“The Moor’s Last Sigh” - Salman Rushdie

🎨 TMLS was a re-read for me after a span of 20+ years. It’s funny how opening once familiar pages can transport you to a specific time and place. I went through a Rushdie period when I was a college student, and I would dutifully bring one of his books with me everyday on campus to snatch reading opportunities between classes. 

This reread has convinced me to pick up his other works and read them again too, before scooping up his latest. After a decades-long advocacy for freedoms of expression, Rushdie has emerged fighting after the horrific attack last year. He is an inspiration to everyone of us who understands that knowledge and the written word are the most powerful tools against ignorance. 

🎨 TMLS is in fourth position in my personal rankings of Rushdie’s works. My favorites are “The Satanic Verses” and “Midnight’s Children”. “The Enchantress of Florence” comes next. 

🎨 Moraes “Moor” Zogoiby has been exiled by his mercurial mother Aurora, from the da Gama-Zogoiby spice dynasty of Cochin. Moor’s complicated relationship with Aurora is juxtaposed with the complicated relationship between Mother India and her people. The da Gama-Zogoiby family history evolves against the backdrop of modern Indian history.

🎨 TMLS explores the complicated family saga of the da Gama-Zogoiby clan. Members of the family variously trace their lineage back to the Portuguese and the Jewish migration to India. As always, there are layers upon layers (indeed the concept of the palimpsest is a recurring theme - is that Aurora on the cover?) in Rushdie’s writing, with heavy nods to magical realism (hello, metamorphic tiles). TMLS is rooted in Indian history, but readers will also find themselves alongside Boabdil as he cedes the Alhambra to Ferdinand and Isabella. To say Rushdie’s works are sweeping narratives in time and place, would be an understatement.

🎨 Rushdie is a bona fide student of history. TMLS is a family saga, but it is also an often critical assessment of modern Indian history. Moor’s soliloquies on subjects ranging from religion, identity, and art, to politics and corruption convey Rushdie’s interpretation of historical events ranging from Indian independence, Partition, Indira Gandhi’s state of emergency, Operation Blue Star, and the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Communalism and sectarian violence were doubtless parting gifts from the British, but each of these events unleashed new waves of terrible violence against minorities.

“I see that hate-the-sin-and-love-the-sinner sweetness, that historical generosity of spirit, which is one of the true wonders of India. When empire’s sun set, we didn’t slaughter our erstwhile masters, saving that privilege for one another …”

“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 – if it is just a question of King Kong and Godzilla wreaking havoc until the aeroplanes bring them down – then the rest of us are excused.”

“Mainduck’s vision of a theocracy in which one particular variant of Hinduism would rule, while all India’s other peoples bowed their beaten heads.”

“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.”

“Both their houses are damned by their deeds; both sides sacrifice the right to any shred of virtue; they are each other’s plagues.”

🎨 Rushdie’s take on how the racist caricature of Mogambo in “Mr. India” was developed - carefully, so as not to offend this group or that - was very interesting. 

“carefully chosen to avoid offending any of the country’s communities; it’s neither Muslim nor Hindu, Parsi nor Christian, Jain nor Sikh, and if there’s an echo in it of the bongo-bongo Sanders-of-the-River caricatures inflicted by post-war Hollywood on the people of the ‘Dark Continent’, well, that’s a brand of xenophobia unlikely to make many enemies in India today”

🎨 Rushdie offers us a peek into the artistic circles of newly independent India. Was it a matter of life imitating art, or art imitating life?

🎨 I particularly enjoy Rushdie’s desified  language in TMLS (we see this prominently in “Midnight’s Children” as well). If you’ve ever been to Mumbai, you’ll immediately recognize the musical cadence and the speech patterns common in this mash up of English and Hindi. I find these dialogues to be a distinctly Rushdie touch and a loving tribute to a perfectly imperfect place.

 

“‘Oho-ho, girl, what a shock you gave, one day you will killofy my heart.’”

“the flat refusal of the old harridan to walk on any terrain that, as she put it, ‘tiltoed up or down’.”

“‘Patience is a virtue,’ she told herself. ‘I’ll just bide-o my time.’”

“‘Outside world isn’t dirtyfilthy enough, eh, eh?”

“‘inform your goodwife to shuttofy her tap.”

“‘Your art-shart, Francisco,’ she told her husband venomously, ‘it will blindofy me with ugliness.’”

🎨 Another classic Rushdie word play, is his use of names that have secondary meanings.

Messrs Tejpattam, Kalonjee and Mirchandalchini are a firm of spice merchants - their names are a play on spices common in Indian cooking.

Or we could look at Moor’s siblings: Ina, Mina, Mynah, and Moor.

And finally, the name Lambajan Chandiwala was imprinted on my mind ever since I first read the book. It refers to a peg legged fellow who often has a parrot on his shoulder - a play on Long John Silver, naturally.

🎨 TMLS also includes several nods to the Bard. Portia and Shylock come to mind immediately.

🎨 The evocative language of Rushdie is on display here. If you’ve ever been sari shopping in India, these words hit home. 

“long afternoons at the fabric stores, as bolts of magnificent silks were flung across a white-sheeted floor for her delight, cloth after cloth flowing thrillingly through the air to settle in soft fold-mountains of brilliant beauty”

🎨 I learned a good deal about the Jewish migration to India from TMLS. The history of the Jews of Cochin is fascinating. Per Rushdie, Black Jews fled Nebuchadnezzar 587 years before the Christian era. Jews from Babylon and Persia were next, arriving in India between 490-518 CE. In the 1300s merchants set up shop in Cochin and Cranganore. The most recent Jewish arrivals in India were those who were expelled from Spain during the Inquisition.

“They have almost all gone now, the Jews of Cochin. Less than fifty of them remaining, and the young departed to Israel. It is the last generation; arrangements have been made for the synagogue to be taken over by the government of the State of Kerala, which will run it as a museum. The last bachelors and spinsters sun themselves toothlessly in the childless Mattancherri lanes. This, too, is an extinction to be mourned; not an extermination, such as occurred elsewhere, but the end, nevertheless, of a story that took two thousand years to tell.”

“‘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.”

“After the Emergency people started seeing through different eyes. Before the Emergency we were Indians. After it we were Christian Jews.”