The Great Indian Novel

I recently bought the novel The Great Indian Novel by Shashi Tharoor. It is a rather lenghthy novel of nearly four hundred and eighteen pages in the publication that i bought. The print of the book is rather minute and the size of the font is a little bit teeny-weeny. Had it been of a quite a big font size, comfortable for the old people to read with or without spectacles, the novel would have definitely gobbled up nearly six hundred pages. It was published in the year 1989, when Shashi was around thirty or in his early thirties. He spent most of his time in the UN and recently ended his career there. He also acquired a Ph d at the age of twenty-two.

The novel is based on two things. Tharoor would have been inspired by the great epic of The Mahabharatha that he had before him a lofty model to emulate. He himself gives out a foreword in the beginning to caution the readers, who would have bought the book with the expectation of reading through a great novel, that the title is a translation of The Mahabharatha into the English, that means the Great India. He has drawn the theme from the two things of the Mahabharatha and the political happenings between 1910 and 1980 in India. The novel begins with a tinge of parody of the conversion of the Brahma, one of the Hindu Trinity, into a tycoon and friend of VV, stands for Ved Vyas, another successful entrepreneur. It sails smoothly by simply retelling the Mahabharatha until the birth of the sons of Vyasa through Ambika and Ambalika. It swerves itself off its path all of sudden as Ganga Dutta, the man who has taken a terrible vow to abstain from climbing onto the throne: Bhishma, is identified with the Mahatma that India engendered. The novel also offers some interesting portraits of all national leaders including the former head of the political party that Shashi Tharoor now represents to have become the Member of Parliament. The novel also touches upon Indian life and views politics through the eyes of common man.

Tharoor can be appreciated for his fictitious selection of names like Manimir, Chakra and so on so forth. The novel depicts some important political happenings in India between 1910 and 1980. I think it is good for anyone who would love to taste History if it was told in the form of a story.