Customer Reviews

The Great Indian Novel

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Whether it's the "Iliad," exploring the nature of the warrior, or the "Mahabarata"," explaining politics, the great stories are always with us and provide illumination to our seemingly modern lives. With "The Great Indian Novel," Shashi Tharoor shows us that "everything old is new again." "The Great Indian Novel," is a re-interpretation of the Mahabarata framed in India's struggle for independence, and the political aftermath of colonization. The famous make their appearances under altered names, and Mr. Tharoor manages to make the Mahabarata current while making modern Indian politics somewhat understandable. The book is also very funny. I don't know if this is a book for the casual reader, but if you're interested in India I think you'll find it quite fascinating.

For me, the book works in a number of ways:

1. Recasting the Mahabharata into modern India.

Two bits struck me: the story of Karna, the driver's son, and Drona teaching the Panduva. The first because of the way personal brilliance can be discounted on the basis of family tree; the second for the retelling of aiming at the crow and Drona's promise to Arjuna.

2. The names.

Apart from the characters from the Mahabharata, there's also whole new cast of characters who reflect the modern world. Two names stand out in my mind. "Gaga Shah" is the story's name for the Aga Kahn. Given the antics of the various Aga Kahns, "Crazy Emperor" is not a bad characterization. Then there's Zinna as Karna - "The Hacker Off" - hacking off Pakistan - "Karnistan" - for himself.

3. Showing the relevance of myth.

Personally, I have a tendency to discount the mythos in favor of the logos, but mythos comes first, and recurs. Casting the Mahabharata onto modern history is a great way to show there's nothing fundamentally new under the sun.

This book made for a great over-Christmas, by-the-fire-with-an-adult-beverage read.

Being interested in India and having traveled there twice recently, I stalked up on all sorts of books dealing with the country. This is one of them. I started this one and immediately kept reading with great interest, as his story-line unfolded flawlessly.

I feel ashamed to admit it, but I am not familiar with Indian mythology and specifically with the Mahabharata, so I cannot comment as others did on how well he melded that epic tale with the modern, historical figures. But even without knowing how that one aspect fell into play within the whole story, I thought the work was absolutely brilliant. His satire on characters from recent Indian history is hysterical. If you have any knowledge about who Ghandi or Indira were, you will obviously spot WHO he is talking about, even though the real names are never used.

Finally, Tharoor's grasp and usage of English is awsome. I enjoyed the way he delivers passages full of sentiment and emotion, yet with witty, tongue-in-check narration. Plus, he wrote many, many inspiring passages that were so aptly phrased--simply the thoughts of a geneous--that I was inspired to highlight them with a neon pen. Truly excellent ideas put on paper!

The reason I didn't give it 5 stars was because I felt it ended rather abruptly or hurried, and it needed, in my opinion, a little more historical/politcal plot to finally bring it all together without a sense of being rushed at the end. (Maybe it's only me who feels this way.)

So, even if you don't know the Mahabharata or much of Indian history/politics, this book will keep your interest and whet your appetite to read even more on the fascinating country.

It takes some nerve and imgaination to try and marry stories as disparate as the Mahabharata, the 2000 year old Hindu epic, and the Independence struggle/first 30 years of post-independence Indian history. Tharoor manages remarkably well, combining wit, a sense of history, deep sympathy and insight into the essence of what being Indian means. I think that not knowing either story to start with will take away very considerably from the reading experience. Having grown up hearing the Mahabharata like almost every other Indian child, I had a fixed idea about the character of each mythological actor, and I was struck by how easily the movers and shakers of this century in our country fit the mould of those characters. This century after all is just a blip in the ancient and endless story of India, and perhaps this says something for the essential continuity of our history. To all you Indians out there, please read it. For everyone else, it will be a wonderful insight into ancient and modern India.

This book is witty, hilarious and engrossing. Reader with no knowledge of Indian history may not find any interest in this book. The book celebrates India in the true sense combining India's struggle of thirty five hundered years ago to the more recent cause of independence. I had never understood Mahabharata so profoundly as after reading this book. Whether the Mahabharata is an historical account or a mere story makes no difference in this issue. The existence of such a story (Mahabharata) factually or on a literary level proves the same thing-that the idea of the subcontinent of India as a cultural unit clearly existed before any of the modern nation-states had come into being. In this regard no nation, subcontinent or religion has an epic of such proportion or which reflects the integration of such a large region as India through the Mahabharata. In fact it compasses all the domains of knowledge and all the issues of human life and culture. It is not just a religious book but the document for an entire civilization. Shashi Tharoor has done an exceptional work in creating similarities between two different times. One can only enjoy this book!

This book is one of the very best I have read in recent times. The book marries Indian mythology with the freedom struggle and recent polity. Filled with humor and sarcasm, the author tells both stories very successfully and also chips in with his subtle observations (especially about independence and after). And to top it all the English is very good. If you don't know much about Indian history, and appreciate good english, you should read it.

I was totally floored by this book. I love the irreverence which pervades this book. I was so sick and tired of reading narrations of the Mahabharat which amounted to no more than the writer's obeisance to the half-mythical demigods who are omnipresent in Indian culture. Having read Rajaji's Mahabharata which is almost didactic in its flow, it was simply refreshing to read this treatment which is so much more than narration; it was also filled with brilliant analyses that were highly insightful and laugh-out-loud funny. The marriage of this epic with the Indian freedom struggle and its pointed comparisons of mythological characters with our erstwhile leaders was on the money. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants not to simply know the story of the Mahabharat, but to understand what it means to us as Indians, what India stands for to non-Indians, and how it is truly a timeless classic which bears relevance anywhere in the world.

While many reviewers have commented that this book is hard to appreciate without a firm grasp of Indian history and mythology, I can disagree from firsthand experience. I am not Indian, and began reading the book after having seen Gandhi (the movie). Other than that, I knew a little bit about Indian culture and conflict with Pakistan and China. As for mythology, I recognized the name of the Bhadhava Gita. That's about it. Maybe I missed half of the subtlety of Tharoor, but nonetheless I finished his book with both some knowledge and much admiration both for the author, and for India. And to boot, this is one of the funniest, most irreverant books I've ever read. I wish someone would do this to for the Bible.

Shashi Tharoor. Shashi Tharoor is a good writer of contemporary politics. The fact that he is being currently considered for the position of the UN Secretary General is enough to establish his political credentials. I have read his book entitled India: From Midnight to the Millenium, which is a political treatsie on modern India as it grapples with problems, finds solutions, all within the context of a great democratic experiment. Chronologically, "India: From ... Millenium" came later than "The Great Indian Novel," so you can see Mr. Tharoor laying down his arguments about India in the latter work and using them in his later work ("India: From ... Millenium.")
The Great Indian Novel is Mr. Tharoor's experiment with the politics of pre-independant and post-independant India (1940-1980) juxtaposed with the legend and lore of Indian history and mythology: the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata (or literally, "Great India") is a seminal piece of Indian prose that extolls the triumph of good over evil, and contains the sacred texts of the "Bhagavad Gita," which resulted from Lord Krishna's teachings to Arjun (the protagonist) on the meaning of life.
Mr. Tharoor has taken the major characters from Mahabharata and transplanted them to the India of 1940-1980 but given them the the personalities of the Indian freedom fighters -- Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi -- and politicians that oversaw independant India -- Indira Gandhi, Lal Bahadur Shashtri, etc. To the reader not versed in Indian mythology, the names Arjun, Bhim, Yudhister, Nakul, Sahdev do not mean much. But here they are, deeply embedded in the travails of post-independant India; independence being the fruits of their parents' generation. One of these parents is Gangaji, a close analogue to Mahatma Gandhi, another is Dhritirashtra, the analogue to Nehru. In Mr. Tharoor's juxtaposition, there is the equivalent of the Jhallianwala Bagh tragedy, as there is one of the Dandi March to protest the British tax on Indian salt (except here, the Gandhi- equivalent marches to abolish the tax on, of all things, mangoes!) The mythic tales from Mahabharata are intervowen in modern context, the most hilarious of these being the tale whereby the five Pandavas were told by their mother to share Arjun's wife equally. While in the original text of Mahabharata, this resulted because the mother was otherwise occupied, in this alternate reality, it happens because the telephone connection to the mother was full of static and she could not hear what was being said!
The book starts of on a great footing, and was extremely enjoyable till about mid-point through. But Mr. Tharoor could not sustain the levity and the storyline all the way through. Towards the end, seminal happenings of Mahabharata -- Arjun being admonished by Lord Krishna on his failure to fight his cousins, a hunter shooting Lord Krishna in his toe, mistaking it for a deer -- are relegated to dream sequences. And other important figures of post-independence India -- Sanjay Gandhi, for instance -- have no equivalence from the mythological figures of the Mahabharata.

This book is a very easy to read and tries to tell the story of the MahaBharat in a modern day perspective. The book is very good if you know the MahaBharat and the 20 th century Indian history and can easily distinguish between the story of Mhabharat and the modern history. It would have been better if the facts and fictions were seprated by chapters or some other mechanism. Sometimes the facts are so mixed up by the MahaBharat story that they are difficult to be separated

I recommend you read at least a concise version of MahaBharat and Indian 20th Century History before you read this book unless you really don't care about historical or Mythical stories and just want a good book to read like fiction

I would highly recommend this to any one who is interested in Indian History and mythology