Pankaj Mishra ( पंकज मिश्रा ) born 1969 in Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh (North India), is an Indian essayist and novelist. He is particularly notable for his book Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, a sociological study of small-town India, and his writing for the New York Review of Books.
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.[1] He was the Visiting Fellow for 2007-2008 at the Department of English, University College London, UK.
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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, 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 the 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 Times Literary Supplement, Travel + Leisure, and The Washington Post. He divides his time between London and India, and is presently working on a novel.[2]
His book Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond was reviewed by The Economist (1–7 July 2006 issue).
In 2008 he was one of the first authors to take part in the Palestine Festival of Literature. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008.[3]
In a lecture Prof Jagdish Bhagwati had this to say in reference to Mishra's op-ed pieces in the New York Times: "Perhaps the most articulate critics are the ‘progressive’ novelists of India, chief among them Pankaj Mishra whom the op-ed page editors of the New York Times regularly and almost exclusively invite to write about the Indian economy, a privilege they do not seem to extend symmetrically to American novelists to give us their profound thoughts on the US economy!" He then said of Mishra's economic analysis "While economic analysis can often produce a yawning indifference, and Mishra’s narrative is by contrast eloquent and captivating, the latter is really fiction masquerading as non-fiction." [5]
Patrick French in response to Mishra's review [6] of French's book India: A Portrait(2010), suggested that his writing is aimed to please his readers in his new home, Britain: "Pankaj has obviously been on a long journey from his self-described origins—in what he calls a “new, very poor and relatively inchoate Asian society”—to his present position at the heart of the British establishment, married to a cousin of the prime minister David Cameron. But he seems oddly resentful of the idea of social mobility for other Indians."[7]
He is married to Mary Mount, a cousin of British Prime Minister David Cameron and he divides his time between Delhi, Shimla and London.[8] His father-in-law is Sir William Robert Ferdinand Mount, 3rd Baronet, and Eton-educated Conservative Party politician and former head of Margaret Thatcher's policy unit. He has one daughter.