for modern man, terror is exactly what is evoked by the fear of being left behind, of being ‘backward’. There is perhaps no better means of tracking the diffusion of modernity across the globe than by charting the widening grip of this fear, which was nowhere more powerfully felt than in the places that were most visibly marked by the stigmata of ‘backwardness’. It was what drove artists and writers in Asia, Africa and the Arab world to go to extraordinary lengths to ‘keep up’ with each iteration of modernity in the arts: surrealism, existentialism, and so on. And far from diminishing over time, the impulse gathered strength through the twentieth century, so that writers of my generation were, if anything, even less resistant to its power than were our predecessors: we could not but be aware of the many ‘isms’—structuralism, postmodernism, postcolonialism—that flashed past our eyes with ever increasing speed.
Amitav Ghosh
