Nonfiction should bring 'dignity to the idea of truth': award-winning writer Pankaj Mishra

Ideas53:58The Role of Nonfiction in a World of Contested Truths: Writer Pankaj Mishra

It's perhaps the defining movement in global politics today: millions and millions of people losing patience with liberal democracy, and taking out their frustration on immigrants, democratic institutions and the political establishment itself.

Indian writer and journalist Pankaj Mishra has argued for years that the West has been wilfully blind to the contradictions and failures of liberal democracy as it's been practiced.

"I don't understand why so many people, so many people in senior positions, in journalism, in academia and in other intellectual communities, remain so stubbornly ignorant of the histories of the non-West," he said.

Mishra, who divides his time between London, England and the village of Mashobra in northern India, has written well-received novels over his career. But it was his body of non-fiction that won him the 2024 Weston International Award, presented by the Writers Trust of Canada.

In his public lecture, he argued that when public discourse is so murky and distorted with misinformation and disinformation, nonfiction assumes an essential purpose.

After Mishra delivered his talk at the Royal Ontario Museum, IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed joined him onstage. She started the conversation by asking about his decision to donate his $75,000 prize money to Palestinian writers. 

Here is an excerpt from their conversation.

PM: It's a recognition that writers like myself, who belong to a network that continuously rewards us for our efforts and keeps us in a state of bourgeois contentment, and we can continue to inhabit that state over a long period without necessarily… feeling exercised about what is happening in different parts of the world: the gross violations of human rights and the cruel injustices suffered by peoples around the world. It's very easy to belong to that world, and I have belonged to it enough for a long period.

In India, I'm intensely aware of people who don't have those privileges because it's a society where most people write on the side and most people really cannot make a living off writing, so they are dependent on fellowships, of which there are very few, that are dependent on all kinds of different modes of patronage, which they don't really receive.

I remember going [to Palestine] many years ago to a university in the West Bank and meeting these aspiring writers and being moved to tears by their determination to record their experience in a variety of fictional and nonfictional forms. And I remember breaking down after that encounter. It was an incredibly intense visit for all kinds of reasons.

But meeting young writers in particular, and to see how blocked their horizons were, really stayed with me and in a way always motivated me to engage with this subject, to at least in my writing, seek some kind of clarity about it. So in these circumstances, I received an advance for my next book, which is also something I'm going to give away because I don't need the money as much as these other people do. It's as simple as that.

So there is the matter of money, but there's also the matter of motivation and desire to write. I was very struck by what you said about the fact that you are less confident after Gaza about the recovery after this post-truth world. What are the lessons — as you say, lesser privileged journalists around the world, not just in Gaza, but elsewhere, to think if you have arrived at that point, what are they to think?  

I have a lot of trust and a lot of faith in a younger generation, both here in this part of the world and people that I see elsewhere, because I think they they have gone through an experience that has taught them a great deal already, that has educated them so rapidly and so deeply — unlike generations which lived through a relatively stable, relatively untroubled politically, economically period. They don't really have the means, they don't have the spiritual resources, they don't have the intellectual resources to understand even what is going on today.

Young people, when you think about people born in the 90s, what have they already undergone? You know: the 9/11 attacks, the failed war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, financial crisis, the arrival of Trump, Brexit. One disaster after another has educated them in a way that I don't think generations in the West have been educated since the Great Depression, since the Second World War.

There's a big gap really in perception and sensibility between this young generation and their elders. And that's where I feel very, very strongly hopeful. So when I talk despairingly about journalism, I really am talking about my generation. 

What do you think is the responsibility of nonfiction when we live in this world that we live in now, misinformation runs amok, truth is so contested. What should be the main role of nonfiction?  

I think, you know, at least restore some dignity to the idea of truth. While recognizing that one person's truth may not be someone else's truth. 

Well, that's the question: whose truth? 

Someone who we never really think about in this context, but who was thinking about our post-truth age was [Mahatma] Gandhi. He said, we are going to inhabit a time when all of us will have very different conceptions of what the truth is, because we will have different experiences, and perspectives will come from different historical backgrounds.

This is a man who spent time in South Africa. He's been in England. He's been in India. He's known multicultural societies, pluralist societies. So he knows what he's talking about. He's talking about something like truth being in trouble because the old homogenous societies have cracked and people have multiple different visions of the same reality. And so his way was 'okay, let's try and reconcile these different versions nonviolently through a process of dialogue,' which he called satyagraha, a process of moral persuasion.

While we acknowledge difference, while we acknowledge that your truth may not be the same as ours, but we at least acknowledge that plurality creates these particular visions — and the only thing is that you have to draw the line at deliberate distortion, which is what we are seeing today on so much digital media.

Have you ever found it hard as a writer not to be sucked into a "Western narrative?"

Fortunately, that narrative is now so fragmented that one can dispense with that anxiety. I've always felt that I was not part of that narrative, and I was certainly made to feel that way. There was always a little bit of a pointed tone in many of the responses I used to receive, which is that, 'Why is he so critical of us?'

Because the general assumption was that you would want to be part of this narrative and because there were so many benefits to be had from joining the right think tank, from joining the right kind of magazine and writing in a particular way. So fortunately the temptation was never strong enough for me to be part of that narrative. 

You ask in the lecture, could the continuing intellectual moral debacles of journalism be avoided by a less conformist climate of opinion and of openness to different viewpoints?  

I think the case for diversity is so evident. I would emphasize not demographic diversity, which is important in itself, but we need intellectual diversity. It's not enough to have people from different historical or ethnic, racial, religious backgrounds if you still have the same kind of groupthink, if you have the same broad, complacent consensus everywhere.

We need to really think about how can we create a kind of contested but stable consensus. I think the idea that we can go back to recreating communities of truth, communities believing in one thing — I think we have to move past that particular fantasy. 
 

To listen to the full conversation and Pankaj Mishra's lecture download the IDEAS podcast from your favourite app.

*Q&A was edited for length and clarity. This episode was produced by Chris Wodskou.