The Adaption of Self-Reflexivity and Metafiction Approach to Myth and History in Shashi Tharoor's the Great Indian Novel: A Post-Modernist Study

Abstract

Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel is an example of a post-modern historiographic metafiction that takes the relationship between reality and fiction into consideration. This novel also depicts the 20th century political past by reviving events, incidents and characters of the myth of Mahabharata. The current paper aims to explain how Tharoor rebuilds the twentieth-century past by drawing on the great Mahabharata classical epic. Additionally, it examines the common relationship between fiction and history as it progressed along and continuous processes through the use of self-reflexivity and metafiction approach. In The Great Indian Novel, Tharoor adapts a metafiction tool which is the most fitting way to tackle this novel as a postmodernist study. Tharoor blends fiction and fact through a self-reflective narrative and the use of several metafiction devices by adapting the myth of Mahabharata to construct the distance between the past and the present. Tharoor takes the ancient myth as the basic structure with contemporary group of political characters for a real and ironic review of recent Indian history and representation.