“An Unremembered Time”: Secular Criticism in Pankaj Mishra's The Romantics

Abstract

In Pankaj Mishra's novel, The Romantics, Samar writes about his struggle to reconcile diverse cultural influences in his private life with a political context increasingly defined by a narrow definition of Hindu identity during the late 1980s and early 1990s in India. While he characterizes India's political rhetoric as dominated by notions of cultural purity and religious orthodoxy, my essay argues that the novel's setting and historical context is rife with symbols of India's inter-cultural and hybrid past that Samar refers to as emerging out of “an unremembered time”. I argue that Edward Said's notion of “secular criticism”, with its emphasis on exilic consciousness, is a particularly apt way of unpacking the novel's examination of majoritarianism through ironic representations of Hindu nationalism, Indo-Saracenic architecture and the history of the founding of Benares Hindu University. This paper tracks how Samar's fictional memoir is marked by a growing unease with uneven effects of modernity on Indian society in the midst of escalating sectarian violence in the last decade of the twentieth century.