Postcolonial Kitsch and writing History: Critical Inquisitions in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and The Ground beneath Her Feet (original) (raw)
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Postcolonial Lack and Aesthetic Promise in Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh
2001
Made available courtesy of Hofstra University: http://www.hofstra.edu/ ***Reprinted with permission. No further reproduction is authorized without written permission from Hofstra University. This version of the document is not the version of record. Figures and/or pictures may be missing from this format of the document.*** Article: In his documentary film The Riddle of Midnight, Salman Rushdie returns to India 40 years after independence to see if a definable national identity exists. He interviews Indians of different backgrounds and economic statuses, and a crowd confronts him and asks "How can a country that never previously existed become independent? What does it mean to call this crowd of separate national histories, conflicting cultures, and warring faiths, a nation?" Rushdie, is narrator and national spokesman, answers unsatisfactorily, "It's by the lack of definition that you know it's you." The fiftieth anniversary of independence occasioned another round of national introspection. "[W]e are a land of belonging rather than of blood," writes Shashi Tharoor (126). Sunil Khilnani, addressing the same "tantalizing possibility of a principle of unity but its evident empirical lack" (157), attempts to move beyond competing claims for a singular national identity without abandoning the nation altogether. In place of the old opposition between "the monochromy of the past-imperial imagination," "nationalist histories of a unified people," and "the pointillism of the new Indian historians" searching for "examples "resistance" (textual and practical) to the ideas of the nation and the state," he proposes "new routes, that do not altogether abandon the terrain of political history, but recount it in different terms" (3). Khilnani"s route begins with the vastly different but ultimately collaboratory visions of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi for an independent India and proceeds through key cities-Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore-just as Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh charts a similar journey through the workings of a national imagination. Tracing the story of India's colonial and postcolonial histories from the Moorish invaders to the sectarian, technological present, the Moor presents his family saga against a national backdrop. Beginning with greed and corruption and ending with rampant commercialism and communal violence, the story is essentially pessimistic. Yet Rushdie tempers this pessimism with the regenerative potential of the aesthetic. When existing political and social metaphors fail to hold the subject's allegiance, Rushdie suggests, we must turn to the aesthetic to provide a new perspective, to heal historical wounds enough to make renewed faith in the nation possible. In The Moor's Last Sigh, historical., metaphorical, and narrative concerns reflect one another. To represent and respond to the paradox of national identity through history and across cultural differences, Rushdie employs sutures and palimpsests, combining them into an aesthetic vision that, although never wholly successful, attempts to allay what Saleem in Midnight's Children calls the "national longing for form." Rushdie may have borrowed the trope oldie palimpsest from Nehru, who pictured Indian history as a palimpsest of successful intercultural exchanges that the new nation would constitutionally extend and guarantee. In The Moor's Last Sigh, that image is compounded, as it is in Nehru's own writings, by the metaphor of the nation as family, a metaphor whose longevity stems From its ability to synthesize both historical and seemingly ahistorical aspects of the nation. Playing off the rich associative traditions of the Western patriarchal Family and Mother India, Rushdie shows their competing attempts to forge unity out of historical, ethnic, religious, caste, and linguistic difference. By invoking the metaphor of the nation as family, he exposes its ideological foundations even as he uses it to sustain an imaginary identification between the nation, its subjects, and
Building post-colonial identity : metaphor of the nation in Salman Rushdie's "The Moor's last sigh
2017
In the modern world, migrants constitute a significant part of the global network society. One of the biggest is the Indian diaspora, comprising more than 30 million people around the globe1. Thus, the fiction produced by them constitutes a large portion of literature, which cannot stay unnoticed both by ordinary readers and academics. Among those authors, one of the most renown and simultaneously controversial writers of Indian origin is Salman Rushdie, a representative of the Anglo-Indian and migrant as well as the postcolonial writing. In this paper, I would like to focus on one of his most important, though not so well known novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh, as an image of Indian cultural identity. The primary aim shall be to analyze the book in the historical context of nation building through the lens of the characters’ individual stories. Rushdie, as proved in his numerous works, such as Midnight’s Children (1981), Satanic Verses (1988) or Shalimar the Clown (2005), just to mentio...
Building post-colonial identity. The metaphor of the nation in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh
Maska, 2017
The subject of the article is The Moor’s Last Sigh – one of the most important, though not so well known novels by Salman Rushdie. It was published in 1995 and is considered to be a combination of magical realism and historical fiction. It is packed with symbols and references to the culture of India, the country of Rushdie’s origin. The paper shall reveal multiple dimensions of the plot and the metaphor hidden beneath the fictional surface of narration. The key aim is to analyze the book in the historical context of nation building through the lens of the characters’ individual stories. The work also deals with the question of identity in the context of migration.
2012
In “Global Literature and the Technologies of Recognition” (PMLA 119), Shu mei-Shih articulates the necessity of resisting those “omnipotent definitions” (18), in global literary studies, that are prompted by the paradigmatic forces of the West/ mainstream/dominant discourses. She analyzes that these ‘definitions’ not only reduce postcolonial literatures into mere “representational machineries” of the nation-state (Prasad 72) they also conceal the basic attribute of literatures: their political and aesthetic autonomy.1 Taking the cue up from Shih’s argument, in this article I explore the possibility of developing an alternative critical discourse vis-à-vis postindependence Indian writing in English by diasporic authors. To establish my argument I use Salman Rushdie’s novels, The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995)2 and The Enchantress of Florence (2008)3 as case studies.
International Journal for Multidisciplinary Research (IJFMR), 2024
In postcolonial literature, there are various classical aspects of traditions by Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy. The stories they write in Indian English literature depict the cultural and experiences they experience. This aspect suggests important historical landmarks in their stories. The conversation of that construct will be very important for them to recognize and develop the physical body. Thus, the traditions they created are described in the novels they write. They increase our knowledge based on their specific actions. Thus, by studying the postcolonial identities of both Rushdie and Roy, we can learn what their contributions and legacies are. Through this analysis, economic strategists will be properly informed about the political, social and ownership of these identities. The production of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy has illustrated the introduction of postcolonial identity and cultural hybridity in novels in Indian English literature. Through this, we understand how hybrid postcolonial cultural identities appear and what they represent in Indian and British narratives. It teaches them uniqueness and defines Indian society. More importantly, a unified theory of scholarship serves as a secondary structural definition of the Indian and British narratives. At the end of the analysis, Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy recommend summaries of political, resource ministries, and economic policy on ownership. This will be an important aspect for analysis because Indian English literature and cultural hybridity are among the most popular. In the analytical work, we can examine the more familiar traditions of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy in Indian English novels. Through this, we can know that their roles in English literature and their feelings are correct in the stories they created. Enough, those symbols can be known in our new way and to see them everything will be completed well.
The Shadow of Postcolonial Ideas as Reflected in Salman Rushdie's Shame
2014
The central concern of the paper is to highlight the Postcolonial ideological substratum in Shame. In addition to this, the nightmarish and monochromatic Pakistani reality has been examined, satirized and ridiculed from the perspective of Rushdie who has his roots fixed in undivided India and drawn sustenance from its values. He looks back with nostalgia at the old world of his Indian childhood as continuity and a reality as different from the facts of his present faraway life as illusion. The basic ingredient of postcolonial Literature is the English Language is not the Queen's English but the other English. Therefore, Indian English Literature written since independence may be said to be born of free India. But a reasonable time span was really required for this curious cultural phenomenon. Thus we may call it Postcolonial literature in general, for Postcolonial Studies have been gaining momentum since 1970. Postcolonialism is a theory that seeks to understand how oppression, ...
‘Worlds in Collision’: Salman Rushdie, Globalisation, and Postcoloniality-in-Crisis
The Global Novel and Capitalism in Crisis - Contemporary Literary Narratives , 2020
Pre-publication draft of a chapter from 'The Global Novel and Capitalism in Crisis - Contemporary Literary Narratives' (2020). This chapter maps a transition from the postcolonial disenchantment of Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), to the global-American style of The Ground Beneath her Feet (1999) and Fury (2001), and their cosmopolitan mythologizing, geopolitical allegories, and account of American hegemony. It initially examines how The Moor’s Last Sigh rejects the exuberant postcolonial magic realism that characterised Rushdie’s earlier works in favour of a disenchanted realism that focuses on the insufficiency of art to represent Bombay’s globalised criminal capitalism. The section on The Ground Beneath her Feet argues that its deterritorialised rock music mythology embodies the fractures, or irreconcilabilities, of cosmopolitan abstractions of identity and form. The final section on Fury concludes the argument by examining how it operates as a form of fin de siècle ‘world-systemic’ literature that foregrounds the ‘autumnal’ decline of American hegemony through a hyperrealist aesthetics of literary compression and excessive violence.
Intertextuality and Exoticism in Salman Rushdie's THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH
This paper analyses Salman Rushdie's novel THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH (1995) as a postmodernist text emphasising the role of narrative voice and of intertextuality within the intepretive act, and their implications for the study of intercultural understanding, the postmodern treatment of the exotic, of truth, and of the constructedness of the subject. Intertextuality becomes a central literary strategy whose function is to accomodate a multiplicity of cultural discourses and to articulate a postcolonial perspective on exoticism. In THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH, Rushdie acknowledges the cultural and historical positioning of the reading and writing of narrative fiction, and reflects on the nature of the limits between the visual and verbal text as well as the more general one between fiction and history, and uses his individual historical locus (the aftermath of the Rushdie affair) in order to play with the generic frames activated in reading different kinds of texts.
The Novels of Salman Rushdie: A Postcolonial Study
The twentieth century has been the age of theories and practices. The first half of the century concerned especially with linguistic theories, with form rather than content while the latter half attempted to focus on content and context, history and new historicism. Since 1960s, theories became reader oriented and meaning of the writing shifted from the author and work to the 'scriptor' and 'text' and even the very existence of the author fell into danger.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR INNOVATIVE RESEARCH IN MULTIDISCIPLINARY FIELD (IJIRMF), 2023
This research paper explores Salman Rushdie’s novel, Midnight’s Children, as a significant work of postcolonial literature that delves into the intricate relationship between postcolonial perspectives and socio- political realities in India. Employing a postcolonial lens, the paper aims to unravel the complex web of colonial legacies, national identity formation, and the socio-political landscape of post-independent India. It provides an overview of the novel’s historical context, set against the backdrop of India’s struggle for independence, partition, communal tensions, and the subsequent challenges of nation-building. Through an in-depth analysis of the characters’ experiences, the paper examines themes such as hybridity, identity negotiation, and the impact of colonialism on individual and collective consciousness. Furthermore, it investigates the portrayal of political leaders and their ideologies, highlighting their influence on the country’s socio-political trajectory. The paper also explores the role of magical realism as a narrative technique, employed to challenge dominant colonial discourses, reimagine historical narratives, and offer alternative perspectives on postcolonial experiences and socio-political realities. By critically examining Rushdie’s novel, this paper contributes to the broader discourse on postcolonial literature, shedding light on the intricate connection between personal narratives, collective memory, and the formation of a postcolonial society.