India facing Climate of Mounting Intolerance: Tharoor

Kolkata, Jan 15 (IANS) Admitting he was fortunate his book "The Great Indian Novel" wasn't banned when it released 25 years ago, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor Thursday said there is a trend of "mounting intolerance" in India today and he was not confident if the same book would have survived in this age.

"The Great Indian Novel" was one of the first of its kind in India 25 years ago that poked fun satirically at both the hallowed heroes of the nationalist movement and also timeless legends of the great legend Mahabharata, said Tharoor, the bestselling author of 15 books, both fiction and non-fiction.

"When the book came out, initially it was rather rapturously received in India because I had signed a separate contract with David Davidar to do an affordable Indian edition and it was very well received.

"To my both delight and horror the doyen of Indian writing at that time Khushwant Singh devoted an entire column to this book but he said , 'Go out and buy this book immediately because it will be banned within a week' a that was not what I wanted to see," Tharoor said during a discussion at a literary festival here.

Published in 1989, the novel penned by Tharoor was his first work in fiction. 2014 marked its 25th anniversary.

However, he remarked, "There has been a lot of mounting intolerance that perhaps wasn't there 25 years ago."

Tharoor said he had to make some "very minor changes" to the manuscript since the publisher was facing the heat (in 1989) due to author Salman Rushdie's fatwa.

"I don't know what saved me, had Indians suddenly become more mature or was it simply because the kinds of people who banned books were not trying to read English language books in 1989.

"I was lucky the book didn't get banned and thereafter, I haven't looked back and worried about censorship or anything like that though I have written against the subsequent emanations of intolerance that we have seen with other writers," said Tharoor.

Tharoor, a former union minister, said he was quizzed by someone whether the book could have been written today and replied that he "couldn't in all honesty assert with all confidence that it would have survived in the present climate of mounting intolerance that we seem to be living with, in our country".