|
|
METRO TODAY | DAILY NEWS | ASTROLOGY | ARCHIVES | INDIA TODAY | HOME |
|
|
Steady
Drift The author explores the vacuity in a young man's life. By Ira Pande THE ROMANTICS Pankaj Mishra's debut novel is drawn round a young Brahmin boy, Samar, who goes to Benares for his studies after the death of his mother and his father's retirement to the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry. A lonely, silent boy, he shuttles between the university library and his digs until he meets Miss West, and older English woman. She introduces him to the joys of western classical music and a world beyond his own tight cocoon of solitude. Through her he meets the lovely Catherine and falls in love. A trip to the hills and a night of passion precede his loss of innocence. Samar leaves Benares and returns, now a young man, to find the old world vanished and a lumpen bunch of blacks in control of all his beloved and familiar landmarks. Although Mishra's evocative and dreamy prose captures individual moods and moments, his characters are isolated studies and never quite part of a cohesive universe, so that The Romantics appears more like an exercise in writing a romantic novel without actually being one. In fact, Benares itself, that great gene pool of Brahmin ancestry, comes across as a still-life picture, perfect in the details but dead as a city. Mishra draws some memorable vignettes of the city, yet alongside these evocative pictures are the shamefully inadequate passages that recreate Samar's night of epiphany with Catherine. Not only does their gaucheness grate, it is difficult to understand how any novel called The Romantics can be so completely devoid of passion. All this leads one to the conclusion that at best the novel is Mishra's personal statement on the vacuity in the life of a young man in possession of a good mind but who has an unclear notion of life. Samar's connections with the world around him are tenuous and unsure. So, unlike his father, he is unable to participate in "the serenity of the old Brahmin world" and feels that his own life had "drifted apart... it had attached itself to another constellation of desires and reverences". Samar is thus seduced, not by Catherine but by his own mind that propels him to reach out to things that are not for him. His fastidious avoidance of the lumpen Rajesh and the student politics of his time, his aloofness from him not so much an outsider as an arrogant prick who deserves to be rejected by the white memsahibs who enchant him so. Ironically, Mishra's problem seems to stem from the fact that he is a voracious and serious reader. Like all dedicated bookworms, he is haunted by the memories of his favourites that he has read over and over again. Thus the setting of Benares and the ghats, the loneliness of an only child cast off by a father who has renounced the world, reminds one strongly of Satyajit Ray's Aparajito. There is a touch of Forster in the Englishwoman Miss West who initiates Samar into a world beyond his own, there is Turgenev in Samar's hopeless love for Catherine and there is Waugh's Brideshead Revisited in the gentle, nostalgic tones. But above all there is Edmund Wilson's exposition of Flaubert's Sentimental Education whose protagonist, Frederic Moreau, like Mishra's Samar, "seemed to mirror my own self-image with his large, passionate, but imprecise longings, his indecisiveness, his aimlessness, his self-contempt..." One wonders whether this is Samar on himself or Mishra on himself or Mishra on Samar. Perhaps Mishra should stick to non-fiction after all. NEW RELEASES Eaten by the Japanese Personal Finance A Nation in Turmoil Power through People and Principles Yoga for Health |
||||
| Top |
 BUSINESS TODAY | INDIA TODAY PLUS | COMPUTERS TODAY Write to us | Subscriptions | Advertise with
us |
