Midway through Pankaj Mishra’s first novel in 20 years, Run and Hide, the narrator, Arun, predicts something drastic. “The new India will never make it,” he thinks, on a long cab ride from New Delhi to the Himalayas. Arun has just abandoned his girlfriend, Alia, in London and returned to India for the first time since his mother’s funeral. A close friend of Arun’s died by suicide in an American prison not too long ago; another friend is about to make a creepy move on Alia. And yet Arun is beleaguered more by his country’s prospects than his breakup or loss. You don’t have to agree with his opinion of “new India” to realise that his prognosis is superfluous to the story.
Ever since his debut novel, The Romantics, was published in 1999, Mishra has established himself as a prognosticating pundit of sorts. His essays have scrupulously documented the dark underside of India’s economic growth: the widening rift between the country’s nouveau riche and the millions who struggle to make ends meet; the decades of military occupation of Kashmir; the reverberatory ascent of Hindu nationalism. In 2017 he published Age of Anger, an ambitious polemic that traced the rise of Modi, Erdogan and Trump to older ideas of discontent with western modernity. Even in the 18th and 19th centuries, Mishra wrote, “the sense of being humiliated by arrogant and deceptive elites was widespread, cutting across national, religious and racial lines”.
