Unlikely connections in Benaras

If fiction holds a mirror to the shifting sands of time, 'The Romantics' does it with admirable delicacy 25 years on

- Somak Ghoshal

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 humor and insight, it was ahead of its time in its aspirations. Its subtle, stylized, 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 mold 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-liberalization 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. 25 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.

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