The Great Indian Novel: by Shashi Tharoor

It’s an amazing book. It left me speechless. Few months back I had tried to read a book on India’s struggle for Independence, but couldn’t make myself finish that. Reason being “Too many Facts”. I always wanted to know more about Indian history, but from a unbiased source, which you don’t get in your text books.

Luckily I picked up this marvelous book, which initially I did because of its author, and later I checked for the theme. From quite sometime I was planning to read Shashi Tharoor’s work, and now after reading this book, I am a big fan of him.

Actually it’s an incredible piece of imagination. Shashi Tharoor has re-dramatized the “Mahabharata” in the context of “Indian Independence Struggle” era.

I have tried to find the analogy between characters, as per my understanding:

Bhisma: Gandhiji
Dhritrashtra: Nehru
Paandu: Subhash C Bose
Drupad: Lord Mountbatten
Dronachaarya: Jai Prakash Narayna
Duryodhana: Indira Gandhi
Karma: Mohammed Ali Jinnah
Yudhishthir: Morarji Desai or (Symbolically) Judiciary
Bhim: Indian Army
Arjun: Arun Shourie or Journalism
Nakul: Bureaucrats
Sahadev: IFS officers
Draupadi: Democracy
Eklavya: V V Giri
Amba: Nathuram Godse or Orthodox religious beliefs


I am yet to find some: Krishna, Vidur, Kunti and Shakuni.

Analogy between events:

Creation of Bangladesh: Bhim – Jarasandh yudh
Emergency enforced by Indira Gandhi: Chaupar between Shakuni and Yudhisthir
Election of 1975: Mahabharata Yudh.

Excerpts:

If every Australian novelist has to set down the speech of his characters to approximate the sound the spoke, do you think there would be single readable Australian Novel in the World?

Dissent, is like a Gurkha’s ‘khukri’ , once it emerges form its sheath it must draw blodd before it can be put away again.

Don’t ever forget, that we were not lead by a saint with his head in clouds, but by a master tactician with his feet on the ground.

Indira:

She was a slight frail girl, with a thin tapering face like kernel of a Mango and dark-brown eyebrows that nearly joined together over high-ridged nose, giving her to look of a desiccated school teacher at an age when she was barely old enough to enroll at school. She had dark and lustrous eyes. They shone from that finished face like blazing gems on a fading backcloth, flashing, questioning.

Philosophical ones:

There is, in short no end to the story of life. There are merely pauses. The end is the arbitrary intervention of the teller, but there can be no finality about the choice. Today’s end is, after all tomorrow’s beginning.

Instinctive Indian Sense: Nothing begins and nothing ends. We are all living in an eternal present in which what was and what will be is contained in what is, or to put it in a more contemporary idiom, that life is a series of sequel to history.

A Philosopher is a lover of Wisdom, Not of knowledge, which for all its great uses ultimately suffers from the crippling effect of ephemerality. All knowledge is transient linked to the world around it and subject to change as the world changes, whereas wisdom, true wisdom is eternal immutable. To be philosophical one must love wisdom for its own sake, accept its permanent validity and yet its perpetual irrelevance. It is the fate of the wise to understand the process of history and yet never to shape it.


We Indian, Arjun, are so good at respecting outward forms while ignoring the substance. We took the forms of parliamentary democracy, preserved them, put them on pedestal and paid them due obeisance. But we ignored the basic fact that parliamentary democracy can only work if those who run it are constantly responsive to needs of the people and if parliamentarians are qualified enough to legislate. Neither condition was fulfilled in India for long. Today most people are simply aware of their own irrelevance to the process. They see themselves standing helplessly on the margins while professional politicians and unprofessional politicians combine to run the country to the ground. What we have done ………….

We Indians are notoriously good at being resigned to our lot. Our fatalism goes beyond, even if it springs from, the hindu acceptance of the world as it is ordained to be. I must tell you a little story - a marvelous fable from our puranas that illustrates our resilience and self-absorption in the face of circumstances. A man is pursued by a tiger. He runs fast, but his panting heart tells him that he cannot run much longer. He sees a tree. Relief! He accelerates and gets to it in one last despairing stride. He climbs the tree. The tiger snarls below him, but he feels that he has at last escaped its snapping jaws. But no - what’s this? The branch on which he is sitting is weak. That is not all: wood-mice are gnawing away at it: before long they will eat through it and it will snap and fall. The branch sags down over a well. Aha! Escape” Perhaps our hero can swim ? But the well is dry and there are snakes writhing and hissing on its bed. As the branch bends lower, he perceives a solitary blade of grass on wall of well. On top of the balde of grass gleams a drop of honey. What is our hero to do? What action does our puranic man quintessential Indian, take in the situation?

He bends with the branch and licks up the honey.

What did you expect? Some neat solution to the problem? The tiger changes its mind and goes away? Amitabh Bachchan leaps to the rescue? Don’t be silly. One strength of Indian mind is that it knows some problems cannot be resolved and it learns to make best of them. That is the Indian answer to the insuperable difficulty. One does not fight against that by which one is certain to be over-whelmed; but one finds the best way, for oneself, to live with it. This is our national aesthetic. Without it, india as we know it could not survive.

And there is more……specially the last chapter and his views on Dharma.

--> Mishra