Rapid reader of past and present

Pankaj Mishra moves swiftly across diverse political & cultural landscapes to capture world history

AGE OF ANGER   

A HISTORY OF THE PRESENT

Author: Pankaj Mishra  

Publisher: Juggernaut

Pages: 432

Price: Rs 699

Time was when Pankaj Mishra ate butter chicken in Ludhiana. He has moved from the local to the global. His more recent books attempt to capture swathes of world history. These attempts, though laudable, are inevitably problematic. How does one anchor the global — trends in world history — with the local — the events and occurrences that are so integral a part of the historian’s craft? The lure to label many decades of history under the rubric of “Age of such and such’’ was initiated by Eric Hobsbawm in his celebrated quartet —revolution, capital, empire and extremes. But even Hobsbawm could not quite pull it off, in spite of the popularity of the four volumes: reviewers pointed out errors and omissions at the level of the local and the details. This has not deterred Pankaj Mishra from trying to comprehend the troubled present in a sweep a la Hobsbawm.

Age of Anger

Mishra began to think about this book after Narendra Modi was elected to power in India in 2014. The book went to the printers in the week Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. From thought to print the book took about two and a half years — that is some achievement for an author who is seeking to say something profound and thought-provoking about what is going on in the world today. The book bears the marks of this speed. It is quick to judge and moves too swiftly across diverse political and cultural landscapes.

In a celebrated attack on Christopher Hill, the Marxist historian of 17th century England, in the middle 1970s on the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, the American historian J H Hexter divided historians between “lumpers’’ and “splitters’’. It is not an altogether unfair description of the different methods that historians choose to adopt. Mishra in this book is the lumper tout court. Mishra’s bringing together of various trends and movements is admirable, albeit mind boggling. He does not give pause to the readers to think, and occasionally makes one wonder if he himself has thought things through.

At the heart of the book is the thesis that the world that the West had fashioned within its own geography and, Asia, Africa and Latin America through imperialist domination, is falling apart and giving way to “an apparent global disorder’’. The causes of the disorder emerge from a long and tortuous process of resentment: the West took the rest of the world for granted far too long and lived off the rest of the world. Out of this has been born what Mishra calls a “global civil war’’ that haunts the world today.

Mishra’s argument is that present troubles are rooted in past histories. The present era is one in which “the modern promise of equality collides with massive disparities of power, education, status and property ownership’’. The age of anger is rooted in these disparities and the latter are located in a period of history when the West dominated and sought to fashion the world and claimed to speak for it. All that Europe stood for — liberalism, a certain kind of sensibility, a secular outlook, reason and the scientific temper — has now been turned upon its head and has come to haunt Europe. Unnatural vices have been spawned by Europe’s heroic age.

The argument is not new nor is the intellectual project of trying to understand the present in the context of what happened in the past. Mishra writes with verve and with an admirable intellectual engagement. His analysis is partly based on a new kind of reading of some well-known texts. Some of those readings are not always very convincing and are marred by Mishra’s pronounced propensity to lump.

To take one example. There is a section in the book on Rousseau who Mishra sees as a thinker who went beyond “the conventional political categories of left and right to outline the basic psychological outlook of those who perceive themselves as abandoned or pushed behind’’, a spokesman of the “injured and the insulted against powerful elites”. From this he makes a gigantic claim that Rousseau’s critique helps us understand “why a cleric like Ayatollah Khomeini rose out of obscurity to lead a popular revolution in Iran”. Does it? Rousseau’s texts, powerful as they are, do not even help in understanding the French Revolution, notwithstanding Mishra’s assertion that Robespierre was Rousseau’s “first great disciple”. It is too simplistic, if not ahistorical, to draw such straightforward links between the ideas of a thinker and historical events, especially across two centuries. There is enough work on the French Revolution that shows how difficult it is to draw direct links between the ideology of the philosophes and the events of 1789.

I do want to emphasise that I find very little to disagree with in the broad thrust of this book. I have problems with Mishra’s method and his haste. The book has a tantalising subtitle: “A History of the Present’’. Can there ever be a history of the present? History looks at the past which has ties with the present but history by definition is about the past. The owl of Minerva, as Hegel noted, flies only after dusk. The sun is still shining on the present and that bright light is blinding. The twilight could provide greater (in)sight. Pankaj Mishra has attempted the impossible. He needs to follow the slow fluttering of the owl rather than the swooping flight of the swift.

The reviewer is vice chancellor and professor of history, Ashoka University