The Great Indian Novel

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Prof. P. Lal for permission to quote from his book, The Mahabharata of Vyasa.

My gratitude also goes to Tony Lacey, David Davidar and Julia Sutherland for their valuable editorial guidance; to my agent, Deborah Rogers, for her dedication and perseverance; to my brother-in-law, Dr Chandra Shekhar Mukherji, for his early and repeated encouragement as the work progressed; to my friends Deepa Menon, Margaret Kooijman, Ansar Hussain Khan and Arvind Subramanian, for volunteering to inflict the draft manuscript on themselves and for reading it with affection and insight; to my sisters, Shobha Srinivasan and Smita Menon, for their love, support and hospitality on two continents; to my wife, Tilottama, for bearing with me throughout the difficult evenings and weekends of my writing, and for trying (with only partial success) to get me to approach her own high critical standards; and to my parents, Chandran and Lily Tharoor, for teaching me to aspire, and for sustaining my faith in this book as they have sustained all my writing for so many years.