Novelist, political analyst and commentator, Shashi Tharoor lives in New York where he works as a diplomat for the UNO. Though geographically displaced he has always written about India because he feels he has something to say; and when a writer has something to say he must write, especially when it concerns the common historical experience of shared cultural codes and the retelling of the past. A writer in the situation of Tharoor is always positioned by and positions himself within the narrative consisting of a continuous play of history, culture and power. Myth, memory, fantasy all constitute the raw material on which he depends for a construction of fictionalized history or historical 'fiction. Different perspectives create new histories in terms of one's ideological dispositions and in accordance with race, gender and class. Permanent insatiability, and the politics of difference as well as recognition manoeuvre the form of the novel: Positioned between alternative homelands as well as ethnic communities, the perspective of different characters alter continuously and clash thereby contributing to the tension so much needed in a work of art as well as in the Young Hegelian outlook on politics and religion.

Filled with subtlety, grace and beauty, the just released novel Riot takes on a range of topics fusing life, art, history, class and culture into a vibrant novel about communalism in the wake of the Babri Masjid demolition. Tharoor has always been keenly involved in his writings on the issue of the growing communalization of Indian politics.

The lingo is the same. The often repeated jokes are the same. Both the language and the humour reminded me of my undergraduate days. Does Shashi Tharoor write like an undergraduate? Is he good only with short pieces more of the journalistic kind and not with a full length novel? And is this not the reason he uses this new experiment in the novel, a structural fragmentation which allows the reader to open the book anywhere? Lakshman, the protagonist, exclaims, 'Down with the omniscient narrator! It's time for the omniscient reader. Let the reader construct her own novel each time she reads it'. Is not Tharoor trying to do just this?

The mode of address, with its multiple positioning, avoids a strong interpellation. This is clear not just from the technique of using different voices to speak to us, but also from the very structure of the work. The device of a mystery which is never unveiled first involves us, and then moves us into Priscilla's love affair and her personal drama of awakening. The result is a more open text; the reader is also left in a dialectic of ideological positioning, adopting a series of positions that conflict with each other. The various documents that make up the novel assume different audiences like the heterogeneity of voices. The manifold vectors of ideology, individuality, originality and intertextuality intertwine in so many ways enabling the novel to emerge from an ideological context including the structures of class, gender and nationality.

The plot takes off from an account of a riot in Khargone, Madhaya Pradesh, sent to Tharoor by an IAS friend, Harsh Mander, especially since it introduced him to the Intricacies of controlling a riot. Another incident that lies at the origin of this novel is the death of an American girl in South Africa who is killed in the racial disturbances. The two images, he says, 'fused in [my] mind. A lot of what I am trying to explore involves collisions of various sorts.'

The novel traces the fate, through various voices, of the 24-year old American student Priscilla Hart, killed in the sectarian violence in 1989 to bring out the communal tensions and cultural divide facing the country. The gory, grim but always compelling panorama evokes the almost unimaginable horrors and atrocities of communal and cultural difference. A phantasmagoria of estranged man-woman relationships and the indisciplined apparatus of the state machinery, combining with the shadow terrors of this small 'dirty' town and the disturbed life of its opposing communities, the novel turns out to be popular history in the best sense with its attention to human situations and its commanding prose.

Riot is a well researched book with a compelling hard-driving narrative. Love, cultural collision, xenophobia, man's social and political independence are some of its concerns that endeavour to weave history with the illusion of truth and romance, mingling the lives of the different characters caught up in love and communal war, and most of all, in search of their identity The individual's beliefs and values are constructed through cultural and political pressures and sometimes even by oneself. The clash between the private and the public, between one's individual beliefs and t beliefs of others is thus a confrontation that sometimes results in a riot and this is what the novel emphasizes.

The central concern of Riot as well as the various characters are steeped in an inherent dilemma. The time is our time. The ravages communalism and the consequences of a country divided against itself are the political circumstances, into which maelstrom steps a young woman from America. Tharoor has introduced into his novel a foreigner like Adela Quested from A Passage to India because, as he argues, 'very often we define ourselves in relation to others and because a foreigner comes with a certain level of both innocence and a lack of understanding that helps for those who are trying to read a story like this.' Priscilla is in India as a volunteer in a women's health programme dealing with their reproduction rights.

In. her scrapbook dated December 25, 1989, she writes: "Here I have come to do good. It's true:/ So simple a task in so complex a land./ wheel my bicycle into their habits,/ Tell them what's right, what can be done, And how to do it. They listen to me,/ So ignorant, so knowing, and when they have heard,/ They go back to their huts, / Roll out the chapatis for dinner./ Pour the children drinks of sewer water,/ Serve their men first, eat what's left,/ If they're lucky, and then submit unprotected/ To the heaving thrusts of their protectors, /Abusers, masters. One more baby comes,/To wallow in misery with the rest'. This indicates the sincerity of her involvement, but she is an intruder representing cultural penetration so much obvious in the political controversy generated by the Coca Cola affair and the reaction of the 'hysterical left' or George Fernandes who demanded to know, 'What kind of a country is India, where you can get Coke in the cities but not clean water in the villages'. Was Coca Cola here to loot the country or ruin the health of the nation? Such questions are thrown up in the context of Priscilla's father who has charge of Coca-Cola India before it was evicted from the country in 1977, and symbolically represents the economic penetration of India as well.

Pricscilla falls in love with the District Magistrate, Lakshman and they begin to meet in a haunted house: called kotli. They meet here clandestinely every Tuesday and Saturday, but after an intense courtship, Lakshman decides that he /cannot possibly desert his daughter whom he also loves. They plan to meet for the last time on a Saturday. That is when the riots begin: Lakshman cannot make it and Pricilla is killed in their secret meeting place. No one in the town can explain why anyone would want to kill Priscilla. There are no clues, no confessions. `In riots all sorts of things happen', says Gurinder Singh, the police officer. `People strike first and ask questions later.'

Tharoor defies the distinction between the historian and the novelist, stressing the contingency of all historical knowledge. He writes in the Afterword: `Memory and oblivion: how one leads to the other, and back again, has been the concern of much of my fiction. History, the old saying goes, is not a web woven with innocent hands'. Recovering the totality of the past is virtually impossible. Traditional practices of writing of history fail to question the conditions of their own making and therefore, retard any development of a democratizing critical intelligence. They raise before us the spectre of the real past, an objective past about which their accounts are held to be accurate and even true. History's epistemological fragility and the tentativeness of all readings is here completely ignored.

Is history then an art or a science and is it really possible to say what happened in the past without a bias? What is the nature of historiography in a post-modernist world? Should history abandon the search for objective truth about the past? Is it not important that it is time that history came to terms with its own processes of production?

Emphasis on multiple perspectives and the construction of meaning is arguably the best way that history ought to proceed if it is to be modernized. The world has to be read as a text and these readings are infinite. It is obvious that the world/past comes to us as various stories which we interpret and our of which we can never break out. Tharoor tries to show just this. He uses journalistic reporting, diary writing and interviews to depict from a multiple point of view the concerns of his novel. It could, therefore be argued that history is nothing but historiography, an array of reading practices that engage dialectically with existing texts that represent an assortment of culturally constructed forms of knowledge, beliefs, codes, and customs.

The past according to such fiction writing is a site where antagonistic institutions initiate contradictory cultural codes, alter them, or help to retain them. All texts produced in a particular period have to seen in the context of their relationship to the institutions and practices that constitute that age in all its totality.

There are no histories that are not aimed someone. The ideological nature of all positions fixes the historical account without on having to pay excessive attention to centres because dearly there are no centres.

Thus the question that can be posed is: To what degree are historical studies objective? Often interpretation takes hold over the thinking process which cannot transcend its own discursive practices to get to the truth. is postulated by postmodernism, there is no autonomous procedure of bringing reality to bear on interpretation since all judgments are based on interpretation that cannot be infallible. It can, therefore, be concluded that there cannot be rigid foundations for knowledge.

Though it is a difficult task to satisfy the skeptic, and this is what many writers also f eel they finally do succumb to Foucaules claim that though all that he produces is fiction, he d not `go so far as to say. that fictions are beyond truth.' He is of the view that it is possible to make fiction work inside of truth.

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Shelley Walia, Professor and Chairman, Department of English, Punjab University, teaches post colonial theory and cultural studies and is the author of Witness to Decline, Between Truth and History and Edward Said and the Writing of History.