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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"History...is not a web woven with innocent hands.", 11 Sep 2003
The ill-fated romance of Priscilla Hart, a young American working at a birth control clinic in India, and Lakshman, an older, married, Indian civil servant, is an engrossing story in its own right, but it serves a much wider purpose in this ambitious and utterly fascinating novel. It provides the limited, manageable context through which the author asks questions about cultural identity and presents an impassioned plea for understanding and tolerance among cultures. Priscilla, we discover on the first page, was stabbed to death by an unknown assailant during a riot in Zalilgarh, a riot instigated by militant Hindus wanting to build a temple on the site of an ancient Muslim mosque. Many other, competing social and political forces contributed to the unrest which resulted in the riot, however, and the author clearly believes that religious and ethnic extremism has destroyed the traditional fabric of Indian society and may eventually be the undoing of the nation. There is no narrator here to interpret the events of Priscilla's death and of the riot. Tharoor leaves all interpretation up to the reader. Through newspaper stories, entries in Priscilla's scrapbook, letters to her best friend at home and to Lakshman, transcripts of meetings with goverment officials, and a reporter's interviews with extremist religious leaders, the police, and professors (who provide the reader with crucial historical background), the passionate affair of Priscilla and Lakshman comes to life, and the complex and tumultuous forces which contribute to her death emerge. Tharoor is a smooth and disciplined writer who respects his characters and his readers. He presents historical background clearly and allows for multiple interpretations of events, assigning no blame and making no declarations of truth. His American characters are realistic, and the contrasts of their values with those of traditional Indians are presented insightfully. Amazingly, he manages to bring to life the world of traditional India, its cultures, its ironies, its recent history, and its possible future, in fewer than 300 pages, and he does so within the context of a love story which epitomizes the incredible difficulty of separating our selves from our cultures. This is a novel which enlightens while it entertains, presenting a rational view of irrational behavior. Mary Whipple
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