| BOOKS: INREVIEW
Behind the Facts
By
Shailaja Neelakantan/HONG KONG
Issue cover-dated November 8, 2001
Riot, By Shashi
Tharoor, Penguin India. 295 rupees ($16)
Shashi Tharoor's new novel, Riot, opens with the killing of
an American social worker, Priscilla Hart, in northern India
in 1989, when Hindus and Muslims clashed in bloody riots. The
object of controversy is a 400-year-old mosque, the Babri Masjid,
that Hindu militants eventually destroyed in 1992.
The official verdict suggests Priscilla was in the wrong place
at the wrong time. But Tharoor is more interested in unofficial
versions. He presents his story as a series of newspaper clippings,
journal entries written by the characters and transcripts of
conversations, revealing much more than the official version.
The married District Magistrate V. Lakshman, with whom Priscilla
had been having an affair, agonizes in his journal about the
state of his affair and affairs of state. Randy Diggs, a journalist
from the New York Journal, has transcripts of several boozy
interviews with the magistrate's old college mate who heads
the town's constabulary. A secular Muslim academic and a militant
Hindu bigot also espouse their causes to the journalist.
Riot weaves a whodunnit with contemporary history. But, most
of all, it is a polemic for reason and peace. Tharoor's conflicting
and colluding sub-texts suggest that Hindus and Muslims have
generally coexisted peacefully in India, that history is manufactured
in the service of ulterior motives and that economic deprivation
leads to sectarianism.
In his day job in the United Nations Department of Public Information,
Tharoor probably knows reality is more multi-layered, but this
is literature. Tharoor's earlier two novels showed he is a master
at fiction grounded in history. Priscilla's father, a former
Coca-Cola executive in India, says, "I'll tell you what
your problem is in India. You have too much history. Far more
than you can use peacefully. So you end up wielding history
like a battle-axe, against each other. Whereas we at Coke .
. . don't worry too much about the past. It's your future we
want to be part of."
For Tharoor, understanding the past is the way to the future.
Shailaja Neelakantan is a writer based in Hong Kong
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