I was sent this link to an interview with Pankaj Mishra. It appeared in The Believer magazine. I liked the interview because of exchanges like the one below–but am posting it mostly because I dig it very much when an Indian writer is introduced thusly: “X who has very dark hair and adumbrative eyes yet seems to emit brightness…” (The picture is interesting too, presenting PM as a cross between a character actor in a Hindi film poster and a psychedelic hippie on the Buddha trail.)

BLVR: Do you write with a specific audience in mind?

PM: There is a lot of anxiety in India about writers selling out to foreign audiences, but I’m neither flattering the Indian audience nor the American audience. I’m uneasily somewhere in the middle. I think there may be a new audience coming into being. The internet has created a transnational audience. If you publish something in the New York Times, it’s read all over the world. Who knows how big this audience is or how long it will last.

Ideally, the act of writing should not be accompanied by the sense of an audience, someone peering over your shoulder, but in nonfiction I think it’s almost imperative that you identify an audience so you can confirm or challenge or undermine whatever ideas or prejudices they might have about your subject. You have to have a sense of what they might be thinking about the Indian economy or terrorism or Islam based on what they may have read. I find myself writing more and more of these kinds of pieces with this in mind and having to reckon with prejudices which are multiplying very fast.

pankaj-mishra-the-believer