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.