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Introduction: Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel
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19181 |
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BOOK WORLD
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7 / 1991 |
425 Words |
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To readers unfamiliar with Hinduism and the recent history of the subcontinent, Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel may seem on first glance a great Indian puzzle: puns, metaphors, and political allusions abound in this apparent allegory of modern Indian politics. But readers on both sides of the Atlantic have found the award-winning novel, excerpted in the following pages, well worth the effort, both for its clever wordplay and its earnest cautionary tale about the temptations of political power.
It helps to know, of course, something about the novel's subtext, the Mahabharata, an epic as familiar to Hindus as the Old Testament is to Westerners. The two thousand year old Mahabharata is one of two major Indian epics, valued for its high literary merit and its religious inspiration. It contains legendary and didactic material built around a central heroic narrative, the struggle for supremacy between two related families, the Kauravas and the Pandavas. In the epic, Dhritarashtra, the elder of two princes, was passed over as king on his father's death, in favor of his brother Pandu. Dhritarashtra later obtained power when Pandu renounced the throne to become a religious hermit. The sons of Pandu, the five Pandavas, grew up in court along with the sons of Dhritarashtra, the Kauravas. Rivalry and jealousy, however, forced the Pandavas to leave the kingdom on their father's death. During their exile, the five jointly married Draupadi, and met their friend Krishna, who remained their adviser and companion thereafter.
Tharoor's adaptation of the epic sagely applies some of the Mahabharata's spiritual insights to the ebb and flow of Indian politics. By novel's end, every character has fulfilled his appointed destiny, and even villains evince some goodness. It suggests that democracy will flourish in India--and indeed anywhere else--so long as political leaders do not overlook the divine spark in even their bitterest rivals.
In the following excerpt, narrated by the aged sage Ved Vyas, we may infer that India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, is the figure represented by Dhritarashtra. Draupadi may be understood to be Tharoor's metaphor for Indian democracy at its best. Other equivalents are discussed in three commentaries following the excerpt. Novelist Clark Blaise discusses the place of Tharoor among several other new writers in English from India (p.342). Literary critic Uma Parameswaran examines in detail how the epic informs Tharoor's ideas about the survival of Indian democracy in the face of adversity (p.350). Finally, WORLD & I editor Doug Burton queries Tharoor about his literary motivations in an
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