Shadows across the Playing Field tells the story of the turbulent cricketing relations between India and Pakistan through the eyes of two men – Shashi Tharoor and Shaharyar Khan – who bring to the task not only great love of the game but also deep knowledge of subcontinental politics and diplomacy.
Shashi Tharoor, a former UN Under-Secretary-General and man of letters, is a passionate outsider, whose comprehensive, entertaining and hard-hitting analysis of sixty years of cricketing history displays a Nehruvian commitment to secular values, which rejects sectarianism in sport in either country. Shaharyar Khan, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, is very much the insider, who writes compellingly of his pivotal role as team manager and then chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Control Board at a time when cricket was in the forefront of détente between the two countries. By the time the book was published Shashi Tharoor had won the election from the Thiruvanathapuram Constituency and is now a member of Parliament and Minister of State for External Affairs.

In their essays, the two authors trace the growing popularisation of cricket from the days of the Bombay Pentangular to the Indian Premier League. They show how politics and cricket became intertwined and assess the impact it has had on the game. But above all the book is a celebration of the talent of the many great cricketers who have captivated audiences on both sides of the border. If politics and terrorism can at times stop play, the authors believe that cricket is also a force for peace and they look forward to more normal times and more healthy competition.

Paperback: 498 pages
Publisher: Arcade Publishing (October 15, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1559708948
ISBN-13: 978-1559708944

Over the past 25 years, India has moved from a largely impoverished, underdeveloped country to an innovative, fast-changing society. This entertaining and informative book shows how and why.

Interest in India has never been greater. Here Shashi Tharoor, one of the subcontinent’s most respected writers and diplomats, offers precious insights into this complex, multifaceted land, which despite its dazzling diversity of languages, customs, and cultures remains—more than 60 years after its founding—the world’s largest democracy. He describes the vast changes that have transformed this once sleeping giant into a world leader in science and technology, a nation once poverty-stricken that now boasts a middle class of over 300 million people—as large as the entire population of the United States! Artfully combining hard facts and statistics with opinion and observation, Tharoor discusses the strengths and weaknesses of his rapidly evolving homeland in five areas—politics, economics, culture, society, and sports—and takes a fresh look at the world’s second most populous country.

Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Arcade Publishing (July 11, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1559707577
ISBN-13: 978-1559707572

Supremely personal, yet always probing and analytical, this brilliant collection of essays is part memoir, part literary criticism.

“A fluid and powerful writer, one of the best in a generation of Indian authors” (New York Times Book Review), Shashi Tharoor, the acclaimed author of six books, all published by Arcade, is once again at his provocative best.

In the title piece, we learn what Iraqis go through in their beleaguered land merely to get hold of a book, and how selling books from their own libraries on the street helps some put bread on the table. Tharoor reminisces about growing up with books in India and discusses the importance of the Mahabharata in Indian life and history. There is also a poignant homage to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, whose home was raided by the oppressive military regime while he lay on his deathbed, and who famously said: “There is only one thing of danger for you here—my poetry!” Pondering world affairs, Tharoor declares that “the defining features of today’s world are the relentless forces of globalization—the same forces used by the terrorists in their macabre dance of death and destruction.” Tharoor’s astute views on Salman Rushdie, India’s love for P. G.Wodehouse, Rudyard Kipling, Aleksandr Pushkin, John le Carré, V. S. Naipaul, and Winston Churchill make for fascinating reading. His insightful takes on Hollywood and Bollywood will intrigue even the most demanding cinephile. Together, these 39 pieces reveal the inner workings of one of today’s most eclectic writers.

Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Arcade Publishing; 1 edition (November 14, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 155970697X
ISBN-13: 978-1559706971

An incisive new biography of the great secularist who—alongside his spiritual father, Mahatma Gandhi—led the movement for India’s independence from British rule and ushered his newly independent country into the modern world.

The man who would one day help topple British rule and become India’s first prime minister started out as a surprisingly unremarkable student. Born into a wealthy, politically influential Indian family in the waning years of the Raj, Jawaharlal Nehru was raised on Western secularism and the humanist ideas of the Enlightenment under his father’s careful guidance. Once he met Gandhi in 1916, Nehru threw himself into the nonviolent struggle for India’s independence, a struggle that wasn’t won until 1947. India had found a perfect political compliment to her more spiritual advocate, but neither Nehru nor Gandhi could prevent the horrific price for independence: Partition.

In this fascinating biography, Tharoor, author of India: From Midnight to the Millennium,casts an unflinching eye on Nehru’s heroic efforts for, and stewardship of, independent India and gives us a careful appraisal of his legacy to the world.

Hardcover: 272 pages
Publisher: Arcade Publishing; 1st edition (September 10, 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1559706058
ISBN-13: 978-1559706056

A powerful novel–set in and around a riot in India in 1989–about love hate, cultural collision, religious fanaticism, the ownership of history, and the impossibility of knowing the truth by the award-winning author of The Great Indian Novel.

Who killed twenty-four-year-old Priscilla Hart? And why would anyone want to murder this highly motivated, idealistic American student who had come to India to volunteer in women’s health programs? Had her work make a killer out of an enraged husband? Or was her death the result of a xenophobic attack? Was she involved in an indiscriminate love affair that had spun out of control? Had a disgruntled, deeply jealous colleague been pushed to the edge? Or was she simply the innocent victim of a riot that had exploded in that fateful year of 1989 between Hindus and Muslims?

In his long-awaited new novel, Shashi Tharoor, the acclaimed author of The Great Indian Novel and Show Business,whom the Independent(London) called “one of the finest novelists writing in English today,” once again triumphs. Experimenting masterfully with narrative form, he chronicles the mystery of Priscilla Hart’s death through the often contradictory accounts of a dozen or more characters, all of whom relate their own versions of the events surrounding her killing. Like his two previous novels, Riot probes and reveals the richness of India, and is at once about love, hate, cultural collision, the ownership of history, religious fanaticism, and the impossibility of knowing the truth.

In plot, style, and characterization, Shashi Tharoor’s latest novel is a brilliant tour de force.

Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Arcade Publishing; 1st edition (August 15, 1997)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1559703849
ISBN-13: 978-1559703840

One of the best in a generation of Indian authors shows how the challenges facing the world’s largest and most diverse democracy will also affect America and the West in the 21st century—now available in paperback, with a new preface by the author.

At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, a new nation was born. It has 17 major languages and 22,000 distinct dialects. It has over a billion individuals of every ethnic extraction known to humanity. It has a population that is 32 percent illiterate, but also one of the world’s largest pools of trained scientists and engineers. Its ageless civilization is the birthplace of four major religions, a dozen different traditions of classical dance, and three hundred ways of cooking a potato.

Shashi Tharoor’s India is a fascinating portrait of one of the world’s most interesting countries — its politics, its mentality, and its cultural riches. But it is also an eloquent argument for the importance of India to the future of America and the industrialized world. With the energy and erudition that distinguished his prize-winning novels, Shashi Tharoor points out that Indians account for a sixth of the world’s population and their choices will resonate throughout the globe. He deals with this vast theme in a work of remarkable depth and startling originality, combining elements of political scholarship, personal reflection, memoir, fiction, and polemic, all illuminated in vivid and compelling prose.

Paperback: 416 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial (September 1, 1998)
Language: English, German and Malayalam
ISBN-10: 0060977531
ISBN-13: 978-0060977535

Amazon.com Review

Author Shashi Tharoor has spent half of his life outside of India, yet his position as a “NRI” (Non-resident Indian) has given him the distance and perspective necessary to produce India: From Midnight to the Millennium, an in-depth critique of the country’s first fifty years of independence. Tharoor, currently executive assistant to the secretary general of the United Nations, is known for both his fiction (The Great Indian Novel, Show Business) and his journalism; in this effort, he blends fine prose with a reporter’s talent for analysis, resulting in a skillful examination of some of the greatest challenges India has faced over the past five decades, as well as what lies ahead for the nation.

In chapters devoted to such diverse topics as caste, the free-for-all nature of Indian democracy, the troubled legacy of Indira Gandhi, and the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, Tharoor both explicates the history of India since independence and attempts to define what makes India one country and Indians of various ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds one nationality. He is forthright in his discussion of the sectarian violence that has ripped through the country, the corruption that is rife throughout the ranks of the Indian civil service, and the difficulties that face a nation in which 48 percent of the population remains illiterate. Yet Shashi Tharoor writes of these problems with a sense of optimism about the future, confident in the ability of his countrymen to find solutions within a democratic political system. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Arcade Publishing; 1st North American Ed edition (September 20, 1993)
Language: English (also available in Italian)
ISBN-10: 1559702273
ISBN-13: 978-1559702270

A rollicking novel about the razzle-dazzle of the Hindi film industry, know as Bollywood. “Exuberant and clever . . . both affectionately and fiercely done.”–New York Times Books ReviewNotable book of the year

This triumphant novel about the razzle-dazzle Hindi film industry confirms Shashi Tharoor’s reputation as one of India’s most important voices and a writer of world stature. His hero–or antihero–is Ashok Banjara, one of Bollywood’s mega-movie stars, a man of great ambition and dubious morals. With irrepressible charm and a genius for staure, Tharoor protrays the film world, with all its Hollywoodesque glitz and glamour, egos and double standards, as a metaphor for modern society. On-screen fiction and offscreen reality intertwine seamlessly to weave a tapestry of power and priveiledge, seduction and betrayal, politics and intrigue, that is at once colorful, entertaining, and deadly serious.

Hardcover: 175 pages
Publisher: Arcade Publishing (June 25, 1993)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1559702257
ISBN-13: 978-1559702256

This touching and funny collection of stories showcases Tharoor’s daunting literary acumen, as well as the keen sensitivity that informs his ability to write profoundly and entertainingly on themes ranging from family conflict to death.

In the title story — written in a lonely hotel room in Geneva soon after the author began his work with the United Nations — a young Indian orphan is on his way to visit America for the first time, and his anguish and longings in the airplane seem hardly different from those of any American child. Tharoor’s admiration for P.G. Wodehouse makes “How Bobby Chatterjee Turned to Drink” a delightful act of homage, while “The Temple Thief,” “The Simple Man,” and “The Political Murder” bring to mind O’Henry and Maupassant. His three college stories, “Friends,” “The Pyre,” and “The Professor’s Daughter,” are full of youthful high jinks, naïve infatuations, and ingenious word play, and “The Solitude of the Short-Story Writer” explores a writer’s conflicted relationship with his psychiatrist and his work in the manner of Woody Allen. In the duet “The Village Girl” and “City Girl” the author provides an experiment in perspective: the twin stories begin exactly the same except for the gender of the protagonist and then evolve in a radically different way. Together, the fifteen stories gathered here show a major writer in the making.

Paperback: 432 pages
Publisher: Arcade Publishing (April 1993)
Language: English (also available in German and French)
ISBN-10: 1559701943
ISBN-13: 978-1559701945

In this award-winning novel, Tharoor has masterfully recast the two-thousand-year-old epic, The Mahabharata,with fictional but highly recognizable events and characters from twentieth-century Indian politics.

Nothing is sacred in this deliciously irreverent, witty, and deeply intelligent retelling of modern Indian history and the ancient Indian epic the Mahabharata. Inspired by the question “What would a modern-day epic say about India and the great events of this century?,” Shashi Tharoor has masterfully recast the two-thousand-year-old myth with fictional–but highly recognizable–events and characters from twentieth-century Indian politics. His novel is a dazzling tapestry of prose and verse that satirically, but also poignantly, chronicles the struggle for Indian freedom and independence.

The Great Indian Novel takes its name from the Mahabharata,which (loosely translated) means “Great India.” As in the original, the story is told by the venerable, omniscient Ved Vyas. Restless in his retirement and anything but retiring, this cantankerous old politician dictates his singular memoirs to a loyal scribe, the elephantine Ganapathi. Although this story will appeal to those who know little or nothing about India, many will recognize characters and events that have visible counterparts in real life: from the nationalist Mahaguru Ganga and the effete Lord Drewpad to the Massacre at Bibigarh Gardens, the Great Mango March in protest of the British Mango Tax, and the birth of Indian democracy as a result of the passionate coupling of a blind nationalist and a British vicereine.

Alternately outrageous and instructive, hilarious and moving, The Great Indian Novel tells the story of a nation riddled with contradictions that are reflected in the book itself, as prose jostles with poetry, precept with pun, comedy with tragedy. Through it all runs a vision of India–an India whose greatness emerges from the fusion of its myths with the aspirations of its history.

As the author muses, The Great Indian Novel may well not be great, or authentically Indian, or even, strictly speaking, a novel. But the critics agree that it is a remarkable creative achievement, an Iliad of independent India that will provoke, delight, and perhaps offend but that will surely leave no reader indifferent.