|
|
Mukul Kesavan, in Looking through Glass, has his contemporary protagonist dropped back into the Quit India struggles of 1942. He shows how revolutionary forces strive to break free of history in order to start anew, but in doing so invoke historical origins.
Amitav Ghosh, in The Circle of Reason, shows how this antihistoricist historicising has its own history, nationalist zeal in Bengal being grounded in the rationalism of the French Revolution and its own attempt to reset the clock of history.
Obviously, although Kesavan can depict with some irreverence the coincidences, posturings, and foolhardiness behind the heroic legends of nationalist struggle (notably in the chaotic attack on a country police outpost by local peasants and students of the Benaras Hindu University that follows the previously cited speech), he still has to revisit his grandmother’s era because it is not yet over, just as his “Old School” turns out to be merely a modern veneer on an older colonial hotel: “One building with two histories…creating practical difficulties for memory and nostalgia” (168).
Kesavan’s narrator tells the family that takes him in an astounding story and then reflects,