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A Critique of Shashi Tharoor’s “The Great Indian Novel”

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“Our past, present and future problems are much more crowded than we expect. I think in
India, some stories should be kept alive by literature. Writers experience another view of history, what’s
going on, another understanding of progress. Literature must refresh memory.” (Gunter Grass). It’s
against background, Shashi Tharoor’s novel should be viewed and interpreted in the light of these
remarks. In fact, the novelist has re-vivified hi story as he knew it from the information he had
gathered , pouring on various resources like history, hagiography, legends, and anecdote, and
mythological and philosophical sources, and glued them all into the format of a novel , and succeeded
in trans-creating a kind of a postmodern Gandhi epic .Indeed, it is not an easy task for a novelist to
jostle all the encyclopedic information into a compendium and re-mythicize of the facts that are
purely political in nature. The form is so formidable that it needs the sweep of imagination and an
inclusive intellectual potential to agglutinate all into the format of contemporary history.

Shashi Tharoor observes , in his introduction to the novel :” I imagined what the
Mahabharata” might be like if I told as a Tale of twentieth century India, ” and he goes on to say: ”what
is here is nowhere else. What is not here is nowhere… because ‘the Mahabharata is vividly alive for
Indians, the mirror in which we see our worlds.” But who doth ambition shun? As Shakespeare writes
some where Tharoor has indeed chosen an ambitious work with the best of his intentions, and he has
enough creative and imaginative potential at his command. Is that enough to re-recreate the nuanced
ambiance of the historical-mythological story in the fictional garb of the Indian freedom struggle in
which Gandhi becomes a pivotal character live in political action with his cherished tools of Truth and
non-violence against his fight with the imperial Britishers ? One has a nagging suspicion whether he
succeeds in his avowed task of fictionalization all? It all needs an acid test of postmodern gambits that
the novelist uses in trying to unspool the critical strategies.

The story of the Mahabharata is known to everyone; it’s succinctly, a battle between good and the evil
whose emblematic figures are the two humongous families of Kauravas against five Pandava princes
that ultimately leads to the epic battle of Kurushetra in which the ievil gets decimated and the good
gets the pyrrhic victory The novelist utilizes this as the vast landscape of a mythological story as
backdrop of the Gandhi’s struggle for freedom. The novelist is perhaps awre of the fact that he knew
that it is an epicenter for a ballast, and that he cannot sustain the two=story formula any more. He
made Gandhi as the pivotal character around whom the whole epic saga of the freedom struggle
revolved. Thus .Gandhi becomes Gangaputra, the elderly Bhishma of the epic, an ideal character whose
integrity of character and personality are able to guide the whole epic till the blast battle of Kurushetra.
And then, the narrative of the India’s freedom struggle slowly begins to unspool. Tharoor makes a few
observations, in his introduction:”The choice of historical events to portray all the principal episodes of
the nationalist struggle for Indian freedom-was easily made. The mode of the portrayal was another
matter.” This isn’t enough, for the novelist is self-aware that it’ll land him in fictional cul de sacs.
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He makes another interesting observation:” At the same time

yoking of The Mahabharata and modern history restricted some of my fictional options: as the novel
progressed, I was obliged to abandon novelistic conventions and develop some characters as walking
metaphors’ So Pandvas became five pillars of Independent India: righteous Yudhistir the judiciary and
the idea of justice, Arjun free press and the idea of liberty, Bhim the army, Nakul nd Sahadev the
administrative and foreign services of the nation. Their shared wife Draupadi (Draupadi Mokrasi)
became emblematic of Indian democracy ‘’. One has to see whether he adheres to the same narrative
framework, and continues to drive the narrative movement to a successful finality. The task is ahead for
him is formidable and well-neigh is fraught with hazards. But it is obvious that one gets the impression
that the novelist achieves a tremendous vibrancy and skill,, and narrative acceleration without mincing
the details. I’ve a nagging suspicion that Shashi Tharoor gets trapped in his own creative inhibitions,
though possessed of both imaginative and intellectual capabilities, and a definitive adroitness to carry
on with what he thought as an avowed conviction.

The Indian struggle for freedom is a well-charted political

movement meant to overthrow the imperialist colonizers, the British rule in India. It was organized as a
mass movement, albeit a non-violent movement by a large conglomeration of people that includes all
races and all castes which rose like a great tornado . The movement was led by a charismatic leader
named Mahan Das Karam Chand Gandhi, with large hordes of his trusted friends and devoted loyalists.
Tharoor tries to a small throw-back at the personal history of his heroic persona, Gandhi ,taking the
reader back to Gandhi’s career as a lawyer of the oppressed people of South Africa, where he started his
career as a practicing lawyer and later became the central figure among the masses when he arranged
a mass movement against the company that refuses to raise the wages of the workers. It is here Gandhi
started his experiments with truth, and non-violence, and greatly succeeded to prove the world that
they are potential forces against all kinds of oppression. He simply translated them into global action in
his fight against the British Raj in India.

Here are a few observations that the novelist makes of the Gandhian
struggle for freedom from oppression. He writes:” The principles he stood for, and the way in which he
accepted them ere always easier to admire than to follow. While he was alive, he was impossible to
ignore; once he had gone ,it was impossible to imitate.{ p,53.)”

And again:” Truth was his cardinal principle by which he tested every action and utterance…His truth
emerged from the convictions; it meant not only what was accurate but what was just, and therefore
right.(Ibid.,)

Then the novelist shifts his attention to a global scene where Gandhi
formulated tested all his avowed convictions based on his principles he stood for and laid out a large
plan to liberate his own country from the oppression of the imperialist regime. This took considerable
time and exhausted his energies to rouse Indians into the concerted patriotic action of overthrowing a
powerful government that colonized India. It was not an easy task that was to be won a by a single
individual, but it must be a collective action that was the need of the time .He realized that only a cmass
movement could bring down the imperial powers, and it must be inclusive and vehemently regenerative
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The novelist attempts to dovetail the details of the mythopoeia of Mahabharata with the details of the
historical Indian struggle for Independence. The crux of the lies in here; it seems to me, Tharoor gets
trapped in his own self-aggrandizing web of perceptions where encompassing the novelistic traditions
and historicity break to get structural but lie as disentangled mosaic. He is forced into breaking the
literary into the postmodern sanctum. Thus the two-story format conveniently gets bypassed on several
occasions, and Tharoor admits this is a serious desideratum that hinders the progress of the narrative
action, But where he succeeds definitively is in his narrative re-chronicling of the India’s struggle for
freedom, and in his endeavors to portray Gandhi’s philosophy of asceticism and detachment as his
cardinal principles that uphold the whole movement. In fact, I would prefer to call the novel
imetafiction though the novelist reaffirms that it is purely a fictional tome.

The narrative continues through the achievement of Indian

Independence ,after the Imperial British government concedes to the Home Rule .Gandhi , of course,is
self- aware that Indian cannot rule themselves unless the nation rallies around a leader who could pull it
through to a great yawning gap , after the Britshers left India to fend for itself. As the novelist
observes :” We are all in a state of continual disturbance, all stumbling, tripping and running and floating
along from crisis to crisis .And in the process we are all making something of ourselves, building a life, a
character, a tradition that emerges from and sustains us In such succeeding crisis.(p.343)”.And a
charismatic leader to lead the nation is chosen by consent It a Jawaharlal Nehru who addressed the
nation, as its first elected prime minister ,from the ramparts of the Red Fort in Delhi. As he said: “A the
world slumbers into darkness, India wakes up into freedom’. This is the celebratory note that makes the
multitude as citizens of the Independent India’.

Then follows the Partition of India that remains a traumatic

experience .The cultural, social and economic mosaic of the conglomerate India is maimed into two
nations-one as the Hindu state and the other as Pakistan where majority community of Muslims are to
be located in a separate state carved out of the one large chunk of the geographical unity. This marred
the unitary character of the Indian polity where the “Two-nation theory” was perforce impinged on and
was forced upon the Indian political leaders. The British Viceroy oversees all this transition with abysmal
sorrow and anxiety and a laceration which became an endless paradox in the Indian polity, and a
traumatic shift which nobody liked or accepted As the future of Indian secularism was depended on the
ability to integrate both Hindus and Muslims. But what was destined happened, and nothing could have
been different in those of turmoil after India won freedom on August 15, 1947.

The novel ends with the abysmal truths and paradoxes of the
Partition tribulations. And for the novelist, post-Independent India was not a concern, and he almost
surrenders to the exhaustive re-creation of the freedom struggle. As he writes” I have been on the
whole a good hindu in the story. I have portrayed a nation in the struggle but omitted its struggles with
itself, ignoring the regionalist and the autonomists, and separatists who even today are trying to tear
the country apart.(p.597.).”That is simply to encompass the post-Independent Indian situational
realities, succinctly though.
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But the reality of Tharoor’s fictional gambit lies somewhere, in the deep down distress of the narrative
progression where the thematic opulence gets throttled by the sense of ambiguity and creative
exhaustion when the two-story narrative mosaic breaks and the threads of narration lie disentangled,
and when all the fictional contours get thrown out of gear. Perhaps the novelist realizes that the
mythopoeia of the Mahabharata becomes aware of the fact that any attempt at novelization is un-
transferable. And yet that Tharoor attempted this is a creative adventurism, for which he has been
amply rewarded with a generous praise lavished by most of the critics. As one critic says: “It’s a like a
literary tour de force, seeking recreative energy from Reality cul de sacs.

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