustrating read – my overall opinion went back and forth a few times both as I read and as I put together this review.

The book is ostensibly a history of Asia’s intellectual response to European empire’s sudden military and economic superiority and political imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, though it’s focus and sympathy is overwhelmingly with what it calls ‘middle ground’ responses (i.e. neither reactionary traditionalism nor unthinking westernization). It structures this as basically a series of biographies of notable intellectual figures from the Islamic World, China and India from throughout the mid-late 19th and early 20th centuries - Liang Qichao and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani get star bidding and by far the most focus, with Rabindranath Tagore a distant third and a whole scattering of more famous personages further below him.

The central thesis of the book is essentially that the initial response of most rich, ancient Asian societies to sudden European dominance (rung in by the Napoleonic occupation of Egypt and the British colonization of India) was denial, followed (once European guns and manufactured goods made this untenable) by a deep sense of inferiority and humiliation. This sense of inferiority often resulted in attempts by ruling elites and intellectuals to abandon their own traditions and westernize wholesale (the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms, the New Culture Movement in China, etc), but at the same time different intellectual currents responded to the crisis by synthesizing their own visions of modernity, and tried to construct a new world with a centre other than the West.

I will be honest, my first and most fundamental issue with this book is that I just wish it was something it wasn’t. Which is to say, it is a resolutely intellectual and idealist history, convinced of the power of ideas and rhetoric as the engine for changing the world. Which means that the biography of one itinerant revolutionary is exhaustively followed so as to trace the evolution of his world-historically important thoughts, but the reason the Tanzimat Reforms failed is just brushed aside as having something to do with europhile bureaucrats building opera houses in Istanbul. Not at all hyperbole to say I’d really rather it was actually the exact opposite – the latter is just a much more interesting subject!

Not that the biographies aren’t interesting! They very much are, and do an excellent job of getting across just how interconnected the non-Western (well, largely Islamic and to a lesser extent Sino-Pacific) world was in the early/mid-19th century, and even moreso how late 19th/early 20th century globalization was not at all solely a western affair. They’re also just fascinating in their own right, the personalities are larger than life and the archetype of the globe-trotting polyglot intelligentsia is one I’ve always found very compelling. While I complain about the lack of detail, the book does at least acknowledge the social and economic disruptions that even purely economic colonialism created, and the impoverishment that created the social base the book’s subjects would eventually try to arouse and organize. And, even if I wish they were all dug into in far more detail, the book’s narrative is absolutely full of fascinating anecdotes and episodes I want to read about in more detail now.

Which is a problem with the book that it’s probably fairer to hold against it – it’s ostensible subject matter could fill libraries, and so to fit what it wants to into a readable 400-page volume, it condenses, focuses, filters and simplifies to the point of myopia. Which, granted, is the stereotypical historian’s complaint about absolutely anything that generalizes beyond the level of an individual village or commune, but still.

This isn’t at all helped but the overriding sense that this was a book that started with the conclusion and then went back looking for evidence to support its thesis and create a narrative. Which is a shame, because the section on the post-war and post-decolonization world is by far the sloppiest and least convincing, in large part because you can feel the friction of the author trying to make their thesis fit around the obvious objections to it.

Which is to say, the book draws a line on the evolution of Asian thought through trying to westernize/industrialize/nationalize and compete with the west on it’s own terms (in the book’s view) a more authentic and healthy view that rejects the western ideals of materialism and nationalism into something more spiritual, humane, and cosmopolitan, with Gandhi kind of the exemplar of this kind of view. It tries to portray this anti-materialistic worldview as the ideology of the future, the natural belief system of Asia which Europe and America can hope to learn from. It then, ah, lets say struggles to to find practical evidence of this in modern politics or economics, lets say (the Islamic Republic of Iran and Edrogan’s Turkey being the closest). It is also very insistent that ‘westernization’ is a false god that can never work, which is an entirely reasonable viewpoint to defend but if you are then you really gotta remember that Japan/South Korea/Taiwan like, exist while going through all the more obvious failures. One is rather left feeling that Mishra is trying to speak an intellectual hegemony into existence, here. (The constant equivocation and discomfort when bringing up socialism – the materialistic western export par excellence, but also perhaps somewhat important in 20th century Asian intellectual life – also just got aggravating).

It’s somewhere between interesting and bleakly amusing that modernity and liberal democracy have apparently been discredited and ideologically exhausted for more than one hundred years now! Truly we are ruled by the ideals of the dead.

I could honestly complain about the last chapter at length – the characterization of Islam as somehow more deeply woven in and inextricable from Muslim societies than any other religion and the resultant implicit characterization of secular government as necessarily western intellectual colonialism is a big one – but it really is only a small portion of the book, so I’ll restrain myself. Though the casual mention of the failures of secular and socialist post-colonial nation-building projects always just reminds me of reading The Jakarta Method and makes me sad.

So yeah! I felt significantly more positively about the book before I sat down and actually organized my thoughts about it. Not really sure how to take that.

[dipnotski]

Kolektif – 19. Yüzyılın Sonundan 1945’e Modern Asya Entelektüel Tarihi (2023)

Bu kitap Türkiye’deki tarih okurlarının pek aşina olmadığı birçok isme ve olaya yakından bakarak modern Asya entelektüel tarihinin temel meselelerini ele alıyor. Hem Batı-merkezci hem de onunla aynı ölçüde sorunlu Asya-merkezci bakış açılarının ötesine geçebilmek adına dikkatle seçilen makalelerle Asya’nın kolonyal geçmişine ve postkolonyal bugününe ilişkin yeni pencereler açıyor. Kitapta Michael…

[anotherfanaccount]

Finally watched Masaan. And god it breaks you down to your soul. And then says life goes on because you're still here. Your life is still yours even if it's hard right now.

For a movie to deal with grief it's a oddly comforting one. The songs the ghats the rawness are one of the reason. And of course thank gods for heartfelt actors.

[bookcoversonly]

Title: From the Ruins of Empire | Author: Pankaj Mishra | Publisher: Doubleday Canada (2012)

[nomorenightingaless]

my gender is pankaj kapoor from maqbool when he goes to the dargah