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Unlikely connections forged, abetted and nurtured by Benaras
Summary
If fiction holds a mirror to the shifting sands of time, ‘The Romantics’ does it with admirable delicacy 25 years after its appearance
In 1999, a little-known Indian writer of 30 published his first novel, The Romantics, which caught the eye of the literary press in the West. Pankaj Mishra’s debut non-fiction book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, had appeared in 1995 to modest success. A quaint travelogue looking at the vagaries of life in small-town India with humour and insight, it was ahead of its time in its aspirations. Its subtle, stylised, and self-deprecating reportorial voice set a template for other Indian journalists, who went on to write books in a similar vein in the years to come. The two recent debuts written in the Butter Chicken mould that come to mind are Snigdha Poonam’s Dreamers: How Young Indians are Changing Their World (2019) and Kunal Purohit’s H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars (2023).
In his first work of fiction, Mishra took a route similar to the one he adopted in his non-fiction book—a thinly veiled autobiographical plot unfolding through the protagonist Samar’s trials and travels in pre-liberalisation India, where the forces of Hindutva hadn’t properly reared their head yet—there is only a brief, but prescient, reference to a fictitious entity called “Hindu Pride Party" in the novel. Twenty-five years on, The Romantics retains much of its residual charm, though its primary setting, the city of Benaras (now Varanasi), is far more tainted with political turmoil than it was in 1989, when Mishra’s story is set.
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In an early review in The Washington Post, writer and critic Marie Arana praised Mishra’s “supple first novel" for “the quick intelligence behind it". She noted, sharply, the presiding genius of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), behind the affective structure of The Romantics. Like the troika of Dr Aziz, Adela Quested and Mrs Moore in Forster’s novel, Mishra’s plot hangs on the delicate relationships between 20-year-old Samar, an eccentric but melancholy Englishwoman Diana West, and the enchantingly beautiful Catherine, daughter of a French banker, who is living in Benaras, struggling to discover herself through her love for Anand, a sitar player of average talent, but with ambitions to conquer the West like Pandit Ravi Shankar.
In the decades to follow, Mishra would go on to write much weightier tomes—on geopolitics, Buddhism, Indo-China relations—but he wouldn’t quite return to the voice of his first work of fiction, not even in the second novel, Run and Hide (2022), which would take over 20 years to gestate. Ironically, what makes re-reading The Romantics rewarding after 25 years is its sheer lack of big ambitions. This isn’t the work of a first-time novelist wanting to make a splash on the global scene by distilling immutable truths about India into his book. Nor is he interested in offering a clash of civilisations narrative, as Forster did, in which the East and West never meet. Imagine trying to sell such a muted protagonist like Samar to a contemporary publisher, a novel that wears only its interiority on its sleeves, while folding in all its social, political, and economic messaging into its subterranean layers.
Samar is a resolutely inward-looking character, uncertain about his feelings, sexually inexperienced, and not motivated to do much other than fill his time with copious reading. Mirroring his personality, which he describes as “raw and incoherent… vulnerable to large vague longings", the novel meanders through the lives of its characters, all lacking in any fixed purposefulness. As Samar undergoes his emotional adventures, he barely registers the embers of identity politics simmering around him. The India he inhabits is still a few years away from the watershed moment of political change that came with the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, but the stage is already set for radical reckonings.
In Allahabad and Benaras, the two cities where Samar seeks higher education, student politics is undergoing a violent churn, a rapid realignment of caste- and religion-based allegiances is taking place before his eyes. But Samar doesn’t want anything to do with social transformation. His accidental acquaintance with Rajesh, a student leader who has an alternative career as a criminal, brings him close to the divides of caste and class on the ground.
When Samar witnesses violent mayhem erupt on the campus of Banaras Hindu University, he is more shaken by the graphic bloodiness of its consequences rather than the ignition behind it. Unlike Rajesh, who seems to have a stake in such popular uprisings, Samar’s instinct is to flee at the first sign of trouble. He wants to hide away in the library and absorb himself in his books.
In contrast, even though he is a Brahmin, Rajesh has been forced to do things “no Brahmins would ever do", because of his debilitating poverty. Samar, on the other hand, wears his Brahmin identity much less self-consciously. Coming from a relatively better off family, he can devote months of his life to preparing for the civil services examination. He can weather penury because he has the privilege of being rescued from it by his father, if push comes to shove.
Samar’s world however, begins to expand further with his growing friendships with Miss West and Catherine. He is suddenly able to access experiences that aren’t readily available to caste Brahmins of his pedigree. A casual chat with Ramchand, a lower caste boatman, even being alert to his resplendent beauty, is made possible to Samar only because Miss West drags him out for a boat ride on the Ganges. As one of the titular romantics (the other two being Catherine and Miss West), Samar is compelled to reckon with multiple layers of his inner self: from his inherited Brahminical advantage to a more fluid identity he begins to create for himself, shaped by his reading of European literature.
One of the key influences on Samar’s selfhood is Frédéric Moreau, the hero of French writer Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece Sentimental Education. Like Moreau, Samar is open to being formed by the forces of the world out there. He is a creature of circumstances he doesn’t always understand, but doesn’t mind being exposed to. He welcomes change, even at the risk of losing the validation of society and his peers. He is content to pursue the unglamorous life of a primary schoolteacher in a village in Dharamshala, with no hope of greater glory.
Miss West, smarting from a lifelong hurt and jilted love, and Catherine, with her earnest but volatile intimacies, are fitting companions to Samar in this sentimental journey of self-discovery. While none of the three characters is left unscathed at the end of the novel, the beauty of The Romantics is that these unlikely connections are forged, abetted and nurtured by Benaras—once a great leveller and melting pot of conflicting values, now revered almost exclusively for its singular status among Hindus in contemporary India.
If fiction holds a mirror to the shifting sands of time, The Romantics does it with admirable delicacy 25 years since its appearance.
