Pankaj Mishra explores the seduction of the expat scene in Benares
By Kimberly ChunWe live in one of the least romantic of times. We attend singles clubs’ mixers and deconstruct personal ads in our search for romance. Yet most people probably spend more time with their computer than their partner, and the most renowned union of late has been the romance-free hookup of Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire. So Pankaj Mishra’s debut novel, The Romantics, seems to be moving against the tide, taking a romantic view of the changing landscape of the Indian holy city of Benares in the late ‘80s and ‘90s.
Then again, The Romantics is all about people charting their own course amid modern and ancient cultural currents. The novel revolves around Samar, a 20-year-old Brahmin intellectual who moves to Benares to read “big books” by Schopenhauer, Turgenev, Proust and other Penguin and Picador stalwarts. In an age in which children rebel against their parents and those in the Brahmin caste no longer have a guarantee of influence and property, he tries to hold on to the romance of his undergraduate days, while deciding what to do with his life. He spends his days in the library, trying to find refuge in the world of literature and ideas, although violent student protests are erupting around him on campus.
Another distraction is a collection of Western bohemians and expatriates, following the path that vaguely resembles that of the Hindu pilgrims who have traditionally sought release from the cycle of rebirth in the city of Benares. Early on, Samar befriends his neighbor Diane West, an Englishwoman with a mysterious past. She opens his mind, lending him CDs of Schubert and Brahms, and he says, “I was glamoured by this contact with names that I had encountered only in print.” She gets him to explore the city, the banks of the Ganges and other parts of India, and look at the world with new ideas.
Still, Samar is struck by their differences. “One of the first things she said to me was: ‘Where did you learn to speak such charming English?’ I hadn’t known what to make of this remark. Was she being complimentary or condescending?” he wonders.
Miss West, as Samar calls her, introduces him to Mark, an American who talks about wanting to “find a way of sharing my experience of Benares and find some way of integrating it into daily life” when he returns to the United States, as if he were trying to work a tourist souvenir into his home decor. Other spiritual drifters, such as the American Debbie and German Sarah, seem to be trying on Buddhism to see if it would fit—like a sari or salwar-kurta—an act, which Miss West scorns. Debbie “gets her parents to send her videos of David Letterman, she misses her dog, all she wants to do in Benares is sunbathe and get a great tan,” she says with derision.
But among all the expats, Samar is most attracted to the beautiful Catherine, a young Frenchwoman rebelling against her wealthy parents. Her Indian boyfriend Anand, who comes from a struggling family, is trophy of sorts. She thinks he is the next Ravi Shankar, and the couple pins their hopes on the concerts he will give and the CDs he will record in France. Samar drifts into their orbit, dropping by their humble quarters to listen to their daily dramas and explore the skewed dynamics of their relationship.
In contrast, Samar also befriends Rajesh, a fading campus radical who owns guns, recites Urdu poetry, has some kind of connection to the student unrest, and has never traveled or “met a white person.” Samar lends this would-be student leader Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, and in return, Rajesh offers support, as he does for other Brahmin students from rural districts. “If anyone bothers you, let me know and I’ll fix the bastard,” the budding enforcer says.
The two cultures that divide Samar finally collide when Catherine and he take a trip to the Himalayas, the traditional spiritual retreat for his family’s men. They find themselves drawn inexorably together as the inhabitants of their circle begin to pack up and move apart.
Throughout the novel, Mishra plays on both definitions of “romance.” Samar’s view of the backpackers and spiritual seekers that travel to India—which is criticized in books such as Alex Garland’s The Beach—is here infused with romanticism and fondness. But the author also sees them as 20th-century descendents of 18th-century Romantic artistic icons such as Byron, Wordsworth and Shelley.
The spirit of the original Romantics also permeates this novel and that may be both its curse and crowning glory. The pace of Mishra’s elegiac, spare prose is as gentle and leisurely as a boat ride, propelled by human hands along the Ganges. And it feels like a rarity in these times, when fiction and nonfiction alike are edited for speed and efficiency. In the process, Mishra succeeds in painting a beautifully detailed landscape of a place and a portrait of people that others, such as Garland, might view with less subtlety. In spite of these scenes, Mishra also gives the reader the impression that he tells more than he shows.
The book is light on dialog and heavy on Samar’s thought processes and flickers of emotion. Nonetheless this sentimental education will eventually win over an equally romantic-minded reader with its dreamy yet carefully wrought tale of West-obsessed Indian characters who see European literature and culture as a locus of desire and of the Westerners who arrive, ready to pack spiritual enlightenment into their luggage along with their other tourist trinkets.