CONCLUSION

CONCLUSION

Shashi Tharoor’s Subjective account of India is from all the angularities of perception

and gives inklings into the understanding of life in its amplitude and manifoldness. It is

nonetheless, not a photographic representation but is something more than life. The novelist

therefore is obliged to make a careful selection of the material and language in order to present

his perception of life. In order to achieve this, the novelist has to evolve his own views and

images view to present the segment of life in a way he desires. The material of the novel may be

a fantasy, a realistic documentation, or an autobiographical revelation, but it is the style and art

that makes it relevant to life and art. Shashi Tharoor is that novelist who perform the greater

task of handling down things and make the memory of great epics last in their distinct way. He

is the novelist who use myth and history purposively literature acquires simultaneously with the

present. This is done with a will to performance. In The Great Indian Novel, Tharoor seeks to

highlight the ancient principle of Dharma as preached and propagated by the original text of

Mahabharata which is considered to be the fifth Veda and occupies a monumental place in a

Vedic studies. According to him irreligion was not the issue; every religion flourishes in India.

Through this one can see that Tharoor argued the case for restoring dharma to its place in Indian

public life. In this he very well gives the meaning of ‘dharma ‘which according to Hindi means

only faith or religion. But in Sanskrit the word has a pre-eminently secular meaning of social

ethics covering law-abiding conduct. Mahabharata is a house hold word in India. The Novelist

justifies his chosen irreverence as acceptable in ancient Indian scriptures, which attributes

certain weaknesses and feet of clay even to god. Thus he is the novelist who is deeply engaged

in universal problems, and is worried about the destiny of man. Shashi Tharoor as a novelist

artifices his own strategies to present a segment of life in the way he desires. Shashi Tharoor

perform the greater task in his novel The Great Indian Novel. In this he records the experiences
in the context of contemporary socio political conditions, exploiting the mythical patterns

present in ethics like Mahabharata. Tharoor thus provides the subjective framework for

representing the variegated complex cultural and political environment of Indian society. This

novel of Tharoor has witnessed an unprecedented openness. The assurance of the Gandhi Nehru

era having gone, and that social evils and individual weaknesses are exposed rather bluntly.

Thus the novel reminds us mean-minded separatists such as Duryodhani’s, whose ambition and

dark ego can cause unsought of devastation, dishonest schemers like Shakuni and

unprecedented crooked tyrants like Jarasandha. Thus Tharoor highlights the contractedness of

narrative history as well as fiction,in the tradition of the epic and the oral narrative. Tharoor’s

novel teems with ordinary mortals as well as gods. Tharoor’s work, despite its persistent irony

and tone of Trivialization, reveals an underlying moral purpose and positive commitment. The

subjective account of India, which Tharoor presents in The Great Indian Novel, covers a much

longer time period from the nationalist movement to the assassination of Indira Gandhi, 1984.

Thus the protagonists of his novels are host of imperial historical figures from the pre and post-

Independence eras. Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Patel, Indira Gandhi, Krishna Menon, Sam

Manekshaw, Arun Shouries as well as major historical events such as the salt March,

Jallianwallah Baugh, the assassination of Gandhi, the emergency of the general elections of

1982, thus appears in Tharoor’s fictional recasting of the epic. Hence the novel is called a

political allegory of selected episodes from the ancient epic Mahabaratha. Tharoor’s novel may

not be really “great’ or truly ‘Indian’ but it has made the point that it wanted to make. It has

displayed a mistrust of interpreting the past and has countered the crushing burden of tradition

and history. Growing cultural interaction between the East and West; the consequently changing

social ethos after Independence have given an added impetus to Tharoor’s writing of novel on

the theme of East-West confrontation.

politically reflexes, he thus wanted to present the novel Riot as one of many voices, many points

of view, many perspectives and many truths. In a larger mode, the novel consists of large

chunks of subjective whose primary function is quite obviously to fill in social, cultural and

historical gaps that may be assumed in an average American’s knowledge bank of India.

Priscilla Hart, the social worker who comes to India and killed in a Riot, Rudyard and Priscilla,

parents of the dead Priscilla Hart and Randy Diggs the reporter who comes to India to do a story

on her death. In this context so much print and other media has been expended on the

Ramjanamabhoomi-Babrimasjid conflict. After having a detailed study of the novel one can tell

the problem in India, as said the American businessman ‘you have too much history. Far more

than you can use peacefully. So you end up wielding history like a battle axe, against each

other. ‘the American businessman doesn’t exist; he is a fictional character in the novel Riot,

about a Hindu-Muslim riot that erupts in the course of the Ram Sila Poojan campaign, the

forerunner of the agitation to construct a Ram Janmabhoomi temple on the site occupied for

four and a half centuries by the Babri Masjid.

The tragedy in India repeats again in Gujarat riots in 2002 which can conclude that even

those who know history seem condemned to reapeat it. The Hindu zealots who chanted

insultingly triumphalist slogans helped incite the worst elements on the Muslim side, who may

have criminally set fire to a railway carriage carrying temple campaigners; inturn, Hindu mobs

have torched Muslim homes and killed innocents. As the courts deliberate on a solution to the

dispute, the cycle of violence goes on, spawning new hostages to history, generating new

victims on both sides, ensuring that future generations will be taught new wrongs to set right.

We live, Octavio Paz once wrote, between oblivion and memory. Memory and oblivion: how

one leads to the other, and back again, has been the concern of much of Tharoor’s fiction. It is

pointed out in the last words of Riot, history is not a web woven with innocent hands. The
present black and white stereotypes of the Hindu fundamentalist and the secularist Hindu and

Muslim is to make the mockery of the issue itself. Other than this the novel concerns itself with

the reproductive rights of women or as, Priscilla Hart sees it, the rights of women and dignity in

general. Tharoor, as an Indian who when lives abroad, gives us the observer’s penchant and also

as outsider’s view of the agonizing indecisions and the sparks of hatred that we all carry within

us. Tharoor in this novel also highlights economic asymmetries to produce stark cultural

discontinuities.

Challenging the account of the narrative cinema based on universal mental structures

and trans historical aesthetic norms the notion of cinema’s as vernacular modernism has

recently proposed by Tharoor with regard to classical Bollywood cinema (1920s through 1950s)

Shashi Tharoor in The Show Business had highlighted certain aspects of Bollywood which

were previously neglected. Its relation to contemporary modernist movements in the traditional

media as well as social and economic modernization, its ability to offer mass audiences a

market based cultural horizons in which the experience of modernity including its traumatic as

well as liberating effects could be very well seen in the novel Show Business. Tharoor’s satirical

novel Show Business lampoons the Indian film business and its superficiality. It is the best

example of Bollywood’s fantasy element. In the novel nothing is as it first appears, as the movie

mega Ashok Banjara finds out. He is a superstar of Bollywood, a hero of Godambo, Judia, Dil

Ek Qila, Mechanic, and his last unfinished movie kalki. Ashok is critically ill, fighting for his

life in the intensive care unit. Between the voices, like pranay, Ashoks long time cinema villain,

Kulbhushan, Ashoks politician father Mehnaaz Elahi, Ashok’s bedded wife for whom Ashok

has no feelings, Ashbins’ Ashok’s brother the writer takes us to the film sets of each one of the

Ashok’s stars and from these various points of view we gather Ashok in Show Business.

Tharoor explores the Bombay movie industry, he explains the culture of this industry. It is

satirical tale of Ashok’s hits and masses in the world of politics and cinema. Through this
chapter it is seen that the Indian film industry is by far the largest in the world-making twice as

many films as Hollywood. Much of this is Escapist entertainment, but it all reflects the

understanding that the only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its

parts. The film world embodies the very idea of India’s diversity in the way in which it is

organized, staffed, and financed-and in the stories it tells. An India that denies itself to some

Indians could end up being denied to all Indians; and so Indians films communicate the

diversity that is the basis of the Indian heritage, by offering all of us a common world to which

to escape, by allowing us to dream with our eyes open. Through this novel Tharoor allows the

complexity of India’s social fabric, economic realities, the political exigencies of an enormous

entrenched system built equally of corruption and necessity to arrange itself around his

protagonists. Arriving at its apex of irony, according to Tharoor the life of movie is both

lampoons and celebrates, pain and pleasure which mix until the final fade out.

Tharoor’s short stories have emotional colouring, which enhances the emotional and

imaginative impact of the story. Capturing life in the raw seems to be the chief source of appeal

in all Tharoor’s creative writing the stories like The Five Dollar Smile, Friends, The pyre is a

refusal to come out with his own biographical details, and it is generally superfluous. He has

written out material of his life many times. The village Girl, The Death of a School master

represents the Malyali culture, the comprehensive picture of the rural India. The characteristic

of Tharoor’s short story is that he uses the first person mode of narration. His short stories

depicts the contemporary human situation in all its lucidity or pathos or tragedy. Stories like

Auntie Rita, The village Girl are delineation of emotional and behavioral patterns that

complexify human relationship, especially the man woman ones. Tharoor’s stories though they

are adolescent stories, make a lasting impression by their portrayal of characters. Thus they are

symbolic of particular human experiences.

who have really lived and about events, which really occurred. The word fiction describes

characters and events which the author has invented. A work of non-fiction has as its subject

real people and real events. Thus the writers of non- fiction always present their reflections,

experiences and discoveries in a vivid and stimulating way. Non-fiction writers choose their

words carefully with the intention to perceive the reader to believe a certain idea and inform a

reader one practical subject. Tharoors non-fictional works India: From Midnight to The

Millennium and Reasons of states is the thoughtful and well informed observer, on who

demonstrates the balance of insider and outsider that has often made for the best writing about

India. Tharoor’s India: From Midnight to The Millennium is an exceptionally well-reasoned and

thorough reply from what, in India would be regarded as the westernized liberal camp. Blending

memoir, essay and empirical argument, Tharoor carefully reviews the core questions about

India’s unfinished experiment in self-governance the durability of it constitutional democracy,

its persistent struggles over caste, the rise of Hindu extremist politics, and the recent and

historic attempt to catch up to Asia’s economic figures through adoption of free market reforms.

Shashi Tharoor writes a series of essays focusing on different aspects of his two major

concerns; India’s terrible poverty and the rise of sectarian feeling powerful enough to threaten

the common sense of nation head. Tharoor’s observations about India are extremely optimistic.

He believes that India has tremendous strengths, energy, dynamism, skills and great will to

work, to achieve, astonishing capacity to save and invest, very importantly freedom to express

our views, change our leaders and determine our own fate. Reasons of State is a revised version

of Tharoor’s Ph.D. Dissertation at the Fletcher school of law and Diplomacy, Medford,

Massachusetts, U.S.A. Reasons of State reflects the meticulous study of Tharoor on India’s

foreign policy. The study covers the span from freedom of India and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru as

the first Prime Minister and the journey ends with Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister. The
Elephant, the Tiger &the cellphone is the present volume, in which Tharoor tried to bring

together over sixty articles, op-eds and essays that have published in the last half-dozen years on

subjects related to contemporary India. The book reflects India in the first decade of the twenty-

first century is a young country, an optimistic country, a country marching confidently towards

the future. The book also reflects something of the assumptions and the world view of the

English-speaking, educated professional and entrepreneurial classes who are driving change and

prosperity in India. But it is still a land of contrasts, where millions live wretched lives amid

poverty and neglect even as India boasts the highest number of billionaires of any country in

Asia, higher than either Japan or China. As one who loves and believes in one’s country. Thus

the book’s opening section ends on a sobering note that is not meant to undermine the message

of the later chapters. Rather, it points to the necessity of entering the sunlit uplands with eyes

wide open to the dangers lurking in the shadows. Thus the book is oriented towards the future,

but one in which issues of history and identity make more than an occasional appearance.

Whether through elections or quotas, political mobilization in contemporary India has asserted

the power of old identities, habits, faiths and prejudices. Transcending them will be the major

challenge for the Indian politics in the twenty-first century. The present thesis has tried to focus

on the politico-historical aspects of society that has political independence but not the

independence of mind. People are not awakened to consciousness fully. This study is also an

attempt to recreate the bond of humanitarianism where realization of self and the knowledge of

their potentiality are wanting. The thesis also provides the readers the attempt for order and

attempt for the feeling of nationality is a must. In spite of all these Tharoor’s work also stresses

the fact and reality of the idiosyncratic society which one feels anxious about it. The politicians

who are really expected to educate the society and bring them necessary awareness become the

part of the rotten pattern themselves. History the world, the universe, human life, and every

institution under which one lives is in a constant state of evolution. The world and everything is
being created and recreated. Thus the thesis has to be end with the speech of Swami

Vivekananda, who more than a century ago, at Chicago’s World Parliament of Religions in

1893, articulated best the liberal humanism that lies at the heart of his (and my) creed:

‘I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and

universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as

true. I am proud to belong to a country which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of

all religions and all countries of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our

bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to southern India and took refuge with us

in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am

proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand

Zoroastrian nation. I remember having repeated a hymn from my earliest boyhood, which is

every day repeated by millions of human beings: ‘As the different streams having their sources

in different places all mingle their water in the sea,so,O Lord, the different paths which men

take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to

Thee’…..(T) he wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita (says)….’Whosoever comes to Me,

through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end

lead to me.’(TETTATC-68)

This Thesis follows all the parameters of the seventh edition of the MLA handbook.

The study ends with an exhaustive list of works cited and bibliography.