In Pankaj Mishra's debut novel, The Romantics, the young narrator, Samar, receives a telegram: your father seriously ill. come soon. His thoughts, however, are elsewhere. He has been looking forward to hearing from his friend Catherine, a French visitor to India, with whom he has had his first sexual, perhaps even emotional, experience.

Mishra's novel is based, for the most part, in Benares on the banks of the river Ganges. Samar is a bookish Brahman, a self-conscious provincial living alone and attempting to acquire an education. His friendship with two European women--apart from Catherine, there is Samar's neighbor who is literally called Miss West--sets into process a drama of discovery and change.

A few years ago, in Mishra's well-received travelogue, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, we read of a woman in Benares named Sarah, soon bound for study in Chicago. She told Mishra: "I haven't met a single young white woman in Benares who has not been molested.... The difference between a man's and a woman's experience of Benares is the difference between day and night." In The Romantics, neither Miss West nor Catherine speaks of such threat or fear. There is no evocation either of what Salman Rushdie has called "white society's fear of the darkie." As the novel is set in the eighties, before the new vulgarity had taken root, the romance in its pages comes without that particular pain that Sarah spoke of so bitterly. Hence also, perhaps, the title.

The meeting of the East and the West as a narrative of romance is not new territory: E.M. Forster, and lesser lights like M.M. Kaye and Paul Scott, have also presented the colonial encounter as a romance, at times failed, at other times forced. More important, writers from the other side of the colonial divide have come to prominence in recent decades through their own, perhaps more contested, portrayals. Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North was an early classic of this genre; Assia Djebar's Fantasia is a complex, more contemporary, exploration of love and betrayal in the engagement of East and West.

Mishra's novel inscribes its difference less in relationship to those postcolonial writers than it does with respect to recent Indian fiction in English. If much of cosmopolitan Indian writing has valorized the immigrant and the foreign land, then The Romantics is a celebration of the home and its forgotten world. What is remarkable is that this is unlike the nostalgic home of much of expatriate Indian writing. Instead of the bustling, bursting metropolis, we have the carefully drawn pictures of a few linked lives in India's small towns.

Mishra's writing is appealing because even in a small-town milieu you find the details of a complex dialogue with the West. The deliberate pursuit of Western literature by a provincial student, carrying from his past the influences of his fast-eroding Brahmanic world, is only one of those details, but it is among the richest and most rewarding. To read Mishra on that theme, as with Naipaul, who is a clear influence here, means confronting the vivid energies of an imagination that is often shut off from the world but never closed to it.

This is the book's real romance. Samar's reading of Western literature opens a new world to him. Thus, it comes to be that Flaubert's Sentimental Education--"an account of an ambitious provincial's tryst with metropolitan glamor and disillusion"--offers satisfaction to our protagonist. More strikingly, the story also touches Samar's friend Rajesh, a well-read Brahman who has joined the ranks of the lumpen. We are with Samar and Rajesh inside a grimy second-class compartment of a train running on a narrow-gauge line between Benares and Allahabad, and Rajesh says about Flaubert's book: "It's the story of my life." Years later Samar learns that Rajesh is a contract killer. Rajesh writes him a letter--as direct, honest and disillusioned a testament as any--and he quotes Faiz: "This is not that long-looked-for break of day/Not that clear dawn in quest of which those comrades/set out."

When the new comes bursting in, the novel comes to an end. Samar was happy with Flaubert, but he won't accept satellite TV. Mishra, mature about the drama of the self, remains almost quiescent about the new capitalism. The Brechtian maxim--"Do not build on the good old days, but on the bad new ones"--is not heeded here. The literary humanism that binds this novel cannot go beyond expressing dismay at the new Benares, with its crowd of other tourists, some from the West and others from India's newly minted middle class, flocking to the new, concrete-and-glass hotels. Samar loses his passion for literature and retreats from the world. Rajesh is on the run. Catherine is gone and Miss West is leaving behind the India of free-market reforms.

Forget Flaubert. Make way for World Bank Lit.

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