Writer Shashi Tharoor was educated in India and later took a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. For more than 20 years he has had a double career -- as a writer of both fiction and non-fiction and also a United Nations official. His fiction includes The Great Indian Novel and Show Business. He also holds various UN positions in Singapore, Geneva and is Executive Assistant to Secretary General Kofi Annan. His new novel Riot is just out in bookshops. 

The interesting thing about Riot, your new novel is that it’s in quite a different tenor and style from your earlier novels, particularly the well known The Great Indian Novel which was from the very sprawling tradition of myth, magic and realism. Riot focuses on a particular incident of an American girl who is in an NGO and who gets killed in a riot in Uttar Pradesh. Does it come from a specific incident or is it a more general response to political developments in India?

Both really. In fact, you are right -- it’s different because the other two novels are satirical novels and this is one that intends to be taken seriously and that takes itself seriously. However, the novel was inspired by a real incident which fitted in with my concerns about the growing communal divide in parts of our country. I’ve written about this in my non-fiction and in India: From Midnight to the Millennium. 

A college friend of mine, an IAS officer actually dealt with the riot. His case was in Madhya Pradesh. I thought it was an interesting story and that I could make something different out of this. My friend Harsh Mander has published this particular account in his new book Unheard Voices. Harsh graciously consented that I could reinvent his riot and make it my riot. I used the riot to write a different kind of novel -- one that focuses on collisions of various sorts between individuals, between cultures, between ideologies and between religions. At the same time, a novel which by focussing on one place, one time, a small group of people, helps illuminate the kinds of issues I want to talk about -- our identity and communalism and so on. In a way, that’s quite different from an editorial or an opinion piece. 

One of the things that strikes me about Riot is that your ill-fated heroine, Priscilla Hart seems to come from a tradition of white women who are victimised or meet their end in India, at least in the fictional imagination -- you look at EM Forster, Paul Scott… why do white women have these disastrous encounters in India. Why is it such a consistent theme?

I actually did not think of this as being in the direct line of succession to Adela Quested and the rest. The truth is that this is a different generation of western women, this is part of an attempt…

Yes, she is post-Coca Cola, I know that…

Post-Coca Coca and also part of a different awareness where in fact a person like her, and there are many like her, come with a different relationship to the processes of change. They are convinced about development, about ecology, about awareness, about women’s empowerment. It’s a different set of issues that brings them to our country. 

As a fiction writer, I also had a more prosaic motive. I wanted there to be a love affair between this American in this situation and the district magistrate and it somehow seemed altogether more easy for the district magistrate to be male and for the visitor to be female.

At another level, it’s about an Indo-American encounter, isn’t it because what’s interesting about Priscilla Hart, your heroine, is that her father has been a Coca Cola executive at that crucial phase of India closing in 1977?

Exactly. In fact, that was quite deliberately chosen because I’m looking at an aspect, what one might call, cultural penetration. You know, it’s a bit more than that. The Coca Cola executive, for example, says at one point in the novel to an Indian history professor that the problem with people in India is that we have