‘Run and Hide’: Pankaj Mishra’s novel takes a hard look at the politics of optics in modern India

“‘There is a whole generation, maybe two generations, of fucked-up men in India,’ you used to say. ‘People without a moral compass.’

I now think this is incontestable – freedom for too many men like us had meant profaning values and ideals that guide most human lives. There is so much I have learned since I met you about the cruelties and operations of what remains, more insidiously than before, a man’s world.”

Pankaj Mishra’s long-awaited new novel Run and Hide tells the story of this world of men, from a man’s perspective, without any of the usual self-congratulatory rhetoric that has come to define masculine voices in a patriarchal social order, irrespective of geographical or cultural location. Mishra’s protagonist, Arun Dwivedi, IITian and drop-out from the rat race of financially defined success, is an anomaly, not just in the fictional world of personal ambition and social climbing that he inhabits, but also in the grand hustle culture of our times where the obverse of every tragedy is profit-making.

The narrative is structured like a letter / confessional, often reflective, never dropping into vapid self-absorption, always cognisant of a world outside that lacks parity, lacks empathy, and largely, lacks honesty. Little wonder then, that the solution to crises is often to run and hide.

The IIT trio

The story begins in pre-liberalisation India of the 1980s, at that cathedral of Indian middle class aspiration – IIT. Three boys – Arun Dwivedi, Virendra Das, and Aseem Thakur – from fairly impecunious backgrounds, carry the burden of familial expectations as well as personal aspiration, as they start their journey at IIT.

Arun baldly acknowledges a sentiment all aspirants, particularly those from an underprivileged backgrounds, are probably familiar with: “The immense effort to enter the country’s most prestigious engineering institution destroyed our childhoods, stuffing it with joyless tasks and obligations, and the dread of failure.”

Having made it to the hallowed grounds, the obvious next step is to achieve success, even if at great personal cost. The narrative does not linger at IIT but the short time that it does spend at the institution is a study in social reality. The boys, plunged into a world of caste divide, abuse, and relentless hard work, learn to “disguise” themselves, to hide their pasts, and to fashion themselves afresh, away from their parochial roots.

Both Arun and Aseem are drawn to literature, one for the joy that language brings him, and the other in the pursuit of cultural capital, to establish himself as an artist, to acquire social status and currency. Arun and Aseem, both read stories about men, written by men, whether Stendhal or Chekhov or Naipaul. But while Arun gravitates to the echoes of truth in his reading and subsequently, makes a career in reading / reviewing and translation, Aseem makes literature and language his pathway to social and political success.

The third of this loosely connected trio, Virendra, takes the expected route of financial success, investment, and the conquering of the American dream. The intersections between privilege and deprivation, class and power, ambition and quietude, come to define much of the narrative.

Flux and friction

Run and Hide is as much social commentary on a country and culture in flux as it is fiction. Mishra tells the story of many small towns in provincial India, when he takes us to Arun’s childhood in Deoli. There is squalor, even while the family refuses to see themselves as “poor”, reserving that pejorative term for those with even lesser privilege, lesser means than themselves.

It is an unquestioningly patriarchal world in which women exist only as wives and daughters, putting men first, making sacrifices, running themselves into the ground. The father rages, the mother cowers. The father complains about corruption while ignoring his own role as a cog in the wheel. It is a familiar picture and not just from small-town India, or from the ’80s.

Mishra’s writing, while negotiating this over-traversed territory, steers clear of poverty porn; turning the lens inward, instead of making a spectacle of want, inequity, and unfairness. Arun remembers the solitude and not the squalor, thereby turning the reader’s attention away from the dankness of an impoverished home to the clarity of unblemished skies, almost erasing the heartache of always having too little, always being made to feel small.

Arun’s decision to relocate to Ranipur, a small hamlet outside of Shimla, is his attempt to reconnect with what he recognises as a “purified version” of his past; a return to unhurried days and a withdrawal from the incessant pressure of seeking social validation. In a subversive hybrid of a twist and a nod to the tale of the epic hero in quest of the golden chalice, Arun flounders in his path, thrown off course by the delicious promise of romance.

Caste and gender

Caste makes its presence felt throughout the narrative. Arun carries an “upper caste” surname that comes with a slew of privileges and protection. He also carries a secret that makes him vulnerable and anxious about his caste identity. His friend Virendra, outside of this circle of protection owing to his Dalit identity, is made to suffer sexual abuse and other kinds of ritual humiliation, till he becomes just another part of the system, replicating the same patterns of abuse and violence.

Early in the novel, Arun dubs as the “most superior caste” those who never have to worry about money, but as the text reminds us, even class and its concomitant benefits of education, access, and ease, do not trump caste. Caste violence, in Mishra’s novel, is ubiquitous. It exists in villages, inside classrooms, in cities and in prestigious educational institutions, in workplaces, and inside heads, sitting on educated, urbane tongues, waiting to be unleashed.

The women in Run and Hide are mostly silent, secondary figures. Aseem’s mother is more written about from a nostalgic distance than seen. His sister’s is an oft-repeated story, banal in the ordinariness of its tragedy. Even the fictional women, the women Aseem writes in his novels, are only objects inspiring lust, as deprived of a voice and any agency as the women in Aseem’s life.

There is primarily one important woman character in the novel – Alia, separated from Arun in age, privilege, religion, and perhaps, in this stark difference, accruing value as the trigger for transmogrification. A young, outspoken, independent Muslim woman from a pedigreed family, writing a commissioned book on the “secret history of globalisation”, studying the men who made it big and then had their success implode on them, Alia is also an obvious troll-magnet in a world of social media activism and social media personalities.

In the attitudes of men towards Alia and through conversations that force Arun to re-assess his erasure of gender concerns, the book holds up a mirror to our own patriarchal-and-proud social spaces while it also underscores the possibility of establishing dialogue, of making a difference, of bringing about change, one undaunted voice at a time.

Pankaj Mishra’s writing, fiction as well as non-fiction, has always tackled questions of lived reality and social responsibility. Run and Hide is no exception. Tongue firmly in cheek, the book takes a hard look at the politics of optics. The tension between liberal democracy and populism that defines much of our current political climate is brought to life in Mishra’s characters.

There are the usual opportunists and ideologues and then there is the appropriator, the voyeur, the person who makes all the right noises because they want to be seen on the “right side” of this unbalanced binary, but whose actions belie and abjure all social responsibility. In this iniquitous, possibly irredeemable world, is it then unethical to withdraw from social roles? In privileging the self over others, over social/familial responsibilities, do we accept, at least momentarily, our own insignificance or is it an unforgivable character flaw?

Mishra’s title remains ambiguous. Whether it is a cautionary tale or a mantra, a literal solution or a metaphorical disguising of the self, is up to the reader to decipher.

Run and Hide, Pankaj Mishra, Juggernaut.