The Great Indian Novel

I don’t know about you but I don’t like Shashi Tharoor. Blame it on shady alliances for IPL teams or the very non intellectual head of hair that he wears – I’ve pretty much placed him in a category of authors who aren’t ..well..authors.

Then I read the Great Indian Novel.

It’s a quiet, unassuming book with no grand declarations of timelessness on its blurb-zone, neither does it start with a bang going into whirlwind chapters or breathless action.

It starts with a conversation between a quirky old man and an assuming young man. Its only as you read on that the characters unfold merging multiple times into people you have heard of and people you think you have heard of. You worry a bit about whether you are placing the characters right, and you move uneasily on, peeling back pages ever so often, but you end up moving on.

And then you get caught up in the events that pages unfold for you, and you realize that you have got the characters right and that its all beginning to make sense. Often you are caught unawares by the clever turn of phrase and often by the rhyme. The pages make you smile and make you frown but it never fails to touch you.

The book is about India, the creation of it, the fragility of the events that led to it. It surprises you to see the very human and very mundane conversations and emotions that could have led to its creation, and how it could all have ended up very differently. The fight for independence, you realize, was about greatness and sacrifice but also about petty matters like ego and pride, willfulness and sloth.

Shashi Tharoor ( I am tempted to knight him on the fly, never mind the hair) is a giant intellect who has brought an immense amount of knowledge about world history and affairs to bear very lightly on a subject that touches most Indians in the most parochial of ways.

He uses the Mahabharatha’s familiar contours to take us into the lives of eminent personae of the independence struggle, and brilliantly uses the it’s remarkably tolerant view of human strengths and frailty to bring us close to these leaders, to make them more human without judging them.

In Tharoor’s book, the characters of the Hindu epic stand for people - Bhishma becomes Gangaji Datta  (Gandhiji), Dhritarashtra is Nehru while sometimes he uses the characters to stand for institutions and values – democracy, then Indian Army and so on. It’s great fun to decode the characters so I won’t spoil it all for you here – the wikipedia has a list if you are still tempted, but I would suggest you read the book. Its in the various characters you will try on each character that the book holds its truest joy.

In the end, the book will leave you a little closer to the idea of India – and also to the leaders who helped create her, you will feel more intimately connected but also more than a little sad for the streak of mortality that you will see. Enjoy this book slowly – am sure you will find a number of flaws – but you will come away richer, none the less.