Pankaj Mishra

“Gandhi's ideas were rooted in a wide experience of a freshly globalized world.”

“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.”

“Like the Britain of Beaverbrook and Kipling, Japan in the early twentieth century was a jingoistic nation, subduing weaker countries with the help of populist politicians and sensationalist journalism.”

“As the 19th century progressed, Europe's innovations, norms and categories came to achieve a truly universal hegemony.”

“It's strange to recall that America animated none of my youthful daydreams. I did not see a Hollywood film until my late teens.”

“I think subsuming political and economic conflicts into some grand 'clash of civilisations' theory or 'the West versus the rest' binary is a particularly insidious form of ideological deception.”

“As in the early 20th century, the elemental forces of globalisation have unravelled broad solidarities and loyalties.”

“Obama was expected to restore an ethical sheen to post-9/11 foreign policy, but he has intensified drone warfare in Yemen and Pakistan, pursued whistle-blowers, and failed to close down Guantanamo.”

“The Arab Spring showed that people are not going to wait for an American president to make good on his big talk about democracy and human rights; they are going to fight for those rights themselves and overthrow pro-American dictators who stand in their way.”

“I grew up in small towns in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra - places like Akola, Betul, Wardha, Jhansi; I thought the rise of provincial India would be an interesting subject to tackle.”

“For boys like me, in north Indian railway towns in the '70s and '80s, where nothing much happened apart from the arrival and departure of trains from big cities, the Soviet Union alone appeared to promise an escape from our limited, dusty world.”

“Devout Anatolian masses rising from poverty have transformed Turkey politically and economically.”

“In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in English.”

“Enlightenment values of individual freedom are manifested best in individual acts of criticism and defiance.”

“Minorities within nation-states frayed by global capitalism are naturally more resentful of hollowed-out but still heavily centralised systems of political and economic domination.”

“Living in a cultural milieu where the foreign writers most widely available and admired were Russian, I came very late to postwar American writers, and I had great trouble with the canonically exalted white male writers I tried first.”

“In 1853, American warships bullied Japan out of centuries of virtual isolation and into the modern world. The threat of force compelled Japan, like India and China before it, to accept trade agreements that were economically ruinous and eroded national sovereignty.”

“Governments everywhere that are unable to guarantee equitable growth and social welfare have suffered a fatal decay of legitimacy.”

“I think there is no reason for us to bring to Islamism or political Islam the fear and ignorance of Western commentators and their hysterical vocabulary.”

“I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.”