New aesthetics of political fiction: a study of the strategies of demystification in the novels of Salman Rushdie, O V Vijayan and Shashi Tharoor

Abstract

Political fiction explores the convergence of politics and human experience, attempting an inter-penetration of personal sentiments and political ideology. Politics in such novels integrates with the patterns of lives of the characters and functions as the germinal nucleus which ferments the human story. Post-Independence political situation of India proved to be a fertile ground for the blossoming of a number of literary talents. The present research is inspired by a close reading of the works of Salman Rushdie, O. V. Vijayan and Shashi Tharoor that revealed a common thread of creative sensitivity in the fictionalization of the contemporary India. They introduced subversive novelistic techniques in their eagerness to interrogate the prevalent political situation. They tried to galvanize the lethargic and slumberous Indian English fiction with their shocking repudiation of existing paradigms of fictional writing. The novels chosen for structural analysis are; Rushdie s Midnight s Children, Vijayan s The Saga of Dharmapuri and Tharoor s The Great Indian Novel. They represent a distinct form of political imagination attuned to the paradoxes of living under a totalitarian system. Each writer employs his own unique skill in delineating the subcontinental experience more acutely felt than it has ever been before. These three novelists have tried to put into their transcendental kaleidoscope, the shifting scenes of the post-Independence Indian politics by employing innovative aesthetic strategies of demystification. They provide new dimensions to the understanding of the twentieth-century Indian society.