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Review
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The Romantics
By Pankaj Mishra
Published in hardback (1999)
Touted prior to its release a few years back as the Next Big Thing in South Asian literature, Mishra’s “The Romantics” fails to live up to its promise.
Told through the eyes of Samar, an undergraduate at the Benares
Hindu University at the end of the 1980’s, “The Romantics” takes a
look at the reality that is India and the romantic preconceived
notions of it that Samar sees in his foreign artisan friends, in
particular the beautiful French girl Catherine who, unfortunately
for him, is already involved with a local musician.
Samar is faced with a variety of predictable
conflicts: the conflicts of Eastern and Western culture, of his
Brahmin upbringing and his attraction to ‘non-Brahmin’ vices, of his
desire for Catherine and his loyalty to his friends, as well as the
everyday conflicts and class struggles of Benares.
Bland prose, a sanctimonious and emotionless tone and
an overall lack of substance make this a boring and not particularly
memorable read. Mishra’s explorations of a post-colonial,
post-Emergency, pre-nuclear India are disappointing and too
self-absorbed to be realistic.
Sharanya Manivannan is a 19 year old writer, painter and Bharatnatyam dancer, as well as founder and executive producer of the CRESCENDO: Raise Your Voice series, which uses performance to raise funds for organisations supporting women in distress. But primarily, she is hardcore junkie, supporting a 100-books a year habit (the kind who, the odd teenage indiscretion aside, sneaked books into her parents' house in the bad old days before moving out). She can be reached at sharanya.manivannan@gmail.com
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