Salman Rushdie
Given what happened to him after the publication of The Satanic Verses, who could criticize Salman Rushdie if he became a little gun-shy? His first substantial literary effort after the death threats against him was a children's book called Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a work so disappointingly simplistic that it seemed the Ayatollah had succeeded in silencing Rushdie as the powerful satiric voice he had proven to be in earlier works like Midnight's Children and Shame. But with his fifth novel, The Moor's Last Sigh (Pantheon Books, 435 pages, $ 25), Rushdie is, happily, back to his old form.
Perhaps too close to his old form. The Moor's Last Sigh features many of the themes and even the characters of previous work, among them Aadam Sinai from Midnight's Children and Zeenat Vakil from The Satanic Verses. But the new book lacks the intensity of focus as well as the inspired flights of imaginative writing in these earlier novels, which I count among the notable literary works of our time. Nothing in The Moor's Last Sigh can match, for example, the surrealistic evocation of the nightmarish labyrinth of the Sundarbans jungle in Midnight's Children. But Rushdie has always been an uneven writer, and at least The Moor's Last Sigh is far superior to Haroun or his disastrous first novel, Grimus. It falls roughly in the middle of his creative achievement.
The Moor's Last Sigh is a complicated novel, at times too complicated for its own good. Rushdie introduces some characters only to dispose of them a few pages later, thus giving a breathless quality to his narrative, no doubt in an attempt to mirror the frenetic pace of modern life but making the book difficult to follow. Still, many of Rushdie's best characteristics as an author are in evidence. He can be very funny, although he is still too prone to pun merely for the sake of punning. He writes some of the liveliest prose in contemporary fiction, in part because he allows the syntax, vocabulary, and rhythms of Indian speech to enrich his English. He is a master at creating characters, often with only a few broad strokes. When Rushdie gets serious, he sometimes descends into bathos, especially when he tries to write steamy love scenes (which are the only truly awkward passages in the book), but he is capable of moments of genuine pathos as well.
Spanning four generations in the life of a prominent business family in India, The Moor's Last Sigh is a kind of Bombay Buddenbrooks, and the divisions within the family repeatedly mirror the larger divisions within Indian society as a whole. The central character and narrator, half-Jewish, half-Christian Moraes Zogoiby, falls victim to a peculiar biological fate that makes him age at twice the rate of normal human beings. In Midnight's Children, Rushdie symbolizes the fate ofpostcolonial India in the story of a strange set of telepathic children born with a variety of magical powers in the first hour of Indian independence on August 15, 1947. In a somewhat pale imitation of that brilliant idea, Rushdie intends Moraes's rapid growth to serve as a metaphor for the uncontrolled development of postcolonial life: " Like the city itself, Bombay of my joys and sorrows, I mushroomed into a huge urbane sprawl of a fellow, I expanded without time for proper planning, without any pauses to learn from my experiences or my mistakes or my contemporaries, without time for reflection. How then could I have turned out to be anything but a mess?"
The story of Moraes's mother, Aurora da Gama Zogoiby, forms the imaginative core of the novel; as one of India's most famous artists, she paints a picture called "The Moor's Last Sigh" that serves as a central symbol. Aurora is a magical realist, alternating naturalistic portrayals of the miserable life of the Bombay poor with mythical refigurations of Indian history -- a hybrid art like Rushdie's itself. Indeed, when Rushdie describes Aurora's art as "the mythic-romantic mode in which history, family, politics and fantasy jostled each other," he might have been characterizing The Moor's Last Sigh.
As Michael Valdez Moses has argued, Rushdie uses magical realism-the literary strategy that intertwines the fantastic and the realistic made famous by Gabriel Garcia Mfirquez in his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude -- to capture an India caught in the crosscurrents between modern Western rationality and its own traditional ways. He combines a journalistic fidelity to the hard facts of life in India with a skilled evocation of the myths and family legends that form part of the texture of everyday existence, even in a sophisticated city like Bombay. For example, Moraes may be nothing more than what he appears to be -- the son of Abraham Zogoiby -- but Rushdie leaves open the more romantic possibility that he is the product of a fling rumored to have taken place between his mother and his nation's founding prime minister, Nehru. The duality of Rushdie's vision is reflected even in the style of the book. Rushdie employs many of the hypersophisticated techniques of postmodern fiction, but at the same time he tries to give an oral quality to his storytelling, as if he were not an artful novelist but a simple village elder repeating the legends of his tribe.
In so doing, Rushdie might be dubbed the "postcolonial Dickens." No other writer is more successful at conveying a sense of the distinctive reality of life in a Third World nation. He does not idealize it; he shows it honestly, warts and all, moving from the grotesque comedy of absurd government policies to the deep pathos of dashed hopes and failed aspirations. Judging by many of Rushdie's public pronouncements on political issues, one might be tempted to dismiss him as a typical left-wing, anti-Western intellectual who has supported all sorts of fashionable radical causes. But Rushdie the novelist is not Rushdie the polemicist; his fiction gives a far subtler and more balanced view of the world. That is why he has been roundly condemned throughout the Third World and why the literary critical establishment in the academy has increasingly turned against him. Rushdie satirizes post- colonialintellectuals in The Moor's Last Sigh, having one of them write a treatise on Aurora Zogoiby with a title so pretentious and gimmicky that it would be right at home in the program of a Modern Language Association convention: Imperso-Nation and Dis/Semi/Nation: Dialogics of Eclecticism and Interrogations of Authenticity in A. Z.
Rushdie is no simpleminded cheerleader for the cause of Third World regimes. In The Moor's Last Sigh he is highly critical of British colonial rule in India, but he is also willing to show the ways in which an independent India has failed to make good on its promises to improve upon conditions under the British Raj. When Moraes ends up in a contemporary Indian prison, he reflects upon the downward spiral in postcolonial India: "My forebears . . . and my mother too, had spent time in British-Indian jails; but this post- Independence made-in-India institution was far beyond their worst imaginings." Rushdie documents the many forms of corruption in the postcolonial regime in India, culminating in the amusing "Indian variation" on Einstein's Theory of Relativity that one character formulates with the late prime minister Indira Gandhi's family in mind: "Everything is for relative. Not only light bends, but everything. For relative we can bend a point, bend the truth, bend employment criteria, bend the law. D equals mc squared where D is for Dynasty, m is for mass of relatives, and c of course is for corruption."
In one of the most hilarious episodes in the novel, Rushdie takes on the left directly. Moraes's grandfather, Camoens da Gama, becomes an enthusiast of the Russian Revolution and is especially excited when he hears about a Soviet scheme to train a group of Lenin look-alikes to spread the communist gospel throughout Russia. Camoens wants to adapt this scheme immediately to India and begins training a local crew of Lenins. Unfortunately, when one of the authentic counterfeit Lenins travels from Russia to India to inspect Camoens's troupe of actors, he is disturbed by their foreign appearance to the point of racism: "Vladimir Ilyich asks what is the meaning of this outrage. . . . These persons have blackness of skin and their features are not his." And in the end, the attempt to turn the Third World Lenins loose on a local crowd proves to be a comedy of errors:
In Malayalain, Kannada, Tulu, Konkani, Tamil, Telugu and English they proclaimed the revolution, they demanded the departure of the . . . blood-sucking cockroaches of imperialism . . . Babeling Lenins, their beards coming loose in the hear, addressed the now-enormous crowd; which began, little by little at first, and then in a great swelling tide to guffaw.
To be sure, Rushdie's leftism does play a significant part in the novel. The story deals with one of India's leading companies in the spice trade, which later becomes a sprawling financial conglomerate. Rushdie makes it clear that, in his view, capitalism is indistinguishable from gangsterism. Yet even here Rushdie's instincts as a novelist override his ideological intentions. He cannot help betraying a kind of grudging admiration for the human energy, vitality, and ingenuity of capitalism in action, and in the end the business figures in his novel come off no worse than the socialists or other political figures he portrays.
The great theme of Rushdie's writing ever since Midnight's Children has been cultural hybridity -- what happens when you try to combine seemingly incompatible elements from different cultures into some kind of larger synthesis. The results range from the political -- like the inadvertently comic effort to impose Marxism on India -- to the cultural -- like the phenomenon one of the book's characters calls "'Country and Eastern" music, a set of twangy songs about ranches and trains and love and cows with an idiosyncratic Indian twist."
Most controversially, Rushdie explores the unavoidable conflict between basing a community on a secular principle -- the Western way -- and basing it on a sacred principle. He realizes that introducing the secular political principles of Western-style liberal democracy into a traditional community inevitably undermines the very faith that gives meaning to the lives of its citizens.
Rootless cosmopolitanism appears as a profoundly corrosive force in The Moor's Last Sigh. At the same time, Rushdie realizes that unenlightened parochialism is not the answer either. The amalgam of religion and politics can lead to the kind of religious strife that has torn the Indian subcontinent apart for centuries and that has been responsible for millions of deaths in the postcolonial era alone. It is the very same religious fanaticism that resulted in the threats against Rushdie's life.
The complexity of Rushdie's analysis emerges clearly in his treatment of a character called Mainduck, a Hindu nationalist with fascist tendencies. Mainduck is one of the many who want to return to a primordial India of pure Hinduism: "He spoke of a golden age "before the invasions" when good Hindu men and women could roam free. "Now our freedom, our beloved nation, is buried beneath the things the invaders have built. This true nation is what we must reclaim from beneath the layers of alien empires.'"
And yet Mainduck is at the same time capable of instructing his fanatical followers in the virtues of hybrid culture in India: "But when they began . . . to belittle the culture of Indian Islam that lay palimpsest-fashion over the face of Mother India, Mainduck . . . thundered at them. . . . Then he would sing ghazals and recite Urdu poetry -- Faiz, Josh, Iqbal -- from memory and speak of the glories of Fatehpur Sikri and the moonlit splendor of the Taj."
Like Mainduck, many of Rushdie's characters crave the moral, political, and religious certainty of life in the tribe, but they also are drawn to the cultural richness and diversity that result only when different civilizations meet and interact, even if one is colonizing the other. At times, Rushdie himself seems to indulge in a postmodern celebration of cultural difference for its own sake, but he is just as likely to lament the loss of a solid sense of identity in the fluid world of contemporary multiculturalism.
In one of the most moving passages in the novel, Moraes, drawing upon the ambiguity of the term Indian, gives voice to the bewilderment of the uprooted, modern intellectual, displaced from his homeland, forever denied any sense of belonging:
In a way I had been in Indian country all my life, learning . . . to follow its trails . . . sending up smoke -signals, beating its drums, pushing out its frontiers . . . Not even an Indian was safe in Indian country; not if he was the wrong sort of Indian, anyway -- wearing the wrong sort of head-dress, speaking the wrong language, dancing the wrong dances, worshipping the wrong gods . . . In Indian country, there was no room for a man who didn't want to belong to a tribe, who dreamed of moving beyond.
In this eloquent cry of a cultural exile, it is hard not to hear the voice of Rushdie himself. Indeed, by contriving the plot so that Moraes has written the narrative largely while in prison and under the threat of death from a madman, Rushdie offers a compelling image of his own troubled fate as a writer.