Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography: Writing the Nation into Being

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Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography

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Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography Writing the Nation into Being

Nicole Weickgenannt Thiara

© Nicole Weickgenannt Thiara 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–20548–2 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–20548–8 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For my grandmother Gisela Hotz

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Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction Indian historiography and the nation

1 6

1.

A Biography of the Nation Imagining a nation The mirror of the nation Indira is India

16 17 26 43

2.

Wives, Widows, and Witches The nation’s script for its middle-class wives The nation at the mercy of its monstrous women The wicked witch of the East

56 57 68 76

3.

The New God-and-Mammon India Nationalist élite India Hindu nationalist India Palimpsest India

88 91 102 109

4.

Mother India Sacralising the motherland Envisaging the nation in the image of the Mother Corrupting hegemonic images of Bharat Mata

122 123 137 149

5.

The Idea of a Hybrid India Macaulay’s minutemen The novelistic nation

158 162 172

Notes

200

Bibliography

213

Index

225

vii

Acknowledgements I particularly thank Tony Crowley, who read and re-read this book in its former incarnation as a doctoral thesis; I am very grateful for his kind support, thoughtful criticism and his useful Scouse lessons. For their advice and comments on various drafts of the manuscript, I am indebted to Lyn Innes, Anindita Ghosh, John Zavos, Mary Searle-Chatterjee, Berthold Schoene, Ken Hirschkop, Thomas Blom Hansen, Anastasia Valassopoulos, Dalia Said Mostafa, Tilman Frasch and Dietmar Rothermund. For funding my doctoral thesis, I thank the University of Manchester (Lees Fellowship) and the Arts and Humanities Research Board. I am also grateful to the publishing team at Palgrave Macmillan. Some parts of chapters 2, 3 and 4 have been previously published and I am grateful to the editors and publishers for permission to reprint the following material: ‘The Nation’s Monstrous Women: Wives, Widows and Witches in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 43: 2 (2008); ‘Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh: Corrupting Mother India’, in (M)Othering the Nation: Constructing and Resisting Regional and National Allegories Through the Maternal Body, edited by Lisa Bernstein (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008); ‘Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh: Hindu Nationalism, Democracy and the “new god-and-mammon India”,’ The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 14: 2 (2007). I owe great thanks to my family and friends for their love and support. In particular, I thank my parents, Angela and Winfried, and my brothers, Daniel and Dominik, and their mother Reinhilde. Many thanks go to Traveen for his kindness and love.

viii

Introduction

When Salman Rushdie described how the poems of the Welsh nationalist R. S. Thomas sought to ‘write the nation into fierce, lyrical being’, he also explained his own ambivalent approach towards writing about India: ‘To feel so ferociously is to feel contempt as well as pride, hatred as well as love. These proud contempts, this hating love, often earn the writer a nation’s wrath. The nation requires anthems, flags. The poet offers discord. Rags’ (Rushdie 2002: 64–5).1 Rushdie commented explicitly on the centrality of India for his work when he wrote on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of its Independence that he spent much of his ‘adult life thinking and writing about [the so-called “idea of India”]’ (Rushdie 2002: 178). Midnight’s Children (1981) and The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) are the novels in which he explicitly explores the idea of India and by doing so also creates his own version of the nation.2 Rushdie’s preferred strategy in writing his own India into existence is to have India personified by characters who relive and re-create the history of the nation in a semi-allegorical way. In Midnight’s Children, which covers the period from 1915 to 1978, this role is mainly performed by Saleem Sinai, the first person narrator-protagonist, but also by his rival Shiva and the other children of midnight. In The Moor’s Last Sigh a family, the da Gama-Zogoiby clan, embody the nation during the period 1900 to 1993, specifically the characters Aurora, as a new version of Mother India, and her son, Moor, the first person narrator, who personifies the ideal of a hybrid India in his mother’s paintings. Rushdie’s India is created in a contested space of rival ideas of the nation and the focus here will be on a comparison of Rushdie’s concept of the nation with the ideas of India as presented in Indian historiography. Eric Hobsbawm and Partha Chatterjee point to the role of ‘national history’ and its construction of the national past in 1

2


the figuration of the nation itself (Hobsbawm 1983: 14; Chatterjee 1993: 84). Indian historiography offers a rich field of competing versions of the nation’s past, beginning with the second half of the nineteenth century when ‘bonds of “nation-ness” ’ and a consciousness of a national solidarity were being constructed in a nascent nationalist historiography (Chatterjee 1993: 84). Of particular relevance for my discussion of Rushdie’s novels will be academic historiography after Independence and more specifically those historiographical discourses in the last quarter of the twentieth century which are roughly contemporary with Rushdie’s composition of Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh. Mikhail Bakhtin describes the novel as ‘an encyclopedia of all strata and forms of literary language’ and of a variety of discourses (Bakhtin 1981: 301). This undoubtedly holds true for Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh and one aspect of my analysis will be to explore how Rushdie incorporates historiographical discourses surrounding the concept of the Indian nation into his novels and to what effect. Whenever Rushdie uses a term like ‘nation’, ‘India’ or ‘Mother India’, he inevitably has to deal with the complex discursive history of such words: For the novelist working in prose, the object is always entangled in someone else’s discourse about it, it is already present with qualifications, an object of dispute that is conceptualized and evaluated variously, inseparable from the heteroglot social perception of it. The novelist speaks of this ‘already qualified world’ in a language that is heteroglot and internally dialogized. Thus both object and language are revealed to the novelist in their historical dimension, in the process of social and heteroglot becoming. (Bakhtin 1981: 330) Thus in order to interpret the way Rushdie uses a word such as ‘nation’, it is necessary to be familiar with the discourses that have conceptualised and qualified it. Later in this introduction I therefore delineate briefly the major trends in modern Indian historiography, from the nineteenth century on, with an emphasis on how the concept of the nation was envisaged. This introduction to Indian historiography forms the background to the discussion which follows on how Midnight’s Children’s Saleem Sinai and The Moor’s Last Sigh’s Moor Zogoiby narrate Indian history as a chutney – to use an image from Midnight’s Children – by mixing historiographical discourses with idiosyncratic versions of

Introduction 3

Indian history. As Rushdie’s narrator Saleem is self-consciously aware, this pickled national history is often provocative: The pickles of history [...] may be too strong for some palates, their smell may be overpowering, tears may rise to eyes; I hope nevertheless that it will be possible to say of them that they possess the authentic taste of truth ... that they are, despite everything, acts of love. (MC 461) For Rushdie, to narrate the nation is at the same time to interrogate and criticise it (Guttman 2007: 59–87; Rege 1999; ten Kortenaar 1995: 41–2). However, Timothy Brennan’s conclusion that Midnight’s Children constitutes an overwhelmingly negative assessment of the concept of the nation as the ‘disease of nationalism’ is misleading (Brennan 1989: 98).3 Partha Chatterjee somewhat polemically points out that as nationalism has become associated with the Third World, its former positive image as ‘one of Europe’s most magnificent gifts to the rest of the world’ was damaged (Chatterjee 1993: 4). By the 1970s, nationalism was regarded as ‘the reason why people in the Third World killed each other’, which is why nationalism is now mainly perceived as a ‘dark, elemental, unpredictable force of primordial nature [...]. Like drugs, terrorism, and illegal immigration, it is one more product of the Third World that the West dislikes but is powerless to prohibit’ (Chatterjee 1993: 3–4). My argument is that Rushdie’s novels severely question various concepts of the nation and reject some of them, but Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh do not invalidate or negate the constructive and creative side of the idea of nation and nationalism and their importance in the anticolonial struggle for independence. When Rushdie’s novels are interpreted as predominantly postmodern texts, this often entails a fore-grounding of their playful and parodic elements to the point where the novels’ concept of the nation is perceived as ‘happily post-apocalyptic’ (Banerjee 2002: 156); the novels’ version of history is considered to expose and celebrate history’s enigmatic unintelligibility (Banerjee 2002: 148–9). But this interpretation misses Rushdie’s deep concern for India and Indian democracy in the often anguished portrayal of Indian history in Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh. Emphasising the post-modern elements in Rushdie’s novels often predetermines critics to find fragmentation privileged over unifying elements (Afzal-Khan 1993: 153–4; Booker 1999: 299; Gonzalez 2005: 99–141). Centripetal tendencies in the novels, such as the focus on the concept of the nation, are consequently ignored.

4


Existing work on Rushdie’s use of historiographical discourse in his novels concentrates on placing it in the context of developments in Western historiography.4 It has often been pointed out that Rushdie’s novels problematise the production of history as an allegedly totalising and objective narrative (Hutcheon 1989: 65; Reder 1999: 226–8). However, this characterisation of historiography as unwittingly producing totalising narratives is often matched by a rather naïve treatment of the writing of history. Lipscomb, for example, quotes only from one history book, which is equated with ‘the official discourse of history’, and seems oblivious of controversies in Indian historiography which in themselves would reduce historiography’s alleged claim to ‘absolute forms of knowledge’ ad absurdum (Lipscomb 1991: 164 & 177).5 It is not clear if Lipscomb ignores the Indian tradition of historiography or simply subsumes it under the category of ‘the discourse of western historiography’, but both approaches are problematic (Lipscomb 1991: 164). Indian historiography developed its own strategies which are not simply derivative of trends in Western historiography and so it cannot be reduced to a sub-category of this discourse. Indian feminist historiography and work produced by the Subaltern Studies group are highly self-reflexive, which means that the accusation that historians invariably produce totalising narratives is misleading. Other critics assert that Rushdie tries to create ‘a counternarrative’ to established versions of modern Indian history (Gauthier 2006: 175; Price 1999: 123). Yet the field of Indian historiography is too complex and contested for any novelist simply to be able to produce an ‘alternative’ history of India. Rushdie’s depiction of Indian history suggests that he is acutely aware of developments in Indian historiography and I intend to unravel some of the complex interactions between academic historiography and fictionalised history in the novels. The following chapters explore the most significant aspects of Rushdie’s narrativisation of the nation and discuss them in the context of Indian historiography. Chapter 1 delineates the way in which the narrator Saleem Sinai writes the nation’s biography in the form of his autobiography. I explore specifically the incorporation of the discourse of nationalist historiography in the novel and the roles which Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi play in both historiography and in Midnight’s Children. In Chapter 2 I focus on how women were perceived as representing the nation’s tradition and essential Indianness from the nineteenth century on, and how Rushdie’s female characters in Midnight’s Children negotiate the space which nationalist discourse and nationalist historiography have allocated them. It is often pointed out that Rushdie uses misogynist stereotypes in constructing

Introduction 5

his female characters, particularly with regard to Indira Gandhi, but the purpose of those stereotypes has so far not been adequately explained (Cundy 1996: 37–8; Hai 1999; Mukherjee 1990: 117–18; Natarajan 1994; Verma 1991). I will explore the text’s systematic misogyny and the function it serves in Saleem’s version of Indian history. I will also compare Rushdie’s strategies in his portrayal of gender with the strategies deployed in Indian feminist historiography. Chapter 3 will begin the analysis of The Moor’s Last Sigh and explore how it represents the rise of Hindu nationalism with its idea of India as an exclusive Hindu nation. Particular attention will be paid to the novel’s depiction of the response of the Nehruvian élite to the success of Hindu nationalism in Bombay.6 In Chapter 4 the concept of Bharat Mata or Mother India will be analysed as this is one of the most influential images of India in nationalist discourse which The Moor’s Last Sigh reworks and interrogates. I begin with a discussion of the influential Bengali novel Anandamath (1882) by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee since this novel was the source of an influential image of the country in the form of the mother goddess for whom her children will have to make great sacrifices in order to rescue her from her miserable state under colonial rule and to restore her ancient glory. Rushdie’s character Aurora, as a new Mother India, will be read against the traditional nationalist perception of the nation as a mother or goddess and the feminist historiographical re-evaluation of this tradition. Chapter 5 analyses The Moor’s Last Sigh’s representation of the idea of a hybrid India and its relation to the Nehruvian nationalist concept of the composite, synthetic nation. The conceptualisation of India as a syncretic nation was a defining feature of nationalist historiography, which was produced by an often self-consciously hybrid or Westernised Indian élite. My discussion of the novel’s multi-faceted and complex portrayal of Indian hybridity will make use of Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia. Criticism often considers The Moor’s Last Sigh as providing an elegy to Rushdie’s ideal of hybridity as a consequence of his realisation that such a concept was no longer applicable in an India dominated by Hindu nationalism and the homogenising forces of a global capitalist economy (Ball 2000: 44–7; Hassumani 2002: 115–16; Schülting 1998: 241–3). I will argue that The Moor’s Last Sigh promotes an ideal of a hybrid India but that it does not contain a vision of the future manifestations of this ideal as a result of the development of India beyond the dominant Nehruvian discourse with which Rushdie had been familiar.

6


Indian historiography and the nation Modern Indian historiography has been marked by severe contestation and a series of radical re-interpretations, at the centre of which has often been the concept of the nation. Thus in this brief and schematic survey of modern Indian historiography an emphasis is placed on the role of the concept of the Indian nation in the writing of Indian history; this will provide contextual knowledge for the following chapters. Even though academic historiography from the 1970s on will furnish the main material for a comparison with Rushdie’s treatment of Indian history in his novels, it is necessary to place later trends of Indian history-writing in the context of crucial developments in the field in the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century. Partha Chatterjee traces the development of history-writing in nineteenth- century Bengal from historical works which use Puranic conventions of historical writing to later histories which adopted Western models of historiography (Chatterjee 1993: 76–115). Whereas in Puranic histories divine power is responsible for the rise and decline of dynasties and the making of history, it is humans and nations who make history according to ‘the modern rational principles of European historiography’ (Chatterjee 1993: 81–8).7 The spread of Western education and of British histories among the middle class was of crucial significance in this ‘imposition of Western historiographical models’ (Sarkar 1998: 6). British historians, such as James Mill in The History of British India (1817), were of the opinion that ancient Indian models of recording history did not constitute proper historiography; this idea was largely accepted by the educated middle class and this created ‘a widespread sense of tabula rasa’ (Sarkar 2002: 6).8 In the second half of the nineteenth century this sense of being a nation without history was felt to be a grave defect by early nationalist thinkers like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838–1894), and he declared the writing of a ‘truly Indian historiography of India’ a national duty (Guha 1988a: 1–2 & 48). Bankim’s was an ‘agenda for self-representation’ directed against foreign historians who distorted the nation’s past (Chatterjee 1993: 76).9 This nation, whose history had to be written, was frequently conceptualised as a Hindu nation by the Bengali middle class which consisted mainly of upper-caste Hindus. The predominant narrative of the nation’s history was one of a glorious Vedic past and a subsequent decline which was caused by Muslim rule (Chatterjee 1993: 93–110). This narrative could draw on the work of European Orientalist scholars from William Jones (1746–1794) to Max Müller (1823–1900),

Introduction 7

both of whom greatly admired ancient India and saw the ancient period as the Golden Age of Hindu civilisation.10 For nationalists in the late nineteenth century, the nation in its present subjected state needed regeneration and Vedic India was to provide inspiration and a precedent for the nation’s ‘historical agency’ (Chatterjee 1993: 102). Corresponding to the image of an idyllic Vedic Hindu past was the ‘myth of the golden age of Indian womanhood’ in the Vedic age when women were educated and respected (Chakravarty 1990: 28). The romanticised Vedic woman was a construct which was meant to invalidate the British imperialist argument that the low status of Hindu women was a sign of an essential Indian inferiority (Chakravarty 1990: 34). In his History of British India, Mill established the status of women as a yardstick with which to measure the degree of civilisation of ‘nations’ and concluded that a ‘state of dependence more strict and humiliating than that which is ordained for the weaker sex among the Hindus cannot easily be conceived’ (Mill 1858, Vol. I: 309). The Hindu intelligentsia tried to refute this image of their womanhood by citing textual evidence from ancient sources, admitting that the status of Hindu women was low at present due to unfortunate historical developments, but that it was not due to the essential inferiority of Hindu culture (Chakravarty 1990: 33–8). This narrative of Hindu women’s history, which paralleled that of the nation, ‘attained the status of a historical commonplace’ through A. S. Altekar’s The Position of Women in Hindu Civilization, originally published in 1938 (Sarkar 1998: 33). Altekar argued that the position of women in Vedic times was ‘satisfactory’ but that it had then deteriorated for 2,000 years (Altekar 1995: 338 & 359). As with the nation’s decline, the decline in the status of women is partly attributed to Muslim rule (Altekar 1995: 23–4 & 309–16).11 The focus here, as in the nineteenth century, was clearly on the status of upper-caste Hindu women since they constituted the nation’s womanhood in nationalist discourse (Chakravarty 1990: 79). Hostility towards the upper-caste, Hindu concept of the nation and its history was displayed by lower-caste, anti-Brahmanical movements (Sarkar 1998: 33). Mahatma Jotirao Phule (1827–1890) was a pioneer of such a movement in the Bombay Presidency, now Maharashtra, in the late nineteenth century. He created an early ‘subaltern’ history which was, unlike early nationalist history, not directed against the imperialist version of Indian history but against the middle-class, uppercaste Hindu one. Phule’s main antagonists were Brahmans and his argument was that Brahmans had kept lower caste groups down for centuries by indoctrinating them with a pernicious and false caste

8


ideology. In Slavery in the Civilised British Government Under the Cloak of Brahmanism (1873), he constructed an alternative history for the lower castes by projecting a Golden Age before the ‘Aryan invasions’; he argued that Brahmans or Aryans had fought and vanquished the kshatriyas, or warriors, and kept them in a subject state by declaring them to be of low shudra or even untouchable status and concealing from them their true history (Phule 1991, Vol. I: xli–li). The only way to break out of this subjection was to break the religious authority of the Brahmans (O’Hanlon 1985: 7). Educating the lower castes and promoting them in the administration of the country was the means he envisaged to achieve this goal (O’Hanlon 1985: 137–8). The British colonial government was supposed to be an ally in this endeavour to better the lot of the lower castes, whereas national organisations such as the Indian National Congress were vilified as organs for the promotion of Brahman interests against the lower castes (Phule 1991, Vol. II: 23–7). While colonial discourse in the late nineteenth century denied the possibility that India was a nation, or could ever become one because it consisted of several communities incapable of being merged into a national whole, liberal Indian nationalists proclaimed that India was a nation in the making (Chatterjee 1993: 223–4).12 This national becoming was presented as an evolutionary process under the auspices of the Indian National Congress (founded in 1885) and its middle-class leadership in A. C. Mazumdar’s history of the Congress from 1915 (Mazumdar 1985: 1–3). The prominent nationalist Surendranath Banerjea (1848– 1925) argued in his autobiography, with the significant title A Nation in the Making (1925), that this national development should ideally be achieved along constitutional lines in cooperation with the British: ‘I have preached patriotism coupled with orderly constitutional progress. I have preached self-government within the Empire as our goal, and constitutional and lawful methods as the only means for its attainment’ (Banerjea 1963: 166). Part of this Indian liberal nationalist discourse, exemplified by Dadabhai Naoroji (1825–1917) and the pioneer of Indian economic history, Romesh Chunder Dutt (1845–1909), was criticism of colonial economic policies which resulted in the draining of the nation’s wealth and mass poverty (Dutt 1916, Vol. I: v–xxii). Naoroji described British rule as ‘destructive and despotic to the Indians and un-British and suicidal to Britain’ and appealed to the British rulers to include educated Indians in their administrative bodies in order to represent the nation’s interests (Naoroji 1969: ii & 198–200).13 Rajani Palme Dutt (1896–1974) produced one of the first Marxist histories of the Indian national movement (Chandra et al. 1987: 21).14

Introduction 9

In India To-day (1940), he agreed with Marx’s analysis of British imperialism’s positive role in India in its sweeping away of the old society and the ‘evils of the rotting social system’ and then regenerating it by initiating the capitalist phase as a necessary transition to socialism (Dutt 1940: 38 & 105).15 But since imperialism was now arresting the economic and social development of India, for Dutt its demise was certain (Dutt 1940: 31). He mocked the changing imperialist rhetoric towards the question of whether there existed an Indian nation or only a hotchpotch of religions, castes, and linguistic communities: Since the emphatic denials [of the existence of an Indian nation] of those earlier days, which failed to arrest the advancing flood of the national movement, King Canute’s courtiers have changed their tactics; and the alternative argument is now favoured that, if there is an Indian nation, since all the efforts of imperialism, first to deny it, then to suppress it have failed, in that case it is selfevident that the existence of the Indian nation is a tribute to the achievement of British rule which has brought it into being. [... B]y a kind of teleological anachronism, this is regarded as having been the real objective of British rule from the beginning. (Dutt 1940: 254–5 & 267) He argued that it was less the wholesome British influence than the ‘struggle against imperialism’, which brought Indian nationalism into being and which developed ‘in unison with [the] world currents’ which had brought forth the American, French and Russian revolutions (Dutt 1940: 269–70). Dutt disclosed other imperialist hypocrisies such as that of creating and profiting from a policy of divide-and-rule while considering communal tensions as proof of native incapacity to rule themselves (Dutt 1940: 260). According to Dutt, communalism, or the antagonism of religious communities in India, was ‘a special product of British rule’ (Dutt 1940: 406). In the struggle for national liberation he considered the hegemonic role of an Indian bourgeoisie necessary, but one which would have to be finally overcome by the leadership of the masses; as in the 1930s, the ‘triangular character of the contest, or rather the deeper contest between imperialism and the Indian masses, with the hesitant and vacillating rôle of the Indian bourgeoisie, was coming far more clearly to the front’ (Dutt 1940: 285 & 321). Dutt held a particularly negative view towards Gandhi, seeing him as the agent of the Indian bourgeoisie who at crucial moments discouraged and stopped

10 Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography

the masses from promoting radical change: the prophet who by his personal saintliness and selflessness could unlock the door to the hearts of the masses where the moderate bourgeois leader could not hope for a hearing – and the best guarantee of the shipwreck of any mass movement which had the blessing of his association. This Jonah of revolution, this general of unbroken disasters was the mascot of the bourgeoisie. (Dutt 1940: 323)16 Marxism exerted a crucial influence on Indian academic historiography after Independence but Palme Dutt’s positive assessment of the initial role of British imperialism and his critical portrayal of Gandhi and the leadership of the Indian National Congress did not become part of the hegemonic discourse of left-wing nationalist historiography. One of the most important and influential conceptions of the Indian nation as epitomising ‘unity in diversity’ was propounded by Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964), the most prominent leader of the national movement after Gandhi, in his history of India, The Discovery of India, written during one of his spells in prison in 1944. Nehru’s narrative of the nation resembled that which was developed by the early nationalists in the nineteenth century as he described a vibrant, culturally and politically blossoming ancient India, followed by a ‘progressive decline’ around 1000 AD (Nehru 1989: 225). However, he attributed this decline to an ‘inner decay’ and the loss of a dynamic outlook which was caused in part by the growing rigidity of the caste system rather than foreign invasions (Nehru 1989: 95 & 226). The essential characteristic of the Indian nation, Nehru emphasised repeatedly, was its ability to absorb various influences and incorporate them without losing its basic cultural characteristics: We see in the past that some inner urge towards synthesis, derived essentially from the Indian philosophical outlook, was the dominant feature of Indian cultural, and even racial, development. Each incursion of foreign elements was a challenge to this culture, but it was met successfully by a new synthesis and a process of absorption. This was also a process of rejuvenation and new blooms of culture arose out of it, the background and essential basis, however, remaining much the same. (Nehru 1989: 76) He celebrated in particular the syncretic culture which existed under the Mughal ruler, Akbar, in the sixteenth century: ‘It was in his reign that the cultural amalgamation of Hindu and Moslem in north India took a

Introduction 11

long step forward’ (Nehru 1989: 260). This release of ‘fresh energy’ did not, however, ‘go deep enough’ and the increasing rigidity of Indian social culture was not halted (Nehru 1989: 264). British colonisation of India resulted in an ‘arrested growth’, both socially and economically, which could only be overcome through independence, thus freeing the path to modernisation and industrialisation (Nehru 1989: 507–9). Only as an independent nation would India again develop her great syncretic ‘culture-potential’ and ‘progress both in scientific theory and the application of science and become a great industrial nation’ (Nehru 1989: 526). While Nehru frequently used the term ‘nation’ in his history to refer to ancient, medieval and modern India without problematising this concept, he contemplated what nation actually meant when he discussed M. A. Jinnah’s two-nation theory (Nehru 1989: 392). Jinnah’s claim that India consisted of two nations, one Hindu and one Muslim, contradicted Nehru’s narrative of a composite nation, which he so elaborately constructed in The Discovery of India. Nehru, however, did not simply invalidate Jinnah’s claim but questioned the nature of a nation and appeared to leave it open whether India constituted one: ‘What a nation is it is difficult to define. Possibly the essential characteristic of national consciousness is a sense of belonging together and of together facing the rest of mankind. How far that is present in India as a whole may be a debatable point.’ (Nehru 1989: 392). After Independence and the Partition of the subcontinent in 1947 the history of the national movement for the first time became a subject for academic research (Chandra 1986: 194). Marxist historiography became hegemonic in certain influential history departments but there was ‘considerable scope in modern Indian history for a kind of Left nationalist-Marxist consensus’ (Sarkar 1998: 39).17 Part of this consensus was the emphasis on communal harmony in Indian history and Tara Chand’s ‘semi-official’ History of the Freedom Movement in India in four volumes (1965–1972) was written with this precept in mind (Gottlob 2003b: 70). The draft of Romesh Chandra Majumdar, who had initially been supposed to conduct this work, was rejected by the Minister of Education, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, because of its pronounced Hindu nationalist and anti-Muslim bias (Rothermund 2001: 32).18 The Nehruvian version of the Indian nation as historically composite and hybrid had become the programmatic narrative. An external attack on this national historiographical consensus was made by exponents of the so-called Cambridge School in the late 1960s, whose principal representative was Anil Seal. It was his The Emergence of Indian Nationalism. Competition and Collaboration in

12


the Later Nineteenth Century (1968) that nationalist historians found most offensive (Chandra et al. 1987: 17–20). In Seal’s view Indian nationalism only developed when the British rulers could no longer satisfy the aspirations of the collaborating Western educated élite (Seal 1968: 344–5). Collaborators, a term with clear negative connotations, were defined in an all- encompassing way as ‘all those groups [...] whose actions fell into line with the purposes of the British’ (Seal 1968: 9). Seal reiterated arguments made by imperialists when he invalidated the claims of the Indian National Congress to represent the Indian nation by arguing that such a nation did not exist in the nineteenth century: ‘In so shapeless, so jumbled a bundle of societies, there were not two nations, there was not one nation, there was no nation at all. What was India? – a graveyard of old nationalities and the mother of new nationalisms struggling to be born’ (Seal 1968: 339).19 An influential new trend in Indian historiography was initiated by a group of Marxist historians around Ranajit Guha; they established the Subaltern Studies group in the early 1980s as a counter-movement to what they perceived as élite historiography. Élite historiography was described as consisting of two categories: imperialist and bourgeois-nationalist historiography, both of which were ‘the ideological product of British rule in India’ (Guha 1988b: 37). The subalternist historians provocatively dismissed almost all history-writing on the Indian national movement as élitist and therefore ‘un-historical historiography’ (Guha 1988b: 40). Élite historiography turned a blind eye to the crucial role subalterns played in the national movement and ‘the making of the Indian nation’: Both these varieties of elitism share the prejudice that the making of the Indian nation and the development of the consciousness – nationalism – which informed this process were exclusively or predominantly elite achievements [either] credited to British colonial rulers, administrators, policies, institutions and culture [or] to Indian elite personalities, institutions, activities and ideas. (Guha 1988b: 37) Subalterns were equated with ‘the people’ and were defined as those groups who were not part of the British or indigenous élite (Guha 1988b: 44).20 The Subaltern Studies group set out to give a voice to these unrepresented masses and to study popular movements, especially the frequent peasant uprisings, as the truly anti-imperialist forces (Guha 1988b: 39). Since such a ‘domain of subaltern politics’ could be demarcated from the domain of élite politics, it was argued that the Indian bourgeoisie had failed to ‘speak for the nation’ (Guha 1988b: 41).

Introduction 13

Guha did not question the legitimacy of the concept of the nation but claimed that its formation remained incomplete. He argued that because neither the Indian bourgeoisie nor the Indian workers and peasants were successful in leading a real anti-colonial revolution, the Indian nation had failed to ‘come to its own’: It is the study of this historic failure of the nation to come to its own, a failure due to the inadequacy of the bourgeoisie as well as of the working class to lead it to a decisive victory over colonialism and a bourgeois-democratic revolution of either the classic nineteenthcentury type under the hegemony of the bourgeoisie or a more modern type under the hegemony of workers and peasants, that is, a ‘new democracy’ – it is the study of this failure which constitutes the central problematic of the historiography of colonial India. (Guha 1988b: 43) The Subaltern Studies project gradually moved away from the focus on popular movements and increasingly studied élite discourse, often with an emphasis on its shortcomings. Sumit Sarkar regretted this ‘decline of the subaltern’ in the wake of what he called the ‘Saidian turn’ in Subaltern Studies (Sarkar 2000b: 300; 2000a: 239). Despite the insights which the influence of Said’s Orientalism (1978) and the work of thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida had provided in ‘avantgarde history writing’ in India, it enabled ‘an attractive radicalism with remarkable success in the Western, especially US, academic market, [...] amid the wholesale collapse of radical hopes’ (Sarkar 2000a: 239–40). Indian feminist historiography brought a very different perspective to the understanding of Indian history. In keeping a critical stance towards nationalist and imperialist historiography, feminist historians had a similar agenda to that of the Subaltern Studies group (Sangari & Vaid 1990: 18–19). Feminist historiography gave a voice to women who had been written about extensively since the nineteenth century within a narrative whose framework was defined by the exigencies of nationalist discourse and defined against imperialist historiography. Women’s history and feminist historiography grew out of the secondwave women’s movement in India which gained momentum in the late 1970s (Basu 1991: 182; Liddle & Joshi 1986: 17–18). Feminist historiography is part of women’s history but not confined by it as Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid argue: Historiography may be feminist without being, exclusively, women’s history. Such a historiography acknowledges that each aspect of

14


reality is gendered, and is thus involved in questioning all that we think we know, in a sustained examination of analytical and epistemological apparatus, and in a dismantling of the ideological presuppositions of so called gender-neutral methodologies. (Sangari & Vaid 1990: 2–3) Feminist historians have investigated the concept of the nation and criticised how middle-class Indian women were appropriated as symbols of the ‘traditional’ Indian nation from the early nineteenth century onwards: as the nineteenth century progresses, at a symbolic level, the fate of women and the fate of the emerging nation become inextricably intertwined. Debates on women, whether in context of sati, widow remarriage or zenanas (seclusion of women), were not merely about women, but also instances in which the moral challenge of colonial rule was confronted and negotiated. In this process women came to represent ‘tradition’ for all participants: whether viewed as weak, deluded creatures who must be reformed through legislation and education, or the valiant keepers of tradition who must be protected from the first and be permitted only certain kinds of instruction. (Mani 1990: 118) The important role of women in the mass movements of the freedom struggle has been acknowledged in all strands of historiography, but feminist historians have argued that women’s roles have neither been adequately appreciated nor studied: Women’s struggle for broader roles, and their involvement at all levels of the national movement has been recorded in history as the space granted to them by benevolent politicians and leaders. This distorted image of women’s political activism certainly needs a historical reassessment to reformulate the traditional image of women as dependent and passive into agents of history – active and assertive. (Jain & Sharma 1996: 199) Since the mid-1970s a further challenge to Indian academic historiography has come from Hindu nationalist politicians, who have tried to influence the teaching of the subject by suppressing textbooks which in their opinion misrepresent the Indian past, and by promoting textbooks which espouse Hindu nationalist ideology.21 Hindu nationalists have

Introduction 15

tried to impose a history which represents the Indian nation as a Hindu nation and which dwells on a glorious Hindu past and emphasises the role of Muslims as bloodthirsty invaders and fanatical temple-breakers (Sarkar 2002: 244–7). The fact that such a simplistic version of Indian history cannot stand up to evidential challenge does not stop it from being reproduced at a popular level in schools and pamphlets (Sarkar 2002: 254–6). Sumit Sarkar considers this gulf between the production of history at the top universities and the teaching of history in schools as the major contemporary problem facing the understanding of history in India: ‘The paradox of postcolonial front-ranking historiography has been that the affirmation of socially radical values and approaches [...] has been accompanied by more, rather than less, elitism in structures of historical production and dissemination’ (Sarkar 1998: 46). The extent of the problem has led to his issuing a rallying cry to his colleagues to ‘democratize [...] the production of historical knowledge [and] to work towards a new kind of historical culture’ (Sarkar 1998: 48). This survey has provided a sketch of those historiographical trends in India from the nineteenth century on which will be relevant for the discussion of Rushdie’s novels. It has shown how Indian nationalist historiography wrote the nation into being by providing it with a coherent narrative which stretched from a glorious ancient past through to the heroic independence movement of Gandhi and Nehru. However, the way nationalist historiography envisaged the nation and its narrative has been questioned by other trends in academic historiography, particularly those of subalternism and feminism. But these challenges have had limited reach beyond academia, in contrast to the contemporary popularity of Hindu nationalist historiography with its promotion of the concept of the Hindu nation. In the following chapters, I will explore how Rushdie responds to these developments in Indian historiography in his novels, and how his image of India compares to these conflicting visions of the nation.

1 A Biography of the Nation

As the previous survey of Indian historiography demonstrates, India’s status as a nation has been controversial. Imperialist discourse at first denied it and then later claimed that nation building had always been the aim of British colonisation.1 Nationalist historiography argues that Indian nationalism and Indian nationalist discourse shaped the idea of India as a nation in opposition to colonialism.2 In the 1970s, when Rushdie was writing Midnight’s Children, the idea of India as a nation again began to be interrogated in Indian historiography. Previously, nationalist historiography had been dominant and decried as neo-imperialist anyone who doubted the existence of a genuine Indian nationalism and its success in producing a real nation.3 In the late 1970s, however, Indian historiography underwent crucial changes. Nationalist historiography’s emphasis on the role of the nationalist élite was increasingly disputed, as was its conception of the nation. The Subaltern Studies group initiated a radical re-writing of Indian history with an emphasis on ‘history from below’. Chaturvedi describes how Subaltern Studies were conceived in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s dictatorial Emergency rule of 1975–77: ‘At its origins, the project, while reflecting the “disillusionment” of the 1970s, was meant to explore the relationship between revolutionary theory and mass struggle in India’ (Chaturvedi 2000: x). So both the Subaltern Studies project and Midnight’s Children are in part the offspring of the Emergency.4 In the following, I will analyse how Rushdie portrays the idea of the Indian nation and how he responds to the discourses surrounding the concept of the nation in Indian historiography. I will be particularly interested in how far the novel’s version of national history corresponds with nationalist historiography’s narrative of the nation and to what extent the novel shares the subalternist historians’ 16

A Biography of the Nation 17

criticism of that narrative. My sub-chapters will roughly follow the tri-partite structure of Midnight’s Children: an investigation of the period leading up to Independence will be followed by an examination of post-Independence history and a separate sub-chapter on the Emergency. In Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai, the narrator-protagonist, tries to create a meaningful account of his life by imposing a pattern on Indian history with himself at the centre. Saleem Sinai’s autobiography and the ‘biography’ of the nation are inextricably intertwined in Saleem’s account – they are ‘mysteriously handcuffed’ together, his ‘destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country’ (MC 9). Through Saleem’s perspective the novel offers an exaggeratedly idiosyncratic and often purposely flawed analysis of Indian history in the twentieth century. Saleem considers himself a historian and eye- or rather nose-witness. His main sources are problematic material such as ‘my new, all-knowing memory’ (MC 88), telepathy and his ‘powers of sniffing-out-the-truth’ (MC 307), none of them the archival documents that are the stuff of which more traditional histories are made. Unlike conventional historians, Saleem draws attention to his mistakes, and grows increasingly confused about the nature of reality and truth. Nevertheless Saleem tries to write a history that is at least theoretically guided by historiographic principles. He provides facts, interpretations, motives and the ‘banal chain of cause-and-effect’, and he is conscious of creating source material for future historians: It is possible, even probable, that I am only the first historian to write the story of my undeniably exceptional life-and-times. Those who follow in my footsteps will, however, inevitably come to this present work, this source-book, this Hadith or Purana or Grundrisse, for guidance and inspiration. (MC 295) This eclectic selection of historiographical precedents, the Hadith, the Puranas and Marx’s Grundrisse, sets the stage for Saleem’s historiographical enterprise.

Imagining a nation Benedict Anderson argues in Imagined Communities (1983) that ‘nationness’ and nationalism as ‘cultural artefacts’ developed from the late eighteenth century on in the Americas and Europe, and then became ‘modular’ and so ‘capable of being transplanted’ to other parts of


the world (Anderson 1991: 4 & 140).5 Partha Chatterjee, a member of the Subaltern Studies group, objects to Anderson’s argument because it makes Indian nationalism and the Indian imagined community ultimately derivative: If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain ‘modular’ forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine? [...] Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized. (Chatterjee 1993: 5) In his The Nation and its Fragments (1993), Chatterjee criticises ‘standard nationalist history’ because it ‘cannot but converge with Anderson’s formulations’ (Chatterjee 1993: 5). He argues that because nationalist historiography uses ‘modular’ Western nationalist discourse, it inevitably comes up with the same story for the nation, which he judges an imaginative failure: In fact, since [nationalist historiography] seeks to replicate in its own history the history of the modern state in Europe, nationalism’s selfrepresentation will inevitably corroborate Anderson’s decoding of the nationalist myth. I think, however, nationalism’s autobiography is fundamentally flawed. (Chatterjee 1993: 5–6) Instead of affirming ‘nationalism’s autobiography’ as given in nationalist historiography, Chatterjee proposes to split the examination of Indian nationalism. He argues that nationalist discourse in India divided the world into an outer, material domain and an inner, spiritual domain. In the outer, material world, the nationalist élite strove for equality with the colonisers and used their discourses and concepts of ‘the modern liberaldemocratic state’ (Chatterjee 1993: 10). In the inner, spiritual or cultural domain, the educated élite tried to create a specifically Indian modern cultural identity: ‘here nationalism launches its most powerful, creative, and historically significant project: to fashion a “modern” national culture that is nevertheless not Western. If the nation is an imagined community, then this is where it is brought into being’ (Chatterjee 1993: 6). This division into the inner and outer domain results in two separate (auto)biographies of nationalism which are complementary but not compatible since the discourses of the two spheres are not coextensive: the derivative liberal discourse of nationalism and the modern nation-state of the outer sphere is juxtaposed with the communitarian discourse of the inner sphere.


Midnight’s Children’s history begins with the exploration of Aadam Aziz’s nationalist becoming, which also raises Chatterjee’s problematic: is Aadam’s a derivative or an indigenous imagining of nationalism or both? Saleem’s autobiography begins in the spring of 1915 in Kashmir when his grandfather Aadam Aziz cannot reconcile the act of prayer with the new self produced by studying medicine in Heidelberg: now ‘he saw through travelled eyes’ (MC 11). Aadam tries to pray but ‘Heidelberg invaded his head; here was Ingrid, briefly his Ingrid, her face scorning him for his Mecca-turned parroting; here, their friends Oskar and Ilse Lubin the anarchists, mocking his prayer with their anti-ideologies’ (MC 11). His loss of faith leaves him ‘vulnerable to women and history’ (MC 10). This is the preparation for his entry into a specific kind of nationalism, which is secular with a vague tendency to communist socialism as indicated by the ‘stacked copies of Vorwärts and Lenin’s What is to be done? [...] dusty echoes of his halffaded German life’ (MC 19). However, he is not portrayed as merely mouthing imported ideas. Aadam’s idea of India is irreconcilable with his friends’ imperialist concept of India: ‘[Aadam] learned that India – like radium – had been “discovered” by the Europeans; even Oskar was filled with admiration for Vasco da Gama, and this was what finally separated Aadam Aziz from his friends, this belief of theirs that he was somehow the invention of their ancestors’ (MC 11). Aziz occupies a space of a mediated ‘middle place’, the space of an antagonistic encounter between his anarchist friends’ world-view and the world of boatman Tai, ‘the living antithesis of Oskar-Ilse-Ingrid’s belief in the inevitability of change’ with his ‘antiquity so immense it defied numbering’ (MC 12–15). Tai has no concept of India but a strong sense of Kashmir and its antiquity: ‘I have watched the mountains being born; I have seen emperors die. [...] I saw that Isa, that Christ, when he came to Kashmir. Smile, smile, it is your history I am keeping in my head. Once it was set down in old lost books’ (MC 16). Tai’s version of oral history (with a reference to a now lost authoritative written version) is not paraded as authentically Indian or Kashmiri, but it is nevertheless a legitimate version. Historian Tai claims to be an eyewitness to all epochs, by authority of his enormous age, blurring the boundaries of centuries and turning history into legend and myth where historical accounts are legitimised by their allegorical potential or imaginative truth value. Kashmir is turned into a mythical location beyond any linear space-time continuum, which is the antithesis of Aadam Aziz’s Heidelberg-imported clock-measured time. The discourses of Tai and Ilse-Oskar-Ingrid are juxtaposed in a way which makes a simple

20


adoption of either one impossible; a veneration for Tai’s ‘authentic’ indigenous position is pre-empted by portraying him as an alcoholic ‘watery Caliban’ (MC 15). But they are the beginnings of Aziz’s nationalist position, which is discontinuous with both. Both parties furthermore seem to betray Aziz: Ingrid by committing suicide and Tai by driving him away because of his hatred of Aadam’s imported foreignness. A crucial next step in Aadam’s development of feeling part of an imagined national community is the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in April 1919, which he only narrowly survives. Significantly, this is the first major Indian historical event mentioned in Midnight’s Children, an event which is depicted in nationalist historiography as having once and for all given the lie to the rhetoric of the British Raj’s ‘civilizing mission’ (Chandra et al. 1987: 183–5). The Rowlatt satyagraha, which preceded the Amritsar massacre, is significant for its marking the beginning of the Gandhian national anti-colonial mass movement. In this context the first of remarkably few references to Gandhi is made, one which acknowledges his dominant position in working out the strategies of the national movement: Leaflet newspaper mosque and wall are crying: Hartal! Which is to say, literally speaking, a day of mourning, of stillness, of silence. But this is India in the heyday of the Mahatma, when even language obeys the instructions of Gandhiji, and the word has acquired, under his influence, new resonances. Hartal – April 7, agree mosque newspaper wall and pamphlet, because Gandhi has decreed that the whole of India shall, on that day, come to a halt. To mourn, in peace, the continuing presence of the British. (MC 33) Amritsar’s central role in rallying Indians to support the movement for swaraj or self-government is emphasised in Midnight’s Children since Aziz is politicised and drawn into the national movement as a result of witnessing General Dyer’s massacre of an unarmed, peaceful crowd. Shortly before the massacre, ‘Aziz, with Tai in his head, does not feel Indian’ (MC 33); after surviving the shooting with only a bruised chest, this changed: ‘ “I started off as a Kashmiri and not much of a Muslim. Then I got a bruise on the chest that turned me into an Indian” ’ (MC 40). At this point the narrative jumps to the year 1942, when the entire situation looks different. In Midnight’s Children, the period is characterised by the presence of ‘a highly dangerous form of optimism. [...] this virulent disease had been breaking out all over India that year’ (MC 39). Nineteen forty-two was the year of the ‘Quit India’ resolution and the


‘August revolution’ when mass participation in the anti-colonial struggle was at its height. Communal participatory differences were marked and few Muslims were involved (Sarkar 1989: 399). Yet Midnight’s Children tells a different story. The text addresses the question of the national movement for Independence by way of the eccentric perspective of the imaginary Free Islam Convocation, instead of principally portraying the positions of the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League. By 1942 the Muslim League was dominated by M. A. Jinnah and had adopted his ‘two nation theory’, which claimed that Hindus and Muslims on the subcontinent were two different nations which therefore needed a partition of the territory so that Muslims would not be subjugated under Hindu rule.6 The League’s claim to represent the ‘Muslim nation’ was counteracted by the National Congress’s assertion of representing the entire Indian nation. The League’s communalist definition of the nation is clearly discredited in Midnight’s Children since the text’s sympathy is with the imagined Free Islam Convocation whose central political stance is opposition to the ‘two nation theory’. Aadam Aziz and his friends are involved in the Convocation and voice its policies: Like Aadam Aziz, like the Rani of Cooch Naheen, Nadir Khan loathed the Muslim League (‘That bunch of toadies!’ the Rani cried [...]. ‘Landowners with vested interests to protect! What do they have to do with Muslims? They go like toads to the British and form governments for them, now that the Congress refuses to do it! [...] And what’s more,’ the Rani said with finality, ‘they are mad. Otherwise why should they want to partition India?’). (MC 46) Significantly, the invented anti-Partition Free Islam Convocation is under the dynamic and electrifying leadership of a subaltern, namely the Delhi magician Mian Abdullah, who is popularly referred to as the Hummingbird. He is the unlikely figure of a magician turned saviour, ‘a creature which would be impossible if it did not exist’ (MC 40). The Hummingbird is described as having single-handedly formed, from ‘dozens of Muslim splinter groups’, ‘a loosely federated alternative to the dogmatism and the vested interests of the Leaguers’ (MC 46). However, apart from the Convocation’s anti-Partition stance, its politics remain vague. The assassination of Mian Abdullah is portrayed as the end of optimism and hope for a united independent India. His death is described as serving both the interests of the British and the Muslim League and therefore functions as a denunciation of both. Aziz, however,

22


never considers joining the Congress, which can be interpreted as a comment on its failure to convince Muslims of its secular stance. The Hummingbird represents Muslims and subalterns, which the Congress claimed to speak for but largely excluded from decision-making posts. Mian Abdullah’s subaltern connection is emphasised when the story of his death is integrated into oral history by the paan-chewers who react to his assassination by turning it into the legend of the avenging piedogs. This memorable episode, in which the pie-dogs miraculously congregate at the murder scene and rip apart the assassins, makes his death significant and punishes the assassins in a way that is proportionate to their crime; the local oral historians are on Hummingbird’s side and keep his memory alive. This form of history, created by subalterns, is justified by its usefulness: ‘Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than facts’ (MC 47). In depicting the development of Aadam Aziz’s nationalism, Midnight’s Children does not affirm what Chatterjee called ‘nationalism’s autobiography’ as written by nationalist historiography.7 Aziz’s nationalism is a hybrid construct whose discursive contours are not clearly delimited. His nationalism is not depicted as exclusively derived from Western models. In fact his principal Western influence, namely the anarchist influence of his friends, is not a nationalist model in any case, but it contributed to the unmooring of Aadam’s thinking. After his experience in Amritsar, Aadam’s nationalism is clearly articulated in opposition to colonialism, but the Free Islam Convocation’s policies, which coincide with Aadam’s, are nebulous apart from their anti- colonial, anti-Partition stance. The Convocation’s concept of an undivided nation and its anti-colonial position theoretically match the Congress’s nationalist discourse. However, simply in its existence the Convocation implicitly criticises the Congress’s position since Muslims apparently feel alienated from the Congress in Midnight’s Children. The fact that a Muslim organisation has to be invented contradicts the affirmation of Indian nationalist historiographical discourse that the Congress represented the entire nation. Aziz’s nationalist position also indirectly incorporates subaltern elements since he supports Mian Abdullah. The leadership roles are even reversed as the subaltern Hummingbird leads the movement and middle-class Aadam Aziz follows his lead. The dominant mood following Hummingbird’s assassination is one of regret about possibilities lost, the possibility of a united India but also the possibility of an idea of the nation whose conceptualisation directly involves wider strata of society. It is in evoking this feeling of an ‘incomplete’ nationalism that the novel’s narrative is most at odds


with nationalist historiography’s account of the Congress’s successful nation-building. This sense of chance wasted, however, is suppressed in Midnight’s Children by a shift of focus away from Aadam Aziz to the eventful build-up to the synchronous birth of the narrator, Saleem, and the independent nation-state. The novel’s representation of the period immediately before Independence is dominated by collecting Independence’s ‘parents of midnight’, which is rivalled by Saleem’s collection of parents (MC 108). The factual pre-history of the event of Independence is depicted as chaotic, with elliptical sentences and the seemingly arbitrary dropping of names like Cripps, Wavell, Attlee, and Mountbatten and their various schemes for a ‘transfer of power’ (MC 64). This unorthodox history-writing, without proper explanation or referencing, recreates the atmosphere of this erratic and improvised transfer of power and contradicts imperialist historiography’s narrative of an ordered withdrawal of the British, while the absence of Indian names punctures the triumphalist narrative of nationalist historiography.8 The transfer of power is depicted as an unglamorous rushed process in Midnight’s Children. ‘Among the parents of midnight’, the text lists ‘the failure of the Cabinet Mission scheme; the determination of M. A. Jinnah who was dying and wanted to see Pakistan formed in his lifetime, and would have done anything to ensure it [...] and Mountbatten with his extraordinary haste’ (MC 108–9). The driving forces of this specific event of Independence are depicted as consisting of the British government and the Muslim League. Neither Jawaharlal Nehru nor Gandhi, the ‘official’ fathers of the nation, are portrayed as having influenced it in a meaningful way.9 In the meantime, Saleem is depicted as more successful than the Congress as he turns out to be a truly national baby, whose parents include the Muslim middle-class Amina and Ahmed Sinai, the poor Hindu Vanita, the wife of the accordion player Wee Willie Winkie, and the Englishman William Methwold. Even as an embryo Saleem diffuses communalist tension: ‘My annunciation saved a life’ (MC 77). Amina saves the peep-show man Lifafa Das, a Hindu in danger from a bloodthirsty mob in the Muslim neighbourhood of old Delhi where Amina and Ahmed Sinai live before moving to Bombay, by providing him with a refuge and announcing her pregnancy: ‘ “Come on now, if you want to kill, kill a mother also and show the world what men you are!” ’ (MC 77). Consequently Saleem receives a subaltern blessing in the form of a prophesy from Lifafa Das’s cousin, Ramram Seth, who is described as ‘finding history speaking through his lips’ (MC 87). This prophecy is emphasised as an important element in the making and


self-understanding of Saleem. However, the indigenous credentials of the national baby Saleem are sullied by the ‘fact’ that he is doubly illegitimate as a half-British bastard and one who is swapped at birth, which further confuses the issue of the indigenous versus Western parentage of independent India. In the context of the prophesy episode, the text makes an unusual reference to the communal massacre in Calcutta in 1946, which began as the Muslim League’s ‘Direct Action Day’ and is described by Sumit Sarkar as the beginning of the ‘communal holocaust’ (Sarkar 1989: 432). A ‘white man’ begs from an embarrassed Amina in the slum where Ramram Seth lives: ‘she looks with embarrassment into a white face with long eyelashes and a curved patrician nose – embarrassment, because he was white, and begging was not for white people’ (MC 81–2). He turns out to be a woman or, as Lifafa Das whispers, a ‘Hijra, transvestite’, allegedly seeking penitence for her husband’s participation in the massacre: ‘a white man deranged by the coming futility of his kind’ (MC 82). Midnight’s Children’s use of bizarre perspectives on history, which display a hallucinatory quality, are in diametrical opposition to traditional historiography’s attempt to explain reality by means of a rational, exhaustive and coherent narrative. The novel, in contrast, frustrates the reader’s expectations and prejudices. One would not expect to meet a European in the slum, to say nothing of a British beggar of undefined sex. Together with Dyer and Methwold, s/he is the only representative of the British in Midnight’s Children, and is explicitly listed among the ‘parents of midnight’ (MC 108–9). Hayden White argues that historiography inevitably has to use emplotment to structure its narratives in order to make sense of a series of ‘facts’: The effect of such encodations is to familiarize the unfamiliar; and in general this is the way of historiography, whose ‘data’ are always immediately strange, not to say exotic, simply by their virtue of their distance from us in time and their origin in a way of life different from our own. (White 1978: 86) Rushdie’s strategy in Midnight’s Children is exactly the opposite as he wants to preserve and emphasise the strangeness of history. On occasion, he specifically creates strangeness rather than dispels it. According to White’s argument, history is by necessity stranger than fiction, and historiography uses narrative in the same way as fiction-writing in order to give historical discourse form and meaning. In Midnight’s Children Rushdie lays bare these mechanisms and narrative strategies and so


creates an effect which is incompatible with a seamless nationalist historiography such as that of Bipan Chandra, in which every event and occurrence are unproblematically slotted into the smooth nationalist narrative of the nation. In Rushdie’s narrative of the nation’s becoming, there remains room for doubts and contradictory and irresolvable elements. Imperialist discourse is conspicuous by its near absence in Midnight’s Children; it is considered hardly worth refuting or parodying. William Methwold is the only mouthpiece of the imperialist rhetoric of the ‘civilising mission’, a mission which he only reluctantly abandons: ‘Bad business, Mr Sinai,’ Methwold sips his Scotch amid cacti and roses, ‘Never seen the like. Hundreds of years of decent government, then suddenly, up and off. You’ll admit we weren’t all bad: built your roads. Schools, railway trains, parliamentary system, all worthwhile things. Taj Mahal was falling down until an Englishman bothered to see to it. And now, suddenly, independence. Seventy days to get out. I’m dead against it myself, but what’s to be done?’ (MC 96) This discourse of the aborted ‘civilising mission’ is framed by Amina’s shock at the dirty toilet habits of the British: ‘I never believed, but it’s true, my God, they wipe their bottoms with paper only!’ (MC 96). However, the lasting influence of colonialism is not belittled but emphasised. Methwold, after all, is supposed to be Saleem’s biological father, which he achieved through trickery as his most attractive feature, his hair, with which he ensnared Vanita, is fake. Ironically, Methwold eventually unmasks himself by taking his wig off and reveals at the same time that the power of the Raj was also based on ‘deception’, though of course this is hardly a flattering commentary on the deceived colonials either (MC 114). During the build-up towards Independence at midnight, the Partition massacres are only briefly mentioned as the ‘mass blood-letting’ of the Punjab and the ‘long pacifying walk of Mahatma Gandhi’ (MC 112) in Bengal. This is a typical reference to Mahatma Gandhi in that his role is marginalised, but his name is nevertheless mentioned at nodal points of the narrative. The fact that Rushdie mentions Gandhi’s ‘pacifying walk’ is also significant as this is considered as one of his most courageous deeds, and one which was successful in avoiding more bloodshed. Sumit Sarkar refers to it as the ‘Mahatma’s finest hour’ (Sarkar 1989: 437). Thus Gandhi is not absent in Midnight’s Children, but Gandhian discourse is, which is a clear distancing device: the Gandhian idea of India, with his


references to Hindu mythology and his emphasis on India’s peasants, is clearly not endorsed by Midnight’s Children, whose idea of the nation is relentlessly urban.10 And whereas Midnight’s Children almost ignores the Partition massacres, they usually overshadow the narration of India’s Independence in Indian historiography: Independence day was replete with contradictions: unforgettable scenes of mass rejoicing, the swearing-in as Prime Minister of a flaming radical of the 1930s by Lord Mountbatten amidst all the pageantry of Empire, and a ‘Father of the Nation’ who said that he had run dry of messages and who was to spend the last months of his life in a lonely and desperate struggle against communal violence. (Sarkar 1989: 4) Ironically, in this sense Midnight’s Children resembles benevolent imperialist historiography with its account of an almost unblemished birth of independent India.11

The mirror of the nation With the event of Independence, a very different phase begins in Midnight’s Children in terms of exploring the idea of the Indian nation. The nation is portrayed as being partly embodied by Saleem and partly constructed as a nation-state under Nehru’s leadership. Besides these more concrete manifestations of the nation, the text emphasises the collective element in the concept of the Indian nation and the idea of an ‘imaginary’ community; ‘imaginary’ is a term which belongs to the other cluster of words the text uses in describing the idea of the nation, such as ‘fantasy’, ‘fiction’, ‘dream’, ‘myth’, and ‘fable’: August in Bombay: a month of festivals, the month of Krishna’s birthday and Coconut Day; and this year – fourteen hours to go, thirteen, twelve – there was an extra festival on the calendar, a new myth to celebrate, because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will – except in a dream we all agreed to dream; it was a mass fantasy shared in varying degrees by Bengali and Punjabi, Madrasi and Jat, and would periodically need the sanctification and renewal which


can only be provided by rituals of blood. India, the new myth – a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God. (MC 112) This is Midnight’s Children’s equivalent of Nehru’s ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech, which is later extensively quoted, and with which the novel’s version shares uplifting pathos to a remarkable degree. The text emphasises the masses, who are supposed to be the nation in this ‘mass fantasy’ and ‘collective fiction’. In Midnight’s Children, the mythical and legendary are represented as the domain of the subaltern, for example, Tai’s and the paan-chewers’ mythic history. The masses are, however, an ambivalent part of the nation. In the Independence scene, the masses are repeatedly referred to as ‘the many-headed monster’ (MC 115). This description of the masses as a threatening monster is an echo of the description of the slum-dwellers with whom middle-class Amina has come in contact on her way to the seer Ramram Seth: Children tugging at the pallu of her sari, heads everywhere staring at my mother, who thinks, It’s like being surrounded by some terrible monster, a creature with heads and heads and heads; but she corrects herself, no, of course not a monster, these poor poor people – what then? A power of some sort, a force which does not know its strength, which has perhaps decayed into impotence through never having been used ... . (MC 81) The view of the people as a many-headed monster appears to question the nationalist discourse of the inclusive, unified nation, which is represented by Nehru’s ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech. In Midnight’s Children, Nehru’s Independence speech is intertwined with the description of Amina’s and Vanita’s labour and Mary’s baby-swapping:12 in Delhi, a wiry serious man sits in the Assembly Hall and prepares to make a speech. [...] The wiry serious man gets to his feet. [...] Without written speech in hand, without having memorised any prepared words, Jawaharlal Nehru begins: ‘... Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny; and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge – not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially ...’ [...] The monster in the streets has begun to roar, while in Delhi a wiry man is saying, ‘... At the stroke of the midnight hour, while the world sleeps, India awakens to life and freedom ...’ [...] – ‘A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the

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new; when an age ends; and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance ...’ [...] as Jawaharlal Nehru told the Assembly Hall, ‘We end today a period of ill-fortune’ [...] ‘... This is no time for petty or destructive criticism,’ Jawaharlal Nehru told the Assembly. ‘No time for ill-will. We have to build the noble mansion of free India, where all her children may dwell’. (MC 115–18)13 This moving speech, expressing such high hopes for free India’s future, is somewhat bathetically deflated and put into perspective by Ahmed Sinai’s cry of pain when ‘the falling chair shattered his toe’ the moment Nehru predicts the end of ‘a period of ill-fortune’ (MC 117). Nehru’s role in the scene of Independence is represented as central, but the text’s portrayal of him is not awe-struck, in contrast to his depiction in biographies. For example, in Midnight’s Children Nehru is described as ‘wiry’ whereas his biographer Michael Brecher spends the first pages of his biography praising Nehru’s exceptional beauty. In Midnight’s Children Nehru’s speech is used to express the high hopes connected to the event of Independence, which also raises expectations for the midnight’s children’s potential as embodiment of the future of India: In fact, all over the new India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents – the children of midnight were also the children of the time: fathered, you understand, by history. It can happen. Especially in a country which is itself a sort of dream. (MC 118) Saleem is emphatic about his self-professed allegorical role in embodying the imaginary element of the nation together with the midnight’s children: ‘I have been, in my time, the living proof of the fabulous nature of this collective dream’ (MC 112). On the other hand, Saleem’s history is not supposed to make sense merely as a national allegory and his autobiography is not meant to be simply decoded as standing for the nation’s biography.14 Jyotsna Singh refers to Midnight’s Children’s ‘mockallegorical structure’, which captures the parodic aspect of this strategy (Singh 1996: 167). Saleem’s story always also makes sense as the story of a child growing up, but the story of him representing the nation growing up is frequently undermined, not least by Saleem’s excessive claims to centrality: ‘[in 1947] I was already beginning to take my place at the centre of the universe; and by the time I had finished, I would give meaning to it all’ (MC 126–7). Saleem works on different and often contradictory planes in the novel which cannot be entirely separated.


In Midnight’s Children, one cannot divide an accurate account of India’s history from Saleem’s partly allegorical and partly megalomaniac one. The synchronous births of the independent nation and Saleem are depicted as the beginning of a new era, an era that is closely connected to Jawaharlal Nehru, whose pivotal role in nationalist historiography rivals Saleem’s self-professed centrality in his history of the nation. Nehru inspired great enthusiasm in his biographers, which sometimes borders on hero-worship. Thus Sarvepalli Gopal emphasises Nehru’s Saleem-like centrality: ‘Nehru was not merely a political leader. In these early years of independence, he was the presiding genius in all aspects of Indian public life’ (Gopal 1979: 312). Nehru’s institutionalising of democracy is usually referred to as his greatest deed: ‘Achieved against daunting odds, democracy in India – adult suffrage, a sovereign Parliament, a free Press, an independent judiciary – is Nehru’s most lasting monument’ (Gopal 1984: 279).15 However, this achievement is not described as the result of a democratic process, as ‘from the end of 1950 the Government of India was basically a one-man show’ (Gopal 1979: 304). Michael Brecher asserts, ‘Nehru holds more offices than that of Prime Minister, and even in this position he can hardly be termed “first among equals”; a more apt description would be “a giant among pygmies” ’ (Brecher 1959: 19).16 Saleem’s exalted position almost inevitably invites comparisons with Nehru who stands for more than himself in nationalist historiography as his biography constitutes ‘almost a history’ of the first half of twentieth-century India (Gopal 1975: 5). Saleem resembles Jawaharlal Nehru in subtle but crucial ways; the parallels, however, are never mentioned explicitly.17 Saleem’s connection to Nehru is cemented with the fated letter, which is a key element of Saleem’s claim to fame and historical centrality: Jawaharlal Nehru wrote: ‘Dear Baby Saleem, My belated congratulations on the happy accident of your moment of birth! You are the newest bearer of that ancient face of India which is also eternally young. We shall be watching over your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.’ (MC 122) Saleem reads this letter literally and uses it as ‘proof’ for his mirroring of the nation. Yet Saleem is not supposed to be allegorically decoded as Nehru’s avatar; he parodically reflects Nehru’s centrality in nationalist historiography’s narrative of the independent nation. Saleem’s megalomania in explicitly claiming such a central position serves as a critical comment on the conventions of nationalist historiography which write


India’s immediate post-Independence history in the form of biographies about Nehru. Midnight’s Children shows the distorting and dangerous effects of adopting such a view of history where the course of history is depicted as being shaped by a single protagonist. Rushdie uses Saleem to incorporate Nehruvian discourse in his novel. However, when Saleem becomes the mouthpiece of Nehru’s discourse, it usually constitutes a parody of Nehru’s language. Saleem’s attempt at creating a scientific theory of his relation to history by modes of connections, deploying a ‘scientific’ discourse, is an instance of Saleem mimicking Nehruvian rhetoric (the word ‘scientific’ was one of Nehru’s favourites).18 ‘... Your life, which will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own,’ the Prime Minister wrote, obliging me scientifically to face the question: In what sense? How, in what terms, may the career of a single individual be said to impinge on the fate of a nation? I must answer in adverbs and hyphens: I was linked to history both literally and metaphorically, both actively and passively, in what our (admirably modern) scientists might term ‘modes of connection’ composed of dualistically-combined configurations of the two pairs of opposed adverbs given above. (MC 237–8) Saleem’s meticulous science of the modes of connection is rather questionable, however, as the boundaries between the literal and the metaphorical are damaged beyond repair in Midnight’s Children. This passage’s mockery of Nehruvian discourse criticises his over-confidence in sciences and scientific language. But in parodically reproducing Nehru’s rhetoric, the novel also provides glimpses of a more intimate and fond portrayal of Nehru. Besides this gentle mocking of Nehru and his language, Midnight’s Children often depicts critically the shortcomings of Nehru’s politics. Nehru placed great hope in scientific modernisation to combat what he perceived as primordial fissiparous communal, regional and caste identities, and he considered secularism to be crucial in achieving a modern, equal society.19 Nehru is usually referred to as the architect of secularism in India, and frequently criticised for having imposed this alien concept on a religious society.20 In Midnight’s Children it is not the un-Indian character of secularism that is criticised but its fictitious nature since it lacked serious implementation. In the novel Nehru’s secularism seems to be swamped by ‘non-scientific’ attitudes as, in the midst of ill omens and rumours of supernatural creatures being


unleashed in India, Nehru’s historic announcement is mentioned in brackets: Religious leaders described the snake escape as a warning – the god Naga had been unleashed, they intoned, as a punishment for the nation’s official renunciation of its deities. (“We are a secular state,” Nehru announced, and Morarji and Patel and Menon all agreed; but still Ahmed Sinai shivered under the influence of the freeze.) (MC 137) The freeze on Ahmed’s property referred to here and Amina’s reaction of relief when she hears that Gandhi was killed by a Hindu nationalist and not a Muslim, depict the precarious situation of Muslims in the new nation-state and demonstrate that Nehru’s secular vision struggled to compete against various antagonistic ideas and interests.21 Nehru’s at times utopian vision of India is portrayed as having difficulty in living up to expectations. Like independent India, the child Saleem is plagued with questions of how to fulfil the promises of greatness. This occurs when Saleem discovers his gift of telepathy in June 1956 (which is shock-induced after having watched his mother masturbate): ‘I could glimpse – shadowy still, undefined, enigmatic – my reason for having been born’ (MC 163). After the false start of mistaking himself for a prophet communicating with Archangels, he realises the secular, if magical, nature of his gift of communication. Telepathy is the instrument to keep in touch with the nation: ‘Telepathy, then: the inner monologues of all the so-called teeming millions, of masses and classes alike, jostled for space within my head’ (MC 168). The way Nehruvian democracy works at the grassroots level is described when Saleem provides a sketchy overview of the state of India in 1956 by using his newly discovered gift of telepathy for mind-travelling: At one time I was a landlord in Uttar Pradesh, my belly rolling over my pajama-cord as I ordered serfs to set my surplus grain on fire ... at another moment I was starving to death in Orissa, where there was a food-shortage as usual: I was two months old and my mother had run out of breast-milk. I occupied, briefly, the mind of a Congress Party worker, bribing a village schoolteacher to throw his weight behind the party of Gandhi and Nehru in the coming election campaign. (MC 174)


In this irreverent catalogue Rushdie captures a depressing image of India in which the ‘feudal’ remnants of bonded slavery and corruption in the Congress are instances of the old power structures merging with the new ones. Nehru’s ideal of creating social justice seems distant, and his socialist agenda is similarly depicted as being overpowered by India’s ‘traditions’. Indian socialism manifests itself in a mixed economy, with the goals of the public sector being organised in Five-Year Plans, but in Midnight’s Children, it is mainly associated with astrologers of planning rather than bureaucrats: And finally I hit my highest point: I became Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister and author of framed letters: I sat with the great man amongst a bunch of gap-toothed, stragglebeard astrologers and adjusted the Five Year Plan to bring it into harmonic alignment with the music of the spheres. (MC 174) Furthermore, Nehru’s historic effort of reforming the Hindu Civil Law is belittled as electoral vote-hunting as ‘the Congress fought back with reforms such as the Hindu Succession Act, which gave Hindu women equal rights of inheritance’, even if this is favourably compared to the Hindu nationalist Jan Sangh’s campaigning ‘for rest homes for aged sacred cows’ (MC 184–5). Thus one by one, Nehru’s achievements as lauded in nationalist historiography are depicted as either severely compromised or near-failures in Midnight’s Children. After this critical assessment of the nation-state and its political representatives, the Midnight Children’s Conference (MCC) is established in 1957, on Saleem’s tenth birthday, when he ‘understood the secret of my original hour of birth’ (MC 207). A counter-image of the Indian National Congress (which consisted of various factions and dominated the parliament, forming a super party in the Nehru era), the MCC resembles it in various ways. Both the Congress and the MCC are nation-wide organisations and have a representative function with regard to the nation. And both could be described as having their origin in telepathy; A. O. Hume, an ex-officer of the Indian Civil Service who played a key role in founding the Indian National Congress in 1885, believed in the imminence of a national uprising and therefore considered the formation of a national forum for Indians to be of the utmost importance in order to dissipate the threat by a ‘safety valve’ (Chandra et al. 1987: 61–2). The evidence for this imminent revolt, however, appears to have been based on Hume’s contact with telepathic gurus who kept him informed of the spirit of the masses (Chandra et al. 1987: 63–9).


The children’s significance lies in their multiple (mock-)allegorical potential. Their existence accounts for the glamour and anticipation associated with the independent nation in Midnight’s Children. They both embody and undermine the nationalist Nehruvian image of the unified nation. This multifunctional capacity implies a basic contradictoriness which is reflected in Saleem’s comments on the children as he keeps offering various incompatible explanations: Understand what I’m saying: during the first hour of August 15th, 1947 – between midnight and one a.m. – no less than one thousand and one children were born within the frontiers of the infant sovereign state of India. [...] What made the event noteworthy [...] was the nature of these children, every one of whom was, through some freak of biology, or perhaps owing to some preternatural power of the moment, or just conceivably by sheer coincidence [...], endowed with features, talents or faculties which can only be described as miraculous. It was as though [...] history, arriving at a point of high significance and promise, had chosen to sow, in that instant, the seeds of a future which would genuinely differ from anything the world had seen up to that time. (MC 195) By 1957, only 581 children had survived and their talents do not seem particularly promising in modern, scientific India. It is a miraculousness of an almost ordinary nature, which does not mean that their gifts are not potentially radical or subversive. But to consider them the essence of a traditional India would be misleading, even though the text toys with the idea. Saleem explicitly points out the ordinariness of their kind of magic in India: ‘But no literate person in this India of ours can be wholly immune from the type of information I am in the process of unveiling – no reader of our national press can have failed to come across a series of – admittedly lesser – magic children and assorted freaks’ (MC 197). Their ordinary magic is part of Midnight’s Children’s idea of an India ‘where all her children may dwell’. Throughout the novel, there never is a consistent resolution to the question of why the children exist. They embody vague notions of India’s promise and a sense of the extraordinary potential of the nation. They seem to guarantee that the collective dream which is India actually exists, and so their meaning partly lies in their existence. Saleem offers two opposing views and both are depicted as plausible, but the text works with an understanding that the positive, promising aspect

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outweighs the other ‘backward’ aspect: Midnight’s children can be made to represent many things, according to your point of view: they can be seen as the last throw of everything antiquated and retrogressive in our myth-ridden nation, whose defeat was entirely desirable in the context of a modernizing, twentieth-century economy; or as the true hope of freedom, which is now forever extinguished. (MC 200) The children partly contradict and transcend Nehru’s vision. When Saleem wondered whether they were ‘everything antiquated and retrogressive in our myth-ridden nation’, this echoes Nehru’s impatience with what he perceived as India’s backwardness and superstitions and implies that Nehru’s vision might not have been inclusive enough (MC 200). The unruly Midnight Children’s Conference is both a mirror and a mocking image of Nehru’s ideal of the nation. The MCC and their version of a vibrant democracy where everything seems possible in 1958 represent the extraordinary potential of what India could be. They passionately discuss collectivism, individualism, revolution, capitalism, altruism, science, religion, women’s rights, improvements for untouchables and tribals, and have ‘fantasies of power’ (MC 228). However, Saleem is disappointed because they cannot come up with radically different politics: ‘Nowhere, in the thoughts of the Conference, could I find anything as new as ourselves’ (MC 229). Saleem as the driving force in the MCC resembles Nehru in the Lok Sabha, the Indian Parliament. But in contrast to Nehru, Saleem has a powerful adversary in Shiva with his ‘gifts of war’ (MC 200). Shiva has a more gang-like, authoritarian and hierarchical concept of the Conference whereas Saleem stands for liberal democracy: ‘I had in mind something more like a, you know, sort of loose federation of equals, all points of view given free expression ...’ (MC 220). Shiva, gutter-kid and subaltern, reacts with contempt. While Saleem invokes ‘purpose’, ‘reason’, ‘history’ and Nehru’s letter, Shiva counters his arguments by his subaltern credentials: ‘Rich kid,’ Shiva yelled, ‘you don’t know one damn thing! What purpose, man? What thing in the whole sister-sleeping world got reason, yara? For what reason you’re rich and I’m poor? Where’s the reason in starving, man? [...] Man, I’ll tell you – you got to get what you can, do what you can with it, and then you got to die. That’s reason, rich boy. Everything else is only mother-sleeping wind!’ (MC 220–1)


Ironically, the reason why Shiva is poor is, of course, because he was swapped at birth with Saleem. Shiva represents the less palatable side of the subalterns which frustrates bourgeois benevolence. Even though Shiva is mainly a destructive force in Midnight’s Children, however, the text’s sympathy is not entirely weighed against him. He speaks from a position which is hard to contradict from Saleem’s middle-class location. Shiva embodies the many-headed monster which irritates liberal nationalist discourse, which in turn tries to keep the masses at bay. He can be made to stand for the Indian nation-state’s failure to curb inequality and poverty. His deprivation contradicts the idea of the Indian nation with a sense of comradeship and equality. Aloysius argues in Nationalism without a Nation in India (1997): Political nationalism has been associated with some form of a democratization process within society and the emergence of the mass into the public sphere. [...] This loss by the traditionally dominant of their monopoly access to power, combined with the stepping in of the mass into the public / civic arena at least ideologically as equals, lies at the root of the democratization process associated with political nationalism engendering a nation, i.e. a deep sense of comradeship or of equality, expressed through a shared, mediated and much diversified terrain of social power – the civil society. (Aloysius 1997: 146–7) Because social inequality was not substantially curbed in independent India, Aloysius argues that the Indian nation cannot be said to exist: Gellner did speak of nationalism inventing the nation [...]. In the absence of actual change within society, in our case the destruction of the Brahminic social order, nationalism’s relation to the potential nation becomes ambiguous at best. Here the process of invention is displaced by one of prevention; when imagination is limited to a minority of the elite, it turns out to be an illusion to the masses – the nation. (Aloysius 1997: 224–5) However, the midnight’s children also affirm an idea of the nation which is not merely an élite creation. They retain the idea of comradeship despite their different opinions and believe in their ability to make history. The children are an exuberant mélange of the old and the new or of the modern and the pre-modern, which seems to work, if ineffectually,


until adult prejudices catch up with them. The unequivocally premodern is in any case difficult to identify in Midnight’s Children as the mythical and the modern are frequently inseparably merged. When Saleem is exiled to his uncle Hanif and his aunt Pia in 1958 because of his dubious parentage, Hanif’s modern sense of realism is comically juxtaposed with Saleem’s embarrassment of his own unrealistic, premodern nature, which is, however, envisaged in terms of popular Hindi film conventions: ‘Sonny Jim,’ he informed me, ‘this damn country has been dreaming for five thousand years. It’s about time it started waking up.’ Hanif was fond of railing against princes and demons, gods and heroes, against, in fact, the entire iconography of the Bombay film; in the temple of illusions, he had become the high priest of reality; while I, conscious of my miraculous nature, which involved me beyond all mitigation in the (Hanif-despised) myth-life of India, bit my lip and didn’t know where to look. (MC 243–4) On the other hand, the potentially explosive and competitive coexistence of these two aspects is not negated either. The late 1950s are portrayed as a troubled time with rumoured, mythical history existing beside rational history. Saleem’s ayah, Mary Pereira, prefers the mythical history and believes that ‘the country was in the grip of a supernatural invasion’, consisting of epic characters of the Mahabharata (‘old-time war of the Kurus and Pandavas [...] chariots of Arjun and Karna’), ghosts of historic figures like the Rani of Jhansi and mythical demons, the many-headed rakshasas (MC 245): I remain, today, half-convinced that in that time of accelerated events and diseased hours the past of India rose up to confound her present; the new-born, secular state was being given an awesome reminder of its fabulous antiquity, in which democracy and votes for women were irrelevant ... so that people were seized by atavistic longings, and forgetting the new myth of freedom reverted to their old ways, their old regionalist loyalties and prejudices, and the body politic began to crack. (MC 245) This disintegration is mirrored in the children’s conference whose demise has already begun by 1958, only one year after its formation and before they achieved anything substantial: ‘In this way the Midnight Children’s Conference fulfilled the prophecy of the Prime Minister


and became, in truth, the mirror of the nation’ (MC 255). Prejudices and divisive identities destroy their feeling of comradeship: ‘Children, however magical, are not immune to their parents; and as the prejudices and world-views of adults began to take over their minds, I found children from Maharashtra loathing Gujaratis, and fair-skinned northerners reviling Dravidian “blackies”; there were religious rivalries; and class entered our councils’ (MC 254). Saleem in vain invokes the ideal of becoming a ‘third principle’, which resembles Nehru’s Non-Alignment policy in foreign politics, according to which Third World countries should decide not to align with either the United States of America or the Soviet Union but pursue a third way:22 ‘Do not let this happen! Do not permit the endless duality of massesand-classes, capital-and-labour, them-and-us to come between us! We,’ I cried passionately, ‘must be a third principle, we must be the force which drives between the horns of the dilemma; for only by being other, by being new, can we fulfil the promise of our birth!’ (MC 255). The end of the Midnight Children’s Conference coincides with India’s border war with China in 1962, which is regarded as Nehru’s final disillusionment and the failure of his policy of Non-Alignment. Nehru’s biographer Gopal summarises the nationalist position with his chapter’s title: ‘China goes to War’. Even though Rushdie hardly explains the reasons for that war, it is clearly portrayed as a turning point. Rushdie’s depiction of the war with China does not condemn China’s aggression. Instead, he ridicules the self-delusions of the war-provoked patriotism by comparing it to Saleem’s sinus infection: ‘While parliamentarians poured out speeches about “Chinese aggression” and “the blood of our martyred jawans”, my eyes began to stream with tears; while the nation puffed itself up, convincing itself that the annihilation of the little yellow men was at hand, my sinuses, too, puffed up’ (MC 299). What follows is usually described as the utter and humiliating defeat of the Indian army. The fact that the midnight’s children lose the chance of making history due to their conference’s disintegration during the war with China reinforces the children’s intimate connection to the Nehruvian idea of the nation since this idea was seriously compromised by that war. Nehru had envisaged India to be a significant part of a new international order which would be empowering for Third World countries due to their policy of Non-Alignment and the close and peaceful cooperation of

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Asian countries. Despite the often negative assessment of the success of Nehru’s policies in Midnight’s Children, the text ultimately affirms his idea of India and mourns its weakening as the demise of the MCC is depicted as a sad event. In spite of the disintegration of the MCC, Saleem wants to believe that the unifying factors would have eventually prevailed: ‘I continued to believe – I continue now – that what-wehad-in-common would finally have outweighed what-drove-us-apart’ (MC 298). This tension between the centrifugal and centripetal forces in the idea of the nation is mirrored in Saleem’s style of narration. The narrative structure is an ambivalent re-enactment of the attempt to visualise the nation as a unified whole. Midnight’s Children’s ‘national’ narration entails that the novel includes a vast number of marginal characters, each of whom is depicted as playing a crucial part in the complex story of intertwined narrative strands. The novel’s dense, web-like structure mimics the idea of the nation where everyone is supposed to be integrated in the comradeship of nationhood. In order to tell the story of a nation, Midnight’s Children provides a big cast and intricately interconnected stories. Saleem fears most of all the fragmentation of his history and desperately tries to rein it in by stressing the need for a coherent narrative which will seamlessly connect the fragmentary nature of historical facts and the gaps in memory. This can be read as a parody of nationalist historiography’s strategy of providing a relatively harmonious and unified picture of the nation and its history. This seamless narrative of the nation is seen as ‘totalising’ and deeply flawed by subalternist historiography because it suppresses the ‘fragments’ of Indian society which do not easily ‘fall in line with the “mainstream” (Brahmanical Hindu, consumerist) national culture’ (Pandey 1991: 559). In privileging ‘the “fragmentary” point of view’, historians could resist ‘the drive for a shallow homogenisation’ and struggle ‘for other, potentially richer definitions of the “nation” and the future political community’ (Pandey 1991: 559). While Midnight’s Children clearly makes room for other perspectives apart from that of Saleem’s secular middle-class nationalism, it is also evident that the novel advocates the need for a coherent narrative so that its version of events can be comprehended at all. Fragmentary narration only appears to work up to a certain point as it cannot relinquish the prerogative of making sense. Saleem’s excessive self-reflexivity and his persistent presentation of alternative points of view draw attention to the difficulty of arriving


at coherence, which, nevertheless, does not make a coherent narrative dispensable. When Saleem makes mistakes, such as the misdating of Mahatma Gandhi’s death, this results in severe self-doubts and he questions the validity of his own narrative: ‘Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I’m prepared to distort everything – to re-write the whole history of my times in order to place myself in a central role?’ (MC 166). Gopal points out how similar traits in Nehru have been perceived as ambivalent: The fondness for ideas, taken with his attractive failings – the agonizing continually in public over all aspects of every question, the open-mindedness carried to excess, the over-developed democratic instinct to carry all shades of opinion with him, the civilized selfdoubt – have together clouded Nehru’s reputation as an administrator. (Gopal 1984: 299) Midnight’s Children also emphatically points out the limits of the striving for a seamless narrative. Saleem’s inclusive style of narration, which excessively emphasises coherence, is often suspected of sacrificing truth. Saleem explicitly and honestly points out that memory, as the basis of his history, underlies the laws of narrativity, but nevertheless relativises its status as truth: ‘I told you the truth,’ I say yet again. ‘Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.’ (MC 211) Thus excessive seamlessness and self-reflexivity can both undermine the narrative’s reliability in Midnight’s Children. Padma Mangroli, however, is a crucial instrument in terms of providing Saleem with credibility and investing his narrative with truth. In contrast to Shiva, Saleem does not really question the nationalist discourse of the nation but his narrative can, of course, always be dismissed as biased as he is part of the middle class who benefit from the unequal relations in the Indian state. This is where Padma crucially comes in by signifying the ‘popular’, which is appropriated by middle-class Saleem in order to gain credibility and authenticity. Partha Chatterjee argues


in The Nation and Its Fragments: The popular is [...] the timeless truth of the national culture, uncontaminated by colonial reason. In poetry, music, drama, painting, and now in film and the commercial arts of decorative design, this is the form in which a middle-class culture, constantly seeking to ‘nationalize’ itself, finds nourishment in the popular. (Chatterjee 1993: 73) Chatterjee does not use the term subaltern in relation to his description of the popular but the two terms overlap. This entails that the term ‘subaltern’ undergoes a radical metamorphosis with its integration of the – in this context – positive connotations of the ‘popular’. Saleem explicitly emphasises Padma’s illiteracy and lower class background as signs of the undiluted indigenous popular. As her popular or subaltern credentials are stressed, their usefulness for Saleem is pointed out: ‘Padma is leaking into me [...] with her down-to-earthery, and her paradoxical superstition, her contradictory love of the fabulous’ (MC 38). After Padma stormed out Saleem misses the authenticating subaltern blessing: ‘Padma would have believed me; but there is no Padma’ (MC 167). Thus the popular audience, Padma, helps shape the narrative, and Saleem tries ‘to use Padma’s muscles as my guides’ in reading her boredom or disbelief: ‘The dance of her musculature helps to keep me on the rails; because in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happens is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe ...’ (MC 270–1). But while Saleem uses Padma’s subalternity for his own purposes, he remains convinced of his own superiority and strategically uses his middle-classness in order to persuade Padma and Mary Braganza of his sanity and accountability: ‘call it education, or class-origin [...]. By my show of erudition and by the purity of my accents, I shamed them into feeling unworthy of judging me’ (MC 212). Padma can be read like an ironic demonstration of Chatterjee’s description of the popular: The popular enters hegemonic national discourse as a gendered category. In its immediate being, it is made to carry the negative marks of concrete sexualized femininity. Immediately, therefore, what is popular is unthinking, ignorant, superstitious, scheming, quarrelsome, and also potentially dangerous and uncontrollable. But with the mediation of enlightened leadership, its true essence is made to shine forth in its natural strength and beauty: its capacity


for resolute endurance and sacrifice and its ability to protect and nourish. (Chatterjee 1993: 73) Padma Mangroli is the woman as nurturer and comforter and her resolute and assiduous nature is stressed by Saleem. She only endangered Saleem by accidentally poisoning him with a herbal potion which was supposed to resurrect his ‘manhood’ (MC 193). Only in her contrite and self-castigating pose after the poison incident is she allowed a longer monologue, which stresses her devotion to Saleem: ‘Only believe, mister, how much I have your well-being at heart! [...] It was my own foolish pride and vanity, Saleem baba, from which cause I did run from you, although the job here is good, and you so much needing a looker-after. [...] So then I thought, how to go back to this man who will not love me and only does some foolish writery?’ (MC 192–3). Padma, however, also counteracts her authenticating function when she refuses to believe him and refers to his historiographical mission as ‘foolish writery’. For this reason, Saleem rarely lets her speak for herself. Furthermore, Saleem’s attempt at authenticating his version of the nation’s biography with the help of Padma’s approval is only partially successful. Saleem, in his role of mediator of ‘enlightened leadership’, has problems keeping Padma in her place. Chatterjee mentions that the ‘popular is also appropriated in a sanitized form, carefully erased of all marks of vulgarity, coarseness, localism, and sectarian identity’ (Chatterjee 1993: 73). Saleem, in contrast, emphasises these traits in order to keep this independent, strong woman under discursive control. He patronisingly points out her lower class behaviour and speech, portrays her as unbeautiful, describes her physically exhausting job, and associates her name with excrement: Padma – our plump Padma – is sulking magnificently. (She can’t read and, like all fish-lovers, dislikes other people knowing anything she doesn’t. Padma: strong, jolly, a consolation for my last days. But definitely a bitch-in-the-manger.) [...] she had been named after the lotus goddess, whose most common appellation among village folk is ‘The One Who Possesses Dung.’ (MC 24) However, her ‘sectarian identity’ is partly ‘erased’ as her being Hindu is only implied by her name and other hints.23 After the end of the Midnight Children’s Conference and the drainage of Saleem’s gift of telepathy in 1962, Saleem’s family moves to Pakistan, which is portrayed in nothing but bleak terms. The overall effect of

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Midnight’s Children’s depiction of Pakistan’s history is so thorough a condemnation that India, formerly critically depicted, can only benefit from the comparison. Before Saleem returns to Indira Gandhi’s preEmergency India in 1971, the two Indo-Pakistani wars are narrated from Saleem’s Pakistan-based location, which in itself gives clues as to who had the initiative in both wars. Similar to the portrayal of the war with China, Rushdie’s depiction of the Indo-Pakistani war in 1965 is equally bare of patriotism and refrains from apportioning blame to one side only. Uncharacteristically for any kind of historiography, it also refuses to make sense. Truth is not filtered out of the contradictory statements about the war by the Indian and Pakistani media, and an infinite number of lies ceases to be a prerogative of Pakistani news: ‘In the first five days of the war Voice of Pakistan announced the destruction of more aircraft than India had ever possessed; in eight days, All-India Radio massacred the Pakistani Army down to, and considerably beyond, the last man.’ (MC 339) The Indian and the Pakistani versions of the war are pitted against each other in Midnight’s Children, and Rushdie refuses to be the referee. The pages are full of question marks and Saleem’s own interpretation that ‘the hidden purpose of the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965 was nothing more nor less than the elimination of my benighted family from the face of the earth’ is only one more outrageous claim among many (MC 338). The period between 1965 and 1971 is swallowed by Saleem’s amnesia, which left him ‘emptied of history’, and only forms the prologue for the coming war which will end in the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 (MC 350). A detailed narration of the events leading to West-Pakistan’s attack on the East Wing (because it wanted to secede) is provided, and Rushdie emphasises the atrocities committed by the West-Pakistani army. When the scenes depicted are too horrible to contemplate, Saleem flees into the dream-like unreality of the Sundarbans jungle ‘which is so thick that history has hardly ever found a way in’ (MC 359). In the jungle Saleem is re-connected to his past by a snake-bite and he compulsively narrates his history: ‘it began to pour out of the buddha’s lips [...] unstoppably, because he was reclaiming everything, all of it, all lost histories’ (MC 364–5).24 The Pakistani episode in Saleem’s life – with its incestuous love for his sister, his predilection for the ancient prostitute Tai Bibi, his amnesiac sniffer man-dog existence and his ignominious involvement in the war – leave him cleansed of his Nehruvian elements. This makes room for Saleem’s growing resemblance with Indira Gandhi in his mission of nation-saving and his belief in conspiracy theories.


Indira is India From the moment Saleem arrives in India the narration leads to the other central historical event in Midnight’s Children besides Independence – the Emergency. This period is dominated by Indira Gandhi and her phantasmagorical shadow ‘the Widow,’ who haunt the last part of the novel. While Indira Gandhi’s two-year Emergency rule (1975–1977) is usually portrayed critically in Indian historiography (her sympathetic biographer Inder Malhotra entitles this chapter ‘Emergency: The Cardinal Sin’), Rushdie’s condemnation in Midnight’s Children is considerably more far-reaching.25 India’s involvement in the war between East-Pakistan and WestPakistan, which ended with West-Pakistan’s surrender after 14 days, marked the peak of Indira Gandhi’s popularity and India’s selfesteem as a regional superpower (Kaviraj 1986: 1701). However, in Midnight’s Children Indira Gandhi’s popularity is almost ignored and her seemingly unassailable position after the victory against Pakistan is only briefly referred to: ‘ “The Madam” was basking in the fullness of her glory. [...] On December 16th, 1971, I tumbled out of a basket into an India in which Mrs Gandhi’s New Congress Party held a more-than-two-thirds majority in the National Assembly’ (MC 385). Instead, Indira Gandhi’s centrality is initially portrayed indirectly as she actually occupies the position to which Saleem aspires after his return to India, when he is determined to become the saviour of the nation. As Saleem had echoed Nehru in his youth, Saleem now represents a parodic image of Indira Gandhi. Whereas Indira Gandhi holds a position of ‘centrality and dominance in the Indian political system that appeared to equal or even surpass that of her father’, Saleem is destitute and homeless but nevertheless mirrors Indira’s tendency to consider herself the sole saviour of India, without whom the country would be ruined (Brass 1994: 40): transformed by rage, I had also been overwhelmed by an agonizing feeling of sympathy for the country which was not only my twinin-birth but also joined to me (so to speak) at the hip, so that what happened to either of us, happened to us both. If I, snot-nosed stainfaced etcetera, had had a hard time of it, then so had she, my subcontinental twin sister; and now that I had given myself the right to choose a better future, I was resolved that the nation should share it, too. [...] I had already decided to save the country. (MC 385)

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It was a similar concern for the well-being of the nation that apparently led Indira Gandhi to disregard her unexpected legal conviction on the charge of minor campaign malpractices in 1975, which should have resulted in her stepping down from office as Prime Minister (Kaviraj 1986: 1703). Instead, according to an interview she gave in 1978, Indira Gandhi’s belief in her indispensability led to her declaration of a state of Emergency: After my judgement in 1975 [...] what could I have done except stay? You know the state the country was in. What would have happened if there had been nobody to lead it? I was the only person who could, you know. It was my duty to the country to stay, though I didn’t want to. (Moraes 1980: 220) Saleem’s belief that he is India’s Siamese twin is outstripped by the Congress slogan ‘Indira is India; India is Indira’, in which the nation and its leader are actually equated. This frequently quoted slogan was coined by the Congress President Dev Kant Barooah during the Emergency and Indira Gandhi’s biographers claim that she eventually came to believe this phrase (Gupte 1992: 436). This tendency of Indira Gandhi to ‘identify herself with the nation completely’ is often used as an explanation for her declaration of an Emergency as she tended to ‘look upon personal threats to her as the threats to the nation’ (Malhotra 1989: 170). Sudipta Kaviraj argues that the perceived indispensability of Indira Gandhi was the logical outcome of the use of populist rhetoric and ‘the systematic destruction of the party apparatus’ under Indira Gandhi’s leadership (Kaviraj 1986: 1699). In this new ‘electoral strategy’, the leadership of the Central Government was to ‘set up a direct relationship with the electorate’ which radically changed the structure of the Congress because it was depoliticised and filled with politicians who completely depended on the goodwill of Indira Gandhi because they lacked a power base (Kaviraj 1986: 1699). This centralisation inevitably led to a situation where ‘the Congress did not win elections for Indira Gandhi, she won them for the Congress’ (Kaviraj 1986: 1701). Ultimately, the myth of indispensability, coupled with the de-institutionalisation of the political landscape, turned into ‘real political indispensability’ (Kaviraj 1986: 1707). Kaviraj argues that the new populist style of Indira Gandhi created a momentum of its own in which the declaration of the Emergency was both structural, the expression of a deep crisis in Indian politics, but also contingent, as she was unwilling to step down from office and let go of power (Kaviraj 1986: 1703–4).


In Midnight’s Children the slogan ‘Indira is India’ is used to structure the narrative of the Emergency, which is dominated by Saleem’s rivalry with Indira Gandhi for the right to represent India. Saleem wants to realise his ‘ambitious project of nation-saving’ by enlisting his uncle Mustapha Aziz, ‘a senior Civil Servant’, as ‘patron [...] for my Messianic ambitions’ (MC 388). Mustapha is a caricature of the submissiveness and uncritical loyalty Indira Gandhi nurtured in the Civil Service and the Congress, which results in ‘his blind lap-dog devotion to every one of the Prime Minister’s acts. If Indira Gandhi had asked him to commit suicide, Mustapha Aziz would have ascribed it to antiMuslim bigotry but also defended the statesmanship of the request, and, naturally, performed the task without daring (or even wishing) to demur’ (MC 391). Saleem’s plan of ‘national salvation’ through institutional channels by ‘preferment in the Administration’ are thwarted by Mustapha’s unwillingness to take Saleem seriously and, consequently frustrated, Saleem gradually comes to perceive himself as Indira’s direct competitor (MC 389): [I] explained – with proper solemnity and humble but resolute gestures – my historic mission to rescue the nation from her fate; but he sighed deeply and said, [...] ‘Our country is in safe hands. Already Indiraji is making radical reforms – land reforms, tax structures, education, birth control – you can leave it to her and her sarkar.’ [...] My uncle’s rejection of my pleas for preferment had one grave effect: the more he praised his Indira, the more deeply I detested her. (MC 394–5) An atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia pervades this period in Midnight’s Children as Saleem feels encircled by those who want to prevent him from saving the nation. He suspects Mustapha of having betrayed him when he sees Indira Gandhi’s son Sanjay or his look-alike at his uncle’s house with a folder ‘saying TOP SECRET and also PROJECT M.C.C.’ (MC 395). Saleem’s fear of being conspired against echoes that of Indira Gandhi, who frequently reiterated that her internal and external enemies planned a ‘deep-laid conspiracy’ against her (Malhotra 1989: 175). After Mustapha throws him out, Saleem moves to the ghetto of the Communist magicians around Old Delhi’s Friday mosque; they are the novel’s new focus of promising potential as the official opposition is hardly referred to more positively than Indira Gandhi herself in Midnight’s Children. Their position as subversive outsiders is

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emphasised and hope is built up for a truly subaltern alternative to Indira’s regime: The magicians were Communists, almost to a man. That’s right: reds! Insurrectionists, public menaces, the scum of the earth [...] And let me say at once that no sooner had I discovered this that I, who had been raised in India’s other true faith, which we may term Businessism, [...] felt instantly and comfortingly at home. A renegade Businessist, I began zealously to turn red and then redder [...] so that now my mission of saving-the-country could be seen in a new light; more revolutionary methodologies suggested themselves. (MC 397) The magicians fulfil a similar role as the midnight’s children in the second part of the novel as the magicians represent the people, an overwhelming majority of whom are subaltern. There is a crucial difference, however, as the magicians are portrayed as representing the people rather than the nation as envisaged by the élite. The magicians specifically do not feel part of the myth of the unified nation since the bond of nationness is a difficult feeling to conjure up from the position of the despised outsider, especially if one believes in the existence of a relentless class struggle: Picture Singh had performed an act which was growing more political by the day. [...] While I, in my role as apprentice, read out a prepared harangue, serpents dramatized my speech. I spoke of gross inequities of wealth distribution; two cobras performed, in a dumbshow, the mime of a rich man refusing to give alms to a beggar. Police harassment, hunger disease illiteracy, were spoken of and also danced by serpents; and then Picture Singh, concluding his act, began to talk about the nature of the red revolution. (MC 413) Thus the concept of the nation is undermined in the text both by the claim that Indira Gandhi represents it and by fact that the magicians do not perceive themselves as part of it. It is particularly significant that the idea of the nation is belied by its failure to conform to the magicians’ perception of reality since it is their firm grasp of reality which is strongly emphasised: ‘Picture Singh and the magicians were people whose hold on reality was absolute; they gripped it so powerfully that they could bend it every which way in the service of their arts, but they never forgot what it was.’ (MC 399).


In the atmosphere of the magicians’ ghetto Saleem’s faith in saving the nation crumbles. Even though Saleem seems nearer to meaningful politics than ever before, he feels detached from Picture Singh’s interpretation. The gulf between subalterns and a (former) member of the élite is never entirely bridged and Saleem remains tainted by his middle- classness: something in me objected to Picture’s portrayal in snake-dance of the unrelieved vileness of the rich [...]. After which I began to see that the crime of Mary Pereira had detached me from two worlds, not one; that having been expelled from my uncle’s house I could never fully enter the world-according-to-Picture-Singh; that, in fact, my dream of saving the country was a thing of mirrors and smoke; insubstantial, the maunderings of a fool. (MC 413) The fact that Saleem joined the subaltern magicians seems at first to have brought his mirroring of the nation to some kind of climax as he is finally part of the subaltern majority, which should ideally be the heart of the nation. That this notion of the people being the equivalent of the nation is an illusion has already been partly revealed by Shiva, but now the disillusion appears complete. The magicians resemble the midnight’s children in being able to perform magic, albeit a magic of a non-miraculous kind, but despite their diminished magical potential they are nevertheless promising. For Saleem, Picture Singh in particular embodies optimism and he envisages him as the new saviour figure, comparable to the Delhi magician Mian Abdullah: Picture Singh spoke of a socialism which owed nothing to foreign influences. [...] and had the effect, on me, of convincing me that one day soon the snake-charmer Picture Singh would follow in the footsteps of Mian Abdullah so many years ago; that, like the legendary Hummingbird, he would leave the ghetto to shape the future by the sheer force of his will. (MC 399–400) However, like the Hummingbird and the midnight’s children, Picture Singh and the magicians fail to live up to those promises. They share the same problem of disunity as the midnight’s children and the left opposition in India: ‘The problems of the magicians’ ghetto were the problems of the Communist movement in India; within the confines of the colony could be found, in miniature, the many divisions and dissensions which

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racked the Party in the country’ (MC 399). Picture Singh, the ‘patriarch of the ghetto [...] could restore harmony to the squabbling factions’, but his integrity is called into question by the fact that he ‘was no lover of democracy’ (MC 400). And this distaste for democracy is crucial as it undermines the image of the saviour figure which Saleem is trying to create. This also critically foreshadows the lack of esteem for democracy which Indira Gandhi displays in announcing the Emergency. Kaviraj explains the puzzling speed with which Indira Gandhi faced her worst political crisis in 1975, only four years after her spectacular popularity in 1971, by the logic of her populist politics, which changed the nature of the legitimacy conferred on the government after elections (Kaviraj 1986: 1702). Whereas previously elections were supposed to give the voters’ verdict on the government’s long-term record, the electorate under Indira Gandhi were ‘asked to take sides on a highly simplified, dramatic, emotive and misleadingly rhetorical question [...] – like whether they wished to see poverty removed’ (Kaviraj 1986: 1702). Kaviraj argues that this led to an increasing volatility in politics as the government’s legitimacy gained by elections was characterised by its ‘short tenure’; voters were liable to suddenly withdraw their support as overwhelmingly as they had bestowed it (Kaviraj 1986: 1702). In Midnight’s Children the political shift from Indira Gandhi’s popularity after the war in 1971 to the crisis in 1975 remains unexplained in its suddenness. Instead, the growing public dissatisfaction is represented by the popular impression that Indira Gandhi’s style of government consists of corruption, ‘bribery’, and ‘poll-fixing in the state elections of Kashmir’ (MC 400). The political situation quickly deteriorates as public indignation with the government increases: ‘the country was getting angry’ (MC 412). The immediate pre-history of the Emergency is recounted in detail and both the portrayal of the government as well as that of the growing opposition movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan and Morarji Desai is unflattering: Jaya-Prakash Narayan led a coalition of students and workers against the governing Indira Congress; in Gujarat, there were riots, railway trains were burned, and Morarji Desai went on a fast-unto-death to bring down the corrupt government of the Congress [...] it goes without saying that he succeeded without being obliged to die. (MC 411–12) The significance of the Emergency in Midnight’s Children is reflected in the fact that its portrayal resembles that of the event of Independence.


Aadam’s birth is simultaneous with the declaration of the Emergency, echoing Saleem’s birth in the hour of India’s Independence. It takes the form of a breathless account of Parvati’s 13-day labour which lasts from Indira Gandhi’s conviction of campaign malpractices on 12 June 1975 to the imposition of a State of Emergency around midnight on 25 June. The sense of urgency and impending disaster is conveyed by Parvati’s horrendous labour and Saleem’s misgivings. Parvati and Indira are described as giving synchronous birth to Aadam and the Emergency. Interestingly, Indira Gandhi is portrayed as being almost forced to declare an Emergency by the acts of the opposition. However, it is clearly described as her personal emergency, not the nation’s emergency: while Parvati pushed in the ghetto, J.P. Narayan and Morarji Desai were also goading Indira Gandhi, while triplets yelled push push push the leaders of the Janata Morcha urged the police and Army to disobey the illegal orders of the disqualified Prime Minister, so in a sense they were forcing Mrs Gandhi to push, and as the night darkened towards the midnight hour, [...] triplets began to screech it’s coming coming coming, and elsewhere the Prime Minister was giving birth to a child of her own ... . (MC 418) Aadam inherits Saleem’s role of representing the ‘new India’, which begins with democracy being substituted by Indira’s dictatorship: the word Emergency was being heard for the first time, and suspension-of-civil rights, and censorship-of-the-press, and armouredunits-on-special-alert, and arrest-of-subversive-elements; something was ending, something was being born, and at the precise instance of the birth of the new India and the beginning of a continuous midnight which would not end for two long years, my son, the child of the renewed ticktock, came out into the world. (MC 419) Aadam is described as ‘the child of a time which reality damaged so badly that nobody ever managed to put it together again’ (MC 420), which is reflected in historiographical accounts of the Emergency, for example, in the contradictory information on the numbers of forcibly sterilised people.26 Following the account of the declaration of the Emergency in Midnight’s Children, Saleem significantly equates himself for the first time with the ‘State’ and not simply with the nation (MC 420). At the


same time, Saleem and Indira’s rivalry in representing India is explicitly addressed: Unpalatable, awkward questions: did Saleem’s dream of saving the nation leak, through the osmotic tissues of history, into the thoughts of the Prime Minister herself? Was my life-long belief in the equation between the State and myself transmuted, in ‘the Madam’s’ mind, into that in-those-days-famous phrase: India is Indira and Indira is India? Were we competitors for centrality – was she gripped by a lust for meaning as profound as my own – and was that, was that why ...? (MC 420) Saleem’s claim that he has hatched a ‘life-long belief in the equation between the State and myself’ is an astonishing statement and an apparently misleading one. If his statement were consistent with his previous identification with the nation, this would suggest an equivalence of nation and state. The relationship between nation and state has been a controversial topic in Indian historiography. Partha Chatterjee identifies the nature of the modern state as the origin of the problems of post-colonial India. He argues that even though the imagination of the nationalist élite during the anti-colonial struggle had autonomously created its own cultural community, the middle class had failed to project a post-colonial state form to match this imagined community: The result is that autonomous forms of imagination of the community were, and continue to be, overwhelmed and swamped by the history of the postcolonial state. Here lies the root of our postcolonial misery: not in our inability to think out new forms of the modern community but in our surrender to the old forms of the modern state. (Chatterjee 1993: 11) The state is described as having absorbed the imagined community, as ‘the unifying concept of “nation” ’ was envisaged ‘as concretely embodied in the state’ (Chatterjee 1993: 198).27 In Midnight’s Children, it seems that at the critical point of the beginning of the Emergency the image of the nation merges with the state. However, it does not seem to be portrayed as a de-masking of a fact that had existed all along as Chatterjee argues. In Midnight’s Children, this subsuming of the nation under the state is associated with Indira Gandhi and her Emergency regime and does not so much suggest a fundamental problematisation


of the modern state but the unaccountability of an authoritarian state apparatus after the suspension of democracy. Once Indira Gandhi appropriates the role of personifying the nation in her role as dictatorial commander of the state apparatus, Saleem’s discourse of mirroring the nation basically stops. This is the point when the national allegory centred around Saleem finally breaks down, even though the midnight’s children as a group still have an allegorical function in the novel. In Midnight’s Children, the secret purpose of the Emergency is the annihilation of the midnight’s children because they embody an idea of the Indian nation which is incompatible with that of Indira Gandhi: from her discredited perspective the children are ‘grotesque aberrational monsters of independence, for whom a modern nation-state could have neither time nor compassion’ (MC 434). At one level, the midnight’s children are tailored to act as the final condemnatory device against Indira Gandhi’s Emergency regime: ‘the purpose of the Midnight’s Children might be annihilation; that we would have no meaning until we were destroyed’ (MC 229). Rushdie distils Indira’s villainy in her destruction of hope and the device he uses is a merging of the forced sterilisations with the annihilation of India’s magic children in a procedure Saleem calls ‘Sperectomy: the draining-out of hope’ (MC 437). This medical-cum-metaphorical procedure involves the cutting out of the children’s reproductive organs, which are apparently also the location of their magical gifts with their association with fertility and creativity of all kinds. This crushing of hope, however, is also depicted as a self-betrayal of the Independence generation, Rushdie’s own generation, when guilt-ridden Saleem wonders: ‘do we not get the leaders we deserve?’ (MC 435). It is instructive to place Rushdie’s assessment of the Emergency in Midnight’s Children in the context of other narratives of the Emergency. Emma Tarlo’s book-length academic analysis of the Emergency is a rarity as it remains a ‘much mythologised but little studied’ episode in Indian history (Tarlo 2003: 2). She identifies two main ‘official’ narratives of the Emergency, neither of which was dominant for more than 21 months: the first narrative, disseminated by publications at the time, voices the official discourse which celebrates the Emergency as a necessary ‘step into a brighter future’ for the nation; the second narrative, evidence of which is concentrated in publications immediately following the event, condemns the Emergency as ‘bleak and shameful past’ (Tarlo 2003: 24).28 With the re-election of Indira Gandhi in 1980, the ‘official’ forgetting of the Emergency sets in: ‘As a moment of national shame, a blot on India’s democratic record, the Emergency has been

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built more as a moment for forgetting than as one for remembering’ (Tarlo 2003: 19). Midnight’s Children has clear characteristics of the second, post-Emergency narrative with its vilifying of Indira Gandhi as the annihilator of much of the optimism connected with her father’s vision of the Indian nation.29 The novel is also aware of the process of forgetting the Emergency and tries to stop the obliteration of its memory: ‘the Emergency was rapidly consigned to the oblivion of the past, and the magicians concentrated upon the present with the monomania of snails’ (MC 444). Emma Tarlo constructs an alternative narrative of the Emergency from official files and interviews with the urban poor who were displaced during it; her account complicates the simple assumption of the victimisation of the urban poor. She delineates the various ways with which the urban poor negotiated the situation under the Emergency; for example, by trading in sterilisation certificates which became indispensable at the time. The notorious ‘forced’ sterilisations were not cases of people being abducted and violently sterilised: ‘they submitted their own bodies for sterilisation, not out of choice nor, on the whole, for financial incentives, but rather in order to gain or retain access to basic civic amenities such as work, housing, hospital treatment and education’ (Tarlo 2003: 176). Midnight’s Children largely circumvents questions of the victimisation or partial collaboration of the urban poor with the state during the Emergency. It is after all not so much the actual sterilisations which count in Midnight’s Children but the destruction of an idea of India, which was embodied by the midnight’s children. This makes it possible for Rushdie to focus the opprobrium for the Emergency on Indira Gandhi rather than Sanjay Gandhi who is often described as causing his mother’s downfall by organising those episodes for which the period is most notorious: the violent slum clearances for reasons of city beautification and the sterilisation programme (Malhotra 1989: 176–81). In Midnight’s Children, in contrast, Sanjay Gandhi is a marginal figure; his mother is portrayed as being in control of the situation whereas ‘the Widow’s son arranged for his civicbeautification and vasectomy programmes to carry out a diversionary manoeuvre’ (MC 432).30 In contrast to the ‘official’ condemnatory narrative of the Emergency which celebrates the elections of 1977 as the victory of democracy, Midnight’s Children remains rather sceptical about the newly elected government. The unravelling of the Emergency and the election victory of the opposition, with Morarji Desai as the new Prime Minister in 1977, is portrayed without immediate hope for the political future: ‘I learned


how the tattered hopes of the nation had been placed in the custody of an ancient dotard who ate pistachios and cashews and daily took a glass of “his own water”. Urine-drinkers had come to power’ (MC 441). However, new hope is embodied by the second generation of children, fathered by the promiscuous Shiva: ‘Aadam was a member of a second generation of magical children who would grow up far tougher than the first’ (MC 447). Saleem’s son Aadam, the collective baby of the three most gifted midnight’s children, is contrasted with the previous children: We, the children of Independence, rushed wildly and too fast into our future; he, Emergency-born, will be is already more cautious, biding his time; but when he acts, he will be impossible to resist. Already, he is stronger, harder, more resolute than I [...]. Aadam Sinai, child of knees-and-nose, does not (as far as I can tell) surrender to dreams. (MC 425) While the resolution and determination of the second generation of children is emphasised, there is no indication that their concept of the nation will radically differ from that of the first generation. But Saleem’s prediction of their future implies that they will be more successful in fulfilling the potential of the Nehruvian nation with its promises of equality and democracy, than Saleem’s generation; the text ends optimistically when Aadam, ‘who will have to be a magician to cope with the world I’m leaving him’, says his first word: ‘Abracadabra’ (MC 459). At the end of the novel, when Saleem declares that he developed the art of the ‘chutnification of history’, it is obvious that despite his despair and self-doubts, Saleem has not given up on the possibility of re-writing the nation’s history (MC 459). His life’s final purpose is still perceived as giving the nation its memory back because – as he stated at the beginning – ‘[w]e are a nation of forgetters’ (MC 37): What is required for chutnification? [...] there are also my special blends, in which, thanks to the powers of my drained nasal passages, I am able to include memories, dreams, ideas, so that once they enter mass-production all who consume them will know what pepperpots achieved in Pakistan, or how it felt to be in the Sundarbans ... believe don’t believe but it’s true. Thirty jars stand upon a shelf, waiting to be unleashed upon the amnesiac nation. (MC 460) Chutnification is a form of hybridisation which provides cohesion while still emphasising the multiplicity of the ingredients: ‘The art is

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to change the flavour in degree, but not in kind; and above all (in my thirty jars and a jar) to give it shape and form – that is to say, meaning’ (MC 461). This chutnified biography of the nation in the form of Saleem’s autobiography is described as valid despite inevitable flaws: ‘I reach the end of my long-winded autobiography; in words and pickles, I have immortalized my memories, although distortions are inevitable in both methods’ (MC 459). This chapter has shown that Nehru’s idea of the nation, embodied in the young Saleem, is the novel’s dominant and privileged conception of India. Even though the shortcomings of Nehru’s politics are criticised in the text, his vision of India as a place ‘where all her children may dwell’ closely resembles Saleem’s history of a chutnified nation, which emphasises India’s diversity and hybridity. This is the reason why the text condemns Indira Gandhi’s Emergency as a betrayal of her father’s legacy, specifically when she annihilates the other personification of the Nehruvian nation, the children of midnight. Furthermore, Indira Gandhi’s representation of herself as the symbol of India questions the text’s figuration of the nation. But the concept of the nation is not only discredited in the novel by its abuse by Indira Gandhi but also by the disaffection of the magicians, who do not feel part of the comradeship of nationhood. Yet when the concept of the nation is depicted as failing its people as represented by the subaltern magicians, the novel deflects a more probing critique of the idea of the nation by focusing on the scandal of the Emergency and the annihilation of the midnight children’s magic. Thus the impression is created that Indira Gandhi is principally responsible for the failings of the nation-state and the disillusionment of the Nehruvian idea of India. On the other hand, Saleem’s chutnified biography of India counterbalances the discrediting of the myth of the nation during Indira Gandhi’s regime. At the end the chutnified nation is still the ideal in Midnight’s Children but it has lost the innocence which it had still (ambivalently) possessed in the Nehru era. The idea of the children as a unifying factor persists in Shiva’s numerous offspring; the idea of the nation they embody, however, can no longer be taken for granted and needs re-negotiating. This re-negotiation needs to include more ‘fragments of the nation’ than before. In Midnight’s Children there is a constant tension between unifying and disintegrating forces in the nation’s narrative, forces which mirror the varying imaginative strengths of the collective dream of the nation. It is not clear at the end of Midnight’s Children whether a precarious balance can be maintained. However, the absurdity of any history


which pretends to provide the nation’s self-evident ‘autobiography’ is exposed and Saleem’s version of the nation’s biography is emphatically presented as only one contestable version among many. Nationalist historiography has lost its persuasiveness; in particular, the exclusion of subalterns in nationalist historiography is disclosed as a major flaw. But the subalternist historians’ criticism of nationalist historiography is not unambiguously endorsed by the novel either. Midnight’s Children is not as radical in its critique of Indian nationalism’s achievements in terms of nation-building as the subalternist historian Ranajit Guha who claims that the Indian nation failed to ‘come to its own’ (Guha 1988b: 43); after all the midnight’s children embody the success of this collective endeavour as well as its failings. Nor does the novel unequivocally affirm subalternist historiography’s privileging of the perspective of the subaltern. Hope is often associated with subaltern figures such as Mian Abdullah and Picture Singh but these expectations never come to anything. The novel emphasises the middle-classness of Saleem’s perspective but does not discount it as invalid in contrast to a more ‘authentic’ subaltern one. In his egocentric version of national history, Saleem decides to provide closure by predicting his death on his 31st birthday. Saleem chooses a spectacular ending as he envisages himself falling apart and being ground to dust particles, whose number will match the population of India: ‘I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious dust.’ (MC 37) Now that his link to the biography of the nation is severed, Saleem loses his purpose and unifying function and disintegrates, to be re-absorbed by India.

2 Wives, Widows, and Witches

In nationalist discourse Indian women were invested with the role of representing the essence of Indian culture and the core of the authentically Indian nation. In this chapter, I will explore how the female characters in Midnight’s Children reflect this elevated status and how far they conform to the nationalist ideal of the Indian woman. I will compare Rushdie’s strategies of depicting women and their compliance with or resistance to patriarchal structures to the approaches of Indian feminist historiography. Feminist historiography holds a critical distance in relation to both imperialist and nationalist historiography and this is also Rushdie’s approach. As the previous chapter demonstrates, Midnight’s Children is conceived within the parameters of the nationalist version of Indian history but also criticises its shortcomings, specifically the exclusion of subaltern groups. Here I will examine the novel’s representation of how the nation accommodates its women. Feminist historiography delineates how the nationalist construct of the Indian woman took shape and how it has influenced real women. I will use its findings to interpret the novel’s portrayal of female character, which often appears contradictory and ambiguous. Feminist historiography made its presence felt in the 1980s in India. Sumit Sarkar admits in his 1989 preface to the second edition of his Modern India 1885–1947 (1983) that the ‘whole problem of gender is in fact virtually missing from my book: a very major gap, indeed’ (Sarkar 1989: xxii). Feminist historiography overturns ‘many received categories, periodizations and accounts of Indian history’ and draws attention to women’s near invisibility in previous historiography: The value of feminist critiques is indicated very vividly by my own blind-spot in 1980. It seems obvious enough now, for instance, 56

Wives, Widows, and Witches 57

but was not so only seven years back, that I could have explored fairly easily certain parallels in the dialectic of extension/control by middle- class nationalism over not only plebeian or subaltern groups, but also women. (Sarkar 1989: xxii) Writing women into history is, however, not always a straightforward process. Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak comments on Subaltern Studies’ scrupulousness in ‘its consideration towards women’ but notes critically that this consideration does not go far enough: ‘a feminist historian of the subaltern must raise the question of woman as structural rather than marginal issue’ (Spivak 1988: 26 & 30). The analysis of the question of woman as a structural issue remains contested, since it is a question which constantly demands re-negotiating. For reasons of space I will not give an outline here of controversies in Indian feminist historiography but I need to draw attention to the fact that when I refer to feminist historiography this is by no means a monolithic phenomenon. In Midnight’s Children, the question of woman and her national role is a central concern. Thus in the first part of this chapter I will outline the nationalist construct of the Indian woman, which was an ideal primarily directed at middle-class women. I will examine how Naseem and Mumtaz/Amina navigate the space nationalist discourse allocates them as modern women who nevertheless function as the guardians of Indian traditions and culture. In the second part, I want to explore the theme of monstrosity that runs through the depiction of the female characters in Midnight’s Children, as the narrator Saleem feels victimised by the nation’s fearsome and overpowering women. The chapter’s third section analyses how the theme of female monstrosity culminates in the portrayal of Indira Gandhi as the witch-like Widow who seeks to destroy both the midnight’s children and the idea of nation they represent. I will explore the function of the novel’s misogyny, which is often too easily interpreted as a shortcoming on Rushdie’s part rather than as a conscious and multi-layered strategy.1

The nation’s script for its middle-class wives The nationalist image of the middle-class Indian woman is often perceived as a product of the middle-class negotiation of an alien modernity with which they were confronted by colonialists who were secure in the knowledge of being superior to the native culture in every respect (Chatterjee 1993: 117–21). British rule over India was legitimised by


the portrayal of the abject state of Indian womanhood which, in the terms of imperialist discourse, made a colonial intervention indispensable. Downtrodden Indian women were used as proof of Indian civilisation’s depravity and Indian men’s inability to look after both themselves, and more particularly, their womenfolk, who were depicted as being in desperate need of British protection.2 The woman’s question appeared to dominate social reform efforts in the nineteenth century when campaigns against customs like widow immolation were launched by Indian reformers such as Rammohan Roy (Chatterjee 1993: 116). However, towards the end of the nineteenth century, such issues of social reform were marginalised by the national question (Amin 1996: 30–1). At the same time public opinion appeared to harden against interference with Indian customs and traditions by the colonial state (Sarkar 1995: 98–9). Partha Chatterjee argues that this was not a sign of cultural conservatism but the corollary of the nationalist resolution of the woman’s question (Chatterjee 1993: 121). As mentioned in the previous chapter, Chatterjee argues that nationalist discourse made a distinction between an inner, spiritual domain of the nation and an outer, material domain. In the material sphere, the West was superior but in the spiritual sphere, the East far surpassed the West. The outer/ inner domain corresponded to the division of the home and the world – ghar and bahir. Whereas the world was the domain of the men who had to imitate the scientific and technological advance of the West and its rational and ‘modern methods of statecraft’, the home was the truly Indian domain where women preserved the ‘self-identity of national culture’ (Chatterjee 1993: 120). The household became the ‘embryonic nation’ (Sarkar 2001: 43). Any interference by the colonial state in this inner sphere was perceived as ‘tantamount to annihilation of one’s very identity’ (Chatterjee 1993: 121). As noted earlier, Chatterjee sees Indian nationalism’s creativity as displayed in this inner domain which was characterised by its difference from Western models. One such creative construct was the model of the ‘new woman’ who was modern but in an Indian rather than a Western memsahib-aping way (Chatterjee 1993: 127). Education was crucial for the new woman so that she could become a better home-maker, an able educator of her children and her husband’s fit partner in modernity (Shukla 1991: 63). This remoulding of middle-class women was a contradictory, ambivalent and heterogeneous project as women had simultaneously to be defined against lower class and lower caste women, Westernised women and uneducated middle-class women while preserving the essence of tradition, virtue and Indianness (Chatterjee 1993: 127).


Purdah, or the seclusion of women, was a central aspect of the woman’s question (Lateef 1990: 76–81). Imperialist discourse portrayed purdah as yet another instance of female subjection, symbolising the inferior status of Indian civilisation. European travel literature dwelled on ‘exotic’ Indian customs such as purdah and assumed that Indian women ‘would eagerly welcome the removal of the yoke of purdah’ (Jeffrey 1979: 1). In nationalist discourse, purdah was slowly redefined as the new woman had to have access to education and knowledge of the outside world. The physical boundary of the home came to be displaced by norms of suitable feminine behaviour which were clearly demarcated from norms of male conduct (Chatterjee 1993: 130). The new woman could safely venture outside as long as she displayed the ‘signs of her femininity’ in her dress, religiosity and demeanour, which demonstrated that she had internalised the norms of the ‘new patriarchy’, which was ‘reformed, reconstructed, fortified against charges of barbarism and irrationality’ (Chatterjee 1993: 127–30). Women often welcomed the space this new reformed patriarchy opened for them and ‘keenly propagated the nationalist idea of the “new woman” ’ (Chatterjee 1993: 129). Because of the imperial context, women’s liberation could not be defined against Indian men as upholders of patriarchal practices because women shared the nationalist aspiration of Indian men.3 Rushdie’s treatment of Indian women’s coming out of purdah has to negotiate this contested site of conflicting interpretations and evaluations of what women’s ‘liberation’ entails. Midnight’s Children begins with a scenario in which women want to be in purdah. The fact that coming out of purdah is not described as liberation can be read as an attempt not to feed the imperialist discourse of native women suffering from oppressive despotic customs. In Midnight’s Children it is a native woman who first initiates the exit from purdah but she does not perceive this as an act of emancipation. Aadam Aziz’s anonymous mother is almost exclusively associated with her revolutionary act of breaking out of ‘tradition’ for the sake of her son’s medical education in Europe: This mother, who had spent her life housebound, in purdah, had suddenly found enormous strength and gone out to run the small gemstone business [...]; so he returned to find the seemingly immutable order of his family turned upside down, his mother going out to work while his father sat hidden behind the veil which the stroke had dropped over his brain. (MC 12)

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Her defiant act refuses to be slotted into a narrative of a liberating transition to modernity as she reacts with festering boils to this unaccustomed exposure, which prove incurable as they are a product of her ‘embarrassment’ of being stared at by strange men (MC 19). Aadam’s mother’s troubled coming out of purdah is juxtaposed with Aadam and Naseem’s wooing behind the veil, which at first seems to conjure up romanticised images of veiled exotic women. Naseem is Aadam’s first patient after his return from his medical studies in Heidelberg. Because she is in purdah, however, he can only examine her part by part through a hole in a sheet. He is tantalised by the ‘phantasm of a partitioned woman’ and tries to reassemble her in his mind into a ‘badly-fitting collage of her severally-inspected parts’ (MC 25). However, in the case of Naseem behind the perforated sheet, the piecemeal unveiling both mocks the erotic pleasures of imagining the forbidden and in hindsight proves fraudulent as it promised more than it could eventually deliver. Purdah in this scenario stands more for (self-)deception than women’s oppression. From the very beginning, Midnight’s Children’s depiction of women in purdah resists simplifying this complex issue in which women’s wishes may not correspond to narratives of liberation scripted by benevolent men. In Naseem’s eventual emergence from purdah, Midnight’s Children directly refers to a central strand of the nationalist woman’s question, namely the fashioning of the middle-class wife into a modern ‘companionate’ partner (Sangari & Vaid 1990: 19–20). Aadam Aziz attempts to remould Naseem into a modern wife while at the same time wanting to manage the parameters of that transition in order to give himself a semblance of control over his own entrance into modernity and nationalism. Naseem, however, resists Aadam’s efforts at social engineering as he tries in patriarchal fashion to model her into something he cannot himself live up to. Aadam who had just realised in Amritsar, reading the hartal pamphlet, that he ‘does not feel Indian’, demands that Naseem ‘ “Forget about being a good Kashmiri girl. Start thinking about being a modern Indian woman” ’ (MC 33–4). This apparently ‘progressive’ piece of advice is framed not only by Aadam’s own ambivalent feelings towards panIndian nationalism, but also by his violent and unreasonable behaviour when he nearly burns down the hotel by incinerating Naseem’s purdah-veils in the wastepaper basket. He thus forces his wife out of purdah without leaving any room for her to have a say. Naseem, however, refuses to glide smoothly into the nationalist narrative of women leaving purdah in order to represent the modern feminine


face of the Indian nation. The marital estrangement had already set in after Aadam had asked Naseem to ‘move a little’ during sex which she, horrified, refused on the grounds of it being a corrupting westernised practice or worse: She shrieked in horror. ‘My God, what have I married? I know you Europe-returned men. You find terrible women and then you try to make to make us girls be like them! Listen, Doctor Sahib, husband or no husband, I am not any ... bad word women.’ (MC 33–4) This sexual mismatch provides the crucial element of their marriage’s decline: ‘This was a battle my grandfather never won; and it set the tone for their marriage, which rapidly developed into a place of frequent and devastating warfare’ (MC 34). The text’s portrayal of Naseem serves the purpose of resisting a neat resolution of an individual woman’s entry into the national role which was constructed and propagated by nationalist discourse. The fact that her emancipation from purdah is partly triggered off by sexual frustration on Aadam’s part further complicates matters. Giving the Amritsar episode such a pronounced position in Midnight’s Children is in accordance with its honourable position in nationalist historiography, whereas Midnight’s Children’s parody of the discourse of women’s emancipation for the sake of the nation counteracts this nationalist ethos. Both Midnight’s Children and feminist historiography seek to open up spaces where complex and contradictory histories can be delineated without having to be encapsulated in a teleological narrative of continually advancing emancipation and freedom. Women’s education was a central aspect of the nineteenth-century reform movement and crucial for women’s entry into middle-class respectability and wifely companionship (Karlekar 1986: 29). Naseem is aware of her lack of education in comparison to her husband and resents the position of inferiority in which it places her. When she wants to live up to the image of the supportive and loving wife who nurses her apparently wounded and blood-stained husband while gently scolding him for his unwise behaviour, she is stopped in mid-track by Aadam informing her that it is Mercurochrome, not blood which she is treating. Naseem feels humiliated: ‘Naseem – who had become a whirlwind of activity, seizing clothes, running taps – freezes. “You do it on purpose,” she says, “to make me look stupid. I am not stupid. I have read several books” ’ (MC 35). After the Amritsar massacre, she explicitly makes an effort to be the ‘modern woman’ he wants her


to be and ignores the red stains on his clothes but she gets it wrong again: When my grandfather got home that night, my grandmother was trying hard to be a modern woman, to please him, and so she did not turn a hair at his appearance. ‘I see you’ve been spilling the Mercurochrome again, clumsy,’ she said, appeasingly. ‘It’s blood,’ he replied, and she fainted. (MC 36) Twenty-three years later, in 1942, Naseem’s difficult and hazardous entry into modernity has evidently taken its toll. Naseem has developed into Reverend Mother, but despite her new title, her status as wife and the marital warfare with her husband are the foci rather than her motherhood. Elevation of women as mothers was the central strategy to glorify women’s role in nationalist discourse (Amin 1996: 91–3). In Midnight’s Children, however, motherhood is rarely discussed as such, and women’s roles as wives and sexual partners are foregrounded. But it is presumably from her status as mother rather than the role of dutiful wife that Naseem draws her legitimacy and power. The domestic domain was the realm ordained for the middle-class wife, where she worked for the good of the nation by educating her children well and managing a clean, hygienic and efficient household (Bannerji 1991: 51). Naseem takes full possession of this realm and tries to use the enabling elements in the socially sanctioned new woman’s role to stake out a space for herself. However, her appropriation of the domestic realm is a distortion of the nationalist agenda as she uses this space to grow into a powerful, ruthless matriarch instead of the long-suffering, selfsacrificing good Indian wife which nationalist discourse envisaged. In fact it is her husband and her children who suffer under her dominating and implacable regime. The nation’s progress is of no concern to her and she resents Aadam’s nationalist activities. Yet her strategies are also partially self-defeating. The sympathies of Saleem and the text are clearly on Adam Aziz’s side but an understanding of Naseem’s motives is not entirely lacking: She had become a prematurely old, wide woman, with two enormous moles like witch’s nipples on her face; and she lived within an invisible fortress of her own making, an ironclad citadel of traditions and certainties. [...] It was perhaps the obligation of facial nudity, coupled with Aziz’s constant requests for her to move beneath him, that had driven her to the barricades; and the domestic rules she


established were a system of self-defence so impregnable that Aziz [...] had more or less given up trying to storm her many ravelins and bastions, leaving her, like a large smug spider, to rule her chosen domain. (Perhaps, too, it wasn’t a system of self-defence at all, but a means of defence against her self). (MC 40–1) Her ‘moles like witch’s nipples’ are so frequently referred to in the narrative which follows as to virtually become her defining characteristic, foreshadowing her future awe-inspiring matriarchal status which is coupled with frightening potential. However, in her present state she is mainly deeply unhappy, portrayed as lacking an identity outside her domestic role and bewildered by the rapidly changing world around her: I don’t know how my grandmother came to adopt the term whatsitsname as her leitmotif, but as the years passed it invaded her sentences more and more often. I like to think of it as an unconscious cry for help ... as a seriously-meant question. Reverend Mother was giving us a hint that, for all her presence and bulk, she was adrift in the universe. She didn’t know, you see, what it was called. (MC 41) Yet she refuses to be the victim and turns into a domestic tyrant, and the text does not punish her for her ‘unwifely’ behaviour but allows her to develop her dominance to an alarming degree. The overwhelming support of women for the national movement is often credited to Mahatma Gandhi’s legitimation of their neglect of their domestic duties for the good of the nation and his encouragement of their engagement in activities such as picketing of foreign cloth shops and liquor stores (Kishwar 1985: 1696 & 1757–8). Gandhi idealised Indian women’s capacity for self-sacrifice which he urged the nation’s men to emulate (Kishwar 1985: 1693).4 While feminist historians are critical of the space Gandhi opened up for women because it affirmed the essentialist nationalist image of woman and her predominantly domestic role, it is nevertheless acknowledged that he enabled women’s unprecedented involvement in the nationalist movement (Katrak 1992: 397–401). In Midnight’s Children the Gandhian national movement is not given the pre-eminent role it has in nationalist historiography, and the major battles are displaced from the political to the domestic sphere, which can be read as an affirmation of Chatterjee’s elevation of the inner, feminine sphere of the home as the place where Indian nationalism creatively imagined the parameters of the community of the nation

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(Chatterjee 1993: 6). According to the nationalist script, however, this was not meant to be such a conflict-ridden process. Midnight’s Children describes two major contests in the Aziz household: the ‘war of starvation’ and the ‘war of silence’. Both conflicts have ironic Gandhian overtones as he used hunger-strikes and regularly purified himself by means of vows of silence. Both strategies are appropriated by the couple Aziz in their struggle to define the parameters of their family community. The ‘war of starvation’ is waged over the children’s religious education, to which Aadam objects because it ‘was teaching them to hate’ (MC 42–3). Reverend Mother is unwilling to appreciate the need for religious tolerance for the good of the secular nation and starves her husband almost to death, refusing to fulfil her female nurturing role; he, equally stubbornly, refuses to eat outside the home. Naseem pits her traditions against Aadam’s modernity. This does not, however, contradict the nationalist script for middle-class wives as they are ordained with the role of guardian of religion and tradition, factors which epitomised India’s superiority towards the West. The good Indian wife is, however, not supposed to have recourse to the violent measures for the preservation of Indian spirituality, as Naseem does, since they seem to exceed her role as guardian of Indian culture. Gayatri Spivak argues that even middle-class women can claim subaltern status in India because they are silenced: ‘woman’s interception of the claim to subalternity can be staked out across strict lines of definition by virtue of their muting by heterogeneous circumstances’ (Spivak 1999: 308). Reverend Mother has the tendency to turn weakness into at least a semblance of strength when she wages her war of silence. It is triggered by Aadam’s refusal to give reasonable arguments for granting Nadir Khan refuge in their hidden underground chambers when he simply bellows in patriarchal fashion: ‘ “Be silent woman!” ’ (MC 53). Naseem’s ensuing implacable silence lasts for three years. Her ‘deafening wall of soundlessness’ constitutes a parodic obedience towards her husband’s command and makes a mockery of the self-effacing subservience a good wife is supposed to display (MC 53). Her words may not carry the weight of those of her husband but her aggressive silence is effective enough to make both of their lives unbearable. What kind of tradition, however, does Naseem invoke against her husband’s modernity? Does she display a ‘traditional’ traditionalism or is her concept of tradition a modern ‘invented’ one (Hobsbawm 1983: 1–2)? Lata Mani argues that what is perceived as time-honoured tradition was often partially created or ‘reconstituted’ in the nineteenth century (Mani 1990: 90). Mani analyses the discourse on widow immolation


in the first half of the nineteenth century and concludes that this discourse is ‘a modern discourse on tradition’, produced by colonial administrators and native reformers who use scriptural interpretations in novel ways (Mani 1990: 116). The reformers’ aim is to go back to an allegedly ancient tradition, purified of distortions that developed over time; so ‘both “tradition” and “modernity” as we know them are contemporaneously produced’ (Mani 1990: 116). It is not always straightforward to separate clearly traditional traditions from invented ones and with Naseem’s ‘traditions’ this is evidently the case. She knows she has to compromise her religiosity, as Aadam always appears to have the final say in such matters despite her protests. Consequently, it is only after his death that she can realise her own dream of running a petrol pump in the more god-fearing country of Pakistan. In her middle-class nuclear family with her nationalist husband, her traditions are inevitably redefined by the exigencies of modernity and she has to use the idiom of modernity in order to define her own ways. As already mentioned, this does not necessarily jar with the nationalist discourse of women’s roles as the guardians of culture, even though her methods are rather unfeminine and her explicit opposition towards her husband is not sanctioned by nationalism. Naseem clearly perceives modernity as the enemy which brings ruin to her family, as in the case of the beginning of the love affair between her daughter Mumtaz and Nadir Khan: something steely had entered Reverend Mother; and she resolved to do nothing, to keep her silence intact, and let Aadam Aziz discover just how badly his modern ideas were ruining his children – let him find out for himself, after his lifetime of telling her to be quiet with her decent old-fashioned notions. (MC 56) Reverend Mother only breaks her silence when it is discovered that Mumtaz is still a virgin two years after her marriage with Nadir Khan because of his impotence. Naseem unleashes a hate-filled invective against her husband’s approval of that marriage on the basis of his ‘fancy foreign ideas’ (MC 61). Uma Parameswaran argues that none of Midnight’s Children’s female characters ‘rebels at the traditional role of the male as the ultimate authority in a household’ (Parameswaran 1988: 20). But this is exactly what Naseem does and her reference to honourable tradition is her weapon of choice as she knows that she cannot score on the territory of modernity since her husband commands this discourse more expertly than she ever could. It is, however, a simplification to interpret Naseem as personifying ‘reactionary traditionalism’

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since the complex discourses surrounding the role of the nation’s wives rules out such a clear-cut conclusion because the traditional and the modern are inextricably intertwined in the Indian middle-class project of modernity (Hogan 2001: 530).5 In stark contrast to Naseem, Rushdie created with Mumtaz/Amina a woman who strives desperately hard to be the quintessentially dutiful wife but nevertheless falls short of the expectations associated with that role. After her divorce from Nadir Khan, Mumtaz marries Ahmed Sinai, who re-names her Amina as if to cleanse her from her former marriage and reclaim her as virgin territory for himself. Amina and Ahmed Sinai are the main married couple in Midnight’s Children; even though their parenthood makes them central in Midnight’s Children, it is their marital relationship which is in primary focus. While Aadam Aziz’s perspective is always emphasised above that of his wife Naseem, it is Amina’s perspective we are more familiar and sympathetic with than that of Ahmed. The desirability of this loveless marriage and Amina’s onesided marital mission is persistently questioned: ‘Why had she married him? – For solace, for children. [...] in my mother’s opinion, a husband deserved unquestioning loyalty, and unreserved, full-hearted love. [...] And so, bringing her gift of assiduity to bear, she began to train herself to love him’ (MC 68). In her effort to fall in love with Ahmed ‘bit by bit’ she fools herself as she pretends to fall in love with nasty habits and unattractive physical traits (MC 68). It may be Amina who is successful in changing Ahmed into at least the physical equivalent of Nadir Khan, and this may give the impression that she is the secretly dominant partner. However, he does not need to make an effort to mould her into the image of perfect wife as she has already internalised it and tries her best to live up to it. The near-impossibility of this project is appreciated by the narrator who calls it ‘her Herculean task’ (MC 69). Midnight’s Children depicts it as almost inevitable that Amina’s desire to follow the nationalist script for dutiful wives transforms her nature and makes her resemble her mother as she embraces essential Indianness by means of clinging to tradition. This process begins when the Sinais move to Methwold’s estate. In contrast to Ahmed, Amina is ‘naturally’ not so easily taken in by Methwold because she fulfils the Indian woman’s role as the natural repository of culture which is supposed to make her resistant to the mimicry of the West. According to the division of spheres, Indian men go on the mission of mimicking Western ways in the knowledge that their women will look after the culture and keep their children Indianised. In order to remain unaffected by ‘the subtle magic of Methwold’s Estate’, Amina has to pay the price of


becoming more like her mother (MC 100). The tradition Amina holds on to, however, is the dubious one of believing in the seer Ramram Seth’s prophecy: the supernatural conceits of Naseem Aziz had begun to influence her thoughts and behaviour [...]. ‘Even if we’re sitting in the middle of all this English garbage,’ my mother was beginning to think, ‘this is still India, and people like Ramram Seth know what they know.’ In this way the scepticism of her beloved father was replaced by the credulity of my grandmother. (MC 100) This could be an example of Amina acting in accordance with the nationalist precepts of defending superior Indian spirituality against the encroachments of Western decadent modernity into the sacredness of the Indian home, if it were not for her championing of Indian superstition, against which nationalist discourse clearly defined the newly reformed Indian traditions (Chatterjee 1993: 143–4). Following the nation’s script is portrayed as a tricky business.6 Amina’s desire to live up to the image of the model wife is ultimately portrayed as grinding her down and breaking her spirit. She cannot help but transgress the norms of the national role of the middle-class wife. When she takes the initiative to save her family’s fortunes by gambling and winning miraculous sums with which to bribe judges so that they revoke the freeze on Ahmed’s property, she feels ‘consumed by sin’ as she clearly oversteps her role of companionate partner and neglects religious precepts since gambling is forbidden for Muslims (MC 140). Amina’s defining epithet is her guilt: ‘Looking back at her now, it seems to me that a fog of guilt had begun to form around her head [...] – there were days when you could hardly see the head above her neck!’ (MC 158). The root of her all-consuming guilt is located in her affair with Nadir Khan, in which for the first time she subordinates her family’s interests to her own happiness. Saleem succeeds in breaking up Amina’s relationship with Nadir but at a high cost since from then on she is only a shadow of her former self: ‘she began to shrink’ (MC 265). When Amina leaves Ahmed temporarily because his behaviour becomes intolerable, she declines further as she perceives herself as having no function in life without a husband: ‘Deprived of two husbands, she was also deprived (in her own eyes) of meaning’ (MC 287). Midnight’s Children portrays two contrasting strategies of responding to the nationalist image of the model Indian wife. Amina is the only female character who is portrayed as persistently trying to follow

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the nationalist script for middle-class women and in doing so provides a contrast to the other less scrupulous women, who are, however, far more resilient than she is. Consequently Midnight’s Children depicts as rather undesirable any attempt by women to correspond to an image in which nationalist concerns are inextricably interwoven with patriarchal interests. Of all the female characters in the pre-Independence part of the novel, it is Naseem who dominates this era. Her characteristic feature is her unwillingness to live up to the nationalist script for Indian women as she has no inclination for sacrificing herself for the nation and her family. Her fearsome status grows after Independence, as does that of most women in Midnight’s Children. From more or less willing partners in the national project, they appear transformed after Independence as they increasingly display monstrous traits.

The nation at the mercy of its monstrous women With Independence, the nation’s organised middle-class women expected the independent state to provide them with constitutional and legal equality. One milestone in securing this equality was the Hindu Code Bill, which was passed, however, only after vehement debate and opposition in a series of enactments in the 1950s, while the Muslim Personal Law remained untouched in order not to further alienate the Muslim community after the traumatic experience of the communal violence during Partition (Jain & Mahan 1996b: 227–8). Nehru is criticised by feminist historians for having failed to follow up his ‘sincerity towards the feminist cause’ with more efforts to ‘interweave women and women’s issues into the mainstream of national endeavour’ (Jain & Mahan 1996b: 231). When women’s actual situation was investigated by a committee appointed by the government in the early 1970s, its conclusions published in 1974, the verdict was very negative (Forbes 1998: 226–7). Towards Equality: Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India demonstrated that women’s status ‘had not improved but had, in fact, declined since Independence’ (Forbes 1998: 227). Another commentator noted that the ‘report was an eyeopener, [and] its detailed analysis [a powerful and effective] indictment of the nation’s priorities in its first quarter century’ (Tharu & Lalita 1995b: 101). Whereas much feminist research concentrates on disclosing women’s disadvantaged position, Midnight’s Children takes a very different path. In Midnight’s Children Saleem does not perceive women as victimised but portrays himself as victimised by women. Since Saleem depicts his fate as ‘handcuffed’ to that of the nation, it is


not surprising that Saleem’s perceived victimisation by women results in their portrayal as a national menace (MC 9). The independent nation’s women in Midnight’s Children appear to mistake the nation’s independence with their own as the alarmed Saleem realises. The nationalist ideal of Indian womanhood is undermined by the nation’s women’s apparent unwillingness to respond to it. One of the first signs of this spirit of subversive independence is the breakdown of wifely virtues, as evinced by the proportion of Midnight’s Children’s wives who go astray and choose sexual partners who are not their husbands. Kanaganayakam identifies unfaithful wives as a ‘recurrent motif’ in the novel: Amina, Vanita, Pia, Lila, and Shiva’s partners have adulterous relationships (Kanaganayakam 1987: 96). Chastity, however, is the central virtue of the Indian woman as constructed by nationalist discourse. The exceptional chastity of Indian women has been perceived to be an essential part of India’s ancient tradition, as exemplified by the characters of Sita of the Ramayana and Draupadi of the Mahabharata (Majumdar 1953: 24–5). More problematical folk traditions which, for example, centred on a ‘bawdy’ Krishna, or literature that emphasised women’s extramarital sexual initiative and pleasure in the form of Radha, had to be suppressed and excised from the middle-class nationalist self-image.7 In Midnight’s Children Amina is at the centre of the text’s theme of scandalous female infidelity which begins when she receives Ramram Seth’s prophecy. Saleem suspects his mother of impure feelings towards the seer (who resembles Nadir Khan) and becomes obsessed with his mother’s wifely faithfulness. From Saleem’s perspective, Amina is the first in a row of adulterous wives even though she apparently does not have sex with anyone but her husband, but adultery of the mind is also repudiated by Saleem. Ahmed’s frequent infidelities with his secretaries, in contrast, are hardly commented on and will go unrevenged by Saleem. The dangerous consequences of uncontrolled female sexuality are closely associated with a concern for genealogies. When Amina and Ahmed find out about Saleem’s blood group, which rules out his being their common biological offspring, Amina is accused of cuckolding Ahmed. In Midnight’s Children men can never be secure in their fatherhood. Ironically, even though Amina did not have sex with anyone but her husband, Saleem is nevertheless a product of female adultery. Vanita is yet another wife whose major trait is unfaithfulness. Wee Willie Winkie’s wife is a marginal character who is lured into an adulterous act by Methwold’s centre parting. Her only


other noteworthy scene is her protracted labour, after which she exits by bleeding to death. Vanita is mourned by her husband, who ‘died of no disease but of the bitterness of losing a wife whose infidelity he never suspected’ (MC 128). So it is implicitly suggested by Saleem that she might not have died had she remained faithful, in which case Willie would have lived, too. Instead he dies with the epitaph: ‘singer and cuckold’ (MC 179). Saleem’s desire to punish his mother for her infidelity is portrayed as utterly excessive in Midnight’s Children since it ends with murder. The discourse of women’s (dis)honour shapes the narrative of the Sabarmati incident when Saleem sends an anonymous letter to Commander Sabarmati in order to alert him to the unfaithfulness of his wife Lila (who has an affair with Homi Catrack).8 Sabarmati ends up killing Catrack and seriously wounding his wife. The sequence of events is triggered off by Saleem’s wish to alert his mother to her own immorality: ‘By unmasking the perfidy of Lila Sabarmati, I hoped also to administer a salutary shock to my own mother’ and give ‘a lesson to all unfaithful wives and mothers’ (MC 260–2). And this lesson is not lost on the nation: ‘Commander Sabarmati was the most popular murderer in the history of the Indian jurisprudence. Husbands acclaimed his punishment of an errant wife; faithful women felt justified in their fidelity’ (MC 262). Midnight’s Children suggests, however, that the price to pay for containing the nation’s women’s sexuality is too high. The allure of the nationalist image of the pure and chaste wife is undermined by demonstrating its pernicious effects in Amina’s guilt-consumed self-denial of her own happiness and by the fact that it is used to legitimise the murder of an unfaithful wife (even though Lila Sabarmati narrowly escapes death). There is a strong tendency in Midnight’s Children to portray its female characters as endowed with a form of monstrosity which is in general directed against men and which leaves them either dead or emasculated. Rushdie develops the dark underside of the nationalist construct of women which seeks to mobilise women’s strength while trying to contain its threatening potential lest it undermine patriarchal structures. In Midnight’s Children the containment of the nation’s women becomes precarious in independent India. Naseem, for example, was difficult to contain in pre-Independence India but after the event she becomes unmanageable. She inverts the nationalist ideal of a good wife as her main victim is her husband Aadam Aziz. She is described as vampire-like, sucking out the life of her hapless husband as her ‘strength of will seemed to increase as Aziz was ground down by age’ (MC 111).


The images associated with her float freely between various monstrous creatures such as witch, vampire and demon: as he declined, Reverend Mother grew larger and stronger; she [...] now appeared to thrive on his weakness, as though their marriage had been one of those mythical unions in which succubi appear to men as innocent damsels, and, after luring them into the matrimonial bed, regain their true, awful aspect and begin to swallow their souls. (MC 274) Monstrosity and female power seem to go hand in hand since women in Midnight’s Children cannot be portrayed as powerful without at the same time carrying the potential for the monstrous. In the end Naseem has replaced Aadam; his nose may have ‘established incontrovertibly his right to be a patriarch’ (MC 13), but it is Naseem who is eventually established as the matriarch: ‘Moustachioed, matriarchal, proud’ (MC 328). Reverend Mother’s husband-crushing potential is echoed by Durga, the washerwoman, who is the target of some of Saleem’s most vehement misogynist invective. Durga is a character only introduced in the final chapter but she does not appear unfamiliar because she is the epitome and culmination of monstrous women who seem to dominate the nation and reduce men to shadows of their former selves. Durga stands for the emasculation of the failed saviour Picture Singh. Saleem deeply resents Picture Singh’s infatuation with Durga even though he acknowledges her awe-inspiring qualities: ‘She was a woman whose biceps bulged; whose preternatural breasts unleashed a torrent of milk capable of nourishing regiments; and who, it was rumoured darkly (although I suspect the rumour of being started by myself) had two wombs’ (MC 445). Women like Durga and Naseem are portrayed by Saleem as destructive of progressive change in India as they ruin men’s capacity to fulfil the promises of the independent nation: Durga the washerwoman was a succubus! A blood-sucker lizard in human form! And her effect on Picture Singh was comparable only to her power over her stone-smashed shirts: in a word, she flattened him. [...] he seemed to be shrinking daily; the possibility of his becoming a second Hummingbird was vanishing before my very eyes. Durga, however, flourished: her gossip grew more scatological, her voice louder and more raucous, until at last she reminded me


of Reverend Mother in her later years, when she expanded and my grandfather shrunk. (MC 445–6) Patriarchal anxiety about women’s power over men has made the image of the widow a very precarious one. Images of Indian widows, specifically high-caste Hindu widows, emphasise their potential for suffering and self-sacrifice as they are supposed to spend the rest of their lives in selfless service for others (Kumar 1991: 23). However, there are also more sinister connotations of widowhood as widows are perceived to have fallen short of properly caring for their husbands, since otherwise they would still be alive (Nandy 1980: 9). So the ascetic lives widows are supposed to lead can also be understood as a punishment for failing to live up to the image of a good wife. Midnight’s Children refers to such fears connected to widows as its female characters are endowed with dangerous powers, be it as wives who are capable of deciding whether their husbands live or die, or as widows who have proven their destructive potential by having already one corpse to account for, namely that of their husband. Mrs Dubash, for example, is associated with her husband’s death and it is suggested that only after his departure could she follow her true ‘fanatical’ nature: something fanatical gleaming in the inner corners of her eyes, biding its time; it will not emerge until Mr Dubash, whose daily life was spent working with the most dangerous substances in the world, dies by choking on an orange from which his wife forgot to remove the pips. (MC 130) The accusation of husband-murder is not explicitly spelled out, but it accounts for the vague threat women appear to represent for men in Midnight’s Children. Yet the novel does not so much insist that women are monstrous but that they appear monstrous to Saleem. The majority of Midnight’s Children’s female characters are undoubtedly resourceful, resilient and at times ruthless but the attempt to portray them as monstrous men-harming creatures clearly belongs to Saleem’s agenda. The novel often lays bare the absurdity of Saleem’s views on women and exposes Saleem’s growing hysteria in his increasingly grotesque perception of the women who surround him. Lurking underneath Saleem’s obsessive concern about women’s transgressions are the fearful consequences of female sexuality and power let loose and wreaking havoc. Ashis Nandy’s analysis of Indian cultural psychology can be read as


suggesting that Saleem has a representative status. Nandy locates the origin of the concern about woman’s destructive potential, which Saleem obviously displays, in the Indian family structure which provides the male child with a perspective of utter dependence on a fickle mother (Nandy 1980: 36): simultaneously Indian society inculcates in women self-doubt, and in men a certain ambivalence toward womanhood. This ambivalence is very different from the ambivalence which the Western man feels toward woman or the universal fear which Zilboorg, Bettelheim, and Salzmann diagnose. In Indian society, except for small sectors in which the martial values predominate, the man’s fear is not that he will lapse into womanliness and thus lose his masculinity and potency. In fact, potency in India is not generally something men strive for, protect or protest in the external world. The masculine fear here is that a man may fall foul of the cosmic feminine principle, that woman will betray, aggress, pollute, or at least fail to protect. (Nandy 1980: 37) Yet, somewhat contradictorily, he states that the ‘fantasy of a castrating, phallic woman is also always round the corner in the Indian’s inner world’ (Nandy 1980: 42). Even though his interpretations and sweeping generalisations do not go unquestioned by feminists, they fit Saleem’s paranoia, which frequently spills over in misogynist remarks and characterisations. It is remarkable how rarely Saleem feels threatened by men in comparison to the omnipresent threat women appear to constitute. Saleem seems to be an ideal exemplar of Nandy’s hypotheses since Saleem admits that women scare him. He ponders the role of women in his life and portrays them as having a power which exceeds that of men, both in their nurturing function and in their potential for destruction: (Women have always been the ones to change my life: Mary Pereira, Evie Burns, Jamila Singer, Parvati-the-witch must answer for who I am; and the Widow, who I’m keeping for the end; and after the end, Padma, my goddess of dung. Women have fixed me all right, but perhaps they were never central – perhaps the place which they should have filled, the hole in the centre of me which was my inheritance from my grandfather Aadam Aziz, was occupied for too long by my voices. Or perhaps – one must consider all possibilities – they always made me a little afraid.) (MC 192)


Women are referred to as almost a species in their own right by Saleem as he enumerates the entire female cast in order to demonstrate that ‘For sixty-three years, before and after midnight, women have done their best; and also, I’m bound to say, their worst’ (MC 404). This enumeration conjures up an unmanageable and overwhelming excess: ‘Women and women and women’ (MC 405). Saleem significantly refrains from listing the influence of men on his life who, at least in the political sphere, carry far more weight. Saleem homogenises the varied female cast by associating it with the concept of Bharat Mata or Mother India. Tanika Sarkar argues that Bengali nationalists imagined the ‘new and supreme deity within the Hindu pantheon – the Motherland’ at a point in time when Bengali middle-class nationalists felt most self-conscious about the discrepancy between the image of the nobly selfless wife and the actual, much discussed status of abused child-brides in the late nineteenth century (Sarkar 2001: 51). The abstracted Motherland is the ‘reified woman’, removed from the ‘all-too-accountable household’ (Sarkar 2001: 51). Saleem explicitly blurs the difference between the nation’s women and the (male) construct of the nation as mother. In this abstracted form, women become Saleem’s competitors in embodying the nation: I continue: ‘Women have made me; and also unmade. From Reverend Mother to the Widow, and even beyond, I have been at the mercy of the so-called (erroneously, in my opinion!) gentler sex. It is, perhaps, a matter of connection: is not Mother India, Bharat-Mata, commonly thought of as female? And, as you know, there’s no escape from her.’ (MC 404) This image of the abstracted woman as nation is hardly empowering for real women and can obliterate their actual unequal status in the nation. The women Saleem portrays as most dangerous are, after all, those who transgress the narrow confines of socially sanctioned role models; women such as Naseem who wants to become economically independent by running a petrol-pump but cannot do so as long as her husband is alive. Even though Aadam Aziz appears to ignore most of his wife’s wishes and demands, it is Naseem who is depicted as tyrannical and vampire-like, sucking out his strength. This discrepancy between the perception of monstrosity and the actual balance of power in the Aziz household is conspicuous. Saleem does not only invoke the concept of the nation as mother but also the divine symbol of women’s power, Shakti, in order to justify


his fear of women. Some feminists have used this symbol of powerful female sexuality as source of inspiration and strength. Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi perceive Shakti cults as precursors of an indigenous Indian women’s movement: The Shakti cults go back centuries, and the concept of Shakti – the female power principle – was recognised thousands of years ago. In this form the women’s movement represents, not merely an oppositional force fuelled by anger, a rather negative reaction to oppression, but the development of a distinctive female culture, a positive creative force inspiring men and women alike. (Liddle & Joshi 1986: 5) The way that Saleem uses the symbol of Shakti, however, does not suggest itself as an inspiration for men but rather as a reason for men’s need to be wary of women’s power. Saleem effaces women’s individuality by imagining them as a powerful cosmic force which makes their portrayal as a collective entity with both mothering and monstrous qualities possible: How are we to understand my too-many women? [...] as the dynamic aspect of maya, as cosmic energy, which is represented as the female organ? Maya, in its dynamic aspect, is called Shakti; perhaps it is no accident that, in the Hindu pantheon, the active power of a deity is contained within his queen! Maya-Shakti mothers, but also ‘muffles consciousness in its dream-web’. Too-many-women: are they all aspects of Devi, the goddess – who is Shakti, who slew the buffalo-demon, who defeated the ogre Mahisha, who is Kali Durga Chandi Chamunda Uma Sati Parvati ... and who, when active, is coloured red? ‘I don’t know about that,’ Padma brings me down to earth, ‘They are just women, that’s all.’ (MC 406) It is significant that Padma counteracts Saleem’s homogenisation of women as an abstract principle, which merges them into a fearsome and not quite human entity. Nandy draws attention to the disabling effects of the concept of Shakti and mother-goddess worship for women: ‘Unlike in the West, where the concept of a patriarchal god has often legitimized male dominance, in India divine matriarchy burdened women with the task of coping with shared fantasies of womanly responsibility for failures of nature and nurture’ (Nandy 1980: 24). The concept of Shakti, however, does not sit easily with the nationalist


image of woman as a repository of culture since the power associated with Shakti is far in excess of what is required of women in order to stand in for the authentic nation. Feminists try to reclaim this symbol of power and creatively use it as an enabling concept but in Midnight’s Children the emphasis is on how men use this symbol to legitimise the need to constrain women and their role in the nation. Feminism aims at finding a way out of patriarchal mechanisms and stresses the potential for change by laying bare the strategies which are used in order to keep patriarchal structures in place. Midnight’s Children displays similar concerns but in an ambivalent and implicit way. One of the purposes of Saleem’s monstrosity-bestowing description of Indian women is criticism of those strategies which make women appear monstrous in the first place whenever they violate the essentialist image of feminine nature and demeanour. Midnight’s Children opens up the gender code and dissects it.9 The text emphasises Saleem’s discrepancy in condemning deeds according to whether they are committed by women or men. While the novel clearly shows sympathy for its strong and resilient women, they remain largely commented on by Saleem and rarely speak for themselves. For example, Saleem tries to reduce Padma’s role to that of a mute and appreciative audience. Whenever she gets a word in, however, she tends to contradict him as she does when she resists Saleem’s efforts to portray women as an abstract cosmic principle. Her objection is directed at the illusory empowering of women by investing them with divine attributes and responsibilities: ‘ “They are just women, that’s all” ’ (MC 406). The nationalist ideal of womanhood is increasingly exposed as sustaining patriarchal structures rather than serving the nation in Midnight’s Children. The Nehruvian nation may stress its inclusiveness and equality and thereby disavow its patriarchal basis but Saleem’s depiction of women belies this claim of equality. Midnight’s Children’s criticism is directed at the nation which is not prepared to let its women shape it in an equal way but brands every transgression of the restrictive nationalist ideal of womanhood as monstrous.

The wicked witch of the East Whereas Midnight’s Children uses the theme of female monstrosity to criticise the patriarchal nation which ostracises women who fall foul of the nationalist ideal of good wives and mothers, there is another counteracting trajectory of the monstrosity theme in the text which also uses misogynist stereotypes strategically but for almost opposing ends.


The target of this misogynist trajectory is Indira Gandhi and her Emergency rule. To accuse her of trying to destroy her father’s idea of India in the form of the midnight’s children’s sterilisation was apparently not sufficient for Rushdie. Midnight’s Children aims at demonising Indira Gandhi and pursues a remarkably elaborate and persistent strategy in order to achieve this. Both the derogatory connotations of widowhood and witchcraft are combined to create the phantasmagorical image of the witch-like Widow who haunts the novel but who is only disclosed at the very end as identical with Indira Gandhi. The consistently strategic use of misogynist imagery in Midnight’s Children is often not perceived as such but interpreted as Rushdie’s internalisation of misogynist stereotypes. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan criticises Rushdie’s emphatic use of the widow image, which she considers as his unwittingly playing into the hands of misogynist stereotypes towards (Hindu) widows: The powerful negative connotations of Hindu widowhood, viewed in the popular imagination not merely as the misfortune of women but as their destruction of the male, are associated with a (widowed) Prime Minister whose defining act is the massive sterilization programme of the Emergency. [...] But the hostility in [Rushdie’s] foregrounding of her widowhood must remain inexplicable except as a culturally conditioned misogyny. (Sunder Rajan 1993: 112–14)10 Rushdie’s strategy in reducing Indira Gandhi to her widowhood might be effective because he tapped popular prejudice about Indira’s widowhood, a fact which is apparently unmentionable in ‘official’ biographies which usually shy away from analysing the problem of Indira Gandhi’s gender by dividing her into a private gendered self and a neutral political self (Sunder Rajan 1993: 115). However, even Sunder Rajan, who analyses the gendered aspect of Indira Gandhi’s representation in historiography, literature and popular discourse, relegates the information about ‘the widespread prejudice about Indira’s being a widow’ to the endnotes (Sunder Rajan 1993: 125). It is undoubtedly true that Indira Gandhi’s demonisation in Midnight’s Children would not have been so successful if Rushdie had not drawn on the powerful stereotype of the widow, but it is the explicit combination of the images of the widow and the witch which makes this vilification of Indira Gandhi so potent in the text. Widowhood can only be referred to whereas a witch can be painted in the most lurid colours and associated with nightmarish visions, which is exactly what Rushdie does in

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Midnight’s Children. A sense of an all-pervasive presence of the witch is created in the novel by branding almost all female character as witches. Before I discuss Indira Gandhi as witch I want to first demonstrate how strategically the witch leitmotif is constructed in order that it can climax in revealing Indira Gandhi as the wickedest witch of all. Belief in witches in India is often referred to as a marginal tribal or rural phenomenon, attributed to the superstitions of backward people which will eventually be obliterated by progress and literacy.11 However, in Midnight’s Children the image of the witch is at the heart of the narrative and a defining characteristic of women. Feminist scholars have also noted that the image of the witch is readily applied to women, especially widows: Chief among [...] sinister/destructive images are those of the widow and the witch. [...] Although women in general are regarded as capable of becoming witches, witch suspects are typically either those who are arid (baanjh) or those who are widowed at a young age. [...] Despite the discrepancy between the alleged harm potential of the two types (which for the widow is merely ominous but for the witch is definitely horrific), both types of female harmers are said to be capable of provoking baneful effects. (Jain & Mahan 1996a: 18–20) Belief in witchcraft appears to be widespread but also considerably varied in India (Fuller 1992: 237–9).12 Carstairs points out the remarkable similarities of the general characteristics attributed to witch suspects in Europe and India: ‘In both cases witches are perceived as a group apart [...] who like to congregate at midnight in cemeteries or cremationgrounds, riding naked on the backs of wolves (in Europe) or hyenas (in Rajasthan)’ (Carstairs 1983: 56).13 It is children who are most vulnerable to witches, as reflected in Saleem’s nightmare in Midnight’s Children, where the black and green witch harms young children. There has not been a lot of academic research on witches in India, possibly because witches are frequently related to widows and the phenomenon of sati or widow-burning, an event which is specific to India, eclipsed academic interest in the Indian belief in witches.14 Swami Vivekananda, for example, appears to deny implicitly the existence of belief in witchcraft in India in the late nineteenth century by remarking that the superiority of Indian civilisation was apparent in its treatment of women and widows: whereas Indian women heroically burnt themselves on their husband’s funeral pyres, Western women were burnt as witches (Chakravarty 1990: 78). Rushdie, in contrast, portrays the belief


in witchcraft as widespread since some of the midnight’s children are afraid of revealing their magic power for fear of being mistaken for witches: ‘ “O heavens, we must stay secret, just think what they will do to us, stone us for witches or what-all!” ’ (MC 228). The belief in witches is depicted as having been so common that it makes sense to point out that ‘Aadam Aziz had never believed in witches’ (MC 47). It is remarkable how women are persistently referred to as witches in Midnight’s Children with all the manifold connotations this term evokes. Frequently the word ‘witch’ is used as a standard misogynist term with offensive connotations but real witches are also mentioned as members of the midnight’s children. There is no tightly-knit discourse about witches in Midnight’s Children, but they function as a major leitmotif which underscores the ominous aura of women in the novel. From Naseem’s witch-like connotations with her moles ‘like witchnipples’ (MC 115), to the ‘long series of women who have bewitched and finally undone me good and proper’ (MC 241), almost all female characters are associated with the witch leitmotif with a few exceptions such as Amina and Padma. The theme of monstrosity easily merges with the omnipresent witch imagery. As with other misogynist terms, when women are referred to as witches in Midnight’s Children it is to highlight the fact that they transgress the norm for suitable feminine behaviour. The Rani of Cooch Naheen, who remains nameless apart from her title (which means the ‘queen of nothing’), is one of the first important female characters to initiate the witch leitmotif. She is the first politically active woman in Midnight’s Children, and even though women’s participation in the freedom struggle was welcomed and encouraged, unfeminine behaviour such as participation in decision-making and leadership roles was usually discouraged (Jain & Sharma 1996: 196). As soon as the Rani of Cooch Naheen is perceived as overstepping the mark she is suspected of the even worse transgressions typical of such interfering (single) women: ‘And so the rumours began. “These scholars of hers, man, everyone knows they have to perform extra-curricular duties. They go to her bedroom in the dark, and she never lets them see her blotchy face, but bewitches them into bed with her voice of a singing witch!” ’ (MC 47). Thus this strategy of containing powerful women by condemning them as witches is laid bare and partly discredited before Saleem applies it to Indira Gandhi. There is a crucial aspect in which the witch imagery differs from the theme of women’s men-harming monstrosity in the novel as the female characters’ witchcraft can also be directed at other women, a factor which undercuts women’s solidarity. Amina’s sister Alia, who had

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expected to marry Ahmed Sinai and never forgives her sister for having married him instead, belongs to the category of the bitter, childless and hateful spinster, who causes harm to her sister’s family by supernatural means. Saleem depicts the source of her monstrosity as her sexuality gone stale, and her ‘embittered virginity’ conjures up connotations of barrenness which are associated with witches (MC 111). Alia is a character reduced to her sinister spinsterhood and her witch-like characteristics. She plots stratagems to harm Amina’s children as she has evil powers with which she can sew her ‘old maid’s bile’ into the children’s clothes she sends to her sister (MC 155). When the Sinai family emigrate to Pakistan they live with ‘my spinster aunt’ (MC 306) who waits for the fulfilment of her revenge, trapping them like flies in her ‘spider-like’ hospitality (MC 307), waiting to ‘to wreak her awful spinster’s revenge’ (MC 330). Under Alia’s cooking spell, pregnant Amina becomes afraid of her child and mentally disintegrates, ‘crushed beneath the weight of her monstrous pregnancy’ (MC 337). The figure of Alia is remarkable for its unabated misogyny. Alia is a character frozen in the spinster stereotype, which is combined with the image of the witch since she practises sartorial and ‘culinary witchcraft’ (MC 332). Whereas the theme of female monstrosity is often depicted as a threat for men in general and Saleem in particular, the witch theme in Midnight’s Children incorporates women’s violence towards other women and children. Ajay Skaria argues that what characterises a witch’s violence is the element of gratuitousness which makes it unpredictable and therefore particularly dangerous (Skaria 1997: 110–11). In his study of witchcraft beliefs in nineteenth-century western India he finds that in general witches are thought of as attacking ‘for some reason’, which would make their aggression rational, reciprocal and manageable (Skaria 1997: 120–1). But it is the aspect of a witch’s gratuitous violence, which implies that theoretically anybody could be a witch’s victim at any time, which accounts for the excessive brutality of the treatment of witches. Tests which are conducted to prove a woman’s guilt or innocence and procedures which are aimed at provoking her confession and a promise to desist from further using her witchcraft against a specific victim, are often so cruel that they kill the suspected witch even though that is not the aim because a dead witch might cause even more harm (Skaria 1997: 125). The notion of gratuitous violence corresponds with the way the witch-like Widow is portrayed in Midnight’s Children. The figure of the Widow is not explicitly identified with Indira Gandhi in the novel until the end but seems to be a character in her own right. The Widow and


the ‘climax in a widows’ hostel’ is frequently referred to and vaguely associated with a ‘clear proof of meaning’, which builds up suspense and underscores her centrality despite the fact that she has only one major scene in the novel (MC 181). A threatening, mysterious aura is gradually constructed around the figure of the Widow which has its climax in the middle part of the novel in Saleem’s nightmare. In the dream the term witch is never explicitly mentioned in connection with the Widow but she has undeniably witch-like features. The tone is hypnotic and breathless and the atmosphere hallucinatory as the scene is saturated with the colours green and black. The Widow’s violence towards the defenceless children is bound to appear gratuitous and inexplicable. She mishandles children, tearing them apart and rolling them into little balls, though it is not suggested that she devours them. The Widow’s two-coloured hair is emphasised, and she consists only of hair, arms ‘long as death’, a ‘Hand’, long sharp fingernails, a tongue and teeth, and laughter (MC 207–8). In Saleem’s fevered dream, he is the helpless victim of the Widow’s excessive, apparently irrational violence, which gives her a pleasure that cannot be accounted for: And in a corner the Monkey and I (the walls are green the shadows black) cowering crawling wide high walls green fading into black there is no roof and Widow’s hand comes onebyone the children scream and mmff and little balls and hand and scream and mmff and splashing stains of black. Now only she and I and no more screams the Widow’s hand comes hunting [...] and laughing Widow tearing I am rolling into little balls the balls are green and out into the night the night is black ... . (MC 208) This is the Widow-Witch’s longest scene but the threatening image it creates is magnified by the references to the Widow which precede and follow it and which produce a haunting image that Indira Gandhi, once she is united with her alter ego, will not be able to shake off. The image of the witch, however, is not entirely bereft of positive connotations and a witch’s potential power possesses partially enabling facets. Skaria argues that the perception of women as witches is ‘simultaneously an acknowledgement of their power and a reflection on the fundamental illegitimacy of that power’ (Skaria 1997: 132). But it is precisely this power which may lead some women to proclaim themselves as witches (Skaria 1997: 133). By drawing on the powerful image of the witch they can enjoy ‘considerable social status [...] fear and respect’ and procure resources which are out of reach of ordinary women from


those who try to placate them (Skaria 1997: 134–5). An entire village can benefit from the protection a witch can provide (Skaria 1997: 121). So the image of the witch does not completely lack enabling aspects for women but that does not change the fact that the power derived from the image of the witch is perceived as illegitimate by society. When Indira Gandhi is identified as a witch by way of the Widow figure this can imply that her power as head of government is also illegitimate, and this putative illegitimacy is inextricably linked to her being a woman; only women can be witches. The fact that Rushdie modelled the Widow on the character of the Wicked Witch of the West in the Hollywood film The Wizard of Oz (1939) adds further layers to the image of the witch-like Widow in Midnight’s Children. In his essay on the film Rushdie mentions that Saleem’s ‘nightmare of Indira Gandhi is fused with the equally nightmarish figure of Margaret Hamilton [the actress playing the Wicked Witch of the West]: a coming-together of the Wicked Witches of the East and of the West’ (Rushdie 1992b: 33). Rushdie confesses to have had ‘a sneaking regard for the Wicked Witch, and, some might say, a secret sympathy for all persons of her witchy disposition which has remained with me ever since’ (Rushdie 1992b: 17). Rushdie clearly sides with the Wicked Witch against the Good Witch Glenda: frilly pink versus slimline black. No contest. [...] just as feminism has sought to rehabilitate pejorative old words such as hag, crone, witch, so the Wicked Witch of the West could be said to represent the more positive of the two images of powerful womanhood on offer here. (Rushdie 1992b: 42–3) However, the wickedness of the film’s ‘evil’ witch is so delightful because it is reassuringly familiar and containable. The very charm of Hollywood witches is the result of the domestication of their wickedness in Europe in the eighteenth century: Witch personae could thus blossom as comic grotesques at the very time when real witches were disappearing from the daily fears of the educated. In due course the connotations of witchiness would also change: the stereotypical village hag would be superseded by the femme fatale and the vamp [...]. Meanwhile the shawl-clad crone, with her conical black hat, living in a cottage with her cat, and stirring a cauldron, lived on in Romantic fairy-tales, children’s fiction and, in the twentieth century, in Disney. (Porter 1999: 246–7)


The power of the domesticated witch is hardly enabling for women but it is at the same time stripped of most of its misogynist potential too. By referring to the image of the domesticated Hollywood witch, Midnight’s Children signals its own self-consciously ambivalent use of the image of the witch. The closer Indira Gandhi comes to being identified as the Widow in Midnight’s Children the more obvious becomes the deliberate misogyny of the construct of the Widow and the way it is used to condemn Indira Gandhi and the Emergency. As with the theme of female monstrosity, in which women’s alleged monstrosity is disclosed as not being inherent in the female characters but as a patriarchal strategy to discredit their attempt to lead a more self-determined life, so a foregrounding of the misogynist constructedness of the witch-like Widow image similarly reveals the patriarchal anxieties at work here. But the novel also keeps promising a resolution for the Widow-Witch image which will ultimately justify its misogyny. Towards the last third of the novel, the ‘unavoidable Widow’ (MC 346) is mentioned in every chapter but her secret identity is not yet furnished; its disclosure, however, is meant to give meaning to Saleem’s narrative. The figure of Indira Gandhi and the Widow theme coincide for the first time when Mustapha tells Saleem to forget about his Messianic ideas: ‘My uncle’s rejection of my pleas for preferment had one grave effect: the more he praised his Indira, the more deeply I detested her. He was, in fact, preparing me for my return to the magicians’ ghetto, and for ... for her ... the Widow’ (MC 394–5). Only after the declaration of the Emergency are the Widow and Indira Gandhi explicitly identified as the same person. Whereas they had occupied nearly autonomous zones in Midnight’s Children earlier, once the two strands are collapsed Indira Gandhi is referred to almost exclusively as the Widow. The actual revelation of Indira Gandhi’s identity as the WidowWitch seems at first to demolish the demonic character of the Widow as the brief biography of Indira Gandhi which explicitly establishes her widowhood lacks witch-like traits. Her biography is narrated in a seemingly neutral style which is diametrically opposed to the hypnotic hallucinatory tone reserved for the Widow-Witch. Saleem briefly mentions her family background, her marriage to her husband Feroze and the fact that she has two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay. The biography, however, suggests that she was a ‘bad’ wife as ‘in 1949 she moved back into her father’s home and became his “official hostess” ’, thus neglecting her husband (MC 421). The reason for her support of her father, namely that Nehru asked her to assist him, which could have portrayed her as a


dutiful daughter rather than a neglectful wife, is not mentioned. Feroze is portrayed much more favourably than his wife and he is granted extensive space in her brief biography: Feroze made one attempt to live there, too, but it was not a success. He became a ferocious critic of the Nehru Government, exposing the Mundhra scandal and forcing the resignation of the then Finance Minister, T.T. Krishnamachari – ‘T.T.K.’ himself. Mr Feroze Gandhi died of a heart seizure in 1960, aged forty-seven. (MC 421) One incriminatory sentence is missing because Indira Gandhi successfully sued Rushdie for libel in 1984. Significantly, the only part she wanted censored was the sentence which alludes to her responsibility for her husband’s death (Frank 1996). But even without the censored sentence, this passage sounds accusatory since Feroze is clearly depicted as the tragic victim of fate or worse. Saleem pretends to neutrality by adopting an emotionless tone, but he is biased against Indira Gandhi in a way that has nothing to do with her politics but rather with her shortcomings as wife. Saleem finally reveals Indira Gandhi’s widowhood: ‘I have included this somewhat elementary summary just in case you had failed to realize that the prime Minister of India was, in 1975, fifteen years a widow. Or (because the capital letter may be of use): a Widow’ (MC 421). Saleem’s account of Indira Gandhi makes her look like the victim of Saleem’s description rather than confirming her status as evil Widow-Witch. As with the seemingly monstrous female characters, the horrifying potential of the figure of the witch-like Widow loses part of its persuasiveness by being so closely associated with the personal agenda of Saleem who appears willing to use any means – fair or foul – to discredit his main adversary. By the time he accuses Indira Gandhi of harbouring the desire to become the ‘Devi, the Mother-goddess in her most terrible aspect’, his credibility has suffered considerably, especially as it was Saleem himself who betrayed the other midnight’s children to the Widow’s helpers: But what I learned from the Widow’s Hand is that those who would be gods fear no one so much as other potential deities; and that, that and that only, is why we, the magical children of midnight, were hated feared destroyed by the Widow, who was not only Prime Minister of India but also aspired to be Devi, the Mother-goddess in her most terrible aspect, possessor of the shakti of the gods, a


multi-limbed divinity with a centre-parting and schizophrenic hair ... And that was how I learned my meaning in the crumbling palace of the bruise-breasted women. [...] We were are shall be the gods you never had. (MC 438) Since Saleem directly competes with Indira Gandhi in personifying the nation, and goes so far as to picture himself in a divine light, his invalidation of her ambitions must at the same time question his own. The attempt to bring her into disrepute is further undermined by his contradictory strategy. In his biographical sketch he portrays the only truly politically powerful woman in Midnight’s Children as the daughter of a famous man rather than as a powerful woman in her own right. So her power is depicted as either derived from her father or threateningly and mysteriously associated with her attempt to become India’s supreme goddess. By seemingly laying bare its strategy of using misogynist imagery in order to undermine Indira Gandhi’s legitimacy as political leader, the novel partly disavows this strategy and even criticises it. At the same time, however, the text relies on the functioning of this allegedly disavowed strategy. It is still the novel’s aim to discredit Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in a way that will make a deep impression. So despite various qualifications of the emphatic misogyny of the main image for Indira Gandhi, namely the nightmarish Widow-Witch, this image is nevertheless meant to perform its function in signalling the Emergency’s illegitimacy. While the text questions the strategic use of misogynist imagery, it relies on the power of these images to serve their purpose. This is underscored by the eventual return of Midnight’s Children to the image of the Widow-Witch when Saleem and the other midnight’s children are tortured and their magic annihilated, as the woman in charge of this procedure is associated with the black and green Widow of Saleem’s nightmare: I had a visitor. Creak of door, rustle of expensive chiffon. The pattern: green and black. Her glasses, green, her shoes were black as black [...] I have my own name for her: she was the Widow’s Hand. Which one by one and children and mmff and tearing tearing little balls go ... . (MC 437) Unlike female monstrosity which is emphatically portrayed as being the expression of Saleem’s patriarchal anxiety, the horror of the WidowWitch has its correspondence in the actual brutality and totalitarian

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measures during the Emergency and cannot be discounted as merely existing in Saleem’s imagination. This chapter has attempted to unravel the ambivalent characterisations of women in Midnight’s Children and to identify two main trajectories of the theme of female monstrosity, one aimed at criticising the nation’s unwillingness to grant women an equal status and an equal say in constituting the nation, and the other designed to demonise Indira Gandhi. Eventually, the latter strategy is given a clearer emphasis in the text and the former concern often appears subordinated to the dominant aim of condemning Indira Gandhi’s politics and questioning her legitimacy. Thus, apparently paradoxically, the nation Rushdie writes into being in Midnight’s Children is implicitly criticised for the status it bestows on its women, while the same ‘misogynist’ strategies which point to the nation’s discriminatory practices are used to blame Indira Gandhi for the nation’s decline because of her dictatorial Emergency regime. I have used the findings of Indian feminist historiography to explore Midnight’s Children’s characterisations of female figures in the historical context in which they are situated. This approach enabled me to do justice to the complexity of the novel’s portrayal of women. Feminist historiography’s analysis of imperialist and nationalist discourses on women has added new dimensions to our understanding of how these discourses and the models of women they constructed have influenced actual women. Midnight’s Children reflects the prevalence and longevity of nationalist images of ideal womanhood whereas the novel’s portrayal of women suggests that these images can only be made to fit by doing violence to women (as in Amina’s case). Even the strong and resilient female characters are scarred by the limited ways of imagining a life for women and the way transgressors are branded as monsters and witches. However, this strategic use of misogynist elements in order to reveal the way gendered stereotypes are employed to reinforce patriarchal structures can, paradoxically, appear to confirm rather than undermine those stereotypes since they may be perceived as too naturalised to jar. It is ironic that Saleem, who created the larger-than-life monster, the Widow Indira, and who frequently muses and obsesses over his victimisation and fear of women, ends up in Mary’s or Mrs Braganza’s womenonly realm. It is Saleem’s final refuge, where he finds Padma’s love and the peace to write his history. For the first time, we are confronted with misogyny’s opposite: Mary, with her ancient hatred of ‘the mens’, admits no males except myself into her new, comfortable universe ... myself, and of course


my son. [...] the formidable competence of the Narlikar females is reflected, on this factory floor, in the strong-armed dedication of the vat-stirrers. (MC 460) It appears that the novel’s final joke is on men whose misogyny conjures up the very thing they feared and loathed. Dr Narlikar leaves such a subverted legacy: ‘Having been a bachelor and a misogynist all his life, he was engulfed, in death, by a sea of giant, noisy, omnicompetent women’ (MC 178). These anonymous women are described as a plague of insects, their threatening, life-crushing qualities proven by their ruination of Ahmed Sinai who had been the money behind Narlikar’s business. Only for a while does Ahmed manage to resist the ‘fat-bellied and grossly competent women’ who want to build ‘a triumphant pink obelisk, a signpost of their future’ on the ground of the Methwold villas (MC 266). Even classical phallic symbols are appropriated by these scary women, and the pinkness can hardly mask this endeavour. Saleem, however, eventually lives on the business sense of those women: Mary’s pickle factory is financed by them.

3 The New God-and-Mammon India

In The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), Rushdie portrays the transformation of India in the 1980s and 1990s, in terms of a transformation of an allegedly cosmopolitan, tolerant and hybrid Bombay into a city dominated by an extremist Hindu nationalist party, whose aim is to mould India into an exclusive Hindu nation where non-Hindus live at the mercy of the majority community. This transformation of India was not anticipated in Midnight’s Children where Hindu nationalism is depicted as a relatively marginal phenomenon. In The Moor’s Last Sigh Bombay is explicitly made the symbolic centre of the rise of a new India, which appears to be replacing the Nehruvian secular concept of the Indian nation: ‘In Bombay, as the old, founding myth of the nation faded, the new god-and-mammon India was being born’ (MLS 351). The manifestation of this new India is related to the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya by Hindu nationalists on 6 December 1992 and the ensuing communal riots in Bombay but it is also linked to the emergence of an insatiable, globalised form of capitalism: ‘It was the birth of a new age in India, when money, as well as religion, was breaking all the shackles on its desires’ (MLS 343–4). In Indian historiography, the increasingly successful mobilisation of Hindu nationalist organisations, and the communal violence that accompanied it in the 1980s and 1990s, led to a reassessment of Indian history and forced the question: where did it all go wrong? Communalism is the usual name given to the problem which leads to the display of ‘suspicion, fear and hostility between members of different religious communities’ (Pandey 1990: 6). There is a widespread consensus that the beginnings of communalism lie in the nineteenth century when various factors led to a ‘tightening of community boundaries’ (Sarkar 2002: 224). Pandey argues that communalism is ‘a form 88

The New God-and-Mammon India 89

of colonialist knowledge’, standing ‘for the puerile and the primitive – all that colonialism, in its own reckoning, was not’ (Pandey 1990: 6). According to this line of argument, the colonialist perception of India as constituted by religious communities gradually became integral to the self-perception of the Indian middle class, which led to the production of a specific ideology of Hindu nationalism by a section of the nationalist élite. Hindu nationalism is usually perceived as an aspect of Hindu communalism and the beginning of Hindu nationalism ‘proper’ is generally located in the 1920s when the Indian nation was explicitly envisaged as an exclusive Hindu nation by, for example, V. D. Savarkar (Basu et al. 1993: 4–10). The Hindu nationalist version of history reduces the last thousand years of Indian history to a struggle between a homogenous bloc of Hindus and an equally homogenous bloc of Muslims (Basu et al. 1993: 2). Indian academic historiography may have demolished the truth of this version of history but that appears to have little impact on the popular ‘common-sensical’ understanding of Indian history provided by Hindu nationalist organisations: Academic refutations have gone on, but myths persist and proliferate providing a simplistic, hand-me-down history to the layman. Modern secular historiography, still composed mainly in English, has a very limited reach in a subcontinent marked by mass illiteracy, generally poor and dated textbooks, and now, by the attempt of the VHP and BJP to dominate oral culture through audio-visual media. (Basu et al. 1993: 3)1 Until the 1980s and 1990s, however, Hindu nationalism and its version of Indian history did not appear to be capable of becoming hegemonic. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie’s main emphasis, apart from describing the transition to the ‘new god-and-mammon India’, is on portraying the secular nationalist élite and their vision of India and its demise. In Indian historiography the ‘erosion of the foundations of Nehruvianism’ in the 1980s and 1990s is widely attested and often used as an explanation for the rise of Hindu nationalism (Deshpande 2000: 189). The Moor’s Last Sigh constitutes an elegy to the era of the Nehruvian nation, whose decline is mirrored by the family history of the first-person narrator and protagonist Moraes Zogoiby, called Moor, who introduces his narrative as a ‘sigh for a lost world’: Now, therefore, it is meet to sing of endings; of what was, and may be no longer; of what was right in it, and wrong. A last sigh for a


lost world, a tear for its passing. Also, however, a last hurrah, a final, scandalous skein of shaggy-dog yarns [...] and a set of rowdy tunes for the wake. (MLS 4) As in Midnight’s Children, Indian history is re-enacted by the protagonists in a semi-allegorical style. But in contrast to Midnight’s Children, the da Gama-Zogoiby dynasty actually has a central place in guiding India’s fate: Moor’s father, Abraham, becomes the mightiest businessman in India; his mother, Aurora, is a heroine of the freedom struggle and the most important Indian artist in independent India; and Moor himself participates in the rise of Bombay’s Hindu nationalist organisation as an élite thug. In this chapter I am interested in how Rushdie charts the development of Hindu nationalism up to the representation of the series of bomb blasts in 1993, which constitutes the apocalyptic ending of the third part of the novel. Initially The Moor’s Last Sigh appears to flaunt a rather eccentric approach to the exploration of the development of Hindu nationalism as the secular nationalist élite is in the spotlight and Hindu nationalist organisations are not mentioned. However, it is exactly this secular élite’s nationalism which is usually juxtaposed to Hindu nationalism or communalism in general in Indian historiography; the success of Hindu nationalism is often attributed to the innate flaws or failings of secular nationalism. In the first part of this chapter, therefore, I explore how this nationalist élite is portrayed both in The Moor’s Last Sigh and in Indian historiography with respect to their understanding of communalism. The second part of the chapter focuses on the depiction of Hindu nationalism, in the form of Fielding and his party, from Moor’s insider’s perspective. In the third part I examine the way Rushdie depicts the forces which compete for political dominance in India and the way he uses the image of a complex and inscrutable palimpsest as an image for late twentieth-century India. Of particular interest will be how Rushdie’s strategies in coming to terms with Hindu nationalism compare with the strategies used by Indian historiography. I find Thomas Blom Hansen’s account of Hindu nationalism in The Saffron Wave (1999) and his depiction of Bombay’s Hindu nationalist organisation Shiv Sena in Wages of Violence (2001) especially useful and will often use his line of argument in this chapter to draw comparisons between it and The Moor’s Last Sigh. In this chapter I make use of Partha Chatterjee’s concept of ‘political society’ as opposed to ‘civil society’. He deploys the term ‘civil society’ in the general sense of the élite ‘bourgeois society’ whereas ‘political


society’ is used to ‘conceptualize the rest of society that lies outside the domain of modern civil society’, which according to Chatterjee still includes the vast bulk of India’s population which has not yet been elevated to the status of proper citizenship (Chatterjee 1998a: 61). Chatterjee’s use of this terminology opens up the possibility of speaking of a realm of negotiation and mediation in political society where the subaltern can make history in a manner which transcends the expectations of how civil society and the state are expected to interact in a liberal democracy.

Nationalist élite India Academic historical writing on Hindu nationalism and communalism concentrates on delineating the discursive creation of a clearly delimited Hindu community in opposition to an equally constructed homogenous Muslim community. By way of contrast, Rushdie’s narrative of the da Gama and the Zogoiby families displaces this focus on Hindus and Muslims as the da Gamas are Roman Catholic Christians and the Zogoibys are Jews. Ironically, both the da Gamas and the Zogoibys use the same strategy as that deployed by Hindu nationalists in providing themselves with an illustrious past. Whereas Hindu nationalists invoke a glorious, culturally pure Hindu past before the Muslim invasions, the da Gamas proudly trace their lineage back to another invader’s history, namely that of the Portuguese Vasco da Gama, and the Zogoibys claim a 2,000 year old Jewish Indian history as their own together with the illegitimate descent from the last Moorish king of Granada. This extraterritorial ‘allegiance’, however, is used to discredit their claim to Indianness at various points in the narrative. Rushdie’s strategy is to disclose the absurdity of Hindu nationalist discourse, which reduces India’s history to a ‘Hindus versus Muslims’ contest, as this clearly does not make sense from the standpoint of Rushdie’s protagonists. However, the narrator is self-conscious about the precarious status of his own story as a counter-narrative since it could easily be dismissed as too irrelevant to deserve attention, and he therefore pleads emphatically for the validity of his story but also foreshadows the eventual deadly hegemony of the Hindu-versus-Muslim discourse: Christians, Portuguese and Jews; Chinese tiles promoting godless views; pushy ladies, skirts-not-saris, Spanish shenanigans, Moorish crowns ... can this really be India? Bharat-mata, Hindustan-hamara,

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is this the place? [...] is this not the most eccentric of slices to extract from all that life – a freak blond hair plucked from a jet-black (and horribly unravelling) plait? No sahibzadas. Madams-O: no way. Majority, that mighty elephant, and her sidekick, Major-Minority, will not crush my tale beneath her feet. Are not my personages Indian, every one? Well then: this too is an Indian yarn. That’s one answer; but here’s another: everything in its place. Elephants are promised for later. Majority and Major-Minority will have their day, and much that has been beautiful will be tusked & trampled by their flap-eared, trumpeting herds. (MLS 87) Rushdie’s strategy of focusing on ‘minor’ minorities, however, does not of itself challenge the logic of imagining India as essentially constituted of competing religious communities. As already mentioned this perception of a religiously compartmentalised India is usually attributed by Indian historiography to colonial knowledge patterns and administrative practices. The role of the decennial All India Census, introduced in 1871, is a conspicuous example of how such religious communities were produced by the process of classifying and enumerating various castes and groups, which turned out to be more difficult than envisaged because of the perceived vagueness of the category ‘Hindu’ (Zavos 2000: 74). Once classified, such ‘enumerated communities’ could compete for representation in institutions of the colonial state according to their numerical strength (Kaviraj 1992: 29): colonial modernity introduced a novel horizon that crystallized in and around modern institutions and modern forms of knowledge. [...] empirical knowledge-practices [...] introduced the notion of numbers and rights to equal representation of abstract, and yet precise, Hindu and Muslim communities; [...] Communities – especially Hindus and Muslims – could now increasingly be ‘talked into existence’ within a generalized, supralocal nationalist discourse and imagination. (Hansen 1999: 38–9) The arenas for representing the respective communities were domains of civil society from which subalterns were excluded.2 In colonial discourse, only the élite was considered amenable to reason and negotiation whereas subaltern groups were deemed innately religious and irrational (Hansen 1999: 32). Both colonialists and the native élite


shared the view that the ordinary Indian was not part of civil society and its procedures: It is well recognized in those arguments [by the early nationalist elite] that the new domain of civil society will long remain an exclusive domain of the elite, that the actual ‘public’ will not match up to the standards required by civil society, and that the function of civil-social institutions in relation to the public at large will be one of pedagogy rather than of free association. (Chatterjee 1998a: 62) In The Moor’s Last Sigh, the early anticolonial struggle is clearly portrayed as an élite domain for those who know the ways of civil society. The rich spice trader Francisco da Gama begins his career as a nationalist by participating in a typical institution of such civil society when he ‘joined the Home Rule campaign of Annie Besant and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, hitching his star to the demand for an independent Indian Parliament’ in 1916 (MLS 19). Both Tilak’s and Besant’s Home Rule Leagues were mainly élite, upper-caste affairs, which nevertheless claimed to represent wider communities (Cashman 1975: 199; Geetha & Rajadurai 1995: 1768). When subalterns increasingly began to participate in the political field with the beginning of a national mass movement in 1919, the nationalist élite embarked on a pedagogical mission in order to educate them in the ways of modernity (Hansen 1999: 10). The pedagogical zeal of the élite’s modernising mission is epitomised by Francisco’s son, Camoens da Gama, who tries to train ‘counterfeit Lenins’ with which to educate the Indian masses in socialism (MLS 29). Inspired by a group of official Lenin look-alikes who stand in for the real Lenin when he is unable to attend public functions, Camoens selects seven local Indians who are meant to impersonate Lenin and spread the socialist word in Indian vernaculars in 1924. This attempt fails because the subaltern Lenins are not approved by a Russian authorised counterfeit Lenin, but what is worse, the subalterns prove unworthy of such pedagogical endeavour as they laugh at the ‘Babeling Lenins’: the Too-Tall Lenin, the Too-Short Lenin, the Too-Fat Lenin, the TooSkinny Lenin, the Too-Lame Lenin, the Too-Bald Lenin, and (this was a misfortunate fellow with gravely defective orthodenture) Lenin the Too-Thless [...] Babeling Lenins, their beards coming loose in the heat, addressed the now-enormous crowd; which began, little by little at first, and then in a great swelling tide, to guffaw. (MLS 29–31)


After his disillusionment, Camoens turns away from the Communists’ form of socialism and becomes a ‘Nehru man’, but he refrains from active politics and from enlightening subalterns and trying to initiate them into modernity and civil society (MLS 31). With Camoens, The Moor’s Last Sigh provides an insight into the working of the secular nationalist élite’s imagination, particularly its blind spots regarding the lack of any problematising of their own role and status: If you pointed out the contradictions between, for example, [Camoens’s] egalitarian ideas and the olympian reality of his social position, he would answer with no more than an owningup smile and a disarming shrug. ‘Everyone should live well, isn’t it,’ he was fond of saying. ‘Cabral Island for all, that is my motto.’ (MLS 32) Camoens’s second estranging encounter with the people takes place in a scene which portrays Mahatma Gandhi’s role among the villagers from the perspective of the left secular élite. Before Camoens witnesses Gandhi on one of his tours through Indian villages, a clear distinction is made between civil society’s discourse of modernity, which is deemed intelligible to the élite only, and a more religious register with which the masses are addressed. Camoens distances himself from Gandhi’s religious idiom and his encouragement of the spinning of cotton as a way of symbolically participating in the struggle for independence: ‘[Camoens] was for Nehru, not Gandhi – for business and technology and progress and modernity, for the city, and against all that sentimental clap-trap of spinning your own cotton’ (MLS 54). In this scene, Gandhi is only portrayed as singing religious songs, which alienates the secular Camoens. This episode is an apt demonstration of the élite’s perception of the common people as essentially religious but also threatening.3 The way Camoens describes the villagers makes them appear as ‘naturally’ communalist, with fanaticism just lurking beneath the surface: I had seen India’s beauty in that crowd [...] but with that God stuff I got scared. In the city we are for secular India but the village is for Ram. And they say Ishwar and Allah is your name but they don’t mean it, they mean only Ram himself, king of Raghu clan, purifier of sinners along with Sita. 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. (MLS 55–6)


According to the secular nationalist view represented by Camoens, communalism is defined as a primordial, instinctive sentiment of villagers, which needs to be transcended in independent India. The Nehruvian model of the secular, inclusive modern Indian nation was seen as the appropriate model to strive for in order to overcome divisive and communalist sentiments: Nehru and many leftists in the 1930s developed the idea of the Indian nation as an abstract, modern (synthetic) ideal that could transcend older identifications with community and caste by relegating them to the realm of the irrational and premodern, and eventually render them irrelevant. (Hansen 1999: 45–6) This Nehruvian model of the nation is expressed by Camoens’ speech on Belle’s deathbed when he envisions an independent India: Belle, a free country, Belle, above religion because secular, above class because socialist, above caste because enlightened, above hatred because loving, above vengeance because forgiving, above tribe because unifying, above language because many-tongued, above colour because multicoloured, above poverty because victorious over it, above ignorance because literate, above stupidity because brilliant, freedom, Belle. (MLS 51) There is an endearing naivety in Camoens’s utopian vision of a free India, but he also appears to imply that those who are ‘above’ all these lower divisive elements are those who can live up to the standards of civil society, which here stands for the nation. As the concept of the Nehruvian nation is as central to The Moor’s Last Sigh as it is to Midnight’s Children, the representation of Nehru is significant. Unlike the critical and often hostile attitude towards Nehru in contemporary academic discourse, the portrayal of Nehru in The Moor’s Last Sigh is a rather fond one and rich in nuance.4 The text sketchily delineates his development from an eager young critic of the Congress – ‘just a talk-shop for wogs’ (MLS 19) – to the point when he becomes the leader of the national movement and when he often tires of his responsibility: ‘ “My voice is hoarse,” he wrote. “I can’t make out why I attract these crowds. Very gratifying, no doubt, but also very trying and often irritating” ’ (MLS 117–18). In the novel the last quote is part of a letter to Aurora, which Rushdie adopted from an actual letter by Nehru to his daughter Indira, and it shows Nehru in an intimate but slightly peevish and whimsical light.5 Rushdie’s Nehru in The Moor’s Last Sigh is very

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different from the Nehru in Midnight’s Children where he remained the distant Prime Minister, the iconic figure whose ideals were mirrored in the young Saleem of the Midnight Children’s Conference. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Nehru is more intimately portrayed as close friend and lover of Aurora and much is made of the rumour of his affair with Edwina Mountbatten. Furthermore, Nehru is rather outrageously appropriated as the possible father of Moor, which would make him Indira Gandhi’s brother. This intimate connection between Aurora and Nehru is important in order to identify the aloofness which they share as part of the nationalist élite. The role this élite assigns to the subalterns is usually not the one the subalterns choose themselves: When the actual masses, once in a while, did enter the stage of political conflict during the colonial period they inevitably failed to follow the script prepared by middle-class ideologues. To the nationalist leadership the main challenge appeared to be how the masses and their uncontrollable emotions could be directed and led. (Hansen 1999: 44) Aurora adopts a different position to that of the nationalist leaders when she shows solidarity with the revolutionary stance of the subalterns during the 1946 naval strike, which seriously threatened the colonial state but which was resolved with the mediation of the Congress leadership. Aurora is dismissive of what she perceives as cowardice on the part of the Congress: the Congress were acting like chamchas, toadies; that even now, when the British were too unsure of the army to send it in against the sailors, they could be sure that Congresswallahs would spare them the trouble of having to do so. When the masses actually do rise up, she thought, the bosses turn tail. (MLS 133) However, her belligerent mood is made ambiguous as the next thing she does is flatten a striking sailor’s leg because she panics as she is suddenly afraid of the subaltern men surrounding her and her car. Far more revealing is the way Aurora tries to make up for ruining the sailor’s career by creating an alternative identity for him as one-legged pirate, Long John Silver, vernacularised as Lambajan Chandiwala, without so much as asking his opinion. Lambajan Chandiwala is described as humouring Aurora by adopting his pirate identity out of love for her.


He thus becomes the devoted guardian of the Elephanta mansion in his ridiculous pose as pirate with parrot. This is a rather drastic and eccentric example of the élite providing a script for the subaltern, but in this case it is also partly a subterfuge on the part of the ex-sailor as his other hidden identity plays a crucial part in the latter half of the novel. In line with the tendency in Indian historiography to portray the Nehru period in an increasingly unglamorous way, suggesting that the Golden Years had largely been a myth, Rushdie all but demolishes one of the hallmarks of the Nehruvian state, namely its socialism and developmentalism. The interest both Rushdie and Indian historiography display in the role of the nationalist élite lies in its self-projection as the core of modern India, guiding the masses towards equality and progress through paternalistic welfare and planned industrialisation. This selfprojection effaces the fact that the nationalist élite is the main beneficiary of this policy: Accompanied by a high rhetoric of socialism and equality, the Indian state became the main provider of resources, jobs, recognition, and protection for the middle classes of bureaucrats, private entrepreneurs, and wealthy farmers – groups that soon developed a solid interest in the continuation of this style of governance. (Hansen 1999: 50) In The Moor’s Last Sigh, this is demonstrated by the career of the private entrepreneur Abraham Zogoiby who amasses an amazing fortune through vicious exploitation of the poorest sections of the Indian population. With the help of gangsters and politicians, Abraham slowly advances to the top through child prostitution and by employing an ‘invisible work-force’ which consists of the city’s disenfranchised poor (MLS 186). The invisibility of these subalterns clearly demonstrates the discrepancy between the rhetoric of socialism and equality and the state’s practice. While describing how Abraham begins his rise in the business world of Bombay by blackmail, the stark inequality of the economy is already portrayed as an entrenched feature in the 1960s as the concentration of the nation’s capital in the hands of a few wealthy families is emphasised: when official sources revealed that just one and a half per cent of the country’s companies owned over half of the private capital, and that even within that elite one and a half per cent, just twenty companies dominated the rest, and that within these twenty companies there were four super-groups who controlled, between them, one


quarter of all the share capital in India, the da Gama-Zogoiby C-50 Corporation had already risen to number five. (MLS 180) The first time communalism of the post-Independence Hindu nationalist kind is mentioned in The Moor’s Last Sigh is in connection with the celebration of the Ganesha festival in Bombay as Rushdie stages a symbolic encounter of nationalisms. From 1946 until her death in 1987 Aurora performs her counter-dance to the Ganesha Chaturthi, and the depiction of Aurora’s defiant annual anti-religious dance connects preIndependence India’s national movement under Nehru with a preview of 1970s Hindu nationalism when Ganesha Chaturthi had become the occasion for fist-clenched, saffron-headbanded young thugs to put on a show of Hindufundamentalist triumphalism, egged on by bellowing ‘Mumbai’s Axis’ party politicos and demagogues such as Raman Fielding, a.k.a. Mainduck (‘Frog’). (MLS 124) This encounter appears to represent a clash between the loud, aggressive Hindu nationalist Fielding and the softly-spoken, poetry-reciting Nehru. There is a contrast of tone, atmosphere and class. The rich, ‘westernised’ élite looks down from the luxury villa Elephanta on Malabar Hill on the celebrating masses on Chowpatty Beach who ‘risk death-bytrampling’ for the sake of a religious ceremony, whereas the Mumbai’s Axis (MA) is part and leader of the crowd (MLS 124). This encounter raises the question of democracy and how the role of the people is envisaged in the alternative conceptualisations of nationalism. During her first anti-Ganesha dance, Aurora accuses Nehru and the National Congress of having called off the Naval Strike in 1946 because they were afraid of the radical potential of the masses: ‘ “Panditji, Congress-tho is always chickening out in the face of radical acts. No soft options will be takeofied round here” ’ (MLS 125). However, Aurora’s radical act of dancing against what she perceives as the ‘perversity of humankind’ is presented as arrogant and the gulf between people like her and the masses is strongly emphasised (MLS 124). She is deliberately provocative in her anti-Ganesha dance but the subalterns appear to get the better of her because they appropriate her by reading her ritual against the grain: the more scornfully the legendary lady danced on her high parapet, the further above it all she seemed to herself to be, the more eagerly


the crowds sucked her down towards them, seeing her not as a rebel but as a temple dancer: not the scourge, but rather the groupie, of the gods. (MLS 124) It is significant that Aurora’s anti-Ganesha dance always has essentially the same message of contempt. This is a first indication that the secular élite’s response to organised Hindu nationalism and its popular endorsement is not very constructive; instead of trying to comprehend this phenomenon or to question its own role in perpetuating the gulf between élite and masses, the élite keeps attributing the allure of communalism to the ‘perversity of humankind’ and the obscurantist habits of the people. The Mumbai’s Axis, in contrast, is portrayed as part of the people and its support from the poor is emphasised: ‘ “Mumbai’s Axis”, the party of Hindu nationalists named after the mother-goddess of Bombay, which was growing rapidly in popularity among the poor’ (MLS 230). However, Mumbai’s Axis, whose structure is described as ‘rigidly hierarchic, neoStalinist’, is depicted from the perspective of the secular nationalist élite and its popular endorsement seems rather distasteful, consisting of ‘fistclenched, saffron-headbanded young thugs’ (MLS 124 & 231). Its leader, the ex-cartoonist Raman Fielding, whose nickname Mainduck means frog, is portrayed in an equally unappealing way: And in his low cane chair with his great belly slung across his knees like a burglar’s sack, with his frog’s croak of a voice bursting through his fat frog’s lips and his little dart of a tongue licking at the edges of his mouth, with his hooded froggy eyes [...] he was indeed a Frog King, a Mainduck Raja whose commands could not be gainsaid. (MLS 232) This depiction provokes the question as to whether it augurs well for Indian democracy if this party is popular among the poor. According to Hansen, similar questions were asked by the middle class in the 1970s, who experienced increasing democratisation in India with ‘a widespread discomfort with the proliferating populist techniques of political mobilization and governance, and a disapproval of the new breed of public figures from modest social backgrounds who used their language, manners, and social background to consolidate mass followings’ (Hansen 1999: 8). Partha Chatterjee argues that political society has gradually overtaken civil society in being the ‘most significant site of transformations’ in independent India and that this shift has brought questions


regarding democracy to the fore: ‘The question that frames the debate over social transformation in the colonial period is that of modernity. In political society of the post-colonial period, the framing question is that of democracy’ (Chatterjee 1998a: 65). Political parties such as Bombay’s Shiv Sena (Shivaji’s Army), on whom the Mumbai’s Axis is closely modelled, operate in the domain of political society in a way that changes the institutions through which the population and the state interact: This mediation between the population and the state takes place on the site of a new political society. It is built around the framework of modern political associations such as political parties. [...] if we have to give a name to the major form of mobilization by which political society (parties, movements, nonparty political formations) tries to channel and order popular demands on the developmental state, we should call it democracy. The institutional forms of this emergent political society are still unclear. Just as there is a continuing attempt to order these institutions in the prescribed forms of liberal civil society, there is probably an even stronger tendency to strive for what are perceived to be democratic rights and entitlements by violating those institutional norms. (Chatterjee 1998a: 64) The Shiv Sena is a particularly interesting example as it stands out from other Hindu nationalist organisations such as the RSS through its mixed following as far as the class of its members is concerned; despite its middle-class following, the Shiv Sena is mainly associated with its constituency of poorer and lower-middle class angry young men (Hansen 2001: 47). The Shiv Sena was founded in 1966 by Bal Thackeray who rules the party in a dictatorial style and who commands an extraordinary loyalty from his followers (Hansen 2001: 56–7).6 It started out as a ‘sons of the soil’ movement for Marathas, which demonised first Bombay’s South Indian immigrants and Communists before Muslims became ‘the more effective other’ (Hansen 2001: 50). The Shiv Sena is a symptom of increasing democratisation in India which manifests itself as a ‘ “plebeianization” of the political field’, and this makes the middle class question the attractiveness of democracy: ‘Anti-democratic attitudes are today widespread in the same urban middle class in India that for years was regarded as the bedrock of political democracy in the country, and the backbone of the nation’ (Hansen 1999: 8).7


The Moor’s Last Sigh depicts these developments as they are perceived by the élite, which is why these developments are never explicitly referred to as democratising tendencies. Since this increasing democratisation works less and less in a way the élite expects a liberal democracy to function, the élite is reluctant to recognise the plebeianisation of politics as a deepening of democratic structures. But Aurora experiences an attraction towards Fielding which makes it impossible for her to utterly dismiss him and which is attributed in the novel to his raw slum appeal: ‘in my mind’s eye I saw her both revolted and entranced by this guttercreature of real potency, this savage, this walking slum’ (MLS 257). But this attraction might also be symbolic of Aurora’s realisation that he does not only stand for Hindu nationalism but also for a revolutionary democratisation of India taking place in the slum as previously marginalised groups assert themselves in political society, a process which she finds fascinating. The 1970s and early 1980s were a period in which political discourse changed markedly towards a majoritarian rhetoric, which indirectly legitimised communalist discourse. According to majoritarian discourse, Hindus could legitimately transform their status as ‘a numerical majority to a political majority which can then dictate terms to other religions in India’ (Mitra 1992: 21). Indian historiography emphasises the role Indira Gandhi and her Congress (I) played in this crucial period (Jaffrelot 1996: 330–3). The significance of majoritarian discourse is that it does not diverge from the practice of perceiving India as consisting of religious communities whose interests need balancing. On the contrary, majoritarian discourse can be seen as the logical continuation of this perception as the largest community is considered to carry more weight than the others: The majoritarian notion of the ‘rights’ of Hindus was gradually becoming a ‘legitimate problematic’, as the dominant interpretation of secularism as a permanent balance between various communities – in many ways the central political episteme in the postcolonial democracy – had settled among broad groups as a fundamental principle of intelligibility of the social world. [...] one of the effects of the deep enfranchisement of the population through democratic processes was the ‘naturalization’ of Hindus as majority and as ‘proprietors’ of the nation. When Hindu communalists today refuse to recognize majority assertion as communalism, but insist that it is tantamount to ‘natural justice’ and ‘democracy’, they do not address the vocabulary of the political

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elite but widely held ‘folk’ understandings of what secularism and democracy mean. (Hansen 1999: 157) In The Moor’s Last Sigh, this change towards a majoritarian discourse is located in the late 1970s when Aurora’s art is declared an ‘irrelevance’, an alteration which is described as disclosing ‘one of those disorientating but also radical shifts by which a changing society all at once reveals that it is of a new mind’ (MLS 261). The damning verdict on Aurora’s art, which envisaged a hybrid, secular and inclusive India, is a symptom of the end of a Nehruvian consensus among India’s middle class. The new hegemonic discourse of majoritarianism is exemplified by Fielding’s speech at the opening of Aurora’s art retrospective: ‘Let everyone see today what-what we do for minorities,’ he said loudly. ‘Is it a Hindu who is given this honour? Is it one of our great Hindu artists? No matter. In India every community must have its place, its leisure activity – art et cetera – all. Christians, Parsis, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jews, Mughals. We accept this. This too is part of the ideology of Ram Rajya, rule of Lord Ram. Only when other communities are usurping our Hindu places, when minority seeks to dictate to majority, then we say that the small also must accept to bend and move before the big’. (MLS 260) Ram Rajya, which had been used by Gandhi to denote just rule, is now defined as Hindu rule, which allocates non-Hindu communities only a peripheral space in the Hindu nation. Here a ‘naturalised’ majoritarian discourse becomes indistinguishable from Hindu nationalist discourse.

Hindu nationalist India Both The Moor’s Last Sigh and secular academic historiography have the aim of discrediting Hindu nationalism while examining and explaining it. As a novelist, Rushdie can do this by means of satire. At the heart of Rushdie’s satirical onslaught is the vicious caricature of Thackeray as a repulsive cowardly frog-like Fielding, which Thackeray apparently found unamusing as he called for a ban on the book (Hansen 2001: 214). Rushdie’s satire attacks almost every aspect of the image Thackeray tries to cultivate: the image of an attractive, slim, vital man with an ‘aura of youthful exuberance’, exuding manliness and ‘physical courage’ (Hansen 2001: 51). Parodically, Shiv Sena’s symbol of a roaring tiger is turned into a smug frog in The Moor’s Last Sigh. Rushdie also satirises


the Shiv Sean by absurdly finding the basis of its fictional counterpart in cricket: In his bizarre conception of cricket as a fundamentally communalist game, essentially Hindu but with its Hindu-ness constantly under threat from the country’s other, treacherous communities, lay the origins of his political philosophy, and of the ‘Mumbai’s Axis’ itself. (MLS 231) Rushdie emphasises the Hindu nationalist strategy of creating paranoid scenarios in which Hindus are under threat from extinction, even though they constitute over 80 per cent of the population.8 Therefore it is only Fielding’s belief in minority robots which is actually an exaggeration: Hai Ram how you minorities stick together. How you gang together against Hindus, how good-natured we are that we do not see how dangerous is your threat. [...] About the robots even I will tell you, the manufacture of high-technology minority-rights cybermen to attack and murder Hindus. And about babies, the march of minority babies who will push our blessed infants from their cots and grab their sacred food. Such are their plans. But they shall not prevail. Hindu-stan: the country of Hindus! (MLS 295) However, with Moor’s descent into a surreal inferno when he is imprisoned because he is suspected of having murdered Uma Saraswati and of being involved with drug trafficking at the beginning of the third part of the novel, Rushdie engages very differently with the phenomenon of Hindu nationalism by making Moor an insider. Moor’s traumatic uprooting prepares him for adopting an entirely new identity as Fielding’s thug after he is rescued from prison by the guardian of Elephanta and his former boxing coach Lambajan Chandiwala. Rushdie may have chosen to use the Shiv Sena as his main model for a Hindu nationalist organisation because it is not predominantly a middle-class, upper-caste affair like the RSS, and, therefore, not as easy to discount. The fact that the likable figure of Lambajan turns out to be Fielding’s man is in line with Hansen’s assessment that the Shiv Sena is a vehicle ‘for a democratic revolution’ which gave subalterns a space for political mobilisation as it introduced ‘ “plebeian” politics into Bombay’s political culture’ (Hansen 2001: 69). It is significant that it is Fielding who for the first time calls Lambajan Chandiwala by his real

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name, Borkar, which makes Moor realise that he had ‘long forgotten’ it (MLS 293). Nor had Moor known that Borkar was a member of the MA: ‘it was being made shamefully plain that I had known nothing of importance about him, nor made it my business to know’ (MLS 293). Fielding makes fun of Moor’s kind and of how they perceive the world and ‘democracy’: ‘Whose town do you think this is?’ [Fielding] asked. ‘On Malabar Hill you drink whisky-soda and talk democracy. But our people guard your gates. You think you know them but they have also their own lives and tell you nothing’. (MLS 293) It is Shiv Sena’s championing of the common man, and its more unruly politics of celebrating the collective strength of the common man, which sets it apart from other Hindu nationalist parties and organisations:9 The popularity of sainiks [members of the Shiv Sena] as brokers and protectors owes much to their image of being violent, ruthless, aggressive defenders of the common man by means of employing the common man’s only strength – his strength in numbers – and his language – fists and muscles – in order to assert his rights vis-à-vis the establishment. (Hansen 2001: 55) Fielding echoes this rhetoric of privileging the common man but when he claims that he owns people like Borkar because he looks after them, it is nevertheless patronising. Fielding’s lower middle-class background also predisposed him to apply paternalistic rhetoric towards people like Borkar, a discourse which has been typically used by the middle class with reference to subalterns, even though Fielding’s language is of a cruder kind compared to the élite’s more benevolent rhetoric: I own his body and also his soul. And how did I purchase? Because I have looked after his people. You-tho don’t even know how many family members does he have in his village. But I have been getting kiddies educated and solving health and hygiene problems since many years. Abraham Zogoiby, old man Tata [...], even Mother Indira herself – they think they are the in-charges but they care nothing for the Common Man. (MLS 294) A frequently used strategy to discredit Hindu nationalism in Indian historiography is to draw parallels between Hindu nationalist


organisations and European fascism and Nazism.10 Thackeray’s often repeated admiration for Hitler has obviously facilitated such comparisons (Katzenstein, Mehta & Thakkar 1997: 379).11 In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie problematises this strategy because the demonisation of Thackeray/Fielding is too simplistic a solution and effaces the complicity of the rest of society, especially perhaps that of secular civil society which considers itself the guardian of the nation. It is, after all, a member of this secular élite, Moor, who defends his portrayal of Fielding from an insider’s perspective: Yes, I know there is a fashion now for these Hitler’s valet-type memoirs, and many people are against it, they say we should not humanise the inhuman. But the point is they are not inhuman, these Mainduck-style little Hitlers, and it is in their humanity that we must locate our collective guilt, humanity’s guilt for human beings’ misdeeds; for if they are just monsters [...] then the rest of us are excused. (MLS 297) Rushdie’s portrayal of Fielding is in the main unflattering, but he creates a contradictory picture of Fielding, one which also has its less repulsive side. And Rushdie emphasises the complicity of members of the élite, who are shown as anxious to please him. When the children of ‘the city’s blue-bloods’ applaud Fielding by making derogatory remarks about Indian Islam, he unexpectedly defends its cultural achievements: But when they began, in their guffawing way, to belittle the culture of Indian Islam that lay palimpsest-fashion over the face of Mother India, Mainduck rose to his feet and 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 splendour of the Taj. An intricate fellow, indeed. (MLS 298–9) This alleged intricacy of Fielding’s character is, of course, ironic as his figure never develops any real depth in the novel. It is rather Moor’s perspective of Fielding which the text focuses on as he tries hard to overcome the final traces of his disgust and repulsion in order to emulate him: ‘I would become this man. I studied Fielding closely. I must say as he said, do as he did. He was the new way, the future. I would learn him, like a road’ (MLS 300). Moor’s utter surrender of his identity and complete immersion in Fielding’s world in order to become Fielding’s man is Rushdie’s main

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strategy to depict and comprehend Bombay’s Hindu nationalist organisation in all its contradictoriness and complexity. Moor embraces his new life and identity with a vengeance: ‘willingly, even joyfully, I leapt’ (MLS 295). Moor with his deformed hand and the disorder which makes him age at double speed appears to fit in perfectly among the menagerie of assorted freaks who form Fielding’s élite corps. The Mumbai’s Axis’ supreme team is led by Sammy Hazaré, the Tin-Man, who had a ‘sizable steel plate [...] bolted into the left side of his face, and one of his hands, too, was shiny and smooth’ (MLS 301). Chhaggan Five-in-a-Bite is an equally implausible figure who gained his nickname after he bit off his brother’s toes in a wrestling match. It is among such company that Moor feels at home for the first time: ‘I found, for the first time in my shortlong life, the feeling of normality, of being nothing special, the sense of being among kindred spirits, among people-like-me, that is the defining quality of home’ (MLS 305). Moor may have theoretically been part of Bombay’s élite but his freakish nature had forced him to lead an isolated life, which he now for the first time transcends by becoming what he perceives as his secret identity, which is epitomised by his deformed hand: ‘my true self, whose secret was contained in that deformed limb which I had thrust for too long into the depths of my clothing. No more! Now I would brandish it with pride. Henceforth I would be my fist; would be a Hammer, not a Moor’ (MLS 295). Rushdie’s tactic of providing an insider’s perspective on a Hindu nationalist organisation, with the description of all its contradictions and attractions, resembles that of the anthropologist Hansen when he explains why angry young men from various social milieus are attracted to the Shiv Sena. Hansen even makes a reference to the accuracy with which The Moor’s Last Sigh portrays this attraction: The brutality of sainiks does not grow out of desperation or poverty; it is nourished by Thackeray’s command to let go of restrictions and social conventions, to act out frustrations and desires without bounds. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie captures the attraction of this violent milieu. (Hansen 2001: 200) What Rushdie intimately portrays in The Moor’s Last Sigh is the attraction of being part of political society with its anarchic and chaotic quality, in contrast to the ordered, ‘civilised’ ways of civil society: There was a thing that Raman Fielding knew, which was his power’s secret source: that it is not the civil social norms for which men


yearn, but the outrageous, the outsize, the out-of-bounds – for that by which our wild potency may be unleashed. We crave permission openly to become our secret selves. (MLS 305) Hansen explores the political functioning of the Shiv Sena by employing Chatterjee’s concept of political society which he describes as ‘the expansive realm of public protest, public violence, and local mobilizations in which Shiv Sena has thrived and perfected its political mode’ (Hansen 2001: 229). This political society is characterised by ‘sometimes anarchic, sometimes highly organized [...] collective performances and protests, ritualized violence in public spaces’ (Hansen 2001: 230). In The Moor’s Last Sigh this ‘ritualised violence’ is described in detail. Political society is a domain full of democratic possibilities but this potential often results in practices which seem to undermine democracy by not following the rules of civil society. The narrative in The Moor’s Last Sigh exemplifies this duality of the vibrant and violent field of political society by the way it appears to be pulled in different directions at the same time when Moor describes his emotional life as Mainduck’s thug. Moor’s explanation of his new-found belonging, of actually following his nature, is bound to evoke both sympathy and disgust in the reader. Moor emphasises his ecstatic pleasure in committing the most atrocious and violent crimes and the joy of doing it in a team, of experiencing ‘the virile pleasures of comradeship and all-for-one’ (MLS 305). But at the same time Moor is haunted by nightmares and finds himself ‘vomiting without apparent cause’ (MLS 309). Hansen emphasises the essential importance of performative violence for the Shiv Sena both for those outside the movement in order to instil fear and respect, but also for the members themselves in order to affirm their identity: It is through the ritualized destruction of property, the attacks on the police, the hurling of stones, the shouting of slogans that sainiks are produced, their identities affirmed and stabilized. It is this ‘ritualized violence’, driven by the imperative of public assertion and performance, that is Sena’s raison d’etre. (Hansen 2001: 65) This performative aspect is also stressed in The Moor’s Last Sigh when Fielding’s élite thugs break the great textile mill strike in the early 1980s by beating up individual workers and instilling fear in the rest. The systematic beating up of whoever is declared the enemy – Communists, dalits, striking women – becomes the core of Moor’s existence and the only thing that he experiences as real. His seven years working for


Fielding are described as a string of violent acts, which he experiences as exhilarating: ‘To beat a man is a kind of exaltation, a revelatory act, opening strange gates in the universe’ (MLS 308). This aspect of the Shiv Sena/MA exposes glaringly the contradictions in the realm of political society where democratising forces appear to create conditions in which the poorest of the poor become completely unprotected as the legal framework of the civil society-state nexus is suspended: ‘The Sena has expanded the scope of political society in Maharashtra by defying every rule and convention of democracy – such as abiding by laws, respecting adversaries, and pursuing political ends by peaceful means’ (Hansen 2001: 231). Chatterjee describes political society as a site where marginal groups have utilised the ‘imaginative power of a traditional structure of community’ in order to claim agency in the political field (Chatterjee 1998b: 282). He appears to see great potential for developing new democratic procedures in the way claims are made collectively by marginalised communities. But in a situation of intense competition between various communities, brute force may become the decisive factor, as is the case when Fielding’s men break the textile mill strike by destroying the spirit of individual striking workers in order to deter them from organising themselves in a competing collective again: ‘A man who is beaten seriously [...] will be irreversibly changed. [...] Afterwards he will never fully re-enter himself, and invitations to join any larger, collective entity – a union, for example – are instantly rebuffed’ (MLS 307). It is the description of Moor’s horrendous crimes, which he commits as Fielding’s goonda for no ethically justifiable reason, which functions as the condemnation of Fielding and his organisation in The Moor’s Last Sigh. It is less any specific aspect of Hindu nationalist ideology which is focused on, but the sheer ruthlessness of the organisation and its violence towards victims who are frequently those at the bottom of society. The choice of victims is portrayed as almost arbitrary as violence becomes an end in itself. The case of Sammy Hazaré exemplifies the vacuity of the reasons given to justify these crimes: Hazaré was a Christian Maharashtrian, and had joined up with Fielding’s crew for regionalist, rather than religious reasons. O, we all had reasons, personal or ideological. There are always reasons. You can get reasons in any chor bazaar, any thieves’ market, reasons by the bunch, ten chips the dozen. Reasons are cheap, cheap as politicians’ answers, they come tripping off the tongue: I did it for the money, the uniform, the togetherness, the family, the race, the nation,


the god. But what truly drives us – what makes us hit, and kick, and kill, what makes us conquer our enemies and our fears – is not to be found in any such bazaar-bought words. Our engines are stranger, and use darker fuel. Sammy Hazaré, for instance, was driven by bombs. Explosives, which had already claimed a hand and half his jaw, were his first love [...], Nadia Wadia was his second. (MLS 312) It is Sammy’s inexplicable love of bombs and his unrequited love for Nadia which will become important in the latter part of the novel where motivations and deeds of actors become increasingly inscrutable.

Palimpsest India The palimpsest is the defining image of the last phase of the part of the novel dealing with Bombay, which begins with Aurora’s murder in 1987 and ends with a series of bomb blasts in 1993. A palimpsest is usually a manuscript which was written upon several times with each writing effacing the layer of writing beneath. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, however, the image of the palimpsest is used in various complex and contradictory ways. Palimpsests in The Moor’s Last Sigh both hide and reveal secrets as Aurora’s final palimpsest painting hides her murderer’s identity under the picture with the name ‘The Moor’s Last Sigh’. The various layers of the novel’s palimpsest world do not tend to conform to a neat, hierarchical layering but merge into each other or become otherwise indistinguishable. Gradually, the intelligible world of the nationalist élite which we encountered at the beginning of the novel is displaced by a multilayered and opaque India that is structured like a chaotic palimpsest of which Hindu nationalist India is only one layer. Rushdie’s strategy of portraying contemporary India as increasingly unintelligible to its own élite, the force which was supposed to have shaped and defined post-Independence India, is similar to Hansen’s explanation of the rise of Hindu nationalism among the middle class. Hansen argues that the Hindu middle class became gradually more receptive to Hindu nationalist discourse, with its emphasis on order and discipline, as the social world was perceived as increasingly disorderly by dint of intensified democratisation: it was the desire for recognition within an increasingly global horizon, and the simultaneous anxieties of being encroached upon by the Muslims, the plebeians, and the poor that over the last decade have prompted millions of Hindus to respond to the call for Hindutva at

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the polls and in the streets, and to embrace Hindu nationalist promises of order, discipline, and collective strength. (Hansen 1999: 5) The growing assertiveness of lower castes and classes, and the wider exposure to consumerism and globalisation which is experienced as threatening by the middle class, account for the attractiveness of the clearly structured world of Hindu nationalist discourse: My argument is that the articulation of Hindutva (Hinduness) in politics and in public life is primarily a way of making sense of the social world, a strategy that aims at creating a certain order within the disorderly realm of democratic politics, by imposing a matrix of a natural, eternal, and essentialized ‘Hindu culture’ upon it. (Hansen 1999: 19) Hansen’s argument that the success of Hindu nationalist organisations and parties was mainly premised on trends and processes ‘beyond the control of its organized effort’, stands in contrast to the assessment of those historians such as Basu and Sarkar who argue that the growing support for Hindu nationalism was primarily based on the extraordinary skills of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) at organising a Hindu nationalist mass movement (Hansen 1999: 134). Basu and others use the sophisticated employment of videos and audio cassettes with easily replicable propagandist material as a prime example of the RSS and VHP’s ‘highly orchestrated and controlled movement’, which tries to efface this orchestration by presenting it ‘as natural and spontaneous’ (Basu et al. 1993: 101).12 This line of argument portrays Hindu nationalism’s success as the fruit of a manipulative and conspiratorial movement, whereas Hansen identifies larger shifts in Indian society as the cause of the attractiveness of Hindu nationalist discourse. In this respect Hansen’s account is close to the way The Moor’s Last Sigh depicts the rise of Hindu nationalism. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, India’s palimpsest world is portrayed as the result of the processes of the democratisation and politicisation of wider sections of India’s population in the form of the Mumbai’s Axis’ politics, and an increasing involvement in globalised capitalism. These processes create a confusingly layered reality whose impenetrability contributes to the attractiveness of the simplistic messages of Hindu nationalism such as Fielding’s version of Indian history: 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 built. This true nation is what we must reclaim from beneath the layers of alien empires.’ (MLS 299) The Hindu nationalist version of palimpsest history, which can be easily ‘rectified’ by erasing the top layers, is portrayed as inadequate, and the text uses the image of the ambiguously layered palimpsest predominantly to discredit this history and displace the certainties it entails. Juxtaposed to this simplistic Hindu nationalist history is the ‘war of the worlds’, represented by the Hindu nationalist politician Fielding and the ‘secular’ businessman Abraham, in which the dominant ‘two layers of power’ vie for supremacy: the coming war of the worlds, Under versus Over, sacred versus profane, god versus mammon, past versus future, gutter versus sky: that struggle between two layers of power in which I, Nadia Wadia, and Bombay, and even India itself would find ourselves trapped, like dust between coats of paint. (MLS 318) Hansen’s argument with regard to Hindu nationalism therefore resembles Rushdie’s narrative as both portray Hindu nationalist forces as only one group among many in a confusing and intensely competitive field, rather than depicting Hindu nationalism as a conspiratorial, sinister force which knows exactly how to pull the strings in order to come to power. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, the protagonists in the war of the worlds are portrayed as inadequate both in judging their opponent and assessing their own strengths. Another crucial layer beside ‘god versus mammon’ is the underworld ‘proper’, epitomised by Abraham’s business partner, the ‘Muslim gangboss’ called Scar (MLS 182). He remains an éminence grise with a fearsome aura ‘whose real name I will not make so bold as to set down here, contenting myself with that terrifying cliché of a sobriquet by which he was known throughout the city’s underworld’ (MLS 182). Rushdie keeps to rare references to ‘Scar’, who remains a vague threat in the background; Scar is evidently modelled on the notorious Bombay gangster Dawood Ibrahim, who leads a similarly nebulous existence. Hansen describes how Dawood Ibrahim became a legendary, larger-than-life figure in the 1980s and 1990s, especially after his move to Dubai, from where he is supposed to control a huge criminal empire (Hansen 2001: 190). In the increasing communalisation of Bombay’s atmosphere, the underworld, which has been allegedly dominated by Muslims, began to

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play an important part from the 1980s onwards as Muslim gang-bosses, especially Dawood Ibrahim, came to be seen as the protectors of the city’s Muslims and the scourge of Hindus: Over the years [Ibrahim’s] mythological status has grown into an enormous self-perpetuating narrative of a mystical hero that incarnates much of the stigmas, stereotypes, and fears associated with Muslims within the Hindu middle classes, the press, and the police. Dawood is feared and respected because of his courage and power. He has become a hero, whose status as the radical evil of all Hindu dreams makes him an icon among young toughs. (Hansen 2001: 180) Hansen emphasises that the knowledge which structures the narrative of Bombay’s underworld is based on rumour, allegations and stereotypes rather than evidence and that the role of the police and the media in perpetuating this narrative is crucial. It is conspicuous that the narrative which provides the model for understanding Bombay’s underworld is the Hollywood gangster movie: Exactly when the term gang became the dominant model through which the police, officials, and the press tried to understand the hidden side of the city is unclear. However, in the 1970s, a complete terminology and set of narrative frames derived from the American gangster mythology became ever more popular in descriptions of Bombay’s underworld. The gang world was divided into four distinct mafia syndicates, each defined by a specific territory and headed by a don whose life story, lifestyle, and personal qualities, spread both by rumor and intensive press coverage, became the ‘talk of the town.’ (Hansen 2001: 188) This popular narrative and its Hollywood vocabulary are replicated in The Moor’s Last Sigh but Rushdie increases the suspense of the story of the Bombay underworld by uniting the gangs under a single figure, ‘not just Godfather, but Gone-farthest’ (MLS 168): It was the conventional wisdom of the period that the (mainly Muslim) gangs controlling the city’s organised crime, each with their ruling boss or dada, had been weakened by their traditional difficulties in forming any kind of lasting syndicate or united front. My own experiences with the MA, working in the poorest quarters of the city to win friends and build support, suggested something different.


I had begun to see hints and glimpses of something shadowy, so frightening that nobody would talk about it – some hidden layer of what-seemed-to-be. I had suggested to Mainduck that the gangs had finally achieved unity, that there might even be a single Mafia-style capo di tutti capi in place. (MLS 331) Rushdie uses the popular myth, with a twist, by making Abraham this über-godfather, which satirically alludes to the equally misguided notion of a Jewish world domination conspiracy. Palimpsest India is a place where expectations are persistently subverted and where the truth is portrayed as either hidden or unlikely: ‘Yes, the High Command did exist, and the Muslim gangs had been united by a Cochin Jew. The truth is almost always exceptional, freakish, improbable, and almost never normative, almost never what cold calculations would suggest’ (MLS 331). Palimpsest India is in stark contrast to the India of the beginning of the novel where the battle lines between nationalists and anglophile loyalists were clearly drawn and there appeared to be potential for heroism in the anticolonial struggle and in the creation of a free secular India. In this mock-epic contest of the ‘war of the worlds’, it is clear that there will be no heroes. The predominant mood of the latter part of the novel is gloomy and it is hardly a consolation when Moor celebrates the interreligious union of gangsters as ‘a dark, ironic victory for India’s deeprooted secularism’: ‘The very nature of this inter-community league of cynical self-interest gave the lie to Mainduck’s vision of a theocracy in which one particular variant of Hinduism would rule, while all India’s other people bowed their beaten heads’ (MLS 332). Here as elsewhere the tidiness of ‘Under versus Over’ or any other neat binary opposition breaks down as it cannot do justice to the complexity of the contending forces (MLS 318). Ironically, corruption is elevated to the position of an almost positive force because it unites different layers in self-interest and cuts through what may appear impenetrable boundaries: Vasco had said it years ago: corruption was the only force we had that could defeat fanaticism. What had been, on his lips, no more than a drunkard’s gibe, had been turned by Abraham Zogoiby into living reality, into a union of hovel and high-rise, a godless crooked army that could take on and vanquish anything that the god-squad sent its way. (MLS 332) The alliance of Abraham and Scar thrives in an economic system that is described in the bleakest terms in The Moor’s Last Sigh. Abraham makes

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the most of India’s increasing openness to global capitalism, which involves ‘[c]orrupt global-scale banking schemes, stock market fixing at the super-epic Mogambo level, multi-billion-dollar arms deals, nuclear technology conspiracies’ (MLS 250–1). The demise of the Nehruvian system of a planned economy and the deregulation and liberalisation of the Indian economy in the 1980s and 1990s resulted in what Jayant Lele describes as the ‘expansion of predatory capitalism’: Its fires are being fed through multilayered links that extend from criminal gangs to movie tycoons, from slum landlords and real-estate dons to respectable corporate and public sector executives. A range of ‘service sector industries’ are now thriving on the ideology of liberalization. From banking and stock market manipulation to gun-running and drug-trafficking, there are chains of profit-sharing. (Lele 1995: 203) This economic system is depicted in surreal terms in The Moor’s Last Sigh when Abraham confides in his son after their reconciliation: ‘I would go to his high-rise glass Eden at night and he would tell me his serpentine tales. And they were like fairy tales, in a way: goblin-sagas of the present day, tales of the utterly abnormal recounted in a matter-of-fact, banal, duty manager’s normalising tones’ (MLS 333). Abraham’s secret activities make the global economy appear as a mysterious space which defies comprehension. The palimpsest image is used here to demonstrate how the truth is hidden under layers of competing realities, and the atheist Moor is shaken both in his belief and disbelief: ‘And if the reality of our being is that so many covert truths exist behind Mayaveils of unknowing and illusion, then why not Heaven and Hell, too?’ (MLS 334). These passages prepare us for Abraham’s dreadful secret, which is his collaboration in global nuclear terrorism, especially the manufacture of a ‘so-called Islamic bomb’ for ‘certain oil-rich countries and their ideological allies’ (MLS 341 & 335). In one of the many unexpected twists in this part of the novel, Moor grounds his first redemptive act, namely his refusal to be part of Abraham’s crimes, in his communal identity as a Jew. As it is suggested in the text that Abraham’s bomb is meant for Israel, Moor for the first time stands up to his father with the words: ‘ “excuse me, but I find that I’m a Jew” ’ (MLS 337). This newly discovered allegiance comes as a surprise since Moor’s identity up to this point is decidedly ‘non-communal’: I heard a voice within me making an absolute, non-negotiable refusal. [...] I now believed I had passed the bounds of what was required of


me by family loyalty. To my surprise, another loyalty had taken precedence. Surprise, because after all I had been raised in Elephanta, where all communal ties had been deliberately disrupted; in a country where all citizens owe an instinctive dual allegiance to a place and a faith, I had been made into a nowhere-and-no-community man – and proud of it, may I say. (MLS 336) This is an interesting turn in a novel in which communal identities are associated with divisive, xenophobic tendencies. The positive effect of Moor’s communal identity, however, is shortly afterwards juxtaposed with the climax of communal hatred and slaughter in Bombay in 1992 and 1993. The Moor’s Last Sigh is partly an elegy to an idea of Bombay as a secular, cosmopolitan metropolis where the different religious communities lived in relative peace side by side, an image shattered after the destruction of the mosque in Ayodhya and the ensuing communal riots: In Punjab, Assam, Kashmir, Meerut – in Delhi, in Calcutta – from time to time they slit their neighbours’ throats and took warm showers, or red bubble-baths, in all that spuming blood. [...] In Bombay, such things never happened. – Never, you say? – OK?: never is too absolute a word. Bombay was not inoculated against the rest of the country, and what happened elsewhere [...] also spread into its streets. But on the way to Bombay the rivers of blood were usually diluted [...] Am I sentimentalising? [...] Bombay was central. In Bombay, as the old, founding myth of the nation faded, the new god-and-mammon India was being born. (MLS 350–1) The major contending forces in this ‘new god-and-mammon India’ are represented by Abraham and Fielding, who is now in political control of the city. They are portrayed as preparing for the final battle for supremacy: ‘Mogambo versus Mainduck: the long-awaited dual, the heavyweight unification bout to establish, once and for all, which gang (criminal-entrepreneurial or political-criminal) would run the town’ (MLS 351–2). Both forces are described as being at the height of their power with a far-reaching network of allies, and the line between legal ‘overworld’ and illegal ‘underworld’ is difficult to draw since both are deeply implicated in criminal activities. Abraham and Scar are pitted against Fielding and ‘like-minded national parties and paramilitary organisations, that alphabet soup of authoritarians, BJP, RSS,

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VHP’ (MLS 337). This mock-epic contest between these destructive forces is depicted as a tragedy performed by clowns, one in which it is impossible to take sides. This stage of India’s history is bereft of heroes, in explicit contrast to the history of the struggle for independence and early independent India: So was this a Mahabharat-style conflict, then, a Trojan war, in which the gods took sides and played their part? [...] We were not, did not deserve to be thought of as being, of tragic status. [...] Tragedy was not in our natures. A tragedy was taking place all right, a national tragedy on a grand scale, but those of us who played our parts were – let me put it bluntly – clowns. Clowns! Burlesque buffoons, drafted into history’s theatre on account of the lack of greater men. Once, indeed, there were giants on our stage; but at the fag-end of an age, Madam History must make do with what she can get. Jawaharlal, in these latter days, was just the name of a stuffed dog. (MLS 352) The destruction of the Babri mosque is portrayed as a turning point both in the novel and in Indian historiography. For Hindu nationalists the campaign for the demolition of the mosque was staged as a reclamation of national honour and as an act of natural justice since the mosque was supposed to have been built on a destroyed Ram temple built on the site of his birthplace. The demolition of the mosque was meant to constitute ‘the “exorcising” of Muslims in order to create the Hindu nation’ (Hansen 1999: 181). Whereas the eventual destruction of the mosque, and the inability to have stopped it, is usually presented in Indian historiography as a cynical, calculated act by politicians, Rushdie’s depiction of the event emphasises the irreconcilability of its interpretations and of the way it was experienced:13 The mosque at Ayodhya was destroyed. Alphabet-soupists, ‘fanatics’, or, alternatively, ‘devout liberators of the sacred site’ (delete according to taste) swarmed over the seventeenth-century Babri Masjid and tore it apart with their bare hands [...] The police, as press photographs showed, stood by and watched the forces of history do their historyobliterating work. [...] It was one of those moments best described as irreconcilable: both joyful and tragic, both authentic and spurious, both natural and manipulated. (MLS 363) In contrast to the indictment of the Emergency in Midnight’s Children, this turning point in India’s history is described briefly and with detachment


on the part of the narrator. Rushdie does not linger on enumerating historical facts or the lack of them: ‘Nobody could even be sure, some commentators dared to point out, that the present-day town of Ayodhya in U. P. stood on the same site as the mythical Ayodhya’ (MLS 363). If perceptions of reality diverge so glaringly from each other, an insistence on historical factuality can be easily neutralised by the counter-arguments of Hindu nationalist histories, whose authenticity is pitted against academic histories produced by Westernised ‘deracine scholars’ in Indian universities (Pandey 1994: 1525). In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Fielding locates the authenticity of Indian history in the ‘original’ layer of Hindu history which existed in a pristine state before its contamination by the histories of ‘others’ who can only be imagined as ‘invaders’: ‘When such alien artefacts [the mosque and Aurora’s stolen paintings] disappear from India’s holy soil, let no man mourn,’ he said. ‘If the new nation is to be born, there is much invader-history that may have to be erased.’ So we were invaders now, were we? After two thousand years, we still did not belong. (MLS 364) The ensuing communal riots, which left several hundred people dead in Bombay alone, are described in the same brief manner as the demolition of the mosque by a narrator who seems above all tired of recounting communal violence. In the depiction of the communal slaughter following the destruction of the mosque the narrator accuses both sides equally: In the days after the destruction of the Babri Masjid, ‘justly enraged Muslims’/‘fanatical killers’ (once again, use your blue pencil as your heart dictates) smashed up Hindu temples, and killed Hindus, across India and in Pakistan as well. There comes a point in the unfurling of communal violence in which it becomes irrelevant to ask, ‘Who started it?’ The lethal conjugations of death part company with any possibility of justification, let alone justice. 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. Both their houses are damned by their deeds; both sides sacrifice the right to any shred of virtue; they are each other’s plagues. (MLS 365) Rushdie clearly does not want to exonerate Muslims and portray them solely in a victimised position as those who constituted the majority of

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murdered people. His account leaves no room for a distinct condemnation of the crucial role the Shiv Sena and the pro-Hindu police force played, in contrast to Madhu Kishwar’s account of the Bombay riots, which makes for harrowing reading as it enumerates the atrocities, the acts of rape and murder (Kishwar 1998: 149–78). The description of the riots in The Moor’s Last Sigh problematically echoes the discourse of ‘balanced and equally apportioned guilt’, which was employed during the official investigation of the riots by the Srikrishna commission: the dominant, official interpretation of the riots as irrational excesses committed in extraordinary situations spontaneously, and with equal participation, by faceless Hindus and Muslims and not by organizations or specific individuals had gained widespread currency. The government’s decision authorized the formula of a ‘balanced and equally apportioned guilt’, namely, that every murder of a Hindu committed was ethically neutralized by a corresponding atrocity committed by a Muslim. (Hansen 2001: 142) The difference between Rushdie’s approach and that of the commission, however, is that although Rushdie wants to opt out of the numbers game, the official investigation avoided naming and prosecuting those guilty of committing the violence. In The Moor’s Last Sigh the comparison of the number of Muslims and Hindus killed in the riots is avoided in order not to follow the logic of evaluating suffering according to communal belonging. The violence of the riots is displaced from the streets of Bombay to Moor’s individual murder of Mainduck in order to avenge the death of his mother. However, as it is revealed in Benengeli, Aurora’s murderer was in all likelihood Abraham, not Fielding. So Moor’s righteous act of revenge turns out to be a set-up, designed by Abraham in order to eliminate his main rival. This episode demonstrates the futility of seeking justification for murder, which is also a comment on the Bombay riots. The series of bomb blasts in Bombay on 12 March 1993 which killed hundreds of people is the only major historical event in The Moor’s Last Sigh whose depiction considerably diverges from historical accounts. In the novel the bombs are mainly the work of Abraham, after he is ruined, and of Sammy Hazaré, who both decide to go down ‘with all guns blazing’ (MLS 361). It is implied that Abraham’s phone call to Scar triggers off the bombings before Abraham makes sure that Moor will kill Mainduck as the alleged murderer of Aurora. However, the event remains partly unexplained as it is not clear who


else is involved. According to historical accounts, it was ‘mainly Muslims affiliated with criminal networks in Bombay’ who arranged the bomb blasts, interpreted as a retaliatory act for the Bombay riots, with the alleged help of Dawood Ibrahim and the Pakistani intelligence service: Regardless of the factual complexities surrounding the bombings, it soon became widely assumed to all that the bomb blasts were the Muslims’ answer to militant Hindus. ‘Don’t mess with us’ was the message allegedly sent by the legendary Dawood Ibrahim, now elevated to the status of stern godfather, along with his gang, on behalf of the Muslim community. (Hansen 2001: 125–6) So both the novel’s and the official version of the event have residual unexplained elements. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, the bomb blasts are eventually depicted as the city devouring itself: Bombay blew apart. [...] Hindu and Muslim areas were both attacked; men, women, children perished, and there was nobody to give the dignity of meaning to their deaths. What avenging demon bestrode the horizon, raining fire upon our heads? Was the city simply murdering itself? [...] Maybe Abraham Zogoiby lit the fuse, or Scar: these fanatics or those, our crazies or yours; but the explosions burst out of our very own bodies. We were both the bombers and the bombs. The explosions were our own evil – no need to look for foreign explanations [...]. We have chopped away our own legs, we engineered our own fall. (MLS 371–3) Apart from being depicted as a fall from grace, this apocalyptic event is also purgative, however, as the slate is wiped clean since all characters apart from Moor and Nadia are killed.14 The deaths of both Abraham and Fielding open the possibility of a new beginning. This ending of the third part of the novel is consistent with the novel’s portrayal of the ambiguity of palimpsest India, which transcends the duality of the ‘god-and-mammon India’. The complexity of palimpsest India with its constantly shifting alliances is epitomised by Sammy Hazaré’s role in the novel as he is first presumed to be a loyal follower of Fielding until it is disclosed that he also works for Abraham. What finally drives him over the edge of rational behaviour is his unrequited love for Nadia Wadia and his love for bombs, which he lets loose in a self-destructive bombing spree. So the slum-dweller plays a part in


the destruction of Bombay which is beyond the control of his former bosses. The Moor’s Last Sigh’s palimpsest India resembles Chatterjee’s political society where democratic negotiations are carried out in new ways by people whose ‘normative status of the virtuous citizen will remain infinitely deferred until such time as they can be provided with the basic material and cultural prerequisites of membership of civil society’ (Chatterjee 1998b: 282). Until such an ‘infinitely deferred’ moment in time, the ‘politics of democratisation must therefore be carried out not in the classical transactions between state and civil society but in the much less well-defined, legally ambiguous, contextually and strategically demarcated terrain of political society’ (Chatterjee 1998b: 282). Chatterjee predicts that the resolution of this division of the Indian population is less likely to be the eventual integration of political society into civil society but rather a more pronounced opposition (Chatterjee 1998a: 65). He argues that the ‘historical task [...] is to work out new forms of democratic institutions and practices in the mediating field of political society that lies between civil society and the nation-state’ (Chatterjee 1998a: 68). It is on account of these difficult manoeuvres in the political field that Hansen predicts that Hindu nationalist parties and organisations will not be able to negotiate the complexities of an increasingly contested Indian democracy tied to the exigencies of a globalised economy (Hansen 1999: 237). As I have argued in this chapter, the conceptual opposition between civil society and political society is useful in analysing the shifting balance of power in The Moor’s Last Sigh. The standards of civil society are first introduced as ‘normal’, which is the way Nehruvian nationalism portrayed them. When more unruly ‘plebeian’ forces enter the stage in the shape of Fielding’s party, they appear at first as an unwelcome deviation from this norm. It is not immediately apparent in the novel that this new force also signals an intensified democratisation of India, not just an increasing communalisation. The perception of a democratising process is partly precluded by the persistent emphasis on the perspective of the secular Nehruvian élite, for whom this democratisation appears to spell rougher times. To the end, the text clings to this secular nationalist idea of India which is symbolised by the stuffed dog Jawaharlal, which Moor introduces to the Spanish custom’s official as ‘the former Prime Minister of India, metamorphosed into canine form’ (MLS 385). Yet despite the implicit and explicit criticism of the nationalist Nehruvian élite in The Moor’s Last Sigh, the narrator cannot let go of its battered ideals and myths: ‘I must admit that Jawaharlal the stuffed


dog had seen better times. Since I began carting him around he had lost most of one ear and there were a couple of missing teeth’ (MLS 395). But eventually, Jawaharlal is stowed away in a broom- cupboard in Andalusia: ‘I said my farewells to Jawaharlal. His had been a long journey, too, and it deserved a better end than a broom-cupboard in a foreign land’ (MLS 407). The myth of a cosmopolitan, live-and-let-live Bombay is also only half-heartedly and only partially abandoned in the novel. Hansen argues that The Moor’s Last Sigh reveals ‘Bombay’s Janus face’ as the ‘truth of the city – the intimate dependence of the elite and middle-class life of the city on the underworld, on sectarian violence, and on brutal exploitation; in brief, all that official nationalism for so long sought to repress and efface’ (Hansen 2001: 5). This is undoubtedly an accurate reading of the novel. But this truth is partly hidden under layers which still affirm the ideal of a Nehruvian civil society for all.

4 Mother India

Rushdie’s imagining of the nation in The Moor’s Last Sigh is situated in a drastically changed historical context in comparison to the representation of the nation in Midnight’s Children, which takes the Nehruvian secular and inclusive nation as its main model and point of reference. In Midnight’s Children Rushdie criticises the Nehruvian nation’s élite and its patriarchal character but does not advocate placing something radically different in its place. Indira Gandhi’s Emergency threatened the democratic basis of the Nehruvian nation and was therefore vehemently condemned in the novel, but after the reinstatement of democracy in 1977 a tougher generation was predicted as taking the place of the midnight’s children. It is not suggested, however, that their vision of India was to differ fundamentally from that of Nehru. Midnight’s Children still pleads for a fulfilment of the promises of equality and justice made by the Nehruvian nation-state. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, in contrast, the Nehruvian consensus is depicted as crumbling and Hindu nationalism is portrayed as the new dominant force in the late twentieth century, a force which imagines India as an exclusive Hindu nation. What The Moor’s Last Sigh does not explicitly mention, however, is that there are many formerly quiescent, disadvantaged groups, castes, and regional communities which have demanded participation in the shaping of the nation and the distribution of the nation-state’s resources since the 1980s.1 And from the 1990s a ruling coalition in Delhi has only been able to be formed by making alliances with various regional parties. This increasing regionalisation of Indian politics might not augur well for the future of the Indian central state and it is highly significant that Rushdie decided to use and experiment with the nationalist concept of Mother India in The Moor’s Last Sigh at a time when the Indian nation seemed increasingly fragmented and in danger of falling apart. 122

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The anthropomorphic image of the nation as Mother India implies its territorial intactness. Thus the Partition in 1947 can be perceived as Mother India’s ‘gory dismemberment’, and separatist movements can be accused of attempting to amputate the motherland (Bose 1997: 51). In this chapter, I want to pursue the question of whether The Moor’s Last Sigh represents the idea of Mother India as useful in providing an image that can hold the nation together. Figuring as a unifying image has been one of the functions of envisaging the Indian nation and the land as mother, which has been a recurrent and emotive theme in nationalist discourse from the late nineteenth century onwards (Bose 1997: 51–7). In The Moor’s Last Sigh Rushdie explores this nationalist image by creating an alternative Mother India, embodied by Aurora da Gama Zogoiby. In order to examine the often mischievous and provocative nature of Rushdie’s reworking of this revered nationalist image, I will contextualise it historically by using Indian historiography’s analysis of the concept of the nation as mother. I will also discuss three other texts which were crucial interventions in creating the image of Mother India: Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s famous novel Anandamath (1882), Katherine Mayo’s controversial account of Indian culture and customs, entitled Mother India (1927), and Mehboob Khan’s popular Hindi film Mother India (1957). Rushdie only explicitly refers to the film in his novel but the image of Mother India cannot be mentioned without at the same time evoking Bankim’s patriotic novel and specifically the song ‘Bande Mataram’, which features in the novel, or without conjuring up the spectre of the racially degenerate, disease-ridden subcontinent of Mayo’s text. Before I examine Rushdie’s version of Mother India, I will delineate the development of this image up to the controversy caused by Mayo’s book. In the second part of this chapter, the characteristics of Rushdie’s Mother India will be analysed in comparison with nationalist depictions of the nation as mother, in particular Mehboob Khan’s film version of 1957. And the third part explores how the novel deals with the deployment of the image of Mother India from the 1970s to the 1990s when first Indira Gandhi was cast in the role of Mother India, and then later when Hindu nationalism appropriated the image as a symbol of the Hindu nation.

Sacralising the motherland Jasodhara Bagchi describes how the symbolic representation of the country as mother found a congenial atmosphere in colonial Bengal with its long tradition of mother goddess worship, allied to motherhood


being a ‘culturally privileged concept’ (Bagchi 1990: 65–6). The nationalist concept of India as mother had its ancient precedent in a Sanskrit text from the fifth or sixth century AD which referred to ‘the presiding goddess of Bharat [...] as Bharatmata’ (Bagchi 1990: 69).2 Indira Chowdhury-Sengupta argues that by the 1870s the notion of Bharat Mata was ‘a highly contested image’ in Bengal (Chowdhury-Sengupta 1992: 22). She refers to the play, Bharat Mata, by Kiran Chandra Bandyopadhyay, first performed in 1873, as ‘one of the earliest works of literature to deal with this nationalist image’ (Chowdhury-Sengupta 1992: 22). This play had a ‘great impact’ on the Bengali middle class and features, beside a distraught and frail widowed figure representing Bharat Mata, a potentially benign but absent Mother Victoria whom Bharat Mata implores to improve the lot of her children (ChowdhurySengupta 1992: 22–9). It was in this highly charged atmosphere of nascent nationalism in colonial Bengal that Bankim Chandra Chatterjee created his influential image of the land as mother.3 Bankim’s vision of a sacralised motherland was part of a wider project of envisaging a utopian ‘alternative history of India’ and a vision of the nation, which Bankim developed in his last novels, among which Anandamath is the most well-known (Kaviraj 1998: 123). The song ‘Bande Mataram’ (‘I bow to you, Mother’), which is incorporated in Anandamath, became the ‘most potent patriotic slogan’ for nationalists from the early twentieth century onwards (Sarkar 2001: 163).4 Anandamath uses as historical background the devastating famine and the sannyasi uprising in Bengal in the 1770s. Despite providing some historical references, however, the history portrayed in Anandamath is largely an invented one (Kaviraj 1998: 133). The image of the country as mother is a crucial device used to conjure up feelings of patriotism and a sense of unity among those who sacrifice their lives in the service of the Mother.5 However, it is remarkable how many elements of Bankim’s image of the Mother in Anandamath are in fact controversial. What the Mother represents, and whose mother she is, is contested; it is difficult to decide what community Bankim had in mind as the devotees of the Mother and whether the British or the Muslims constitute the enemy of the motherland. There are two translations of Anandamath from Bengali into English which are considerably different. The title of the first translation is The Abbey of Bliss (AB), translated by Naresh Chandra Sen-Gupta and published in 1906. The second translation of Bankim’s novel was produced by Basanta Koomar Roy and published with the title, Dawn over India, in 1941. Before exploring the differences between the two

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translations, I will first discuss the earlier translation of the novel, as Sen-Gupta claims to have translated Anandamath without censoring any controversial parts.6 The eponymous abbey consists of the ruins of a Buddhist monastery, hidden in the jungle, which forms the headquarters of the ascetic rebels who call themselves the ‘children’ of the Mother. The children fight against what they perceive as alien rulers who let the Bengalis starve during the famine, while they insist on collecting taxes. The children are worshippers of Vishnu who is the central deity invoked in the novel, but the land is also envisaged as a god-like entity, namely the Mother. When Mahendra, one of the protagonists, is initiated into the order of the children, he is led from room to room where he encounters the various images of the motherland. In the first room, he sees the Mother, beautiful and charming, sitting on Vishnu’s lap. In the following three rooms Mahendra encounters three images of the Mother in the form of established Hindu goddesses who symbolise the past, the present and the future states of the Mother. In the past, she is represented as ‘a complete image of Jagaddhatri, perfect and luxuriously decorated’ (AB 40). In stark contrast, the present is symbolised by Kali, ‘covered with the blackest gloom, despoiled of all wealth, and without a cloth to wear. The whole of the country is a land of death and so the Mother has no better ornament than a garland of skulls’ (AB 40). Kali is depicted as trampling on Shiva, and she is presented with weapons which were given to her by her children. The future is personified by Durga, ‘a golden image of the ten-handed goddess smiling brightly’, who is strong and slays her foes without effort (AB 41). This golden future can only be achieved once all of her children recognise her as the Mother. The fight for the Mother demands great sacrifices. The children have to renounce all other family ties and live their lives as celibates. The relation towards the Mother is couched mainly in terms of a motherson relationship and the role of women is highly problematic. One of the main preoccupations of the novel seems to be an attempt at solving this problem. As a result, the two main female characters, Shanti and Kalyani, take centre-stage in the novel. They provide two very different solutions, one of which is normative and the other extraordinary. The normative role is embodied in Kalyani, Mahendra’s wife, who is prepared to commit suicide so that her husband can devote himself to the service of the Mother without distraction. She remains at the periphery of the action of the novel and is only re-united with her husband after the victory of the children. But despite her exemplary willingness to suffer silently, she remains a problem simply by her presence. Because

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of her beauty she is a temptress, against her will, and a source of distraction for the male celibates. Shanti occupies an extraordinary position as she chooses to fight alongside her husband by concealing her female identity. Dressed as a man, she excels in all ‘male’ activities such as fighting and riding a horse. She persistently trespasses norms of suitable female behaviour and is not punished for it. But only her extraordinary virtue and celibacy make such transgressive behaviour acceptable under these specific circumstances. In various dialogues her behaviour is contested in the novel but she wins all verbal disputes because of her wisdom and virtue. Shanti, however, is also a mischievous figure, who threatens to be uncontainable at times by patriarchal codes; she nevertheless remains a lovingly portrayed character, full of energy and charm. The text creates the impression that Shanti incorporates aspects of the Mother. Similar to the image of Durga as ‘the mother as she would be’, Shanti slays her foes effortlessly and gracefully (AB 41). The leader of the children, Satyananda, makes this connection almost explicit: ‘I have never yet called anybody mother save my country. No one but this well-watered land of ours, rich in dainty fruits, is a mother to us. And now I call you my mother. As a mother, you must do your work’ (AB 145). After the victory over the army, Shanti and her husband retreat from an active life as contemplative and permanently celibate ascetics. At the end the children are depicted as victorious over their enemies whom the novel portrays as both the Muslim rulers of Bengal and the British. There are various passages in the novel in which the Muslim rulers are identified as the sole enemy of the children since it is pointed out that the British have not established their rule over Bengal yet and act only as the collector of the land revenue. Therefore the children rebel against unjust Muslim rulers and the British only get in their way accidentally. But the British are responsible for raising and collecting the land revenue during the famine and are represented as the main military power who sends their armies against the children. So the children mainly fight against the British, and sepoys under British command, whom they kill in great numbers. As the reader is intended to be sympathetic to the children’s cause and delight in the massacre of their enemies, the detailed description of the death of British captains and soldiers often foregrounds the enmity between the children and the British. On the other hand, the children are also frequently portrayed as burning down Muslim villages and as holding virulently antiMuslim views. In a scene preceding a battle, one of the children looks forward to the day when ‘we shall be able to break the mosque to raise

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the temple of Radha-Madhava in its place’ (AB 146). In the final chapter, after the children’s ultimate triumph of having defeated the British-led army, the actual purpose of the children’s fight is depicted as ushering in British rule as a prerequisite to the eventual establishment of ‘Hindu rule’ (AB 197). Bankim resorts to a mysterious physician who exhorts the leader of the children, Satyananda, to desist from further fighting against the British and explains that the children had fulfilled their heavenly ordained mission by having ‘established the English rule’ as the British were now forced to take sovereignty due to the threat the children pose to the order of the state (AB 200). British rule would be indispensable for the eventual regeneration of the ‘True Faith’, Hinduism, which needed the complementary ‘knowledge of objective sciences’: ‘The English are great in objective sciences and they are apt teachers’ (AB 198–9). Satyananda only reluctantly abandons the fight but is eventually led away from the battle-field by the physician. This apparent resolution of the novel, which posits British rule over Bengal and India as providentially ordained, has often been perceived as a ‘wrong’ ending which goes against the ‘logic of the narrative’ and ‘against the evidence of historical reception’ of the novel (Kaviraj 1998: 150). Bagchi asserts that the ‘patriotic euphoria of the novel [...] overwhelms any loyalist message’ (Bagchi 1986: 73). Tapan Raychaudhuri argues that Bankim could not fully express his anti-British and anti-colonial sentiments for fear of censorship and loss of employment (Raychaudhuri 1988: 117–19, 132–4 & 182–3). In contemporary Indian historiography, Bankim’s ambivalent portrayal of the British in Anandamath is read as paradigmatic of the predicament of the Westerneducated middle class who were keenly aware of their humiliating subaltern position as a result of colonial rule but who also depended on this foreign rule for education and employment. Furthermore Bankim sincerely believed that the British had given Indians access to valuable education and instructed Hindus about the meaning of nationalism (Kaviraj 1998: 128). The novel cannot be understood as a call to rebellion against the British since this would not have made sense at the time of the novel’s composition as the British power was more strongly entrenched than ever after the brutal repression of the revolt of 1857 (Haldar 1989: 101). Sisir Kumar Das refers to the contradictoriness of Bankim’s attitudes: ‘Bankim was a peculiar man, complex, unpredictable and enigmatic. Ananda Math is a strange combination of a glowing patriotism and yet of a docile surrender’ (Das 1984: 147). In order to cleanse Bankim of the suspicion of being fundamentally antiMuslim, a passage of Bankim’s from 1873 is often quoted which refers


to Bengal as the common land of Hindus and Muslims, whose progress can only be achieved by the unity of both communities (Das 1984: 236). Tanika Sarkar counters this tendency to down-play Anandamath’s anti-Muslim elements as displaced attacks whose real target were the British. Bankim’s novel, she argues, can also be read ‘literally’: Bankim delineates the politics of the reconstructed Hindu. The old Hindu suffered from the absence of physical prowess and the desire for self-rule; the new Hindu will only have arrived when he proves himself in a final battle and overwhelmingly establishes his superiority over the very Muslim who has in the past always defeated the Hindu. [...] Since the British have something to impart to the Hindu, Hindu empowerment, it seems, must enfold within an overarching colonial frame. (Sarkar 2001: 181) What the Mother actually represents is also controversial: Mother Bengal or Mother India? Chowdhury-Sengupta identifies Bankim’s Mother in Anandamath unequivocally as Bharat Mata whereas Bose considers it self-evident that Bankim had envisaged her as Mother Bengal since the song ‘Bande Mataram’ referred to her children’s 7 million voices which roughly constituted the number of Bengal’s population (Chowdhury-Sengupta 1992: 22; Bose 1997: 53 & 68). This problem is intimately tied to the question as to which community the children stand for: Bengalis, Hindu Bengalis, Hindus or Indians. This difficulty in identifying the Mother’s community and Bankim’s evasiveness in ‘naming the nation’ indicate how difficult it was for the Bengali intelligentsia of the late nineteenth century to imagine a nation which they could or would want to claim as their own (Kaviraj 1998: 129). Kaviraj argues that Bankim often ‘inclines towards giving an answer in terms of a Hindu nation. [...] though what to do with the residue if Hindus constitute the possible nation is never asked’ (Kaviraj 1998: 129). Bankim’s tentative attempts to envisage his nation is seen in historiographical accounts as exemplary of how the Bengali Westernised middle class ‘came to be a “people” called Bengalis, and how this chauvinistic, pampered and self-indulgent group concluded that they must be Indians’ (Kaviraj 1998: 115). Compared to the vague contours of the nation, the land must have appeared as tangible and definable in comparison and that is why, ‘in Bankim’s discourse, the territorial identification gathers strength over the demographic one’ (Kaviraj 1998: 132). Bankim stressed the importance of having an uplifting narrative of the nation’s past in order to create an inspiring national self-image.7

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Bankim is often referred to in histories delineating the development of Indian historiography as an influential voice in colonial Bengal and one who exhorted his countrymen to write a true history of Bengal and India (Guha 1988a: 1; Chatterjee 1993: 76–7). He was intensely dissatisfied with history as portrayed by British authors and denied it the status of true history (Guha 1988a: 56–9); a true history should be a reminder of the people’s glorious past deeds which would inspire the repetition of such heroic acts (Chatterjee 1993: 76). Bankim, however, never managed to write such a history despite various aborted attempts (Kaviraj 1998: 112 & 125). Kaviraj argues that Bankim became aware that ‘an academic, rationalist history of Bengal would not provide him with what he wanted – a series of symbolic events of defiance, of great acts which this people could be exhorted to remember, and when the time came, to re-enact’ (Kaviraj 1998: 112–13). So Bankim resorted to a half-imaginary history in his novels which would espouse this uplifting message.8 The creation of a heroic ascetic order of highly disciplined and educated sannyasis who venerate the land as mother in Anandamath and who are prepared to die for her liberation is history in ‘novel’ form. Anandamath is meant to provide a nation with a usable and useful past which promises a great future. The ‘historical’ self-image for the Bengali or Indian Hindu which is created by the novel, characterised by fearless heroism and sacrifice, counterbalances the imperialist stereotype of the Bengali middle-class man as effeminate and cowardly. Chowdhury-Sengupta examines the gendered anxiety at the heart of the concept of the Mother: ‘This constant and incessant emphasis on the need for heroism and physical courage thus enabled a masking of the colonially constructed anxiety about the weak and effete Bengali male’ (Chowdhury-Sengupta 1992: 22). The ‘compensatory imaging of the valiant Hindu’ is an important element in Anandamath as it provided a ‘historical’ precedent for Hindu/Bengali heroism (Chowdhury-Sengupta 1992: 22). To a small group of nationalists Bankim’s blueprint for heroic action was an immediate inspiration; namely the revolutionary terrorists in the early twentieth century whom Chatterjee refers to as ‘Bankim’s direct disciples’ (Chatterjee 1998c: 79). These groups of militant nationalists were recruited from the middle class and were ‘wedded to secret underground organization and planned assassination’ in India and in Europe (Chatterjee 1998c: 79). Like the children in Anandamath, they were willing to die fighting for the Mother (Kumar 1993: 44–9). The image of the sacralised land as mother is crucial in Bankim’s endeavour to conjure up a nation. It is emphasised in Indian historiography


that the image of the Mother was able to become so influential because it invoked both the concept of the all-powerful mother goddess in her various forms and the nationalist notion of selfless Indian motherhood: ‘It was the coming together of human intimacy and divine inspiration that gave [...] the idea of the nation as mother its overpowering appeal’ (Bose 1997: 57). Indian motherhood was elevated in nationalist discourse as a site of superiority of the East over the West as Indian mothers came to epitomise the true core of Indianness with their unlimited capacity for self-sacrifice and overabundant love for their children (Bagchi 1990: 68). By referring to the land as Mother, Bankim avoids naming the precise nation but uses the multiple associations this word conjures up. The image of the Mother is helpful in charging the concept of the nation with familial connotations so that the ‘real’ inhabitants of the Motherland are all united in being her children. The image of the land as mother and goddess, victimised and awe-inspiring, frail and powerfully destructive is contradictory, but nevertheless ‘intimately and unmistakably one’s own’ (Bagchi 1990: 66). The Indian-wide dissemination and success of the nationalist image of the land as mother was remarkable since ‘within the first decade of the twentieth century one or more translations of Anandamath came out in the major languages of India’ (Bhattacharya 1994: 367). The image of the Mother can unite a variety of images and blend them into an apparently seamless whole. The affection for one’s mother and the veneration of the mother goddess are connected with the love for the land and the concept of the nation. Aurobindo’s praise for Bankim as ‘nation-builder’ in 1907 exemplifies how the concept of nation and the land merge with the inspirational image of the Mother in nationalist discourse, which culminates in a fervent nationalism (Aurobindo 1994: 4): he gave us the vision of our Mother. The bare intellectual idea of the motherland is not in itself a great driving force; the mere recognition of the desirability of freedom is not an inspiring motive. [...] It is not till the Motherland reveals herself to the eye of the mind as something more than a stretch of earth or a mass of individuals, it is not till she takes shape as a great Divine and Maternal Power in a form of beauty that can dominate the mind and seize the heart that these petty fears and hopes vanish in an all-absorbing passion for the Mother and her service, and the patriotism that works miracles and saves a doomed nation is born. (Aurobindo 1994: 6)

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In this personified form the land can take on various characteristics, from a stoically suffering mother to a fearsome divine figure. In an article in his journal Bande Mataram in 1908 Aurobindo evokes a dictatorially demanding mother who expects unquestioning allegiance: ‘if any thought of self pollutes the sanctity of our love, then the Mother will not be satisfied and will continue to withhold her presence. [...] Selfabandonment is the demand made upon us, “How many will live for me? How many will die for me?” ’ (Aurobindo 1973: 854–5). Feminist historians often concentrate on the disabling effects of the Bharat Mata image for Indian women. Chowdhury-Sengupta argues that the exclusive focus on the mother–son relationship resulted in ‘closing the space for real women’ (Chowdhury-Sengupta 1992: 20). Simultaneously, the Bharat Mata concept with its glorification of motherhood also ‘signalled a specific pedagogy for women, for with the mother-to-be rested the fate of the nation of the future’ (ChowdhurySengupta 1992: 23). Giving birth to many sons and rearing them to become fearless devotees of the Mother was expected of the nation’s mothers. Bagchi argues that the concept of the country as mother reinforced the exploitation of women despite ‘extolling an ideology that apparently rested on a show of the empowerment of women’ (Bagchi 1990: 70). Her criticism is directed at the ideology of glorified motherhood rather than the concept of ‘abstracting Hindu goddesses as the motherland’, but both are inextricably linked in the image of Mother India which ‘reinforced the traditional notion that the fruition of women’s lives lay in producing heroic sons’ (Bagchi 1990: 70). Bharat Mata as a nationalist symbol and incentive to act heroically mainly appealed to her middle-class sons, as Surendranath Banerjea, the liberal Bengali nationalist, demonstrates in his autobiography, A Nation in the Making (1925). Banerjea describes how Bankim’s song and slogan ‘Bande Mataram’ had become a nationalist rallying cry by the early twentieth century: ‘The cry [...] has become pan-Indian and national, and is on the lips of an educated Indian when at any public occasion he is moved by patriotic fervour to give expressions of his feelings of joy’ (Banerjea 1963: 191). With the growing popularity of this slogan, the colonial rulers became uneasy about its connotations and the public shouting of ‘Bande Mataram’ was declared illegal by the Government of Eastern Bengal in the wake of the protest against the partition of Bengal in 1905 (Banerjea 1963: 191). It is interesting that Banerjea disavows the goddess associations of the slogan ‘Bande Mataram’: ‘an authority in the person of a high European official, supposed to be versed in the ancient lore of our country, was found, who went so far as to assert


that it was an invocation to the goddess Kali for vengeance. Where he got this idea from it is difficult to know’ (Banerjea 1963: 191). Liberal nationalist discourse avidly made use of the slogan but tried to sanitise it by turning it into a ‘very innocent formula’ (Banerjea 1963: 191). Banerjea’s statement reveals the attempts by liberal nationalists to foreclose an examination of the image of the Mother which could endanger its usefulness by drawing attention to its contradictory elements. From the 1920s the slogan ‘Bande Mataram’ was not only used by liberal nationalists and revolutionary terrorists but also by Hindu nationalists in communal riots against Muslims (Das 1984: 220). Tanika Sarkar argues that the anti-Muslim bias of Bankim’s later works such as Anandamath was an important resource for Hindu nationalism and constituted a link between nineteenth-century Hindu revivalism in Bengal – whose Hindu supremacist agenda was not primarily turned against Muslims or Islam – and the hard, aggressive Hindutva politics that started organizing itself in the 1920s on an exclusively and explicitly anti-Muslim platform. (Sarkar 2001: 165–6) Whereas nationalists ‘used the song as an abbreviated history of colonial exploitation and the patriotic struggle for liberation’, Hindu nationalists ‘took it to imply a “historical” struggle against the Muslim’ (Sarkar 2001: 177). The Muslim League consequently protested against the use of the song ‘Bande Mataram’ by the Congress because it was considered offensive by Muslims and displayed the Congress’s pro-Hindu stance (Das 1984: 220–1). Anandamath’s pronounced anti-Muslim bias made it a problematical text to use for secular nationalists. This explains why Bankim’s novel was adapted and re-formed in a second ‘translation’ by Basanta Koomar Roy and published with the title, Dawn over India, in 1941. In this version of Bankim’s novel, the anti-Muslim comments are either omitted or replaced by anti-British comments. The ultimate aim of the children’s fight is now explicitly the demand for Indian independence. This version of Anandamath is also consistently stripped of any references to Hinduism so that Mother India can be a symbol for all.9 This obviously demanded a change in iconography in the initiation scene. The Hindu goddesses had to be removed and they were replaced by maps: At first Mahendra could not see what there was in the room. Gradually a picture revealed itself to him. It was a gigantic, imposing, resplendent, yes, almost living map of India.

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‘This is our Mother India as she was before the British conquest,’ the Mahatma said. ‘Now say Bande Mataram.’ ‘Bande Mataram,’ Mahendra said with much feeling. ‘Now follow me, Mahendra,’ the Mahatma ordered; and they entered a dark tunnel to emerge into another, even darker room. Only one ray of light entered it, so it was sad and gloomy. There Mahendra saw a map of India in rags and tears. The gloom over this map was beyond description. ‘This is what our Mother India is today,’ the Mahatma said. ‘She is in the gloom of famine, disease, death, humiliation and destruction. ‘Why does a sword hang over Mother India of today?’ Mahendra asked. ‘Because the British keep India in subjection by the sword. And she can be freed only by the sword. Those who talk of winning India’s independence by peaceful means do not know the British, I am sure.’ (A 43)10 In this translation of Bankim’s novel the image of the land as mother has undergone considerable changes since the late nineteenth century as she is transformed to stand explicitly for India. In the translation of Bankim’s novel of 1906, the term Mother India was not used and the words Mother and motherland were employed instead because Bankim had been reluctant to define clearly the geographical contours of the land signified by the Mother. In contrast, the 1941 translation emphatically employs the term Mother India throughout. The second translation clearly bears the mark of having been adapted to the context of the national freedom struggle of the 1930s and 1940s as it displays the characteristics of secular nationalist discourse but also criticises the non-violent methods of the chief organ of such secular nationalist discourse, namely the Indian National Congress. In 1927 the by then well-established nationalist image of a glorified motherland was confronted with an imperialist counter-representation in Katherine Mayo’s Mother India. The nationalist icon, which the book’s title invoked, was juxtaposed with horrific descriptions of abused childwives and child-mothers who had to give birth under degrading and unhygienic conditions. The American journalist Mayo (1867–1940) had collected her material for the book on a tour through India in 1925/26 with the tacit support of British officials (Jha 1971: 31–49). The book caused a storm of protest in India since it amounted to a thorough condemnation of what it portrayed as India’s unsanitary and debased


culture and customs which were bound to produce a race so degenerate that it made their capacity for self-rule inconceivable (Sinha 1998: 1–4 & 34). The root cause of all problems of Indians was identified as their ‘manner of getting into the world and [their] sex-life thenceforward’ (Mayo 1927: 29): Inertia, helplessness, lack of initiative and originality, lack of staying power and of sustained loyalties, sterility of enthusiasm, weakness of life-vigour itself – all are traits that truly characterize the Indian not only of to-day, but of long-past history. [...] Take a child of twelve years old, a pitiful physical specimen in bone and blood, illiterate, ignorant, without any sort of training in habits of health. Force motherhood upon her at the earliest possible moment. Rear her weakling son in intensive vicious practices that drain his small vitality day by day. Give him no outlet in sports. Give him habits that make him, by the time he is thirty years of age, a decrepit and querulous old wreck – and will you ask what has sapped the energy of his manhood? (Mayo 1927: 24–5) An excessive pre-occupation with sexuality from childhood onwards leaves Indians at the age when the Anglo-Saxon is just coming into full glory of manhood, broken-nerved, low-spirited, petulant ancients; need you, while this remains unchanged, seek for other reasons why they are poor and sick and dying and why their hands are too weak, too fluttering, to seize or to hold the reins of Government? (Mayo 1927: 38) Mayo deflates the nationalist concept of Mother India by portraying her as a ‘shabby, threadbare, sick and poor’ figure whom she condescendingly refers to as ‘old Mother India’, ‘victim and slave of all recorded time’ (Mayo 1927: 259). She mocks Indian men who proclaim ‘devotion to the death to Mother India; but India’s children fit no action to their words. Poor indeed she is, and sick – ignorant and helpless’ (Mayo 1927: 27). While Indian nationalists clamour for self-rule, the British do ‘practically all of whatever is done for the comfort of sad old Mother India’ (Mayo 1927: 28). Apart from these ironic references to the nationalist image, the text displays strategies of more radical replacement of the nationalist mother icon by drastic and shocking images of the pathologised body of Indian women (Shetty 1995: 61–3). At the heart of this strategy is the chapter entitled ‘Mother India’ which constitutes

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a horrific ‘phantasmagoria’ of Indian birthing and midwifery (Shetty 1995: 64). Mayo describes an anonymous, witch-like midwife or dhai practising her child-delivering methods on a dehumanised and victimised body of an anonymous mother, and she merges both figures into an image of a tortured and monstrous entity which epitomises Mother India: According to the Hindu code, a woman in childbirth and in convalescence therefrom is ceremonially unclean, contaminating all that she touches. Therefore only those become dhais who are themselves of the unclean, ‘untouchable’ class [...] one saw her Witch-of-Endor face through its vermin-infested elf locks, her hanging rags, her dirty claws, as she peered with festered and almost sightless eyes out over the stink-cloud she had raised. [...] If the delivery is at all delayed, the dhai is expected to explore for the reason of the delay. She thrusts her long, unwashed hand, loaded with dirty rings and bracelets and encrusted with untold living contaminations, into the patient’s body, pulling and twisting at what she finds there. If the delivery is long delayed and difficult, a second or a third dhai may be called in, if the husband of the patient will sanction the expense, and the child may be dragged forth in detached sections – a leg or an arm torn off at a time. [...] She kneads the patient with her fists; stands her against the wall and butts her with her head; props her upright on the bare ground, seizes her hands and shoves against her thighs with gruesome bare feet, until, so the doctors state, the patient’s flesh is often torn to ribbons by the dhai’s long, ragged toe-nails. (Mayo 1927: 90–3) Sandhya Shetty argues that by creating the doubled figure of tormented mother and monstrous midwife Mayo’s text fails to produce an antinationalist ‘coherent, and transcendent image [which] can reply to the question of what “India” is’ (Shetty 1995: 65). In my reading, Mayo achieves such a transcendent image of India in the ‘merged’ figures of the mother and the contaminated witch-like midwife with her hand thrust inside the mother, clawing and tearing apart the uterus and the child. This repulsive image of India is ideally suited to Mayo’s purposes since it forecloses sympathy for either the mother or the untouchable midwife. This makes the British rulers and doctors look even more heroic as they thanklessly labour for the benefit of rather unappealing people. Mayo’s primary motives for writing Mother India appear to have been legitimation of British colonial rule in India and the discrediting of the


Indian nationalist cause in the United States (Jha 1971: 51–9). It was fairly successful on both counts; Mayo’s book was a sensation and a bestseller in the United States and Britain and was generally interpreted as making the Indian demand for self-rule nonsensical (Jha 1971: 61–79). Mayo’s book, however, has also been appropriated for Western radical feminism by Mary Daly in Gyn/Ecology (1978). Daly argues that accusing Mayo of imperialism is merely intended to erase her work’s feminist potential (Daly 1978: 127–30). In her uncritical praise of Mayo’s Mother India, Daly also refers to the most memorable figure of the book, the monstrous midwife, and Daly’s comments mirror Mayo’s revulsion and contempt for those ‘filthiest and most ignorant women’ and their ‘filthy, brutal, grotesque, and frequently murderous ministrations’ (Daly 1978: 439). Daly precludes any discussion of Mayo’s imperialist motives and seems unaware of the fact that Mayo’s strategy was to depict India as monstrous in its entirety rather than condemn patriarchal structures in particular (Liddle & Rai 1998: 505–15). Indian feminist historiography tries to negotiate this difficult terrain and criticises Mayo’s imperialist designs without ignoring or downplaying ‘the problem of male atrocities against women’ (Liddle & Joshi 1985: 72). Mrinalini Sinha focuses on the response of Indian middle-class women to the Mayo controversy: they overwhelmingly condemned Mayo’s portrayal of India as imperialist propaganda but also made use of the public debate to further their own demands for social and legal reform (Sinha 1994: 20–4). Indian women’s organisations benefited from the controversy by gaining increased visibility and legitimacy in the public domain as they could present the face of the new modern nationalist female citizens to the world, which contradicted Mayo’s portrayal of downtrodden Indian womanhood (Sinha 2000: 628–35). In an international context this often resulted in middle- class Indian women competing with British women for the right to represent Indian womanhood since ‘postsuffrage British women’s organizations turned increasingly to the “white woman’s burden”, especially as it affected the condition of women in the colonies, as a new focus of their feminist agenda’ (Sinha 2000: 628). British and American feminists were often positively disposed to Mayo’s book and were reluctant to accept eloquent Indian middle-class women as representatives of Indian women (who turned out to be ungrateful and unwilling recipients of their Western sisters’ civilising mission). Sinha also problematises the controversy’s disabling effects in de-legitimising radical criticism of the nationalist discourse on women and gender politics as middle-class Indian women felt compelled to close ranks with

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their male fellow-nationalists against Mayo’s attack on Indian culture and nationalism (Sinha 1994: 26–7).

Envisaging the nation in the image of the Mother Tanika Sarkar argues that one should be careful not to collapse the image of the deified mother-country with the concept of the nation since in colonial India it was primarily the country which was the object of devotion, not the nation (Sarkar 2001: 272–3). However, it is in general almost impossible to clearly separate the land from the nation in the image of Mother India as the usefulness of this image consists precisely in its elasticity in combining land and nation with the emotive figures of mother and goddess. When Nehru used the image of Mother India in The Discovery of India (1946), he emphasised that she represented the nation rather than the land when he exhorted peasants to recognise themselves in the image of Bharat Mata: Sometimes as I reached a gathering, a great roar of welcome would greet me: Bharat Mata ki Jai – ‘Victory to Mother India’. I would ask them unexpectedly what they meant by that cry, who was this Bharat Mata, Mother India, whose victory they wanted? [...] Bharat Mata [...] was essentially these millions of people, and victory to her meant victory to these people. You are parts of this Bharat Mata, I told them, you are in a manner yourselves Bharat Mata, and as this idea slowly soaked into their brains, their eyes would light up as if they had made a great discovery. (Nehru 1989: 60–1) As Shetty asserts, the nation is ‘hungry for metaphors that will tell what it is’, and anthropomorphic images are able to endow the nation with a variety of features and characteristics (Shetty 1995: 66). Both The Moor’s Last Sigh and the film Mother India are significant examples of how the concept of the nation and the image of the land are merged in the figure of a mother. But whereas the filmic version of Mother India is a distinctly nationalist image of the nation, Rushdie’s version of the nation as mother is not immediately classifiable. The nationalist image of Mother India is a precarious construct which is in constant danger of becoming a hollow symbol unless the Mother’s children recognise themselves in her image. Kaviraj argues that Bankim’s image of the Mother already implies the concept of the nation, not only the sacralised land, and constitutes ‘a mediation of the collective self’ whose ‘worship should, to be successful, move historically from


a prayer to the metaphorical to the literal self’ (Kaviraj 1998: 140–1). This nationalist self-worship can only work if the image of the nation is one with which its people-nation wants to identify. Mehboob Khan’s Mother India clearly represents such a nationalist self-celebration of the independent Nehruvian nation, one which confidently looks forward to a bright future while preserving essential Indian virtues and wisdom. Rushdie’s use of the concept of Mother India, in contrast, does not amount to a pious nationalist self-adoration, as is made amply clear by The Moor’s Last Sigh’s first reference to Mother India at the very beginning of the novel which refers to her as a prostitute. Commenting on the pivotal role of the spice trade in Indo-European relations, Aurora casts India in the role of a woman selling herself to Vasco da Gama and the ‘English and French [who] sailed in the wake of that first-arrived Portugee’ (MLS 4): we were ‘not so much sub-continent as sub-condiment’, as my distinguished mother had it. ‘From the beginning, what the world wanted from bloody mother India was daylight-clear,’ she’d say. ‘They came for the hot stuff, just like any man calling on a tart.’ (MLS 5) While the image of Mother India as impoverished and exploited by colonisers was frequently deployed in nationalist discourse, a figuration which implied that her valiant sons should rescue her from the foreign yoke with selfless devotion, envisaging Mother India as a ‘tart’ is unlikely to inspire deeds of heroic self-sacrifice. Even though Rushdie introduces the theme of Mother India with this irreverent comparison, he invents an image of the nation as mother which is seductive and powerful. The novel conveys a sense of Rushdie’s great experimental enthusiasm in creating a scandalous, shamelessly élitist and irresistible Mother India in the character of the narrator’s mother. Aurora’s status as an alternative Mother India is revealed in the novel when the narrator compares and contrasts her with Nargis, the actress who played this role in Mehboob Khan’s film and who came to personify this image in the ‘popular imaginary’ (Mishra 2002: 62). In The Moor’s Last Sigh Aurora is not only the embodiment of the image of the nation as mother but also its creator when she paints pictures on the theme of Mother India. Aurora is no ordinary woman but one of superlative qualities as she is the ‘most illustrious of our modern artists, a great beauty who was also the most sharp-tongued woman of her generation’ (MLS 5). She is associated with an eclectic range of god(dess)imagery in the novel as she is named after the Roman goddess of dawn

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and likened to the biblical ‘Burning Bush’: ‘Handing down commandments, pillar of fire, I am that I am ... yes, indeed, she had made a study of the Old Testament god. Sometimes I think she practised partings of waters in the bath’ (MLS 88). Extravagant, theatrical and majestic, this is a character who demands to be at the centre of attention, behaves ‘like an empress or a grand tragedienne’ and indulges in ‘supernova detonations of her legendary – and highly artistic – rage’ (MLS 93 & 136). She stages herself as a glamorous, bohemian diva, and becomes a femme fatale for several male characters. Her ability to inspire devotion in others is emphasised, and her great artistic talent makes her home a site of pilgrimage for her admirers. Because she towers over the other characters, she ultimately remains an aloof and solitary figure who irresistibly draws people near her, often with fatal consequences as her personality threatens to overwhelm theirs: My mother Aurora Zogoiby was too bright a star; look at her too hard and you’d be blinded. Even now, in the memory, she dazzles, must be circled about and about. We may perceive her indirectly, in her effects on others – her bending of other people’s light, her gravitational pull which denied us all hope of escape, the decaying orbits of those too weak to withstand her, who fell towards her sun and its consuming fires. (MLS 136) Significantly, the person who is closest to her is her son, Moor, whose intimate portrayal of her depicts her predominantly as a positive and impressive character despite her erratic, dark and destructive features. Like most images of Mother India, this one is also created by a loving son. After the disrespectful reference to Mother India as a ‘tart’, the second mention of Mother India is equally bare of an overtly anti-colonial message but it displays the characteristics of the nationalist image of the Mother as it merges the land and the people with an earthly and almost divine mother figure. After her mother’s death, Aurora creates, at the age of 13, her first room-sized painting in which her mother Belle, also called Queen Isabella, is invested with the status of Mother India. It is an all-encompassing painting of India’s history, its crowd and landscape and at the same time, an intimate expression of Aurora’s ‘inner self’, her vision of the world and her grief for her beloved mother (MLS 58). It does not foreground an anti-colonial message as in this vast tableau of India British colonial rulers are apparently considered too insignificant to feature, apart from ‘British soldiers whispering rumours of an approaching war’ (MLS 59). But the painting depicts the imprisoned heroes of

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the nationalist movement: ‘jails full of passionate men, Congress and Muslim League, Nehru Gandhi Jinnah Patel Bose Azad’ (MLS 59). The description of the painting concludes with a passage which pulsates with the repetition of the term Mother India: it was Mother India herself, Mother India with her garishness and inexhaustible motion, Mother India who loved and betrayed and ate and destroyed and again loved her children, and with whom the children’s passionate conjoining and eternal quarrel stretched long beyond the grave; [...] a protean Mother India who could turn monstrous, who could be a worm rising from the sea with Epifania’s face at the top of a long and scaly neck; who could turn murderous, dancing cross-eyed and Kali-tongued while thousands died; but above all, in the very centre of the ceiling, at the point where all the hornof-plenty lines converged, Mother India with Belle’s face. Queen Isabella was the only mother-goddess here, and she was dead; at the heart of this first immense outpouring of Aurora’s art was the simple tragedy of her loss, the unassuaged pain of becoming a motherless child. The room was her act of mourning. (MLS 60–1) The energetic, loving and destructive Mother India of Aurora’s painting is not entirely incompatible with the nationalist image of Mother India but there is a shift in emphasis towards her dark potential for annihilating her own children. Whereas she is usually portrayed in nationalist imagery as demanding selfless devotion in the fight for her independence which could easily result in the death of her children, in Aurora’s painting she is depicted as a devouring mother who kills her children almost gratuitously. When she is portrayed as eating her children, this is mainly attributed to failings of the soil and fickle nature as her ‘vast rivers full of mercy and disease’ and ‘harsh droughtridden plateaux on which men hack with pickaxes at the dry infertile soil’ both nourish and kill her children (MLS 61). In her terrifying manifestations Mother India is associated with both a human and a divine image, respectively Aurora’s hated grandmother Epifania and a figure resembling goddess Kali: ‘dancing cross-eyed and Kali-tongued while thousands died’ (MLS 61). The reference to Kali may only be halfexplicit because the benevolent pivotal image of Belle is supposed to stand unrivalled as ‘the only mother-goddess here’ (MLS 61). But central characteristics of Kali’s iconography are mentioned, namely her huge eyes, her ‘lolling tongue, grotesquely long and oversized’ and her worlddestroying dance in which she, ‘drunk on the hot blood of her victims’,

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can only be stopped by Shiva who lays himself under her trampling feet (Kingsley 1986: 116–26). It is significant that this reference to Kali associates Aurora’s image of Mother India closely with the nationalist image of the Mother, which was often envisaged as Kali after Bankim’s Anandamath. On the other hand, this allusion to a ‘murderous’ Mother India in the image of Kali also implicates Aurora as she turns murderous in the following scene in which she is portrayed as calmly watching her grandmother die without calling for help or attempting to save her. A further device to relate Aurora to the image of Mother India is her explicit attempt to emulate her mother, the painting’s Mother India, and become her ‘avatar, [...] her mother’s living ghost’ in order to deny death its victory (MLS 58). By ‘naturally’ using the image of Mother India in order to represent India, Aurora’s painting clearly stands in a nationalist tradition. The ‘seeming naturalness’, which ‘continuous usage’ bestowed on it, effaces the fact that the anthropomorphic image of India is a nationalist construct (Sarkar 2001: 251). The Moor’s Last Sigh’s Mother India resembles Nehru’s portrayal of India in The Discovery of India in this respect as both refer to an eternal feminine entity which involuntarily and irresistibly draws all her children towards her: She is a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive. [...] Shameful and repellent she is occasionally, perverse and obstinate, sometimes even a little hysteric, this lady with a past. But she is very lovable, and none of her children can forget her wherever they go or whatever strange fate befalls them. For she is part of them in her greatness as well as her failings, and they are mirrored in those deep eyes of hers that have seen so much of life’s passion and joy and folly, and looked down into wisdom’s well. Each one of them is drawn to her, though perhaps each has a different reason for that attraction or can point to no reason at all, and each sees some different aspect of her many-sided personality. (Nehru 1989: 563) Nehru’s impious image of India as ‘lady with a past’ shows how much this image had become ‘natural’ and familiar since Bankim, whose passionately devotional portrait of the Mother in Anandamath hid the vague contours of the motherland and the undetermined nature of the nation-in-the-making. In contrast to Bankim’s Mother, who appears to recognise only Hindus as her children, both Nehru’s and The Moor’s Last Sigh’s image of Mother India is secular in the sense

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of including equally all her children irrespective of their religious faith. But this apparent inclusiveness of the image of India as mother suppresses the articulation of other differences, for example, those of class, gender and region (Singh 1996: 155–7). And as Partition proved, not all of her children wanted to show filial affection to Mother India. Nehru’s gendered portrayal of India is surprising in its irreverence and its peculiar characterisation as ‘perverse and obstinate, sometimes even a little hysteric’, since such traits are far from what is recognised as typically maternal in nationalist discourse. Nehru presents this ambivalent image of India as the conclusion of his history of India in order to emphasise the need for change. Nehru pleads for India to embrace modernity without losing her identity and wisdom: Though her attire may change, she will continue as of old, and her store of wisdom will help her to hold on to what is true and beautiful and good in this harsh, vindictive, and grasping world. [...] She will go forward with confidence, rooted in herself and yet eager to learn from others and co-operate with them. To-day she swings between a blind adherence to her old customs and a slavish imitation of foreign ways. In neither of these can she find relief or life or growth. It is obvious that she has to come out of her shell and take full part in the life and activities of the modern age. (Nehru 1989: 563–4) Aurora could be seen as a modern yet rooted incarnation of India since she creatively combines inspirations from various parts of India and the world in her art. She also has great nationalist credentials as she is, like her parents Belle and Camoens, a proponent of Nehruvian nationalism. In the nationalist movement of the 1940s, she becomes a nationalist icon and is closely associated with Nehru: Aurora Zogoiby grew into the giant public figure we all know, the great beauty at the heart of the nationalist movement, the loosehaired bohemian marching boldly alongside Vallabhbhai Patel and Abul Kalam Azad when they took out processions, the confidante – and, according to persistent rumours, mistress – of Pandit Nehru, his ‘friend of friends’, who would later vie with Edwina Mountbatten for his heart. Distrusted by Gandhiji, loathed by Indira Gandhi, her arrest after the Quit India resolution of 1942 made her a national heroine. (MLS 116)

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Rushdie elevates Aurora to a politically active heroine of the freedom struggle, one who embodies traits of Nehru’s gendered image of India, precisely in order that she can compete with the glorification of the peasant woman in the film Mother India. A decade after Independence, Mehboob Khan (1909–1974) released his film Mother India (1957) in which the mother Radha, played by Nargis (1929–1981), is represented as combining the concepts of the eternal motherland, nation, and mother earth with the modernity and progress of the independent nation-state. Previously an image of anticolonial nationalism, Mother India is harnessed for the didactic purpose of consolidating the nation by presenting a self-image of the nation as a hard-working, law-abiding peasant woman who embodies the virtues of ideal Indian womanhood and who loves the Indian soil on which she labours (Shetty 1995: 60).11 Radha is first shown as an old woman who, as the ‘mother of the village’, is persuaded by Congress politicians to accept the honour of opening a dam, the symbol of ‘Nehruvian modernity [which] is promoted as the solution to the village’s problems’ (Dwyer & Patel 2002: 64). When the film depicts Radha’s life in a flashback, she is shown as an exemplary loving wife, dutiful daughter-in-law, self-sacrificing mother and ceaseless worker on the fields and at home who has to endure terrible hardship. She is left by her husband after he lost both his arms in an accident and is ashamed to burden her with his existence; two of her four sons die as infants and her village is ruined by a flood which causes a famine. Despite this series of catastrophes, she manages to save her honour and dignity from the lecherous and evil moneylender who threatens to ruin her family and who wants to make her his mistress. Empowered by her inviolate chastity, she can stop the villagers’ exodus after the flood and appears responsible for the subsequent flourishing of the village’s fortunes (Thomas 1989: 18). This first half of the film constitutes a seamless narrative of selfless and dedicated nation-building which is emphasised by the shot in which the map of India is formed with sheaves of grain to stand for a flourishing nation (Chatterjee 2002: 60). The second part, however, introduces more controversial elements as the younger son, Birju, grows up to become a robber and revolutionary who kills the evil moneylender and abducts his daughter. Radha, who promised that she would protect the village women’s honour, in the end shoots her beloved son. This scene is highly complex and contradictory since Birju is killed by his mother for violating a woman’s chastity but at the same time he is depicted as restoring his mother’s dignity as wife when he gives her back her wedding bangles which he retrieved from the moneylender (Chatterjee 2002: 70).

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The ‘frightening’ erotic and incestuous undertones in the relationship between Radha and her son disturb the consolidating narrative of the nation (Mishra 1989: 132). By discussing the film in The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie refers to the most well-known precedent of the creation of an influential image of the nation through a fictional mother character after Independence. The film is introduced in the novel by drawing attention to its phenomenal success – both commercially and in projecting Nargis in the image of Mother India: Motherness – excuse me if I underline the point – is a big idea in India, maybe our biggest: the land as mother, the mother as land, as the firm ground beneath our feet. Ladies-O, gents-O: I’m talking major mother country. The year I was born, Mehboob Productions’ all-conquering movie Mother India – three years in the making, three hundred shooting days, in the top-three all-time megagrossing Bollywood flicks – hit the nation’s screens. Nobody who saw it ever forgot that glutinous saga of peasant heroinism, that super-slushy ode to the uncrushability of village India made by the most cynical urbanites in the world. And as for its leading lady – O Nargis with your shovel over your shoulder and your strand of black hair tumbling forward over your brow! – she became, until Indira-Mata supplanted her, the living mother-goddess of us all. (MLS 137) In an interview with Colin MacCabe Rushdie emphasises the film’s significance as a classic example of a cinematic ‘nation-building project’, in which ‘the biggest movie star in India at the time, Nargis, [was asked] to impersonate the nation’ (MacCabe 2001: 215). Rushdie also refers to the astonishing effect this role had on the actress: ‘[Nargis] really had been an extraordinary actress. Great versatility, great sensitivity. [...] But after she played Mother India, she had been so stamped with that part that not only was it difficult for other people to see her differently, it became difficult for her to see herself differently’ (MacCabe 2001: 215). The popular identification of the actress with her film role was interestingly heightened by the fact that she fell in love with the actor Sunil Dutt, who played Birju, during the shooting of the film and married him shortly afterwards, which constituted ‘a dizzy exacerbation of an already dangerous Oedipal subtext, for it provides the “knowledge”/ fantasy that the scene was really played out. [...] The son “got” the mother’ (Thomas 1989: 27).12

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Promiscuous and flamboyant Aurora is clearly constructed in contrast to the emphatically chaste and virtuous Nargis as Mother India. But they can also be read as complementary – an image of village India being completed by a quintessentially urban Mother India: ‘My mother was no Nargis Dutt – she was the in-your-face type, not serene. [...] Aurora was a city girl, perhaps the city girl, as much the incarnation of the smartyboots metropolis as Mother India was village earth made flesh’ (MLS 139). What the novel emphasises most of all, however, are the precarious parallels in the depiction of the ‘mother-son relations’ (MLS 137): In Mother India, a piece of Hindu myth-making directed by a Muslim socialist, Mehboob Khan, the Indian peasant woman is idealised as bride, mother, and producer of sons; as long-suffering, stoical, loving, redemptive, and conservatively wedded to the maintenance of the social status quo. But for Bad Birju, cast out from his mother’s love, she becomes, as one critic has mentioned, ‘that image of an aggressive, treacherous, annihilating mother who haunts the fantasy life of Indian males’. I, too, know something about this image; have been cast as a Bad Son in my turn. (MLS 138–9)13 When Aurora mentions the taboo subject of the erotically charged atmosphere between film mother and son, her guest Nargis is scandalised: ‘I took one look at your Bad Son, Birju, and I thought, O boy, what a handsome guy – too much sizzle, too much chillie, bring water. He may be a thief and a bounder, but that is some A-class loverboy goods. And now look – you have gone and marry-o’ed him! What sexy lives you movie people leadofy: to marry your own son, I swear, wowie.’ [...] ‘I knew right off that bad Birju had the hots for his gorgeous ma.’ [...] ‘Dirty talk,’ said the Living Mother Goddess. ‘Filthy-dirty, chhi. I heard tell that depraved artists and beatnik intellectuals came up here, but I gave you all benefit of doubt. Now I observe that I am among the blaspheming scum of the earth. [...] If this godless antinational gang is the world of art, then I-tho am happy to be on the commercial side.’ (MLS 137–8) The startling core of Rushdie’s Mother India theme is the representation of nationalist devotion towards Mother India as potentially

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incestuous. As Nargis characterises Aurora as ‘anti-national’, this raises the question whether the nationalist image of Mother India can withstand an open debate on the erotic aspect of the relationship between the venerated Mother and her passionately devoted children. The theme of incestuous desire between Aurora and Moor is explicit and of crucial importance in the text’s exploration of the image of Mother India. To read this desire allegorically in terms of the citizenchildren’s longing for Mother India is, of course, less problematic than countenancing the sexual attraction of a human mother for her child. However, even as allegory this representation evokes highly controversial and profoundly negative associations. Rushdie mischievously portrays the nationalist sons’ fervent patriotism for the Mother as a tainted attraction when he spells out the erotic characteristics of Moor and Aurora’s relationship. This overtly sexual element is there from the very beginning when Moor is born uttering a ‘mighty bovine groan’ because he is stuck in the birth canal due to a ‘generous erection’; Aurora is ‘at once appalled and impressed’ (MLS 144–5). Miss Jaya Hé, the housekeeper, tells Moor that he was sexually abused by his mother as a baby: ‘And if I am honest I can picture such scenes, they seem completely credible to me: my mother fooling with my soo-soo while suckling me at her breast’ (MLS 197–8). It is significant that Aurora’s sexual relationship with her husband deteriorates after Moor’s birth. She is negligent towards her three daughters and only has an intimate relationship with her son who serves as her main model in her art studio. For her own pleasure Aurora paints ambiguous, erotic pictures of herself and Moor in different roles as a couple of peacocks, as Desdemona and Othello or as Karl Marx with daughter Eleanor: ‘ “If you were twice as old as you look, and I was half as old as I am, I could be your daughter,” my forty-plus mother explained, and at the time I was too young to hear anything except the lightness she used to disguise the stranger things in her voice’ (MLS 224). Aurora never exhibits these pictures but they cause a stir after her death: ‘Aurora was often at her most iconoclastic, her most épatante, when she was most light-hearted; and the high-voltage eroticism of all these works [...] created a posthumous shock-wave’ (MLS 225). This passage constitutes a comment on Rushdie’s purpose in highlighting the incestuous possibilities in the image of Mother India as it indicates that his own ‘iconoclastic’ treatment of Mother India is not primarily aimed at demolishing the nationalist icon, as Katherine Mayo attempted, but could be read in a ‘light-hearted’ way. But it is this element of incestuous desire in the relationship of the citizen-son and the Mother-nation

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which overwhelmingly accounts for the atmosphere of unease surrounding the image of Mother India in The Moor’s Last Sigh. The nationalist image of Mother India emphasises the selfless love of her children for her rather than her love for them, and the same is the case in The Moor’s Last Sigh. But whereas fervent patriotism as love for Mother India is welcomed in nationalist discourse, this love is depicted as having distinctly dangerous aspects in the novel. Despite Aurora’s lack of typical mothering qualities, she is fiercely loved by her children with a self-destroying love: did I mention that she was irresistible? Listen: she was the light of our lives, the excitement of our imaginations, the beloved of our dreams. We loved her even as she destroyed us. She called out of us a love that felt too big for our bodies, as if she had made the feeling and then given it to us to feel – as if it were a work. If she trampled over us, it was because we lay down willingly beneath her spurred-and-booted feet; [...] we were all her slaves, and she made our servitude feel like Paradise. Which is, they say, what goddesses can do. (MLS 172) The love Aurora inspires is compared to the love a mother goddess calls forth rather than a human mother. Mother goddesses need not necessarily display the behaviour that is expected from Indian mothers who are ideally self-effacing and long-suffering. Kali, for example, whom Aurora is likened to in this passage (‘If she trampled over us, it was because we lay down willingly’), is approached by devotees as a mother: ‘The devotee [...] appropriates the truths Kali reveals [that life feeds on death] by adopting the attitude of a child, whose essential nature towards its mother is that of acceptance, no matter how awful, how indifferent, how fearsome she is’ (Kingsley 1986: 126–7). The emphasis on the goddess aspects of Mother India makes seemingly transgressive maternal behaviour acceptable because human mothers and mother goddesses like Mother India function on different levels. Conduct which would be censured if displayed by human mothers, such as taking one’s children’s lives as a sacrificial offering, becomes permissible for mother goddesses. Aurobindo had Mother India demand complete self-sacrifice when she asked, ‘ “How many will live for me? How many will die for me?” ’ (Aurobindo 1973: 854–5). Radha similarly claims her own son as sacrifice at the end of the film. Like the motherhood of a goddess, Aurora’s motherhood is transcendent. Vasco Miranda’s painting of Aurora as mother consists of her sitting bare-breasted on a lizard ‘with her arms cradling nothing, unless of course they were cradling

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the invisible Vasco, or even the whole world; unless by seeming to be nobody’s mother she indeed became the mother of us all’ (MLS 160). Aurora’s pose resembles the iconography of mother goddesses since they are not typically portrayed as having children and the devotees adopt the position of their children instead: ‘mother-goddess iconography is at variance with the ideology of motherhood as applied to reallife mothers. She is mother, but not spouse. She is mother but not often portrayed with children’ (Ganesh 1990: 61). Jyotsna Singh argues that Rushdie intends to satirise and deconstruct the myth of Mother India by associating it with the novel’s defective mother characters: In fact, at strategic moments in the novel, the narrator evokes the image of Mother India, not as a unifying, accommodating ideal, but as a protean and often deadly entity, and cast in the more ambivalent image of the erratic and unreliable mothers in the story. (Singh 1996: 171–2) Such a reading ignores the positive aspects of the novel’s mother characters but also the fact that nationalist images of Mother India often drew on terrifying characteristics of mother goddesses, which indicates that Rushdie’s version of Mother India is not as transgressive or against the grain of more ‘traditional’ depictions of Mother India as it might sometimes appear. It is not so much the myth of Mother India which is discredited in the novel but the blind nationalism which it can engender. This aspect is exemplified by Aurora’s paintings of an alternative Mother India, in which Bombay functions as a terrible and seductive metaphor for Mother India. The description of Aurora’s paintings constitutes a comment on Rushdie’s own creation of an ‘alternative vision of India-as-mother’ which warns against loving this image too much or being blind to its ugly and treacherous aspects: that exploration of an alternative vision of India-as-mother, not Nargis’s sentimental village-mother but a mother of cities, as heartless and lovable, brilliant and dark, multiple and lonely, mesmeric and repugnant, pregnant and empty, truthful and deceitful as the beautiful, cruel, irresistible metropolis itself. (MLS 203–4) This emphatically ambivalent image of Mother India does not easily lend itself to nationalist deployment. But Rushdie does not intend to demolish the figure of Mother India, which would be in any case a futile

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exercise, rather he problematises the image’s implications of a blindly devoted patriotism. It is specifically in the context of the political use of the image of Mother India by Indira Gandhi and the appropriation of Bharat Mata by Hindu nationalism that Rushdie’s version of Mother India has to be read.

Corrupting hegemonic images of Bharat Mata The Moor’s Last Sigh puts into disarray what Shetty refers to as the nationalist ‘maternal fantasy within which national identity and sociality was constituted as dedicated sonship’ by the novel’s unpalatable representation of Mother India in the image of a mother who is sexually attracted to her son and the perturbing representation of nationalism as the incestuous longing of a child for his mother (Shetty 1995: 62). By associating Mother India with the taboo image of incest Rushdie makes this nationalist image a problematic and difficult one to use. This appears to be a strategy intended to disturb the remarkable revival of the communally divisive political use of this image in the 1980s and 1990s by Hindu nationalist organisations. But before the Hindu nationalist use of Bharat Mata is examined, I will explore the other notable attempt at constructing a new hegemonic image of Mother India, namely Indira Gandhi’s adoption of the role of Mother India during her political career. Indira Gandhi may be the noteworthy exception of an actual woman who was empowered by the image of Mother India. In The Moor’s Last Sigh she is referred to as displacing Nargis as the official Mother India: ‘Nargis [...] became, until Indira-Mata supplanted her, the living mothergoddess of us all’ (MLS 137). Historiographical accounts emphasise that Indira Gandhi cast herself in the role of the mother for India’s dispossessed children from the late 1960s (Ali 1985: 161). After the triumph in the war with Pakistan in 1971 she was ‘cheered all over the country as Bharat Mata, an association she herself encouraged’ (Chakravarty 1993: 152). The election campaign slogan ‘India is Indira and Indira is India’ would probably not have had such a resonance if there had not been a tradition of equating the nation with a female image, and Rushdie refers to her ‘use of the cult of the mother’ as ‘calculated and shrewd’ (Rushdie 1985a: xi).14 Pranay Gupte entitled his biography of Indira Gandhi, Mother India, and described how she was popularly perceived as the nation’s mother or ‘demon goddess’: Indira Gandhi was sometimes called Bharat Mata – Mother India – by her supporters and detractors alike. For her fans, Indira was the


bountiful mother figure, who radiated strength – shakti – and a leader who gave succour to her political party, granted patronage to backers, and who tried to improve the lot of luckless Indians, in the manner of a mother who was always – albeit sometimes sternly – supportive of her progeny. For her critics, Indira Gandhi was the smothering mother figure who always strove to dominate the political scene, one who harboured no dissent, least of all any questioning of her policies, programs, and personal style. For her critics, Indira Gandhi was more demon goddess than Bharat Mata. (Gupte 1992: 21) In The Moor’s Last Sigh the intimate relationship between Indira Gandhi and her younger son Sanjay forms the third suspect mother-son relation beside Aurora-Moor and Radha-Birju, which suggests that the incestuous element forms an integral and inevitable part of the image of Mother India. Moor makes a gossipy comment to the housekeeper Miss Jaya Hé ‘about the unhealthy relationship between Mrs Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay. “The whole nation is paying for that mother-son problem” ’ (MLS 197). This remark triggers off the disgusted reply from Miss Jaya that he had a nerve to mention that considering that his mother (and sisters) were perverts who sexually stimulated him as a baby: ‘How they played with you. Too sick’ (MLS 197). By drawing this parallel between the relationships of Aurora and Moor and Indira and Sanjay, Rushdie makes an ‘unspeakable’ element in the Prime Minister’s bond with her son dangerously explicit. In doing so, he taps into popular unease surrounding this relationship. Emma Tarlo mentions an interesting popular narrative about Sanjay Gandhi’s death which she interprets as a way of diffusing the tension created by the intimate connection between him and his mother. Several people told Tarlo that Sanjay did not die in an aeroplane accident but that he was murdered by his mother because he would have ruined India, or as an anonymous woman put it: ‘Indira Gandhi killed her son in order to save Hindustan’ (quoted from Tarlo 2003: 216–17). Though by no means accepted by everyone we met, this version of events was not uncommon. It was an elegant means of converting the potentially negative undertones of Indira’s close relationship with her son into a positive affirmation of her greatness. It was a story which confirmed her superhuman strength and at the same time served to boost her status as great patriot. Such was her love for her country that she was even willing to sacrifice her own son for the greater good of the nation. (Tarlo 2003: 218)

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This popular narrative closely resembles the story of Nargis as Radha in Mother India since Radha also sacrifices her son for the honour and order of the village/nation. Yet The Moor’s Last Sigh does not refer to this alternative narrative about Sanjay’s death, in which the sacrificial death of the son functions as a precarious resolution to the crisis presented by the scenario of incest. In fact rather than sublimating the incestuous theme, the novel displays it emphatically and heightens its shock value in order to taint both the trope of the mother as nation and those who use it to improve their political stature. In the 1980s Hindu nationalist organisations, especially the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), appropriated the image of Bharat Mata as the Mother of the Hindu nation with the apparent aim of making this image of a Hindu nationalist Mother India hegemonic. As mentioned earlier, Hindu nationalist organisations had always evoked Bharat Mata as the Mother of Hindu India and had used Bankim’s slogan ‘Bande Mataram’ as a rallying cry against Muslims in communal riots since the 1920s. But the image of Mother India had had predominantly nationalist associations and was linked to the Indian National Congress in the film Mother India and through Indira Gandhi’s use of the image. In 1983 the VHP made a conscious effort to invest the image of Mother India with Hindu nationalist connotations by organising a nationwide six-week ‘All-India Sacrifice for Unity’ tour, displaying a statue of the goddess Bharat Mata on a truck for public worship to ‘earn for its participants the honor of being called “Children of Bharat Mata” ’ (McKean 1996: 255–7). In the same year, the VHP ‘consecrated its eight-storey Bharat Mata temple in the pilgrimage town of Hardwar’ in Northern India, which resembled a ‘museum of Hindu nationalism’ rather than a Hindu temple (McKean 1996: 250 & 277). This forceful reinterpretation of the image of Bharat Mata as an exclusively Hindu image was legitimised by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s attendance at the consecration of the temple (McKean 1996: 261). In the guidebook to the temple the unity of India is emphasised: ‘We are all children of Bharat Mata. Our country is one, our society is one, our civilisation is one, our culture is one, our relations are blood relations’ (quoted from McKean 1996: 261). This view of a homogenous India claims not to rest on any exclusions. However, the temple, which aims at educating its visitors in national history and culture, exhibits only Hindu gods and goddesses and mainly commemorates the deeds of great Hindu heroes and martyrs, thus defining ‘national identity in terms of Hindu piety and activism’ (McKean 1996: 264). The goddess Bharat Mata is depicted as a beautiful, smiling, richly decorated young woman with a milk urn


and sheaves of grain in her hands and stands beside a great map of India (McKean 1996: 269–70). The representation of this Mother India as relating exclusively to Hindus seems to be reinforced by referring to her mainly as Bharat Mata, even in the English guidebook and signs in the city, in contrast to the term Mother India which presumably sounds more ‘secular’ and evokes Mother India’s embodiment by the Muslim actress Nargis in Mehboob Khan’s film. The renewed and effective appropriation of Mother India by Hindu nationalists in the 1980s and 1990s may have been one of Rushdie’s principal motives in creating an alternative Mother India in The Moor’s Last Sigh, one which carries associations incompatible with a Hindu nationalist image of Bharat Mata. In the novel the way Hindu nationalism took possession of the figure of Mother India is only hinted at when sympathisers of Fielding’s Hindu nationalist party ‘belittle the culture of Indian Islam that lay palimpsest-fashion over the face of Mother India’ (MLS 299). The scene indicates that non-Hindu elements are not perceived as part of Mother India in Hindu nationalist discourse. Another symptom of the changing connotations of the image of the nation as mother is the celebrated piece of Hindu art by Uma Sarasvati, entitled ‘Alterations in/Reclamations of the Essence of Motherhood in the PostSecularist Epoch’ (MLS 261–2). This title signals the end of Nehruvian secularism and to Hindu nationalism’s glorification and essentialisation of Indian motherhood which is ‘reclaimed’ for the ‘gigantic Hindu nation’ (MLS 262). The new hegemony of a Hindu nationalist image of Mother India is revealed by the contrasting reception of Uma’s and Aurora’s work: ‘the critics who had mauled Aurora Zogoiby hailed Uma as Indian art’s new star – young, beautiful, and driven by her strong religious faith’ (MLS 262). Uma Sarasvati is determined to annihilate Aurora and her family and in doing so brings the erotic attraction between Aurora and her son to a dangerous climax. Uma with her instinctive knowledge how best to ensnare and destroy people, drags the incestuous desire of Aurora and Moor into the open as she provokes Moor to utter obscenities during their love-making, which she secretly records: Screw her I said. Screw her stupid the stupid bitch. And Uma: How? Darling, my darling, how? Fuck her. Fuck her upside down and sideways too. – O, you can, my only sweet, if you want to, if you only say you want. – God yes. I want to. Yes. O God. Thus at the moment of my greatest joy I spilt the seeds of ruin: my ruin, and my mother’s, and the ruin of our great house. (MLS 252)

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When Uma confronts Aurora with the tape of Moor’s incestuous utterances, Aurora cannot face up to it and banishes Moor from his home without giving an explanation. When the act of consummation of Aurora and Moor’s sexual desire for each other is explicitly referred to, Aurora shrinks from Moor in horror, disowns him and never speaks to her son again. This unspeakable incestuous core of the relationship between Mother India and her devoted son is irreverently developed in The Moor’s Last Sigh to a point of near-consummation. But the novel shies away from annihilating the image of Mother India, which an actual portrayal of the mother and the son having sex may have achieved. ‘Innocent’ nationalist fervour for the Mother, however, has become irredeemably corrupted by Moor’s verbalised incest. Nationalist devotion to Mother India has been translated into an image of a son who says he wants to ‘fuck’ his mother (MLS 252). This ‘perverse’ reading of the allegory of the nation as mother and her citizen-son strips (Hindu) nationalist passion for the Mother of its positive connotations. Like contemporary academic Indian historiography, The Moor’s Last Sigh draws attention to the dangers inherent in the image of Mother India in producing and legitimising a hatred of the nation’s enemies which is more vicious and blind because the nation is depicted as a mother and not merely as a territory with a specific population. Historiographical accounts describe the way Hindu nationalist discourse portrays Muslims in the role of the rapists of the motherland who are responsible for both the Mother’s desecration and her horrific dissection (Hansen 1999: 113): Partition – always described by them as the result of Muslim culpability – comes to acquire new and more terrible meanings when it is filtered through the grid of this theological understanding. It is no longer a human disaster or a territorial division: it is the mutilation of a sacred body, an act of desecration committed by Muslims. [...] The map of India becomes the divine idol – at once sacred and vulnerable [...] The sacrality of an integrated and aggressive yet perpetually threatened female body is the organizing principle that holds the edifice together. The argument loses its power, its charge, if the country is allowed to be seen as a piece of land with flesh-and-blood people living within it. (Sarkar 2001: 277–9) Muslims are depicted as the enemy within who collaborate with Pakistan and other Muslim countries and who want to see Mother India

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murdered; her only hope lies with her Hindu sons who are prepared to kill for her. Rithambra, a Hindu nationalist spokeswoman, appeals to Hindu mothers to give birth to such valiant and dedicated sons: ‘Reproduction and mothering are reviewed primarily as acts of anger [...]. The woman in this vision of Hindutva conceives and nurtures her sons as instruments of revenge; she gives birth to masculine violence’ (Sarkar 2001: 284). In The Moor’s Last Sigh Moor is blinded by what he perceives to be his mother’s command to revenge her: Ancient, irrefutable imperatives had claimed me. Against all expectations, my mother’s perturbed shade was hovering at my shoulder, crying havoc. Blood will have blood. Wash my body in my murderers’ red fountains and let me R. I. P. Mother, I will. (MLS 362) But instead of doing his mother’s will by murdering Fielding, Moor is deceived by his father Abraham who convinced Moor that his rival had had Aurora killed because of ‘[s]exual ... revenge’ after Aurora discarded him as a lover (MLS 362). The voice that Moor imagines he hears cannot be Aurora’s as she identified her own husband Abraham as her murderer by painting his image and hiding it under another picture with the title ‘The Moor’s Last Sigh’ (MLS 415). In the novel, the violence of the communal riots after the demolition of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in 1992 is displaced by a portrayal of Moor’s murder of Fielding. As Moor later finds out that he killed the wrong man, since Abraham was probably responsible for having Aurora assassinated, this also further invalidates the violence of the communal riots in which Hindu nationalists killed Muslims as the enemies of Bharat Mata. The Moor’s Last Sigh implies that the emotive image of Mother India has too often legitimised murder and bloodshed, acts whose motives were deceptively proclaimed as righteous deeds in revenge of the Mother. When Moor’s vision of his mother’s ‘perturbed shade’ which shrieks for revenge is disclosed as an illusion, this constitutes a disclosure of how the image of Bharat Mata can easily be (ab)used for nefarious ends. The powerful image of Aurora as Mother India which Moor creates in his narration is gradually dismantled and unmasked as largely illusionary. To the end, Moor clings to the fantasy of his mother’s strength and power as he imagines the apocalyptic end of Bombay to be his mother’s revenge: ‘Disembodied, she hung above us in the sky, Aurora Bombayalis in her glory, and what rained down upon us was her wrath’

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(MLS 352). By then, however, the powerful image of Mother India has been deflated in the novel because Abraham has grown into an evil central patriarchal figure who secretly draws the strings. The narrator compares Abraham to the arch villain in the film Mr. India (1987) and mischievously reads the film against the grain by casting the film’s non-Indian villain, who wants to destroy India, in the role of ‘National Father’: Nobody ever made a movie called Father India. ‘Bharat-pita?’ Sounds all wrong. ‘Hindustan-ké-Bapuji’? Too specifically Gandhian. ‘Valide-Azam’? Overly Mughal. ‘Mr India’, however, perhaps the crudest of all such nationalistic formulations, that we did latterly get. [...] It seems to me that maybe, in this trashy extravaganza, as worthless in its gaudy colours as the old Nargis mother-vehicle was sombre and worthy, the producers did unintentionally provide us with an image of the National Father after all. There he sits, like a dragon in his cave, like a thousand-fingered puppet-master, like the heart of the heart of darkness; [...] not just Godfather but Gonefarthest, the dada of all dadas: Mogambo. (MLS 168) The Moor’s Last Sigh’s vision of a National Father figure lacks positive qualities as Abraham becomes a destructive, deceitful and ruthless character unconstrained by moral and ethical considerations. It is significant that Abraham vanquishes Aurora’s hold over him, and has her killed in the end, as this implies the victory of the image of the National Father over that of Mother India. In contrast to Anandamath’s Shanti and Mother India’s Radha, Aurora is a representation of Mother India who had always been dependent on a man to provide for her. From the beginning Aurora’s art is implicated in Abraham’s crimes as she lives off the money he earns. Aurora is tainted by Abraham’s business practices whose ruthlessness is pointed out from the start. Moor describes his mother as Abraham’s willing accomplice: hers was a chosen blindness, her complicity the complicity of silence, of don’t-tell-me-things-I-don’t-want-to-know, of quiet-I-am-busy-withmy-Great-Work. And such was the force of her not-seeing that none of us looked either. What a cover she was for Abraham Zogoiby’s operations! What a brilliant, legitimising façade. (MLS 107) Aurora’s illusionary power and independence reveal the patriarchal implications which underpin the image of Mother India. The figure of

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Abraham as dominant National Father signifies the hollowness of the empowerment of the female figure of the nation. This chapter has delineated the characteristics of the image of Mother India and situated Rushdie’s version of this image in its historical context. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee created the first influential image of the Mother whose story in Anandamath was supposed to constitute a useful and usable imaginary history of an as yet unnamed nation in novel form. The way Anandamath combined elements of glorified Indian motherhood and mother goddess worship with the image of the sacred land and the concept of the nation became characteristic of the image of Bharat Mata. The Moor’s Last Sigh’s image of India as mother draws heavily on earlier nationalist models of Mother India since Rushdie’s Mother India displays traits of mother goddesses, as did Anandamath’s Shanti and Mother India’s Radha. But unlike Bankim’s Kalyani or the film’s Radha, Aurora violates most norms associated with exemplary Indian motherhood. In contrast to the nationalist imagery of the Mother, The Moor’s Last Sigh’s portrayal of Mother India makes this image mischievously unusable for nationalist ends. The Moor’s Last Sigh and contemporary Indian historiography share a keen interest in the idea of the nation and the way it is imagined in (Hindu) nationalist discourse. Both the novel and historiography demystify the image of Mother India. Indian historiography examines the way the image of Mother India was constructed and used by nationalist and Hindu nationalist discourse, which disturbs the illusion that Mother India is a ‘natural’ concept beyond questioning. The Moor’s Last Sigh ‘denaturalises’ the nationalist fervour surrounding the image of Bharat Mata by highlighting and magnifying its incestuous potential and stressing the dangers of blind passion which the image of Mother India is intended to arouse in (Hindu) nationalist discourse. It is remarkable that there is a relative absence of radically antinationalist representations or interpretations of the image of Mother India in Indian historiography and in The Moor’s Last Sigh. The reason for this might be the influential precedent of an anti-nationalist depiction of Mother India in Katherine Mayo’s book which still obstructs attempts to demolish the image of Mother India since such a strategy could play into the hands of uncritical neo-imperialist readings such as that of Mary Daly. This could explain why Rushdie’s portrayal of Mother India is not emphatically anti-nationalist or interested in destroying the image per se, even though what is left of the image of Mother India in The Moor’s Last Sigh is only a brittle shell of the previously awe-inspiring nationalist icon. The novel’s image of Mother India is not designed to

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hold the nation together and the text suggests that roughly a century after Bankim’s Anandamath, the image of Mother India has exhausted its nation-consolidating potential. Feminist historiography often stresses the disabling aspects of the female image of the nation because it taps into the ideology of glorious motherhood which constitutes a burden for real women since they have to live up to an impossible ideal. Yet the impact of the image of Mother India on ‘ordinary’ women, which feminist historiography is mainly interested in, is an area Rushdie does not explore in The Moor’s Last Sigh. In fact, Rushdie’s alternative Mother India, embodied by Aurora, is anything but a representative of ‘real’ women. The reason why Rushdie does not discuss the influence of the image of Mother India on actual women in The Moor’s Last Sigh may be because he had already done so in Midnight’s Children, where Padma pithily rejected the comparison of Indian women with Bharat Mata or other goddesses by saying, ‘ “They are just women, that’s all” ’ (MC 406). The ways women can use the image of Mother India as an empowering resource may indeed be rather limited. The feminist scholars Thapar-Björkert and Ryan, while being in general critical of the national symbols of Mother India and Mother Ireland in their comparative study, also argue that ‘it is important to emphasise that some women actively negotiated with the symbol of national motherhood and used it within their own political activities’ (Thapar-Björkert & Ryan 2002: 310). However, the only Indian example they refer to is Dhirendranath Pandey’s mother, whose name they do not mention and who went onto a fast unto death in 1930 to ‘support her husband’s struggle’ (he was imprisoned because of his activities in the nationalist movement) (Thapar-Björkert & Ryan 2002: 310). Pandey, who was one year old at the time, interprets his mother’s suicide as ‘a sacrifice and service (seva) for the nation’ in an interview with ThaparBjörkert: ‘the day she died, all the accused in jail wore black bands and did not eat for the whole day. She was our Bharatmata’ (ThaparBjörkert & Ryan 2002: 310).

5 The Idea of a Hybrid India

The idea of an inclusive, composite Indian nation based on tolerance and cultural synthesis was a key component of secular nationalist discourse in the 1930s and 1940s. This concept of India which emphasised both an ancient capacity for synthesis and a ‘fundamental, essential unity of India’ was a reaction to the increasingly hostile communalist confrontations from the 1920s onwards and the danger of the partitioning of the subcontinent (Pandey 1990: 247–52). The idea of a harmoniously composite India was represented both as a reality in the past and as a model for the future independent nation. With the increasing communalist violence in the 1980s and 1990s, however, the credibility of this concept of India has come under severe strain. One of the major concerns of The Moor’s Last Sigh is the representation and interrogation of this idea of an inclusive, creatively diverse India against the background of Hindu nationalism’s campaign for an exclusive Hindu nation. This chapter explores how this idea of India is represented in The Moor’s Last Sigh and whether it is depicted as a viable concept for the future, in contrast to the notion of Mother India, which the novel eventually abandons as a usable conception of the nation. Like the figure of Mother India, the idea of the composite nation is closely associated with Aurora Zogoiby in The Moor’s Last Sigh, the character who artistically re-creates the ‘myth of the plural hybrid nation’, personified by her son Moor in her paintings (MLS 227). Another concern of this chapter is how the novel represents the ‘westernised’ or ‘hybrid’ nature of Aurora and her class. Both are repeatedly referred to as the product of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Education’ (1835) which promoted the dissemination of Western knowledge in the educational system sponsored by the East India Company and sought to establish English as the medium of higher education in India (Young 1952: 719–30). 158

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The desired effect of this educational policy was to turn educated natives into ‘brown Englishmen’ with a decisive role in building an ‘imperishable empire of England’s arts and letters’ by recreating India’s culture in England’s image (Rajan 1999: 103 & 174). This chapter will explore how the novel addresses the question of whether the educated Indian élite played the role Macaulay envisaged for them and whether this legacy of ‘westernisation’ questions the legitimacy of the élite’s nationalist narrative of the nation. Partha Chatterjee argues that the rich diversity of social relations in India and the ‘intricacy of their interconnections’ were interpreted by imperialist discourse as an ‘orderless mélange’ which called for an imposition of ‘linearity and order on an ungovernable society’ (Chatterjee 1993: 168–9). The negative evaluation of India’s diversity was thus used to legitimise colonial rule. In the colonialist endeavour to order India’s communal diversity, British ethnographers and census officials zealously catalogued and analysed Indian tribes and castes and tried to evolve ‘an all-India caste classification’ (Pant 1987: 155).1 However, the classificatory mission was beset by problems, and colonial officials encountered numerous obstacles when it came to categorising and enumerating these communities (Cohn 1987: 231–50). The ethnographer Sherring, for example, testified to the difficulty of bringing order into the ‘chaotic confusion’ that some castes had fallen into because they became ‘so hopelessly blended’ and ‘intermingled with lower tribes, that the ethnological differences originally subsisting between them are irrevocably lost’ (Sherring, Vol. II 1974: iv).2 Yet what imperialist discourse represented as India’s hybrid formlessness was re-interpreted by Indian nationalist discourse as ‘evidence of the greatness of the indigenous tradition which was capable [...] of absorbing diverse social forms into a single unity without destroying the marks of difference’ (Chatterjee 1993: 169). Thus Nehru in The Discovery of India (1946) emphasised the non-threatening aspects of ‘foreign influences’ on the grounds that an essential Indian unity was never endangered by it: Foreign influences poured in and often influenced that culture and were absorbed. Disruptive tendencies gave rise immediately to an attempt to find a synthesis. Some kind of dream of unity has occupied the mind of India since the dawn of civilization. That unity was not conceived as something imposed from outside, a standardization of externals or even of beliefs. It was something deeper and, within its fold, the widest tolerance of belief and custom was practised and every variety acknowledged and even encouraged. (Nehru 1989: 62)

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The dissemination of this version of Indian history as being characterised by ‘communal harmony’ was encouraged by the government after Independence, and the ‘formula “unity in diversity” became an often pronounced maxim of Government politics’ and a defining feature of nationalist historiography (Gottlob 2003b: 69–70). With the increasing dismantling of the representations of nationalist historiography, however, this portrayal of a harmoniously syncretic India which had existed through the ages came under attack as a ‘grave oversimplification of Indian history’ (Pandey 1990: 252). But while subalternist historiography criticised the fact that ‘nationalists glorified the absorptive capacities without taking notice of the considerable internal struggles that marked the process of absorption’, India’s diversity continued to be depicted in a positive light (Chatterjee 1993: 169). In The Satanic Verses (1988) nationalist discourse on India’s creatively multiple and syncretic heritage is embodied by doctor and art critic Zeenat Vakil and exemplified by the representation of the Hamza-nama pictures from the Mughal period which provided eloquent proof of Zeeny Vakil’s thesis about the eclectic, hybridized nature of the Indian artistic tradition. The Mughals had brought artists from every part of India to work on the paintings; individual identity was submerged to create a many-headed, many-brushed Overartist who, literally, was Indian painting. [...] In the Hamza-nama you could see the Persian miniature fusing with Kannada and Keralan painting styles, you could see Hindu and Muslim philosophy forming their characteristically late-Mughal synthesis. (SV 70)3 This passage echoes nationalist historiography’s representation of Indian syncretism which was depicted as having reached a climax under Mughal rule (Pandey 1990: 248–9). But the novel does not portray Zeeny Vakil’s advocacy of ‘an ethic of historically validated eclecticism’ as an accepted version of secular nationalist common sense but as a controversial statement in the India of the 1980s, where Hindu nationalist forces which were in the ascendancy cherished a different version of an Indian culture with a purer and predominantly Hindu lineage (SV 52). Nevertheless The Satanic Verses represents India as exemplary in embodying a functioning (but increasingly contested) hybridity: ‘for was not the entire national culture based on the principle of borrowing whatever clothes seemed to fit, Aryan, Mughal, British, take-the-bestand-leave-the-rest?’ (SV 52). While The Satanic Verses is predominantly


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preoccupied with the representation of a migrant’s hybridity, The Moor’s Last Sigh chiefly portrays India’s hybridity and its embattled status in Hindu nationalist India. Even though it is a major strength of the concept of cultural hybridity that it resists definition and encompasses a wide range of possible applications, it is crucial not to lose sight of the ‘distinctiveness in any significant hybridity that can become submerged in the current proposition that all of us are hybrid’ (Rajan 1999: 11). In the following, I want to explore two distinct aspects of India’s cultural hybridity. In the first part of this chapter, The Moor’s Last Sigh’s representation of the hybridity of India’s élite, which is depicted as an ambivalent legacy of Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Education’, is examined. I will draw on Homi Bhabha’s theorising of hybridity, especially his concept of colonial mimicry, to analyse the novel’s portrayal of the élite’s controversial ‘westernisation’. In the second part of this chapter, I will discuss the novel’s representation of India’s inter-communal cultural hybridity. The theoretical concepts of Mikhail Bakhtin, as expounded in his essay ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (1934–35), will be used to analyse the dialogue between The Moor’s Last Sigh and Nehruvian nationalist discourse on India’s hybridity. In particular, Bakhtin’s concept of novelistic heteroglossia will provide a model for conceptualising The Moor’s Last Sigh’s vision of a ‘plural, hybrid India’. I will use Ken Hirschkop’s reading and development of Bahktin’s theory in his Mikhail Bakhtin. An Aesthetic for Democracy (1999), where he employs Bakhtin’s ‘cultural conception of a dialogical, novelistic world’ in order to envisage a ‘democratic culture’ (Hirschkop 1999: ix). The usefulness of a Bakhtinian framework for analysing Rushdie’s novels lies in Rushdie’s conceptual closeness to Bakhtin. Rushdie’s celebration of hybridity in his essay ‘In Good Faith’ (1992), for example, bears a striking resemblance to Bakhtin’s characterisation of hybridisation in discourse. Thus Bakhtin: It must be pointed out, however, that while it is true the mixture of linguistic world views in organic [unintentional, non-novelistic] hybrids remains mute and opaque, such unconscious hybrids have been at the same time profoundly productive historically: they are pregnant with potential for new world views, with new ‘internal forms’ for perceiving the world in words. (Bakhtin 1981: 360) And now Rushdie: The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of

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human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. (Rushdie 1992a: 394) Zeeny Vakil’s title of a critical study of Aurora’s œuvre in The Moor’s Last Sigh further testifies to Rushdie’s awareness of academic theoretical discourse: ‘Imperso-Nation and Dis/Semi/Nation: Dialogics of Eclecticism and Interrogations of Authenticity in A.Z.’ (MLS 329). In this title allusions to both Bhabha and Bakhtin can be found, namely to Bhabha’s essay ‘DissemiNation’ (1990) and to Bakhtin’s collection of essays, Dialogic Imagination (1981). This could be interpreted as Rushdie’s mocking mimicry of academic discourse, to use Bhabha’s terminology, or Rushdie’s incorporation of theoretical literary critical discourse in his novel with the typical parodying effect Bakhtin ascribes to novelistic style.

Macaulay’s minutemen The educated élite in India is often characterised as ‘Anglicized, alienated or isolated, and equivocal about its cultural alignments,’ and this is attributed to its Westernised education and up-bringing and its preference for the English language rather than an Indian vernacular (Sangari 1990: 236). This suspicion that the Indian élite is not quite authentically Indian is frequently associated with the assertion that the élite is the product of Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Education’ (1835). Macaulay’s minute strongly argued the case for educating the Indian élite in the English language and Western knowledge rather than in Sanskrit, Arabic and ‘Oriental learning’ (Young 1952: 722).4 Macaulay was the key proponent of the Anglicist position which was opposed by the Orientalist faction, who wanted the East India Company to continue funding education in Sanskrit and Arabic (Sirkin and Sirkin 1971: 408). His intervention helped decide the Orientalist-Anglicist controversy in favour of the Anglicists (Cutts 1953: 851–3). Balachandra Rajan juxtaposes the different perceptions of Indian culture which these positions entailed: the Orientalist and Anglicist alternatives are different managerial strategies based on different evaluations of what is to be managed. The Orientalist alternative, with its reluctance to recognize that a culture once noble can be wholly beyond redemption, offers itself for elevation into the realm of the literary and the humanistic. The Anglicist view, based on imperial assumptions of superiority that in


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their nature cannot be dialogic, is less concerned with world understanding than with remaking the world in the Western image. (Rajan 1999: 189) The dominance of the Anglicists had far-reaching consequences for imperialist practice and Rajan argues that ‘the minute on education may well be the most important document in India’s cultural history but only if it is metonymically read in proximity to an extensive complex of attitudes’ (Rajan 1999: 190). The most infamous section of Macaulay’s minute, beside his derogatory remarks on ‘Oriental learning’, is that in which he intimates how comprehensive this educational project should be in terms of constituting a radical break with traditional Indian knowledge. The minute’s promotion of the inculcation of superior knowledge in a language that ‘stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the west’ for a small group of privileged Indians culminates in the expectation that this educated élite will in turn translate this knowledge into Indian vernaculars (Young 1952: 722): it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. (Young 1952: 729) Macaulay does not envisage the possibility that this native class of interpreters might be critical of Western knowledge, or even reject it. Nor does he expect this knowledge to be transformed or adapted in the process of translation. His is not a project of cultural hybridity as he is convinced that the superiority of Western knowledge was bound to replace completely the intellectual allegiance of this class of English-educated Indians. This Indian élite would gladly give up its ‘monstrous superstitions [...] false History, false Astronomy, false Medicine [and] a false religion’ and become English except in ‘blood and colour’ (Young 1952: 728–9). A few decades after its publication, Macaulay’s plan and predictions seem to have been partly fulfilled, as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s essay ‘The Confession of a Young Bengal’ (1872) demonstrates (Bagal 1969: 137–41). Bankim asserted that ‘[w]e have received a High English education. Our culture is thoroughly English and we mean to reconstruct society according to English notions’ (Bagal 1969: 140). He testified to the Bengali élite’s persistent efforts to be ‘English in taste, in opinions,

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in morals, and in intellect’ but also pointed out the problematic residual difference of ‘colour’: Such of us as are gifted with exceptionally disciplined minds and have appreciatingly imbibed the best and the most recent English teaching concerning individuality and non-conformity, eat, dress and conduct ourselves in society exactly like Englishmen, the usual allowance for the imperfection of a first attempt being, of course, made. The Bengali accent refuses to be quite forgotten, the English idiom every now and then proves quite treacherous, above all, the transmigration from “black” to “white” defies the existing resources of chemistry and cosmetics. (Bagal 1969: 140) Bankim’s article reads like a satire on the ‘Minute on Education’, even though the idea that English civilisation as manifested in colonial Bengal could be subjected to mockery by the mimic class English education had brought into being was not envisaged by Macaulay. But as the following remark by Bankim suggests, the element of ridiculousness was intrinsic to the very process of translating Englishness in a colonial context. Mockery became unavoidable even when one protested the contrary: the Lieutenant-Governor congratulated the enlightened gentry of Rajshaye upon what struck His Honour as the most prominent concrete manifestation of English civilization in that district, – dogcarts, to wit. The solemn assurance of His Honour that he was not joking was perfectly needless. (Bagal 1969: 137) Bankim coupled satire with explicit criticism of the spiritual vacuum English civilisation had produced among the educated élite: ‘English civilization has pulled down the three hundred and thirty million deities of Hinduism, and set up, in the total space once occupied by them, its own tutelary deities, Comfort and his brother, Respectability’ (Bagal 1969: 139). Bankim became convinced of the spiritual superiority of Hinduism and promoted a combination of India’s spiritual wisdom with Western knowledge, as he did at the end of Anandamath (Chatterjee 1985: 79). But Bankim also suggested that the ‘Englishing’ of this new Westernised class had been so effective that traditional knowledge was now almost inaccessible to them: This community of the educated [...] cannot understand the discourses of traditional scholarship, even if these are translated into


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Bengali. Just as the pandits belonging to the traditional school (tols) find it difficult to understand statements made by Europeans, even when they read these in translation, those who have been educated in the western mode, do not find it easy to grasp what the traditional Eastern scholars have said, even when that is available in translation [...]. The western mode of thinking is so very different from the traditional Indian mode of thinking that the translation of ideas cannot be achieved simply by the translation of one language into another. (translated by and cited from Guha 1988a: 25) The subalternist historian Ranajit Guha quotes Bankim’s remarks as evidence of a regrettable and irreversible process of cultural alienation amongst the English-educated Indian élite: ‘Thanks to colonialist education, English had thus become constitutive of thought itself for the educated. It cut them off from their own tradition’ (Guha 1988a: 25). Guha emphasises the loss of possibilities as one language and its world views are obliterated by another. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, the topic of Macaulay’s minute is introduced by the drunken Vasco Miranda at the night of Independence, and his invective against the party guests reflects the negative image of Macaulay’s élite class. Miranda’s hostile outburst suggests that this class is associated with being un-Indian, alienated and not a successful and accepted class of mediators and interpreters: This isn’t your night. Bleddy Macaulay’s minutemen! Don’t you get it? Bunch of English-medium misfits, the lot of you. Minority group members. Square-peg freaks. You don’t belong here. Country’s as alien to you as if you were what’s-the-word lunatics. Moon-men. You read the wrong books, get on the wrong side in every argument, think the wrong thoughts. Even your bleddy dreams grow from foreign roots. (MLS 165–6) Vasco Miranda predicts that the Westernised élite will not be able to import successfully the Western political concept of a secular liberal democracy and apply it to India and advises them to get out while they can: ‘Get on the boats with the British! [...] This place has no use for you. It’ll beat you and eat you’ (MLS 167). Aurora echoes his words by ironically concurring with his view that they formed a group of ‘[h]istorical anomalies [...] Mixtures, mongrels’ and foretells that ‘mongrel blood will run-o’ (MLS 172). The Moor’s Last Sigh confronts the precariousness of this kind of hybridity, a factor which questions

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this class’s cultural belonging and its right to envisage India in its own image. The Moor’s Last Sigh’s representation of the élite’s hybrid status aims at producing a complex and nuanced picture which portrays this class as the ambivalent product of colonialism. Homi Bhabha’s concept of colonial mimicry is useful in its emphasis that both colonisers and colonised were implicated in the mechanisms of mimicry and that mimicry never unequivocally worked to the advantage or disadvantage of either (Bhabha 1994: 111–21). According to Bhabha’s account, mimicry was both a colonialist strategy to know and control the natives but simultaneously unsettled colonial authority by producing an image of the native that was at the same time too similar and too different: almost English but not quite (Bhabha 1994: 85–92). Bhabha concentrates on the unsettling effects of mimicry on the colonisers: ‘The ambivalence of colonial authority repeatedly turns from mimicry – a difference that is almost nothing but not quite – to menace – a difference that is almost total but not quite’ (Bhabha 1994: 91). An example of mimicry turning into menace is provided in The Moor’s Last Sigh when Aires and Camoens da Gama are arrested after the murderous family feud of the Menezes and Lobos and lectured to by an Englishman whom they know well and with whose family they had associated and discussed English literature. He ignores them and refuses to look at them or to acknowledge their acquaintance, turning them into anonymous representatives of their mimic class who appear the same but are essentially other. The rhetoric of the ‘White Man’s Burden’ is combined with the disclosure of such treacherous mimicry: Year by year England sends out fresh drafts for the first fightingline, which is officially called the Indian Civil Service. These die, or kill themselves by overwork, or are worried to death, or broken in health and hope in order that the land may be protected from death and sickness, famine and war, and may eventually become capable of standing alone. It will never stand alone [...]. If an advance be made all credit is given to the native [...]. If a failure occurs the Englishmen step forward and take the blame. Overmuch tenderness of this kind has bred a strong belief among many natives that the native is capable of administering the country, and many devout Englishmen believe this also, because the theory is stated in beautiful English and with the latest political colours. (MLS 39)


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In fact, this passage from The Moor’s Last Sigh is a quote from Rudyard Kipling’s short story ‘On the City Wall’, in which this extract is narrated matter-of-factly by the first-person narrator (Kipling 1970: 305–6).5 In the context of The Moor’s Last Sigh, the imperialist rhetoric sounds peevish and ludicrous. Here it seems that Macaulay’s strategy may have backfired since the class of mimic interpreters have learned to answer back in ‘beautiful English’ but have nevertheless remained disturbingly different and untrustworthy. Ironically imperialist discourse became increasingly suspicious of the educated Indian élite and contrasted them to the ‘real’, rural India ‘untainted by urban corruption, blissfully ignorant of Macaulay’s minute, and hence instinctively loyal to the raj’ (Rajan 1999: 194). While The Moor’s Last Sigh represents the unsettling effects of mimicry on the colonisers, the undignified aspect of mimicry for the colonised is also shown in Aires da Gama’s servile mimicking of the English. Aires da Gama, Moor’s uncle, is an example of someone who revels in his role of a mimic man. He is ‘for England, God, philistinism’ (MLS 18) and enthusiastically imitates English lifestyle and fashion: ‘what a ludicrous figure he cut in his monocle, stiff collar, and three-piece suit of finest gabardine’ (MLS 12). Aires seems to be one of Macaulay’s triumphs, but he is ridiculed by the text and, at the same time, inadvertently parodies the English whom he mimics. After his prison sentence he is still unapologetically loyal to the British and an adversary of the Congress nationalists: ‘This misguided policy of ejection of our rulers, [...] Suppose it succeeds; then what will become? Where in this India are the democratic institutions to replace the British Hand, which is, I can personally avow, benevolent even when it chastises us for our infantile misdeeds’ (MLS 50). Unintentionally, Aires makes a mockery of imperialist discourse when he points to the missing democratic institutions which the colonial regime refrained from establishing because this would inevitably undermine the existence of the Empire. The Moor’s Last Sigh’s mockery of imperialist discourse is heightened by having a declared loyalist voice it, one who unwittingly draws attention to the glaring discrepancy of the colonial mission of Englishing India and the imperialist practice of withholding English democratic institutions. Bhabha detects a similar incident of an inadvertent ridiculing of the ‘epic intention of the civilising mission’ in the ‘absurd extravagance’ of Macaulay’s minute which ‘makes a mockery of Oriental learning until faced with the challenge of conceiving of a “reformed” colonial subject’ (Bhabha 1994: 85–7). At this point, ‘the great tradition of European humanism seems capable only of ironizing itself’ by coming up with

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nothing better than the conception of ‘a mimic man’ (Bhabha 1994: 87). Bhabha characterises Macaulay and his mimic men as ‘parodists of history’ because they mock history’s ‘power to be a model’ as the civilising Enlightenment project emerges as something almost unrecognisable in the colonial context (Bhabha 1994: 88): The effect of mimicry on the authority of colonial discourse is profound and disturbing. For in ‘normalizing’ the colonial state or subject, the dream of post-Enlightenment civility alienates its own language of liberty and produces another knowledge of its norms. [...] between mimicry and mockery [...] the reforming, civilizing mission is threatened by the displacing gaze of its disciplinary double. (Bhabha 1994: 86) Bhabha’s emphasis on the self-contradictory, ludicrous, comic and paranoid aspects of imperialist discourse has significant parallels in The Moor’s Last Sigh, but in the novel the ridiculousness of imperialist discourse also infects those who imitate it such as Aires. But just as the native élite are tainted by their status as mimic men, the colonisers are not immune to transformations either. The Moor’s Last Sigh portrays hybridising influences on the colonisers who try in vain to keep up the façade of uncompromised Britishness. Widow Elphinstone and the other memsahibs in The Moor’s Last Sigh are portrayed as being insidiously ‘Indianised’ without being aware of it. The memsahibs’ purpose was to contribute to ‘racial exclusiveness’ by counteracting hybridising influences and preventing their men from going native (Hyam 1990: 119). But when one of the three Aspinwall sisters tells Oliver D’Aeth to intervene in the scandalous love-affair between Aurora and Abraham her language betrays her: ‘ “You samjao that baysharram pair [...] that this sort of tamasha is simply not the cheese” ’ (MLS 97). The newly arrived Anglican Reverend Oliver D’Aeth feels overwhelmed by his desire for Aurora and the threatening otherness of India. He is a tragicomic figure of the colonialist who conjures up a disturbing, paranoid image of hybridity, which he perceives as encroaching on and insidiously penetrating the English enclaves: India was uncertainty. It was deception and illusion. Here at Fort Cochin the English had striven mightily to construct a mirage of Englishness [...] But D’Aeth could not help seeing through the conjuring trick, [...] the frontier between the English enclaves and the


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surrounding foreignness had become permeable, was beginning to dissolve. (MLS 95) In his accounts of colonial mimicry and the natives’ ‘sly civility’, Bhabha foregrounds the troubling and terrifying elements of the colonial encounter for the colonial administrators and missionaries. His texts are full of Schadenfreude, which is meant to clear some space for a ‘change of perspective’: If the effect of colonial power is seen to be the production of hybridization rather than the noisy command of colonialist authority or the silent repression of native traditions, then an important change of perspective occurs. The ambivalence at the source of traditional discourses on authority enables a form of subversion, founded on the undecidability that turns the discursive conditions of dominance into the grounds of intervention. (Bhabha 1994: 112) Here Bhabha stresses the enabling aspects of hybridity for the colonised, but this potentially subversive hybrid site is, of course, necessarily an always already discursively contaminated site – contaminated by the other’s discourse. Bhabha might invite accusations of trivialising the suffering produced under colonial authority or of underestimating the alienating effects of mimicry for the colonised, which Guha has emphasised (Guha 1988a: 25). The Moor’s Last Sigh engages with the potentially painful and conflict-ridden negotiation of this kind of hybridity when the educated élite has to confront Vasco Miranda’s tirade against ‘Macaulay’s minutemen’ (MLS 165). But the novel’s representation of mimicry also shows significant parallels with Bhabha’s parodic and gleeful theorising of the travails of the colonisers and the subversive effects of mimicry on colonial authority. Like Bhabha, The Moor’s Last Sigh advocates a ‘change of perspective’ which acknowledges the irreducible hybridity of the colonial and post-colonial contexts so that the search for the purely indigenous and authentic is pre-empted. Aurora’s art represents a model for a creative hybridity of Eastern and Western influences, which is, however, portrayed as being viewed with suspicion by those who demand a clear preference for either/or: Artists who were truly in thrall to the West, and spent their careers imitating, to dreadful effect, the styles of the great figures of the United States and France, now abused her for ‘parochialism’, while those other artists – and there were many of these – who floundered in


the dead sea of the country’s ancient heritage, producing twentiethcentury versions of the old miniature art [...], reviled her just as loudly for ‘losing touch with her roots’. (MLS 178) As Vasco Miranda’s invective against the English-educated élite and its imported political concepts demonstrates, secular nationalist discourse, because it is the creation of this class, is under suspicion for being inauthentic and the deplorable product of Macaulayesque mimicry. Both subalternist historiography and Hindu nationalism criticise secular nationalist discourse on the grounds that it is a hybrid form, constructed against and informed by imperialist discourse; Nehru, the principal representative of secular nationalism, is perceived as one of the prime examples of the ‘self-alienated victims of Macaulayism’, as the Hindu nationalist Balraj Madhok puts it (Madhok 1982: 115). In The Discovery of India Nehru gives evidence both of the alienation of the Indian educated élite but also of the élite’s rather unapologetic attitude towards this sense of alienation: ‘To some extent I came to her [India] via the West, and looked at her as a friendly westerner might have done. I was eager and anxious to change her outlook and appearance and give her the garb of modernity’ (Nehru 1989: 50). Comments like these fuel the accusations of critics of secular nationalism that Nehru and his class aimed at transforming India according to Western modern models which were utterly alien and detrimental to it. In contrast, Khilnani represents Nehru as exemplary in reconciling his Englishness and Indianness: Nehru too had that capacity [...] to find a cultural poise that allowed him to accept the presence of his Englishness as one more layer to his Indian self. There was, for Nehru, no return to a past purity, no possibility of historical cleansing. Colonialism was a humiliation, but it also carried the aroma of modernity. (Khilnani 1997: 171) Partha Chatterjee, however, is highly critical of this particular version of modernity as promoted by the secular nationalist élite, charging that it has the pungent aroma of the ‘fruits of Macaulay’s poison tree’ (Chatterjee 1985). India’s mimic modernity is vehemently interrogated and contested in subalternist historiography as the project of a tiny and alienated élitist minority. The Moor’s Last Sigh represents Aurora’s hybrid and eclectic artistic vision as a viable way of reconciling Indian and Western elements and does not portray Western influences or modernity as alien


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ingredients in India. The text does not preclude criticism of nationalist discourse or India’s modernity but it does not base this criticism on the fact of the élite’s hybrid status. The majority of the protagonists of both Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh belong to the suspect Indian middle class, and those hybrid characters are at the centre both of the novels’ sympathy and their criticism. These middle- class or élite characters received a hostile reception by Aparna Mahanta in terms which indicate the venom that can be directed at this group: Rushdie’s novels are for and about a tiny stratum of India’s [...] elite, inheritors of the British mantle, the deracinated, speaking English, thinking English, dreaming English, Indians terrified, horrified, revolted by Indians and India [...] cut off from the living, throbbing reality of deprivation and struggle. [...] With no traditions except those sneeringly thrown at them by the departing Sahibs [...] they are cut off from their roots, [...] exotics with aerial roots. They, like their creator, are trapped. (Mahanta 1984: 244–7) The Moor’s Last Sigh implicitly takes a stand against such an assessment by declaring Macaulay’s mission a failure at the end of the Indian part of the novel, before Moor leaves for Spain: To form a class, Macaulay wrote in the 1835 Minute on Education, ... of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. And why, pray? O, to be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern. How grateful such a class of persons should, and must, be! For in India the dialects were poor and rude, and a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature. [...] Thus, a class of ‘Macaulay’s Minutemen’ would hate the best of India. Vasco was wrong. We were not, had never been, that class. The best, and worst, were in us, and fought in us, as they fought in the land at large. In some of us, the worst triumphed; but still we could say – and say truthfully – that we had loved the best. (MLS 376) Moor’s class, however, has the means to leave the country when things become desperate. This option to leave does not in itself negate the legitimacy of the élite’s secular nationalist vision of the nation. But the élite’s claim to have an almost exclusive right to design a modern democratic India, on the grounds of their superior education and privileged

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access to knowledge, is persistently criticised in The Moor’s Last Sigh, as it was in Midnight’s Children.

The novelistic nation The representation of India’s diversity and inter-communal hybridity forms the topic of this section. Both nationalist and imperialist discourses emphasised India’s diversity, but whereas the former portrayed India’s multiplicity as an asset and resource, the latter portrayed it as something that had to be overcome. In resistance to the imperialist perception of India as a disorderly mélange of communities, nationalist discourse stressed India’s unity in diversity (Rajan 1999: 198–9). This strategy is exemplified by Nehru in The Discovery of India in his description of how he experienced India’s ‘essential unity’ while discovering village India in the 1930s in all its diversity: Though outwardly there was diversity and infinite variety among our people, everywhere there was that tremendous impress of oneness, which had held all of us together for ages past, whatever political fate or misfortune had befallen us. The unity of India was no longer merely an intellectual conception for me: it was an emotional experience which overpowered me. That essential unity had been so powerful that no political division, no disaster or catastrophe, had been able to overcome it. (Nehru 1989: 59) The Partition of the subcontinent in 1947 compromised the idea of an essential unity, and this partly accounts for the emphasis in nationalist discourse on the ‘unity’ of India after Independence rather than on its ‘diversity’ (Rajan 1999: 11). Rushdie’s novels, in contrast, emphasise India’s exuberant multiplicity and multi-vocality. In Midnight’s Children, attention is not explicitly drawn to Indian inter-communal hybridity but it is nevertheless emphatically embraced. It is represented by the midnight’s children, ‘the very essence of multiplicity’ (MC 229), and hybrid Saleem, who is allegedly the son of Hindu Vanita and Englishman Methwold, who is raised by middle-class Muslim parents and a Christian ayah and who later adopts the Communist Picture Singh, who is presumably Sikh, as his last father. The hybrid heritage or multi-parentage of India is portrayed as a fact and not as a problem; it is represented as something intrinsically Indian, which neither needs to be nurtured nor contained. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, however, the idea of a hybrid, diverse India is


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depicted as increasingly endangered by Hindu nationalism’s attempt to re-create India as a pure Hindu nation. This trend towards intolerance is indicated by the defiant stance with which Moor flaunts his mongrel status: ‘[I] was raised neither as a Catholic nor as Jew. I was both, and nothing: a Jewholic-anonymous, a cathjew nut, a stewpot, a mongrel cur. [...] Yessir: a real Bombay mix’ (MLS 104). This changed status of hybridity in The Moor’s Last Sigh, as compared with Midnight’s Children, is reflected in the itinerary of the narrators. Both narrators are freakish figures who are represented as the embodiment of the Indian nation precisely because they are such apparently odd, hybrid misfits.6 It signals India’s diminishing accommodative strength that while Saleem could imagine himself to be the centre of India and never left the subcontinent, Moor eventually feels forced to flee. Bakhtin’s concept of the novel as incorporating and organising the ‘social diversity of speech types’ or heteroglossia can provide a model for conceptualising The Moor’s Last Sigh’s vision of India’s inter- communal and cultural hybridity: The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized. The internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behaviour, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups [...] is the indispensable prerequisite for the novel as a genre. The novel orchestrates all its themes, the totality of the world of objects and ideas depicted and expressed in it, by means of the social diversity of speech types [raznoreˇcie] and by the differing individual voices that flourish under such conditions. Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia [raznoreˇcie] can enter the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogised). (Bakhtin 1981: 262–3) Heteroglossia is a reality in modern societies, and the novel orders and organises this diverse social dialogic reality into an artistic entity: ‘When heteroglossia enters the novel it becomes subject to artistic reworking. The social and historical voices populating language [...] are organized in the novel into a structured stylistic system that expresses the differentiated socio-ideological position of the author amid the heteroglossia

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of his epoch’ (Bakhtin 1981: 300). The resulting novelistic heteroglossia is therefore both a reflection of a phenomenon that exists outside the novel and a creation of the novel (Hirschkop 1999: 252). Whereas the social heteroglossia outside the novel could be perceived as being in danger of descending into a Babelic chaos, for Bakhtin novelistic style is able to arrange the diverse interacting social languages, which reflect a culture’s social diversity and heterogeneity, in order to form a representable image with ‘finished contours’: the prose writer witnesses [...] the unfolding of social heteroglossia surrounding the object, the Tower-of-Babel mixing of languages that goes on around any object; the dialectics of the object are interwoven with the social dialogue surrounding it. [...] The prose artist elevates the social heteroglossia surrounding objects into an image that has finished contours, an image completely shot through with dialogized overtones. (Bakhtin 1981: 277–9) What makes the application of Bakhtin’s concepts to an analysis of The Moor’s Last Sigh particularly apt and interesting is that whereas Bakhtin claims that all novels incorporate and represent dialogic heteroglossia by means of novelistic style, The Moor’s Last Sigh also explicitly discusses the conceptualisation of a dialogic hybridising social environment at the level of narrative. In the following, The Moor’s Last Sigh’s self- conscious probing and its representation of heteroglossia on the narrative rather than the stylistic level will be foregrounded. The analysis of The Moor’s Last Sigh’s conceptualisation of a plural and hybrid nation requires a nuanced model of intersubjectivity which Hirschkop’s interpretation of Bakhtin’s novelistic style can provide. Hirschkop argues that the significance of Bakhtin’s novelistic style lies in its combination of two dialogic intersubjectivities or ‘two different aspects of dialogism [...] which a modern novelistic writing ought to synthesize’ (Hirschkop 1999: 209). The first aspect of dialogism is the ‘symmetrical dialogue between languages or points of view’, which corresponds to the ‘dialogical relation of person to person’ and ‘reflects the perspective of a participant, in which the symmetry of dialogue is an essential constituent of its meaning’ (Hirschkop 1999: 79 & 209). The second aspect of dialogism is the asymmetrical dialogue between the author and social languages, which constitutes the ‘distinctive moment of novelistic dialogism’ (Hirschkop 1999: 79). The second dialogical relation ‘reflects the perspective of the contextualising observer, who makes language a worldly and historical object’ (Hirschkop 1999: 209).


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Bakhtin’s novelistic style is a model for an acute sense of social and historical contextualisation. Thus this novelistic perspective enables a consciousness or an intersubjectivity which is both the product of, and a potential means of coping with, our persistently conflictual, dialogic and hybridising modern reality. The Moor’s Last Sigh represents various intersubjective models which will be examined within this dialogic framework. Hirschkop asserts that a novelistic consciousness constitutes a prerequisite for a modern democratic culture by providing a model for a ‘democratic consciousness’ which is sensitive to its heteroglot environment and can make sense of its evolving complexity (Hirschkop 1999: 34). He defines his idea of a flourishing democratic culture against the reality of liberal democracy whose procedures were designed to be ‘uninspiring for the citizenry’ because liberal democracy strives ‘for a passive form of democratic consent, in which discouragement, fear, and resignation persuade the population that their best bet is to play by the rules’ (Hirschkop 1999: 34–5). A democratic culture has to complement formal democratic institutions in order to provide citizens with a meaningful experience of democracy: There are objective prerequisites to a democratic life – political institutions, legally enforceable rights, the technical means for public opinion to shape itself – but there are subjective ones, too: one needs subjects who can think and act “novelistically” for novels themselves to function as paradigms of the dialogical. But this entails thinking hard about the historical contribution modernity makes to democracy itself, for the subjects we will then be talking about will not be the abstract creatures which sometimes dwell in political philosophy but people who bring to their speech modern expectations and resources – irony, a sense of the historical character of social life, desire for a narratively coherent existence, belief in the unalterable fact of specialization and social differentiation, a secular and scientific world-view. (Hirschkop 1999: 56) This argument makes a democratic culture appear as a challenge for which we have to be equipped with an acute novelistic consciousness. It is primarily the authorial perspective which makes a conceptualisation of social heteroglossia possible and without which subjects cannot perceive their social environment ‘novelistically’. The question whether the intersubjective models represented in The Moor’s Last Sigh can be supportive of a democratic culture will be explored in the following.

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A recurrent image for social heteroglossia in The Moor’s Last Sigh is the urban crowd, in particular the dense masses of people in Bombay: ‘Bombay was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea. It was an ocean of stories; we were all its narrators, and everyone talked at once. [...] Did you not see the everyday live-and-let-live miracles thronging its overcrowded streets?’ (MLS 350–1). Rushdie’s concept of India’s social heteroglossia as envisaged in the image of the jostling Bombay crowd emphasises the positive aspects of intensive and contestational interaction, which echoes Bakhtin’s depiction of novelistic heteroglossia: the art of prose [reflecting heteroglossia] is close to a conception of languages as historically concrete and living things. The prose art presumes a deliberate feeling for the historical and social concreteness of living discourse, as well as its relativity, a feeling for its participation in historical becoming and in social struggle; it deals with discourse that is still warm from that struggle and hostility, as yet unresolved and still fraught with hostile intentions and accents; prose art finds discourse in this state and subjects it to the dynamic unity of its own style. (Bakhtin 1981: 331) When the novel’s characters are depicted as creating their own life narratives, they do so dialogically by interweaving the stories of others which crowd around theirs since this great cosmopolis of ours was and is the Central Junction of all such tamashas, and the hottest tales, the juiciest-bitchiest yarns, the most garish and lurid not-penny-but-paisa-dreadfuls, are the ones walking our streets. In Bombay you lived crushed in this crazy crowd, you are deafened by its blaring horns of plenty, and – like the figures of family members in Aurora’s Cabral Island mural – your own story has to shove its way through the throngs. (MLS 128) Aurora represents an authorial perspective as her paintings visualise the crowded multitude of social heteroglossia which undergoes a ‘novelistic’ reworking in her art. She ‘authors’ representations of the nation in which various semi-legendary and half-invented histories are fused with an interpretation of India’s present and a utopian vision of its future. It is an extravagant and eccentric envisaging of a hybrid India through the image of medieval Moorish Spain and its ‘fabulous multiple culture of ancient al-Andalus’ (MLS 398). By the time Aurora uses this Spanish-Moorish historical material, it is already


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represented as densely overlaid with other characters’ interpretation of the story of Boabdil, the last Muslim king of Spain. First, her husband Abraham Zogoybi traces his illegitimate descent from Boabdil; framed by Abraham’s family legend, Boabdil’s story is briefly summarised. The last king of the Muslim kingdom of Granada is introduced as the ‘last prince of al-Andalus; [...] Abu Abdallah, last of the Nasrids, known as “Boabdil” ’ (MLS 79). Only the last moments of his kingship in 1492 are narrated and his lack of heroism is emphasised: ‘the Sultan Boabdil of Granada had surrendered the keys to the fortress-palace of the Alhambra, last and greatest of all the Moors’ fortifications, to the all-conquering Catholic Kings Fernando and Isabella, giving up his principality without so much as a battle’ (MLS 79–80). The protagonists of this narrative comprise only Boabdil and his mother, Ayxa, who is portrayed as stern and unforgiving; when turning around to the Alhambra one last time, Boabdil sighed and wept, whereupon his mother, the terrifying Ayxa the Virtuous, sneered at his grief. Having been forced to genuflect before an omnipotent queen, Boabdil was now obliged to suffer a further humiliation at the hands of an impotent (but formidable) dowager. Well may you weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man, she taunted him: meaning of course the opposite. (MLS 80) This Boabdil bears a close resemblance to Washington Irving’s Boabdil in A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1850), in which Boabdil is portrayed as a tragic figure. Irving wanted his work on Boabdil to stand up to historiographical criteria while embellishing the historical facts with ‘imagination’ (Irving quoted from Harbert 1988: xxii). Irving’s intention was to ‘vindicate the memory of the unlucky Boabdil’ and to rescue him from what he perceived as baseless slander of those who depicted Boabdil as treacherous (Irving, The Alhambra 1983: 81). He portrayed Boabdil as the unlucky victim of family feuds and inconstant subjects. In contrast to this image, the historian Harvey describes Boabdil as the traitor of the people of Granada by becoming the ‘puppet’ of Ferdinand (Harvey 1990: 291–323). The Boabdil in The Moor’s Last Sigh is not such a despicable figure but a pitiable one like that of Irving. But his tragic status is undercut from the beginning by giving his mocking mother Ayxa such a prominent role. Spanish history in The Moor’s Last Sigh mainly serves the function of providing the characters with material for creating their own useful histories. Abraham’s questionable ‘archival’ proof of his bastard descent from Boabdil is ‘a small


book made up of handwritten parchment pages’ in Spanish, in which an anonymous writer claims to have been Boabdil’s mistress who left for India pregnant with a son by Boabdil (MLS 79). As ultimate proof of this royal descent, Abraham refers to his surname, Zogoiby, which resembles the nickname of Boabdil, ‘El-zogoybi’, meaning the ‘Misfortunate’ (MLS 83). This legend is a vital ingredient in Abraham’s identity, and he feels entitled to wear ‘the look of a king in exile’ in his youth (MLS 81). The second character to identify with Boabdil is Vasco Miranda. After Vasco’s portrait of Aurora is rejected by Abraham, he paints another picture over the unwanted one in which he mischievously casts himself in the role of the last Moorish king, giving it the title ‘The Moor’s Last Sigh’ (MLS 160). With this strategy, Vasco virtually usurps Abraham’s identity-constituting family background. Aurora’s concept of a creatively heteroglot and inspiringly hybrid India with Moorish traits is juxtaposed to Abraham’s and Vasco Miranda’s narrow visions and their self-serving versions of the Boabdil story. In her paintings the unifying element of the utopian nation is constituted by the figure of her son, whom she models on the last Andalusian Muslim king. She creates her own Boabdil by interweaving her version of her son’s biography with her idea of India, which is merged with details of medieval Granada before its fall. In the early 1970s Aurora ‘began to explore the idea of placing a re-imagining of the old Boabdil story – “not Authorised Version but Aurorised Version,” as she told me – in a local setting, with me playing a sort of Bombay remix of the last of the Nasrids’ (MLS 225). She paints the Alhambra or a hybrid ‘not-quiteAlhambra’ on Malabar Hill in Bombay blending it with ‘elements of India’s own red forts, the Mughal palace-fortresses in Delhi and Agra’ (MLS 226). It is a palimpsest world with an ambiguous border: ‘ “Call it Mooristan,” Aurora told me. [...] Places where 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’ (MLS 226). By refracting Indian history with the history of Moorish Spain, Aurora creates a hybrid image of the nation which transcends the history of the Indian nation by being part of a transnational dialogue with another image of a hybridised culture. This strategy draws on the typical image of Moorish Spain as a successful and creative synthesis between several communities since medieval Andalusian culture is often portrayed as creating and in many ways maintaining a unique symbiosis between Arab aristocrats, Muslim Arab or Berber soldiers and settlers, a


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Christian majority in many places except the main cities, and a sizeable and constantly growing Jewish minority. [...] the paradox of Nasrid Andalusia lies in the fact that a decadent, indeed moribund political and military power coincided with a strikingly rich and original culture. (Grabar 1978: 31 & 37) Whether Nasrid culture was actually hybrid and original, however, is questioned by the historian Harvey.7 But Aurora’s portrayal of Moorish history is based on the image of a hybrid culture. Aurora paints a ‘golden age’ of inter-communal harmony and carnivalesque exuberance, but ironically Hindus do not seem to be invited to the ball: In a way these were polemical pictures, in a way they were an attempt to create a romantic myth of the plural, hybrid nation; she was using Arab Spain to re-imagine India, and this land-sea-scape in which the land could be fluid and the sea stone-dry was her metaphor – idealised? sentimental? probably – of the present, and the future, that she hoped would evolve. So, yes, there was a didacticism here, but [...] it was easy not to feel preached at, to revel in the carnival without listening to the barker, to dance to the music without caring for the message in the song. [...] Aurora Zogoiby was seeking to paint a golden age. Jews, Christians, Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhist, Jains crowded into her paint-Boabdil’s fancy-dress balls, and the Sultan was represented less and less naturalistically, appearing more and more often as a masked, particoloured harlequin, a patchwork quilt of a man; or, as his old skin dropped from him chrysalis-fashion, standing revealed as a glorious butterfly, whose wings were a miraculous composite of all the colours in the world. (MLS 227) This vision of the Indian nation is persistently more than a nationalist vision as borders are ambiguous and the figure of Boabdil stands for an inclusive, transcending, hybridising ideal. It incorporates elements of an imagined past as Boabdil’s Al-Andalus was not quite an ideal of inter-communal hybridity but might nevertheless seem rather idyllic compared to the period after the reconquista when Muslims and Jews had to choose between conversion and expulsion. Aurora’s vision is also directed towards the future, which ironically includes the foreshadowing of its own failure to unfold gloriously, since Boabdil’s story will have to end in sadness. Despite the transnational, cosmopolitan aspect of Aurora’s imagery, her ideal of a hybrid India is predominantly conceived in dialogue with

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nationalist historiography’s version of Indian history as communal synthesis and Nehru’s vision of a composite nation. In using the palimpsest metaphor, Aurora echoes Nehru who famously perceived India as a palimpsest in his discovery of village India: India with all her infinite charm and variety began to grow upon me more and more, and yet the more I saw of her, the more I realized how very difficult it was for me or for anyone else to grasp the idea she had embodied. It was not her wide spaces that eluded me, or even her diversity, but some depth of soul which I could not fathom, though I had occasional and tantalizing glimpses of it. She was like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously. (Nehru 1989: 58–9) Whereas Nehru’s portrayal of India as a palimpsest is based on a representation of mysterious unfathomable depth, the metaphor is used rather differently in Aurora’s ‘palimpsest-art’ as she depicts the intermingling of worlds and ideas which results in ambiguity, where it is impossible to decide which world overlaps the other (MLS 226). In contrast to Nehru, she focuses on the hybridising borderline and is not interested in a hidden essence: ‘The water’s edge, the dividing line between two worlds, became in many of these pictures the main focus of her concern. [...] But was it a waterworld being painted over the world of air, or vice versa?’ (MLS 226). The description of Aurora’s art bears a striking resemblance to Bakhtin’s valorisation of the ‘varied play with the boundaries of speech types, languages and belief systems’ in novelistic style which entails ‘deliberately flexible and ambiguous’ boundaries between ‘another’s speech’ and ‘authorial speech’ (Bakhtin 1981: 308). In contrast to Aurora’s dialogic art, Nehru’s championing of India’s ‘passion for synthesis’ may appear ‘monologic’ in its stress on an essentialised unifying impulse (Nehru 1989: 145). Nehru is frequently criticised for displaying a simplistic conception of India’s unity in diversity, in which ‘India becomes an accommodating ideal, one which seamlessly binds together the pre-colonial past with the moment of independence’ by claiming ‘a spurious ideological unity among all citizens, irrespective of caste, religion, sex, wealth or education’ (Singh 1996: 154 & 157). Singh argues that Nehru promoted a unity based on ‘secular modernism’ in a zealous civilising mission reminiscent of the British colonial project and with insensitivity towards India’s actual, complex diversity (Singh 1996: 158). Whereas Nehru emphasises


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the unity in India’s diversity, Aurora’s vision does not point to a unifying element apart from Boabdil-Moor, who embodies the hybrid principle and undergoes metamorphosis without disintegrating. Fragmentation, which was to be countered by emphasising unity in nationalist discourse, is not perceived as a problem at this stage of Aurora’s paintings of the nation. Thus Aurora’s myth of India is dialogically juxtaposed with, transcends and questions Nehruvian nationalist discourse. It is significant that the text avoids using words associated with nationalist discourse such as ‘unity in diversity’, ‘synthesis’ and ‘composite culture’. Aurora is represented as keeping a certain distance from the Nehruvian nationalist concept and creating a more heteroglot model with which to conceptualise India’s multiplicity. This avoidance of nationalist rhetoric is conspicuous, especially as Aurora’s idea of India cannot avoid being at least implicitly in dialogue with nationalist discourse. Singh suggests that The Moor’s Last Sigh manages to resist nationalist models and nationalist rhetoric by ‘represent[ing] the post-colonial Indian nation as unrepresentable’ (Singh 1996: 174). But Singh’s position evades the actual problem by not acknowledging the intense struggle of the novel with Nehruvian discourse. Despite the differences of conceptualising the plural nation, Aurora’s image of India is in many ways a reworking of the Nehruvian vision which seeks to enhance its dialogic features and to radicalise them. The Moor’s Last Sigh’s attitude towards the Nehruvian nation is not, after all, primarily antagonistic since Aurora and her parents are supporters of Nehru and Aurora’s ‘talisman’ for her hybrid vision, Moor, may even have been fathered by Nehru (MLS 174). The novel’s stance towards Nehru’s nationalist vision and practice is closer to Sunil Khilnani’s interpretation of them in The Idea of India (1997), in which he argues against the widespread contemporary criticism that Nehru’s vision of India’s unity in diversity is tainted by monologism. In fact, Khilnani’s depiction of Nehru’s perception of India portrays Nehru as exemplary in his dialogic approach. He asserts that after Independence ‘Nehru’s idea of Indianness emerged through improvised responses to constrained circumstances: its strength was not its ideological intensity, but its ability to steer towards an Indianness seen as layered, adjustable, imagined, not as fixed property’ (Khilnani 1997: 167). Khilnani celebrates Nehru’s idiosyncratic and provisional approach to defining Indianness as one of his greatest achievements: Nehru saw cultures as overlapping forms of activity that had commerce with one another, mutually altering and reshaping each

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other. India was a society neither of liberal individuals nor of exclusive communities or nationalities, but of interconnected differences. That insight [...] guided his practice after 1947. Given the environment in which he had to act, it is particularly striking that he could maintain this distinctive conception. [...] There were few models, from either European or any other history, that could be used to help focus India’s assorted diversities into a political structure founded upon a democratic principle. This had to be invented through practice. [...] No attempt was made to impose a single or uniform ‘Indian’ identity upon the new nation. (Khilnani 1997: 172–3) According to Khilnani’s characterisation of Nehru’s idea of India, it appears Bakhtinian in its welcoming of open-ended heteroglot ‘historical becoming’, like Aurora’s vision of a hybrid carnivalesque nation. They appear to share a perspective which allows for the envisaging of a continuous narrative for the nation capable of making sense of the surrounding social heteroglossia. These ideas of India could be the ideal prerequisite for encouraging and supporting democratic intersubjectivity and a democratic culture. Khilnani’s praise for the accommodating and democratic nature of Nehru’s conception of India and Indianness, however, fails to problematise its élitist aspects. Nehru’s vision was hardly dialogic in the sense that it had evolved from listening to the people; rather he lectured them (Chatterjee 1998c: 146–9). This again raises the question whether the secular élite has the legitimacy to try and engineer a democratic culture as it sees fit. This is a problematic which also affects Aurora’s vision of India from her cosmopolitan, transnational vantage-point, one removed from that of ‘ordinary’ Indians. It is in its élitist, cosmopolitan conception that Aurora and Nehru’s ideas of India resemble each other so closely that their differences seem insignificant. And it is this Nehruvian aspect of Aurora’s concept of the hybrid nation which is parodied by the text; by depicting Aurora’s vision as ‘romantic’, ‘idealised’ and ‘sentimental’, the text gently mocks it and creates doubts about the feasibility of Aurora’s ‘myth of the plural, hybrid nation’ (MLS 227). Both Nehru’s and Aurora’s concepts of India problematically resemble each other by relying on the ‘didacticism’ of privileged individuals and on their capacity to will this ideal India into being by the sheer persuasive force of their vision (MLS 227). The text’s image of a hybrid India is obviously incompatible with Hindu nationalist discourse which advocates a purification of the Hindu nation and warns that the Nehruvian rhetoric of a ‘composite culture can prove to be suicidal’ (Madhok 1982: 29). But Hindu nationalism


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cannot entirely deny the composite nature of India since it has proven so difficult to define clearly what it is that constitutes Hinduness or Hindutva. The main Hindu nationalist strategy of resolving the problem of defining the ‘unity in diversity’ of the Hindu nation is to proceed instead by identifying those who do not belong, namely the minorities, especially Muslims. Hindu nationalists try to create a ‘collective Hindu subjectivity’ by ‘the constant drawing of the external boundaries of the “Hindu-community-becoming-nation” ’ (Hansen 1999: 177). In The Moor’s Last Sigh Fielding gives voice to the Hindu nationalist attempt to represent this construction of a Hindu nation as the recovering of an ancient ‘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. The true nation is what we must reclaim from underneath the layers of alien empires” ’ (MLS 299). According to this logic, it is possible to get through to the authentic core of Indianness by erasing layers of alien history, which entails the disavowal of history and its substitution by the eternal epic nation. The populist rhetoric of Hindu nationalism promotes what Hirschkop refers to as ‘a democracy with an epic culture’: A democracy without novelistic culture, or, to be exact, a democracy with an epic culture, is determined to give ‘the people’ a narrative without giving them, in Bakhtin’s sense, a history. Particularly in its nationalistic variant, populism is ready to supply the meaningful national narrative which liberalism deems below itself. But there is no risk in populism, no risk and no future, because populist citizens know themselves already, and know that there is nothing more to know about themselves. (Hirschkop 1999: 296–7) Hindu nationalist populism does not set the challenge of a ‘novelistic culture’ as a task and constitutes an intersubjective model which The Moor’s Last Sigh rejects. The Emergency is the first profound crisis for Aurora’s concept of the hybrid nation as Hindu nationalist discourse gains legitimacy through it. Aurora finds herself described as ‘that Christian female married to a Jew’ (MLS 234). By assigning her the status of belonging to a minor minority, Hindu nationalists cast doubt on Aurora’s legitimacy to envisage artistically the nation, and invalidate her vision and her existence. Aurora paints a picture with a sucking deadly fissure which replaces the former ‘permeable frontier’ between the land and the sea (MLS 235). She paints the annihilation of her ideal of a hybrid world full of

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possibilities as the Emergency made her ‘India of dreams’ implausible and unconvincing (MLS 236). Since the Emergency is also usually perceived as a hollowing out of the Nehruvian idea of India with its ideals of secularism and democracy, this is another instance of the proximity of the visions of India of Aurora and Nehru, for both are in permanent decline after the Emergency. The Emergency results in Aurora’s withdrawal from public affairs, which leads to her increasing occupation with personal, private topics in her art rather than an engagement with the heteroglot world beneath her hill-top mansion. Aurora’s acuteness of vision is drawn into question as she deals less and less with political matters but is instead obsessed with ‘maternal jealousy’ in her Moor paintings (MLS 247). When Moor tries to find excuses not to pose in the nude for his mother, she guesses that it was Uma Sarasvati’s doing and has a jealous fit and banishes him from her studio for good, painting him naked nevertheless and introducing the Chimène figure. The title of the picture is ‘Mother-Naked Moor Watches Chimène’s Arrival’ and it shows Moor with Aurora as Ayxa holding up a mirror to him but he looks to ‘a beautiful young woman – Uma, naturally, Uma fictionalised, Hispanicised, as this “Chimène”, Uma incorporating aspects of Sophia Loren in El Cid, pinched from the story of Rodrigo de Vivar and introduced without explanation into the hybrid universe of the Moor’ (MLS 247). Chimène or Ximena is a historical figure whose treatment in The Moor’s Last Sigh resembles that of Boabdil as her story is also idiosyncratically appropriated by the novel’s characters. Belle, Aurora’s mother, whose full name is Isabella Ximena da Gama, is the first character associated with Ximena, the wife of El Cid, the legendary hero of the reconquista.8 The historical Ximena existed but we know very little about her from historical sources and in the myth of El Cid she played a subordinate role. In the film, El Cid (1961), which starred Sophia Loren and Charlton Heston, the Ximena character moved into the foreground as a heroically suffering wife who enables her husband to fulfil his last wish to ride into battle as a corpse, tied to his horse, in order to give courage to his men and instil fear into the hearts of his enemies (Rodiek 1990: 306–17). It is to that scene that The Moor’s Last Sigh refers when dying Belle wants to be remembered as an El-Cid-like character protecting her family after her death as she mistrusts her relatives: ‘Then tie my body to a bloody rickshaw or whatever damn mode of transport you can find, camel-cart donkey-cart bullock-cart bike, but for godsake not a bloody elephant; okay? Because the enemy is close and in this sad story Ximena is the Cid’ (MLS 52). This reference to Ximena is the last which refers to her as El Cid’s wife. In Aurora’s reworking


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the Chimène character plays the lover of Boabdil, which constitutes a mischievous coupling of the wife of the Spanish national hero with the last Moorish king. Aurora’s incorporation of the Uma-Chimène figure indicates her increasing loss of faith in her powers to persuade the world to develop according to her vision, and she partly admits defeat as other visions rival hers and seem to be victorious: Ever since Isabella Ximena da Gama on her deathbed had united in her own person the figures of the Cid Campeador and his Chimène, her daughter Aurora who had picked up Belle’s fallen torch had seen herself, too, as hero and heroine combined. That she should now make this separation – that the painted Moor should be given the Charlton Heston rôle and a woman with Uma’s face should be baptised with a Frenchified version of my grandmother’s middle name – was almost an admission of defeat, an intimation of mortality. (MLS 247) Aurora paints pictures as a narrative told through the story of Boabdil’s loss of his kingdom, in which she reveals her jealousy and her spying on her son. Moor-Boabdil fails to remain a unifying element and is in danger of being ripped in half: The Moor was an abstract figure now, a pattern of black and white diamonds covering him from head to foot. The mother, Ayxa, was black; and the lover, Chimène, was brilliant white. Many of these pictures were love-scenes. [...] Ayxa the mother was always somewhere in these pictures, behind a curtain, stooped at a keyhole, flying up to the windows of the lovers’ eyries. The black-and-white Moor turned towards his white love and away from his black dam; yet both were a part of him. [...] He was the living proof of the possibility of the union of opposites. But Ayxa the Black pulled one way, and Chimène the White, the other. They began to tear him in half. (MLS 259) Like Irving’s Boabdil, Aurora’s Moor is portrayed as a victim rather than a traitor. Instead, Aurora in her jealousy casts Chimène in the role of traitress. In her pictures a female figure treacherously hands the key to the Alhambra to the besieging army, and pretends to be black Ayxa but is later revealed as white Chimène. Aurora’s interpretation loses credibility as the quote above appears to testify to her inability to let Moor emancipate himself from her and her dominant vision of him. The blunt black and white imagery casts doubt on her

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sense of vision, even though Uma turns out to be a destructive force in the novel. Uma Sarasvati represents a failed intersubjective perspective; she is unable to sustain a coherent authorial perspective and is trapped in a series of disconnected dialogical encounters. She has a capacity for apparently motive-less evil as her manipulative lies destroy lives without any reason or gain. In contrast to Aurora’s depiction of Uma, however, she is not the unified polar opposite of Aurora but an explicitly hybrid and fluid character who invents a new life-story for every person she meets: ‘Her ability to take on radically different personae in the company of different people – to become what she guessed a given man or woman (but usually man) would find most appealing – was exceptional; but this was a talent for acting that had been pushed to the point of insanity, and beyond’ (MLS 265–6). She demonstrates how the lack of an ethical dimension can turn a flawed dialogical perspective into a pathological condition. Hirschkop argues that a novelistic perspective enables us to enter ‘into a new relationship with language’ which he calls ‘the “ethical” dimension of language’, which reorders ‘our sense of what it means to participate in it’ (Hirschkop 1999: 86). It makes us acutely aware of the essential importance of narrative and our irreducibly ‘intersubjective situation: our neediness and ultimate vulnerability, the role of the future, and the recognition of others in determining the meaning of our actions, our need and desire for narrative coherence and justification in our actions’ (Hirschkop 1999: 86). Uma Sarasvati is the character in The Moor’s Last Sigh who illustrates the failure to ‘comprehend one’s life intersubjectively [which] means to see one’s life both from within and from beyond it’ (Hirschkop 1999: 87). Uma’s condition is discussed by Moor as if it were an invalidation of Aurora’s vision of hybrid multiplicity. He suggests that this is a case of hybridity on the individual plane which has gone terribly wrong: It did not fail to occur to me – indeed, for a time it occupied most of my waking thoughts – that what had happened was, in a way, a defeat for the pluralist philosophy on which we had all been raised. For in the matter of Uma Sarasvati it had been the pluralist Uma, with her multiple selves, her highly inventive commitment to the infinite malleability of the real, her modernistically provisional sense of truth, who had turned out to be the bad egg; and Aurora had fried her – Aurora, that lifelong advocate of the many against the one, had with Minto’s help discovered some fundamental verities, and had therefore been in the right. The story of my love-life thus became


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a bitter parable, [...] for in it the polarity between good and evil was reversed. (MLS 272) The central flaw in Uma appears to be her inability to turn her past into a meaningful continuous narrative as she persistently invents herself entirely anew. Her fractured and chaotic sense of a historical intersubjectivity results in the lack of any ethical foundation in which to anchor responsible behaviour.9 In The Moor’s Last Sigh a modern provisional hybrid identity is represented as fraught with dangers and problems, which is also exemplified by Vasco Miranda who is, like Uma, a hybrid gone wrong: ‘It seemed that in the pursuit of his chosen future he had shed all affiliation of blood and place, a decision which implied a certain ruthlessness, and hinted, too, at instability. He was his own invention, and it should have occurred to Aurora [...] that the invention might not work, that in the end it might fall apart’ (MLS 157). Rather than individual failures, however, Uma and Vasco’s predicament might be a symptom of a deeper problem as it can be read as indicating a cultural crisis since this malignant form of hybrid instability constitutes a minor epidemic in The Moor’s Last Sigh. A third character badly affected by it is Adam Braganza, Saleem Sinai’s son, who becomes Moor’s detested adopted brother: ‘Something about Adam had been striking me as déjà vu, and now I saw what it was. His refusal to talk about his past, the fluidity of his changes of stride as he tried to bewitch and woo, the cold calculation of his moves [...] The Thing had returned’ (MLS 354). The modernity of this type of identity and its malleability could predestine this provisional sense of identity as an ideal prerequisite for a novelistic consciousness, enabling it to keep up with historical becoming: it is the essence of modern social identities that they are self-consciously human artefacts [...]. Socio-ideological languages – the true heroes of the novel – float on the surface of social life, and can therefore move with the tide of history and participate in its making in a way that older, traditional identities can not. (Hirschkop 1999: 91) The failure of the three characters’ identities to cohere could, therefore, be attributed to the specific culture to which they belong: according to Bakhtin, the unity and integrity of the individual depends on the ultimate unity of the historical culture in which he or she lives; if the continuous intersubjectivity which constitutes

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human culture does not, in the end, add up, or does not aim to add up, then individual lives are left stranded. (Hirschkop 1999: 91) A society’s ‘continuous intersubjectivity’ constitutes a stabilising frame for provisional identities, and presupposes a coherent historical narrative for oneself and for the communities of which one perceives oneself to be part. The Moor’s Last Sigh suggests that a citizen needs a coherent narrative, which is not beyond questioning and which is also provisional, as Aurora’s malleable Palimpstine indicates, but which does not evade the aim to ‘add up’. The novel implicitly stresses the importance of an authorial perspective with which to make sense of dialogical encounters by confronting us with negative, or failed, examples of dialogism. The Moor’s Last Sigh presents yet another type of problematic intersubjectivity which seeks to escape the consequences that historical being entails. At first this intersubjectivity seems to take the form of a utopian hybrid humanity. Three people (who are unhappy in their skins) have the dream of shedding their skin in order to be freed from the burden of historical identity and to become something universal and bodiless: Carmen da Gama (‘flay me flay my skin from my body whole entire and let me start again let me be of no race no name no sex’, MLS 47), Oliver D’Aeth (‘We will never gain our humanity until we lose our skins’, MLS 95), and Moor. The dream stands for the desire to transcend confining narratives of identity and nation: When I was young I used to dream [...] of peeling off my skin plantainfashion, of going forth naked into the world, like an anatomy illustration from Encyclopaedia Britannica, all ganglions, ligaments, nervous pathways and veins, set free from the otherwise inescapable jails of colour, race and clan. (MLS 136) It is a dream of an ultimate and conflict-free unity of humankind. But this dream eventually constitutes an evasion of the historical nature of our being, of which novelistic consciousness makes us aware: ‘Bakhtin regards living in history, however, not as the fate of humanity but as a challenge to it, a challenge which those who indulge themselves in “poetic” and monological culture have refused to take up’ (Hirschkop 1999: 103–4). By transcending history and the body, one can lose more than one gains as Moor painfully experiences in prison: ‘As roaches crawled and mosquitoes stung, so I felt that my skin was indeed coming away from my body, as I had dreamed so long ago that it would.


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But in this version of the dream, my peeling skin took with it all elements of my personality. I was becoming nobody, nothing’ (MLS 288). According to Hirschkop, Bakhtin implies that there is a form of ‘ethical self-transcendence’, which entails a deep involvement with one’s historical becoming and not an escape from it; for Bakhtin the novel epitomises ‘the struggle for a language which gives the subject an entrance into history, an opportunity to transcend itself by means of language’ (Hirschkop 1999: 105). This form of self-transcendence is not the clean, conflict-free process Moor envisages but implies instead the need to face up to the fact that ‘[e]thical reality as the primary “actual” reality [is] embodied for us moderns in social struggle and historical becoming’ (Hirschkop 1999: 104). A novelistic perspective ‘plunges us into the densely knit intersubjectivity of a functioning social world, where obligations, goals, conscience, and norms of response provide the texture of ethical life’ but simultaneously ‘ascends to a disinterested apprehension of and engagement with the task of historical redemption’ (Hirschkop 1999: 104). When Moor claims he ‘must peel off history, the prison of the past’, he seeks for redemption in an a-historical realm (MLS 136). His misguided dream of bodilessness seeks to evade the messiness of actual conflictual heteroglossia, which in The Moor’s Last Sigh reeks of crowded public squares and slums. The text repeatedly asserts that we cannot afford to avoid our historical being if we want to cope in a modern heteroglot world and that we cannot escape our vulnerable bodies if we want to remain ethical subjects. After various representations of negative or flawed intersubjectivity, The Moor’s Last Sigh offers the concept of self-transcendence through love. At his darkest hour in prison Moor portrays love as a healing image of hybridity. The redeeming act of falling in love is compared to embracing hybridity, as an act of daring to give up one’s self-sufficiency, with risks attached: I wanted to cling to the image of love as the blending of spirits, as mélange, as the triumph of the impure, mongrel, conjoining best of us over what there is in us of the solitary, the isolated, the austere, the dogmatic, the pure; of love as democracy, as the victory of the no-man-is-an-island, two’s-company Many over the clean, mean, apartheiding Ones. I tried to see lovelessness as arrogance, for who but the loveless could believe themselves complete, all-seeing, allwise? To love is to lose omnipotence and omniscience. Ignorantly is how we all fall in love; for it is a kind of fall. Closing your eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft;

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but still, I told myself, still, without that leap nobody comes to life. (MLS 289) When Moor compares love to democracy, he acknowledges the need for an intersubjectivity based on intimately dialogic relationships. The text promotes an embracing of our dependence on others, which is a prerequisite for a democratic culture. Beside Aurora’s hybrid vision of the nation, love is the only other explicitly positive concept of intersubjectivity in The Moor’s Last Sigh. But like Aurora’s idea of a hybrid India, the concept of love is severely questioned by the novel and more often betrayed than not. The novel shows only glimpses of the working of its ideal of hybridity and emphasises the risks and dangers involved. As mentioned earlier, Aurora’s withdrawal from political affairs into the private realm resulted in the deterioration of her artistic vision as she became obsessed about Moor’s relationship with Uma. After Uma’s death and Moor’s banishment from Elephanta and his subsequent career as Fielding’s thug, Aurora’s paintings use the figure of Boabdil-Moor again to narrate the fate of the nation. Hybrid India as a utopia is now relentlessly questioned by Aurora in her final paintings, in which Moor has moved from his palace into the gutter. Moor no longer stands for an ideal of a hybrid nation and represents instead Aurora’s bleak image of contemporary India which is embodied by a collage of rubbish: in her pieces it was the people themselves who were made of rubbish, who were collages composed of what the metropolis did not value. [... T]he Moor-figure appeared to lose, in these last pictures, his previous metaphorical rôle as a unifier of opposites, a standard-bearer of pluralism, ceasing to stand as a symbol – however approximate – of the new nation, and being transformed, instead, into a semi-allegorical figure of decay. Aurora had apparently decided that the ideas of impurity, cultural admixture and mélange which had been, for most of her creative life, the closest things she had found to a notion of the Good, were in fact capable of distortion. (MLS 301–3) Aurora’s ideal of hybridity is persistently interrogated and tested in the novel. It is increasingly shorn of its romantic, idealist connotations and mired in the grim reality of the crowded and undignified life in the slums. But Aurora’s final dark images of contemporary India are in turn questioned by the text as her élitist bias is explicitly criticised by Moor: ‘What she missed in herself was the snobbery that her contemptuous rage revealed, her fear of the invisible city, the Malabar-ness of her. [...] she was


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just another grande dame on the Hill, sipping tea and looking with distaste upon the poor man at her gate’ (MLS 304). Here Aurora represents not only the élite’s aversion to the poor but its reaction of distaste for the new democratic forces in India, one of which is, of course, the Shiv Sena with its following among the slum-dwellers of Bombay. Her last paintings indicate the élite’s isolation from the heteroglot reality surrounding it. Partha Chatterjee describes the shift in democratic participation in India since Independence which appears increasingly to represent the social heteroglot crowd: Fifty years ago, when a new structure of electoral democracy was created in this country, the actual proportion of the country’s population which effectively participated in it was extremely small. Today, there are numerous groups that are able to make their demands heard in the democratic arena: groups which, even twenty years ago, would have gone entirely unnoticed. (Chatterjee 1997: 225) Chatterjee delineates the conflict between ‘the growing demands of democratic politics’ and the old élites who ‘attempt, in the name of institutional modernization, to erect fortifications against democracy’ (Chatterjee 1997: 226). He argues that there ‘is much reason to be concerned about the way in which anti-democratic attitudes have slowly and almost imperceptibly seeped into the country’s most articulate, conscious and well-educated circles’ (Chatterjee 1997: 226). Applied to Aurora, this amounts to a devastating evaluation of her vision. Even though her misgivings about the ascendancy of Hindu nationalist forces are justified, her disgusted representation of the slum-dwellers seems to amount to a betrayal of her former vision of a hybrid, carnivalesque nation. But far from declaring Aurora’s former dream of a hybrid India an irrelevance, the text doggedly holds on to her utopian vision while buffeting it from all sides. Aurora’s former notion of an ‘India of dreams’ oddly survives the ending of the novel which leaves her paintings and Bombay destroyed and her vision ostensibly annihilated. A pervasive sense of a utopian potential of India as a hybrid nation endures even though there seems to be no good reason why this should be the case. This effect is partly achieved because the catastrophic developments in Bombay at the end of the Indian part of the novel seem to suggest that there is no good alternative to Aurora’s dream. The text creates a longing for Aurora’s utopia which is underscored by Moor’s desperate search for Vasco Miranda’s painting of Aurora, which turns into a

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quest leading to Benengeli. One of the functions of the concluding part of the novel, which is set in a surreal Spain, is to provide a space for Moor’s mourning of what Aurora’s vision of a hybrid India represented. Even though what Moor eventually finds is in many ways the antithesis of Aurora’s vision, this only heightens the grieving for lost possibilities. Benengeli is named after the fictional Moorish chronicler of yet another Spanish legend, Don Quixote, namely Sidi Hamét Benengeli. The village Benengeli stands for a postmodern globalised and homogenised world of simulacra, the antithesis of the hybridity conjured up by Aurora. Benengeli is not a utopia but a nightmare: the air of mystery surrounding the place was in fact an atmosphere of unknowing; what seemed like an enigma was in fact a void. These uprooted drifters had become, by their own choice, human automata. They could simulate human life, but were no longer able to live it. (MLS 402–3) In Benengeli, Moor ends up as Vasco Miranda’s prisoner in a new version of the Alhambra, which is Vasco’s distorted reconstruction of Aurora’s paintings. One of the reasons why the hybrid idea of India still inspires hope is because it is juxtaposed with the reification of a non-dialogic, postmodern Benengeli, an example of an encounter of diverse cultures which results in their coexistence only in autonomous and sterile ways, a vision which is singularly uninspiring. The ‘Spanish’ part of the novel also functions as a counterpoint to the puzzling sense of optimism-against-all-odds which pervades the final pages of the Indian section in which Macaulay’s mission is interpreted as a failure and Nadia Wadia hearkens to the future: ‘The city will survive. [...] Better days will come. Now I am saying it every day. Nadia Wadia, the future beckons. Hearken to its call’ (MLS 377). The fact that the ‘beauty queen’ and ‘Miss India 1987’ comes to personify India’s resilience after the bomb carnage is the culmination of a series of positive images associated with Nadia Wadia (MLS 311). Her Miss World victory is depicted as transforming the ‘free-spirited Parsi’ into ‘an emblem of the nation, like Lady Liberty or the Marianne, she became the repository of our pride and self-belief’ (MLS 312–14). Mainduck wanted to incorporate her as a ‘trophy’ into his Hindu nationalist movement but she rejected him: ‘Nadia Wadia’s refusal to be possessed by Mainduck became, for a certain kind of Bombayite, a symbol of a greater resistance – it became heroic, political. [...] Nadia Wadia’s hold-out was proof of the survival of another, freer Bombay’ (MLS 311 & 344). She is hardly


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developed as a character and only briefly described as ‘tall, Valkyrian Nadia, who had a walk like a warrior and a voice like a dirty phone call’ (MLS 311). Apart from constituting a vaguely positive, anti-Hindunationalist symbol, Nadia Wadia represents an image of the nation that is intimately associated with Bombay when she is compared to ‘the city whose true creature she was’ (MLS 352). What appears to endure with Nadia is an image of a hybrid Bombay as ‘proof’ of the viability of a hybrid nation. Nadia Wadia, who is, beside Moor, the only character who survives the series of bombings in Bombay, eventually personifies hope for a working hybrid model of India in embodying the classical image of Bombay as cosmopolitan and inclusive: the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian cities. In Bombay all Indias met and merged. [...] What magic was stirred into that insaan-soup, what harmony emerged from that cacophony! [...] In Bombay, as the old, founding myth of the nation faded, the new god-and-mammon India was being born. (MLS 350–1) Bombay’s hybridity is not portrayed as a utopia or a glossy mirage but as a robust working concept which is linked to ‘the old, founding myth of the nation’.10 It is not suggested that the ‘new god-and-mammon India’ will inevitably destroy Bombay’s magical, harmonious ‘cacophony’ but that the new divisive violence of Hindu nationalism and a predatory globalised capitalism will put it under severe strain. Bombay is compared to Granada before the ‘fanatics’ came to power: Just as the fanatical ‘Catholic Kings’ had besieged Granada and awaited the Alhambra’s fall, so now barbarism was standing at our gates. O Bombay! Prima in Indis! Gateway to India! Star of the East with her face to the West! Like Granada – al-Gharnatah of the Arabs – you were the glory of your time. But a darker time came upon you, and just as Boabdil, the last Nasrid Sultan, was too weak to defend his great treasure, so we, too, were proved wanting. (MLS 372) Instead of this bleak outlook, which suggests that Hindu nationalism will do irreparable damage to India’s hybridising capacity, The Moor’s Last Sigh ends on a positive note with Nadia Wadia’s survival and her determination to start again. In embodying a vague sense of hope for the future, Nadia resembles Saleem Sinai’s son Aadam in Midnight’s Children, who personified

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a tougher and more successful second generation of midnight’s children. But the difference between these final figures of hope is that whereas Aadam’s generation was meant to realise Nehruvian promises of an equal and democratic civil society, particularly for the lower strata of society and India’s women, Nadia Wadia signals a future society which cannot be anticipated by the text since the Nehruvian ‘old, founding myth of the nation’ has been superseded by something new. The deepening of democracy, which Midnight’s Children had hoped for, has occurred but with consequences the earlier novel could neither have predicted nor desired.11 The democratic revolution brought communal parties and Hindu nationalist forces to the fore, a development which seems to endanger all the hopes associated with the secular Nehruvian nation. While The Moor’s Last Sigh expresses these fears, by way of Aurora’s ‘Cassandran fears for the nation’, the novel nevertheless does not end pessimistically (MLS 236). The tentative optimism associated with Nadia’s final speech to the nation gives expression both to the novel’s hope for the endurance of the best features of the Nehruvian project, but more significantly it also gestures at fundamental transformations of Indian society and democracy through which the Westernised élite, Macaulay’s ‘Minutemen’, will no longer play a predominant role in shaping the nation. After all, Moor, who despite his involvement in Fielding’s politics is still intimately associated with the Nehruvian hybrid modernity envisaged by his mother, eventually leaves India because he cannot recognise his Bombay anymore, and the new Bombay is for him ‘no longer special, no longer the city of mixed-up, mongrel joy’ (MLS 376). Nadia, however, who is the new embodiment of the nation, personifies a heteroglot India which is possibly and ideally more deeply democratic and more creatively hybrid; but the novel’s optimism remains muted, and the text only ends with an open-ended awaiting of the future: So I asked myself, Nadia Wadia, is it the end for you? Is it curtains? And for some time I thought, achha, yes, it’s all over, khalaas. But then I was asking myself, Nadia Wadia, what are you talking, men? At twenty-three to say that whole of life is funtoosh? What pagalpan, what nonsense, Nadia Wadia! Girl, get a grip, OK? (MLS 376–7) Her mongrelised language indicates the novel’s hope that this new India will be confident in its distinctive hybridity (Schultheis 2004: 146). Nadia Wadia’s face may have been disfigured by Sammy Hazaré, just as Aurora’s ideal of India has been disillusioned, but ‘she looked


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even lovelier than before’ (MLS 376). This new India which Nadia awaits is not Abraham’s and Fielding’s ‘god-and-mammon India’, since both characters are dead, but something else. Contemporary Indian academic discourse, like The Moor’s Last Sigh, grapples with the problem of how to conceive of a viable democratic model of India which is not paralysed by mutually exclusive and hostile communities. The interrogation of nationalist discourse in Indian historiography led to its dismantling along with the idea of India it brought into being. The frequent criticism of the élitist character of the nationalist concept of India entailed a re-evaluation of subaltern resistance to the civilising missions of both colonialism and nationalism. Subalternist historiography showed great interest in subaltern communitarian structures which appeared to constitute a feasible model of inter-communal interaction. Partha Chatterjee uses Kaviraj’s terminology of precolonial fuzzy as opposed to modern enumerated communities and defines a fuzzy community as one ‘which did not claim to represent or exhaust all the layers of selfhood of its members’ and which did not demand enumerated and absolute boundaries (Chatterjee 1993: 223).12 He argues that the ‘imaginative possibilities afforded by the fuzziness of community have [not] disappeared from the domain of popular political discourse’ (Chatterjee 1993: 225). Rather than elaborate on the fuzzy nature of subaltern communities in his later work, however, Chatterjee developed the concept of political society, the sphere in which such communities thrived. As discussed in Chapter 3, the concept of political society is the space of political mediation between the state and civil society. Chatterjee argues that since bourgeois civil society is an élite space closed off to the majority of Indians, political society is the only space in which the masses can articulate their claims. From the point of view of Westernised Indian civil society, the claims of those whose political practices are confined to political society are often perceived as unacceptably pre-modern, irrational and illegal (Chatterjee 1999: 109–10). Chatterjee identifies a growing rift between civil society which advocates modernity and political society which, thanks to a deepening of democratisation and political mobilisation, is increasingly dominated by formerly silenced and now vocal groups and communities which appear to be opposed to or indifferent to the project of modernity (Chatterjee 1999: 115–16). What ensued is alienation of the élite from parliamentary democracy which caused ‘the importation of the disorderly, corrupt and irrational practices of unreformed popular culture into the very hallways and chambers of civic life’ and state institutions (Chatterjee 1999: 116–18).

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The élite’s response is described as one of insulating themselves against this democratic onslaught: This involves a suspension of the modernising project, walling-in the protected zones of bourgeois civil society and dispensing the governmental functions of law and order and welfare through the ‘natural leaders’ of the governed populations. [...] I am convinced that this is the attitude taken by the economically dominant groups in Bombay, the industrial and financial capital of India and the apex of its urban cosmopolitan culture, towards the political leadership of the Shiv Sena, the most overtly fascist element in the Hindu rightwing formation that rules the state of Maharashtra today. (Chatterjee 1999: 118) Rather than isolating itself, Chatterjee argues that the élite should be prepared to steer the ‘project of enlightenment [...] through the thicket of contestations in what I have called political society’ since political society is not only inhabited by Hindu nationalist formations but also by the political mobilisation of dalits, Other Backward Castes, tribals, religious minorities and the women’s movement (Chatterjee 1999: 117–18). Chatterjee advocates a dialogic encounter between modern and democratic forces in India: I have tried here to emphasise that even in resisting the modernising project that is imposed on them, the subaltern classes embark on a path of internal transformation. At the same time, in carrying out their pedagogical mission in political society, the educators – enlightened people like us – might also succeed in educating themselves. That, I submit, will be the most enriching and historically significant result of the encounter between modernity and democracy in a country like India. (Chatterjee 1999: 119) This raises the question of what kind of modernity The Moor’s Last Sigh envisages for the hybrid nation. As explored in the first part of this chapter, modernity in India has been burdened, and to an extent vitiated, by the way it is intimately associated with colonialism and the obliteration of tradition in the name of an imperialist civilising mission. Modernity’s chief proponents, members of the élite which was established under colonial rule, have been branded as Westernised hybrids out of touch with the real India. Even the educated classes have usually not unequivocally welcomed this ‘contaminated’ modernity


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and as Chatterjee argues, its dissemination among India’s population is often resisted. Bakhtin engages with the problematic that modernity and its concomitant phenomenon, heteroglossia, can have a destructive as well as creative side: The decentralizing of the verbal-ideological world that finds its expression in the novel begins by presuming fundamentally differentiated social groups, which exist in an intense and vital interaction with other social groups. A sealed-off interest group, caste or class, existing within an internally unitary and unchanging core of its own, cannot serve as socially productive soil for the development of the novel unless it becomes riddled with decay or shifted somehow from its state of internal balance and self-sufficiency. [...] It is necessary that heteroglossia wash over a culture’s awareness of itself and its language, penetrate to its core, relativize the primary language system underlying its ideology and literature and deprive it of its naïve absence of conflict [...] destroying once and for all a mythic and magical attitude to language and the word. (Bakhtin 1981: 368–9) This chapter has shown that The Moor’s Last Sigh unequivocally welcomes modernity and its noisy, ‘cacaphonous’ heteroglossia. The problem of the élite’s implication in Macaulay’s civilising project is explored in the novel, but the text ultimately pleads for laying Macaulay’s ghost to rest; The Moor’s Last Sigh portrays the hybrid, English-educated élite and its project of modernity as an intrinsic part of India’s development. Chatterjee is in contrast more sceptical as to the unproblematic viability of the project of modernity in India but eventually does not plead for its abandonment. The modernity The Moor’s Last Sigh embraces, however, is not simply a copy of Western modernity but a modernity that has to be distinctly Indian, evolving from India’s historical becoming and its distinct democratic culture as the novel’s insistence on a historically-grounded intersubjectivity demonstrates. Like Aurora’s eclectic art, India’s modernity should not be ‘in thrall to the West’ but neither should India reject modernity in favour of ‘the dead sea of the country’s ancient heritage’ and nativism (MLS 178). This chapter has demonstrated that the idea of a hybrid India is an enduring ideal in The Moor’s Last Sigh. Represented as a self-evident fact in Midnight’s Children, India’s cultural hybridity is depicted as threatened by Hindu nationalism and by the self-isolation of the educated élite in the later novel. In contrast to the nationalist image of Mother

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India, which is ultimately abandoned in The Moor’s Last Sigh, the idea of hybrid India is held on to since it cannot be credibly appropriated by Hindu nationalist discourse. But in order for the idea of hybrid India to endure it has to be disassociated from its nationalist connotations since the Nehruvian nationalist consensus is portrayed as exhausted and the generations reared on its beliefs, those of Aurora and Moor, are either dead or have left India by the end. As Rushdie argued in an essay from 1987, the idea of nationalism in India had grown more and more chauvinistic, had become narrower and narrower. The ideas of Hindu nationalism had infected it. I was struck by a remarkable paradox: that, in a country created by the Congress’s nationalist campaign, the wellbeing of the people might now require that all nationalist rhetoric be abandoned. (Rushdie 1992a: 32–3) This distancing from the nationalist discourse which had helped bring the nation into existence could entail the discarding of the idea of the nation. Arjun Appadurai suggests that the increasing importance of transnational organisations and mass migration calls for the ‘need to think beyond the nation’ (Appadurai 1996: 158). The ‘current crisis of the nation’ signals the beginning of a ‘postnational world’ in which other allegiances and identities are necessary (Appadurai 1996: 158–69). Chatterjee, however, argues against such a persistently transnational or postnational orientation because the ‘framework of global modernity will [...] inevitably structure the world according to a pattern that is profoundly colonial; [...] the proposals to “move beyond the nation” are quite likely to strengthen inequalities and defeat the struggle for democracy the world over’ (Chatterjee 1998a: 68). Despite the transnational imagery involved in The Moor’s Last Sigh’s representation of a hybrid nation, the nation as a meaningful entity is not declared obsolete by the text, but the concept of the nation is systematically stripped of its connotations of nationalist fervour. The Moor’s Last Sigh is deeply riven both by an ambivalent and ironic nostalgia for the Nehruvian nation and by the acknowledgement of its inadequacy as a viable model for the future because of its élitist aspects. Nadia Wadia as symbol of hope for the future can of course also be easily read as parodic. She is a curiously and exaggeratedly optimistic figure who initiates a new narrative of India after the apocalyptic scenario at the end of the Indian part of the novel wipes the slate conveniently clean for a new beginning. The desire for a working democratic


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intersubjectivity, which runs through the novel, calls for a collective narrative of India which takes up the challenge of ‘novelising’ a persistently conflictual and creative social heteroglossia. The Moor’s Last Sigh’s ideal intersubjectivity has been developed through negative examples of a failed or flawed intersubjectivity more often than through positive examples such as Aurora’s idea of a plural, hybrid India. But both positive and negative examples of an intersubjective hybridity emphasise the need for a coherent narrative which has to be meaningful and rewarding for Indians in general and not only an élite or the majority community. The Moor’s Last Sigh portrays this process as riddled with difficulties and dangers but the text also indicates that there is no good alternative to immersion in heteroglossia.

Notes Introduction 1. Salman Rushdie was on born 19 June 1947; he spent his childhood in Bombay but went to England at the age of fourteen to study at Rugby. He enrolled at Cambridge University to read history and afterwards lived mainly in Great Britain, before settling in the USA. After the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa against Rushdie and his novel The Satanic Verses (1988) in February 1989, Rushdie lived in hiding for several years but continued to write, producing The Moor’s Last Sigh among other works. 2. The editions of the novels used are Midnight’s Children (MC) 1995, London: Vintage and The Moor’s Last Sigh (MLS) 1996, London: Vintage, and all page numbers in parentheses refer to these editions. 3. For a view similar to that of Brennan, see Conner 1997: 294–7. Teresa Heffernan likewise argues that Midnight’s Children is ‘from the outset suspicious of the very model [...] of the modern nation’ (Heffernan 2000: 472); Thompson asserts that Rushdie eventually portrays the Indian nation as a ‘bad myth’ (Thompson 1995: 21). 4. See Bernd Hirsch 2001: 56–77. Heike Hartung focuses on exploring trends in western historiography in her study on the novels by Peter Ackroyd, Graham Swift and Salman Rushdie; she also briefly juxtaposes British and Indian historiography by contrasting the representation of the history of the Indian national movement in Percival Spear’s The Oxford History of India (1981) and Sumit Sarkar’s Modern India 1885–1947 (1989), without, however, making use of this material in her discussion of Rushdie’s novels (Hartung 2002: 235–41). T. N. Dhar includes a sketch of Indian historiography in his discussion of the Indian English novel but does not integrate an analysis of historiographical discourses in his interpretation of Rushdie’s novels (Dhar 1999: 61–71 & 159–206). 5. Lipscomb demonstrates that Rushdie used Stanley Wolpert’s New History of India (1977) for certain historical facts, especially historical dates and statistical data in Midnight’s Children (Lipscomb 1991: 183–6). But Lipscomb vastly exaggerates the significance of this material as Rushdie’s few and partial quotes from this concise introductory textbook on Indian history hardly amount to a ‘parody’ of Wolpert’s history (Lipscomb 1991: 181). 6. I will consistently use the name Bombay, not Mumbai, as I only refer to Bombay’s history before 1995 when the city was officially renamed Mumbai. 7. What Chatterjee refers to as ‘Puranic history’ is based on the tradition of the itihasa-purana, ‘an oral tradition for many centuries until it was compiled in the form of the Puranas in the mid first millennium AD’ (Thapar 1993: 151). 8. As the Puranic records cannot live up to Mill’s definition of proper historiography, he repeatedly pronounces this perceived lack of history-writing a sign of the Hindus’ inferiority: ‘The offspring of a wild and ungoverned 200

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9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

imagination, [the Hindu legends] mark the state of a rude and credulous people, whom the marvellous delights; who cannot estimate the use of a record of past events [...] To the monstrous period of years which the legends of the Hindus involve, they ascribe events the most extravagant and unnatural; events not even connected in chronological series; a number of independent and incredible fictions. This people, indeed, are perfectly destitute of historical records. Their ancient literature affords not a single production to which the historical character belongs’ (Mill 1858, Vol. I: 115–16). Such perceived distortion was evinced, for example, by the contemptuous portrayal of Hindus as an essentially depraved and effeminate nation in James Mill’s History of British India. Mill sharply differentiates Hindu from Muslim Indians and juxtaposes their respective traits and histories, concluding that Muslims were considerably less defective, especially in their manliness in contrast to Hindu effeminacy: ‘There was, in the manners of the Mohammedan conquerors of India, an activity, a manliness, an independence, which rendered it less easy for despotism to sink, among them, to that disgusting state of weak and profligate barbarism, which is the natural condition of government among such a passive people as the Hindus. [...] In truth, the Hindu, like the Eunuch, excels in the qualities of the slave’ (Mill 1858, Vol. II: 347 & 365). See William Jones, ‘On the Hindus’ (1786) in Gottlob 2003a: 94–6, and Max Müller, India – What Can It Teach Us? (1883), p. 6. For an analysis of Altekar’s work see Chakravarty and Roy 1988: 3–4. John Strachey’s statement from 1888 is a frequently quoted example of the colonial position: ‘This is the first and most essential thing to learn about India – that there is not, and never was an India, or even any country of India, possessing, according to European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social, or religious; no Indian nation, no “people of India,” of which we hear so much. [...] that men of the Punjab, Bengal, the North-West Provinces, and Madras, should ever feel that they belong to one great Indian nation, is impossible’ (Strachey 1888: 5–8). See Bipan Chandra on the ‘drain theory’ and the development of what he calls ‘economic nationalism’ (Chandra 1966: 636–708 & 736–59). Born and raised in England, R. P. Dutt first published his influential India To-day in London, whence it had to be smuggled into India as it had been banned by the British authorities (Gottlob 2003a: 193). See Karl Marx, ‘The British Rule in India’ (1853) in Avineri 1968: 83–9. R. P. Dutt nevertheless considered Gandhi as indispensable at this stage of the struggle: ‘No other leader could have bridged the gap, during this transitional period, between the actual bourgeois direction of the national movement and the awakening, but not yet conscious masses. Both for good and for evil Gandhi achieved this, and led the movement, even appearing to create it. This role only comes to an end in proportion as the masses begin to reach clear consciousness of their own interests, and the actual class forces and class relations begin to stand out clear in the Indian scene, without need of mythological concealments’ (Dutt 1940: 517). See also Rudolph and Rudolph 1982: 135–6, and Rothermund 2001: 33–4. R. C. Majumdar nevertheless published his eleven volume History and Culture of the Indian People (1951–1977) and criticised the Indian government for

202 Notes utilising ‘history for the spread of ideas which they have elevated to the rank of national policy [...] They do not inquire whether the facts stated are true [...] but condemn outright any historical writings which in their opinion are likely to go against national integration and their views about such things as eternal Hindu-Muslim fraternity, the non-existence of separate Hindu and Muslim cultures, and their fusion into one Indian culture, etc. etc.’ (Majumdar 1973: xxi). 19. The younger generation of Cambridge historians also caused controversy. The work of Christopher A. Bayly and David Washbrook came under attack because their emphasis on the continuities of pre-colonial with colonial regimes in India was interpreted as an attempt to ‘erase colonialism out of existence’ (Chatterjee 1993: 33). Particularly provocative was Washbrook’s argument that in ‘a certain sense, colonialism was the logical outcome of South Asia’s own history of capitalist development’ (Washbrook 1988: 76). For a critique of the Cambridge School see Nicholas Dirks 2001: 306–13. 20. The term ‘subaltern’ in the sense of lower classes or the masses was first used by Antonio Gramsci, whose work provided an important inspiration for the Subaltern Studies group. For Gramsci’s use of the term ‘subaltern’ see Hoare and Nowell Smith 1971: 52–5, 202 & 336–7. 21. For the textbook controversy during the Janata Government in 1977–79 see Rudolph and Rudolph 1982: 139–47. For an analysis of some of the controversial textbooks see Powell 1996: 195–221.

1 A Biography of the Nation 1. For an example of the former position, see John Strachey 1888: 5–6. For an example of the latter, see Percival Spear 1958: 728–35. 2. See, for example, Bipan Chandra: ‘The national movement [...] played a pivotal role in the historical process through which the Indian people got formed into a nation or a people. National leaders from Dadabhai Naoroji, Surendranath Banerjea and Tilak to Gandhiji and Nehru accepted that India was not yet a fully structured nation but a nation-in-the-making and that one of the major objectives and functions of the movement was to promote the growing unity of the Indian people through a common struggle against colonialism. In other words, the national movement was seen both as a product of the process of the nation-in-the-making and as an active agent of the process’ (Chandra et al. 1987: 23). 3. See Chandra: ‘The imperialist writers [the Cambridge School] deny that India was in the process of becoming a nation and believe that what is called India in fact consisted of religions, castes, communities and interests. [...] Nationalism, then, is seen primarily as a mere ideology which these elite groups used to legitimize their narrow ambitions and to mobilize support. The national movement was merely an instrument used by the elite groups to mobilize the masses and to satisfy their own interests’ (Chandra et al. 1987: 18). 4. See Rushdie in an interview with John Haffenden: ‘The book was conceived and begun during the Emergency, and I was very angry about that. The stain of it is on the book. The Emergency and the Bangladesh war were the

Notes 203

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

two most terrible events since Independence, and they had to be treated as the outrageous crimes that they were’ (Haffenden 2000: 38). Anderson’s ‘definition of the nation’ is that ‘it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign’; ‘[i]t is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (Anderson 1991: 6). There were, of course, Muslim organisations which opposed both Partition and the Muslim League. Mushirul Hasan enumerates the most important ones: ‘the socialists, the Congress Muslims of Azad’s generation, the ulama in the Jamiyat al-ulama, the Ahrars, the Shias, the Khudai Khidmatgars and the Momins [...] repudiated, though not always for the same reasons, the two-nation theory and doggedly adhered to their vision of a united India’ (Hasan 1993: 28–9). I will explore what Chatterjee refers to as the inner, cultural sphere of Indian nationalism in the following chapter when the gendered aspects of nationalism are discussed. See Spear for an example of the imperialist position: Mountbatten’s ‘plan worked out smoothly and was carried through with remarkable address by the Viceroy. In essence it was a further adaptation of the Cripps offer of 1942, implemented by a master of rush tactics’ (Spear 1958: 833). An example of the nationalist position is that of Chandra: ‘the peaceful and negotiated nature of the transfer of power in 1947 was no accident, nor was it the result of a compromise by a tired leadership, but was the result of the character and strategy of the Indian national movement, the culmination of a war of positions where the British recognized that the Indian people were no longer willing to be ruled by them’ (Chandra et al. 1987: 26). In Midnight’s Children, there is no suggestion, however, that the bourgeois Congress leaders were reluctant to use their popular support because they feared anarchy or worse, a position which is often voiced by Marxist historiography: ‘Popular action, above all, made continuance of British rule untenable; fear of popular “excesses” made Congress leaders cling to the path of negotiation and compromise, and eventually even accept Partition as a necessary price; and the limits of popular anti-imperialist movements made the truncated settlement of August 1947 possible’ (Sarkar 1989: 414). See Eric Strand for a critique of ‘Midnight’s Children’s erasure of Gandhian ideology’ (Strand 2005: 1002). See Spear: ‘India broke her British fetters with western hammers. And it was significant of the community of ideas between the two sides that the fetters were never in fact broken by force, but began to be removed by one side as soon as they began to be rattled by the other’ (Spear 1958: 833). Baby swaps are a staple feature of Indian popular film; usually the children are eventually restored to their proper family and their rightful place in society whereas in Midnight’s Children the ‘swapped’ relationships are retained throughout the novel. For the full text of Nehru’s speech, see Gopal 1985: 135–6. See also Rushdie on Midnight’s Children: ‘I didn’t want to write a book which could be conventionally translated as allegory [...]. The book clearly has allegorical elements, but they don’t work in any kind of exact formal sense; you

204

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

Notes cannot translate the structure of the book into the secret meaning, the book is not a code’ (Rushdie 1985b: 3). See also Brecher: ‘In fact, the Indian experiment in constitutional democracy owes more to Nehru than to anyone else or to any combination of factors’ (Brecher 1959: 9). Brecher lists Nehru’s impressive collection of offices: ‘Since 1947 he has been Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of India [...]; since 1950 he has served as Chairman of the Planning Commission; from 1951 to 1954 he also held the time-consuming post of Congress President’ (Brecher 1959: 21). Parallels are established from the very beginning. Saleem begins his history in Kashmir where biographies of Jawaharlal Nehru usually begin as Nehru’s ancestors were Brahmins from Kashmir (Gopal 1975: 17). Saleem’s grandfather Aadam Aziz also has characteristics in common with Nehru, for example their western education, the promotion of secularism and modernity and resistance to the partitioning of the subcontinent (ten Kortenaar 1995: 48). See for example Nehru’s address to the National Academy of Science from 5 March 1938: ‘For I too have worshipped at the shrine of science and counted myself as one of its votaries. [...] it is the scientific method alone that offers hope to mankind and an ending of the agony of the world’ (Gopal 1983: 443). See Nehru: ‘The word “secular”, however, conveys something much more to me, although that might not be its dictionary meaning. It conveys the idea of social and political equality. Thus, a caste-ridden society is not properly secular’ (Gopal 1983: 327). Gopal emphasises the role secularism played for Nehru in securing India’s unity: ‘Nowhere was this clearer than in what Nehru regarded as the chief problem of Indian unity, the need to foster among the Muslims the feeling that they were not second-class citizens in India. For this purpose he made secularism the national policy’ (Gopal 1984: 281). See, for example, Madan 1987: 748–9. In an essay in Imaginary Homelands, Rushdie acknowledges the centrality of Nehru’s role in defining Indian secularism and affirms its discourse: ‘To be an Indian of my generation was also to be convinced of the vital importance of Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision of a secular India. Secularism, for India, is not simply a point of view; it is a question of survival’ (Rushdie 1992a: 404). In Midnight’s Children, Narlikar explains the logic behind the freeze on Ahmad’s property: ‘ “These are bad times, Sinai bhai – freeze a Muslim’s assets, they say, and you make him run to Pakistan, leaving all his wealth behind him. [...] This so-called secular state gets some damn clever ideas” ’ (MC 135). Gopal praises Nehru’s Non-Alignment policy: ‘the formulation of a foreign policy new in concept, adapted to national interest and yet helpful in fostering a world community, [ensures] Nehru’s position as one of the few great men of the age’ (Gopal 1984: 300). In contrast, Charu Verma spells out the communal implications of their union: ‘For a traditional Hindu woman, the decision to stay with a barren, Muslim widower is simply radical’ (Verma 1991: 158). The Pakistani episode in the novel is given rather short shrift because after Partition Indian and Pakistani historiography differed considerably.

Notes 205

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

2

My concern here is exclusively with Indian historiography and its narratives of the nation. For incompatible interpretations of subcontinental history in Indian and Pakistani historiography see Avril Powell’s comparative study of Pakistani and Indian history textbooks (Powell 1996). I disagree with Todd Kuchta’s argument that ‘Saleem sees the roots of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency rule in Nehru’s increasing power throughout the late fifties’ (Kuchta 1999: 219). In Midnight’s Children, as in most historiographical accounts, there is a clear contrast between the Nehru era and the era of Indira Gandhi. Contrast, for example, Katherine Frank’s account with that of Malhotra: ‘During the Emergency, thousands were arrested for “vagrancy” and taken off to sterilization camps where they had no choice but to undergo vasectomies’ (Frank 2001: 407); ‘while actual incidents of young and not so young men being dragged out of cinema halls or bus queues and taken to the operating table might have been few, the air of fear and panic they created was pervasive’ (Malhotra 1989: 181). See also Chatterjee: ‘All politics is now sought to be subsumed under the overwhelming requirements of the state-representing-the-nation. The state now acts as the rational allocator and arbiter for the nation. Any movement which questions this presumed identity between the people-nation and the state-representing-the-nation is denied the status of legitimate politics’ (Chatterjee 1998c: 168). Thomas Blom Hansen questions Chatterjee’s conception of the state as ‘governed by rationality and legality’ in opposition to ‘another realm governed by a conceptual register derived from communities’ and suggests that it might not be so easy to ‘maintain a clear distinction between state and community’ (Hansen 2001: 233). Representative of the second narrative is John Dayal and Ajoy Bose’s For Reasons of State. Delhi Under Emergency (1977); their chapter on the slum clearances is entitled ‘The Bulldozers’ and that dealing with the government’s sterilisation zeal, ‘The Days of the Long Knives’. By situating the third part of the novel in Delhi, Rushdie chose the site of the worst excesses of the Emergency where ‘an estimated 700,000 people (15 per cent of the local population) were dispersed outside the city and over 161,000 were purportedly sterilised’ (Tarlo 2003: 16). Rushdie’s demonisation of Indira Gandhi in Midnight’s Children by the systematic use of misogynist stereotypes will be discussed in the following chapter.

Wives, Widows, and Witches

1. See, for example, Verma who notices ‘several disturbing sexist biases both in Rushdie and his narrator-protagonist’ (Verma 1991: 154). 2. Gayatri Spivak captured this aspect of Britain’s civilising mission in her often quoted phrase: ‘White men are saving brown women from brown men’ (Spivak 1993a: 93). 3. Autonomous women’s organisations such as the Women’s Indian Association (founded in 1917) and the All-India Women’s Conference (founded in 1927) saw their work as mainly concerning women’s issues

206 Notes

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

and they campaigned for social reform legislation, women’s rights and education for girls (Forbes 1981: 54–5). They specifically defined their work as complementary to that of men and distanced themselves from western feminists and their antagonistic stance towards men. These women’s organisations were largely supportive of the nationalist movement, and the interests of the nationalist and the women’s movement rarely clashed since women’s emancipation was perceived as dependent on political emancipation (Forbes 1981: 60–1). As long as women’s demands were not perceived as a threat to patriarchal structures they could ‘comfortably coexist within the nationalist movement’ (Forbes 1981: 75). But it led to conflicts when such demands undermined patriarchal society as happened with women’s lobbying for a reformed Hindu Code which aimed at improving women’s rights to divorce and the inheritance and control of property (Forbes 1981: 71–5). Gandhi’s nationalism does not entirely correspond to Chatterjee’s characterisation of Indian nationalism as divided into an inner and essentially Indian sphere and an outer sphere which was imitative of the West. Gandhi did not seek to imitate the West even in the material outer sphere of nationalism but he still affirmed the nationalist image of Indian women’s virtues which best unfolded in the protected sphere of the home. Only under the exceptional conditions of the freedom struggle did he advocate their coming out of their homes to train the nation in self-sacrifice (Jain 1996: 246–7). Dipesh Chakrabarty also unequivocally identifies Naseem with the ‘premodern’ and misses the complexities of Midnight’s Children’s portrayal of the ‘binary of tradition/modernity’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 268–9). Aadam Aziz is not a straightforward representation of modernity either as he explicitly relies on the ‘traditional’ prerogative of the husband to get his way without debate. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan demonstrates the longevity of this nationalist image of woman as the repository of culture and religion in her analysis of television series and commercials in contemporary India where middleclass women continue to stand for tradition without renouncing modernity: ‘The traditional is represented as the timeless, and hence inclusive of the modern, while the modern is viewed merely as a transitional phase which disguises the permanent “essence” of timeless tradition’ (Sunder Rajan 1993: 134). Sumanta Banerjee describes nineteenth-century Bengali folk songs ‘dealing with the love of Krishna and Radha. [...] the divine pair is deglamourized through the imagery into a rustic young couple – often in a daring adulterous and incestuous relationship’ (Banerjee 1990: 134). Susie Tharu and K. Lalita delineate the troubled history of the publishing of the eighteenthcentury poet Muddupalani’s Radhika Santwanam, which emphasised Radha’s sexual desire and satisfaction above Krishna’s and which was praised for its enrichment of the Telugu language in the eighteenth century but considered too depraved to be published in the twentieth century (Tharu & Lalita 1995a: 1–15). This episode is based on the Nanavati case, ‘a very famous murder trial that took place in India in the 1950s’ (Rushdie 1985b: 11).

Notes 207 9. Spivak rightly argues that The Satanic Verses (1988) fails in this respect: ‘All through, the text is written on the register of male bonding [...]. Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha. The two are tortured by obsession with women, go through them, even destroy them, within a gender code that is never opened up, never questioned, in this book where so much is called into question, so much is reinscribed’ (Spivak 1993b: 111). Spivak acknowledges Rushdie’s ‘anxiety to write woman into the narrative of history’ but records a failure in both The Satanic Verses and Shame (1983): ‘In Shame, the women seem powerful only as monsters’ (Spivak 1993b: 111). Spivak does not comment on whether she regards Midnight’s Children a failure in this respect as well. I argue that women’s portrayal in Midnight’s Children differs markedly from those other two novels. The theme of female monstrosity in Shame, epitomised by the character Sufiya Zinobia, is different from that of Midnight’s Children since Sufiya Zinobia is actually monstrous whereas women’s monstrosity in Midnight’s Children lies in the eye of the beholder, Saleem. 10. Rushdie is not only unrepentant but appears to be actually proud of having created a lasting insult for Indira Gandhi: ‘The thing that’s given me great pleasure is to discover that this term [the Widow] every so often crops up in the newspapers, as if it had been in public use before I made it up, and it’s always very nice to give an insult to the English language’ (Rushdie 1985b: 17). But Rushdie obviously felt the need to qualify his often hostile remarks and portrayals of Indira Gandhi in a later interview: ‘Mrs. Gandhi was a remarkable individual with great personal charm, great political and personal courage. It so happened that she went down a political road that I objected to’ (Sheff 2000: 196). 11. In his biography of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, Tariq Ali gives an overview of the different elements of Indian society, in which the tribal population is mentioned together with its allegedly notorious custom of witch-hunting: ‘The Santhal villages amongst the wooded hillocks of West Bengal are still inhabited by tribespeople with their own ancient customs and traditions. Here old women and poor widows alike are branded as “witches” and hounded out of society’ (Ali 1985: 221). 12. Epstein, for example, mentions the prevalent belief in witches among Wangala peasants in South India in the 1950s (Epstein 1967: 136). Cohen cites examples of ‘child-lifting rumors’ in rural and urban 1990s Uttar Pradesh in which the stealing of children was attributed to witches and other sinister groups (Cohen 1998: 259). 13. Skaria, however, cautions against effacing the differences between European and Indian witches (Skaria 1997: 109). 14. Pompa Banerjee explores the interesting fact that European travel writers from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, who were fascinated by the phenomenon of sati, never explicitly compared it with European witch-burnings (Banerjee 1999: 529).

3

The New God-and-Mammon India

1. VHP stands for Vishwa Hindu Parishad, which is a front organisation of the RSS or Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a cadre organisation founded in

208 Notes

2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

1925. The BJP or Bharatiya Janata Party is a political party with close relations to the RSS. See Chatterjee: ‘Civil society in [India] is best used to describe those institutions of modern associational life set up by nationalist elites in the era of colonial modernity, though often as part of their anticolonial struggle’ (Chatterjee 1998a: 62). See Hansen on Gandhi’s unique position in bridging the gap between the élite and the masses without disrupting the fundamental division: ‘Like most other nationalist leaders, Gandhi found any upsetting of the essentially paternalistic relation between the middle-class world of the enlightened leadership and the masses objectionable. His unique position derived from straddling these two worlds, not from collapsing them, and from being ennobled, in the eyes of his middle-class constituency, by his voluntary and fearless immersion in the world of the masses’ (Hansen 1999: 242). See, for example, Bilgrami on the ‘widespread and accumulated deflation of Nehru’s stature, to be found in the intellectual and political mood of the country’ in the 1980s and 1990s (Bilgrami 1994: 1751). The original letter is dated 1 July 1945 and is reprinted in Sonia Gandhi 1992: 511–12. The centrality of Thackeray can be gauged from Purundare’s sympathetic account of the Shiv Sena: a chapter dedicated to Thackeray is entitled ‘DemiGod Thackeray’, in which he claims that the ‘word Shiv Sena is synonymous with Bal Thackeray [...] For the Shiv Sena, Bal Thackeray is irreplaceable’ (Purundare 1999: 445 & 456–7). It is important, however, to bear in mind that Hindu nationalism cannot be simply explained as a symptom of an increasing democratisation in India; it was also a reaction against it as the discourse of Hindu nationalism, as propagated by the RSS, mainly found its followers among the Hindu middle class ‘who feared encroachment on their dominant positions’ (Hansen 1999: 9): ‘Hindu nationalism [is] premised upon and yet reacting against a broader democratic transformation of both the political field and the public culture in postcolonial India’ (Hansen 1999: 4–5). The claim that Hindus are in danger of becoming extinct has a long history: Pradip Kumar Datta examines its beginning in the early twentieth century in Bengal and describes how it became ‘Hindu communal common sense’ (Datta 1993: 1305). See Hansen on the different approach of the Shiv Sena compared to the BJP and RSS: ‘BJP’s tight-knit organizational culture and ideals of ideological consistency, discipline, and self-restraint are far removed from the average sainik’s combination of political pragmatism, aggression, and “actionism” ’ (Hansen 2001: 67); ‘The RSS speaks at length in high-caste idioms of “purification”, “character building” and the sublimation of mental energy into physical strength. Shiv Sena, on the other hand, speaks of physical violence as a way to purify society and to restore masculinity’ (Hansen 2001: 87–8). See, for example, Sarkar 1993: 163–7. In an interview in the 1970s, ‘Bal Thackeray admitted that he admired Hitler and also respected him as an artist’ (Gupta 1982: 139).

Notes 209 12. Katzenstein, Mehta and Thakkar similarly argue that the success of the Shiv Sena is predominantly based on ‘adroit organization-building’ (Katzenstein, Mehta and Thakkar 1997: 382). 13. For an interpretation which stresses the planned and manipulated element, see van der Veer: ‘Although BJP leader Lal Krishna Advani, who was present at the occasion, immediately tried to distance himself from the act of demolition, there can be little doubt that the entire event had been well planned in advance. At the same time there can be no doubt that the paramilitary forces, present at the site, could have prevented the demolition. However, the Congress (I) stood to gain from this illegal act of its political opponents’ (van der Veer 1996: 171). 14. Interestingly the bomb blasts are described as ‘cathartic’ in Kalpana Sharma’s analysis and as ending the circle of violence; this has similarities to the way they are depicted in The Moor’s Last Sigh (Sharma 1995: 286).

4

Mother India

1. For example, an important group which became increasingly mobilised in the 1980s were the so-called Other Backward Classes/Castes (OBCs) which constitute roughly half of India’s population (Hansen 1999: 141–5). This mobilisation was organised around the recommendation of the Mandal Commission in 1980 to reserve ‘27 percent of all educational seats and governmental jobs for this social category’ (Hansen 1999: 142). 2. Bharat Mata translates as Mother India. 3. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (Chattopadhyay) was born in 1838, received a western education and was one of the first two graduates of the University of Calcutta in 1858 (Das 1984: 3–12). Bankim worked as a Deputy Magistrate from 1858 to 1891 and repeatedly referred to his occupation as ‘the curse of his life’ (Raychaudhuri 1988: 107). Celebrated for developing Bengali prose, he was an important novelist, essayist and polemicist (Sarkar 2001: 135). He died in 1894. 4. The title of the song can be transliterated as ‘Bande Mataram’ or ‘Vande Mataram’; Bankim first composed the song in 1875 but it only became well known after it was integrated in Anandamath (Das 1984: 214–6). 5. I will capitalise the term ‘mother’ when I refer explicitly to the deity invoked in Anandamath. 6. Sen-Gupta feels apologetic about translating anti-Muslim passages as he states in his introduction to The Abbey of Bliss: ‘one cannot but regret the anti-Mussulman sentiments that our author has so freely introduced in the present work. [...] I would willingly have expunged those passages from the translation were it not for a desire that the author should be presented in the translation as no better or worse than he is’ (Sen-Gupta 1906: x). 7. See, for example, the translated extracts from Bankim’s often quoted essay, ‘A Few Words about the History of Bengal’ (1882–3) in Gottlob 2003a: 142–3. 8. Sarkar enumerates some aspects in which Bankim deviated from historical records in Anandamath: ‘Against the backdrop of the famine of 1770, armed combat rages between marauding ascetics of the Naga Dasnami orders and

210

9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

Notes a puppet Muslim nawab indirectly controlled by the British in Bengal. Bankim makes no mention of the role of Muslim faqirs who also led plundering bands of starving people. Even though historically the san nyasis were from the Shaiva orders, here they are worshipers of Vishnu, with a militant, warlike bhakti of their own’ (Sarkar 2001: 177–8). This secularised translation of Bankim’s Anandamath has become the ‘official’ version of the novel in English as it has been repeatedly reprinted, not with the title Dawn over India but with the Bengali title Anandamath. Even though the Orient Paperback edition of 2000 states that this is an ‘adapted’ translation, the far-reaching nature of the numerous changes is not indicated. The following quotes will be taken from the Orient Paperback edition of 2000, referred to as Anandamath (A). Here the replacement of the novel’s goddesses with maps was clearly a ‘secularising’ strategy in order to suppress religious connotations, but in Hindu nationalist discourse the Indian map had previously been appropriated as an icon for the Hindu nation in Swami Shraddhananda’s Hindu Sangathan – Saviour of the Dying Race in 1926 when he suggested building a Hindu Rashtra Mandir, a temple to the Hindu nation, in every city, and depositing in each a map of India which was supposed to represent Bharat Mata (Jaffrelot 1996: 22). The construction of the Bharat Mata temple in Banaras/ Varanasi, inaugurated by Mahatma Gandhi in 1936, in which pilgrims show reverence to a ‘large relief map of India’ indicates that by that time the sign of the map had been absorbed into popular Hindu religious imagery as well (Eck 1999: 38–9). In his inauguration speech, Gandhi may have emphasised that this temple should be open for the ‘worship of all, irrespective of creed. [...] Everyone who loved Mother India’, but the opening ceremony, with chanting of Vedic mantras, clearly made it a Hindu ceremony (Gandhi 1976: 387–8). It is interesting that Mehboob Khan, the director of the film Mother India, had to justify his use of this title in 1955 to government departments and claimed that his film was intended to cleanse Mother India from the negative associations of Katherine Mayo’s book: ‘We have intentionally called our film “Mother India”, as a challenge to this book, in an attempt to evict from the minds of the people the scurrilous work that it Miss Mayo’s book’ (quoted in Chatterjee 2002: 20). Nargis was in fact a rather scandalous figure before she recast herself in the virtuous image of Mother India after her marriage to Sunil Dutt. Previously, the daughter of the famous Muslim singer and courtesan Jaddan-bai had a public love-affair with the married film star Raj Kapoor. After Mother India, she withdrew from the film business and became an exemplary wife and mother, was interested in politics, active for charities and a friend and staunch supporter of Indira Gandhi (Thomas 1989: 22–7). The critic’s quote referred to in this passage is from Sumita Chakravarty 1993: 155. It is interesting that during the Emergency, the film Mother India was for the first time shown on television ‘on governmental orders. Obviously, it was perceived that the film promotes developmental activities, and discourages an individual’s attempt to take the law into their own hands’ (Chatterjee 2002: 76).

Notes 211

5 The Idea of a Hybrid India 1. See, for example, M. A. Sherring’s three-volume Hindu Tribes and Castes (1872–81), and Herbert Risley’s People of India (1908). 2. This negative assessment of India’s diversity was reproduced in the historiography of the Cambridge School: ‘For India was not merely an agglomeration of regions in uneven development; it was also a league of submerged nations, a chaos of overlapping castes, a cockpit of rival religions. Between their tongues, sects and communities there were intense competitions, which under the circumstances of foreign rule mainly took the form of struggles for status’ (Seal 1968: 11); ‘Neither the Raj nor the Indian National Congress had been able to forge a solid and economically effective modern state above the mêlée of factions, castes and local bosses’ (Bayly 1997: 677). 3. All references to The Satanic Verses (SV) are from the Vintage edition of 1998. 4. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) spent four years in India from 1834 onwards; he was appointed ‘first law commissioner and member of the supreme council of Bengal’ (Cutts 1953: 830). As member of the General Committee of Public Instruction he wrote his ‘Minute on Education’ (Sirkin and Sirkin 1971: 407–8). Rajan sums up the legacy of Macaulay’s relatively short stay in India: ‘During that brief interval, he penned the minute that is remembered as deciding India’s educational future and was responsible for all of the language and nearly all of the substance of the Indian penal code. The decisions in which he was a principal participant continue to affect the lives of Indians even today’ (Rajan 1999: 175). 5. In ‘On the City Wall’, this English narrator associates freely with the courtesan Lalun and Wali Dali, ‘a young Mohammedan who was suffering acutely from education of the English variety’ (Kipling 1970: 304). Rushdie actually incorporates a brief interpretation of this short story in the above mentioned scene: ‘Kipling’s almost schizophrenic early stories of the Indiannesses and Englishnesses that struggled within him’ (MLS 39). 6. This representation of Moor as personifying the nation seemingly clashes with his embodiment of exemplary devoted citizen-son to Mother India. It is The Moor’s Last Sigh’s characteristic that its protagonists play various intersecting roles whose seemingly contradictory allegorical functions deliberately obstruct an unravelling of the novel’s interwoven allegories. This is a further illustration of the novel’s construction of an ambivalent ‘Palimpsest India’ whose layers of differently perceived realities overlap but which are also often incompatible with each other (see Chapter 3). 7. See Harvey: ‘To argue from historical silence is always extremely dangerous, but mention must be made here of the probable absence of any indigenous Christian elements in the new Islamic state of Granada. [...] The existence side by side of three religious communities, which had been such a marked characteristic of Islamic Spain in the days of the Caliphate, was no feature of Islamic Granada [...] By a process of cultural filtration and concentration, as the years went by those who wished to live a purely Islamic life, to express themselves in Arabic, and to owe cultural allegiance to Islamic rather than European culture, went to live in the kingdom of Granada’ (Harvey 1990: 13–14).

212

Notes

8. In order for the mercenary Rodrigo Díaz to become the national Castilian hero of the reconquista, the historical figure had to undergo a considerable transformation in both legend and legend-inspired Spanish nationalist historiography (Fletcher 1990: 193–205). 9. On the need for foundations as opposed to fundamentalist positions, see Terry Eagleton 2003: 190–207. 10. This image of a classical, hybrid Bombay is implicitly underlined in the novel by the naming of the character who finally embodies this ‘live-andlet-live’ spirit of Bombay, Nadia Wadia. With this name Rushdie obviously refers to the popular film icon Fearless Nadia (1909–1996) of the 1930s and 1940s, who became Nadia Wadia after her marriage with the film-maker Homi Wadia in 1960 (Gandhy & Thomas 1991: 110–16; Chakravarty 1993: 58–60). Uncharacteristically for Rushdie, there is no explicit reference to the film actress Nadia in The Moor’s Last Sigh but compared with the novel’s Nadia, there are obvious parallels in fearlessness, walk and voice. Fearless Nadia was originally the daughter of a Greek and a Welshman who was born in Australia and grew up in Bombay where she made a successful film career in the 1930s and 1940s in stunt films produced by the Wadia brothers. The tall, strong, blond Nadia was India’s most popular action heroine at that time, who performed highly spectacular stunts while delivering nationalist and feminist messages in her films. In Diamond Queen (1940), for example, Nadia declares in Hindi with a distinct English accent, ‘[i]f India is to be free, women must be given their freedom’, in between beating up villainous men (Kabir 2001: 60). What makes her star persona interesting is the way she must have been perceived as Indian to a certain degree by the audiences in order to deliver convincingly her nationalist message in her films. Despite her exotic appearance as white stunt woman she was never portrayed as a foreigner in her films but as an Indian woman, and her exoticness was ‘explained’ by referring to her as a Bombaywali – a woman from Bombay (Gandhy & Thomas 1991: 115). 11. Rushdie mentions in an essay from 1987 that Midnight’s Children was criticised in India for being ‘too pessimistic about the future. It’s a sad truth that nobody finds the novel’s ending pessimistic any more, because what has happened in India since 1981 is so much darker than I had imagined’ (Rushdie 1992a: 33). 12. Sudipta Kaviraj argues that a premodern community’s fuzziness consisted in its indifference to its exact numerical size and in ‘a relative lack of clarity of where one’s community, or even one’s region, ended and another began’ (Kaviraj 1992: 25).

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Index Aloysius, G., 35 Altekar, A. S., 7 Anandamath, 5, 123–5, 127–33, 141, 155–7, 164, 209, 210 Anderson, Benedict, 17–18 Appadurai, Arjun, 198 Aurobindo, 130–1, 147 Babri Masjid, 116–17 Bagchi, Jasodhara, 123–4, 127, 130–1 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 2, 5, 161–2, 173–6, 180, 182–3, 187–9, 197 Banerjea, Surendranath, 8, 131–2, 202 Bhabha, Homi K., 5, 161–2, 166–9 Bose Sugata, 123, 128, 130 Chakravarty, Uma, 7, 78 Chandra, Bipan, 25, 201, 202, 203 Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra, 5, 6, 123–4, 127–33, 137, 141, 151, 156–7, 163–5, 209, 210 Chatterjee, Partha, 1–3, 6, 18–19, 22, 39–41, 50, 58–9, 63, 90–1, 93, 99–100, 107–8, 120, 129, 159–60, 170, 191, 195–8, 203, 205, 206, 208 Chowdhury-Sengupta, Indira, 124, 128–9, 131 Dutt, R. Palme, 8–10, 201 Dutt, Romesh, 8 Emergency (1975–77), 16–17, 43–5, 48–54, 77, 83, 85–6, 116, 122, 183–4, 202, 205, 210 feminist historiography, 4, 5, 13–14, 56–7, 61, 86, 136, 157 Forbes, Geraldine, 68, 205–6

Gandhi, Indira, 4–5, 16, 42–6, 48–52, 54, 57, 77–86, 95–6, 101, 122, 123, 149–51, 205, 207, 210 Gandhi, Mohandas K. (Mahatma), 9–10, 15, 20, 23, 25, 31, 39, 63–4, 94, 102, 142, 201, 202, 203, 206, 208, 210 Gopal, Sarvepalli, 29, 37, 39, 204 Guha, Ranajit, 12–13, 55, 165, 169 Hansen, Thomas Blom, 90, 92–3, 95–104, 106–12, 118–21, 205, 208 Hindu nationalism, 5, 88–91, 98–9, 101–4, 109–11, 122–3, 132, 149, 151–2, 158, 170, 173, 182–3, 193, 197–8, 208 Hirschkop, Ken, 161, 174–5, 183, 186–9 Hobsbawm, Eric, 1–2, 64 imperialist discourse, 16, 25, 58, 59, 159, 167–8, 170, 172 imperialist historiography, 13, 23, 26 Independence (India, 1947), 1–2, 10–11, 17, 21, 23, 25–30, 43, 48–9, 68–9, 98, 143–4, 160, 165, 172, 181, 203 Irving, Washington, 177, 185 Jaffrelot, Christophe, 101, 210 Jain, Prathiba, 206 with Rajan Mahan, 68, 78 with Sangeeta Sharma, 14, 79 Kaviraj, Sudipta, 43–4, 48, 92, 124, 127–9, 137–8, 195, 212 Khilnani, Sunil, 170, 181–2 Kipling, Rudyard, 167, 211 Kishwar, Madhu, 63, 118

225

226

Index

Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 158–9, 161–5, 167–71, 192, 194, 197, 211 Majumdar, Ramesh Chandra, 11, 69, 201–2 Mani, Lata, 14, 64–5 Marxist historiography, 8–12, 203 Mayo, Katherine, 123, 133–7, 146, 156, 210 Midnight’s Children, 1–4, 16–90, 95–6, 116, 122, 157, 171–3, 193–4, 197, 200, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 212 Mill, James, 6–7, 200–1 The Moor’s Last Sigh, 1–5, 88–123, 137–99, 200, 209, 211, 212 Mother India, 1–2, 5, 74, 122–3, 128, 131–57, 158, 209, 210, 211 Mother India (Mehboob Khan’s film), 123, 137, 143–5, 147, 150–1, 152, 155–6, 210 Nandy, Ashis, 72–3, 75 Naoroji, Dadabhai, 8, 202 nationalism, 3, 9, 12, 16–19, 22, 35, 38, 55, 58, 60, 63, 65, 90, 98, 120–1, 124, 127, 130, 137, 142–3, 148–9, 170, 195, 198, 201, 202, 203, 206 nationalist historiography, 2, 4–13, 15–16, 18, 20, 22–3, 25, 29, 32, 38, 55, 56, 61, 63, 160, 180 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 4–5, 10–11, 15, 23, 26–34, 37–9, 42–3, 53–4, 68, 76, 83, 88–9, 94–8, 102, 114, 120–2, 137–8, 141–3, 152, 159, 161, 170,

172, 180–2, 184, 194, 198, 202, 203, 204, 205, 208 Pandey, Gyanendra, 38, 88–9, 117, 158, 160 Parameswaran, Uma, 65 Phule, Jotirao Govindrao, 7–8 Rajan, Balachandra, 159, 161–3, 167, 172, 211 Sangari, Kumkum, 162 with Sudesh Vaid, 13–14, 60 Sarkar, Sumit, 6–7, 11, 13, 15, 21, 24–6, 56–7, 88, 110, 200, 203 Sarkar, Tanika, 58, 74, 110, 124, 128, 132, 137, 141, 153–4, 209–10 The Satanic Verses, 160–2, 200, 207 Seal, Anil, 11–12, 211 Shame, 207 Shetty, Sandhya, 134–5, 137, 143, 149 Singh, Jyotsna, 28, 142, 148, 180–1 Sinha, Mrinalini, 134, 136–7 Skaria, Ajay, 80–2, 207 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravarty, 57, 64, 205, 207 Subaltern Studies, 4, 12–13, 16, 18, 38, 55, 57, 160, 170, 195, 202 Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari, 77, 206 Tarlo, Emma, 51–2, 150, 205 White, Hayden, 24 Zavos, John, 92

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