Pankaj Mishra at the concluding session of the IDRC’s India series of lectures.
Pankaj Mishra reclined in a plum-coloured sitting chair, pensively stroking his short beard as International Development Research Centre president David Malone asked him how he imagined himself as a writer.
With cool, paced delivery he answered: “I’m still in the process of formation . . . I’m still learning, still growing.”
The IDRC hosted the controversial Indian essayist last week, concluding its India series of lectures that has been running since Aug. 27 in collaboration with the Ottawa Writer’s Festival.
The lectures mark the IDRC’s 25-year presence in India, supporting innovators, thinkers and researchers there.
Mishra, who is visiting Canada for the first time, spoke on South Asia’s changing social, economic and political position in relation to other nations.
He said growing up in developing India meant he had to work hard to learn about what was happening in the rest of the world.
But even after extensive travel in different parts of the world, Mishra says he has always been most driven by a desire to deepen his knowledge of his homeland in its intricacy.
“I spent all my adult life there but I feel there are so many aspects of India that I know nothing about,” he says. “It constantly makes me feel shamefully ignorant.”
Mishra’s writings on India are often featured in The New York Times and The Guardian.
His first book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India, is a travelogue describing the profound changes in rural India.
His next novel, The Romantics, about people seeking fulfillment in cultures other than their own, was translated into 11 languages and propelled him onto the international literary scene.
He has been criticized for what some regard as anti-Hindu remarks concerning the massacre of 38 Sikh villagers nine years ago in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir.
He accused Hindu militants of perpetrating the act, but it has since been established that the Islamic terrorist group Lashkar is responsible for the killings.
More than 100 civil servants, writers, journalists and students came out to hear Mishra share his ideas.
Siddhartha Kumar, a social worker in Ottawa, says he attended some of the other lectures in the IDRC 25th anniversary India series and found Mishra’s presentation particularly refreshing and authentic.
“I get the sense that he has a real feel of the place,” Kumar says.
Kumar says he was pleased that the IDRC made it possible for Canadians from different backgrounds to come together and share ideas about India.