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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A RIOT in a Book, May 29, 2002
This review is from: Riot: A Love Story (Hardcover)
On a recent trip to India, I picked up this book. Already familiar with Tharoor's work (The Great Indian Novel) I was rather curious with what is in it. Must say I had half expected the same righteousness many intellectuals handle the recent sectarian violence with, be it in India or Israel. But reading it I was so ashamed that I had made such an assumption. Tharoor was at his anlaytical best. The neutrality one comes to expect (but seldom finds) from a journalist, the objectivity, the in depth analysis seasoned with absloute literary brilliance. Tharoor acknowledges the contribution (at least of the details of a real riot) from one of his real IAS friends. The amount of research that has gone into the book tells us that even if he did not get the help from his friend, he would have still delivered. The style is unique- starting with newspaper clipping of a fictitious newspaper and then swinging from narrative to narrative, some Priscilla's , some from her parents (individually) and some from the luckless Laxman. The historical details are presented in a totally unbiassed fashion. Unbiassed as in depicting both sides of the story, but wait, there is more to it. Unbiassed means also the courage to tell a tale in a way that is well researched. The beauty of it is that each party's account seems so real, so true but yet it is at odds with the other party's version. Tharoor has achieved the unachievable, making us believe (albeit for a short while) what we do want to believe and then quckly give it up and believe the next thing with equal conviction as we move along effortlessly from one narrative to another. Do we feel sorry for Priscilla? Was she really in the wrong place at the wrong time? Well , depends on what you call a wrong place. For her it was the right place, at least for a while. Little girl traumatized by her fathers' infidelity-do they all become idealists and hopelessly inadequate? I think not. Do we even feel sorry for laxman? I am sure some people will- but why? I served briefly in the IAS myself. Much of what he says about the cadre is true (even the fact that IPS is next best) but to think that he is representative of the elite civil servants called IAS is wrong. While they may have similar moral turpitude (some may even be able to conveniently recite Oscar Wilde), I would have thought the pillars of Indian Civil Service have on an average stronger morals than what the cowardly Laxman manages. I have collegaues who constantly bug me to tell them more about India, more about the conflict with Pakistan, more of the Gujrat riots. I usually do not oblige them. Now I don't have to. I can just give them a copy of Riot. I gave one of them the book recently and told him, all you ever wanted to know about India is in the book. I stick by it. It is not a travel guide, but it just as well might be. A travelogue of the journey through the heart and soul of India. That little district town in the Hindi heartland IS India. Shame I can not say the same about the Ram Charan Guptas and above all Laxman. A fascinating book. For all of you who wanted to visit India and were curious about what is it that India does to you, I have one suggestion- READ THIS BOOK.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"History...is not a web woven with innocent hands.", August 30, 2001
This review is from: Riot: A Love Story (Hardcover)
The ill-fated romance of Priscilla Hart, a young American working at a birth control clinic in India, and Lakshman, an older, married, Indian civil servant, is an engrossing story in its own right, but it serves a much wider purpose in this ambitious and utterly fascinating novel. It provides the limited, manageable context through which the author asks questions about cultural identity and presents an impassioned plea for understanding and tolerance among cultures. Priscilla, we discover on the first page, was stabbed to death by an unknown assailant during a riot in Zalilgarh, a riot instigated by militant Hindus wanting to build a temple on the site of an ancient Muslim mosque. Many other, competing social and political forces contributed to the unrest which resulted in the riot, however, and the author clearly believes that the religious and ethnic extremism which has arisen in India in recent years has destroyed the traditional fabric of Indian society and may eventually be the undoing of the nation.
There is no narrator here to interpret the events of Priscilla's death and of the riot. Tharoor leaves all interpretation up to the reader. Through newspaper stories, entries in Priscilla's scrapbook, letters to her best friend at home and to Lakshman, transcripts of meetings with goverment officials, and a reporter's interviews with extremist religious leaders, the police, and professors (who provide the reader with crucial historical background), the passionate affair of Priscilla and Lakshman comes to life, and the complex and tumultuous forces which contribute to her death emerge.
Tharoor is a smooth and disciplined writer who respects his characters and his readers. He presents historical background clearly and allows for multiple interpretations of events, assigning no blame and making no declarations of truth. His American characters are realistic, and the contrasts of their values with those of traditional Indians are presented insightfully. Amazingly, he manages to bring to life the world of traditional India, its cultures, its ironies, its recent history, and its possible future, in fewer than 300 pages, and he does so within the context of a love story which epitomizes the incredible difficulty of separating our selves from our cultures. This is a novel which enlightens while it entertains, presenting a rational view of irrational behaviors. Mary Whipple
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An Experiment in Narratology, November 9, 2001
This review is from: Riot: A Love Story (Hardcover)
If we are looking for a novel in the conventional sense, we will not find it in Riot - there is no formal beginning or end, no linearity or narrative or plot or formal constructions of the genre. Even if we are prepared for the stream-of consciousness, the experimental, postmodernist, or metafiction variety, we are in for a surprise - for the 'novel' (for lack of a more appropriate nomenclature) is more of a collage that brings together many different fragments. Or one may say that the author places a jigsaw puzzle before the reader, a number of pieces that have to be put together to form a coherent whole. The pieces comprise an astonishing variety - there are diary entries, letters, memoirs, excerpts from scrapbooks and journals, transcripts of interviews, conversations overheard, entries in notebooks, journalistic reports, a handful of poems, even a birthday card and a cable. Conspicuous by its absence is the conventional "once upon a time" story, the "dear reader..." approach, the omniscient narrator. In fact the writer is almost completely absent in the novel. "Down with the omniscient narrator. It's time for the omniscient reader, " says a character in the novel. The reader of Riot is faced with the task of groping through the evidence and unravelling the story. At times one has the uneasy feeling of being a voyeur, a peeping Tom taking a peek into a private chamber, or reading another's personal diaries or letters, or eavesdropping, or nosing into somebody else's very special, very intimate encounters. But the embarrassment is not allowed to linger as, almost immediately, there is a swing towards the impersonal, an interview conducted by an objective reporter, or the official voice of police personnel in charge, or simply a shift of perspective. All this is part of the narratorial strategy. Yes, Tharoor is experimenting with narratology, and the experiment is undoubtedly successful! For all the various pieces of the collage are different takes on a central event - the death of Priscilla Hart. How did she die and what were the circumstances? The story is not 'told' to us. It is 'shown' through all these pieces in the collage. The reader's job is to decode the story from these scraps of information. At the same time, what Riot seeks to present is not simply a whodunit tale, or the story of the poignant death of a visiting American. It goes beyond mere statistics, beyond the factual details of the tragedy, to reconstruct the emotional life of the woman. What was it like to be an outsider in a small, conservative township? What were her personal moments like? The idealism that brought her to that remote spot in the middle of nowhere, the passion for her job, the love interest in her life, the secret rendezvous from time to time, the uncertainty and the agony... the record of her emotional history is sketched vividly in a scrapbook that she maintains. The paramour, a local Indian administrator who is married but finds himself helplessly involved in a relationship with the American, is also a writer of sorts and keeps his own journal. So we get two perspectives on a single relationship. The clash of cultures, the divergent viewpoints, the inability to understand the working of the other's mind, the imminent end of a foredoomed relationship - all this comes across through the personal journals of the main characters of the novel. Sure, there is passion, even love. But social pressures are far too strong for a lasting relationship. So East remains East and West remains West. Or rather, they would have remained so, had the violence not erupted, causing Priscilla's death and putting an abrupt end to the possibilities of their love story. This is not to say that Shashi Tharoor is interested in narrating just another tragic romance. More importantly, he is concerned with history as it was lived in a particular chronotopic context. And history is nothing but truth. In an epigraph to Riot taken from Cervantes, Tharoor tells us: "History is a kind of sacred writing because truth is essential to it, and where truth is there god himself is...," thus bringing the three together - history, truth and god. Are they synonymous or is there simply a close kinship between the trinity? The novel lays bare a very personal concept of truth/history/god, presumably based on the author's private belief - that human life being a complex amalgam of paradoxes, human relationships are no less complex, and there are no certitudes, no finalities, no absolutes, no fixed beliefs, nothing good, nothing bad. It is all a matter of perspectives. This story, like the story of Riot, is a readerly text, open to interpretation - we may read in it whatever meaning we choose. Such is the nature of truth. And of history. Tharoor's novel is about the ownership of truth and history. It presents about a dozen versions of a given situation, no single one being privileged over the other. Truth is like the blackbird that can be looked at in thirteen or more ways. If the story is told (or presented) from Lakshman's and Priscilla's points of view, it is also presented from the varying points of view of the other characters: the staunch Hindutva supporter, the Muslim activist, the police official, the grieving parents of the riot victim, the wronged wife, et. al. Their separate stories contribute towards the various pieces of the jigsaw puzzle called truth or history.
"History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors," said T.S. Eliot once. Tharoor in Riot seems to be in agreement with this idea. History, he says, is not a web woven by innocent hands. The different pieces of the collage in Riot are often divergent, often contradictory accounts of the same event. Yet each has its validity. Its own truth. Like the old crone of a story tucked away in "Riot", each is beautiful!
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