While it is understandable why the collision of confused priorities result in the title A Great Clamour, why do you not point more definitively to the Oriental roadmap as it were, that is but hintedIJ Is there any way the Orient is going to evolve a socially-inclusive growth philosophy and moderation or are we looking at new-left extremismIJ

I think a writer has done his duty if he manages to correctly diagnose a problem, if the sum of his travels and encounters is a broad analysis of challenges and dilemmas faced by large populous societies. A roadmap is something that every political community has to find for itself, based on the particular terrain it inhabits. One of the most destructive aspects of the last century was the obsession with universal roadmaps — communism — and then free market capitalism. So we should avoid these one-size-fits-all remedies, or all-roads-lead-to-Rome cartographies. Alas, Neo-Right extremism of the kind we have seen across Asia — accumulation through dispossession, extensive crony capitalism, heedless financialisation — breeds left-extremism, violent backlashes of all kinds. And this further postpones the creation of what you call ‘socially inclusive growth philosophy and moderation.’ But let’s not reduce the complex happenings; say in a place like Chhattisgarh, to a crude narrative of left-extremism. The Adivasis asserting their identity against those dispossessing and marginalising them are more like the Tibetans affirming their faith in the Dalai lama.

While you have deeply analysed the modern Chinese dilemma, do you think the reality of its economic giganticism will ever let people to reinvent themselves, especially in a world where the West is in awe of it precisely because of its ‘marketonomics’IJ 

Yes, Chinese giganticism has underwritten the extravagant spending habits of the West, and there is little sign that this is about to end. So we’ll be stuck with this model of growth for a while — even as the Chinese economy moves from export-oriented growth to greater domestic consumption.

With inherent similarities between a totalitarian China and a democratic India, where do you see the relationship between these two countries goingIJ Will we ever be able to get out of the cycle of neighbourhood conflict as an assertion of our identity or ever find some commonalityIJ How much of commonality is altering, if at all, intellectual discourse in both countriesIJ

So long as the relationship between the two countries is dominated by military and political elites we are not going to get anywhere. These folks have a vested interest in demonising the other country, to keep their defence budgets at an all-time high, and find in nationalism a self-legitimising ideology. We need more contacts between ordinary people, between thinkers, writers and artists. In some ways, we need to return to the world of cosmopolitan exchanges I described in From the Ruins of Empire, a time when thinkers and activists in Kolkata and Mumbai were deeply linked to their counterparts in Shanghai and Beijing, and discussed their common challenges and dilemmas. The risk otherwise is not only greater friction but also intellectual provincialism.  

What to you is the everlasting hold of Mao in the mind of the dispossessed, in China or IndiaIJ

It is the idea of him as a leader of peasants, someone who ignored the orthodoxy of urban elites, worked in the countryside rather than in the cities, and led a successful revolution. I think the strategic side of Mao the guerrilla leader remains relevant to many people in Asia and latin America. His crimes as a leader of the PRC from 1949 onwards are not part of this image of course.

Is propaganda-mongering easier in the East than the WestIJ

Easier in the West, as societies in Asia are still not hyper-organised and fully modern, not completely accessible to the state and the media. And then they are also more diverse, so one kind of propaganda will have no effect on some people, there will always be many with strong adversarial positions. China today is a great clamour of contending voices, and government propaganda has to reckon with strong scepticism, even on such emotive matters as anti-Japanese nationalism. I find it much more frightening when a big majority in the world’s richest and most powerful nation is made to believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks of 9/11, and then made complicit in the destruction of a society.

You say in your book that the 20th century is one of ideological excessIJ Is the 21st century ever going to hold out hope of freeing ourselves from “isms” and is that going to come from the Orient or the EastIJ

You will find that many people in India and China early in the 20th century were already hoping to get away from ideological straitjackets. There were many ideas in play, all kinds of fusions and syntheses were being attempted, between Buddhism and European enlightenment or Buddhism and socialism. People like BR Ambedkar and Dharmanand Kosambi were attempting to move beyond the dominant orthodoxies of national development and growth. A leader like Ram Manohar lohia was explicit in his rejection of both communism and American-style capitalism. We need to recover some of these intellectual resources.

I think latin America has already initiated a liberation from outdated ‘isms.’ look at that part of the world now, and you’ll see almost every country defying copybook notions of change, left- or Right-wing. In Chile you have the middle class supporting a radical student movement even at a time of rapid economic growth. A man like Evo Morales, someone with indigenous ancestry and trade union background, is in power in Bolivia. Uruguay’s President is promoting free education for children and legalising same-sex marriage. In Asia, the experiments of Jokowi, the mayor of Jakarta, and Arvind Kejriwal are worth watching.

You have hinted at a possible hope emanating from Japan in the book. Do you see India crawling out of a similar comatose co-existence of opposites, or is the solution more likely to come out of the Far-East because of a more homogeneous, even if forced, socio-economic structureIJ

The Japanese experiment is worth observing for all kinds of reasons — to see its traumatic embrace of modernity, political, military and economic, over the last century, its successful makeover into a high-tech superpower, and then its existence as a post-growth economy for over two decades. Its experience cannot be replicated, of course, but its lessons are important for all of us — to see how we can find ways of life tailored to our specific conditions, that are alert to the real limitations in our situation, how we can find social cohesion amid economic distress. In many ways, Japan has been a pioneer in outlining the boundaries of growth — the point at which we must find a fresh equilibrium within our societies, between individual rights and collective welfare, human kind and nature. This is of course easier in a small, homogenous and wealthy society, but it still helps to think, for instance, of a new less instrumental relationship with the environment, wherever you are in India or China, and to think of the requirements of small communities within our countries. 

How is moral depravity in post-market, cartel-style power structures ever to be retrieved by a spiritual ascension that two of the world’s oldest civilisations, China and India, have forever espousedIJ Or is spirituality too now becoming a tool of anodyne marketonomicsIJ

At one level, yes, but let’s not cede all intellectual adventurousness and initiative to marketeers and racketeers. There are plenty of resources left in our societies, intellectual, moral and spiritual, to get us out of this trap of market morality. The real question is whether we are willing to question our mental conditioning through the education system and the media, our arrogant assumptions about the world, drop the embarrassing self-congratulation of modern man, who thinks of himself as the apotheosis of civilisation, and acknowledge the lived experience of hundreds of millions of people before us, who had devised much more stable modes of co-existence, and political and economic institutions that did not strip the world bare like locusts, to use an expression of Mahatma Gandhi’s, or set different parts of it ablaze.