Cultural Pluralism In Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel

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Shashi Tharoor, an acclaimed diplomat, has become a popular writer with the publication of his unique novels that are known for their cultural record of India, the religious panorama of India and the picture of Indian myths. The paper focuses on two renowned novels of Tharoor - The Great Indian Novel (1989), which brings out a parallel study between the characters of the Mahabharata and the Indian political leaders and Riot (2001), which traces the events of cultural activism and religious confrontation in the Indian scenario.

Posting the novel Riot amidst the morbid sectarian clashes in 1989 in North India, Shashi Tharoor explores the cultural diversity in Native India. Tharoor voices his assertive views on how culture is broken up due …show more content…

The result is unique. Pluralism is a reality that emerges from the very nature of India. With diversity emerging from the geography of India and inscribed in the history of India, India is made for pluralism. Tharoor tells “The singularity about India is that we can speak about it in the plural.” He focuses on religion on how the secularization of religion in India means religious pluralism rather than religious absence. He reveals the various conflicts between the cultural manifestations in India – between bread and democracy, pluralism versus fundamentalism, centralism versus federalism and globalisation versus self-reliance. In spite of such vagaries, Tharoor feels that India’s greatest strength is its growing pluralism and it emerges from the very nature of the country and this pluralism demands an equal religious pluralism too. Tharoor writes in his essay on “A Culture of Diversity” that “the idea of India is not based on language, not on geography, not on ethnicity and not on religion. The idea of India is one land embracing many. . . . It’s the choice made inevitable by India’s geography, reaffirmed by its history and reflected in its ethnography” (http://

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