“An Unremembered Time”: Secular Criticism in Pankaj Mishra's The Romantics
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".