Excerpt - The Great Indian Novel

Let me, as so often in our story, digress once more. There is, Ganapathi, a curious parallel. To many foreigners who know nothing of India, the one Indian book they know anything about is the Kama Sutra. To them, it is the Great Indian Novelty. The Kama Sutra may well be the only Indian book which has been read more by foreigners than Indians. Yet it is for the most part a treatise on the social etiquette of ancient Indian courtship, and those who think of its author Vatsyayana as some sort of fourth-century pornographer must surely be disappointed to go through his careful catalogue of amatory activities, which reads more like a textbook than a thriller. But what a far cry it is from the precision of the Kama Sutra to the prudery of contemporary India! It never ceases to amaze me, Ganapathi, that a civilization so capable of sexual candor should be steeped in the ignorance, superstition and prurience that characterize Indian sexual attitudes today. Perhaps the problem is that the Kama Sutra’s refined brand of bedroom chivalry cannot go very far in a country of so many women and so few bedrooms.

It is no better with the great stories of our national epics. How far we have traveled from the glory and splendor of our adventurous mythological heroes! The land of Rama, setting out on his glorious crusade against the abductors of his divinely pure wife Sita, the land where truth and honor and valor and dharma were worshipped as the cardinal principles of existence, is now a nation of weak-willed compromisers, of leaders unable to lead, of rampant corruption and endemic faithlessness. Our democrats gamble with democracy; our would-be dictators do not know what to dictate. We soothe ourselves with the lullabies of ancient history, our remarkable culture, our inspiring mythology. But our present is so depressing that our leaders can speak of the intermediate future or the immediate past.
Whatever our ancestors expected of India, Ganapathi, it was not this. It was not a land where dharma and duty have come to mean nothing; where religion is an excuse for conflict rather than a code of conduct; where piety, instead of marking wisdom, masks a crippling lack of imagination. It was not a land where brides are burnt in kerosene-soaked kitchens because they have not brought enough dowry with them; where integrity and self-respect are for sale to the highest bidder; where men are pulled off buses and butchered because of the length of a forelock or the absence of a foreskin. All these things that I have avoided mentioning in my story because I preferred to pretend they did not matter.
But they matter, of course, because in our country the mundane is as relevant as the mythical. Our philosophers try to make much of our great Vedic religion by pointing to its spiritualism, its pacifism, its lofty pansophism; and they ignore, or gloss over, its superstitions, its inegalities, its obscurantism. That is quite typical. Indeed one may say its quite typically Hindu. Hinduism is the religion of over 80 percent of Indians, and as a way of life it pervades almost all things Indian, bringing to politics, work and social relations the same flexibility of doctrine, relevance for custom and absorptive eclecticism that characterize the religion as well as the same tendency to respect outworn dogma, worship sacred cows and offer undue deference to gurus. Not to mention its great ability to overlook or transcend the inconvenient truth.
I have been, on the whole, a good Hindu in my story. I have portrayed a nation in struggle but omitted its struggles against itself, ignoring the regionalists and autonomists and separatists and secessionists who even today are trying to tear the country apart. To me, Ganapathi, they are of no consequence in the story of India; they seek to diminish something that is far greater than they will ever comprehend. Others will disagree and dismiss my assertion as the naivety of the terminally nostalgic. They will say that the India of the epic warriors died on its mythological battlefields, and that today’s India is a land of adulteration, black-marketing, corruption, communal strife, dowry killings, you know the rest, and that this is the only India that matters. Not my India, where epic battles are fought for great causes, where freedom and democracy are argued over, won, betrayed and lost, but an India where mediocrity reigns, where the greatest cause is the making of money, where dishonesty is the most prevalent art and bribery the most vital skill, where power is an end in itself rather than a means, where the real political issues of the day involve not principles but parochialism. An India where a Priya Duryodhani can be re-elected because seven hundred million people cannot produce anyone better, and where her immortality can be guaranteed by her greatest failure the alienation of some of the country’s most loyal citizens to the point where two of them consider it a greater duty to kill her rather than protect her, as they were employed to do.
Perhaps they were right. Or perhaps it is simply that I can no longer distinguish between right and wrong, real and unreal. For I again began to dream.

The Great Indian Novel, by Shashi Tharoor
(Reproduced here without permission)

Finally read this book, its been on the bookshelf for a while now. And makes very interesting reading - its remarkable how history has the uncanny knack of repeating itself! Tharoor has done a rather remarkable and imaginative job of fusing the Mahabharata with the more contemporary history of India, and lightened the possible grimness with a healthy dose of wry humor.

So if the present reservation fiasco has got your hackles up and your panties all atwist, then this may be just the thing that will get you laughing and able to pull it off and get things straightened up again. You’re in good company you see! :o)