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.
