Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Multiplicity of Voices in the novels of Shashi Tharoor

Multiplicity of Voices in the novels of Shashi Tharoor

Shashi Tharoor is undoubtedly an important figure in the history of Indian Writing in English because his novels develop certain specific strategies in order to address directly some of the central concerns of contemporary India. His carefully cultivated neutrality raises several questions of uncertainty which converge in a highly complex vision of life. One notices a continuous alternation between history and fiction in the narrative structure of all his novels. This paper is an attempt to analyze his novels so as to reveal their artistic richness.

The Great Indian Novel (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1989) is a blending of the ancient Indian epic, the Mahabharatha, and the political history of twentieth century India. The characters of the epic are made to re-live their lives in the pre- and post- independent India. At first reading, this novel looks like a political satire with a mythical framework, closely following the epic with its eighteen Books narrated by Ved Vyas, and parading most of the important epic characters across the political vista. The use of myth is a familiar and legitimate technique to define and judge contemporary history. But more than that, in this novel, the sophisticated techniques and the subsequent complex effects lead not only to a revaluation of history but the very myth itself is reborn under the historical process. Great care has been taken by the narrator to present things from a neutral perspective, withholding judgment and encouraging plurality of meaning. The resultant artistic ambivalence defies the distinctive categorical barriers of ancient myth and contemporary history.

As this novel is not merely a political allegory, we must start by analyzing the subtle methods by which it transcends contemporary history and becomes an artistic version of a philosophic vision of life. First of all, let us take a look at the narrative voice: Like Eliot’s Tiresias, Vyas was present in the ‘Dwaparayuga’ and is also present in the ‘Kaliyuga’. Again, he is both a spectator and a participant; what he sees is the subject of the novel. His all-seeing eye sweeps across history, recording impartially what he sees. “I was there, Ganapathi”, says Vyas while describing Gangaji’s visit to Motihari (49). “I know a great many things that people don’t know I know”, says he on another occasion (65). “Facts, that is all I intend to record, facts and names”, claims the impartial historian (86). At the same time he warns us to be ‘wary of history by anecdote’ (141). Though he has sources everywhere, his narrative falters for the first time when Karna gives a piece of paper to Gaga Shah because Vyas’s man fails to view its contents. The aura of certainty begins to disappear fast when questions regarding motives are raised. When Shashi Tharoor reverses the myth and makes his Ekalavya defy Drona and refuse to sacrifice his thumb and Drona angrily asks him to get out, an interesting question is raised: Would Drona have accepted the sacrifice if the boy had been willing? “I do not know, Ganapathi”, confesses Vyas (199). Again, when Gangaji is bleeding to death and Sarah-behn reassures him that everything will be all right, he smiles at the absurdity of the remark. “Or at least I imagine he did: . . . For I was not there, Ganapathi” (232). By the time the narrative reaches the seventeenth Book, while reporting how Duryodhani decided to declare the Siege, Vyas admits that his “sources were no longer as good as in the old days”(366). Towards the end he admits that he has avoided mentioning many other facts in the story because he preferred ‘to pretend they did not matter’ (412), that perhaps he can ‘no longer distinguish between right and wrong’ (413), and realizes that he has told the story so far ‘from a completely mistaken perspective’ and that he ‘must retell it’ (418). And the last sentence of the novel is the very first sentence itself. Instead of an ending, we have a new beginning. Thus this open-ended discourse invalidates the viability of any single version of history. As Vyas states: “I did not begin the story in order to end it; the essence of the tale lay in the telling. ‘What happened next?’ I could answer, but ‘What happened in the end?’ I could not even understand” (162).

The result of such a method is necessarily a profound ambivalence at the core of the book. The carefully maintained ambivalence disappears at times and seems to give a strong subjective judgment, but the ambivalence returns to pay homage to the realization that ‘History’s judgments are not so easily made’ (416). Even though Gangaji’s greatness is the least ambiguous of assertions in the story, he is initially presented with a mixture of the playful and the serious, with his enema and his loincloth. The great Father of the Nation has taken the vow of celibacy but he is determined to get to Heaven ‘without any sons to lift me there’ (24). Just two decades after his death, during his centenary celebrations, he has become ‘the father of our Prime-Minister’ to some, ‘an old saint who lived many years ago and looked after cows’ to some others, and also a poor man who ‘did not have enough clothes to wear’ to yet others (47). The sarcasm is sharp and biting. When he writes, ‘He might as well have become a character from the ‘Mahabharatha’” (47), which Gandhiji was not and Gangaji clearly was, it becomes an index of the historical relevance of all myths and legends. Similarly, when Gangaji withdraws the mango agitation consequent on the attack on the police station and feels that his own people have not understood him, the rightness of the decision is questioned by Pandu: “Is this a Kaurava movement, or a one man show?” and Vyas’s response is: “There was of course, no answer to the question, and no one ventured any, least of all me” (126-27). The same dilemma is visible in judging between Gangaji’s fight against the British and Karna’s against the Hindus and the British: “Which philosopher would dare to establish a hierarchy among such verities?”(164). When Gandhiji declares, ‘I am a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Zoroastrian, a Jew’, and Karna retorts: ‘Only a Hindu could say that’ (142), the tension remains unresolved. As Vyas remarked earlier, ‘India does not choose among her sons, and nor do I’ (115). After the assassination of Gandhiji, Vyas narrates a story, ‘though I don’t believe it myself for a moment’ (234), in which Karna goes to Gangaji to seek his forgiveness and blessings, and as he leaves, ‘a hand slipped out from under the shroud and grazed his shoulder’ (235). Telling a story while questioning its credibility is another clever device to retain the ambivalence. ‘Make of it what you will’ is all the help we get from the narrator.

The same ambivalence is present in depicting Karna as a Muslim. He circumcises himself to be a Muslim like his foster father, but he ‘disdains the mullahs and disregarded their prohibitions’ (142). And the narrative voice adds: ‘It was not Islam that separated him from Gangaji, but Hinduism’ (142). In spite of his professed detachment, Vyas is beginning to judge. The judgment becomes less ambivalent with regard to Nehru’s decision for cease-fire in the Kashmir issue: “Of course he was wrong, but he was wrong, Ganapathi, for the right reasons” (260). Vyas’s Brahminical ambivalence, though nothing to be ashamed of, is becoming ‘less and less tenable with time’ (368), especially with regard to Priya Duryodhani. The ‘corrupt electoral practice’ of which she is found guilty is ‘an offence whose triviality was underscored by the far greater crimes perpetrated and perpetuated all around her and her government’ (365); it is ‘an impartial (if unimaginative) reading of the statutes’ by an honest judge (368). Even when the leaders of the opposition party are arrested, however base be the motives of the Siege, Vyas is not blind to the positive results: with strikes banned, and habitual absentees reporting for work, he expresses his conviction that ‘more Indians would benefit from the abolition of bonded labour and the implementation of land reforms than would suffer from the censorship of articles’ (369). But as things grow worse, he finds it impossible to sustain his ‘comfortable ambivalence’ (371), the product of an ‘instinctive awareness of the subjectivity of truth, the relativity of judgment and the impossibility of action’ (373). Arjun who has always been respectful towards him openly declares that Vyas must be wrong in his non-involvement. Unable to face this reality, Vyas enters a dream in which the false game of dice and the disrobing of Draupadi are re-enacted. He cannot ignore the hurt in her eyes anymore. He wakes up from the dream to see that ‘my ambivalence had gone’ (383). With the defeat of Duryodhani, a new era begins to dawn, but soon it turns out to be just an illusion. The ‘determined tyrant’ is followed by ‘an indeterminate collection of tyros’ (402); Duryodhani comes back to power; ‘Dharma had turned full circle’ (411).

Does it mean that history is amoral? It looks like that, when all people, including Duryodhani, reach heaven, ‘even those who have failed to observe Dharma’ (417). But Yudhishtir finds it difficult to accept this. He sums up the whole Indian situation like this: “But for too many generations now we have allowed ourselves to believe India had all the answers, if only it applied them correctly. Now I realize that we don’t even know all the questions.”(418). The exhortation to admit that there is more than one truth, more than one ‘dharma’, leads Vyas to retell his story from the beginning.

One important device, which is fastidiously employed in order to diminish all certitudes and to emphasize the plurality of meaning, is irony. An interesting case in point is the account of the so-called ‘Hastinapur Massacre’. Colonel Rudyard, the British officer responsible for the brutality, was prematurely retired with a full pension, and a collection was raised and presented to him by the Englishmen in India to the tune of a quarter of a million pounds, ‘an amount it would take the President of India thirty-five years to earn’ whereas it took Rudyard ‘less than thirty-five minutes’ (82). The irony does not stop here. Two young Indians, swearing vengeance, went to England and blew him to pieces. But the murdered man was not Colonel Rudyard but one Professor Kipling who had called the Indians ‘dogs’ and was struck by Pandu. The young men who went to the gallows were ironically unaware that they had killed the wrong man. But the crowning irony is the irony of fate whereby the sentence of death had fallen, ‘not on the man who had ordered the soldiers to fire on an unarmed assembly but on he who had so vilely insulted an entire nation’ (84).

Shashi Tharoor’s use of irony reveals how ‘the sublime degenerates into the sub-slime’ (124). After establishing the glamour and grandeur of the ‘mango satyagraha’, after Gandhiji plucked the first fruit of India’s liberation, stones flung by the mob to bring down some mangoes fell on some volunteers, mingling their blood with the mango juice on their dresses. But the greater irony is that the Imperialists who acted on such a trifle are held to ridicule by the whole world. Often irony works in a simple and straightforward way: Arjun, at whose birth it was announced that he would become the friend of Vishnu and Shiva, blunders into a misadventure in his first attempt to abduct Subhadra. He makes a wrong grab and is forced to pay forty rupees to extricate himself from the prostitute Kameswari. There is powerful irony in the contrast between Gandhari who wills herself to blindness because she does not wish to see more than her husband does, and Dhritharashtra who is ‘not there to share the darkness with her’ (152). Or again, when Yudhishtir makes himself the laughing stock of the whole world with his ‘Auto Urine Therapy’, the effect is indeed bathetic.

The use of dreams is another ingenious device in this novel that sustains and interrupts the narrative in turn. It blends history with myth, sometimes as an alternative to history, and at other times as a supplement to it. It offers parallels and contrasts between two widely different ages. Let us take a couple of examples to see how dreams function in this novel: After describing the assassination of Gandhiji, Vyas has a dream in which Gandhiji is on the bed of arrows, ‘the bed which was all that a torn and jagged nation could offer its foremost saint to rest on’ (233). It is difficult to tell whether he died from the injury inflicted on him by the bullet or from the incisions of the arrows. The nightmare suggests that it was ‘India collectively that ended Gangaji’s life by tearing itself apart’ (234). Here the dream is in addition to history; it is also an appropriate symbolic assertion of the greatness of the man and of the nature of the issues involved – death wish, sense of failure and the tragedy of partition. Another is a fantasy of Vyas which precedes the actual occurrence, a kind of wishful thinking. Jayaprakash Drona, who was once insulted by Heaslop, has become the Minister of State for Administrative Reform and now he gets a chance to even the score with Heaslop who has lost everything in a communal riot. In the fantasy, Drona repays the Englishman in the same coin – that is, by throwing some coins towards him, just as was done to him in the past. Then Vyas admits that ‘what happened was far more prosaic than my fantasy’ (242), and goes on to describe how Drona generously offered all help to him. A polite ‘namaste’ to Heaslop’s outstretched hand ends the meeting, and that is all the revenge he takes.

There are a number of other dreams as well and their general purpose is to include in the narrative certain incidents from the epic, which are too important to be omitted but too difficult to incorporate onto the factual level in any realistic way. Vyas is willing to ‘pay the price of chronological inexactitude’ so that he can have the relief of relinquishing ‘this heavy burden of historical memory’ (175). After each escape into his world of fantasy, he invariably returns to received memory. Thus the narrative establishes a rhythm of its own by alternating between dream and reality.

This novel stops at the brink of the present, with the never-ending story beginning once again, with the endless process of rearranging and reordering the past and casting dubious glances into an uncertain future. The formal ending of the novel is a double opening: one for the future to enter, and the other to revise the past. The final vision is neither prophetic nor nostalgic: it simply affirms the constant need to weave and unweave the fabric of myth and the design of history into varying patterns of significance. The interchangeability of the fabric and the design is perhaps the highest accolade one can offer to the artistry of The Great Indian Novel.

If The Great Indian Novel works mainly through a contrast between the ancient and the modern levels of experience, Show Business (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1991) draws its plan around the similarity between the illusory world of films and the actual world of realities. The highly glamorous world of Bollywood and the improbable and unrealistic stories with which its formulae-pictures are mechanically and successfully produced offer a clear contrast to the average Indian and the socio-political realities amidst which he lives. Nothing can be more different than these two. At the same time, the average Indian is fatally attracted to and often motivated by the world of films; his impossible dreams and unattainable ambitions find a vicarious fulfillment in celluloid; thus the major part of his mental life is coloured and occupied by a pseudo-world of make-believe. From this perspective nothing appears more intrinsic to the Indian psyche than the cinema. This dual status of the popular cinema which is distinctly contrasted with, yet strangely akin to ordinary life, makes possible the simultaneous exercise of a double method within the same discourse. The illusion created by the film and sustained by people’s ‘ignorance’ and ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ finds its way into their hearts and becomes a dominant influence whereby the distinction between reality and illusion becomes rather tenuous. It is in this borderland that Show Business acquires its power as a work of art.

The ending of Show Business is an interesting instance where the thread of reality is shown as inextricably intertwined with the cinematic illusion. Ashok is dying, he feels that reality is leaving him, the people surrounding him cease to be real and are out of focus, “And me, I am not real either”, only “the pain is real” (306), and at the last moment, “the pain is gone now, in its place there is the limpid clarity of darkness and glowing and shadow and fire, the final fire that will shoot me to the sky” (307). But the narrative does not stop here. It cannot, because it is uncinematic for the hero to die at the hands of the villain; there must be justice and retribution. To quote the last paragraph:

But not yet. Someone will find out how to stop the pain, someone will find out who did it, someone will arrest the villain for the crime, someone will find the lyrics to the theme song, someone will gather the crowds for a joyous celebration, and then, only then, will it be, only then can it be, the end. (307)

Ashok does not accept his end; this sort of ending happens only in life, and he is awaiting the cinematic turn that events must take in order to make it a ‘proper’ ending. For the novelist it is a refusal to give a conventional ending to the story with the death of Ashok; he postpones the ending indefinitely.

The unexplained death of an American girl in the midst of a communal riot in an Indian village is the nucleus around which Shashi Tharoor’s Riot (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2001) imposes a multiplicity of perspectives regarding the so called facts of history. If history is a pluralistic discourse with its mutually contradictory interpretation of facts, its novelistic representation is bound to be a welter of conflicting view points, and any attempt to resolve its essential ambivalence is an offense that goes against its own grain. The obvious quest is to uncover the circumstances which led to the brutal murder of Priscilla Hart. Unlike the murder mystery stories which begin with several probable options and move inexorably towards the identity of the actual murderer, thereby satisfying the reader’s urge for certainty, here the novel moves from the apparent certainty of an accidental casualty of a communal riot to a highly unsettling list of possibilities, thus frustrating the reader’s desire for the final resolution. Yet the experience is aesthetically satisfying, partly because it works on a now familiar fictional tradition of a Borges, Fowles or Calvino, but mainly because it enables the reader to see the ‘simple’ issue in all its complexity. It is effective because the convention employed here has successfully integrated an important mode of human perception: the gradual deepening of understanding which reveals the complex underpinnings of even familiar things. The momentary pleasure of resolution gives way to meditative joy which centers round the drama of possibilities. Anyone who feels that he has learned to see things in a wider and deeper way feels good about himself. It is perhaps in some such way that Shashi Tharoor enables the reader to accept the uncertainties of Riot, and the novel succeeds in leaving the reader strangely satisfied.

But it should be emphasized that this method as used here has a certain central weakness. Riot presumes to be an investigation into the mysterious death of Priscilla Hart. What is unfolded in this process is the love story of Lakshman and Priscilla. Lakshman falls in love with her against his will, against his own better judgment whereas Priscilla is instinctively sure of the rightness of her choice. Despite the occasional doubts about the sanity of her choice expressed in her letters to Cindy, she has given herself up to him with complete abandon. Similarly, though Lakshman expresses feelings of compunction at his behaviour, he too is overwhelmed and overruled by his riotous passion for Priscilla. The novel does not leave us in any doubt about their mutual feelings. Now what Shashi Tharoor does is to shroud the identity of her murderer in mystery. It could have been Makhan Singh, or Ali, or the Swami’s goondas, or any other anonymous participant in the riot. What is the purpose served by this device which is rather hastily inserted into the text towards the very end? Is it to give us the realization that the exact knowledge is rather irrelevant and that the only thing that matters is that she got killed? Perhaps he wants to emphasize the inaccessibility of truth. Priscilla’s mother is the only person who feels that there is something more to be understood. As the knowledge that is withheld from her is offered to the reader, he cannot share her dissatisfaction.

This is precisely where the weakness of the novel lies. It pretends to take us into the restless realm of uncertainties, but the only uncertainty, the deliberately suppressed identity of the murderer, is rather felt to be irrelevant, and so it fails to engage the reader in any particularly disturbing way. If the ambiguity had been built into the relationship of Lakshman and Priscilla, or if it had been used to render ambiguous our response to these characters, it would have been an entirely different story altogether. For example, in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, another story of adultery, what makes Anna memorable is the ambiguity of the reader’s, and perhaps even the writer’s, response to her. In Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, a novel to which allusions have been made in Riot (204), the depiction of Major Scobie’s adultery is a lot more complex than that of Lakshman here. One may argue that Tharoor was not writing a psychological novel and it is unfair to find fault with him for his not doing what he never proposed to do. But Tharoor has definitely taken pains to present the story of adultery as thematically significant. More importantly, the stalemate in the personal story is deliberately intended to reinforce the moral and political dilemma of communal conflicts. What is observed here is the inability of the book to combine the personal with the political. To make this argument clearer, one may bring in another parallel with E.M.Forster’s novel, A Passage to India, another work alluded to in Riot (161). Is Priscilla Hart another Adela Quested? Is the problem basically more cultural than psychological? Is this another instance of the West and the East never being able to meet? Even in that case, a failure to render the complexity of the lovers’ situation is a serious lapse, and what the book loses is the kind of thing which goes into the making of great literature.

Riot has taken for its central theme a communal riot which took place in Zalilgarh and it analyzes the ideological issues involved in this affair. He presents both the Hindu angle which advocates the reclamation of the Ram Janma Bhumi from the Muslims, and the Muslim version of the whole incident. Through the juxtaposition of Ram Charan Gupta and Prof. Mohammed Sarwar, Tharoor tries to analyze the concept of secularism in which Hindus and Muslims are proud of being Hindus and Muslims respectively but with tolerance and respect for each other and united through their common identity as Indians. Running along with this is the love story of Lakshman and Priscilla. The love story is another instance of a ‘riot’ where passions run high, people violate the usual norms of moral conduct and end up by destroying each other. In this story of adultery, it is curious to notice that both parties involved in the affair are ideologically oriented towards the concept of adultery even before they step into it. Lakshman had an uncle, not exactly his uncle but called him Sudhir uncle, an exceedingly handsome man who had left his wife and gone off with another woman. When he once visited Lakshman’s house, Lakshman’s father and mother greeted him with cold hostility. When Sudhir left, Lakshman’s father commented: “He [Sudhir} has suffered the diminishment of his status, lost the respect of friends and family, abandoned the sweet familiar comforts of home life, borne the stigma of social life, and endured court-ordered financial impoverishment. Above all, he knows that in doing what he did he has spurned those in relation to whom he recognized himself”(189). These were the last words of his father, and it has stayed in his mind ever since. For example, when he is torn between his duty and his passion, he muses: “My role as a husband and father is central to who I am; it concerns my rootedness in the world; it is inextricably bound up with my sense of my place in the cosmos. I have been brought up to believe that such things – marriage, family – are beyond individual will, that they transcend an individual’s freedom of action. Priscilla’ll never understand that” (201-2). Thus as a man who gives a lot of importance to family responsibilities and filial obligations, he is already equipped with a moral armour against adultery. Priscilla has a more immediately personal and less simple attitude to adultery. What she carries with her is not the practical consequences of a broken marriage but the intensely emotional disgust of a daughter who could never forgive her father for his ugly affair with Nandini his secretary. It is heavily ironic that Lakshman finds himself in a situation which is emotionally satisfying but morally repulsive, and Priscilla finds herself entangled with a man who in conceding to her wishes will be re-enacting the ugly drama of her father’s.

Lakshman and Priscilla stand for two different ways of life, and their values are not compatible with each other’s. Lakshman is the educated Indian who cannot share his intellectual ideas and humorous Wildisms with any of the Indians in Zalilgarh and he feels quite comfortable with an American girl. But he is, at heart, an Indian, and is quite aware of the cultural gap between them. He is, in his own words, ‘overworked, overweight and married’ (215); his love life with his wife Geetha is a fiasco; and in seeking out Priscilla, he is vaguely conscious of his own desire to escape from routine work and a dull wife. He admits to himself: “Priscilla is an escape from reality; her magic cannot survive too much realism” (106). At the same time, he has come to a point where he cannot imagine a life without Priscilla. Being in love has shattered all his certitudes; he has lost ‘the sense of being anchored to the world’ (216). His choice lies, not between happiness and unhappiness, but between two kinds of unhappiness – the unhappiness of losing Priscilla and the unhappiness of shattering his daughter’s life. He does not deny that Priscilla fulfills an important need of his, but when it comes to a definite choice between his duty and his passion, he cannot bring himself to break his ties. The most important reason he gives is his attachment to his daughter Rekha. On the other hand, Priscilla is quite sure of her choice and she will never understand the inner anguish and utter helplessness of Lakshman: “I can’t believe he’s even hesitating to leave a loveless marriage he hates for the woman he says he loves” (199). She is the broadminded and progressive daughter of the West for whom personal fulfillment is more important than adherence to any other value. She demands from him exactly what she gives, neither more nor less. The conflict between Lakshman and Priscilla is the conflict between the Victorian ideals of duty, responsibility and respectability, and the Romantic credo of freedom, love and individual fulfillment. Or to put it in another way, it is the conflict between the East and the West.

Once it has been established that Lakshman is not going to forsake his family and culture by running away with an American girl, no matter how strong the temptation has been, Tharoor destroys this sense of finality by a clever stroke. Lakshman learns that Priscilla was pregnant at the time of her murder. The question is: would it have made any difference to his decisions if he had known about it? This was the acid test of his love that Priscilla had planned to perform. If his paternal duty to his daughter has been the strongest of motives as he claims, how can he shirk off his obligation to his future child? At the same time, it raises another question regarding Priscilla which is perhaps not consistent with her image. What was her motive in getting pregnant? Was her pregnancy a planned one, or accidental? Once she had written to Cindy: “Sometimes I wonder what would happen if Lucky and I had a daughter . . . And then Lucky would see me as family” (171). Further, as her work is concerned with population-control awareness, and as she carries birth-control pills in her bag, it is a little difficult to believe that her pregnancy has been an accidental occurrence. One can never be completely certain. Rendering the certainties thus uncertain is a typical method of Shashi Tharoor.

The structure of the novel deserves special attention. Riot is written in the form of newspaper reports, letters, diaries, transcripts from interviews, and so on, and the style varies from the funny Indian English of Shankar Das to the literary English which is employed for the major part of narration, with a wild profusion of four letter words and strange forms of swearing. The poems written by Lakshman and Priscilla, and the long essays on history and politics by Ram Charan Gupta and Prof. Mohammed Sarwar turn the novel into a medley of diverse genres. As a highly self-conscious novel, Riot experiments with the form of the novel. The book begins with a few newspaper reports from The New York Journal, and the last one by Randy Diggs encloses the story proper. One sees Diggs going around interviewing people in order to write this report. By giving us the report as well as the material from which the report is made, Shashi Tharoor gives us the product and the process – a method employed by Doris Lessing, though on a much larger level, in The Golden Notebook. Even though the official ending of the novel, that is, the last printed word in the book, is the ending of the report by Diggs, the story ends just before that. Endings always fascinated Tharoor; in all his novels he has refused to give the conventional endings.

Somewhere in the middle of the novel there is a section called ‘From Lakshman’s journal: June 2, 1989’ (135-7), in which Shashi Tharoor talks about the art of writing novels. Lakshman, the aspiring poet and writer, is the fictional surrogate of the author here. Almost all reviews which appeared on the publication of Riot had extensive excerpts from this section. To include a theory of the novel within the novel itself is quite common in most postmodern novels. To quote:

“I’d like to write a novel,” I tell her, “that doesn’t read like a novel. Novels are too easy – they tell a story, in a linear narrative, from start to finish. They’ve done that for decades. Centuries, perhaps. I’d do it differently.”

She raises herself on an elbow. “You mean, write an epic?”

“No,” I reply shortly, “someone’s done that already. I’ve read about this chap who’s just reinvented the Mahabharata as a twentieth-century story – epic style, oral tradition, narrative digressions, the lot. No, what I mean is, why can’t I write a novel that reads like – like an encyclopedia?”

“An encyclopedia?” She sounds dubious.

“Well, a short one. What I mean is, something in which you can turn to any page and read. You pick up chapter 23, and you get one thread of the plot. Then you go forwards to chapter 37, or backwards to 16, and you get another thread. And they’re all interconnected, but you see the interconnections differently depending on the order in which you read them. It’s like each bit of reading adds to the sum total of the reader’s knowledge, just like an encyclopedia. But to each new bit of reading he brings the knowledge he’s acquired up to that point – so that each chapter means more, or less, depending on how much he’s learned already.”

(135-6)

Here his humorous reference to his own magnum opus is clearly reminiscent of writers like Milan Kundera; perhaps he shares his encyclopedic ambition with Vladimir Nabokov; and the book in which one jumps from chapter 23 to 37 and then to 16 evokes Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch. In short, with its intertextual references and allusions, with its sophisticated awareness of its own reflexivity, Riot is quite in tune with much of the metafictional writings of today. While it is true that his playful techniques serve their purpose in a satiric or ironic mode, as in The Great Indian Novel, one cannot help feeling that it fails to embody the tragic predicament of the protagonists in Riot, which one may attribute either to the inherent limitation of the method or to the ineptitude of the writer’s craft.

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