For the untutored Western reader this exuberant and clever novel about the histrionics of twentieth-century Indian politics invites comparison with Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. But this is a mistake. Tharoor covers similar territory to Rushdie, and gives voice to the same virulent distaste for the late Mrs Gandhi, but his book couldn’t be more different.

The Great Indian Novel is not a tongue-in-cheek estimate of the book’s worth (although it may well be that also) but a literal translation of the ancient heroic epic, the Mahabharata, which this novel has expropriated. In a mock heroic tour de force, Tharoor has cast the political turmoil of India’s in­dependence and separation in the form of the Mahabharata of Vyasa. To quote from one of the novel’s several epigrams: ‘The essential Mahabharata is whatever is relevant to us in the second half of the twentieth century. No epic, no work of art, is sacred by itself; if it does not have meaning for me now it is nothing; it is dead.’