The last time I visited my ancestral home, in a typical Bengali village, no roads led there; we made our way on foot, crossing bamboo bridges at night, our path lit by fireflies. The village had no electricity, no running water. Twenty years later, I am there again, having recently arrived via a motorway whizzing through the village, or what’s left of it. Now with electricity and plumbing, my neighbours have mastered the smartphone and the WC simultaneously: two centuries traversed in two decades.
The Indian writer Pankaj Mishra is fascinated by these transformations, first observing them in travelogues written in south Asian backwaters, then analysing their philosophical underpinnings and psychological reverberations in book-length essays. He has also tackled the subject polemically, especially in the Modi era, with opinion pieces in almost every major newspaper, including this one.
The changing forms of his writing, always straining to encompass the chaotic reality Mishra sees around himself, reveal him to be a profoundly literary voice, as interested in how to write about a subject as the subject itself. Run and Hide is his first novel since an unjustly forgotten debut more than 20 years ago. It offers a new way to envision what is by now, for him, familiar material.
The characters in Run and Hide are the masterminds of the “New India”, who have risen from dusty hinterlands to Wall Street boardrooms and London penthouses, although Arun, our narrator, has dropped out of the rat race to translate Hindi fiction. He and his friends Aseem, a social-climbing literary celebrity, and Virendra, a hedge-fund billionaire, first met during their freshers’ hazing at IIT Delhi (one of India’s hothouse technical colleges whose alumni include Google’s CEO). The intersecting, transnational careers and personal lives of the three men ultimately involve a woman too, Alia, the Ivy League-educated scion of old-money Muslims, now writing an exposé of global elites. The novel poses as a letter from Arun to Alia, an account of fleeing their glitzy romance in London to return home to the Himalayas, from where Arun is writing in a state of moral clarity.
This epistolary form (in which we never get Alia’s side) is a curious choice. The philosophising tone is reminiscent of 19th-century Russian discourse, in which the letters of the sceptic Peter Chaadaev – often referenced in Mishra’s nonfiction – critiqued his country’s modernisation. “It had become impossible for educated people like us to rest in a worldview,” Arun reflects; unlike his ancestors’ values, “unchanged from generation to generation”. Chaadaev made a similar observation, widely quoted in Russia at the time: “Our memories are no older than yesterday … and the past is lost to us for ever.”
The novel manages to be somewhat plotless, yet unnecessarily convoluted. There are, at points, three levels of narrative: Arun’s letter to Alia, Alia’s own book, and Aseem’s novel. The latter two exist inside the first, an occasionally disorienting framework hardly helped by Mishra’s vacillation between first, second and third person. But Mishra is having fun with the newfound freedom of fiction, and the reader comes to share in it. Satirical snippets from post-Brexit soirees or from activist Instagram accounts are part of this; so is the vivid use of Hindi invective.
Those vernacular fragments do hint, more seriously, at the linguistic wounds of success in India. Fluency in the lingua franca of global capitalism is slavishly acquired as a matter of necessity (the colonial government of Thomas Macaulay could only dream of such institutionalised deracination). In a brilliant irony, the word Aseem struggles with most is “career” (pronounced “carrier”).
After the density of his recent books, with their weighty bibliographies, Mishra’s fictional prose is permitted, once again, to take lyrical flight. Here he is soulfully recollecting, in Arun’s childhood, “many moments that detach themselves from the noise of time to whisper of enchanting and irretrievable things: like the one rocket we buy at Diwali that flares into life with a gratifying hissss and then soars up and up, and then, when green and red sparks tumble down, all our smiling upward faces briefly glow”.
There is such feeling behind that lovely, lilting image. Mishra, after all, embodies his own subject; writing about India’s development from an inward-looking, custom-bound society to a neoliberal global player is what instigated his own elevation from the deprived, semi-rural landscape of his birth to a London postcode nestled among the liberal elite. The mirroring of autobiography and subject recalls VS Naipaul, the Nobel prize-winning author whose enigmatic arrival in London from a tropical island allowed him to understand the postcolonial craving for modernity.
Indeed, Naipaul, constantly cited and recited and even making a cameo in the book, casts an unshakeable shadow over it; wherever Mishra treads, Naipaul’s spectre looms steps ahead. Naipaul was the prophet who caught the mood of India’s ascendancy before it existed – its self-serving, self-made men – in A Bend in the River: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”
The whole sublime line is quoted on the first page of Run and Hide, as Aseem’s credo. Arun, however, resists such “visions of aestheticised amorality”. Where Aseem is always repeating, after Naipaul, that “to be modern is to trample on the past”, Arun repudiates metropolitan mod cons for a monastery in the Himalayas, doubting the point of modernity if trampling on the past means deforestation and mosque demolition (which Naipaul justified).
Naipaul was once a hero to every young man from the boondocks seeking to leave his mark on the world. Mishra – no different – championed Naipaul’s work in admiring reviews and edited two collections of his essays, an association that links him to Aseem in the novel. But Aseem’s Naipaulian drive leads to moral disgrace. Of the two alter egos Mishra has here, it’s Arun who remains uncompromised; Arun who shows true self-possession. With this disavowal of his onetime hero, Mishra has dispelled a troublesome shadow with one last act of homage: he has overridden the past, just like the motorway whizzing through my village.
• Run and Hide is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
