The Great Indian Novel is an attempt to retell the political history of twentieth century India through a fictional recasting of events, episodes and characters from the Mahabharata. By the end of the 19th century, no book in English literary history had enjoyed more editions, spin-offs and translations. Tom Jones is a classic English novel that captures the spirit of its age and whose famous characters have come to represent Augustan society in all its loquacious, turbulent, comic variety.
The future prime minister displayed flashes of brilliance that equalled the greatest Victorian novelists. Its great breakthrough was its intimate dialogue with the reader. David Copperfield marked the point at which Dickens became the great entertainer and also laid the foundations for his later, darker masterpieces.
A thrilling adventure story, gripping history and fascinating study of the Scottish character, Kidnapped has lost none of its power. Hardy exposed his deepest feelings in this bleak, angry novel and, stung by the hostile response, he never wrote another. The evergreen tale from the riverbank and a powerful contribution to the mythology of Edwardian England.
The story of a blighted New York marriage stands as a fierce indictment of a society estranged from culture. This portrait of a day in the lives of three Dubliners remains a towering work, in its word play surpassing even Shakespeare. In Sanskrit, Maha means great and Bharata means India. The Mahabharata has not only influenced the literature, art, sculpture and painting of India but it has also moulded the very character of the Indian people.
Characters from the Great Epic. In India a philosophical or even political controversy can hardly be found that has no reference to the thought of the Mahabharata. Deshpande,Transmission of the Mahabharata Tradition The essential Mahabharata is whatever is relevant to us in the second half of the twentieth century.
No epic, no work of art, is sacred by itself; if it does not have meaning for me now, it is nothing, it is dead. Lal,The Mahabharata of Vyasa Our past and present and future problems are much more crowded than we expect.
I think in India, some stories should be kept alive by literature. Literature must refresh memory. Gunter Grass, speaking in Bombay What follows is the tale of Vyasa, great Vyasa, deserver of respect; a tale told and retold, that people will never cease telling; a source of wisdom in the sky, the earth, and the lower world; a tale the twice-born know; a tale for the learned, skilful in style, varied in metres, devoted to dialogue human and divine.
They attend seminars, appear on television, even come to see me, creasing their eight-hundred- rupee suits and clutching their moulded plastic briefcases, to announce in tones of infinite understanding that India has yet to develop. Stuff and nonsense, of course. I tell them they have no knowledge of history and even less of their own heritage.
I tell them that if they would only read the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, study the Golden Ages of the Mauryas and the Guptas and even of those Muslim chaps the Mughals, they would realize that India is not an underdeveloped country but a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay. They laugh at me pityingly and shift from one foot to the other, unable to conceal their impatience, and I tell them that, in fact, everything in India is over-developed, particularly the social structure, the bureaucracy, the political process, the financial system, the university network and, for that matter, the women.
Cantankerous old man, I hear them thinking, as they make their several exits. And, of course, there is no party-ticket for me any more, no place for me in their legislative confabulations. Not even a ceremonial governorship. I am finished, a man who lives in the past, a dog who has had his day.
I shall not enter the twenty-first century with them. But I do not finish so easily. Indeed, I have scarcely begun. You remember what happened to the last poor girl I sent you? You ought to be leaning back on those bolsters and enjoying a quiet retirement, letting these other fellows run about for you, reaping the adulation of a good life well spent.
After all, what are laurels for but to rest on? Brahm, in my epic I shall tell of past, present and future, of existence and passing, of efflorescence and decay, of death and rebirth; of what is, of what was, of what should have been.
Name of Ganapathi, South Indian, I suppose, with a big nose and shrewd, intelligent eyes. Through which he is staring owlishly at me as I dictate these words. Brahm was right about his being demanding. He listened to me quietly when I told him that his task would be no less than transcribing the Song of Modern India in my prose, then proceeded to lay down an outrageous condition.
I agreed. And he was back in the afternoon, dragging his enormous trunk behind him, laden with enough to last him a year with me, I have no doubt. I made my own condition: that he had to understand every word of what I said before he took it down.
And I was not relying merely on my ability to articulate my memories and thoughts at a length and with a complexity which would give him pause. I knew that whenever he took a break to fill that substantial belly, or even went around the corner for a leak, I could gain time by speaking into my little Japanese tape-recorder. Yes, yes, put it all down. Every word I say. This is my story, the story of Ved Vyas, eighty-eight years old and full of irrelevancies, but it could become nothing less than the Great Indian Novel.
I was born with the century, a bastard, but a bastard in a fine tradition, the offspring of a fisherwoman seduced by a travelling sage. Any householder was honoured by a visit from a holy man with a sacred thread and no luggage but his learning. And the Brahmin would partake of the offerings, the shelter, the rice, the couch, the girl, and move on, sometimes leaving more than his slippers behind. India is littered with the progeny of these twice-born travelling salesmen of salvation, and I am proud to be one of them.
She was on the river that day, the wet fold of her thin cotton sari flung over one shoulder, its hem riding up her thigh, the odour of perspiration mixing with that of the fish she was heaving into her boat, when a passing sage, Parashar, caught a glimpse of her. He was transfixed, he later told me, by the boldness of her beauty, which transcended any considerations of olfactory inconvenience. He motioned her to paddle towards it, and swam to it himself in a few swift, strong strokes. Satyavati followed, blushing.
She had no intention of resisting the sage: a mist around the island, already curtained by the trees, dispelled her modest hesitation. When she told me the story she claimed Parashar had caused a magic cloud to settle on the island to keep off prying eyes, which I took as evidence of understandable female hyperbole. Obedience was, of course, a duty, and no maiden wished to invite a saintly curse upon her head.
If you take me, what will become of me? How can I show my face amongst my people again? Who will marry me? Parashar smiled in both desire and reassurance. Even men of the world - and few in this category can equal one who is above this world - feel tenderly for those they have loved. So, afterwards, lying by her side, Parashar asked Satyavati when she had had her time of month.
And when he had heard her answer, he did not attempt to evade his responsibility. I shall, of course, return her to you when she is of marriageable age. You have my word. He bowed his head and bade his daughter farewell. Satyavati fared well. Parashar took her far away from the region before her pregnancy began to show. No, Ved Vyas is much easier.
I became. My father had taught her several lessons from the ancient texts, including one or two related to the inscrutabilities of virginity. Upon her return, to quell the rumours in the village, her father had Satyavati examined by the senior midwife. Her hymen was pronounced intact. Brahmins knew a great deal in those days. Yes, we had kings in those days, four hundred and thirty-five of them, luxuriating in titles such as Maharaja and Nawab that only airline ads and cricket captains sport any more.
The British propped them up and told them what to do, or more often what not to do, but they were real kings for all that, with palaces and principalities and twenty-one-gun salutes; well, at least some of them had twenty-one guns, but the number of cannonballs wasted on you descended in order of importance and the man who was entranced by my mother was, I think, only a fourteen- or even an eleven- gunner.
His name was Shantanu and he had had a rather unfortunate marriage in the past to an exquisite Maharani who suffered seven successive miscarriages and disappeared when her eighth pregnancy produced a son. Whatever the truth of the rumours - and there was always enough evidence to suggest that none of them was wholly unfounded - there was no doubting that Shantanu had seemed very happy with his wife until she abruptly left him. Not, that is, until my mother entered the scene.
She was in the woods oft the river bank when Shantanu came across her. He was struck first by the unique fragrance that wafted from her, a Brahmin- taught concoction of wood herbs and attars that had superseded the fishy emanations of pre-Parashar days and he was smitten as my father had been. Tell me you agree and I will be happy to give you my daughter. Can you promise her the same, Your Majesty - that her son, and no one else, will be your heir?
He shunned company, snubbed the bewhiskered British Resident on two separate occasions, and once failed to show up at his morning darshan. It was all getting to be too much for the young Crown Prince, who finally decided to get the full story out of his father. What if something should happen to you? Of course we take all due precautions, but you know what an uncertain business life is these days. The damned Resident has already run over three people in that infernal new wheeled contraption of his.
Something happens and sut! So what happens if you pick a fight with someone, or get shot hunting with some incompetent visiting Angrez? Kings, he well knew, did not travel to forests alone; there were drivers and aides to witness the most solitary of royal recreations. Ganga D. One day he was even to die in front of a crowd. Well, you listen to me. I hereby vow, in terms that no one before me has ever equalled and no one after me will ever match, that if you let your daughter marry my father, her son shall succeed as king.
I mean, you may renounce the throne and all that, but your children may have, other ideas, surely. Now, in front of all these nobles of the realm, I swear never to have children. I intend to get to Heaven all right - without any sons to lift me there.
The wind soughed in the trees, signalling the approach of the monsoon rains, rustling the garments of the consternated courtiers. He shook them off. One of the courtiers stooped to pick up the fallen flowers. You will not die unless and until you really want to die. It would bring the entire British Empire into disrepute. That was not, of course, the end of the strange game of consequences set in train by the wooded wanderings of my malodorous mother.
But that is another story, eh, Ganapathi? And one we shall come to in due course. Never fear, you can dip your twitching nose into that slice of our history too. But let us tidy up some genealogy first. With our national taste for names of staggering simplicity, they were called Chitrangada and Vichitravirya, but my dismayed readers need not set about learning these by heart because my two better-born brothers do not figure largely in the story that follows.
The younger Vichitravirya succeeded him, with Gangaji as his regent and my now-widowed mother offering advice from behind the brocade curtain. When the time came for Vichitravirya to be married, Gangaji, with the enthusiasm of the abstinent, decided to arrange the banns with not one but three ladies of rank, the daughters of a distant princeling.
The sisters were known to be sufficiently well-endowed, in every sense of the term, for their father to be able to stay in his palace and entertain aspirants for their hands. He had been immersing himself increasingly in the great works of the past and the present, reading the vedas and Tolstoy with equal involvement, studying the immutable laws of Manu and the eccentric philosophy of Ruskin, and yet contriving to attend, as he had to, to the affairs of state.
His manner had grown increasingly other-worldly while his conversational obligations remained entirely mundane, and he would often startle his audiences with pronouncements which led them to wonder in which century he was living at any given moment.
But one subject about which there was no dispute was his celibacy, which he was widely acknowledged to have maintained. Hindus were not wedded to monogamy in those days, indeed that barbarism would come only after Independence, so the idea of nuptial variety was not in itself outrageous; but when Gangaji, with his balding pate and oval glasses, entered the hall where the Raja had arranged to receive eligible suitors for each of his daughters and indicated he had come for all three, there was some unpleasant ribaldry.
In our heritage there are many ways in which a girl can be given away. Our ancient texts tell us that a daughter may be presented, finely adorned and laden with dowry, to an invited guest; or exchanged for an appropriate number of cows; or allowed to choose her own mate in a swayamvara ceremony. In olden times girls were given to Brahmins as gifts, to assist them in the performance of their rites and rituals.
But in all our sacred books the greatest praise attaches to the marriage of a girl seized by force from a royal assembly. I lay claim to this praise. I am taking these girls with me whether you like it or not. Just try and stop me. The protests of the assembled princes choked back in their throats; hands raised in anger dropped uselessly to their sides; and the royal doorkeepers moved soundlessly aside for the strange procession to pass.
It seemed a deceptively simple victory for Ganga, and indeed it marked the beginning of his reputation for triumph without violence.
But it did not pass entirely smoothly. One man, the Raja Salva of Saubal, a Cambridge blue at fencing and among the more modern of this feudal aristocracy, somehow found the power to give chase.
If Ganga saw his pursuer, it seemed to make little difference, for his immense car rolled comfortably on, undisturbed by any sudden acceleration. Before long they drew abreast on the country road. As the cars shuddered to a halt Salva flung open his door to leap out. Then it all happened very suddenly. The Rolls drove quietly off, engine purring complacently as the Raja of Saubal shook an impotent fist at its retreating end.
And that besides, you are pledged to another man? Ever since his vow Ganga had developed something of an obsession with his celibacy, even if he was the only one who feared it to be constantly under threat. What seems to be the problem? I had already given myself, in my heart, to Raja Salva, and he was going to marry me. We had even told Daddy, and he was going to. Go back to your room and pack. You shall go to your Raja on the next train.
I know this is a digression - but my life, indeed this world, is nothing more than a series of digressions. So you can cut out the disapproving looks and take this down. Right, now, where were we? If Gangaji had thought that all that was required now was to reprint the wedding invitations with one less name on the cast of characters, he was sadly mistaken.
For when Amba arrived at Saubal she found that her Romeo had stepped off the balcony. He carried you away as I lay sprawling on the wreck of my car.
And now you expect me to forget all that and take you back as my wife? Go to Ganga and do what he wishes. It was hardly my idea to have her shuttling to and from Saubal by public transport, in full view of the whole world. No one will marry me now, you know that. You ought to try it, my dear.
It will make you very happy. I am sure you will find it deeply spiritually uplifting. She tried herself after that, imploring first Vichitravirya, then Salva again, equally in vain.
When six years of persistence failed to bring any nuptial rewards, she forgot all but her searing hatred for her well-intentioned abductor, and began to look in earnest for someone who would kill him. It was then that she would resolve to do it herself. We had paused with Vichitravirya committing bigamy, bigamy inspired by Gangaji and sanctioned by religion, tradition, law and the British authorities.
Ambika and Ambalika were each enough for any king, with ripe rounded breasts to weigh upon a man and skins of burnished gold to set him alight, bodies long enough to envelop a monarch and full hips to invite him into them; together, they drove Vichitravirya into a fatally priapic state. Yes, it was terminal concupiscence he died of, though some called it consumption and a variety of quick and quack remedies were proposed in vain around his sickbed.
When kings died without heirs in the days of the Raj, the consequences could be calamitous. We even fought a little war over the principle in but the British won, and annexed a few more kingdoms.
Satyavati, whose desire to see her offspring on the throne had deprived Gangaji of more than a crown, turned to him anxiously. Do your duty as a brother, as the son of my husband, and take Ambika and Ambalika to bed. You took it, after all, for me. It may have fallen somewhat into disuse in recent years, but it could be useful again today. We Brahmin sons never deny our mothers, and we never fail to rise to these occasions. I rose. I came. The palace at Hastinapur was a great edifice in those days, a cream-and-pink tribute to the marriage of Western architecture and Eastern tastes.
High-ceilinged rooms and airy passages supported by enormous rounded columns stretched ever onwards across a vast expanse of mosaic and marble. In the dusty courtyard beyond the front portico stood a solitary sedan, ready for any royal whim, its moustachioed chauffeur dozing at the wheel. The estate was all that was visible, lush lawns and flowered footpaths; the visitor was made conscious of a sense of spaciousness, that evidence of privilege in an overcrowded land.
Inside, the cool marble, the sweeping stairways, the large halls, the furniture that seemed to have been bought to become antique, imposed rather than captivated. At night there was stillness where once there was sound, and new sounds emerged where silence had reigned during the day.
It was to this place that I went, and it was here that my mother told me anxiously why she had sent for me. For they have never seen me, and after a lifetime, even a short one, spent as a wandering Brahmin sage and preacher of sedition, I am not a pretty sight.
At the appointed moment Ambika, freshly bathed and richly adorned, was laid out on a canopied bed, and I duly entered the room, and her.
But she was so appalled by the sight of her ravisher that she closed her eyes tightly throughout what one might have called, until the Americans confused the issue, the act of congress. Ambalika was more willing, but as afraid, and turned white with fear at my approach. The result, I warned my mother as I went to her to take my leave, was that the products of our union might be born blind and pale, respectively. So, on my last night Satyavati sent Ambika to me again, in the hope of doing better.
By the time I discovered the deception it was too late, and a most agreeable deception it had proven, too. But I had made my plans to leave the next morning, and I slipped out as quietly and unobtrusively as I had come, leaving the secret of my visit locked in three wombs.
From Ambika emerged Dhritarashtra, blind, heir to the Hastinapur throne; from Ambalika, Pandu the pale, his brother; from the servant girl, Vidur the wise, one day counsellor to kings. Of all these I remained the unacknowledged father. Yes, Ganapathi, this is confession time. Got everything? Under our agreement, I mean. But you must keep me in check, Ganapathi. I must learn to control my own excesses of phrase. It is all very well, at this stage of my life and career, to let myself go and unleash a few choice and pithy epithets I have been storing up for the purpose.
But that would fly in the face of what has now become the Indian autobiographical tradition, laid down by a succession of eminent bald- heads from Rajaji to Chagla.
The principle is simple: the more cantankerous the old man and the more controversial his memoirs, the more rigidly conventional is his writing. Look at Nirad Chaudhuri, who wrote his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian on that basis and promptly ceased to live up to its title. It is not a principle that these memoirs of a forgotten Indian can afford to abandon. Right, Ganapathi? A new British Resident, successor of the bewhiskered automobilist, is in place and is far from sure he likes what is going on.
Picture the situation for yourself. Gangaji, the man in charge of Hastinapur for all practical purposes, thin as a papaya plant, already balder then than I am today, peering at you through round-rimmed glasses that gave him the look of a startled owl.
And the rest of his appearance was hardly what you would call prepossessing. He had by then burned his soup-and-fish and given away the elegant suits copied for him from the best British magazines by the court mastertailor; but to make matters worse, he was now beginning to shed part or most of even his traditional robes on all but state occasions. People were for ever barging into his study unexpectedly and finding him in nothing but a loincloth.
In fact, as you can well imagine, it only added to the confusion. Not all of them were happy with the ash-smearing requirement, but they and I learned more wandering about with a staff and a bowl under the British than I did after becoming a minister in independent India. Preaching a lot of damn nonsense about equality and justice and what have you.
And you tell me he cleans his own toilet, instead of letting his damn bhisti do it. Different words for everything. He wanted to explain that a bhisti was a person, not a container. The sun had begun its precipitous descent into the unknown, and the distant sky was flaming orange, like saffron scattered on a heaving sea.
In the gathering gloom the insects came into their own, buzzing, chirping, biting at the blotchy paleness of colonial flesh. This was when English minds turned to thoughts of drink. Twilight never lasts long in India, but its advent was like opening time at the pubs our rulers had left behind. The shadows fell and spirits rose; the sharp odour of quinine tonic, invented by lonely planters to drown and justify their solitary gins, mingled with the scent of frangipani from their leafy, insect-ridden gardens, and the soothing clink of ice against glass was only disturbed by the occasional slap of a frustrated palm against a reddening spot just vacated by an anglovorous mosquito.
Chhota whisky, burra water, understand? What will you have, Heaslop? Two whiskies, do whisky, boy. And a big jug of water, understand. Not a little lota, eh? Bring it in a bhisti. Bhisti men lao. I learned those on the boat. I was speaking about this damn regent we have here. All this nonsense about equality, and toilet-cleaning. And now a chap comes along out of nowhere, scion of the ruling caste, and says Untouchables are just as good as he is.
He cleans his own toilet to show that there is nothing inherently shameful about the task, which, as you know, is normally performed by Untouchables. The young man continued, carefully moderating his tone. As you can imagine, sir, this gets talked about. The latter mainly from the upper castes, of course. And how do they take all this at the palace? Cleaning his own toilet, indeed. We have heard that he tried to get the royal widows to clean their own bathrooms, sir, and they burst into tears.
Or threw him out of the zenana. Or both. Born into a wealthy, politically influential Indian family in the waning years of the Raj, Jawaharlal Nehru was raised on Western secularism and the humanist ideas of the Enlightenment. India had found a perfect political complement to her more spiritual advocate, but neither Nehru nor Gandhi could prevent the horrific price for independence: partition. Score: 5. In Tharoorosaurus, he shares fifty-three examples from his vocabulary: unusual words from every letter of the alphabet.
You don't have to be a linguaphile to enjoy the fun facts and interesting anecdotes behind the words! Be ready to impress-and say goodbye to your hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia! He was not the only one to denounce the rapacity and cruelty of British rule, and his assessment was not exaggerated. Almost thirty-five million Indians died because of acts of commission and omission by the British-in famines, epidemics, communal riots and wholesale slaughter like the reprisal killings after the War of Independence and the Amritsar massacre of Besides the deaths of Indians, British rule impoverished India in a manner that beggars belief.
When the East India Company took control of the country, in the chaos that ensued after the collapse of the Mughal empire, India's share of world GDP was 23 per cent. When the British left it was just above 3 per cent. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. Great book, The Great Indian Novel pdf is enough to raise the goose bumps alone.
Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:.
0コメント