INTERTEXTUAL MYTH AND POLITICAL ALLEGORY: REIMAGINING INDIANNESS IN THAROOR'S THE GREAT INDIAN NOVEL

Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (1989) represents a remarkable confluence of myth and political satire, deploying intertextual strategies to critique the postcolonial Indian state and reimagine national identity. By retelling the Mahabharata through the lens of twentieth-century Indian politics, Tharoor uses allegory, parody, and metafiction to challenge the coherence of nationalist historiography. This paper explores how myth is interwoven with political allegory to construct a hybrid narrative space, where Indianness emerges as a contested and fluid idea. Through close readings and theoretical insights from postmodernism and postcolonialism, the paper examines how Tharoor constructs a self-reflexive narrative that questions the authority of both epic tradition and historical truth.