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Finding the Epic Center
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19190 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1991 |
4,192 Words |
| Author
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Uma Parameswaran
Uma Parameswaran teaches English at the University of
Winnipeg
and is author of A Study of Representative Indo-English
Novelists (1976), The Perforated Sheet: Essays on Salman
Rushdie's Art (1988), Trishanku (poems, 1989), and a play,
Rootless but Green Are the Boulevard Trees, (1987). |
The last decade has witnessed an efflorescence of English writing in India: Upamanyu Chatterji, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, and now Shashi Tharoor. Each has burst into international review columns, and it is too early to know how long they will stay in popular consciousness. The appreciation of Tharoor's Great Indian Novel depends on three factors, each of which could be an insurmountable hurdle for the average American reader: an unfamiliar use of the novel form that does not conform to the usual expectations, an expertise or interest in modern Indian history, and familiarity with the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata.
The television and movie industries have helped lay the groundwork. Richard Attenborough's Gandhi and Peter Brook's Mahabharata have given us the highlights of modern Indian history and of the epic, respectively. While the discerning critic might have problems with the directors' imprint on both--especially Peter Brook's Africanization of the Indian epic through his choice of music, setting, and costume in what may be an effort to universalize it--familiarity with these two productions certainly would help in the appreciation of Tharoor's novel.
Tharoor's literary ancestry
There is a current tendency to date all contemporary Indo-English fiction from A.M.C. (the year of Midnight's Children) as though all roads lead back to Salman Rushdie. Tharoor's Great Indian Novel so effectively echoes the rambunctious humor and epic sweep of Rushdie's novels that comparisons are inevitable in this case. However, while there is no denying that Rushdie changed the horizon of Indo-English writing by invigorating it, it is appropriate, as necessary, to consider a panoramic view of the literary landscape of modern English writing in India, especially with reference to the fictionalization of history and the Indianization of the English language. Tharoor, in turn, has added yet another dimension to the linguistic acrobatics that Rushdie developed as his hallmark. More important, he brings to the Western literary landscape a new dimension of mythological archetypes and thus enlarges our literary vocabulary to include not only the Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian but the Hindu as well. Tharoor is heir to a tradition that started long before Rushdie took the world by storm in 1981 (and the storm took Rushdie's world in 1989).
Every Indo-English writer inherits from several sources: the Western literary tradition, his Indo-English predecessors, and the classical and regional literature of
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