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The Rushdie Phenomenon:
A Second Look
-bookreview-
The Moor's Last Sigh
by Salman Rushdie
Reviewed by C.J.S. Wallia
Salman Rushdie's unique predicament has made it high fashion for reviewers
to pour generous praise on his books. It's almost seven years since the
publication of his notorious novel, The Satanic Verses. That novel
enraged Muslim fundamentalists in many lands and led to the fatwa proclamation
for his head by Iran's Khomeini. The fatwa
generated a global collective sigh of sympathy for Rushdie, hoisting him
to the stratospheric height of the world's best-known living writer. However,
The Satanic Verses,
a loosely constructed book, was virtually unreadable and remains widely
unread, probably the most widely unread controversial book of our time.
It is axiomatic, among people of the secular-humanist
persuasion, a persuasion I share, that all writers have
the right to write about any subject, in any manner
they wish -- with impunity. And, at the very least,
all writers, even bad writers, deserve to live on --
well, most of them anyway.
A few reviewers, unwilling to follow fashion, have
asserted that they found Rushdie's books unreadable,
one of them archly noting that he belonged to, perhaps,
the most exclusive new club in England, a club with
membership restricted to those who have read past page 17 of The Satanic
Verses. Rushdie's latest novel, The Moor's Last Sigh, also ill-crafted,
has nonetheless received the obligatory "rave" reviews. (For once
the adjective in this cute cliche is altogether apt.) The American edition,
published in January 1996, carries these blurbs from the reviews of the
British edition, published in September 1995:
===========================
In sum, the pervasive use of contrived, overly clever language
and the lack of empathy-evoking characters are the besetting faults
of much of Rushdie's fiction.
========================
"...a poised, celebratory work of fiction...(The Times)";
"... a wonderful book, gorgeous in colour and texture
...it is both a celebration and a threnody (The Independent);
and "...a triumphant tribute to language and to the spirit
...an outstanding feat. One would not indeed wish for one word of this novel
to have been done differently...(The Scotsman)." Not one word
done differently, holy writ, indeed!
The narrator of The Moor's Last Sigh, Moraes Zogoiby, nicknamed
"Moor" is a grotesque character. Born with a
fingerless clublike right hand and a genetic disorder
which makes him look twice his chronological age,
he looks like an old man at the time he begins writing
his memoir -- in his late thirties. His parentage is of
mixed Jewish and Catholic religious backgrounds from Cochin in South India.
The Moor, born in 1957, narrates the tangled, melodramatic history of his
family from 1900 to 1993. His father, Abraham, is caricatured as a Jewish
godfather, a druglord, an instigator of religious riots, and a procurer
of prepubescent girls. His mother, Aurora, ofpartial Portuguese descent
is a famous painter, who bequeaths him one of her paintings "The Moor's
Last Sigh." Aurora has had many affairs with prominent people including
Pandit Nehru, the prime minister, and with one Raman Fielding, a fictional
double of Bal Thackeray, the powerful Shiv Sena leader in Bombay. This novel
is an artless melodrama straining to be comical. With its publication, another
exclusive Rushdie club will soon be in the making -- people who have actually
read more than a few pages of The Moor's Last Sigh.
In a classic essay of American literature, Mark Twain,
reviewing James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking
novels, observed that "in his little box of stage properties
[Cooper] kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks,
artifices, for his savages and woodsmen to deceive
and circumvent each other with, and he was never so
happy as when he was working these innocent things
and seeing them go." Rushdie's repertoire of cunning
artifices is about the same size, and he is incurably addicted
to working them over and over again.
Rushdie's principal cunning artifice is to attack the most
prominent personalities of the milieu he is writing about.
Now, there's nothing wrong, in principle, for a writer to
do this. However, Rushdie frequently indulges in attacks
that are tangential to his story's structure. His story line,
all too often, is already mere melodrama, and the tangential
deployment of this artifice worsens it. Rushdie correctly
calculates that such attacks will evoke public response
from the targeted prominent people, immediately
drawing attention on the author himself. In his earlier
novel Midnight's Children, (1981), narrated for
the most part from a child's charming point of view,
one such deployment was on the prime minister
of India, Indira Gandhi. Infuriated, she took Rushdie
to court and won her libel suit in England, from which he escaped only because
of her assassination in 1984, before the final terms of the damages were
settled. (When Midnight's Children came out,I, too, was impressed
by the clever writing in it. In retrospect, it brings to mind Professor
Nair's famous comment on Rushdie's writing:
"clever, but silly.")
In The Satanic Verses, (1989), a novel about
Indian immigrants in England, Rushdie gratuitously
deployed his attack artifice on the prophet Muhammad
and on his wives. Evidently Rushdie miscalculated
the enormity of the response this would evoke. The fatwa,
no less. Not that nobody forewarned. The manuscript of
the novel was sent by the publisher, Penguin Books, to
their chief editorial consultant in New Delhi, the illustrious
Sikh historian and novelist, Khushwant Singh, who, accurately anticipating
the adverse reaction,
advised against publishing. So far, seven years of hiding for Rushdie. I
doubt that he will ever escape to normal freedom -- the final terms of the
damages of this compulsive deployment of his attack artifice remain to be
settled.
Another artifice that Rushdie constantly works over
is his grotesque exoticizing of the Indian-English
language for the amusement of his Western readers.
Here is an example from The Moor's Last Sigh.
Aurora Zogoiby, a famous painter, who, we are told,
is "a giant public figure ...the confidante -- and
according to persistent rumours, mistress -- of
Pandit Nehru." Moreover, "...there was the group of
distinguished writers who gathered for a time under
Aurora's wing, Premchand and Sadat Hasan Manto
and Mulk Raj Anand and Ismat Chugtai..." Four of
the biggest names, all literary lions. All right, we
understand that Aurora is a very accomplished lady.
Now, this is the Indian-English Rushdie wants
us to believe Aurora articulates:
"Mourning period is over ... henceforth history
will proceedofy";
"Get that woman out of here, Abie ... before I
inflictofy some tough-tough wounds myself";
and saying to the elegant Pandit Nehru in the
Rashtrapati Bhavan (presidential palace),
"...that chicken-breasted mame! Edweenie Mount-teenie!
... God knows why you keep on going
sucking back like a beggar at her gate. If it's
white meat you want, ji, you won't find-o much on her."
Here's another example. Nadia Wadia wins three
beauty contests: the Miss Bombay, the Miss India,
and yes, the Miss World. And this is the song
Rushdie manages to concoct, which, he claims,
the whole country loves:
"There was a song about Nadia Wadia after she
conquered the world,
'Nadia Wadia you have gone fardia
Whole of India has admiredia
Whole of world you put in whirlia
Beat their girls for you were girlia
I will buy you a brand new cardia
Let me be your bodyguardia...' "
Sure.
Observe the rhyme obsession of Rushdia
Says the writer of this article, C.J. Wallia.
Moreover, Nadia Wadia's mother, Fadia Wadia,
the reader is supposed to believe, calls her not
just Nadia, but always Nadia Wadia: " 'Very true,
Nadia Wadia,' said Fadia Wadia. 'Cricket is sport
of kings'; ... 'Oh, Nadia Wadia' moaned
Fadia Wadia, 'See how rude ....' " Rushdie can't forbear
repeating his rhyming coinages Nadia Wadia, Fadia Wadia,
-- no matter how odd this makes his dialogues.
How exotic, this Indian English. Too exotic to Indian ears.
In his East, West stories (1994) one of the main characters
in "Chekov and Zulu" is a graduate of India's elite Doon
school, where he won prizes in Latin and in English.
Nonetheless, Rushdie has him talking like a Kipling babu character: "Excellent
jalebi, Mrs. Z. Thanking you."
Much of Rushdie's Indian-English is absurdly inauthentic.
To be sure, Indian-English has its peculiarities,
many elements of which have found authentic expression
in brilliant fiction, for example, Gita Mehta's
A River Sutra, Khushwant Singh's Delhi: A Novel,
and R.K. Narayan's many novels to cite three outstanding
contemporary writers. Indian-English has also been the
subject of numerous linguistic studies by excellent
scholars like M.P. Jain and Braj Kachru.
In a much-quoted NYTBR article, one critic wrote that
in Rushdie's writing "the whole subcontinent has found
its voice." What arrant nonsense! Was the subcontinent
without voice? Voiceless, the land that produced the
oldest book in world literature, the 1028 poems of the
Rig Veda, in 3750 B.C.? The land that produced Vyasa's
Mahabharata, in 3100 B.C., eight times longer than the
much later Iliad and Odyssey put together? The land that
produced the prodigious poet Rabindranath Tagore, the
first Asian to win a Nobel prize in literature, in 1913?
(I have taken the dates of the Indian classics from
Navaratna Rajaram's acclaimed book The Politics of History: Aryan Invasion
Theory and the Subversion of Scholarship -- published by the appropriately
named publishing house -- Voice of India, New Delhi, 1995.)
Rushdie grotesquely exoticizes not only the Indian-English
language but also the country's ethos to pander to his
Euro-centered readers. In The Moor's Last Sigh, for example, the
first person narrator writes, "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."
True, religious riots do erupt every now and then and people do get stabbed,
typically in hit-and-run killings; however, this "red bubble-baths"
is a Rushdie fabrication. About as authentic as Steven Spielberg's Temple
of Doom showing Indians feasting on monkey brains. The country that
practically innovated vegetarianism and has the largest percentage of vegans.
Hasn't Rushdie done something right in The Moor's Last Sigh? While
preparing this essay, I had noted on one of my
index cards that the author has done a lot of library work.
But no, I can't say that. On page 363, Rushdie writes about
the "seventeenth-century Babri Masjid." Wrong by a hundred years.
Seventeenth century was the not the time of
Babur, but of Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb.
Every Indian schoolboy and schoolgirl knows that. But then
Salman Rushdie didn't complete his schooling in India.
At age 13, he left for the elite Rugby school in England.
Some have noted Rushdie's borrowed clothes from
Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes,
among others. What about the emperor's own clothes?
Rushdie's writings illustrate the classic syndrome of imitative literature:
"the parts that are good are not original; the parts that are original
are not good."
Genuine Indian cuisine is much apppreciated the world over.
Thankfully, Indian restaurants in London, New York,
and elsewhere have the good sense not to offer a
masala-mix toss-up of renowned German, Colombian,
and other preparations. Attempts at fusion cuisine are often confusion cooking.
Rushdie's is a mess.
In sum, the pervasive use of contrived, overly clever language and the
lack of empathy-evoking characters are
the besetting faults of much of Rushdie's fiction.
==================================
See responses to the above article (in the Letters to the Editor section
of IndiaStar)
from novelists Manorama Mathai,
Robbie Clipper Sethi, Julian Samuel among others. |
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