Guest of the ilb 2003 and 2006
The Indian writer and diplomat Shashi Tharoor
was born in London in 1956. At the time his father was working for the
English language Indian newspaper »The Statesman«. Tharoor studied in
India and in the US, where at 22 he received a doctorate in Law and
Diplomacy. He then worked for the United Nations. In the early 1980's,
during the crisis of the Vietnamese »boat people«, he was in charge of
the UN refugee office in Singapore and later coordinated measures to
secure peace in the former Yugoslavia. From 1997 to 1998 he was the
assistant to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; in 2002 Annan appointed
him Under Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information
at the UN.
Tharoor, who initially saw his diplomatic work as a passing thing,
today describes writing books and working for the UN as two equally
important aspects of his responses to the world: »without either, a
part of my psyche would wither on the vine.« He constantly adopts new
approaches to one central topic: his native country, India. While he
remains faithful to this one topic, he works with a variety of literary
genres and in addition to novels writes newspaper articles, short
stories, non-fiction and scholarly works. »The Great Indian Novel«
(1989) is a modern ironic adaptation of the 2000-year-old national
epic, the »Mahabharata«, and is narrated from a 20th-century viewpoint.
»Show Business« (1992) – filmed in 1994 under the title »Bollywood« and
recently translated into German – is a satire on the Indian film
industry. He has received numerous awards for his works, amongst them
the Commonwealth Writers’« Prize in 1991.
Set against the background of religious tensions in India, Tharoor’s
most recent novel »Riot. A Love Story« (2001) is about an American and
a married government official who have a clandestine love affair. After
riots between Hindus and Muslims during a procession, the woman is
found stabbed. In this book as in the work of nonfiction »India. From
Midnight to the Millennium« (1997), Tharoor manages without a general
narrative perspective. Instead he brilliantly combines fictional
newspaper articles, diary entries, letters, and fragments from
conversations in a collage, not only leaving it to the reader to decide
which truth he or she would like to pursue, but also making it clear,
that the reality of India, with its long and varied history and its
current pluralisms and conflicts, is too complex to be reduced to a
simple formula: »Whatever one might say about India – the opposite is
also true«, says Tharoor.
Following his biography of the statesman and companion of Ghandi
»Nehru: The Invention of India« (2003) Tharoor has most recently
published the collection of essays »Bookless in Baghdad« (2005). Here
the well-read and widely-travelled author presents an abundance of
experiences, reflexions and anecdotes relating to books and the act of
reading. Tharoor lives in New York.
© internationales literaturfestival berlin
Shashi Tharoor online: www.shashitharoor.com/index.shtml | 
