As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people - writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics - who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories. - Pankaj Mishra 1 Share Now -
The Korean War, which China entered on the side of North Korea, fixed Mao's image in the United States as another unappeasable Communist. - Pankaj Mishra 2 Share Now -
Enlightenment values of individual freedom are manifested best in individual acts of criticism and defiance. - Pankaj Mishra 3 Share Now -
If your writing collides with the conventional wisdom, there's going to be some kind of friction. - Pankaj Mishra 4 Share Now -
Democracy, loudly upheld as a cure for much of the ailing world, has proved no guarantor of political wisdom, even if it remains the least bad form of government. - Pankaj Mishra 5 Share Now -
National independence, and the preceding political struggles, helped create the space for literary creation in many post-colonial countries. Much of modern Indian or Chinese literature is inconceivable without the political movement for freedom from foreign rule. - Pankaj Mishra 6 Share Now -
In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in English. - Pankaj Mishra 7 Share Now -
The British Empire passed quickly and with less humiliation than its French and Dutch counterparts, but decades later, the vicious politics of partition still seems to define India and Pakistan. - Pankaj Mishra 8 Share Now -
In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Japan had put forward a proposal to guarantee racial equality at the League of Nations, but Woodrow Wilson overturned it in the face of majority support. - Pankaj Mishra 9 Share Now -
