Volume 53, Number 14 · September 21, 2006
Revelations for the West
By Hilary Mantel
Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond
by Pankaj Mishra
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 323 pp., $25.00
We want to know who's taking us on this ambitious voyage through India and Pakistan, through Kashmir, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Tibet, and in his opening chapter, 'Learning to Read,' Pankaj Mishra offers us a self-portrait. We are back in the 1980s; a young scholar sits in a library in Benares, poring over Edmund Wilson, flicking through back issues of this journal, reading Heinrich Mann and then discovering he had a more famous brother. He knows that what a writer reads is as interesting as his own output, and inseparable from it; while he lurks in the shady library, student mobs run riot in the sun, and the police move in with their batons. But do not pity the students; they have guns.
Review, 3431 words
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