China lite

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton

Pages: 325

Price: Rs 499

A Great Clamour opens with all the questions,doubts,ambiguities,and contradictions of the young,restless,not-so-rooted,educated Indian with regard to modernity,capitalism,civilisation,interconnectedness,alternatives and the rapid pace of economic transformation. “We don’t know enough…about political and social experiments in other Asian societies,” says author Pankaj Mishra. Nary a truer word! “We know even less about…the particular challenges and dilemmas of China… [xiv (the “Greece of Asia” [p xvi) The laudable objective of the book is “self education” — “to sense the inner life of a society” [p xx through not only physical journeys but also politics,history and literature [p xviii; to “eavesdrop” on the debates and quarrels not meant for foreign consumption and plunge into the parallels and symmetries between Asian societies.

So we do not expect a deeply researched work but a travelogue; about people and places; about journeys — the inner and outer — which interweave to create a world,which the reader can both appropriate and share. But we are straightaway plunged into a succession of essentially one-sided historical narratives,each chapter derived from summarising select scholarly,fiction and nonfiction books interspersed with a series of conversations. From Qian Zhongshu (Besieged Fortress),a novel on life in Shanghai in the 1940s,to Yang Jisheng (Tombstone) and Frank Dikötter (Mao’s Great Famine) on the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s; from Ma Jian,the London-based novelist,to interactions with Zhu Xueqin and Wang Hui — the liberal and the new left intellectuals respectively and the novelist Yu Hua — this is literally an encounter with some of the most intelligent,perceptive and witty intellectuals of China.

We move from chapter to chapter,not quite clear as to where exactly we are headed (not literally,of course),wondering when we are going to feel the quickening of the blood and the racing of the pulse which always happens with good travel writing. The first breath of originality — and some fresh air — comes after ploughing through 66 pages when Mishra describes his response to Shanghai. And an enormous sense of relief on reaching page 85 and discovering that Mishra has actually visited a tea-growing village in Zhejiang. The description of his train ride to Tibet is the other section where some degree of authenticity comes across — but there is little by way of the flavour of a quintessential free spirit on his travels — Mishra is in the business of description,so it has the flavour of tongue-in-cheek reportage.

For the somewhat more informed,the profusion of facile descriptions and shallow judgements seem out of sync with the lofty objectives of a seeker: the “pseudo-scientific vision of socio-economic engineering” of the post-liberation leaders [p 20; “Mao was intellectually insecure” [p 23; Chinese leaders — “men of uniformly somber countenance and dyed hair” [p 33; “the Chinese nation will continue in the decades ahead to acknowledge Mao as its father – disgraced,discredited and irreplaceable” [p 52; “Tibetan self-immolations cause more embarrassment than anxiety among Chinese authorities” [p 130; and “The world is still likely to prefer China over Taiwan” [p 232 (how does he know?) Thankfully,such mortifying assessments lessen as we move beyond the second part of the book.

At the end,we discover the ‘Acknowledgements’,wherein we are told that this book is actually a collection of “specially commissioned pieces”. The strange unease,which accompanied us after the ‘Introduction’,is explained. Written by an Indian in the first instance for non-Asian readers of the New York Review of Books,New York Times Magazine,New Yorker,The Guardian,Financial Times and the London Review of Books,the decision to put them together with a “skillfully carved”  “thematically linked narrative” is not difficult to fathom. The China story; the ‘China and its neighbours’ story,and now increasingly,the ‘China and India story’,commands a huge market. There is a degree of novelty (and of course,profit) in having an Indian take on China. One who lightly comments on well-worn controversies (the Great Leap Forward,the Cultural Revolution,the authoritarian Communist Party,the Dalai Lama) familiar themes (the downside of the economic reforms,self-immolation of the Tibetan protestors),records his conversations with the elites of Shanghai,Beijing and Taipei (the last in very posh settings) or even Tibetan dissident intellectuals (through an interpreter — and therein Mishra has already lost half the battle) who are already known in the west — with the occasional ‘oriental’ touch. And who,of course,gives the occasional reminder that “the usual simple-minded oppositions between authoritarianism and democracy deployed in discussions of India and China are of not much use…” surprisingly — though it is likely that Mishra may be unacquainted with them — there are no references to Ramnath Biswas’ thrilling accounts of travelling through China on a bicycle in 1931 or the travel accounts of Indumadhav Mullick (1869-1917),Travels in China,and Kumar Sarkar (1887-1949),The Chinese Empire in the Present Age. The latter with his descriptions of Shanghai would possibly have educated Mishra more in the Indian quest to understand our neighbour than Qian Zhongshu. But then,these intrepid souls are unlikely to have much relevance in articles written especially for the aforementioned foreign publications.

A Great Clamour falls between a number of stools. As separate pieces,they were probably mildly entertaining. It could have passed as a book with independent stand-alone essays,despite their uneven character. But the imposition of a “thematically linked narrative” is much too blatant and clumsy.

Alka Acharya is director,Institute of Chinese Studies,Delhi