Shashi Tharoor’s Riot: A Postmodern Study

Postmodernism is an extension to the modernism. It serves as a reaction to the supposed stylistic and ideological limitations of modernist literature and it is characterized by fragmentation, paradox, unreliable narrators, often unrealistic and downright impossible plots, games, parody, paranoia, dark humour and authorial self-reference. Postmodern authors are likely to reject outright meanings in their novels, stories and poems, and instead, highlight and rejoice the prospect of multiple meanings, or a complete lack of meaning, within a single literary work. Shahi Tharoor is one of the makers of new pattern in writing novels with post-modern thoughts and emotions in India. His Riot: A Novel (2001) is an influential work that employs the postmodernist perspectives in the form and content. The fundamental features of postmodernist fiction such as experimentation with the formal and thematic content of the novel, self-reflexivity, conscious handling of narrative, fragmentation, discontinuity, subversion of conventional modes of narration, multiple viewpoints, intertextuality, metafiction, mixing of the genres are all present in this novel. The present paper attempts to analyze Riot: A Novel in the light of postmodern perspectives.