Pankaj Mishra Quotes About Tradition

Quotes about: Tradition

• When I first decided to be a writer, that meant dealing with preoccupations and concerns that took little account of Indian traditions. I saw India's past as part of an antiquity rendered irrelevant by modernity, which with its science, nation states, free enterprises, and consumer societies was supposed to have solved all problems.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Past, India, Littles

  "'The Buddha' & the End of Human Suffering / Pankaj Mishra in Kathmandu, Nepal". Interview with Felix Holmgren, www.livefromplanetearth.org. 2008.

• I think overtly political novels - those that never transcend or contest their author's conscious intentions and prejudices - are problematic. This is not just true of the innumerable unread books in the socialist realist tradition, but also of novels that carry the burden of conservative ideologies, like Guerrillas, Naipaul's worst book, where the author's disgust for a certain kind of black activist and white liberal is overpowering.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Book, Thinking, White

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Incidentally, I am intrigued by how many European and Latin American writers expressed their political views in the columns they routinely wrote or write in the popular press, like Saramago, Vargas Llosa, and Eco. This strikes me as one way of avoiding opinionated fiction, and allowing your imagination a broader latitude. Similarly, fiction writers from places like India and Pakistan are commonly expected to provide primers to their country's histories and present-day conflicts. But we haven't had that tradition in Anglo-America.

  Pankaj Mishra

  Country, Latin, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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