The reign of error
Tropes of exception in Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2179372 |
|---|---|
| Authors | C S Bhagya |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 56 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 761-774 |
| Publication date | 2020-11-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Postcolonial Writing (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1744-9855 • E-ISSN: 1744-9863 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17449855.2020.1766854 |
| OpenAlex | W3034530794 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 9 |
This article examines the way the Indian Emergency of 1975–77 is represented in Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (first published in 1989) as a watershed moment in the history of postcolonial India. Tharoor frames the crisis as a pivotal event that inversely mirrors the moment of Indian independence, and, thus, foregrounds the failure of the Indian state to deliver the promises of that euphoric time. The article argues that, compared to other texts in the corpus, Tharoor’s novel primarily uses gender as a focalizer of Emergency anxieties, recuperating the traumatized and stigmatized female body as a powerful “trope of exception”. Tharoor’s narrative represents the Emergency as a crisis that precipitates endemic social problems persisting in the longue durée of Indian pre-colonial and postcolonial history. Omnipresent in the country’s epic memory, and recurrently narrated in multiple modern retellings of the Mahabharata, these social ills are recaptured, yet again, in Tharoor’s novel in the form of a political allegory
Allegory · Art · Art history · Body politic · Colonialism · EPIC · Independence (probability theory · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · State (computer science · Trope (literature · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South Asian Cinema and Culture · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · History · Law
| Citations per year | 0.2 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2021 - 2021 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |