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Pankaj Mishra is a North India-born writer who lives in London with his wife and daughter. Pankaj contributes to a wide range of publications, from The New Yorker to the Guardian and the Financial Times. At the same time, his work hovers between journalism and fiction and his essays mesh reportage, history, philosophy and religion. No one would accuse Pankaj of being anything less than serious.

Anyhow, two weeks ago I hosted him in Jakarta. While Pankaj — with a slew of well-reviewed books under his belt — is very much a member of the global literary elite, he is also an avowedly Indian presence: kurta-wearing and a vegetarian.

Having first met him many years before at a literary festival in Australia, I was delighted when he told me — only a few months ago — that he was interested in writing about Southeast Asia and especially Indonesia.

Moreover, as a storyteller myself, I’ve always found it fascinating to observe how other writers approach their material. Indeed, nearly 20 years ago, I assisted V.S. Naipaul as he worked his way through Malaysia for his seminal though controversial book, “Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples.” At the time, I watched and learned, listening as he noted down all his interviews painstakingly by hand.

Indeed, I now realize that the weeks spent with the grumpy but surprisingly generous Nobel laureate were crucial in helping me find my literary voice as well as deepening my understanding of my home country.

Now with Pankaj alongside me, I was embarking on a similar journey. However, as we spent time together, I began to see that I was learning about two countries at once: both India and Indonesia.

First off, Pankaj was very much struck by Jakarta’s sheer scale — the vastness of the city as well as the suddenness of the shift from the first-world splendor of Jalan Sudirman to the far more modest homes arrayed behind the grand Sukarno-inspired boulevard.

Arriving in Jakarta just as the Cikeusik and Temanggung attacks were in the headlines, he ended up being drawn into the ongoing debate about pluralism and the position of minorities in Indonesia.

Coming from India — another great secular republic — his views were perhaps less alarmist than many of would have expected.

While he fully recognized the brutality and viciousness of the attacks, he cautioned that such violence was sadly a relatively common occurrence in India where huge chunks of the nation were effectively beyond the reach of the government.

Nonetheless, he was struck by the extent to which Indonesians celebrated and sought to live out the ideals enshrined in the state ideology, Pancasila, saying, “Pancasila seems to have a presence or potency that I hadn’t expected. People seem to really use it as a benchmark of a model society. It’s an extremely important asset. Indeed, we may have lost it in India. Nehru’s economic failure has very much discredited the entire Nehruvian project. Nowadays, Indian nationalism has been reduced to mere Hindu revivalism. As a society, we’ve lost our national ideological framework.”

As it happened, we also visited the House of Representatives just as the issue of the “tax mafia” was being voted on in order to interview the newly elected head of Ansor, Nahdlatul Ulama’s youth wing, Nusron Wahid.

After witnessing the drama and the cacophony in the House, Pankaj remarked, “Here are some serious political battles. Besides, democracy shouldn’t be orderly.

“Order and stability belong in authoritarian regimes. Democracy needs debate and argument and it’s often unpleasant. But in the end: What’s the alternative? It’s better to have all these latent frictions out in the open rather than be subject to sudden and surreptitious eruptions of malice and hatred.”

However, democracy, secularism and economic growth are all relatively new forces. At the end of the day, Pankaj was drawn by the resonance and profound links between India and Indonesia — cultural, religious and aesthetic.

And I can still recall one memorable encounter with a local editor over coffee. Sitting there face-to-face, the Muslim Javanese writer explained to Pankaj how his children’s names had all been taken from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

There was moment of silent acknowledgment — a sense of the plethora of influences and exchanges that had taken place over the previous centuries and millennia — before we continued our discussion, a mere speck in a continuum.

 

Karim Raslan is a columnist who divides his time between Malaysia and Indonesia.