This is both how a book review should NOT be written and glimpses into the genius of a man.He might have twittered away his ministry but I do have a faith that he will rebound, true to his St. Stephen Campaigning Slogan "Shashi Tharoor, Jeetega Jaroor"!
He dedicates the book to his two sons and one "Tilottama", arguably his first wife. I hope I could do somehting similar for my own pretty Bimbo. But let me tell you Bimmo, it shakes me with shivers thinking that a man as witty and wise as Mr. Tharoor who writes so emphatically of Indian culture, it's diversity and its ability to hold the opposites, couldn't save his first marriage.And that despite his two sons. And no one can blame me poking my nose in authors' personal life because once in him I had begun to find a person I would like to become.
During 2006 PAN-IIT global alumni meet after his speech which was more a reproduction of his writings from his 1997 book he was abandoned to a corner. IITians at such meets do cocoon themselves gloating mostly on self praise if not in never ending nostalgia. It took me almost half an hour to shake myself from disbelief and awe to walk upto him, to word my muddled thoughts into few straight questions of which later I could ask none.I could just compliment him on his masterpiece. He smiled and signed a piece of paper advising me to read more. I have misplaced that piece of paper now but I am sure to meet him sometime again... after I have read more..:))
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
“They tell me India is an underdeveloped country. They attend seminars, appear on television, even come to see me, creasing their high hundred rupee suits and clutching their moulded plastic briefcases, to announce in tones of infinite understanding that India has yet to develop. Stuff and nonsense of course. These are the kind of fellows who couldn’t tell their kundalini from a decomposing earthworm, and I don’t hesitate to tell them so. I tell them they have no knowledge of history and even less of their own heritage.I tell them that if they would only read the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, study the golden age of the Mauryas and the Guptas and even of those Muslim chaps the Mughals, they would realize that India is not an underdeveloped country but a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.”(First Book,1)
This is how Shashi Tharoor begins his ‘The Great Indian Novel’. He begins by not only attacking the popular perception of India as underdeveloped country but also traces its roots in the ignorance of the populace about their own roots. Not surprisingly, in the subsequent pages which serve as eclectic mixture of messages he marries two histories – a real and a mythical -- to hatch his story. His characters whose origins bear more resemblance to the first century epic Mahabharat, live in the times and represent leaders more identifiable with the last century. It must have been an arduous task to spin a story seeing metaphors stitching two patches separated two thousand years away. But surprisingly, he does it very well and provokes one to look with a new perspective at a new nation muddling through present into future with its ethos inscribed in age old tales told and retold a countless times in countless ways.
Traditionally, the age old tale of Mahabharat is ascribed to Maha Rishi Ved Vyas who is said to have narrated the epic to Lord Ganesh of Hindu mythology. In Tharoor’s novel we have an omnipresent narrator named VVji who employs an elephantine scribe Ganapathi. Ganapathi, under a contract has to understand each word before writing and hence he is the first person to listen and absorb the twice-born tale from VVji. And VVji when he sets out to straighten Ganapathi’s ‘frowns on crown’ and ‘furrows on brows’ after a reckless bout of humor or after picking few of history’s rumors is actually communicating in the first person with the reader. This narrative structure not only draws reader into the story but also helps author to be tactfully didactic without boring his readers.
“How, you may well ask, and I shall tell you. But not just yet, my impatient amanuensis. As the Bengalis say when offered cod, we still have other fish to fry.”(Second Book,12)
“How shall I tell it, Ganpathi? It is such a long story, an epic in itself, and we have so much else to describe. Shall I tell of the strange weapon of disobedience, which Ganga, with all his experience of insisting upon obedience and obtaining it towards himself, developed into an arm of moral war against the foreigner?” ( Second Book,11)
Gangaji or Ganga Datta is the most dominant character of the novel. Like Bhisma of Mahabharat he renounces the throne and vows celibacy but still he is at the centre of the politics and most concerned with the procreation of progeny that populates the story. Gangaji later grows into a spiritual leader just as pale and bald as Gandhiji. While Tharoor humors Gangaji’s unusual ways of preparing his own enema and cleaning his own toilet he also admires at length the unusual results yielded by his unusual resolve in his unusual philosophy.
“That is where Ganga spoke for the genius of a nation; we Indians have a great talent for deriving positives from negatives. Non-violence, non-cooperation, non-alignment, all mean more, than the concepts they negate.” (Second Book, 11)
Tharoor successfully sketches the Gandhian philosophy in his renderings of Mahatma’s movements against British for rural indigo-farmers of Motihari and suburban jute-factory workers of Budge Budge in two chapters aptly titled ‘The Duel With the Crown’ and ‘The Powers of Silence’. Gandhiji’s call to follow the dictates of conscience rather the laws of British and to except punishment silently to prove the strength of ones convictions are further illustrated in a hilarious satire in chapter ‘Forbidden Fruit” where ‘The Mango March’ mimics ‘The Dandi March’.
The chapter titles of the novel also bear resemblance to many English writings on India. With titles like ‘Passages Through India’, ‘The Bungle Book’, ‘The Duel With the Crown’, ‘Midnight's Parents’ and ‘The Far Power-Villain’ Tharoor refers to many writers like Forster, Kipling, Paul Scott, Salman Rushdie and M.M. Kaye. Letting loose a rein of cheerful irreverence he also litters his prose with poetry. Particularly for Pandu he writes his longest poem detailing his days before his death caused arguably by a plane crash.
To tell the tale of Pandu
Will not detain us long;
His slogan was a ‘can do!’
And on his lips a song.
‘Away with Tolstoy, Ruskin, Buddha:
Their ideas just make little men littler.
No more “truth force”, only yuddha –
It’s time to learn from that chap Hitler.’
So saying, our angry hero
Became the country’s first Fascist;
Admiring Roma’s latest Nero
He practised how to clench his fist.
(Ninth Book, 50)
Pandu, in the novel, leaves the country for Germany on a path divergent from both the Gangan philosophy spelled by Tharoor in his prose and the events as recorded in the verses of Mahabharat. But inspite of his many liberties with both the histories the author claims his story to be true.
The song I sing is neither verse nor prose.
Can the gardener ask why he is pricked by the rose?
What I tell you is a slender filament,
A rubbing from a colossal monument;
But it is true.
(Eighth Book, 46)
The characters and the places of The Great Indian Novel though are not true in totality to either of history they are nevertheless true in parts to either or sometimes both the histories. Almost everyone eventually dies in the novel and summing the parts of their lifetimes one can tag each character to some symbol or leader of Indian polity. Hence, Pandu whose truth is opposed to Gangaji’s is Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and Dhritarashtra, the blind king who couldn’t see like the rest around him is Nehru, the idealist and a Fabian Socialist. The other important character who has an important role to play to the climax of the novel that apes the Indian Independence Struggle in minute detail is Mohammad Ali Karna, the father of Karnistan (The Hacked Off Land).
It is in this part of the novel till climax that Tharoor sparkles with the brilliance of his insight and narration, sounding most convincing with the precise conformity of his allegory to the history. He uses the skills not only of his career as diplomat but probably also of his stint at St. Stephens as a student of History. In his satire he tries to get inside the heads of the leaders who enacted the great historical drama leading to partition. At one point he writes...
… Where Dhritrashtra learned to brew his own tea in England, Karna acquired taste for Scotch and cocktail sausages. Far from praying five times a day, he prided himself on his scientific and therefore agnostic, cast of mind. His outlook was that of an Englishman of his age and profession: ‘modern’ (to use an adjective that has outlived more changes of connotation than any other in the language), formalist, rational, secular. It was not Islam that separated him from Gangaji, but Hinduism.
In other words, Karna found the Kauravs under Gangaji insufficiently secular, and this made him, paradoxically, more consciously Muslim. Gangaji’s efforts to transcend his Hindu image by stressing the liberalism of his interpretation of it only made the matters worse. When the Mahaguru , in one of his more celebrated pronouncements, declared his faith in all religions with the words, ‘I am a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Zoroastrian, a Jew,’ Karna responded darkly: ‘Only a Hindu could say that’. (Seventh Book, 38)
The other important feature of Shashi Tharoors writing is his hard hitting humor which doesn’t spare the loftiest of figures both mythological and the real. He makes a jest of Lord Mountbatten or Mahatma Gandhi with the same candour as that of Dharmaraj and his Dharma towards the end of his book. And this is one of the reasons why The Great Indian Novel is a successful satire both political and religious.
VVji who has his sources everywhere including the bedroom of the last Viceroy of India, the charming Lord Drewpad, reproduces a conversation between the Lord and the Lady Georgina Drewpad. Lord Drewpad as he trims his moustache, tweezes his eyebrows, files his nails, combs his recalcitrant curls and squints critically at mirror for hours before going to bed says ---
‘I won’t be ruling it, dear, just giving it away,’ her husband replied, patting cologne onto his cheek. ‘And, besides, I think they have chosen me because I am young. We are the glamorous brigade, you see, marching forth to the skirl of bagpipes. They can’t send an old dodderer who would make it look as if we were only leaving India because we haven’t the strength to carry on.’
‘Why are we leaving India, then?’
‘Because we haven’t the strength to carry on.’ (Tenth Book, 62)
Lord and Lady leave India soon after their honeymoon, after their swift cartographers draw mindless lines on maps leaving millions moping across those lines. The lines that extended for miles both on land and in memories that no amount of fiction can ever mop up is completely sidelined in Tharoor’s novel. Instead he focuses on the leaders who faltered at the momentous occasion. Gangaji who dominates throughout the novel fails to dominate when it mattered most and dies when Amba the assassin pumps three bullets in his already broken heart. And then deviating from the history as we know from our text books, Shashi Tharoor writes of the last words that departing Gangaji utters ---
‘I …have … failed,’ he whispered.
And then he was gone, and the light, as Dhritrashtra was to say, went out of our lives.
(Eleventh Book,69)
Dhritrashtra is another important character who rises to prominence after Gangaji’s death for a brief period before his own life ebbs away after the heartbreak. Besides portraying the blind king in grand roles of fathering Draupadi Mokarasi (D. Mokarasi symbolizing democracy) Tharoor also takes a peek at his personal life writing in detail both about his cold relation with his wife Gandhari the Grim and his liaison with the glamorous Georgina Drewpad.
Though the focus of The Great Indian Novel is more on telling the story of modern India, Tharoor doesn’t miss to pick up on the Mahabharat itself at places. One of those places where he diverges from the epic to comply his characters with the modern context and re-invent the age old epic simultaneously concerns Gandhari the Grim.
‘Useful? It is not a wife’s role to be useful.’…. ‘No, my lord, a dharmpatni is not expected to be useful. Her duty is to share the life of her husband, its joys and triumphs and sorrows, to be by his side at all times, and to give him sons.’ A note of steely wistfulness crept into her voice. ‘A hundred sons.’
Dhritrashtra had never known a woman like this in England. He tried to inject a note of playfulness into the conversation. ‘Not a hundred. That would be exhausting.’ (Third Book,14)
So, unlike the Gandhari of the Mahbharat, Tharoor’s Gandhari the Grim bears only one child, a daughter named Priya Duryodhani. Gandhari dies as well, waiting for her husband; her eyes still open behind the blindfold, casting a deep impression on her daughter who later looms large over the entire story entering into a new phase with a new generation of characters.
Tharoor tries his best to record every important political detail of Independent India through his assortment of characters from Mahabharat. However, with the increasing number of characters and increasing complexity and divergence of two histories the author finds it difficult to embrace the enormity of his task and it shows at places.
But, as usual, Ganapathi – you are not strict enough with me – I digress; my mind wanders across this vast expanse of nation like the five heroes whose tale I am trying to relate. Yet we cannot tell it all; we must soar above the mountains and the valleys…
… And occasionally we must swoop down to watch them at closer quarters, as they perform the acts and utter the words that give our geography it’s history. (Fourteenth Book,86)
Similar to the epic Draupadi is married to five husbands, the Pandavs. Yudhistir stands for statesman and in later parts assume the persona of Morarji Desai. Bhim symbolizes Indian Army, Arjun the free press and Nakul and Sahdev who are always spoken of together represent bureaucrats and foreign diplomats respectively. Tharoor wraps up the story of Indian democracy under Priya Duryodhani in a chapter titled “The bungle Book – Or The Reign of Error.’ Author tries to give a glimpse of India from the passages of Pandavs across jungles and villages of the country, where they wander and gather wisdom under their guru Jaiprakash Drona or JD.
Towards the end, in a narration that seems to be written in a haste by the busy author playing multiple roles the in real life, all the characters converge to gain control over the political power. Finally, the Pandavs triumph under JD. But the triumph is short lived and Priya Duryodhani like Indira Gandhi bounces back to recover her lost glory. But she dies too paying the price for her high handedness, the details of which and the story thereafter are not spelled in an already overgrown novel.
The last chapter aptly titled The Path to Salvation describes the ascent of Himalayas by Pandavs, Draupadi and Krishna on their way to heaven. Krishna symbolizing the intelligentsia is first to fall for he didn’t used his capacity to strengthen democracy and restrained himself to the backwaters of some place down south in the country as well as in Tharoor’s rendition of history. D.Mokrasi fails next for she has to depend on her husbands. She is followed by Nakul and Sahdev who valued institutions more than the incorporated values. The arrogant Arjun is next followed by powerful Bhim who served his brothers more than D.Mokrasi. Yudhistir the statesman is alone to complete the ascent and pass all the tests inflicted by Dharmaraj upon him and enlighten his examiner with his new acquired wisdom.
India is eternal….. But the dharma appropriate for it at different stages of its evolution has varied
'No more certitudes,' he called out desperately to the receding figure . 'Accept doubt and diversity. Let each man live by his own code of conduct, so long as he has one. Derive your standards from the world around you and not from a heritage whose relevance must be constantly tested. Reject equally the sterility of ideologies and the passionate prescriptions of those who think themselves infallible. Uphold decency, worship humanity, affirm the basic values of our people- those which do not change- and leave the rest alone. Admit that there is more than one Truth, more than one Right, more than one dharma...'
(Eighteenth Book, 123)
VVji who comes close to the figure of Raja Gopalachari explains many Indian parables and myths to Ganapathi, asserting wisdom of India and its people grappling with countless problems.To end his novel he gives a flavour of just another characteristic of the country that isn’t underdeveloped.
Your eyebrows and nose, Ganapathi, twist themselves into an elephantine question-mark. Have I, you seem to be asking, come to the end of the story?How forgetful you are: it was just the other day that I told you stories never end, they just continue somewhere else. In the hills and the plains, the hearths and the hearts, of India.
But my last dream, Ganapathi, leaves me with a far more severe problem. If it means anything, anything at all, it means that I have told my story so far from a completely mistaken perspective .I have thought about it, Ganpathi, and I realise I have no choice. I must retell it.
(Eighteenth Book, 123)
He dedicates the book to his two sons and one "Tilottama", arguably his first wife. I hope I could do somehting similar for my own pretty Bimbo. But let me tell you Bimmo, it shakes me with shivers thinking that a man as witty and wise as Mr. Tharoor who writes so emphatically of Indian culture, it's diversity and its ability to hold the opposites, couldn't save his first marriage.And that despite his two sons. And no one can blame me poking my nose in authors' personal life because once in him I had begun to find a person I would like to become.
During 2006 PAN-IIT global alumni meet after his speech which was more a reproduction of his writings from his 1997 book he was abandoned to a corner. IITians at such meets do cocoon themselves gloating mostly on self praise if not in never ending nostalgia. It took me almost half an hour to shake myself from disbelief and awe to walk upto him, to word my muddled thoughts into few straight questions of which later I could ask none.I could just compliment him on his masterpiece. He smiled and signed a piece of paper advising me to read more. I have misplaced that piece of paper now but I am sure to meet him sometime again... after I have read more..:))
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
“They tell me India is an underdeveloped country. They attend seminars, appear on television, even come to see me, creasing their high hundred rupee suits and clutching their moulded plastic briefcases, to announce in tones of infinite understanding that India has yet to develop. Stuff and nonsense of course. These are the kind of fellows who couldn’t tell their kundalini from a decomposing earthworm, and I don’t hesitate to tell them so. I tell them they have no knowledge of history and even less of their own heritage.I tell them that if they would only read the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, study the golden age of the Mauryas and the Guptas and even of those Muslim chaps the Mughals, they would realize that India is not an underdeveloped country but a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.”(First Book,1)
This is how Shashi Tharoor begins his ‘The Great Indian Novel’. He begins by not only attacking the popular perception of India as underdeveloped country but also traces its roots in the ignorance of the populace about their own roots. Not surprisingly, in the subsequent pages which serve as eclectic mixture of messages he marries two histories – a real and a mythical -- to hatch his story. His characters whose origins bear more resemblance to the first century epic Mahabharat, live in the times and represent leaders more identifiable with the last century. It must have been an arduous task to spin a story seeing metaphors stitching two patches separated two thousand years away. But surprisingly, he does it very well and provokes one to look with a new perspective at a new nation muddling through present into future with its ethos inscribed in age old tales told and retold a countless times in countless ways.
Traditionally, the age old tale of Mahabharat is ascribed to Maha Rishi Ved Vyas who is said to have narrated the epic to Lord Ganesh of Hindu mythology. In Tharoor’s novel we have an omnipresent narrator named VVji who employs an elephantine scribe Ganapathi. Ganapathi, under a contract has to understand each word before writing and hence he is the first person to listen and absorb the twice-born tale from VVji. And VVji when he sets out to straighten Ganapathi’s ‘frowns on crown’ and ‘furrows on brows’ after a reckless bout of humor or after picking few of history’s rumors is actually communicating in the first person with the reader. This narrative structure not only draws reader into the story but also helps author to be tactfully didactic without boring his readers.
“How, you may well ask, and I shall tell you. But not just yet, my impatient amanuensis. As the Bengalis say when offered cod, we still have other fish to fry.”(Second Book,12)
“How shall I tell it, Ganpathi? It is such a long story, an epic in itself, and we have so much else to describe. Shall I tell of the strange weapon of disobedience, which Ganga, with all his experience of insisting upon obedience and obtaining it towards himself, developed into an arm of moral war against the foreigner?” ( Second Book,11)
Gangaji or Ganga Datta is the most dominant character of the novel. Like Bhisma of Mahabharat he renounces the throne and vows celibacy but still he is at the centre of the politics and most concerned with the procreation of progeny that populates the story. Gangaji later grows into a spiritual leader just as pale and bald as Gandhiji. While Tharoor humors Gangaji’s unusual ways of preparing his own enema and cleaning his own toilet he also admires at length the unusual results yielded by his unusual resolve in his unusual philosophy.
“That is where Ganga spoke for the genius of a nation; we Indians have a great talent for deriving positives from negatives. Non-violence, non-cooperation, non-alignment, all mean more, than the concepts they negate.” (Second Book, 11)
Tharoor successfully sketches the Gandhian philosophy in his renderings of Mahatma’s movements against British for rural indigo-farmers of Motihari and suburban jute-factory workers of Budge Budge in two chapters aptly titled ‘The Duel With the Crown’ and ‘The Powers of Silence’. Gandhiji’s call to follow the dictates of conscience rather the laws of British and to except punishment silently to prove the strength of ones convictions are further illustrated in a hilarious satire in chapter ‘Forbidden Fruit” where ‘The Mango March’ mimics ‘The Dandi March’.
The chapter titles of the novel also bear resemblance to many English writings on India. With titles like ‘Passages Through India’, ‘The Bungle Book’, ‘The Duel With the Crown’, ‘Midnight's Parents’ and ‘The Far Power-Villain’ Tharoor refers to many writers like Forster, Kipling, Paul Scott, Salman Rushdie and M.M. Kaye. Letting loose a rein of cheerful irreverence he also litters his prose with poetry. Particularly for Pandu he writes his longest poem detailing his days before his death caused arguably by a plane crash.
To tell the tale of Pandu
Will not detain us long;
His slogan was a ‘can do!’
And on his lips a song.
‘Away with Tolstoy, Ruskin, Buddha:
Their ideas just make little men littler.
No more “truth force”, only yuddha –
It’s time to learn from that chap Hitler.’
So saying, our angry hero
Became the country’s first Fascist;
Admiring Roma’s latest Nero
He practised how to clench his fist.
(Ninth Book, 50)
Pandu, in the novel, leaves the country for Germany on a path divergent from both the Gangan philosophy spelled by Tharoor in his prose and the events as recorded in the verses of Mahabharat. But inspite of his many liberties with both the histories the author claims his story to be true.
The song I sing is neither verse nor prose.
Can the gardener ask why he is pricked by the rose?
What I tell you is a slender filament,
A rubbing from a colossal monument;
But it is true.
(Eighth Book, 46)
The characters and the places of The Great Indian Novel though are not true in totality to either of history they are nevertheless true in parts to either or sometimes both the histories. Almost everyone eventually dies in the novel and summing the parts of their lifetimes one can tag each character to some symbol or leader of Indian polity. Hence, Pandu whose truth is opposed to Gangaji’s is Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and Dhritarashtra, the blind king who couldn’t see like the rest around him is Nehru, the idealist and a Fabian Socialist. The other important character who has an important role to play to the climax of the novel that apes the Indian Independence Struggle in minute detail is Mohammad Ali Karna, the father of Karnistan (The Hacked Off Land).
It is in this part of the novel till climax that Tharoor sparkles with the brilliance of his insight and narration, sounding most convincing with the precise conformity of his allegory to the history. He uses the skills not only of his career as diplomat but probably also of his stint at St. Stephens as a student of History. In his satire he tries to get inside the heads of the leaders who enacted the great historical drama leading to partition. At one point he writes...
… Where Dhritrashtra learned to brew his own tea in England, Karna acquired taste for Scotch and cocktail sausages. Far from praying five times a day, he prided himself on his scientific and therefore agnostic, cast of mind. His outlook was that of an Englishman of his age and profession: ‘modern’ (to use an adjective that has outlived more changes of connotation than any other in the language), formalist, rational, secular. It was not Islam that separated him from Gangaji, but Hinduism.
In other words, Karna found the Kauravs under Gangaji insufficiently secular, and this made him, paradoxically, more consciously Muslim. Gangaji’s efforts to transcend his Hindu image by stressing the liberalism of his interpretation of it only made the matters worse. When the Mahaguru , in one of his more celebrated pronouncements, declared his faith in all religions with the words, ‘I am a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Zoroastrian, a Jew,’ Karna responded darkly: ‘Only a Hindu could say that’. (Seventh Book, 38)
The other important feature of Shashi Tharoors writing is his hard hitting humor which doesn’t spare the loftiest of figures both mythological and the real. He makes a jest of Lord Mountbatten or Mahatma Gandhi with the same candour as that of Dharmaraj and his Dharma towards the end of his book. And this is one of the reasons why The Great Indian Novel is a successful satire both political and religious.
VVji who has his sources everywhere including the bedroom of the last Viceroy of India, the charming Lord Drewpad, reproduces a conversation between the Lord and the Lady Georgina Drewpad. Lord Drewpad as he trims his moustache, tweezes his eyebrows, files his nails, combs his recalcitrant curls and squints critically at mirror for hours before going to bed says ---
‘I won’t be ruling it, dear, just giving it away,’ her husband replied, patting cologne onto his cheek. ‘And, besides, I think they have chosen me because I am young. We are the glamorous brigade, you see, marching forth to the skirl of bagpipes. They can’t send an old dodderer who would make it look as if we were only leaving India because we haven’t the strength to carry on.’
‘Why are we leaving India, then?’
‘Because we haven’t the strength to carry on.’ (Tenth Book, 62)
Lord and Lady leave India soon after their honeymoon, after their swift cartographers draw mindless lines on maps leaving millions moping across those lines. The lines that extended for miles both on land and in memories that no amount of fiction can ever mop up is completely sidelined in Tharoor’s novel. Instead he focuses on the leaders who faltered at the momentous occasion. Gangaji who dominates throughout the novel fails to dominate when it mattered most and dies when Amba the assassin pumps three bullets in his already broken heart. And then deviating from the history as we know from our text books, Shashi Tharoor writes of the last words that departing Gangaji utters ---
‘I …have … failed,’ he whispered.
And then he was gone, and the light, as Dhritrashtra was to say, went out of our lives.
(Eleventh Book,69)
Dhritrashtra is another important character who rises to prominence after Gangaji’s death for a brief period before his own life ebbs away after the heartbreak. Besides portraying the blind king in grand roles of fathering Draupadi Mokarasi (D. Mokarasi symbolizing democracy) Tharoor also takes a peek at his personal life writing in detail both about his cold relation with his wife Gandhari the Grim and his liaison with the glamorous Georgina Drewpad.
Though the focus of The Great Indian Novel is more on telling the story of modern India, Tharoor doesn’t miss to pick up on the Mahabharat itself at places. One of those places where he diverges from the epic to comply his characters with the modern context and re-invent the age old epic simultaneously concerns Gandhari the Grim.
‘Useful? It is not a wife’s role to be useful.’…. ‘No, my lord, a dharmpatni is not expected to be useful. Her duty is to share the life of her husband, its joys and triumphs and sorrows, to be by his side at all times, and to give him sons.’ A note of steely wistfulness crept into her voice. ‘A hundred sons.’
Dhritrashtra had never known a woman like this in England. He tried to inject a note of playfulness into the conversation. ‘Not a hundred. That would be exhausting.’ (Third Book,14)
So, unlike the Gandhari of the Mahbharat, Tharoor’s Gandhari the Grim bears only one child, a daughter named Priya Duryodhani. Gandhari dies as well, waiting for her husband; her eyes still open behind the blindfold, casting a deep impression on her daughter who later looms large over the entire story entering into a new phase with a new generation of characters.
Tharoor tries his best to record every important political detail of Independent India through his assortment of characters from Mahabharat. However, with the increasing number of characters and increasing complexity and divergence of two histories the author finds it difficult to embrace the enormity of his task and it shows at places.
But, as usual, Ganapathi – you are not strict enough with me – I digress; my mind wanders across this vast expanse of nation like the five heroes whose tale I am trying to relate. Yet we cannot tell it all; we must soar above the mountains and the valleys…
… And occasionally we must swoop down to watch them at closer quarters, as they perform the acts and utter the words that give our geography it’s history. (Fourteenth Book,86)
Similar to the epic Draupadi is married to five husbands, the Pandavs. Yudhistir stands for statesman and in later parts assume the persona of Morarji Desai. Bhim symbolizes Indian Army, Arjun the free press and Nakul and Sahdev who are always spoken of together represent bureaucrats and foreign diplomats respectively. Tharoor wraps up the story of Indian democracy under Priya Duryodhani in a chapter titled “The bungle Book – Or The Reign of Error.’ Author tries to give a glimpse of India from the passages of Pandavs across jungles and villages of the country, where they wander and gather wisdom under their guru Jaiprakash Drona or JD.
Towards the end, in a narration that seems to be written in a haste by the busy author playing multiple roles the in real life, all the characters converge to gain control over the political power. Finally, the Pandavs triumph under JD. But the triumph is short lived and Priya Duryodhani like Indira Gandhi bounces back to recover her lost glory. But she dies too paying the price for her high handedness, the details of which and the story thereafter are not spelled in an already overgrown novel.
The last chapter aptly titled The Path to Salvation describes the ascent of Himalayas by Pandavs, Draupadi and Krishna on their way to heaven. Krishna symbolizing the intelligentsia is first to fall for he didn’t used his capacity to strengthen democracy and restrained himself to the backwaters of some place down south in the country as well as in Tharoor’s rendition of history. D.Mokrasi fails next for she has to depend on her husbands. She is followed by Nakul and Sahdev who valued institutions more than the incorporated values. The arrogant Arjun is next followed by powerful Bhim who served his brothers more than D.Mokrasi. Yudhistir the statesman is alone to complete the ascent and pass all the tests inflicted by Dharmaraj upon him and enlighten his examiner with his new acquired wisdom.
India is eternal….. But the dharma appropriate for it at different stages of its evolution has varied
'No more certitudes,' he called out desperately to the receding figure . 'Accept doubt and diversity. Let each man live by his own code of conduct, so long as he has one. Derive your standards from the world around you and not from a heritage whose relevance must be constantly tested. Reject equally the sterility of ideologies and the passionate prescriptions of those who think themselves infallible. Uphold decency, worship humanity, affirm the basic values of our people- those which do not change- and leave the rest alone. Admit that there is more than one Truth, more than one Right, more than one dharma...'
(Eighteenth Book, 123)
VVji who comes close to the figure of Raja Gopalachari explains many Indian parables and myths to Ganapathi, asserting wisdom of India and its people grappling with countless problems.To end his novel he gives a flavour of just another characteristic of the country that isn’t underdeveloped.
Your eyebrows and nose, Ganapathi, twist themselves into an elephantine question-mark. Have I, you seem to be asking, come to the end of the story?How forgetful you are: it was just the other day that I told you stories never end, they just continue somewhere else. In the hills and the plains, the hearths and the hearts, of India.
But my last dream, Ganapathi, leaves me with a far more severe problem. If it means anything, anything at all, it means that I have told my story so far from a completely mistaken perspective .I have thought about it, Ganpathi, and I realise I have no choice. I must retell it.
(Eighteenth Book, 123)
I see the look of dismay on your face. I am sorry, Bimbo ...errr..Ganpathi.
(Eighteenth Book, 123)
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