The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel, satirical novel by Indian politician and author Shashi Tharoor. His debut novel, The Great Indian Novel was first published in 1989. It was critically praised and has been translated into four European languages and three Indian languages.

The Great Indian Novel sets itself the daunting task of, as one of the characters puts it, telling “the story of an entire nation.” Tharoor uses the epic Indian stories of the Mahabharata as the medium through which to tell this story. The result is an assured, sensitive, and remarkably humorous journey through a semi-imaginary 20th-century India that is simultaneously a parodic retelling of the original.

Like the Mahabharata (which can be translated as “Great India”), The Great Indian Novel is divided into 18 sections, covering the time of the Indian Independence Movement, through the partition, and finishing with the end of the Emergency. Told as a memoir by Ved Vayas to his scribe, Ganapathi, the novel follows the complex political machinations of a family formed by combining India’s most famous political leaders and mythological creations, with Mahatma Gandhi appearing as Ganga Datta, the counterpart of Bhishma; Jawaharlal Nehru as Dhritarashtra; Subhas Chandra Bose as Pandu; Indira Gandhi as Priya Duryodhani, the counterpart of Duryodhana; and Mohammed Ali Jinnah as Karna. Clever and self-aware, the novel also plays with the cultural heritage of English novels of India, with references to books ranging from E.M Forster’s A Passage to India to the works of Rudyard Kipling.

Despite its ironic humor and slippery political allegiances, the novel treats its subject with both reverence and a critical eye, emphasizing, in the grand sweep of its satire, both the importance of this story of national birth and the sense that, as Tharoor puts it, “in our country the mundane is as important as the mystical.”