Revisiting Pankaj Mishra's 'Age of Anger' in age of hypernationalism

Pamela Philipose

WHEN the first edition of Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Age of Anger: A History of the Present’ came out in 2017, it seemed to speak for a historical moment in which a very public and deliberately created public anger was being weaponised to fuel hypernationalist narratives across the world.

In his preface, Mishra sets down the conjuncture: the manuscript was completed the week Britain voted to leave the European Union and was dispatched to the printers when Trump was elected President — each development revealing ‘faultlines’ running through inner lives as well as nations, communities and families and which, he avers, he had barely noticed earlier but now had sought to map out in the book. It would be limiting to see the final product as a history of the ideas that have fuelled contemporary politics and society because it is, more importantly, about the particular climate of those ideas. Mishra tries to comprehend this climate by using an interesting unit of analysis that he terms “the irreducible human being, her or his fears, desires and resentments”.

Mishra’s eclectic reading and referencing may sometimes leave the reader’s mind in a twist, so wide are their spans. Figures unfamiliar to the Indian reader like Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, who sets off the Prologue, rub shoulders with more familiar ones like Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse, or the Iranian cleric Ayatollah Khomeini with his vision of velayat-e faqih (guardianship by jurist). Mishra negotiates his way through this assemblage of personalities, ideas and interventions with a certain purpose. As he puts it, he is looking for “historically recurring phenomena across the world, and their common underlying source”.

Among the more ubiquitous recurrences is the figure of the angry young man with no future. In contemporary times, the figure has surfaced in Modi’s India, planting hate and raw dissension across the country through vigilante actions. The same figure has fuelled the ISIS (Islamic State). Mishra puts it thus, “The pied pipers of ISIS have grasped particularly keenly that insulted and injured men, whether in Parisian banlieus or Asian and African shanty towns, can be turned into obedient and fearless fighters if they are given a rousing cause to fight…” Similar figures played a decisive role throughout history, whether they were the gendarmes of the East India colonial project, or the youth who swore by the ‘Volk’ imagined by 19th century German thinkers who later went on to comprise the ranks of the Fuhrer’s stormtroopers.

A search for understanding the forces that drive these actors takes Mishra to the historic face-off between the two towering French intellectuals, Voltaire and Rousseau. The first was a votary of the Enlightenment’s rational tradition and notions of human progress even if they came at the cost of others’ misery; the second was committed to the idea of “freedom and moral integrity of individuals, combined with an extreme loathing for inequality and change”. It was the German philosopher Nietzsche who termed the particular battle of ideas between the two as the ‘unfinished problem of civilisation’. Mishra concurs: “(Their) disagreements illuminate some of our perennial questions: how human beings define themselves, what holds societies together, and divides them, why the underprivileged majority erupts in revolt against the privileged few, and what roles intellectuals play in these conflicts”. The questions get heightened against a backdrop of globalisation and economic neoliberalism that define our world today.

Mishra identifies a Rousseauian concept — resentment — as a mighty driver of violence and anger when nurtured in the breasts of ordinary folk. Resentment, twinned with “mimetic desire” — a desire in individuals and nations to emulate patterns of life and consumerism of the more prosperous among them — has time and again upended societies and unleashed chaos across nations.

Keeping track of Mishra’s arguments is a rollercoaster ride, partly because of the innumerable references, quotations and shifting perspectives. However, even if the reader does not always agree with his conclusions, it rewards a careful reading precisely because the book provides keys to unlocking the world we presently live in. The question that arises is whether a 2017 book like this continues to be relevant in 2022. I would say that this is indeed the case given how the present times remain witness to wave upon wave of wild, often irrational, mass anger. We had, for instance, the storming of Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. We are also conscious that authoritarian leaders from Turkey to Hungary to Argentina to the Philippines have harnessed public anger to consolidate their power.

Developments in India best illustrate this. The Modi election of 2014, incidentally, was one of the factors that prompted the book. But an argument that Modi takes advantage of the rage of the provincial outsider against an “entrenched elite” has now become almost a prophecy of a death foretold — the death of democracy, that is.

Given this, one must welcome the reissuance of ‘Age of Anger’ in the more accessible paperback form.