In September 2021, I interviewed Pankaj Mishra for Humber@TIFA, an interdisciplinary conference organized between the Toronto International Festival of Authors and Humber Polytechnic, where I work.
The conference theme was on anti-intellectualism and conspiracy theories, so I suggested Mishra’s name for the keynote because I saw a connection with the direction his ideas had been moving in since the 2017 publication of Age of Anger: A History of the Present.
Three years later, I can be more honest: Age of Anger was my favourite - sorry, the best - work of popular nonfiction from the 2010s, and I was looking for any reason to bring him to Humber. Many thanks to colleagues and conference organizers Jennifer Marotta and David D. Miller for making that happen, as my one-on-one conversation with Mishra was one of the highlights of my career at Humber thus far
Mishra and I talked a lot about liberalism, less so as a political philosophy and more as a weapon used repeatedly throughout the history of Western imperialism, the kind many of us know well from the last five centuries of European history and the one we struggle to confront in our North American present. In this framework, liberalism is propagated as something that non-Western and non-white peoples are supposedly incapable of coming up with on their own and therefore in need of receiving through colonial rule, delivered always through strategies of military violence and capitalist exploitation of human labour and natural resources.
We also talked about the importance of Small Things as a means of resistance to Western modernity’s Big Things. Liberalism is one of those Big Things, what seventies and eighties postmodernism called “grand narratives,” but also Big because of the weight of colonial violence behind it. This part of the conversation was mostly conceptual without many specific examples of Small Things, but in my mind it related directly to the themes, images and language of violence as well as resistance in Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize-winning first novel, one which Mishra played an important role in bringing to publication. '
At one point, I brought up a conference theme-related question: “what does an Indian conspiracy theory look like?” I don’t think Mishra answered it directly, but the discussion nevertheless gave me the framework to find answers in so much of the news that continues to come out of India since we did this interview. The trope is simple: every time Hindutva activists talk about “love jihad”, “population jihad”, “land jihad” and anything else that similarly evokes “jihad” we’re in the realm of conspiracy theory - theory without evidence and sadly, theory to justify so much violence against Muslims in India. (Harsh Mander provided a solid glossary on these “jihad” conspiracy theories for his Scroll India piece, covering the demolition of a mosque in Uttarakhand earlier this year and around the same time the Ram Mandir temple complex was inaugurated on the site of the Babri Masjid’s 1992 demolition.)
I’ve been meaning to share the video of my 2021 interview with Mishra for some time now and the news of him receiving the $75,000 Weston International Award in Toronto last week feels like as good of a time as any. So many of the key points in our 2021 conversation are still relevant - actually more relevant - in these times of hate and fear-mongering, especially with an American election six weeks away and a fascist candidate on the bill (yes, “Haitian immigrants eat their pets” is a conspiracy theory and yes, banning Critical Race Theory is a form of anti-intellectualism) and also as war continues to escalate between the Israeli state, the Palestinians living under occupation, and now Lebanon.
I was in the audience for Mishra’s award ceremony, and aside from the fact that the fanboy in me finally got to meet him in person, the journalist in me feels there are a few things that all of us should take away from this event, especially for those of us who couldn’t be there.
At the end of his presentation, Mishra dedicated his prize to the 200+ Palestinian writers and journalists that have died since Oct. 7, yet whose collective tragedy has been barely acknowledged by the literati of the West - dissenting PEN writers being among the exception. He threw in another mic drop by announcing that he will be donating his prize money.
It appears that The Globe and Mail, Canada’s most proudly literary-minded newspaper (they still have a Books section), intended to publish an excerpt from Mishra’s paper, just as they did with with last year’s Weston International Award winner. According to The Breach, the Globe deleted all references to Israel and the genocide in Palestine from Mishra’s.
I am writing this post just over a week after the award ceremony, which was a glitzy affair (the emcees from the Writers’ Trust of Canada wore tuxedos) with a packed audience on a Monday night - and let’s not forget about the five-digit figure prize money for non-fiction, the black sheep of literary arts. Yet, I have yet to see any mainstream coverage of one of this country’s major literary events. (Feel free to point me to any coverage I’ve missed.)
Nahlah Ayed of CBC’s Ideas did the onstage interview with Mishra that night and I am assuming that parts of it will eventually be aired, but it remains to be seen whether they’ll be censored in the same way.
In the meantime, I come back to 2021 and my 90 minutes with Mishra. It was a pleasure to ask him questions, and I think I did good job of simplifying his brilliant, though often rhetorically complex and verbally ornate, ideas for the online audience.
When it was all over, our team of conference organizers and online technicians had a brief debrief about the session. There was a lot of joy in that virtual space, but brother Pankaj raised the roof when he commented, “well, it’s all because Prasad is such a genius…” Like I said, a highlight of my career, but that’s not why I’m sharing this with you.
You can click here for the video of our interview for the real reasons why.
(All photos in this post are taken by yours truly, Prasad Bidaye.)