Prejudice is not a European monopoly

“Prejudice is not a European monopoly. My travel writing, for instance, in Pakistan and Afghanistan is really shaped by my childhood memory, common among small-town lower-middle-class Brahmins, of Muslims as threatening to “others” — and there are moments when I lapse into these inherited fears. I can’t write about China without discussing our nation’s image of the “devious” neighbor who stabbed our backs in 1962. And I can’t write about Israel without bringing in the great admiration my RSS-aligned family had for the Zionists who supposedly knew how to keep Muslims in their place.”
–Pankaj Mishra, Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations (2010)