In one scene in Temptations of the West, Pankaj Mishra finds himself in a hillside town in Kashmir, the Himalayan valley positioned so disastrously between the warring politics of India and Pakistan. He has travelled there to investigate a fire that destroyed a shrine to a 15th-century patron-saint. Having talked to locals and noted the destitution, he prepares to leave.

"Word of my presence in the town had quickly spread," he writes. Sure enough, a delegation of about 40 men appears. They have walked four miles from a still more remote place to meet Mishra, hoping that he is an official who can help get a burst pipe repaired. Their village has been without water for eight days. They are running out of snow to melt.

"Raggedly dressed," he notes of the delegation, "large holes gaping from their pherans, their thickly bearded faces white with dust, they seemed to have emerged out of an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century wretchedness." He listens patiently, if helplessly, to their complaints.

The encounter captures core qualities of Mishra's journalism. This gifted Indian is the author of the novel The Romantics, as well as the extraordinary non-fiction work An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World. He is also a regular contributor to publications in England and the United States, including The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. His writing is marked by fearlessness and freshness alike, and his equal ease with the intellectual traditions of East and West allows for often pioneering forays across various divides.

He is, as it happens, also a bearded local man who could easily be confused in Kashmir – or Kabul or Kathmandu – for an official with expertise in burst pipes. The son of a railway employee from the Brahmin caste, Pankaj Mishra was raised in a series of provincial towns with the same vague hopes as millions of his generation: a career in the civil service and a life somehow exempted from the "ordinary misery and degradation of India." Though still in his thirties, the author has, in effect, already journeyed greater distances, both geographic and psychological, than do most people in the course of a lifetime.

As such, he is uniquely positioned to recognize and understand men and women who are, as he puts it in Temptations of the West, "lured away from their subsistence economies and abandoned on the threshold of a world in which they found they had, and could have, no place." The same applies to nations obliged to "join the modern world and find new identities" in often dire, bloody circumstances.

These preoccupations direct Mishra's travels across the Indian subcontinent. Besides India, where he still lives for part of the year, he visits, generally more than once, Pakistan and Afghanistan, Nepal and Tibet.

The book follows narrative roads that other journalists might not be able to locate on maps. Charting the ominous racial "project of a Hindu nation" in his homeland, Mishra talks to everyone from politicians to gangsters to amalgams of the two such as Ramchandra Paramhans, the godfather of Hindu nationalism. "Two bodyguards nervously watched my face as Paramhans described this history," he writes of this encounter with an old man who had recently been the target of assassins.

In another tense moment, Mishra winds through the slums of Allahabad to meet a politician who represents the Dalits, a term for the various low castes in India, including the Untouchables. In the man's house, he is stared down by supporters, who likely recognize him as a Brahmin. "It occurred to me," he writes, noticing the young men's scrutiny of his clothes and shoes, "that I was the only fully dressed person there."

Back in Kashmir, Mishra chases the story of a massacre of Sikh villagers, despite the fact that reaching the village involves negotiating army roadblocks. Confessing his fear, he grants that "far too many journalists investigating strange events in remote parts of Kashmir had been killed."

His reportage of the massacre is typically vivid. Sikh men were "shouting, beating their chests, feeding upon each other's energy." The sound of weeping women was causing roosters to "go on dementedly for several hours after dawn, their exultant cries hanging discordantly above the village." This scene, too, seems to belong in another age.

Mishra is no less intrepid in his travels through Afghanistan, both under the Taliban and in the present period. Uneasy with the presence of the international aid community, and wary that the country could still fail due to the re-emergence of drug cartels, he wonders at the load-bearing capacity of what is essentially a premodern societal structure. "The obstinacy and destructiveness of the Taliban now appear part of the history of Afghanistan's calamitous encounter with the modern world," he says.

But then, calamitous encounters seem the fate of much of the planet these days, due in no small part to those temptations mentioned in the title. "Western ideologies," Mishra argues in his preface, be they colonialism, communism or globalization, demand that nations "modernize or perish." The resulting pressures can be overwhelming, both for countries and their beleaguered citizens. Nor does slowing the pace seem a likely prospect.

Were Temptations of the West simply a collection of travel essays that ponders how places like India and Nepal negotiate a globalized planet, it would still be a fine book. But the intensity of Mishra's prose suggests that he wants the disruption, and the upheaval, to be felt viscerally. Daring reportage, and an obvious empathy for ordinary people, goes some way toward this ambition.

As important, though, is the use of his own narrative as evidence of the "bewildering complexity" faced by individuals swept along by those negotiations. If, as he claims, the movement for one traveller at least was from "ignorance and prejudice to a measure of self-awareness and knowledge," then it might prove the same for certain readers. Great books, and great books only, can have that rare effect.