The Great Indian Novel

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!

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.

This is one of the most interesting and original pieces of satire I have ever read. The author (playing Maharishi Ved Vyas) scripts his own Mahabharata of modern times, with India of the past century and a half as the backdrop. Mahabharata is more than just the longest epic in the world - it is almost a way of life for most Hindus in India. Its parables and morals are narrated in all corners of the country to illustrate the conundrums of life in this world and the significance of dharma. The vast array of characters in the epic, along with numerous sub-plots embedded into the main plot, make for an absorbing narrative. Shashi Tharoor has brilliantly mapped these mythological characters and events to the freedom fighters, politicians, bureaucrats and the evolution of the modern state of India. The book will be of lot more interest to those who are well versed with the setting of the Mahabharata, however, even as a tale by itself the book makes for good reading. I would definitely recommend this book to everyone...5 stars!

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.

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.

I'm surprised that I'm the only person who actually did not like this book among the dozen or so reviewers here. The characterization was really contrived and the story is just a repetition of Mahabharatha desperately attached to Modern Indian history. Whats new with this book? I must have missed something here.......

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

if ever there was one. The Great Indian Novel gives the Mahabharata a spin that has never been done before...a funny one. Shashi Tharoor has created a work of pure humour and brilliance with this book. It is do-able enough to re-write epics like Ramayana (as Ashok Banker has) but it takes extraordinary imagination required to write something like The Great Indian Novel. Read this book if you're looking for something intelligently funny. I would warn you though, that if you're unfamiliar with various Indian glitterati and legends, you may not find this book very appealing. The humor would be lost.

There are few books I feel deserve 5 stars and I'm happy I came across one like this. This book is a mythological and historical lesson all rolled into one!

Quoting Shashi Tharoor from one of his columns in Sunday Times from about a year ago. "Underdevelopment used to be the condition erroneously ascribed to India by economic theoreticians, who looked at some of our labour-intensive agricultural techniques and promptly concluded that we were primitive. In fact, everything in India is overdeveloped, particularly the social structure, the bureaucracy, the political process, the monetary system, the university network, the industrial base and (as Galbraith tactlessly observed) the women. Given its economic and imperial history in a number of previous Golden Ages under Ashoka, Vikramaditya and Akbar, India is not underdeveloped at all; it is, as I argued in The Great Indian Novel, a highly developed country in an advanced state of decay." Read the novel with this one idea and satisfaction is guaranteed.

Tharoor takes the mythological Indian epic whose early texts date as early as 8th Century B.C. while later ones date as late as 4th Century A.D. and juxtaposes the multi-generation story upon the recent history of India's independence dating early 20th Century A.D. The result is a phenomenal convergence of wit, liberalism, history and satire. Tharoor's grasp of characters from both stories is quite deep, and it shows in every page where his pearls of wisdom and genius are leniently scattered. I would not ruin the surprise by mapping the key characters for you, but discovering that is compelling enough to pick up the book. Like every good book, this has several layers of depth and the better your understanding of the Mahabharata and modern Indian history, more the gratification. If you can forgive the occasional incoherency and chronological flaws that come with the premise of the book, you will find a convincing illustration of India's "advance state of decay".

Great novel who already knows a little of both, The Mahabharata, and Indian independence history. Very sarcastic yet very fast moving writing. Like it. Recommend it.