CHAPTER 1
PARODY : FROM THE ROOTS
As
a
literary
genre,
concretization
of
man's
authority.
has
therefore
upwards
word
It
from the
innate
a
downwards.
'cruder'
urge
nothing
to
but
rebel
bias,
is,
of
generally
covert
the
against
gravitating
society, unlike
It
variety
is
plebian
lower strata of
disseminating
comparatively
parody
the direct
speaking,
literary
a
revolt
against the traditionally accepted, canonical, straightforward
set
of
genres
milieux.
But
essentials,
original,
widely
of
it
it
has
is
differing
been
generally
nothing
usually more
socio-historic,
but
accepted
subversive
cultural
that,
in
mimicry
well-known work. According
the term itself is derived from the Greek 'parodia',
of
its
an
to Fowler,
" a beside
or against song" 1 , 5 5 9 ) , concentrating on the style or thought
of the original. To trace its roots we must necessarily direct
our enquiry back tc ancient Greece.
It
was
a
tragedy
and
parody
mentioned,
iomrncmn
comes
in
practice
among
immeoiate
from the
Greeks
juxtaposition.
'parodia'
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the
to
present
Parody,
of Attic drama,
a
as
scene
which marks the entry of the chorus. The satyr plays, such as
the
Cyclops
Euripides
-
of
Sophocles,
which
performed
by
and
immediately
the
same
The
Searching
followed
actors
the
Satyrs
tragedies,
wearing
odd
of
were
costumes.
Aristophanes is qenerally regarded as the first true parodist
with such works as The
-- Frogs, The Birds, and The Acharnians to
his credit.
The invention of parody is sometimes ascribed to Hipponax
of Ephesus
of
whose
story,
(fl. 1 4 0 B.C.), the mordant, annihilative capacity
bitter
related
brother
parodied
Athenis
by
verses
by
may
Pliny,
who
be
of
hanged
the poet
surmised
the
from
sculptor
themselves
an
apocryphal
Bupalus
after
being
(Howat:$on 410). Aristotle,
credits its invention to Hegemon of Thrace ( 8 7 7 ) ,
and
his
brutally
conversely,
who may have
been the first ever winner of a contest for parodies. However,
the most important parodists in still extant Greek literature
are
Aristophanes,
Plato,
ar.d Lucian.
Of
these,
the
first
parodies mainly the tragic style of Euripides. Plato is subtle
as well
as a m b i t ~ o u s in his
parodies
not
ordinary
Symposium and
mortals,
but
Phaedrus.
the
Lucian
Olympian
gods
themselves.
TO Mikhail Bakhtin
establishing parody
at
(1895-1975) should go the credit for
the
centre-stage
accustomed per-1.phera1 position
prehistory
rather
in literature.
of nove.Listic discourse,
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he posits
than
at
its
Discussing the
that
laughter
acted as one of the two most important factors leading to the
development,
and
Europe,
other
the
eventual
being
establishment,
polyglossia
of
the
He
(50).
novel
in
ascribes
to
parody ancient roots that almost takes us back to the time of
the
Homeric
epics.
Newtonian
In ancient
counter-force
straight-forward genre
'fourth
drama',
which
classic paradigm. The
preceding
trilogy
was
Greece,
to
-
almost
parody
every
shown
in
a
or t h e so-called
tragic
idealized handling
trilogy
being
o f the myth
totally
the
well-entrenched
t.he satyr-play,
folloi.aed the
served a s
different
a
i n the
parodic
light in the satyr-play. All =he great tragedians of antiquity
such as Sophocles,
Euripides, and Aeschylus
satyr-plays a s well. T h e figure of
'comic
very
extending
points
popular
Greece,
later-day Rome,
to
out
in
that
the
Greeks
the
and
did
latter's
even
not
writers
Odysseus'
the great epic-tras3ic hero and the figure o f
were
were
of
parodying
'comic Hercules'
popularity
in Byzantium.
consider
such
even
Bakhtin
parodic-
travestying of their national heroes and myths as blasphemy or
profanation of any sort. In fact, the authorship of the parody
War
between
himself.
the
-- Mice
and
the? Frogs was
Bakhtin views every
attributed
to
Homer
straight-forward genre as being
essentially one-sided, needing parody to illuminate the other
side.
In Rome,
the
role o f
the
satyr-plays were performed
by
the Atellan literary frarces initially, to be replaced by mimes
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at
a
later
stage,
Bakhtin
asserts
graphic
arts
both
that
of
the
che
'consular diptychs',
travestying
parodic
Romans.
the
preceding
spirit
He
tragedy.
pervaded
adduces
the
even
the
of
the
case
i n which comic scenes are depicted o n the
left and the tragic ones o n the right. Bakhtin says in this
connection:
...
there
never
was
a
single
strictly
straight-
forward genre, n o single type o f direct discourse
artistic,
ordinary
rhetorical,
everyday
philosophical,
-
that
did
not
-
religious,
have
its
own
parodying and travestying double, its own comic ironironic
cont:re-partie.
What
is
more,
these
parodic
doubles and laughing reflections of the direct word
were, in some cases, just as sanctioned by tradition
and just as canonized as their elevated models ( 5 3 ) .
The ancient Greeks parodied not the heroes of the Trojan W a r
but their tragic epic heroization. 'It
heroes
who
were
parodied,
nor
was not, after all, the
the
Trojan
War
and
its
participants; what was parodied was only its epic heroization;
not
Hercules
and
his
exploits but
their
tragic
heroization"
(55). Thus, to Aeschylus is attributed the fragmentary satyrplay The Bone-Gatherers
- in wh:ch
themselves
presents
are
him
parodied.
as
being
The
the heroes of the Trojan W a r
travestied
mentally
deranged
taking part in the war (54).
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version
in
of
order
Odysseus
to
avoid
In
ancient
Rome,
and
particularly
in
Southern
,
Italy
there flourished a wide variety of' parodic travestying forms which were
very popular among ordinary people. Affirms Bakhtin:
The literary and artistic consciousness of the Romans could
not irnaglne a serious form without its comic equivalent. The
serious
straightforward
fragment, only
form
was
perceived
as
only a
half of a whole; the fullness of the whole
was achieved only
upon
adding the comic contre-partie of
this form. Everything serious
had to have, and indeed did
have, its comic double ( 5 8 ) .
A bulk of these parodic travestying forms were passed on to the Middle
Ages via oral tradition.
Bakhtin avers that it. is a genre or its Style that is parodied. It
follows therefore that a parody of an epic cannot belong to the genre
of epic. Speaking about the manner in which parodic travestying forms
of antiquity prepared the path for the evolution of the novel, he
asserts that these forms
Liberated the object from the power of language in which it
had become entangled as if in a net; they destroyed the
homogenizing
power
of
myth
over
language;
they
freed
consciousness from the power of the direct word, destroyed
the thick walls that had imprisoned consciousness within its
own discourse, within its own language. A distance arose
between
Language
and
reality
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that
was
to
prove
an
indispensable condition for authentically realistic forms of
I6 0 )
discourse
Just
as
the
.
Greek
parodic
tradition
was
passed
on
to
Rome, so the parodic travestying spirit drifted t o the Middle
Ages from Rome. The most wel:.-known
was
The
-. Feasts
Cyprian
in
which
among such parodic works
all
the
important
sacred
personages in the Bible and Gospel from Adam to Christ eat and
drink merrily in a grand feast. Although scholarly opinion is
divided about the purpose of the play, with some arguing for a
mnemonic
intention and others calling
blasphemous
parody,"
Bakhtin
seems
group calling it "sacred parody"
However,
there
seemed
to
it a "straight-forward
to
adhere
to
the
latter
(71).
have
existed
some
sort
of
a
parodic license even in those "dark" Middle Ages, and even the
Church
such
authorities
works;
currency
may
at that
the Middle Ages,
for a 'new
for
the
holiday
be
to have,
because
ritual
time. Speak:.ng
Hakhtin
paradoxically,
laughter
about the
comments
that
encouraged
was
in
great
role of parody
it provided
in
the path
literary and linguistic consciousness, a s well as
great
or
seemed
Renaissance
festival
was
connection Bakhtln makes
novel".
occasion
the
In
the
for
observation
Middle
parodying.
Ages,
any
In
this
that "There was
no
genre, no text, no prayer, no saying that did not receive its
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parodic equivalent"
Renaissance
novel
(74). Finally, with the appearance of the
of
Rabelais and Cervantes, the novel
as a
new and challenging literary form had arrived. In Don Quixote,
Cervantes parodied both the genre of Romance with its knightly
chivalry
and
nalve
the
reader
of
that
genre
who
tended
to
identify with or- even idealize the text before him.
Coming to English literature, if the Tale of Sir Thopas
is
essentially
parodic
in
form
and
content,
Chaucer
may
arguably be called the father of parody in English as well. In
the Tale of Sir-.Thopas,
he parodies the
romances of knight-
errantry by contemporary poets. In the "Prologue" to the
*
of Sir Thopas, the author can be seen not only as a parodist
but also as a self-parodist.
According
to
Michael
D.
Bristol,
the
traditional
scenarios, masks and. dramatis personae of Carnival and other
popular
festive
forms
are
nothing
but
concretizations
of
unauthorized pclltical views and suggestions with little risk
of
punishment.
As
the
artefacts
of
carnival
are
made
of
perishable material, there is hardly any trace of permanence.
In
fact,
concerned,
Lenten
for
the
it
for
Carnivals.
sidelined
of
is designed
Stuffe
preserve
sake
(1599)
posterity
t c ~ be
and
the
Unfortunately,
by
the
the
gargantuan
personal
safety
of
those
ephemeral. However, Nashe's
Taylor's
spirit
these
Iacke-a-Lente
of
texts
canonical
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parody
were
works
of
(1630)
inherent
in
completely
the
period,
which
afforded
little
space
for
these
texts
of
challenge.
Consequently, even as they dealt with the so-called
stuff',
they were never included in the
'popular
'popular literature'
of the time. Says Bristol:
These
texts
of Carnival
at the frontier
situate
themselves
exactly
between elite and popular culture,
the zone where reciprocal pressure, combination, and
the diversity of speech types and discursive genres
is greatest; and it is precisely in these mongrel or
heteroglot
texts
that
the
repressed
or
excluded
meanings of popular culture become most intelligible
(58).
Lenten
Raphael
'Nowhere
Stuffe as
Hythloday's
Land'.
a
travesty
portraiture
Nashe's
of More's
of
antipodean
a
Utopia,
journey
paradigm
to
parodies
the
distorts
ideal
More's
vision of the ideal with disjointed symbols and images of the
commonplace.
Nashe
depicts
the
fishing
town of
Yarmouth
and
the figure of the Red Herring in the true spirit of parody.
Herring, the humblest of all fishes and the common man's
source
of
protein
the
world
over,
is
glorified
chief
out
of
proportion. Says Bristol:
The
'praise
carni.valized.
of
the
The
Red
Herring'
is
Utopia
saturnalian possibilities of
materlal abundance created by collective labor are
reunited
with
the
anarchic
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and
prolifically
creatlve language of everyday life. Everything is
treated
as
laughing
matter,
even
the central
utoplan hope itself. The utopian reality is reached
by a lourney, but that reality is not
represented
as a distant and exotic social horizon. The golden
age was not long ago, but right now.
Nashe
finds
Utopia a t Yarmouth; he finds the economic, material
and symbolic instrument o f utopian
in the Ketl Herring"
In
Taylor's
servant
parodic
rJtopia
from
traditionalistic:
practised
Instead,
Lent's
in
we
credo,
come
experience
a
as
U t o p ~ a , is
(102).
text,
on
Jack-a-Lent
visit
revealed
the
to
in
exp.3sed as
across
transformation
is
o f freedom in the
fugitive
England.
the
hollow
humorous
a
More's
manorial
and
situation
set-up
suffocating.
of
Jack-a-
city o f London
(Bristol
94).
The eighteenth century was predominantly an age of satire
in England. It proferred the world such significant mock epics
like
Pope's
Dunciatl
and
Rape
of
the
Lock;
Gay's
Beggar's
Opera, a travesty o f the g r a : ~ doperatic style; Swift's
o f the Books, and A
- Tale of a Tub; his Gulliver's
Defoe's
Robinson
Crusoe,
genre of that period
With
modernist
the
-
exception
parody
of
the
both
imitating
traveller's
of
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Travels and
well-entrenched
tales.
Joyce's
Homeric
the
Battle
epic,
Ulysses,
and
which
Sterne's
is
a
Tristam
Shandy, which is metafictional, it would seem that the English
were all too concerned with the direct straight-forward word
to evince much of an inclination for parody. The atmosphere of
polyglossia,
so
vi.tal
for
parodic
travestying
forms
to
flourish, did not exist in E,ngland. Instead, there prevailed
the
uncongenial
parodic
spirit
monoglotic
from
conditions
thriving.
which
English
had
prevented
long
the
established
itself as a major world language, and there did not exist any
challenging he1:eroglossic
the country.
called
the challenge to the direct word had to come
St3
from without.
It
had
to emerge
'commonwealth'
colonial'
stratification o f the tongue within
or
the
from the periphery,
freshly
renomenclatured
two
and
in
on
Tharoor's
'post-
the
work
Not Wanted o n the
India in Indian English fiction
instances),
Wanted
so-
literatures. Such conditions of polyglossia existed
in Canada whlch produced Timothey Findley's
Voyage
the
Tharoor's
Voyage
is
Great
a
is a parody
Indian Novel.
travesty
of
the
(to name only
biblical
of the Mahabharata
Not
Findley's
flood.
set in modern
times, that is, the era of India's
freedom struggle. Needless
to say, Gandhi, Nehru,
of other national
appear
in
the
novel,
and
;i
host
partially
hidden
behind
figures
the
semi-
transparent veii of post-colonial fiction.
Novelisatjon
is a
recent phenomenon
as
far as
India is
concerned, going backwards not more than a century and a half.
There
may
be
people
who
argue
that
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Bana's
Kadambari
and
Subandhu's
'but
the
Vasavadattg are essentially novels, albeit ancient,
description
(314). But
even
fundamentally
would
if
they
islands
Indian literary
not
may
be
isolated
tradition,
for
fit.. ."
really
categorized
in
the
long
says
thus,
extended
Iyengar
they
history
dominated by
are
of
the highly
disciplined and sober epic genre. Max Muller was of the view
that the Brahmans used the di::ect
genres to bolster their own
superior position i n the class hierarchy of the ancient times.
Muller even argues that they rewrote the sacred Sanskrit texts
in such a way
as
(Bisgaard x ) .
suit their own interests
tcr
Naturally, in that age of limi~ted opportunities, when literacy
was
the
privilege
of
a
chosen
few,
there
could
not
be,
and
the
realistically, any opposition to the direct word.
When,
under
dissemination
in
that
the
influenze of
of the English
tongue,
they
tried
the
British
rule
language, India took to writing
to
outEnglish
even
the
English
themselves in t:he matter of their reverence for the straightforward genres. Henry Derozio (1809-1831), one of the earliest
Indian English
evoked
winning
the
such
as
direct
poetic
inspiration
poets,
to
word
in
collection
the
Sanyasi.
to
his
dramatic
Aurobindo
fiction,
transcendental,
Geetanjali
Indian
Savitri of the Mahabharata
Turning
zfter the Romantic poets.
took
used
the
Nobel-prize-
(1912). He
tradition
story
of
Tagore
for
turned
his
for
plays
Satyavan
and
for his massive epic poem Savitri.
Bankim
Chandra
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Chatterjee's
Rajmohan's
Wife
- (1864) was rhe first ever Indian novel t o b e published i n
English
(Iyengar
English fiction
only
were
-
Asphyxiated
serious
attempted
as
so-called
R.K.Narayan,
essentially
Narayan
The
315).
Indian
big
1a;lghter
this straightish atmosphere of
of
Indian
Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao
no-nonsense
English
three
in
writers.
his
literature
'serious'
as
Of
subtle
a
style.
whole
narration,
these,
was
in
only one
writer strove to break the walls and scoff at the direct word:
G.V.
Desani
in
nis
remarkable
novel,
All
About
H.
Hatterr
(1948). A s Naik puts it:
The verbal pyrotechnics in the novel include parody
of numerous types of style including Babu English,
Oriental flowery style, cockney speech, commercial
English, medical,
legal
and nautical terminology;
Outrageous puns and word-play involving half a dozen
languages;
Malapropisms;
twisted
mixed
comic analoyies, funny
translations,
deliberate
metaphors, folksy parallels,
proper
names, mis-applied
allusions and jokes o f all kinds (228).
Commenting on the nature of art in India, Ruskin has made
a very curious observation:
. . . it
[Indian art] never represents a natural fact.
It either forms its compositions out o f meaningless
fragments of colour and flowings o f line; or, i f i t
represent.^ any 1-iving creature, it represents that
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creature under some d-~stortedand monstrous form.
To all the facts and forms of nature it wilfully
and resolutely opposes itself: it will not draw a
man, but an eight-armed monster: it will not draw
a flower but only a spiral or a zig-zag (Sencourt
439).
Ruskin had struck at the heart of the matter, so to speak
-
vital
a
psyche,
truth
which
about
may,
in
the
nature
of
extension, be
the
Indian
applied
to
artistic
the
Indian
literary consciousness. The Indian temperament, which revealed
itself through
her
rich and
suited
for
fantasy
forms
in
literature.
polyglossia
existed
and
diverse
for
subversive
Moreover,
in this
art
a
country
forms, was
ideally
parodic
travestying
maddening
Babel-like
for parodic
travestying
forms to flourish.
But the baffling
favourable
paradox
saclo-(:ultural
is that, not withstanding
milieux
present
for
the
subversive
genres here, we d o not come across parodic-travestying forms
in India as often as should have been the case which may have
led
such
'irony
an
experienced
critic
as
P. La1
to
conclude
was conspicuous by its absence or its minimal presence
in Indian literature" until he came across Tharoor's
Indian
that
Novel..
Tamasha,
the
(11).
folk
However,
theatre
parodic
form
elements
of Maharashtra,
The Great
enliven
in
the
which
a
Tamasha woman personifies ,:he milkmaid of the Krishna legend.
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Lord Krishna
is
impersonated by
none
other than the Buffoon
himself, and the mllkmaid and the Buffoon exchange lewd lines,
striking a bold irreverent tone all the time (Gargi 78). It i s
worthwhile to note that the social stature of the Buffoon was
so low that Ambedkar himself forbade the Dalits from playing
such roles in the Tamasha (Zelliot 172).
Kudiyattam, the ancient theatre form of Kerala, in which
the
local
language Malayalam
'vidusaka',
'vidusaka',
is considered a pure
of
'vidusaka'
Pretending
uttered
only
by
the
clown,
has some vitriolic satire aimed at the upper caste
Hindus. The
spirit
is
the
who is himself a Brahman, speaks what
form of Malayalam:
language
is
essentially
but
the content and
demolitionistic.
The
ridicules the Brahmans vis-a-vis the 'purusarthas'
to
recount
his
own
experiences,
the
.
'vidusaka'
embarks upon a stjnging denunciation of the moral degeneracy
of the Brahmans. He proceeds to elucidiate that the
of
the
Brahman
is
nothing
but
gluttony,
his
cringing servility to the ruler, philandering his
knavery and deception his
'moksha'
Viswa Vigyana
Kapila Vatsyayan
Kosam 433).
of Kudiyattom as the 'parody
'dharma'
'artha'
'kama',
a
and
(Sarva Vigyana Kosam 740;
terms this aspect
of the four Purusarthas"
(26).
However, parody seems to be enjoying great vogue in India
at
present.
In
South
India,
particularly
in
Kerala
for
instance, there are professional mimicry groups which are very
popular
and perform
at varicus
temple and
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church
festivals,
and
even
Malayalam
Mani,
the
at
college
film
Harisri
ranks
Asokan,
of
mimicking
actors
these
and
get-togethers.
like
Dilip
and
'mimics
the
politicians,
Sidhique,
Sainudhin
ubiquitous
parodying
personalities,
Jayaram,
Several
styles
film
well-known
Kala
have
emerged
groups',
of
from
themselves
various
stars,
Bhavan
renowned
popular
music
composers and s o on. Another prominent parodist, V.D.Rajappan,
is
a
household
renditions
of
name
popular
here,
film
and
has
songs
to
many
his
famous
credit.
parodic
It may
be
added that parody, through the institution of various mimicry
groups, has somewhat attained the status of a folk art, albeit
in South
subversive,
India, and
especially
in Kerala.
Nadir
Shah, a well-known parodist, has even published a hit-cassette
a parody of the Hollywood blockbuster, James
titled Titanenic,
Cameron's
Titanic. What is more, a parody of a parody or a yet
unprecedented meta-parody has also emerged in Kerala in recent
times
with
the
publicatior,
of
Lusanenic,
apparently
a
subversion of TLtanenic. The present trend i n Kerala, the most
literate state in India, of utilizing parodying techniques for
electioneering purposes and
is
very
significant
perspective.
when
'
o
drive home political messages
viewed
from
a
post-colonial
I n this backdrop, it is worth noting that Shashi
Tharoor, the auchor of T h e Great Indian Novel, itself a parody
of the Mahabharata,
--
has his
:roots in Kerala, even though he
may be working and writing abroad. The Great Indian Novel is
Prepared by BeeHive Digital Concepts Cochin for Mahatma Gandhi University Kottayam
also important as far as Indi.3n English fiction is concerned,
as it is perhaps, i f we exclu(3e The Satanic Verses, the first
ever
full
length
parody
to
come
out
of
the
Indian
sub-
continent.
Yet it was perhaps Salman Rushdie who first realized the
literary possibilities of parcdy in Indian English fiction. In
an
interview
to
Michael
T.
Kaufman,
he
responded
with
an
amazing insight:
It seemed to me that if you had to choose a form for
that part of the world, the
form
you would choose
would be the comic epic. It seemed like the obvious,
the most. natural form. And it seemed
amazing to m e
that when you lookec. at the literature that had been
produced about India., it seemed dated
and delicate,
and I wondered why these dainty, delicate books were
being written about this massive, elephantine place?
It was as i f you'd
seen a n area of
and
soil
the
richest
cultivated. You
in
know that
it
cultivable land
had
everybody
never
been
is trying to
grow crops in the st-ony ground around the edges and
this
wonderful
prime
soil
(Kaufman 2 2 ) .
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is
just
left
there
T h e strategy of
is
being
'refunctioning'
increaslrlgly
viewed
as
or re-use of older texts
an
essentially
postmodern,
post-colonial practice t o come t o grips with the n e w realities
of existence and their representation in art and literature.
The term 'to refunction'
'Umfunktionierung, '
is in fact a translation f r o m German
used
by
Brecht
36) .
(Rose
Alfred
Liede
stresses the imitative aspects of parody equating success i n
the parodying art to the attainment of maximum similarity t o
the
target
text.
However,
Rose
questions
Liede's
stand
regarding the im3ea of imitaticn:
. . . while
parody
imitation may be used as a technique in the
it
is
distinguishes
quotation
the
the
and
use
of
parody
literary
incongruity
from
other
imitation,
and
which
forms
of
shows i t s
function to be more than imitation alone (22).
Shashi Tharoor's
a s a parody
of
the
T h e Great
Indian Novel
epic Mahabharata
when
arouses
considered
reader
interest
vis-a-vis its relationship wiLh the target text; that is, the
extent
to
traditional
manner
in
which
work
which
Tharoor
in
the
its
has
new
ancient
succeeded
distorted
text
has
situated in the modern post-Independent
Prepared by BeeHive Digital Concepts Cochin for Mahatma Gandhi University Kottayam
in
refunctioning
form,
been
and
the
also
the
transformed
and
Indian context. It is
important to note that 'Tharoor has by and large followed t h e
English
translations
of
the
Mahabharata
of
P.
La1
and
Rajagopalachari as the question of the appropriate target text
can
become
readers.
quite
a
Tharoor's
perplexing
Ved
Vyas
issue
or V.V.
with
discriminating
is a 'cantankerous,
old
a discarded politician who is not even fit for a party-
man,"
ticket anymore, or a "ceremonial governship."
H i s "old friend"
is
with
none
other
Agency
who
than
Brahm
earlier
who
arranged
has
a
contacts
female
the Apsara
amanuensis
for
the
difficult eighty-eight year o:Ld V.V. He is finally persuaded
to arrange Ganapathi, a South Indian, a s his new amanuensis.
Our
present-day
technology"
a
Ved
small
Vyas
even
boasts
Japanese tape-recorder
of
using
to put
'modern
his
voice
into whenever Ganapathi took a break.
T h e salient
ieature o f parody
is its embedding o f dual
texts within a single work; that is, t h e specific parodic text
and
the
target
text.
However,
henceforth be
referred to)
within
find
it
we
embedded
Tharoor's
is exceptional
not
just
two
GIN (as it
will
in this regard as
but
at
least
four
texts. The first two texts are identified as the epic and its
parodization.
The
third
is
the
history
of
twentieth
century
India featuring Nehru, Gandhi, et al; and the fourth works as
the parody of twentieth century Indian history itself. Thus in
Tharoor's
GIN we have a refunctioning of a certain period i n
Indian history itself. In this case also, locating the target
Prepared by BeeHive Digital Concepts Cochin for Mahatma Gandhi University Kottayam
text
becomes
Tharoor's
slightly
target text
problematic.
But
it
is
certain
that
is the wide area of so-called official
o r ruling class historiography, the favourite punching-bag of
several post-colonial
also
seems
to
Rushdie
writer:^,
be
at
odds
with
the
historicization exercises conducted by
Collins
and
Dominique
'objectivity"
Lapierre
and 'neutrality",
imperialistic slant,
as
this
course. Tharoor seems 1:o
the medicinal
curing
for instance.
who,
kind
of
popular
such writers
as Larry
for
all
yet manage
thesis
Tharoor
will
their
implied
to write
with
demonstrate
i n due
view history as a text which
touch
of
the
parodying
art
to
an
needs
restore
reality to its fullness, to correct the misrepresentations of
the
direct
word,
other writers
Ved
Vyas
is
India, his
the
official
version,
in
the
way
s o many
like Rushdie had done before him. If Tharoor's
an
octogenarian
Bhrtshma
is
a
politician
wilful
reminder
of
post-Independent
of
none
other
than
Mahatma Gandhi himself.
Tharoor's
choice
of
an
age-old,
popular
epic
like
the
Mahabharata for his target text must have arisen from accepted
wisdom and conventional practice as, according to Rose:
. . . history
proves
that only parodies of well-known
and 3lsc powerfully poetic works survive. The parody
must also, however, have something
new to say about
these works for it to survive independently (30).
Prepared by BeeHive Digital Concepts Cochin for Mahatma Gandhi University Kottayam
In
medieval
iiterature,
biblical
parody
was
not
only
widespread but also acceptable, as pointed out by Paul Lehmann
(Rose 31). The Mahabharata, though a secular work, occupies a
near similar position in India as it is held in veneration by
most hindus, especially as it includes the Bhagavad Gita.
Rose provides
a valuable
differentiation between parody
and satire, in that while parody makes the target a part o f
its text, satire does not
(34). Hutcheon, on the other hand,
while trying to make a similar differentiation between parody
and satire, seems to be less clear. Even as she stresses that
the best works about parody
says
is different
focus
and
confuse it with satire which she
from parody
'ameliorative
in both
intt?ntion"; in
its moral
the
same
and
social
breath
she
says that parody does have ideological and social implications
(16). Rose
'as
also gives
her
own definition of
literary parody
the critical refunctionir~g of preformed literary material
with comic effect ..." (35). Hutcheon considers parody as 'one
of
the
major
modes
of
form,31 and
thematic
construction
of
texts" in the t:wentiet.h century. In the present century parody
is confined not. merely to literature, but it is t o be found in
other
art
"inter-art
forms
as
well.
discourse."
This i s not a P
a
It
even
Magritte's
acquires
The
the
Treason
of
form
of
an
Images
or
is considered as a parody of the medieval
and baroque emkslem form (Hutcheon 2).
Prepared by BeeHive Digital Concepts Cochin for Mahatma Gandhi University Kottayam
Hutcheon
challenges
definition of parody
the
traditional
standard
as ridiculing imitation.
dictionary
Citing
Joyce's
Ulysses as an example o f twentieth century parody, s h e argues
that while the traditional text is
the formaily backgrounded o r parodied text
is not one to be
mocked o r
it is to be seen, as in the
here, it
ridiculed; if anything,
mock epic, as
or at least as a norm from which the
an ideal
modern departs
(5).
She
therefore
'characterized
of
the
with
text."
critical
s1mllarit.y"
than
Hutcheon's
that
parody
is
an
imitative
form
by ironic inversion, not always at the expense
parodied
'repetition
rather
concludes
argument
as
the
She
also
distance,
16).
author
formulates
parody
as
which
marks
difference
Tharoor's
GIN
reinforces
in
his
introductory
note
about the title emphasizes the significance of the Mahabharata
as his "primary source of inspiration."
the author's
It is very clear that
intention is not to ridicule the target text; it
is in fact the point from which he departs.
Hutcheon asserts that even non-literary discourse may be
parodied. Tom Jones and Tristam Shandy, for instance, subverts
the
scholarly
Menard,
Author
biblio-bio-
practice
of
the
critical
of
annotation
Quixoce"
note
on
a
and
undermines
writer.
footnotes.
the
Woody
genre
Allen's
'Pierre
of
the
Zelig
parodies the television documentary and movie newsreel ( 1 8 ) .
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Hutcheon
discrepancy
considers
and
Rose's
discontinuity
emphasis
in
her
on
incongruity,
reading
of
parody
as
restrictive. Hutcheon feels that a more neutral definition of
repetition
with
explanation
critical
for
the
difference
wide
twentieth century parody
range
alone
of
would
intent
provide
an
effect
of
and
(20).
Gerard Genette in his comprehensive Palimpsestes offers a
new term for what
is generally called parody which he
objectionable. His neologism 'hypertextuality"
relations
Genette's
comic
a
of
particular
t:ext
to
an
finds
fixates on the
earlier
one.
While
omission in his definition of the usual clause about
or
ridiculing
effect
is
welcomed
by
Hutcheon,
she
rejects it as "1:ranshistorical" (21).
Hutcheon's
pragmatic
comes
aspects.
from
alone,
reading of parody stresses both its formal and
his
whereas
Her
partial
insistence
Hutcheon
for
passive,
depending
However,
she
on
on
borrows
the
rejection
formal
parody
decoding
Bakhtin's
term
of Genette's
structural
is
more
process
properties
active
of
"textual
model
the
than
reader.
dialogism"
to
acknowledge her sympathy with Genette while seeing "parody as
a
formal
However,
or
the
transcended
Umberto
structural
Eco
limits
by
who
relation
of
employing
sees
in
between
Genette's
the
formalism
pragmatic
parody
Prepared by BeeHive Digital Concepts Cochin for Mahatma Gandhi University Kottayam
two
a
texts"
can
semiotic
clear
textual
(22).
only
be
tools
of
strategy
'elicited
by
discursi.ve
structures"
that
overrides
any
"whimsical initiati.ve" from the reader (Hutcheon 22).
Richard Terry suggests that parody
can exist only where
there is a climate of sensitivity to language differentiation
(87). David Bennet
ECO'S
adopts a
quite
contrary position
against
strategy of parody "elicited by discursive structures ."
Suggesting
Williams'
a
number
'Red
of
Wheel
Barrow,"
effect o f a particular,
(28).
He
even
interpretations
goes
he
to
argues
William
that 'parody
intertextual strategy of
to
the
extent
of
is the
reading.. ."
claiming
for
critical quotation a parodistic
function particularly
revision
For
of
literary
history.
Bennet,
Carlos
the
much
i n the
parodistic
reading of a text is either
intentlorialist or voluntarist: either it presupposes
a complicity
between
the
reader and the author in
their critical apprehension o f t h e way the
discourse misfigures reality, o r it is
parodied
motivated by
interests extrinsic to the text for which the reader
is accountable (30).
Bakhtin also remarks that the process of using quotations
in
the
Middle
relationship
byzantine
t(3
and
Ages
the
was
highly
"word"
equivocal.
of
gordian
and
another
person
(2uotations
were
tenebrous.
equally
distorted
reinterpreted intentionally very frequently (69).
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was
The
and
Terry
Caesar
hails
Beerbohm
as
the
'finest
flower
of
Victorian parody" and argues that he ought to be placed among
such modernist writers of his time like Eliot, Pound and Joyce
(27). He says thac the kind of writing he shaped was in some
ways
similar to that of the above writers as he
confront
'the
orders"
common
(23-24).
problem
these
Like
of
inherited
modernists,
too had
form
parody
and
was
to
false
also
a
potent writing strategy for Beerbohm. In the Victorian period,
the
tension
between
poetry
and
the
novel
increased
to
the
rebellion of the latter against "the tyranny of the authority
of
poetry,
themselves
from
or
which
the
otherwise
Victorians
come
to
sought
terms
with
to
through
distance
parody"
(27). This probably led to tt.e rise of such a great modernist
novelist as Joyce himself.
F.R.Leavis
parodists
'the
worst
and
nurtured
even went
enemy
of
an
to
outspoken
the
creative
extent
genius
of
and
contempt
for
terming parody
vital
all
as
originality"
(Caesar 3 7 ) . He was particularly hard on Max Beerbohm in this
regard
especially
at
a
tire
writers were appopriat-ing parody
when
the
major
contemporary
as one of their major modes
of representation. Caesar concludes that the "energies" which
silently operated
to weave
Beerbohm's
Christmas Garland were
much the same stuff out of which the great Modernists of his
time spinned out their celebrated works.
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Osip Mandelstam,
the
noted
Russian
poet,
once
observed
that "feminine poetry is a n lnconscious parody of both poetic
and
inventions
have
become
with
fresh
remembrances"
favourite
the
methods
refunctioning
has
tzargets
of
been
141) .
(Suleiman
of
writers
representation.
adeptly
writers as well. According
Popular
utilized
experimenting
This
by
myths
process
many
new
of
women
to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
writing in 1979:
Some of the best known recent poetry by women openly
uses. . . parody in the cause of feminism: traditional
fiqures of patriarchal mythology like
Cassandra, Medusa, Helen, and
Circe,
Persephone
Leda,
have
all
lately been reinvented in the images o f their female
creators, and each poem
figures is a readinj
devoted
that
to
one
reinvents
her
of
these
original
story (Suleiman 142) .
Suleiman has made a sincere attempt at a detailed analysis of
Leonara Carrington's
is
a
feminist
including
that
Winterson's
comic nDvel, The Hearing Trumpet, which
parodic
refunctioning
of
quest
the
for
of
the
many
Holy
feminist
parody
whose
correspond to the books o f the Old Testament
is
an
Grail.
myths
Jean
first novel, Oranges are not the only Fruit is an
anti-patriarchal
Here
old
instance
of
postzmodern,
feminist,
chapter-titles
(Suleiman 163).
sacred
parody
challenging the straight-forward narrative o f the direct word.
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The Canadian writer Timothy Findley's
Not Wanted on the
Voyage is a refunctioning of the biblical story of Noah's
ark.
The central figure is o.f course the tyrannical Dr. Noah Noyes.
In Findley's post-colonial vision, the story of the Ark is not
'
a
story
ot
interpretative
in
which
but
of
marginalization
and
.
BY
appropriating
the
'98)
(Ashcroft
destruction"
world
redemption,
role over the imposed hierarchy of the little
he
is
the
dominant,
Dr.
Noyes
unleashes
a
tyranny down the pyramid of his structured kingdom where the
unfortunate
animals
wince
at
the bottom,
and the other inembers of his family
with
the womenfolk
(menfolk) only marginally
above them. Once when a small white flake of ash
(
indicative
of fire and destruction) happened to glide down from the sky,
Dr. Noyes was quick
t.o label
it as snow, in spite of Ham's
indignant protests to the cont.rary:
Even
where
common
sense
and
knowledge
dictate
a different interpretation, Dr. Noyes will insist on
a reading of the event which confirms his position.
Principles o f ritual and tradition are therefore the
self-serving ratifiers of Noyes'views
of his power
The
basic
throughout
irreverence
the
book
and the basis
(Ashcroft 9 9 ) .
and
puts
tt,e tenor
it directly
of
out
challenge
suggested
of focus with
the
straight-forward texts of tradition and guarantees it a place
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among
the
umpteen,
quintessentially
post-colonial,
writing-
back-at-the-centre books.
book, A History of the World
In Julian Barnes'
in 10 %
Chapters, is embedded yet another refunctioning of the Genesis
story of Noah and the Ark.
Barnes presents a realistic down-
to-earth picture of the Ark with its unbearable stench and few
volunteers
rhinos,
Barnes
to
the
an
'muck
hippos
out,'
and
idealized
it
is
stabbing,
relish
the
elephants
were
the
'nursery
scrubbed stalls. The Ark
rather
especially
likened
version'
is hardly
to
a
trip;
rather,
spies.
their
where
caged;
a n Ark
replete
The
with
reported travails of elephants at our present-day
in Kerala aimed at attracting
well-
with
read
for
reserve,
animals
hardships
the
not
a n ideal nature
prison-ship
information-gathering
the
of
hold
back-
do
not
like
the
gaja-melas
foreign tourists but which has
only indirectly resulted in cruelty t o the animals. Naturally
enough, the animals in the Ark. d o not enjoy, they just endure.
Barnes'
choice
such
of
an
insignificant
creature
as
the
woodworm i n the role of the narrator enhances the afterglow of
his whole refunctloning strategy.
According
ship,
'(you
to
Barnes,
Noah's
ark
was
not
just
a
single
hardly
expect
to
cram
the
entire
animal
could
kingdom into something a mere three hundred cubits long),"
"a
whole
even
had
flotilla"
the
whlff
of
of
eight
vessels,
profligation
Prepared by BeeHive Digital Concepts Cochin for Mahatma Gandhi University Kottayam
and
about
the
it.
eighth
but
vessel
Moreover,
it
rained not for forty days and forty nights as described i n the
biblical story, but
for ab0u.c a year and a half;
took four years to
recede and
days.
Being
not
just
a stowaway, the woodworm
a
hundred
-
the
under no sense of obligation: '...gratitude
Vaseline on the! lens"
his
narration.
But
the Waters
and
fifty
narrator,
is
puts n o smear of
He therefore claims neutrality i n
(4).
before
lcng,
it
becomes
obvious
who
the
narrator is speaking for. His standpoint becomes increasingly
steeped
in
the
discourse
of
the
other.
the serpent as 'Adam's
biblical story 3 f
He
declaims
the
black propaganda"
and
even dares to call that revered biblical figure Noah " a n old
(6). The narrator, after all, was
rogue with a drink problem"
a
stowaway
thanks
to
only
because
Noah's
he
highly
was
not
wanted
discriminatory
on
the
policy
of
Voyage,
animal
selection for the voyage.,
Patricia Waugh views
deconstructive,
and
literary
conventionalization
parody
as a dynamic,
form which
of
earlier
literary practices. As far as Waugh
iconoclastic,
works
against
and
existing
decadence
sets
of
is concerned, parody can
be considered as "another lever of positive
literary change"
( 6 4 ) . She assigns to parody a recurring function as far as t h e
development
of
fiction
is
concerned:
developments in fictlon have always tended
the
parody
of
glder
or
outworn
'In
fact,
new
to evolve through
convictions"
(69). Hutcheon
also concurs that parody acts as a catalyst i n the evolution
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and eventual substitution of aesthetic forms in history: "Out
of the union of chivalric romance and a new literary concern
for everyday realism came m Q u i j o t e and the novel as we know
it today"
(35). According to hiorthrop Frye, parody is 'often
a
sign that certain vogues in lhandling conventions are getting
worn out"
(103).
In this context it must be said that Tharoor's
GIN is
a
literary milestone which proc:.aims that the earlier straightforward ways of fictionalizing are in the process of getting
worn
out.
Even
though
Tharoor
does
not
ridicule
the
target
text, ancient customs and traditions are more often than not
spared. Ved
Vyas,
after
all,
is only
one
among
a
number of travelling salesmen of salvation. And
itinerant
Brahmins
hospitality,
more
hi:i
were
offered,
daughter
understanding
then"
as
well
apart
"because
such learned
from
his
they
(GIN 19). Satyavati's
countless
were
host's
a
lot
father had
a
senior midwife conduct a virginity-test in which her hymen was
found to be intact; and this, after conceiving a son Ved Vyas
off Parashar, f o r "Brahmins knew a great deal in those days"
(GIN 21).
According
to Tharoor,
Or even an eleven-gunner"
Shantanu was
(GIN 2 1 ) ;
only 'a
fourteen
-
that is, he received only
the above-numbered gun-salute from the British out of a total
possible twenty-one.
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Again, it was on1.y a stray wind that showered petals o n
to Ganga Datta's
Mahabharata,
head
when
and
not the gods as portrayed
he publicly
renounced marriage
in the
in order to
enable his father to marry Satyavati.
Speaking about bigamy, Ttaroor comments that monogamy was
i n India before the British came, "indeed that
not practised
barbarism would come only after Independence."
Salva, the king of Saubal who loves Amba, is 'a
blue"
who
gives
a
Bollywood-Like
when Ganga Datta makes
own
"stately
Rolls"
of Ambika
sensuousness
off w:ith
(26).
and
chase
Cambridge
Hispano-Suiza
in his
the three princesses in his
As
for
Alnbalika
is
Vichitravirya,
enough
to
the
drive
him
epic
and
into a terminal1.y priapic condition.
Bakhtin
tragedy
as
views
dead
traditional
languages
flexible skeleton"
w1.th
genres
'a
like
the
hardened
and
no
longer
(3). They completed their development very
early and now stand almost obsolete. The novel, o n the other
hand, is a young and the only developing genre in literature
at
present.
In
the
period
prior
to
the
rise
of
the
novel,
literature was replete with parodies and travesties o f all the
high
genres.
throughout
the
More
significantly,
entire
history
of
it
the
may
be
novel,
noted
dominant
that
or
fashionable novels were always parodied. The unique ability of
self-reflexity is evident in Sorel's
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Le Berqer Extravagant and
Fielding's
Second
Grandison
of Musaus,
to mention
early
examples ( 6 ) .
The importance of the Menippean satire i n the process of
novelisation
has
always
been
underestimated,
although
it
exerted considerable influence o n old Christian literature of
the ancient period while the genre derived its name from the
philosopher Menippus of Sadara who lived i n the third century,
the term itself for the specific genre was first introduced by
the
Roman
scho~lar Varro
of
the
first
century
B.C.
(Bakhtin
112-113). The Menippean satire made free use o f fantasy from a
totally
different
observational
plane
that
was
completely
alien to the ancient epi.c and tragedy. The menippea was also
characterized
by
the
constant: use
of
other
inserted
genres
like novellas, letters, symposia and s o on. Here it would be
worthwhile
Hatterr
to
point
contains
a
out
that
diluted
G.V.
Desani's
concoction
of
All
About
Menippean
H.
and
Rabelaisan humour. Rushdie and Tharoor, afterwards, continued
to write after them, albeit in their own idiosyncratic ways.
Parody
is
the
life-force
of
the
Menippean
satire.
As
Bakhtin puts it: " T o the pure qenres [epic, tragedy] parody i s
organically alien;
to the
carnivalized genres it is, on
contrary, organically inherent"
mission.
It
reinvigorates
(127).
whatever
Parody has a
is
moribund
backward-looking genres like the epic and the tragedy.
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the
renewing
in
the
Tharoor's
treatment. of Gangaji
(Gandhiji) has the effect
of the carnivalistic legend, which is different from the epic
legend i n which the protagonist i s mountainized. According to
Bakhtin:
[the
strategy
. . . debase
of
the
carnivalistic legend i s to]
the hero
and
bring
make him familiar, bring
him
him
down
close,
to earth,
humanize him;
ambivalent carnival laughter burns away all
that is
stilted and stiff, but in n o way destroys the heroic
core of the image (133).
Hutcheon says that the three tropes of parody, irony a n d
satire remain confused in the minds o f the ordinary reader a s
they are rarely seen in their pure
usage.
She
overlap
therefore
and
presents
intermingle
in
state in actual artistic
a model
in
shifting
which
these
circles
ethos
(55).
She
considers irony as both conservative and ameliorative ( 6 5 ) .
She
observes
that:
democratic 'culturally
parody
flourishes
sophisticated societies."
her argument, she points to the paradigmatic
where
this
genre
flourished
comedies o f Aristophanes.
early
Hebrew
and
primarily
with
the
Conversely,
Egyptian
Literature
T o reinforce
cases of Greece
satyr
she
in
plays
takes the
where
there
and
the
case o f
is
no
evidence of any parodic practice o r tradition. She also refers
to
the
twin
impulses
of
reformative as in Bakhtin's
parody
-
revolutionary
"clouble-voicing,"
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and
or conservative
as in the traditional dictionary definition of parody with its
stress
on
ensures
the
ridiculing
cultural
aspect.
continuance,
it
Therefore,
also
while
facilitates
parody
cultural
change (94).
In the GIN,
whenever
wedding
he
Tharoor deliberately
can. Thus
Satyavati had
invitation-cards
printed.
introduces anachronism
her
son Vichitravirya's
Again,
by
rejected
Raja
Salva, a tear-stained Amba returns to Hastinapur in a train.
The traditj~onal role of the
by Tharoor. Gandhari's
'dharampatni'
is questioned
ac!t of choosing to blindfold herself is
revealed as foolish. The blind Dhritarashtra himself hints to
her that she could be of infinitely more use to him as she was
than with a blindfold
on. But Gandhari determinedly
commenting that a wife or a 'dharampatni'
refuses,
should be judged not
by parameters of utllity. In her own words:
. . .a
dharampatni is not expected to
duty is to share the life of
her
be
useful. Her
husband, its joys
and triumphs and sorrows, to be by his
side
times,
hundred sons
and
to
give
him
sons...
A
at all
(GIN 6 4 .
Tharoor's
ranting Ved Vyas not infrequently rambles into
the cricket field as well, exploiting this game's
terminology.
He speaks of h:is "long innings at the karmic crease."
characteristica.lly proud
of
his
knowledge
game.
In
fact, he claims to "know a great deal about a great deal."
He
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of
the
He is
also
admits
to
reading
enunciating
the
"unplayable
shooter"
vital
laws
the
of
vedas
cricket.
bowling
you
and
He
out,
the
also
and
ability of "seeing the ball well
off the sweet of the bat."
at
same
refers
of
the
to
time
the
batsman's
and timing the fours
God is referred
to as "the Great
Cosmic Umpire" who is positioned not behind the stumps at the
bowling end but "He is the chap up there"
(GIN 65).
The twentieth century Ved Vyas frequently breaks off into
versification,
sometimes parodying
song "Raindrop on Roses"
even f i l m songs. Thus the
from the popular movie The Sound of
Music is seen clearly parodied:
groupj~es with rupees and large solar topis,
bakers and fakers and enema-takers,
journalists who promoted his cause with their pen,
these were among his [Ganga'sl
favourite men!
(GIN 68)
Now let us compare it with the original:
Raindrops o n roses, and whiskers o n kittens
Bright: copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper pac:kages tied up with string
These are a few of my favourite things
('The Sound of Music N.pag.)
Tharoor also parodies
the prose
Vidya Bhavan biographies:
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style o f
the Bharatiya
How about this, 0 long-nosed one? In discourse his
[Pandu's] speech became erudite, his tone measured.
In debate he thought high and aimed low. He became
adept at religion, generous
calm in continence (!=
We
also
come
across
in
philanthropy
and
69).
Tharoor's
parody
of
the
Miltonic-
Homeric kind of epic style:
...
Where shall we rejoin Pandu?
Shall
we
intrude
upon him as he tells his red-eared Madri of lustful
Vrihaspati, who
pregnant
formzed
his
sister-in-law
Mamta,
ejaculation blocked :by the
yet-to-be-born
attentions
upon
his
found
his
feet of
his
and
embryonic
neph'sw? Or of the Brahmin youth who
turned himself into
3
deer to enjoy the
fornicate in the forest, until he was
freedom to
felled
sharp--shootingprince on a solitary hunt?
by a
(GIN 69).
And yet again on page 165:
Shall I tell of Karna's
importance
through
his
dramatic
rise
dominance
of
to national
the Muslim
Group? Of the mass meetings he began to address, i n
impeccable Engl-ish, with robed and
bearded mullahs
by his side, speaking to Muslim peasants t o whom h e
seemed as foreign as the
Viceroy,
another Indian inconsistency
supreme leader:?
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-
and
who yet
-
hailed him a s their
Tharoor
employs
the
trope
of
sometimes with devastatfing effect.
discourse
with
the
South
Ganapathi
(who remains
irony
scribe,
throughout
while
time),
commenting
on
the
the
the
can,
long-nosed
book
with
his
himself from time
expressive reactions being read out by V.V.
to
he
In his habitual monologic
Indian
silent
wherever
conservatism
of
Indian
women, chastises them "f:or ever clinging to the traditions o f
the
last
millenium
century
[monogamy] and
[polygamy] . . . "
Again,
the (oxymoronic) 'faithfully
ignoring
when
those
of
the
last
Pandu expostulates with
:.nfidelious"
Kunti on the subject
of the traditional practice which allowed women to make love
to almost anybody of their choice, concludes with the stunning
paradox:
'It
may
seem funny
to you,
but
the deeper
myself i n our traditions the more liberal I become"
Ved Vyas also does not
"the
fabled
courteous
British
behavlour
hesitate t o put
gentlenanliness"
as
Pandavas
are
in a word about
which
includes
such
referred
(GIN 77) .
to
instantly remin~ding us of Enid Blyton's
also to suggest that
(GIN
- 71).
'let-me-take-your-glasses-off-your-
face-before-I-punch-you-in-the-nose"
The
I steep
as
"The
Famous
Five"
kid-heroes, and maybe,
the Pantlavas are vastly elephantized i n
the ancient epic, like the treatment of heroes in children's
tales (GIN 1 5 1 ) .
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It is cricket that the Pandavas play and not any other
ancient
ball
game;
and
it
takes
Drona
to
retrieve
their
cricket-ball which they lose in the disused well.
Kunti,
the
mother
of
the
Pandavas,
is
portrayed
as
a
fashionable lady who smokes Turkish cigarettes (GIN 265).
Tharoor also parodies the form of the telegram in the one
sent by Purochan La1 to Priya Duryodhani:
CONTACT
ESTABLISHED
MOVING
TO
FIVE FULLY TRUSTING STOP
PRE-TREATED
PREPARATIONS MADE
WHEN TO
STOP
STAKT
AS
STOP
HOUSE
DISCUSSED
KINDLY
TOMORROW
STOP
STOP PLEASE ADVISE
CONTINUE
REMIT
FUNDS
WITHOUT STOP STOP PUROCHAN LAL (GIN
- 282).
And yet again when Vidur sends a cable to Purochan Lal,
Tharoor's parody 3 f the form of the telegram is maintained:
FOR PUROCHAN LALL STOP MESSAGE RECEIVED STOP
DO NOT
DO ANYTHING TILL EYE TELL YOU TO START STOP CONTINUE
YOUR PREPARATIONS AND DO NOT STOP STOP PLEASE
DRAFT
CABLES MORE CAREFULLY AND DO NOT END SENTENCES
WITH
STOP STOP STOP YOU S:3E HOW CONFUSING
IS
STOP
NOT
STOP
THIS
FUNDS ARE MY RE:SPONSlBILITY AND THEY WILL
STOP
ESPECIALLY
IF
YOU
STOP
STOP
STOP
STOP
(GIN 282) .
Tharoor sometimes employs allegory as in the presentation
of
Draupadi
who
has
an
add:~tional name
appended,
namely,
Mokrasi. Thus the stripping of Draupadi by Duhshahsanan in the
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court o f the Kauravas is projected as the abuse of democracy
by authoritarian regimes like that of Indira Gandhi's
the
Emergency.
Democracy.
Needless
Tharoor
to
say,
portrays
allegorically: i.t takes place
Draupadi Mokrasi
the
battle
of
during
represents
Kurukshetra
in the ballot-box at a general
election in India, and not on any material field. Krishna, who
is
approached
seat,
offers
himself
as
services and
by
both
sides
to
the
two
sides
the
a
carnpaig1ie:r
contest
for
option
of
(an'3 not
as
a
a
parliamentary
choosing
candidate)
either
or
the
resources of his skilled and experienced party-
workers.
Arjun's
Tharoor's
work,
self-doubts
just as h e
at
Kurukshetra
take
place,
in
is about to file his nomination-
papers, the question being not one of killing or not killing
one's
own relalzives but whether
he should contest at all o r
just continue with his career as a journalist.
Tharoor
also
uses
the
epic
Mahabharata
to
snipe
at
various ancient cusroms in India. One such practice i s that of
'niyoga'
in which a woman may have sons from an extra-marital
relationship with the
Michael
husband"^ connivance and consent.
Hannoosh argues
that parody
challenges the very
idea of the fixity of works:
It
provides
a
new
version
of
a n old story, but
cannot legitimately propose itself as the definitive
one, since
by its own example it belies the concept
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of
a
definitive
or
authoritative work altogether
(1141.
Also, when we discuss parody it is worthwhile to have a
look
at
self-parody,
"distinctly
modern
which
form"
R.Poirier
describes
114) .
(Hannoosh
as
Self-parody
a
is
a
self-ridiculing act, the targ'et being not any particular text
but the activity of literary creation i n general. In s o doing,
the
writer
parodies
the
act:
of
writing
R.Poirier
itself.
points out Joyce, Nabokov and Borges as practitioners of this
form. Even
Jane Austen
has
employed
it
in
the
famous
fifth
chapter of Northanger Abbey in which the author presents her
own novel as the subject of a later work. Northanger Abbey is
frequently
viewed
as
a
part
parody
of
the
gothic
novel
(Hannoosh 114) .
Self-par0d.y is also to be
found in Rushdie's
Midnight's
Children, in which the hero Saleem Sinai is portrayed not as
having heroic virtues but as being just the opposite. He even
does,
though
unwittingly,
an. act
of
voyeurism
on
his
own
y
Pakistani army as a "manmother. He is also recruited , ~ the
dog" because of his abnormally sensitive smell:
This
metamorphosis
transmutations
change
names
one
throughout
or
even
Jamila Singer, Saleem's
the
is
the
of
a
string
of
novel as characters
personalities (Parvati into
ego
into the many
Midnighl::':~ Children, etc) . Like
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egos
of
the fantastic
metamorphosis
in
story,
Kafka' s
Saleem's
transmogrificat:ion into a man-dog suggests some deep
self-loathing; most of the novel's
humour goes
self-parody which might have something
the
narrator's
'truth'
is
t,30 dark
(Shepherd 4 0 1
Brennan
also
confessional
to
to
invention,
be
do
that
directly
into
with
the
revealed
.
suggests
that
Midnight's
Children
often
becomes a parodic exercise of the so-called 'Novel of Empire.'
Dr.Aziz may be seen as referring to the Aziz of E.M.Forsterls
A Passage to InLi2:
Similarly,
powers,
by.
all
assembled
Conference'
but
who
virtue
the
magical
together
in
a
Saleem's
telepathic
children of Midnight are
'Midnight's
Children' s
(MCC), whose members never actually meet
communicate
Saleem's
of
mentzal
with
one
transmissions
-
another
through
a
of All-
kind
India Congress: a bitter allusion to the passage in
Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown
in
which
the
Anglicised Indian, Hari Kumar (Harry Coomer) is said
to belong to the 'P[ayapore Indian Club. The Mayapore
Chatterjee Club. The MCC. The Other Club. The
One'
-
in other
words,
not
the
famous
wrong
British
refuge o f colonial privilege, the Marylebone Cricket
Club i 8 2 ) .
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Finally, it may be added that no project on parody will
be complete without at least a mention of the great parodists
of the Augustan Age. However, a treatment of this Age or its
writers
in
detail
would
be
quite
beyond
the
scope
Of
the
present thesis. So, keeping this limiting factor in mind,
let
us enter into the very briefest of discussions about this Age.
It
should
be
noted,
in
the
Terry considers the Auyustan Age
parody,
the
period
mainstream."
imitation
ambit"
I11
and
(76)
i
which
grotesquerie,
.
Speaking
became
both
'Deference
and
could
about
place,
that
Richard
as the "first great
it
view,
his
first
all
the
fall
age of
prolific
and
indignation,
within
conditions
parody's
that
proved
beneficial for the growth of eighteenth century parody, Terry
suggests that as t h e prolificacy of literary products creates
a sense of congestion it invariably turns self-reflexive. As
he puts it:
Pope's
Dunciad
culture, but
a
is
not
merely
self-reflexive
a
satire
on book
parody of the book.
Like Swift's earlier A Tale of a Tub, it reproduces,
in
bloated
form,
the
dedication, prefatory
apparatus
materials,
of
print:
the
digressions, and
footnotes that swaddle the naked text. Though comic,
the vislon remains grimly apocalyptic, one of
engendering text in a frenzy
(77).
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of
verbal
text
accretion
~ e r r y considers
scrupulously
parody.
exact
as
the
direct
well
as
quotation
the most
as
"the
economical"
most
form of
Pope resorted to this technique i n both Peri Bathous
and The Dunciad with considerable success. Referring to Perj
Bathous, Terry adds:
The
work
bases
descriptive
citation
itself upon the new conventions of
literary
and
criticism,
commentary,
consisting
except
that
of
Pope's
commentary is replete with parodic insinuation:
parody, in other words, arising not from
distorting
but from rec'3ntextualizing 'the original'
(79).
It is highly
parody
in
Johnson
the
the
and
illilminating if we consider the notions o f
eighteenth
Dryden.
The
century,
fcrmer
in
particularly
his
those
Dictionary
of
(1755)
defined parody as " A kind of writing, in which the words of a n
author
new
.. .
are taken, and by a slight change adapted t o some
purpose."
definition
definition
was
Terry
is
probably
of
the
modelled
of parody as 'verses
opinion
on
that
Johnson's
Dryden's
earlier
patched up from great poets,
and turned into another sense than their author intended them"
(86).
Thus, from the above two quotes, it is clear that i n the
eighteenth century parody was being seen as a sort o f literary
theft. Writes Terry about the technique o f Dunciad:
Pope"
rnet~culous anthologizing
of
the
opponents relishes of illicit appropriation,
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words of
taking
words
hostage,, which
parody
frequently
was
a
intended.
perniciousness that
His
cruelest
barb
against the dunces, that their mummification within
his
own
posterity
poem
provided
their
only
gateway
to
...
was a taunt which proved to be only too true. For Terry, it is
but
natural
that
would
parody
flourish
only
"where
there
prevails a reasonable degree of sensitivity to differentiation
of language"
(87). In the x
i s a parody
of
XI1
Sardepon's
(87-88). Also,
e of the Lock, Clarissa's
verbalization
Swift defines parody
speech
to Glaucus i n Iliad
as being "where
the
Author personates the Style and Manner of other Writers, whom
he has a mind to expose"
From this brief
(Terry 8 9 1 .
survey of parody i n various milieux,
it
must be quite clear that this genre has always been a muchdiscussed
form
in
literary
debate
and
popular
with
diverse
sections of society. If parody is "the concretization of man's
innate urge to rebel against authority,"
the
beginning
forms and
of
this
chapter,
then
institutions imposed by
as I have argued at
the
subversion
authority must
of
the
necessarily
constitute the target of parody. It is the a i m of this thesis
to take up this issue of subversion i n the following chapters.
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