Indianness and Satire of History in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh

Christian, Portuguese and Jews; Chinese tiles promoting godless views; pushy ladies, skirts-not-saris, Spanish shenanigans, Moorish crowns. . . can this really be India?

Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh

The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) is a part of the historiographic trilogy of Salman Rushdie along with Midnight’s Children (1981) and Shame (1983). Rushdie is renowned for his brilliant political satire and most of his fiction is set in Indian subcontinent. He is also concerned with the issue of migrant’s quest of identity. Besides historical allegory, The Moor’s Last Sigh can also be read as a family saga. We see the Independence struggle, the Partition and the Emergency era and how these events are inserted into and mutually affect the characters in this novel. In this novel we can see the complexity of India as a nation-state from the aspect of its history as depicted in the novel and how Rushdie satirizes Indian history through intertwining the protagonist’s personal life and historical events.

The common technique Rushdie uses in Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh is the sophisticated connection between India and the main character’s life journey. In the first novel, Saleem Sinai’s birth coincides with the birth of the nation, on the Independence Day, while in the latter India’s plot movement is in sync with the experience of Moor’s family. The story in The Moor’s Last Sigh covers the life of four generations, from the nineteenth century to the present, and is set in Bombay and Cochin. It is narrated by a Christian Portuguese-Jewish named Moraes (‘Moor’) Zogoiby. In his narration, the Moor tells about the history of ‘India’ as he remembers it. History is maintained and modified from time to time. The writing of history in Rushdie’s novel more or less resembles what the Moor says about his mother’s family conflict, ‘I tell them as they have come down to me, polished and fantasticated by many re-tellings.

The play with history is evident in Aurora’s paintings. When her talent is first discovered by her father, she draws history on the walls, starting from King Gondophares and St Thomas the Apostle, the building of the Taj Mahal, the battle of Srirangapatnam, the modern history including the Congress and Muslim League, to, most importantly Catholic Portuguese Vasco da Gama’s first setting his foot in India. Moreover, her bloodline as a Da Gama also formed India in the past, thus she has the sense of Indianness.

Plural India

Indianness is a plural and unstable idea. India is a multilingual, multicultural and multi-religious country. Purity of race is rendered as impossible. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson states that nation, nationality and nationalism are difficult to define (3). We need to see the historical context of those concepts because the meanings change over time. Flory Zogoiby, who is a Jew, objects her son’s choice of woman, the Portuguese Aurora da Gama because of religion and nationality difference. However, it is later revealed that Flory’s bloodline is from Boabdil the Misfortunate, in Moorish tongue, El Zogoybi (83). The term ‘Moor’ itself is difficult to define. It is a loose category in terms of ethnic group, ancient or modern. Besides Hindu, Islam and Christian, other religions in India include Sikh, Buddhism and Jainism.

India is also plural in terms of language. In the novel, the demand of the people for the departure of the British was proclaimed ‘in Malayalam, Kannada, Tulu, Konkani, Tamil, Telugu and English’ (31). We can see the complexity of identity in, for example, Francisco. Political preference is only one side of Francisco. Beneath his determination of the end of the British Empire, he loves English literature and can recite with deep sentiment Andrew Marvell’s ‘On a Drop of Dew’.

Family Entity as a Nation

The nation as a family is something that India is familiar with. This can be seen from the term ‘Mother India’. First, Mother India is the embodied in Isabella, ‘who loved and betrayed and ate and destroyed and gain loved her children, and with whom the children’s passionate conjoining and eternal quarrel stretched long beyond the grave’ (60-1). Then, the embodiment shifts to her daughter, Aurora. She resembles her mother so much—beautiful and sharp-tongued—that Camoens could not even bear to look at her daughter.

The Abraham-Aurora family in a way represents India. The couple is full of hatred and vengeance. However, they love each other. The Hindu-Muslim conflict is something that lingers in Indian history. Referring to one of the major incidents is the 16^th-century Babri Masjid riot, Moraes comments, ‘They surge among us, left and right, Hindu and Muslim, knife and pistol, killing, burning, looting, and raising into the smoky air their clenched and bloody fists’ (365).

Moraes says that ‘motherness… is a big idea in India, maybe our biggest: the land as mother, the mother as land, as the firm ground beneath our feet’ (137). The concept of mother goddess is a combination of Hindu religious feeling and patriotic fanaticism, linking to the idea of the nation as a political entity (Mukherjee 49). We are reminded of Mother India, a mega movie directed by Mehboob Khan and produced in 1957. The epic movie portrays poverty in agricultural India and the protagonist, Radha—a willful mother who ploughs the soil, raises her two sons by herself and being exploited by a moneylender—clearly stands for India.

The Moor’s Last Sigh also deals with the issue of incest. The relationship between Birju and Nargis is an example of Freudian Oedipus complex and this is even more obvious in Moraes and Aurora. The Moor is the mother’s object in her series of paintings. She transforms his deformed limb into art. In “To Die upon a Kiss” painting, Aurora is portrayed as Desdemona and the Moor Othello. She is jealous of Moor’s lover, the sculptor Uma.

The symbol of the country as motherland was confirmed during the nationalist movement. On one side of Aurora is that she is an ordinary wife, ‘a woman of her generation’ (222). Aurora ignores Abraham for his love affairs because he is the breadwinner of the family. But she goes into arts and become very famous.

Intertwining history and personal life is also made possible by creating larger-than-life characters and placing them to actual time and place. Aurora is an apt example. She has several affairs, including with ‘Pandit Nehru’, the Prime Minister of India. There is even a suggestion that Moraes is his son. Moreover, Moraes is a descendant of Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama.

Identity and India’s Secularism

Moraes in a way represents India. He is a big man, six feet and a half. In terms of size, India is vast and is a subcontinent. Moraes has misshapen right hand. Moreover, his greatest anomaly is that his body appears twice as old as his real age. Based on age, Gediman compares Moraes to India and says that the two grow too fast. The Partition took place soon after Indian independence in 1947.

Indianness can also be built by the sense of nationalism. Critics view that Rushdie’s nationalism tends to be that of Jawaharlal Nehru. The Da Gamas support secularity for “Mother India”. Francisco, Camoens and Abraham seem to fall in the same group. Francisco believes that the British must go, while Epifania thinks that the British has been doing some good to the ‘Empire’s children’. She believes the British have given civilization, law and order. In spite of the claim of secularism, India is still seen as a Hindu country, and as we can see in the novel, this is what causes the Ayodhya affair changes Moraes’ life.

The character Raman Fielding stands for pro-Hindu element and is based on Bal Thakeray. He is contrasted with Abraham, who is for secularism. Fielding is on Indira Gandhi ‘s side in terms of preferring the Hindu god Rama. He is longing for Bombay’s past, “the golden age ‘before the invasions’ when good Hindu men and women could roam free”. (299). Rushdie seems to propagate humanism, that underneath social differences, we are all humans.

In the mean time, Bombay—Rushdie’s hometown—is a microcosm for India. Bombay is the heart of India because it is central geographically. It is ‘the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian cities’. Rushdie is for Nehru’s vision of a secular India. The ambiguity of India’s secularism can be seen in the speech of Shiv Sena chief Fielding that every community—Christians, Parsis, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists—must have its own place. This is acceptable to the majority Hindus. However, he implies that if Hindu places is disturbed, the minority shall obey the majority.

Rushdie’s in-betweenness in terms of cultural identity (hybrid) makes him concern about Indianness and nation-state issues. In the end of the novel, Moraes departs to Granada in search of his mother’s painting “The Moor’s Last Sigh”. He feels that he detaches the place, language, people and customs he knew. The language in the novel is not quite English: there are indigenous languages and colloquial conversations. This also shows postcolonial impact on India in connection with English as the language that unites the nation. Moraes does not speak Spanish and does not know the places.

Indah Lestari

The longer (original) version of this article was submitted for Literature in Indian English course (the instructor is GJV Prasad).

This article is published at Namaste Indonesia journal.