SPECIAL ARTICLE may 1, 2021 vol lVi no 18 EPW Economic & Political Weekly 36 Past Continuous K M Munshi, Gujarat and the Patan Trilogy Rita Kothari, Abhijit Kothari In the early 20th century, when K M Munshi was making a name for himself in the literary and cultural sphere of Gujarat, he was both intervening in and departing from the past. Curating elements of the past that suited his equally curated modernity, Munshi exemplifies many connections that become evident of Gujarat in the subsequent years. In this paper, we ask: “What was Munshi’s past?” In other words, whom was he responding to from the 19th century? The period of our inquiry in Munshi’s life is the one that witnessed the famous Patan trilogy. The questions are situated in both cultural history and literature. The authors thank Dilip Menon for his feedback on an earlier version of this paper. His suggestion regarding “tradition” has informed the arguments. Rita Kothari (rita.kothari@ashoka.edu.in) teaches at Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana. Abhijit Kothari (atkothari@gmail.com) is a visiting faculty at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad University, and runs his own business. This (Aryan) culture, however, is to be found in the sense of continuity; in the consciousness of Indian unity, in the permanent values in which the Indians have always seen the fulfilment of life; in the ethical and idealistic absolutes which have moulded the Indian outlook on the eternal questions: What Is life? What is its purpose and end? —Munshi (1942: 179) “ I knew I had crossed a threshold.” A young K M Munshi said this to himself when he walked out of a meeting amid applause following a roaring speech he had made. The speech was in English. The meeting was one where Munshi questioned if all young generations were obliged to take eve- rything Govardhanram Tripathi said as gospel truth. Tripathi was the most acclaimed and read novelist of his time. He had, by then, written the well-known novel Saraswatichandra that had inspired the lives of many young people in Gujarat. We will come back to this moment later. As of now, it is enough to mention that a new and impatient note was injected in the early 20th century. It had complex elements, rebellious but also continuous with a legacy. Munshi would not be departing from the past fully, but curating it. He would respond to the present on its terms where some issues are concerned, but also by exalting it as an heir to his curated past. Instead of asking what exactly Munshi was doing—a question that can only be a leading one and determining its answers in reductive ways— we have chosen to ask what was Munshi’s past. In this paper, we situate a young Munshi who inherited voices from the 19th century—both strident and muffled—in the public sphere of Gujarat. 1 We ask what he might be reading, both in English and Gujarati, and responding to. Who did he consider respectable predecessors of thought and literature? We also turn to the Patan trilogy, the magnum opus Munshi produced in the early decades of the 20th century. We invite the readers to join us in this exploration of a figure that is remembered as an iconoclast among some readers in Gujarat, and has gained infamy as a precursor of Hindutva among some outside Gujarat. How might we see Munshi as a negotiator even when he campaigned? Was this a negotiation with modernity? We may well replace the word modernity with tradition here, thereby overturning the binary pair or a privi- leging of one over the other. In his attempt to understand social consciousness in colonial India, Sudhir Chandra (2014: 1) reminds us that “historiography tends to highlight change, for it is drawn by the logic of con- ventional conceptions to those aspects of humans-in-society that reflect movement.” This process, he continues, engenders