
Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (1989) represents a remarkable confluence of myth and political satire, deploying intertextual strategies to critique the postcolonial Indian state and reimagine national identity. By retelling the Mahabharata through the lens of twentieth-century Indian politics, Tharoor uses allegory, parody, and metafiction to challenge the coherence of nationalist historiography. This paper explores how myth is interwoven with political allegory to construct a hybrid narrative space, where Indianness emerges as a contested and fluid idea. Through close readings and theoretical insights from postmodernism and postcolonialism, the paper examines how Tharoor constructs a self-reflexive narrative that questions the authority of both epic tradition and historical truth.
historiography, political allegory, Shashi Tharoor, nationalism, hybridity, Intertextuality, myth, The Great Indian Novel
historiography, political allegory, Shashi Tharoor, nationalism, hybridity, Intertextuality, myth, The Great Indian Novel
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