Pankaj Mishra Quote

Many of them also became members, like Naipaul and Rushdie, of what the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah calls a ‘comprador intelligentsia’: ‘a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery’. Some others began to think, after close observation of European and American politics and history, that Voltaire and Kant, after all, might not hold the key to redemption, which may lie closer to home, in indigenous religious and cultural traditions.

Pankaj Mishra

Many of them also became members, like Naipaul and Rushdie, of what the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah calls a ‘comprador intelligentsia’: ‘a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery’. Some others began to think, after close observation of European and American politics and history, that Voltaire and Kant, after all, might not hold the key to redemption, which may lie closer to home, in indigenous religious and cultural traditions.

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About Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra (born 9 February 1969) is an Indian essayist, novelist, and socialist. His non-fiction works include Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond, along with From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, and A Great Clamour: Encounters with China and Its Neighbours, and he has published two novels. He is a Bloomberg opinion columnist, and prolific contributor to other periodicals such as The Guardian, The New York Times, The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. His writings have led to a number of controversies, including disputes with Salil Tripathi, Niall Ferguson and Jordan Peterson. He was awarded the Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction in 2014.