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289 pages

English

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The Mahabharata meets modern Indian history in an intellectual roller coaster ride of a novel In Shashi Tharoor s satirical masterpiece, the story of the Mahabharata is retold as recent Indian history, and renowned political personalities begin to resemble characters from the Mahabharata all of whom have a curious and ambiguous relationship with Draupadi Mokrasi (D. Mokrasi for short) . . . Brimming with incisive wit and as enjoyable a read as it is cerebrally stimulating, The Great Indian Novel brilliantly retells reality as myth.

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Publié par	Penguin Books Ltd
Date de parution	12 septembre 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789351187004
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Shashi Tharoor

THE GREAT INDIAN NOVEL
Contents
About the Title
By the Same Author
Dedication
Introduction to the Silver Jubilee Edition
Family Tree
The First Book The Twice-Born Tale
The Second Book The Duel with the Crown
The Third Book The Rains Came
The Fourth Book A Raj Quartet
The Fifth Book The Powers of Silence
The Sixth Book Forbidden Fruit
The Seventh Book The Son Also Rises
The Eighth Book Midnight s Parents
The Ninth Book Him-or, The Far Power-Villain
The Tenth Book Darkness at Dawn
The Eleventh Book Renunciation-or, The Bed of Arrows
The Twelfth Book The Man Who could not be King
The Thirteenth Book Passages Through India
The Fourteenth Book The Rigged Veda
The Fifteenth Book The Act of Free Choice
The Sixteenth Book The Bungle Book-or, The Reign of Error
The Seventeenth Book The Drop of Honey-A Parable
The Eighteenth Book The Path to Salvation
Afterword
A Note on Dharma
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
About the Title
A hasty note of disclaimer is due to those readers who may feel, justifiably, that the work that follows is neither great, nor authentically Indian, nor even much of a novel. The Great Indian Novel takes its title not from the author s estimate of its contents but in deference to its primary source of inspiration, the ancient epic the Mahabharata. In Sanskrit, Maha means great and Bharata means India.
The Mahabharata has not only influenced the literature, art, sculpture and painting of India but it has also moulded the very character of the Indian people. Characters from the Great Epic . . . are still household words [which] stand for domestic or public virtues or vices . . . In India a philosophical or even political controversy can hardly be found that has no reference to the thought of the Mahabharata.
C.R. Deshpande, Transmission of the Mahabharata Tradition
The essential Mahabharata is whatever is relevant to us in the second half of the twentieth century. No epic, no work of art, is sacred by itself; if it does not have meaning for me now, it is nothing, it is dead.
P. Lal, The Mahabharata of Vyasa
Our past and present and future problems are much more crowded than we expect . . . I think in India, some stories should be kept alive by literature. Writers experience another view of history, what s going on, another understanding of progress . . . Literature must refresh memory.
G nter Grass, speaking in Bombay
By the Same Author
Fiction
Riot: A Novel
Show Business
The Five-Dollar Smile
Non-fiction
The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the Twenty-first Century
India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond Bookless in Baghdad: And Other Writings about Reading
Nehru: The Invention of India
Pax Indica: India and the World of the
Twenty-first Century
for my sons Ishaan and Kanishk and for our own Tilottama
Introduction to the Silver Jubilee Edition
Consider the evidence. A television series retelling the Mahabharata becomes the most successful Indian TV programme ever, drawing an audience of over 200 million and paralysing life during the hours of its weekly telecast. The Western world s leading avant-garde theatre director makes a nine-hour play of the epic, which a multinational cast performs to enthusiastic acclaim across the globe, from Avignon to Ayers Rock. The bestselling book in the history of Indian publishing in English is not some steamy potboiler, but the venerable C. Rajagopalachari ( Rajaji ) s episodic translation of the Mahabharata . (If the sales of other translations were added, the Mahabharata would probably eclipse the next few Indian bestsellers put together.)
My own homage to the epic, The Great Indian Novel remains in print twenty-five years on, has undergone forty-three reprints in India, and multiple editions abroad, a fate I could scarcely have imagined when I first sat down at my computer on a cold winter s evening in Geneva and began to imagine what the Mahabharata might be like if it were told as a tale of twentieth-century India.
What makes the epic so popular? A British friend, asked to explain to a foreigner what made England England, replied, cricket, Shakespeare, the BBC . Though so concise an answer would be difficult for an Indian, it is impossible to imagine any similar attempt to describe India that omits the Mahabharata . The Mahabharata declares, What is here is nowhere else; what is not here, is nowhere . Few other works in world literature could make such an extravagant claim, but in doing so, the 2000-year-old Indian epic poem is not defending a closed structure: rather, the Mahabharata has had so many accretions over the years in constant retellings that there is practically no subject it does not cover. Its characters and personages still march triumphantly in Indian minds, its myths and legends still inspire the Indian imagination, its events still speak to Indians with a contemporary resonance rare in many twentieth-century works.
My novel is preceded by three epigraphs: the first from the eminent Mahabharata scholar C.R. Deshpande, attesting to the importance of the epic in the Indian consciousness; the second from its most creative translator, P. Lal, reiterating the case for its contemporary relevance; and the third from a non-Indian writer, Gunter Grass, urging that literature must refresh memory . The Great Indian Novel stands at the intersection of these three ideas.
The Grand Old Man of Mahabharata studies, V.S. Sukthankar, put it uncompromisingly: The Mahabharata , he wrote, is the content of our collective unconscious . . . We must therefore grasp this great book with both hands and face it squarely. Then we shall recognize that it is our past which has prolonged itself into the present. We are it . . . Because the Mahabharata is so vividly alive for Indians, it remains relevant, the mirror in which we see our worlds. Here is Lal again:
The epic of Vyasa is not a literary masterpiece out there, somewhere in the past, or tucked away in air-conditioned museums and libraries. Its characters still walk the Indian streets, its animals populate our forests, its legends and myths haunt and inspire the Indian imagination, its events are the disturbing warp and woof of our age . . . The essential Mahabharata is whatever is relevant to us in the second half of the 20th century; whatever helps us understand and live better our own Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha [faith, wealth, pleasure and salvation] . . . No epic, no work of art, is sacred by itself; if it does not have meaning for me now, it is nothing, it is dead.
The basic story, if the tale of the dynastic rivalry between the Pandava and Kaurava clans may be called that, has been so thoroughly the object of adaptation, interpolation and reinterpretation that the Mahabharata as we now have it overflows with myths and legends of all sorts, didactic tales exalting the Brahmins, fables and stories which teach moral and existential lessons, bardic poetry extolling historical dynasties, and meandering digressions on everything from law to lechery and politics to philosophy. Whenever a particular social or political message was sought to be imparted to Indians at large, it was simply inserted into a retelling of the Mahabharata . The Bhagavad Gita itself is an example of such interpolation, having been included in the Mahabharata at some point in its evolution. As Rajaji drily put it, interpolation in a recognized classic seemed to correspond to inclusion in the national library . This elasticity through the ages adds to the timelessness of the epic s appeal.
But Lal s earlier proposition raises a larger question: what exactly in the Mahabharata is relevant to us in the second half of the 20th century ? Lal himself has an intriguing answer. The Ramayana is cited generally when ethical ideals are expected; the Mahabharata is referred to when compromises are made, shady deals struck, promises dishonoured, battles fought, disasters lamented.
This view is echoed by the French dramatist, Jean-Claude Carri re, who wrote Peter Brook s international version of the epic. This immense poem, Carri re wrote in 1985, which flows with the majesty of a great river, carries an inexhaustible richness which defies all structural, thematic, historical or psychological analysis . . . Layers of ramifications, sometimes contradictory, follow up on one another and are interwoven without losing the central theme. That theme is a threat: we live in a time of destruction-everything points in the same direction. (Emphasis added)
Fair enough: in an India of erupting caste and communal conflict, terrorist and secessionist strife, police encounters and an alarming daily toll of human lives, any work that speaks of a time of destruction cannot but be considered relevant. No wonder that so many contemporary poets, dramatists and novelists, writing in every Indian language, have found inspiration in episodes of the Mahabharata . But the message is not a purely negative one.
The events of the epic, as they unfold, offer other straws for drowning modern optimists to clutch. Rajaji saw the epic as pointing to the vanity of ambition and the evil and futility of anger and hatred . C.V. Narasimhan, then a senior United Nations official, went further, identifying a theme of peace and reconciliation in the Mahabharata which had a special application in the days of the Cold War (and perhaps even more so today, as a hot peace, littered with little wars, has broken out at the end of the Cold War). While the late Prof. Barbara Stoler Miller, Peter Brook s consultant on the play, declared that the purpose of the Mahabharata is to teach that good ultimately triumphs, even in a time of cosmic destructiveness , what do these contradictory exegeses suggest about the message of the Mahabharata in today s India? They reflect, certainly, the undeniable fact that the great epic, like many great e