Abstract:
The present paper, with the most concentrated, analytical, and interpretative reading of the text, presents Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel as a Menippean satire. The research article depicts the satiric narratives in The Great Indian Novel. As a postmodern writer, Shashi Tharoor had used different narrative strategies such as satire, pun, parody, humour, and comedy to make the novel a Menippean satire. In the first part of my research paper, I have explained the author and in the second part of my paper, I wrote a brief introduction to Menippean satire in English. In the final part of my paper, I have analyzed Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel as a Menippean satire.
Key Words: Menippean satire, allegory, allusion parody, epic, novel
Introduction:
Shashi Tharoor is one of the prominent writers in Indian Writing in English. He is a postmodern writer who is known for his experimental writing both in fiction and non-fiction works.
Shashi Tharoor was born in London in May 1956. His father was a newspaper executive and his mother was a housewife. Tharoor hails from Palakkad, a town in Kerala. Tharoor finished his schooling and under-graduation in Indian cities such as Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi in the mid-1970; he went to the United States and acquired two Master’s degrees and a Ph. D. in Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, all by the age of twenty-two. He is a also well-known columnist. He has been writing a fortnightly column for The Hindu Newspaper since 2001 and a weekly column “Shashi on Sunday”, in The Times of India starting January 2007. Previously he was a columnist for the Gentleman Magazine and the Indian Express. Tharoor’s working experience gave him a deep understanding of Indian history to the present-day politics and bureaucracy. He has written extensively both fiction and non-fiction. The Great Indian Novel (1989), Show Business (1992), and Riot (2001) are his three novels and he wrote a short story The Five Dollar Smile and Other Stories (1990). There are six non-fiction works-Reasons of State (1982), India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997), Kerala God’s Own Country (2002), Nehru: The Invention of India (2003), Bookless in Bhagdad (2005), The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cell Phone, India – The Emerging 21st Century Power (2007).
What is Menippean Satire:
The genre of Menippean satire is a form of satire, in prose, characterized by attacking mental attitudes instead of specific individuals or entities. It has also been termed as a mixture of allegory, picaresque narrative, and satirical commentary. The term is used by classical grammarians and by philologists mostly to refer to satires in prose. The word ‘Menippean Satire’ is derived from Greek Satirist ‘Menippus’ (Ca. 340- Ca- 270 B.C). It is a form of social satire; it ridicules scholars, dogmatists, eccentrics, pretenders, wizards, fanatics, grasping, and unskilled professional men of all kinds, although they are addressed in terms of their professional approach to life as distinct from their social behavior.
Modern narrative fiction in the Menippean tradition concentrates on the theme rather than the plot and deals with great and mysterious intellectual concerns. It displays extraordinary learning but often lacks unity and consistency, blending the serious and the comic, the high and the low. Menippean fiction, which often employs multiple narrative voices, is incredulous of any established authority and advocates the priority of common sense against the tyranny of false and dogmatic theories. It appears in a great number of both ancient and modern literary works.
Northrop Frye and Mikhail Bakhtin brought the genre to the attention of the mainstream academic community in the latter half of the twentieth century. Fry explained that Menippean satire “deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes,… resemble(ing) the confession in its ability to handle abstract ideas and theories, and differs from the novel in its characterization, which is stylized rather than naturalistic.” (Fry, 309) Menippean satire, Frye adds, uses 'extraordinary situations for the provoking and testing of a philosophical idea' and such situations include 'scandal scenes, eccentric behaviour, inappropriate speeches and performances' as the protagonists in Menippean satire 'ascend into heaven, descend into the nether world, wander through unknown and fantastic lands, are placed in extraordinary life situations'. The last characteristic of the Menippean satire, according to Bakhtin, is 'its concern with current and topical issues' (Bhaktin, 114)
The Great Indian Novel, the most ambitious classical novel, is a fictional work of Shashi Tharoor that takes the story of the Mahabharata, the epic of Hindu Mythology, and recasts and resets it in the context of the Indian Independence Movement. It also figures out the first three decades of Post-Independence and shows. Indian history is transformed into characters from mythology, and the mythical story of India is retold as a history of Indian Independence and subsequent history through the 1980s. The Mahabharata is an epic tale describing the imperial struggle over the power of the kingdom of Hastinapur between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, two branches of the inheritors of the king Shantanu.
In The Great Indian Novel, the writer represents the story of the blossoming Indian democracy as a struggle between groups and individuals closely related to personal and political histories. Through his argumentative narration, Tharoor takes a mocking tone towards figures such as Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Indira Gandhi who are normally treated with respect by Indians.
The Great Indian Novel comes out as a political satire. Tharoor incorporates far-flung history with modern history. For him, Mahabharata is the key source of muse to write this novel. In a true sense, The Mahabharata is not a novel but an epic poem. However, Tharoor has incorporated, both verse and prose forms for effective satiric narration. He had made use of satirical literary devices such as parody, irony, allegory, lampoon, humour, and derision, etc.
As a satirist, Tharoor sees the individual and society as completely different from a non-satirist. He has fictionalized all the national names Heroes and of the places. V.V. Giri, a writer, orator, politician, labor-activist, freedom fighter, and governor for several states was President of India in 1977. In The Novel, his fictional name appears as Ved Vyas, the narrator, Eighty-Eight-year-old. V.V dictates his narration to Ganapathi, a young South Indian scribe sent by Ved Vyas’s friend Brahma to transcribe the late. Tharoor has described him as an original Ganesh the Elephant-headed Hindu God who wrote down Vyasa’s amount of the Mahabharata.
Moreover, Tharoor has fictionalized two groups of Kaurava and Pandava parties. The Congress Party is a Kaurava party, the villains led by Duryodhani, who assume the Pandavas from the rule of Hastinapura. Indira Gandhi, the daughter of Nehru, and the third Prime Minister of India fictionalized as Priya Duryodhani, the monocratic villain, daughter of Dhritarastra, and the head of the Kaurava party. She appears in altered sex and represents a hundred Kauravas. She is popularly is known as the only man in the entire parliament. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the father of Pakistan, a law graduate, and more an anglophile than Nehru who began his career as a colleague of Nehru and Gandhi in the Indian National Congress, fictionalized as Mohammad Ali Karna, son of Kunti and Hyperion Helios, the leader of the Muslims.
In a true sense, it would be appropriate to affirm that, Tharoor has adopted Menippean satire in The Great Indian Novel. A Menippean Satire is essentially a prose narrative that usually contains some verse. But Tharoor has used it not to attack foolishness but to bring effective narration and to justify to the main source of inspiration. The Great Indian Novel starts with the Menippean Satire verse, which has brought objectivity to the original work Mahabharata:
What follows is the tale of Vyasa,
Great Vyasa, deserver of respect;
A tale told and retold,
The people who never cease telling;
A source of wisdom,
In the sky, the earth, and the lower worlds,
A tale twice-born know;
A tale for the learned,
Skillful in style varied in metres,
Devoted to dialogue human and divine
(P. Lal -The Mahabharata of Vyasa)
This verse serves as an invocation to the novel. This verse itself summarizes the entire story of the Mahabharata and Tharoor has satirized all national heroes.
Tharoor appears to be a ridiculous satirist from the following description of the character of Dhritarastra, a privileged son, who has moral aptitudes becomes an object of satire. He has been satirically described as below:
Dhritarastra was a fine-looking young fellow, slim of an aquiline nose and aristocratic bearing. His blindness was, of course, a severe handicap, but he learned early to act as if it did not matter. As a child, he found education in India a harrowing experience, which was no doubt, even he was in due course sent to Eton […]. He quickly acquired two dozen suits, a different pair of shoes… abstracted manner of the over-educated with these assets he was admitted to King’s College, Cambridge; he devoted himself to developing another kind of vision and became, successively a formidable debater, a Bachelor of Arts and Fabian Socialist. (Tharoor, 41)
As a satirist, Shashi Tharoor is annoyed by the imperial exploitation. He had criticized colonial masters and their attitude to the Indian economy as they call India, an underdeveloped country.
[…] Not of Indian weavers whose thumbs the British had cut off to protect the machine of Lancashire; not of the Indian peasants whose lands have been seized over to Zamindars who would guarantee the colonists the social place. They needed to run the country, and not of the destination and hunger to which their policies reduced Indians. Indulge an old man’s sage, Ganapathi and write this down: the British killed the Indian artisan, they created the Indian landless laborers, they exported our full employment and they invented our poverty. (Tharoor, 95)
The sixth book of the novel is titled ‘Forbidden Fruit’ which is a complement to the Mahabharata’s ‘Book of Bhishma’. This part appears to be the most essential event in the Indian Freedom Movement. In the novel, Dhritarastra is the head of the Kaurava party and Pandy is an equal to deserver for the same position. But he is deprived of any positions so he leaves the Kaurava party. The fictional character Gangaji kicks off the Great Mango March allusion to the Salt March of Gandhi. Gangaji dies in the middle and, before that there have been many conflicts within the national political parties. Mohammed Ali Karna, a Muslim leader who desired a separate state called ‘Karnistan’ (fictional word). Using the theme of partition, Tharoor had satirized the colonial blunder which represents the partition of land:
Congratulations, Mr. Nichols!’…. you have just succeeded in putting your international border through the middle of the market, giving the rice fields to Karnistan and the warehouse to India, the largest pig farm in the Zilla to the Islamic state and the Madrassah of the Holy Prophet to the country the Muslims are leaving. Oh, and If I understand that squiggle there correctly he added, taking a pointer from the open-mouthed expert, the schoolmaster will require a passport to go to the too between classes. Well done, Mr. Nichols I hope the rest of your work proves as easy. (Tharoor, 225)
Moreover, Tharoor gives a direct expression related to urban elite institutions and imperialist favoritism. He illustrates satirically as:
Institution of higher learning colleges of technology, school of management mushroomed in the dark humid forests of our ignorance. The British had neglected village education in this effort to module a limited class of petty clerks to turn the lower wheels of their bureaucracy, so we too neglected the village sin our efforts to widen that literate class for their new places […] our medical schools produced the most gifted ached without aspirin. Our institutes of technology were generously subsidized by our tax revenues to churn out brilliant graduates for the research laboratories of American corporations, while our emaciated women carried pans of stores on their heads to the building- sites of new institutes. When, belatedly, our universities became ‘rurally conscious’ and offered specializations implant pathology and modern agriculture methods, their graduates were a bid a rapid farewell to the wanted land of Auadh and Annamalai and earn immense salaries for making Arab deserts bloom. (Tharoor, 294)
This paragraph has been quoted ironically to showcase one brighter side of India and another darker side. In the novel, these ideas were the dream of Dhritarastra and he always subscribed to the western industrial development concept which was contradictory to the Gangaji’s (Gandhi’s) ideas of small-scale industry.
Conclusion:
Thus to conclude, with these research findings and employment of a variety of satiric devices, it would be appropriate to categorize the novel as a Menippean satire.
References:
- Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics. Edited and Translated by Caryl Emerson. Introduction by Wayne C. Booth. Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 1999. Print.
- Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. Print.
- Tharoor, Shashi. The Great Indian Novel. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1989. Print.
- The Victorian Web: Linking Scholarship, Teaching, and Learning since 1994. N.p., n.d. Web. 9 May 2021.