Abstract
Shashi Tharoor made him reflect on Indian ways of life in a close but distant perspective. Riot is a powerful novel – set in and around a riot in India in 1989 — about love, hate, cultural collision, religious fanaticism, the ownership of history, and the impossibility of knowing the truth by the award – winning author of The Great Indian Novel. Riot is a well, researched book with a compelling hard-driving narrative – love, cultural collision, xenophobia, man’s social and political independence are some of its concerns that endeavour to weave history with the illusion of truth and romance, mingling the lives of the different characters caught up in love and communal war, and most of all, in search of their identity. The clash between the private and the public, between one’s individual beliefs and the beliefs of others is thus a confrontation that sometimes results in a riot and this is what the novel emphasizes. A study is made here to study the narrative form, he chronicles, the mystery of Priscilla Hart’s death through the often contradictory accounts of a dozen or more characters, all of whom relate their own versions of the events surrounding her killing. Like his two previous novels, The Great Indian Novel and Show Business, Riot probes and reveals the richness of India. In plot, style and characterization, Shashi Tharoor’s Riot is a brilliant tour de force.