Nirvana without enlightenment

I enjoyed reading Pankaj Mishra's Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, a delightful travel book with no pretensions. His second book, a novel called The Romantics did not leave much of an impact.

An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, his latest book, makes tall claims, going by the blurb on the dust jacket.

To quote, "His vivid prose weaves together memoir and politics, travel and biography, history and philosophy in a narrative that slices to the heart of our troubled times, offering, through the life and teachings of the Buddha, an exceptionally, insightful vision of the world today." The immediate reaction is that Mishra has taken too much at one go.

How did it start? In 1992, Pankaj Mishra visited Mashobra, a small place where, according to guide books, one can go on an excursion from Shimla.

On this first visit he was impressed by the "purest blue air" as well as the clear and spectacular view of craggy mountain peaks towering over the deep wooded valley. He thought it would be wonderful to live in a place like that and rented a cottage.

Living in the Himalayas in cold weather was not a very happy experience to start with. However, his impressions of those days are recorded in the book in evocative prose.

To quote, "I felt subdued by the pale-blue light that filled the valley, delicately shading the hollows of the distant mountains. I was oppressed by the silences, which were so fine that they could be broken by the apologetic cough of the hunchbacked peasant working somewhere invisibly in the orchard."

As one reads through the book, one realises that in passages like the one just quoted, when Mishra does not have history, philosophy, politics, or even the Buddha on his agenda, he is at his best.

When he ventures into areas that demand some knowledge of any of the above subjects, he reveals his ignorance and attempts to cover it up ineffectually with a supercilious attitude.

When he says, "I had little interest in Indian history or spirituality. Which, if I thought of them at all, seemed to me to belong to India's pointlessly long, sterile and largely unrecorded past."

He sounds like Naipaul in India: A Wounded Civilization. While the latter came to India for short visits and found it difficult to relate to the vast physicality of this country, one wonders why Mishra sounds like a colonial traveller when talking about his own country.

Is he trying to be trendy and on the same wave-length as the western reader, or is it sheer ignorance, or a blend of both?

Predictably, almost all the books he read on Buddha while in Mashobra were by western authors, something that made him declare, "Without the clarifying light of western scholars, the Buddha for me would have remained only one of India's many sages, with some dated, possibly dubious, wisdom to offer."

It is a pity that even in the twenty-first century, a person born and brought up in post-independence India can write with such a strong colonial bias.

As the book progresses, the reader gets a strong feeling that Mishra brings in western scholars/philosophers and the like vis-à-vis Buddha as a sort of intellectual name-dropping exercise. In some cases the link is tenuous as in the case of Nietzsche's views on Buddhism.

What does Mishra really want to tell his reader when he mentions that Wagner wanted to write an opera about the Buddha or that Rainer Maria Rilke carried a small bust of the Buddha? That he has read Rilke, Nietzsche and the others he talks about?

Mishra's perceptions of certain historically important people show his own limitations. Consider his remarks on Ashoka: "Ashoka also saw dharma as the way to a world empire."

As one goes through the 500-odd pages of the book, hoping to find at least a few interesting passages that would measure up to Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, one is disappointed.

Those who have read Mishra's reviews and travel/critical essays in Granta, New York Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement will also feel disappointed with An End to Suffering, because the fusion of his own experiences with that of a wider philosophy and history is not particularly convincing.

With such a vast and varied agenda, the book lacks cohesion and conviction, leaving the reader disgruntled.

An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World

Pankaj Mishra
Picador
Pages: 422;
Price: 495