Pankaj Mishra

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Pankaj Mishra was born in North India in 1969. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in commerce from Allahabad University before earning his Master of Arts degree in English literature at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

In 1992, he moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, where he began to contribute literary essays and reviews to The Indian Review of Books, The India Magazine, and the newspaper The Pioneer. His first book was Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India (1995), a travelogue that described the social and cultural changes in India in the new context of globalization. His novel The Romantics (2000), an ironic tale of people longing for fulfillment in cultures other than their own, was published in eleven European languages and won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum award for first fiction. His recent book An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World (2004) mixes memoir, history, and philosophy while attempting to explore the Buddha's relevance to contemporary times. Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond (2006), describes Mishra's travels through Kashmir, Bollywood, Afghanistan, Tibet, Nepal, and other parts of South and Central Asia.

In 2005, Mishra published an anthology of writing on India, entitled India in Mind (Vintage). His writings have been anthologized in The Picador Book of Journeys (2000), The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature (2004), and Away: The Indian Writer as Expatriate (Penguin), among other titles. He has introduced new editions of Rudyard Kipling's Kim (Modern Library), E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (Penguin Classics), and J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur (NYRB Classics). He has also introduced two volumes of V. S. Naipaul's essays: The Writer and the World and Literary Occasions.

Mishra writes literary and political essays for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and New Statesman, among other American, British, and Indian publications. His work has also appeared in The Boston Globe, Common Knowledge, the Financial Times, Granta, The Independent, the London Review of Books, n+1, The Nation, Outlook, Poetry, Time, the The Times Literary Supplement, Travel + Leisure, and The Washington Post. He divides his time between London and India, and is presently working on a novel.

[edit] Controversies

on 20 March 2000, a few hours before United States President Bill Clinton arrived on his first official visit to India, 38 Sikh villagers were massacred in the village of Chattisinghpura, in the Indian controlled section of Kashmir. The killers wore Indian army fatigues. Mishra visited the village hours after the massacre, and later produced a report that was carried by several Indian and international papers^{[citation needed]}. In the report, Mishra discussed Kashmiri suspicions that the Indian army or government-supported 'ex-militants' had killed the villagers in an attempt to win U.S. sympathy for the Indian stance on Kashmir. A later report carried by the British newspaper, The Guardian, in July 2002 focused on the possible abduction and brutal murder by the Indian army of innocent Kashmiri Muslim civilians shortly after the massacre in an attempt to claim that the killers at Chattisinghpura were Muslim and that they had been quickly dealt with.

It is now believed that the acts were perpetrated by the Islamic terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba, based on the confession of an as yet untried member of the terrorist group in Indian custody [1].

Mishra's polemics regarding Hinduism as a religion and the modern history of nationalist movements among Hindu people in India (he is himself a Hindu of Indian origin) such as the BJP have generated some disquiet among some Hindu circles within India. His book Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond was reviewed by The Economist (1 July – 7 July 2006 issue). The New Yorker indicated that some of his critics believe he is guilty of "pandering to white pro-Muslim audiences in the West"^[1].