The proposer indicated that Salman Rushdie was no stranger.
He was born in 1947 and this prompted him to write Midnight's Children. The
proposer had a copy of this book
autographed and dedicated to him
as a member of the 1947 club .The proposer had told Rushdie he had been conceived in Calcutta during the Raj
even though born late and in
Edinburgh .
Rushdie’s father was a rich lawyer /business man who changed
his name to Rushdie after the great Muslim philosopher of medieval Spain. He
was a Bombay wallah and after early education he sent Salman to Rugby School
and thence to Kings Cambridge to
read History .Then Rushdie joined an advertising agency dreaming up “That will
do nicely” for American
Express , “Naughty but nice”
for cream cakes and “Irresistible” for Aero chocolate .In the evenings
he wrote a first book [a failure ] and then in 1981 Midnight's Children which
won the Booker Prize and the later Best of Bookers. This won lots of Awards and
opened the way for many other talented Indian Authors, eg Vikran Seths A
Suitable Boy .
After Shame a book set in Pakistan he went on to Satanic
Verses .At some time it was always going to provoke Muslim ire but he doubtless
did not expect the Fatwah.
Then in hiding he wrote The Moor's Last Sigh. This was an
important matter for us to recognise in our discussion. The proposer met him when he appeared in 1995 in
London and Edinburgh to launch the book. Security is a familiar fact now but 17
years ago it was interesting to give one’s details in advance, be searched on
arrival and then see that 10% of the audience was looking at the rest of the
audience not at Rushdie. He looked in the flesh less ugly than expected. The goggle eyes are probably
made more obvious by TV studios. Also he was charming.
The proposer had not read Joseph Anton, Rushdie’s recently
published book about his life in hiding after the Fatwah .There was no index so
he could not see in the book shop what Rushdie had to say about The Moor. Finally in 1995 the proposer went
with his wife to India for the first time and later in the year to Granada. The
Red Forts in Delhi and Agra are not too different from the Alhambra .Also they
saw the spice markets and warehouses in Cochin and the Synagogue with its blue
tiles .It follows that this is more than just a literary choice for the proposer.
The Moor’s Last
Sigh is a novel about modern India. Its hero is Moraes Zogoiby of Bombay,
nicknamed by his mother “the Moor.” But the famous sigh to which the title
refers was breathed five centuries ago, in 1492, when Muhammad XI, last sultan
of Andalusia, bade farewell to his kingdom, bringing to an end Arab-Islamic
dominance in Iberia. From Sultan Muhammad a line of descent, partly historical,
partly fabulous, leads to Moraes, the narrator, who in 1992 will return from
the East to “discover” Andalusia. In a dynastic prelude occupying the first
third of the novel, Moraes’s genealogy is traced back as far as his
great-grandparents, the da Gamas. Francisco da Gama is a wealthy spice exporter
based in Cochin in what is now Kerala State. A progressive and a nationalist,
he soon disappears from the action (Rushdie gives short shrift to characters
whose usefulness has ended), but his wife Epifania, faithful to “England, God,
philistinism, the old ways,” survives to trouble succeeding generations and to
utter the curse that will blight the life of the unborn Moraes.
Their son Camoens, after flirting with Communism, becomes a
Nehru man, dreaming of an independent, unitary India which will be “above
religion because secular, above class
because socialist, above caste because enlightened.” He dies
in 1939, though not before he has had a premonition of the violent,
conflict-riven India that will in fact emerge.
Camoens’s daughter Aurora falls in love with a humble Jewish
clerk, Abraham Zogoiby. Neither Jewish nor Christian authorities will solemnize
their marriage, so their son Moraes is raised “neither as Catholic nor as
Jew,…a jewholic-anonymous.” Abandoning the declining Jewish community of
Cochin, Abraham transfers the family business to Bombay and settles in a
fashionable suburb, where he branches out into more lucrative activities:
supplying girls to the city’s brothels, smuggling heroin, speculating in
property, trafficking in arms and eventually in nuclear weapons.
Aurora is
a complex character and , in many
ways the emotional centre of the book. A painter of genius but a distracted
mother, she suffers intermittent remorse for not loving her children enough,
but prefers finally to see them through the lens of her art. Thus Moraes is
worked into a series of her paintings of “Mooristan,” a place where (in
Aurora’s free and easy Indian English) “worlds collide, flow in and out of one
another, and washofy away…. One universe, one dimension, one country, one dream,
bumpo’ing into another, or being under, or on top of. Call it Palimpstine.” In
these paintings, with increasing desperation, she tries to paint old, tolerant
Moorish Spain over India, overlaying, or palimpsesting, the ugly reality of the
present with “a romantic myth of the plural, hybrid nation.”
Aurora’s paintings give a clear hint of what Rushdie is up
to in this, his own “Palimpstine” project: not overpainting India in the sense
of blotting it out with a fantasy alternative, but laying an alternative, promised-land
text over it.
But The Moor’s Last Sigh is not an optimistic book, and the
paintings of Aurora’s high period become darker and darker. Into them she pours
not only her unexpressed maternal love but also “her larger, prophetic, even
Cassandran fears for the nation.” Her last painting, which gives the book its
title, shows her son “lost in limbo like a wandering shade: a portrait of a
soul in Hell.”
Moraes is born under the curse of two witch-grandmothers, so
it is no surprise that he has a clublike right hand and a metabolism that dooms
him to live “double-quick,” growing—and aging—twice as fast as ordinary
mortals. The comparison was made
with Oscar in The Tin Drum, previously discussed by the Group.
Venturing into the world, he is caught in the toils of the
beautiful but evil rival artist Uma Sarasvati. A pawn in the war between this
demon mistress and his mother, Moraes first finds himself expelled from his
parental home and then in jail, accused of Uma’s murder. Released, he joins the
Bombay underworld as a strikebreaker and enforcer in the pay of one Raman
Fielding, boss of a Hindu paramilitary group.
Moraes’s grandfather Camoens had faith in Nehru but not in
Gandhi. In the village India to which Gandhi appealed, he saw forces brewing
that spelled trouble for India’s minorities: “In the city we are for secular
India but the village is for Ram… In the end I am afraid the villagers will
march on the cities and people like us will have to lock our doors and there
will come a Battering Ram.” His prophecy begins to fulfil itself in Moraes’s
lifetime when the doors of the Babri mosque at Ayodhy are battered down by
crowds of fanatical Hindus.
Camoens is prescient but ineffectual. Aurora, an activist as
well as an artist, is the only da Gama with the strength to confront the dark
forces at work in India. When the annual festival procession of the
elephant-headed god Ganesha, a show of “Hindu-fundamentalist triumphalism,”
passes by their house, she dances in view of the celebrants, dancing against the
god, though, alas, her dance is read by them as part of the spectacle (Hinduism
notoriously absorbs its rivals). Every year she dances on the hillside; dancing
at the age of sixty-three, she slips and falls to her death.
Raman Fielding, rising star of the Hindu movement, is a
thinly disguised caricature of Bal Thackeray, the Bombay leader of the Shiv
Shena Party, which Rushdie elsewhere calls “the most overtly
Hindu-fundamentalist grouping ever to achieve office anywhere in India.”
Closely linked with Bombay’s criminal underworld, Fielding is “against
unions,…against working women, in favour of sati, against poverty and in favour
of wealth,…against ‘immigrants’ to the city,…against the corruption of the
Congress [Party] and for ‘direct action,’ by which he meant paramilitary
activity in support of his political aims.” He looks forward to a theocracy in
which “one particular variant of Hinduism would rule.”
The underworld struggle between Fielding and Moraes’s father
culminates in the murder of Fielding and the destruction of half of Bombay.
Sick of this new “barbarism,” Moraes retires to Andalusia, there to confront
another monster or evil, Vasco Miranda. Miranda is a Goan painter who has made
a fortune selling kitsch to Westerners. Obsessively jealous of Aurora, he has
stolen her Moor paintings; to reclaim them, Moraes finds his way into Miranda’s
Daliesque fortress. Here Miranda imprisons him and lets him live only as long
as (shades of Scheherazade) he writes the story of his life. Rushdie of course at
the time of writing the book was in hiding, a form of captivity, to avoid the
same fate as Scheherazade.
Locked up with Moraes is a beautiful Japanese picture
restorer named Aoi who perishes; Moraes, with Miranda’s blood on his hands,
escapes. It is 1993, he is thirty-six years old, but his inner clock says he is
seventy-two and ready to die.
The final chapters of the book, and the opening chapter, to
which they loop back, are packed (or palimpsested) with historical allusions.
Moraes is not only Muhammad XI (Abu-Abd-Allah, or Boabdil, in the Spanish
corruption of his name): he sees himself as Dante in “an infernal maze” of
tourists, drifting yuppie zombies, and also as Martin Luther, looking for doors
on which to nail the pages of his life story, as well as Jesus on the Mount of
Olives, waiting for his persecutors to arrive. It is hard to avoid the
impression that all the left-over analogues of the Moor fable from Rushdie’s
notebooks have been poured into these chapters, which are as a result frantic
and overwritten while elementary
rules of fiction, like not introducing new characters in the last pages, are
ignored: Aoi is the case in point.
As if unsure
that the import of the Boabdil/Moraes parallel has come across, Rushdie glosses
it as follows: Granada, in particular the Alhambra, is a “monument to a lost
possibility,” a “testament…to that most profound of our needs,…for putting an
end to frontiers, for the dropping of boundaries of the self.” The palimpsesting of Moraes over
Boabdil supports a less trite, more provocative thesis: that the Arab
penetration of Iberia, like the later Iberian penetration of India, led to a
creative mingling of peoples and cultures; that the victory of Christian
intolerance in Spain was a tragic turn in history; and that Hindu intolerance
in India bodes as ill for the world as did the sixteenth-century Inquisition in
Spain.
Rushdie pursues palimpsesting with considerable vigour in
The Moor’s Last Sigh, as a novelistic, historiographical, and autobiographical
device. Thus Granada, Boabdil’s lost capital, is also Bombay, “inexhaustible
Bombay of excess,” the sighed-for home of Moraes as well as of the author over
whose person he is written. Both are cities from which a regenerative
cross-fertilization of cultures might have taken place, but for ethnic and
religious intolerance.
Like Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983), and The
Satanic Verses (1989), The Moor’s Last Sigh is a novel with large ambitions
composed on a large scale. In its architecture, however, the Group found it
disappointing. Aside from the dynastic prelude set in Cochin, and the last
fifty pages set in Spain, the body of the book belongs to Moraes’s life in
Bombay. But instead of the interwoven development of character, theme, and
action characteristic of the middle section of what might be called the classic
novel, the middle section of Rushdie’s novel makes only fitful and episodic
progress. New actors are introduced with enough inventiveness and wealth of
detail to justify major roles; yet all too often their contribution to the
action turns out to be slight, and they slipped (or were slipped) out of the
picture almost whimsically. It was also argued by some in the Group that those
without a good knowledge of the history of the period both in Bombay and wider
India would struggle with the narrative.
To complaints of this kind—which have been voiced with
regard to the earlier books as well—defenders of Rushdie have responded by
arguing that he works, and should therefore be read, within two narrative traditions:
of the Western novel (with its subgenre, the anti-novel à la Tristram Shandy),
and of Eastern story-cycles like the Panchatantra, with their chainlike linking
of self-contained, shorter narratives. To such critics, Rushdie is a
multicultural writer not merely in the weak sense of having roots in more than
one culture but in the strong sense of using one literary tradition to renew
another.
It is not easy to counter this defence in its general form,
particularly from the position of an outsider to India. But to take a single
instance from The Moor’s Last Sigh: the episode in which Moraes’s father,
Abraham Zogoiby, in a fit of enthusiasm for the modern, impersonal,
“management” style in business, adopts a young go-getter named Adam over Moraes
as his son and heir. For some fifteen pages Adam occupies centre stage. Then he
is dropped from the book. The Group found the episode unsatisfying; further, we
would hazard a guess that the reason why Adam disappears is not that Rushdie is
following traditional Indian models but that he is only half-heartedly
committed to satirizing the business-school ethos; he abandons this particular
narrative strand because it is leading nowhere.
Others disagreed, enjoying the stories of Adam and other
personages who blazed briefly across the pages of The Moor’s Last Sigh and then
expired.
Such characters as Vasco Miranda or Uma Sarasvati or even
Abraham Zogoiby himself provide a comparable problem. In their extravagant
villainy they seem to come straight out of Hollywood or Bollywood.
In fact Rushdie is far from being a programmatic
postmodernist. For instance, he is disinclined to treat the historical record
as just one story among many. We see this in his treatment of the two histories
out of which Moraes’s story grows: of the Moors in Spain, and of the Jews in
India. In the case of the Moors, and of Muhammad/Boabdil in particular, Rushdie
does not deviate from the historical record, which is probably most familiar to
Westerners from Washington Irving’s nostalgic sketches in The Alhambra. As for
the Jewish communities in India, their origins are ancient and will probably
never be known with certainty. However, they preserved certain legends of
origin, and to these legends Rushdie adheres without embroidering, save for one
superadded fiction: that the Zogoibys descend from Sultan Muhammad (called by
his subjects El-zogoybi, the Unfortunate) via a Jewish mistress who sailed for
India pregnant with his child. This story is specifically (through not
unequivocally) singled out as an invention by Moraes in his function as
narrator.
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The overall reaction to the book was positive. It brought
out the complexity and diversity of Indian society and history. It was a rich,
extensive, humorous and complex story that was very enjoyable to read. There
were reservations ( see above)
expressed by some of our number. The virtuosity and exuberance were
entertaining and admirable but sometimes descended into showing off, stylistic
confusion and incoherence. Against
this it was also pointed out that those writing in English but brought up
outside England were able to call upon a wider range and background in their
works, eg Kipling and Paul Scott in earlier times and Rushdie, Seth, Zadie
Smith and others .
Fielding is Bal Thakeray the founder of Shiv Sena see
ayodhia riots and theBombay riots
QUOTES
“give up such delusive
Esperance you rotter “
Sarah “ a large full bodied girl waiting like an undiscovered continent, for Abrahams vessel to sail into her harbour”
Laurel and Hardon
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