The Great Indian Novel - Softcover

Tharoor, Shashi

3.89

6,558 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1559701943 ISBN 13: 9781559701945

Publisher: Arcade Publishing, 1993

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In this widely acclaimed novel, Shashi Tharoor has masterfully recast the two-thousand-year-old epic "The Mahabharata" with fictionalized - but highly recognizable - events and characters from twentieth-century Indian politics. Blending history and myth to chronicle the Indian struggle for freedom and independence, Tharoor directs his hilarious and often outrageous satire as much against Indian foibles and failings as against the bumblings of the British rulers. Despite its regional setting, this work can be enjoyed by readers unfamiliar with Indian history.

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About the Author:

Shashi Tharoor was born in London and brought up in Bombay and Calcutta. A winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, he is the interim head of the Department of Public Information of the United Nations.

From Publishers Weekly:

The delightfully suspect and satirical tone of Tharoor's title informs and enlivens his monumental tale. In an opening disclaimer, the author cites the Mahabharata , an ancient Hindu epic, as the source of his inspiration. The story he retells, however, is also a thinly veiled account of the people and events that shaped India during the struggle for independence from British rule. Tharoor recasts these in a mythological, fictive realm, skillfully interweaving elements of traditional Eastern and Western literature. The epic, the sonnet, the novel and the folk tale all help to shape the narrative, just as history and myth, dream and reality intertwine in every chapter, calling into question the validity of categories. "One must be wary of history by anecdote," warns the narrator; one must be wary of "history" itself, suggests Tharoor. Despite his stereotypical treatment of British and Indian characters, he animates history with the imagination of an artist and the philosophy of a sage. Throughout, Tharoor appropriates titles, phrases and figures from the work of a pantheon of "first-world" writers, ranging from E. M. Forster and Rudyard Kipling to Ernest Hemingway and Arthur Koestler (and even including his contemporary Salman Rushdie)--a subtle but potent reversal of the traditional tide of cultural colonialism.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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