Beauty and bigotry

When I was a child in the 1950s, I had a delightful book called The Golden Geography which tried to encapsulate every aspect of the globe — its landscape, its climate, its people and their occupations — in a small sketch with a brief caption. From a section called ‘This is Asia’, I learned that Arabs drank water from goatskins, that Indians usually lived ‘out-of-doors’ (a nice way of putting it) and that the Japanese had weird houses with sliding paper doors. Such apparently timeless images were imprinted on my mind and, without much scope for revising them, remained there a long time.

I was reminded of The Golden Geography while reading Pankaj Mishra’s wonderful book, Temptations of the West, because it is a sort of ‘This is Asia’ (or rather South Asia) for grown-ups. A native of the north Indian plains, Mishra writes lyrically of landscapes he has only been able to discover as an adult, of the ‘exhilarating revelation of beauty’ when he first sees Kashmir, of the yaks and monks and hillside monasteries he encounters within ‘the immense empty spaces’ of Tibet. He wants to begin with the stereotype, the ‘resonant cliché’ of a place — Tibet, for example, as ‘the roof of the world’ — before introducing other dimensions and examining contemporary conflicts in the area. The central purpose of the book is to understand those conflicts through travels in their territories and interviews with selected participants. Its title may seem a little misleading, however, because the struggles described are really contests between traditional societies and competing visions of modernity.