Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture Celebr PDF

Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture
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Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature
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9. Anglophone Jewish Literature Age of Urban Crisis
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18. Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-
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The Innovative Appetites of
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19. Making Space in the

Works of James Joyce
Edited by Valérie Bénéjam
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20. Critical Approaches to American

Working-Class Literature
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21. Salman Rushdie and

Visual Culture
Celebrating Impurity,
Disrupting Borders
Edited by Ana Cristina Mendes
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Mendes 3rd pages.indd iv
Salman Rushdie
and Visual Culture
Celebrating Impurity, Disrupting Borders
Edited by Ana Cristina Mendes
NEW YORK LONDON
Mendes 3rd pages.indd v

First published 2012
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the UK
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
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© 2012 Taylor & Francis
The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial mate-
rial, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in
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Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
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without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Salman Rushdie and visual culture : celebrating impurity, disrupting
borders / edited by Ana Cristina Mendes.
p. cm. — (Routledge studies in twentieth century literature ; 21)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Rushdie, Salman—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Rushdie,
Salman—Knowledge—Art. 3. Rushdie, Salman—Knowledge—Motion
pictures. 4. Art in literature. 5. Motion pictures in literature. 6. Art
and literature. I. Mendes, Ana Cristina.
PR6068.U757Z8445 2011
823'.914—dc22
2011019000
ISBN13: 978-0-415-88545-4 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-203-18306-9 (ebk)
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To Rafael and Rui
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Contents
List of Figures xi
1 Editor’s Introduction: Salman Rushdie’s “Epico-Mythico-

Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art,” or
Considerations on Undisciplining Boundaries 1
ANA CRISTINA MENDES
2 Merely Connect: Salman Rushdie and Tom Phillips 12

ANDREW TEVERSON
3 Beyond the Visible: Secularism and Postcolonial Modernity

in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, Jamelie Hassan’s
Trilogy, and Anish Kapoor’s Blood Relations 32
STEPHEN MORTON
4 ‘Living Art’: Artistic and Intertextual Re-envisionings

of the Urban Trope in The Moor’s Last Sigh 50
VASSILENA PARASHKEVOVA
5 In Search for Lost Portraits: The Lost Portrait

and The Moor’s Last Sigh 70
JOEL KUORTTI
6 Paint, Patronage, Power, and the Translator’s Visibility 87

JENNI RAMONE
7 Show and Tell: Midnight’s Children and

The Boyhood of Raleigh Revisited 106
NEIL TEN KORTENAAR
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x Contents
8 “Nobody from Bombay should be without a basic
film vocabulary”: Midnight’s Children and the
Visual Culture of Indian Popular Cinema 123
FLORIAN STADTLER
9 Visual Technologies in Rushdie’s Fiction:

Envisioning the Present in the ‘Imagological Age’ 139
CRISTINA SANDRU
10 Bombay/‘Wombay’: Refracting the Postcolonial

Cityscape in The Ground Beneath Her Feet 158
ANA CRISTINA MENDES
11 Screening the Novel, the Novel as Screen:

The Aesthetics of the Visual in Fury 182
MADELENA GONZALEZ
12 Media Competition and Visual Displeasure

in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction 202
MITA BANERJEE
Contributors 223
Index 227
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Figures
2.1. Tom Phillips, Salman Rushdie as D.I.Y. Zola, Lithograph,

1993. Reproduced with permission. 13
2.2. Tom Phillips, Salman Rushdie, Oil on Canvas, 1992.
Reproduced with permission. 15
2.3. Tom Phillips, Page 135, A Humument, Fourth Edition,
2.4. Tom Phillips, Page 243, A Humument, Fourth Edition,
3.1. Jamelie Hassan, The Satanic Verses (from The Trilogy,
1990). Installation photograph courtesy of the artist
and Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario. 43
3.2. and 3.3. Anish Kapoor, Blood Relations, 2006. Bronze
and wax, 100 x 432 x 151. Collaboration with Salman
Rushdie. Photo: Dave Morgan. Courtesy of the artist
and Lisson Gallery. 44
5.1. Detail of the cover of The Moor’s Last Sigh by Dennis
Leigh. Reproduced with permission. 45
7.1. Sir John Everett Millais, The Boyhood of Raleigh.
Reproduced with permission from the Tate Gallery. 108
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Mendes 3rd pages.indd xii
1 Salman Rushdie’s “Epico-
Mythico-Tragico-Comico-Super-
Sexy-High-Masala-Art,” or
Considerations on Undisciplining
Boundaries
Ana Cristina Mendes
In Salman Rushdie’s work, pictures are invested with the power to manipu-
late the plotline, to stipulate actions from the characters, to have sway over
them, enchant or even haunt them. References to the visual—notably, fi lm,
TV, comic books, photography, and painting—crowd Rushdie’s writing.
Several of his characters are directly connected to the realm of visuality
and portrayed as availing themselves of the power of visual representa-
tion or as submitting to the pictures others make of them. In his writing,
with its wealth of pictures, the visual is hence a site where meaning is
constructed and struggles over representation are staged. In attempting
to shed light on a largely unexplored, even if central, dimension of the
narrative project of a major contemporary author—the extensive interplay
between what might be termed, for the sake of brevity, ‘the visible,’ and
‘the readable’—this collection focuses on ‘pictures’ instead of ‘images’ to
encapsulate the complex ways in which the visual is here transcribed into
the printed word, and the different levels at which that occurs. This means
exploring not only the visual quality or effect that Rushdie strives for in his
texts, but also the influence of the visual on the author and the multifarious
ways the visual is apprehended and represented in the body of his work.
For instance, within such close engagement with visual culture, cinema
has undoubtedly had a constant presence in Rushdie’s life and work, ranging
from cameo appearances in Peter’s Friends (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 1992),
Bridget Jones’s Diary (dir. Sharon Maguire, 2001), and Then She Found
Me (dir. Helen Hunt, 2007), to the use of both Indian and western fi lms in
and as inspiration for his narratives, from his collaboration with filmmaker
Deepa Mehta as screenplay writer in the adaptation of Midnight’s Children
(1981) to his film criticism. In this latter respect, he attracted controversy
in 2009 when his essay on film adaptation published in the Guardian dis-
paraged the (soon to be) eight Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire; accusing
the Oscar sensation of being a “patently ridiculous conceit” and of “piling
impossibility on impossibility” guaranteed him quote after quote in the
Mendes 3rd pages.indd 1

2 Ana Cristina Mendes
media.1 In addition to his film criticism, his novels from Midnight’s Chil-
dren onwards make repeated use of cinematic intertexts and motifs. During
a conversation with filmmaker David Cronenberg, on one of the numerous
occasions when Rushdie has reiterated the shaping influence cinema had on
his work, he stated: “I’ve always said, and I think it’s true, that movies had
more impact on me than novels in a kind of formational way.”2 Indeed, in
his British Film Institute monograph on The Wizard of Oz he revealed that
Victor Fleming’s 1939 film had been his fi rst literary influence, not Frank
Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and went on to add that
when he fi rst saw the film it made a writer of him.3 That screening inspired
him, at the age of ten, to write his fi rst story entitled Over the Rainbow;4
also, Rushdie recalled, “when the possibility of going to school in England
was mentioned, it felt as exciting as any voyage beyond rainbows. [ . . . ]
England felt as wonderful a prospect as Oz.’5 It seems that the pivotal role
The Wizard of Oz had on Rushdie made him not only a writer, but also a
self-described “lifelong film addict.”6
Cinema is in these many respects central to the discussion of his work.
In the words of Vijay Mishra, “[a]ny study of Rushdie remains incomplete,
indeed deficient, if not seen through the literature of migration and cin-
ema”;7 Mishra further suggests that “[n]arrative as shooting script [ . . . ]
holds the key to Rushdie’s narrative technique.”8 The writer’s employment
of different cinematic intertexts has only recently begun to be addressed by
critics who have however tended to focus on the Bombay cinema intertext.9
As Rushdie confesses, “[w]atching these fi lms [Bombay-produced Hindi
films] is entertainment of course, [ . . . ] but this also nourishes.”10 Indian
cinema, and in particular Bombay talkies—which Rushdie defi nes as
“Epico-Mythico-Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art”11—play
a major role prominently, but not exclusively, in Rushdie’s novels; still, the
author’s engagement with a western cinematic intertext is no less extensive
and its relevance to his work demands consideration.
One of the aims of this collection is to address the importance of cin-
ema in Rushdie’s fiction, in particular the fact that cinema has exerted a
strong influence on his work—so often in the construction of his narratives,
using terminology from film, the use of montage, dream sequences, and
techniques of fast-cutting, flashback, and close-up.12 As the contributors
to this volume demonstrate, references to films figure heavily in his novels
and non-fictional writing, and buried allusions in his novels to names of
films abound (e.g., in The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), to The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari13 and Blade Runner14). For instance, in Shalimar the Clown, the
name of one of the male protagonist Max Ophuls is the nom de plume of
the German filmmaker Maximilian Oppenheimer. In addition, Rushdie’s
film reviews, on Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and on director Satyajit Ray’s films,
collected in Imaginary Homelands, also attest to the relevance of cinema
to Rushdie. For instance, he uses western blockbusters as terms of compari-
son, when he compares, in an interview about the novel The Enchantress
of Florence (2008): “Some of the most popular Indian movies when I was

growing up were about Akbar and his queen Jodhabai—it was the Indian
equivalent of Gone With The Wind.”15
Yet, the crucial visual component of Rushdie’s fiction is not limited to
film alone, and the very scope of the studies collected in this volume, rang-
ing from painting to photography, proves it. Salman Rushdie and Visual
Culture engages also with the writer’s complex relationship with popular
culture: an essay focuses on the competition between two kinds of visual-
ity—that of popular culture, in particular television, and that of metaphor.
This collection aims as well to explore less studied aspects of Rushdie’s
engagement with visuality, namely: the visual overload, associated with the
overwhelming landscape of Bombay, as processed through the lenses of the
narrator/photographer of The Ground Beneath Her Feet; the combination
of the visual and the written in The Moor’s Last Sigh and The Enchantress
of Florence as the result of forced acts of textual translation; the overlap-
ping of metaphorical visual elements in The Moor’s Last Sigh and in the
cinematic narration of Rushdie’s search for a lost portrait in the BBC’s
documentary The Lost Portrait (1995) by Chris Granlund; and visual art
as providing a conceptual frame of reference for reflecting on the historical
contradictions inherent in the secular myth of postcolonial India.
As such, this collection brings together, for the first time and into a coher-
ent whole, research on the interplay between the visible and the readable in
Rushdie’s fiction, from one of the earliest novels—Midnight’s Children—
to one of his latest—The Enchantress of Florence. The inspiration behind
this volume of essays was provided by the collaborative project Blood Rela-
tions developed in 2006 between Rushdie and Anish Kapoor for the Lisson
Gallery in London. In this joint venture the sculptor designed two box-like
bronze structures, sealed together by red wax, while the novelist crafted the
words engraved on the outside of the sculpture, excerpted from his revisionist
retelling of Scheherazade’s tale from The Arabian Nights. Blood Relations
tests the boundaries of different artistic expressions into an exciting and yet
uncharted new space—by bringing together different media, Rushdie’s col-
laboration with Kapoor contributes to a redefinition of W. J. T. Mitchell’s
understanding of “mixed media.” This mixed-media assemblage, combining
visual art with literary elements, assumedly acts as a springboard for articu-
lating the concerns of this collection. Blood Relations challenges traditional
disciplinary and media configurations in very concrete terms, establishing
bridges across the divide between literature and the visual arts, a point fur-
ther developed in the first two chapters of this collection.
Energized by cross-referencing, the essays gathered here also make the
case for a cross-disciplinary, even undisciplinary, approach to Rushdie’s
work. In the process, they challenge and disrupt the borderlines that com-
partmentalize ‘the visible’ and ‘the readable’ within discrete fields. Sig-
nificantly in this respect, Rushdie’s archive of personal correspondence,
notebooks, photographs, drawings, inked book covers, handwritten jour-
nals, and manuscripts came out of cardboard boxes and abandoned com-
puters and went on display as the exhibition “A World Mapped by Stories”

at the library of Emory University in early 2010. Two spheres which are
constantly interacting in new ways in Rushdie’s life and work—‘the visible’
and ‘the readable’—could never be light-heartedly torn apart.
When addressing the preponderance of explicitly visual material in Rush-
die’s writing, I follow theorist W. J. T. Mitchell’s defi nition of picture as
“the concrete, representational objects in which images appear.”16 Mitchell
further clarifies the distinction between ‘picture’ and ‘image,’ terms that
are at times used interchangeably, and describes it as
the difference between a constructed concrete object or ensemble (frame,

support, materials, pigments, facture) and the virtual, phenomenal
appearance that it provides for the beholder; the difference between a
deliberate act of representation (‘to picture or depict’) and a less volun-
tary, perhaps even passive or automatic act (‘to image or imagine’).17
After Richard Rorty’s “linguistic turn,” Mitchell identifies an emergent “picto-

rial turn” corresponding to “a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the
picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, dis-
course, bodies, and figurality.”18 He argues that writing—a contention that eas-
ily extends to printed books—“in its physical, graphic form, is an inseparable
suturing of the visual and the verbal, the ‘imagetext’ incarnate.”19 The concept
of the “image/text” is critical to Mitchell’s reasoning—by deconstructing “the
possibility of a pure image or a pure text”20, the theorist proposes an analysis of
the “image/text” based on the constitutive hybridity “of representational struc-
tures within the field of the visible and the readable.”21 In support of his asser-
tion that “all media are mixed media,”22 Mitchell adduces the fact that “texts
act like pictures or ‘incorporate’ pictorial practices and vice versa.”23 There are
no distinctly visual media because these involve, even if to a lesser degree, other
senses.24 For Mitchell, separating verbal and visual media is nothing more than
an “ideology, a complex of desire and fear, power and interest,”25 and concur-
rently “the interaction of pictures and texts is constitutive of representation as
such.”26 In keeping with Mitchell’s arguments on the complex and conflict-
ual “image/text” relations—“a nexus where political, institutional, and social
antagonisms play themselves out in the materiality of representation,”27 I aban-
doned the expression ‘visual media,’ adopted at an early stage of this project
to designate the different media that circulate in Rushdie work and public life:
television, film, photography, painting, and sculpture.
This volume is based on a two-tiered approach: a transgression of both
aesthetic and disciplinary borderlines. At an earlier stage in this project,
when the volume was under peer-reviewing, one of the anonymous read-
ers noted that “[t]here is much lip-service paid to interdisciplinary work,
and any proposal purporting to achieve that perspective should be scru-
tinized.” This reader was able to at least discern “some genuine outreach
from literary studies into film studies, gender studies and contemporary art
production.” In fact, though an “attempt to work with, or across, other
disciplines” was made from the outset, I was forced to the conclusion that

in practice a collection, however expansively conceived, does not result in
instant interdisciplinarity. As Graham Huggan perceptively observes about
postcolonial studies in general, “much of the work that goes on within it
is interdiscursive rather than interdisciplinary.”28 Furthermore, this collec-
tion approaches the Rushdian dynamics of visuality from the perspective
of its favouring of an undisciplining dialogue. Following the anonymous
reader’s caveat, we would thus characterize our methodology as intertex-
tual, interdiscursive, and undisciplinary, and clearly distance the volume
from abusing interdisciplinarity as “a fashionable academic catch-cry.”29
After the ‘visual turn’ in the humanities and social sciences, postmodern
post-text-based culture is not only characterized by the evolving ways in
which the image has been theorized. Beyond the ‘turns’ and ‘posts’ beset-
ting current critical debates, visual culture studies are also marked by an
increasing trend towards the dissolving of boundaries between formerly
particular camps. Beyond the “anxiety of interdisciplinarity” that Huggan
identifies in postcolonial studies, 30 the essays contained within the pages
of this volume meet the undisciplinary criteria in that they do not adhere
to strict disciplinary boundaries. Even though literary modes of analysis
remain central to the discussion of Rushdie’s works, such approach still
allows for the pursuing of a dialogic project, engaging with other narratives
and enabling new connections, bypassing ideas of a single-authorial text
and an exclusionary literature-centered approach. All in all, these essays
provide a timely and provocative critical intervention in undisciplining the
dialogue between the visual and the literary in the Rushdie corpus.
ANGLES OF APPROACH
Rushdie and his fiction have on many occasions provided an inspiration

or conceptual resource for visual artists; in fact, he has engaged in high
profile collaborations with major contemporary artists such as Tom Phil-
lips and Anish Kapoor. These collaborations are a testament to the impact
that contemporary visual arts, and the visual arts community, have had
on Rushdie’s work, but they also reveal profound aesthetic sympathies
between Rushdie’s novels and the works of the artists with whom he col-
laborates. Andrew Teverson’s essay looks at the ways in which Rushdie and
Phillips each engage with Victorian art and culture by incorporating major
Victorian texts across the boundaries of word and image: Philips as an art-
ist who incorporates the Victorian novel into his artwork, and Rushdie as
a novelist who incorporates Victorian art into his literary texts. As Tever-
son observes, visual artist and novelist seek to reconstruct the products of
Victorian culture (notably, the realist novel) in order to contest, rework,
and transform Victorian artistic, social, and political legacies (particularly,
but not exclusively, imperial legacies). Rushdie and Phillips, this chapter
argues, share an aesthetic philosophy that entails the creation of objects
(novels and paintings) that exist as fluid, contingent entities, that resist the

impulse towards ‘totality’ and that are hybrid at the level of media (and
so redefi ne the concept of ‘mixed media’). The creation of this boundary-
crossing aesthetic, this chapter further contends, has cultural significance
for these two figures: they seek to imagine (or visualize) forms of belonging
that are incorporative, rather than monumental or exclusive.
Beyond a reductive understanding of the visual in the fictional world of
Rushdie’s texts as a rhetorical or meta-textual device, Stephen Morton’s
essay begins by considering the correspondences between the style and ethos
of the Progressive Arts Movement and Rushdie’s exploration of the aporia
of Nehruvian secularism in the visual artwork of Aurora Zogoiby in the
novel The Moor’s Last Sigh. In doing so, this essay suggests that the critical
project of aesthetic judgment in visual art provides Rushdie’s fiction with
an important conceptual frame of reference for reflecting on the historical
contradictions inherent in the secular myth of postcolonial India. With ref-
erence to Jamelie Hassan’s Trilogy (1990) and Anish Kapoor’s Blood Rela-
tions (2007), the chapter concludes by assessing the formal ways in which
these artworks respond to the precarious and ambivalent position that the
storyteller inhabits in an era of postcolonial modernity.
Employing the painterly form of the diptych to conceptualize the car-
tographic openness and dynamics of the city in The Moor’s Last Sigh,
Vassilena Parashkevova’s essay explores the ways in which Bombay and
Moorish Granada reflect each other in this novel to produce ‘mirror can-
vases.’ If Rushdie’s work offers a complex schema of reflexivity in which
cities, historical and cartographic tropes, identities, and travel are reconfig-
ured through the processes of refraction, doubling, folding and unfolding,
inversion, substitution, and permutation, in The Moor’s Last Sigh these
processes are informed by creative, intertextual variations on artistic meth-
ods and forms, specifically, the plastic and visual arts.
Joel Kuortti discusses both the metaphorical visual elements in the novel
The Moor’s Last Sigh and the documentary The Lost Portrait, directed by
Chris Granlund, which depicts Rushdie’s journey to India in search for a lost
portrait of his mother. All in all, the film captures the metaphorical literary
quality of layered narrative in very concrete terms. The idea of the palimp-
sest, Kuortti goes on to argue, is central to much of Rushdie’s writing, as he
interweaves parallel narratives and intertextual references and allusions into
a network of texts that become something else in this process. There are sev-
eral ways in which this is expressed in the writer’s oeuvre, but especially in
The Moor’s Last Sigh there is a marked interest to depict it in visual terms.
In this chapter, the focus is on the question of what might be the literary,
artistic, and philosophical corollaries of the prevalence of palimpsest.
Jenni Ramone’s chapter argues that in both The Enchantress of Florence
and The Moor’s Last Sigh there is a forced act of translation and at the same
time there is a clash of visual and verbal cultures. This essay relies on its very
close reading of two texts and its exegetical principles are drawn from a num-
ber of fields: the semiotics of the visual, textual criticism, religious exegesis, as
well as the transgressive nature of translators. It engages with the role of over-

zealous patronage in the creation of artworks and narrative texts in perhaps
two of the most visual Rushdie’s novels to demonstrate the porous boundaries
of the verbal and the visual. As argued by Ramone, in these two novels, the act
of visible translation mediates and marks this moment of touching or contami-
nation, a moment when visual and verbal elements clash.
Emerging from art history, the work of Michael Fried is discussed in Neil
ten Kortenaar’s revised version of his earlier essay “Postcolonial Ekphrasis:
Salman Rushdie Gives the Finger Back to the Empire” (1997). There Korte-
naar discussed the description by Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Midnight’s
Children, of a painting on his bedroom wall, a reproduction of John Ever-
ett Millais’s nineteenth-century historical narrative painting The Boyhood
of Raleigh. Kortenaar related the novel’s ekphrasis to the relation of the
colonized to the colonizer, and to the strategies of postcolonial discourse
to escape the grounds established by imperial art. In this revised essay, the
relation of Midnight’s Children to The Boyhood of Raleigh deserves fur-
ther critical development. Not only painting, but also photography, fi lm,
and advertising constantly inhabit Rushdie’s novels; in the next chapter,
whose main textual emphasis is on The Ground Beneath Her Feet and
Fury, Sandru sees these as both instruments of cultural critique and symp-
toms of leveling globalization. Ultimately, this chapter reads Rushdie’s fic-
tional use of modern technologies of representation to understand public
and private constructions of place, history, and identity.
As we have seen, cinema is intricately interwoven with Rushdie’s artistic
project. Florian Stadlter’s essay concentrates on the dynamic visual culture
of Hindi film, tracing the influence of its discourses on the novel Midnight’s
Children. It compares Rushdie’s text to the film Shree 420 (dir. Raj Kapoor,
1955) to highlight the function of Hindi cinema in the novel, specifically
the way it is critiqued and used as pastiche. Stadtler contends that Rush-
die’s emphasis on Indian cinematic practice is intimately related to the novels’
engagement with the Indian postcolonial socio-historical condition; in this
way, the visual culture of commercial Hindi cinema becomes a site for the
imaginary construction of national identity. Along lines similar to Morton’s
essay, Stadtler explores Indian popular cinema as an essential tool for Rush-
die’s articulation of a concept of India as a postcolonial independent nation
state and for the process of recalling and recuperating Bombay.
The purpose of Mendes’s chapter is to bring together and confront two
apparently unconnected texts, penned more than half a century apart by
two seemingly unrelated authors: Walter Benjamin’s essay on the project of
European modernity, epitomized by the city of Paris of the Second Empire—
“Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1935)—and Rushdie’s The
Ground Beneath Her Feet, a novel set during its fi rst half in the Indian
metropolis—now megalopolis—of Bombay, portrayed as an example of a
former European colony’s belated quest for modernity in postmodernity.
Within this context, this essay establishes thematic commonalities between
Benjamin’s approach to Paris and Rushdie’s Bombay understood as ‘Wom-
bay’; moreover, it will also put forward possible intertextual connections

between The Ground Beneath Her Feet and visual representations of both
the Indian metropolis and the Paris of the Second Empire.
Madelena Gonzalez demonstrates how, in an ironical reversal of readers’
expectations, in the novel Fury the author seems to be writing the book of
the film that is the contemporary experience in the society of the spectacle.
The aim of this essay is to analyze the nature of the visual aesthetic in
Rushdie’s novel Fury and to examine whether it is complicit with, or criti-
cal of Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle and Baudrillard’s simulacrum.
Sharing thematic commonalities with Gonzalez’s essay, the aim of Mita
Banerjee’s chapter is to argue that Rushdie’s fiction is characterized by the
competition of two kinds of visuality: that of popular culture, especially
television, and that of metaphor. Crucially, the visuality of popular cul-
ture—epitomized by what Rushdie’s fictional narratives seem to describe as
the idiocy of television—inevitably loses out. As Banerjee argues, Rushdie’s
fiction could hence be said to reverse the visual turn. Following this argu-
ment, instead of the primacy of the visual, what emerges is a deep-set media
competition, in which literature ultimately wins out. Even more disturb-
ingly, Banerjee compellingly notes, this media imbalance—the sagacity of
literary visuality versus the trite image-centeredness of television—is deeply
gendered. Indeed, Banerjee’s chapter poses innovative questions and draws
some remarkable connections in the depiction of the consumption of media
in post-Communist Eastern European novels and postcolonial Indian nov-
els, particularly in their perpetuation of the association of television view-
ing with passivity and reading literature with intellectual agency, as well as
their assigning of these roles to women and men, respectively.
Given the present-day dynamism in visual culture studies, with visual-
ity in literature being increasingly addressed in academic scholarship, I feel
this to be an appropriate moment to assess and articulate the engagement
between the visual and verbal in Rushdie’s fiction. The original research col-
lected here stands on the cutting edge: contributors apply a variety of critical
approaches to the intermedial intersections in Rushdie’s fiction, with topics
including visual media such as film, photography, and visual arts. Hence, the
strength of this collection lies not only in the uniqueness of its content and in
the fact that it deals with the writer’s latest output, but also in the methodol-
ogy adopted. Through a wide range of perspectives, this collection brings to
the fore how this aspect of Rushdie’s work—so central by his own admission
in essays and interviews—is indeed essential to his conception of what not
only literature, but also the visual arts can do. In this sense, contributors pro-
vide a sustained examination of how the interplay of the visual and the verbal
reflects the broader issues Rushdie’s writing is concerned with, namely: dis-
placement, migrancy, exotica, and the anxiety of authorship.
The essays in this volume might be critiqued for their ‘textualism’ and
endeavor to ‘read’ pictures. In defense of this approach, it is an inescap-
able fact that Rushdie enters into dialogue with visuality on reading terms.
The idea of reading is admittedly central to this volume. This dialogue
might thus be seen as an enduring manifestation of the linguistic turn

and still a long way from W. J. T. Mitchell’s ‘pictorial turn.’ However,
following the undisciplining legacy of cultural studies, the work com-
piled in this volume attempts to surpass restrictive discursive frameworks
discourses, specifically those that reside between literary and visual arts.
While engaging in new and fruitful combinations of theories and meth-
odologies, individual essays are interrelated by a common thread. They
move beyond a demonstration of the strong visual component in Rush-
die’s oeuvre, or an analysis of intertextual relations as pictures connect in
discontinuous and nonlinear structures of cross-reference in his writings.
This perspective can encourage readers to think flexibly across concep-
tual frameworks and to proceed on a path of open-ended exploration of
the existing and forthcoming Rushdie corpus.
NOTES
1. Salman Rushdie, “A Fine Pickle,” The Guardian, February 28, 2009,

accessed March 1, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/28/
salman-rushdie-novels-fi lm-adaptations.
2. David Cronenberg, “Cronenberg Interview,” in Salman Rushdie Interviews:
A Sourcebook of His Ideas, ed. Pradyumna S. Chauhan (Westport, CT and
London: Greenwood, 2001), 168.
3. Rushdie, “A Short Tale About Magic,” in The Wizard of Oz (London: BFI,
1992), 18.
4. He notes the story “was about a ten-year-old Bombay boy who one day hap-
pens upon a rainbow’s beginning, a place as elusive as any pot-of-gold end-
zone, and as rich in promises” (Rushdie, “A Short Tale About Magic,” 9).
5. Rushdie, “A Short Tale About Magic,” 9.
6. Rani Dube, “Salman Rushdie,” in Salman Rushdie Interviews: A Source-
book of His Ideas, ed. Pradyumna S. Chauhan (Westport, CT and London:
Greenwood, 2001), 9.
7. Vijay Mishra, “Salman Rushdie and Bollywood Cinema,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Salman Rushdie, ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2007), 11.
8. Mishra, “Salman Rushdie and Bollywood Cinema,” 19.
9. See Deepa Chordiya, “‘Taking on the Tone of a Bombay Talkie’: The Function
of Bombay Cinema in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,” ARIEL 38.4
(2007): 97–121; Vijay Mishra, “Salman Rushdie and Bollywood Cinema,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie, ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 11–28; and Hema Ramachandran,
“Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses: Hearing the Postcolonial Cinematic
Novel,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 40.3 (2005): 102–117. A
notable exception is John Thieme, “‘So Few Rainbows Any More’? Cinema,
Nostalgia and the Concept of ‘Home’ in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction,” Le Simpleg-
adi: Rivista Internazionale On-line di Lingue e Letterature Moderne 2 (2004),
accessed February 1, 2008, http://web.uniud.it/all/simplegadi/.
10. Rushdie quoted in Gerald Marzorati, “Salman Rushdie: Fiction’s Embat-
tled Infidel,” New York Times, January 29, 1989, accessed February 20,
2010,http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE6DD1F39F93A
A15752C0A96F948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=6.
11. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie dubs Bombay talkies as “Epico-Mythico-
Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art” (Rushdie, The Moor’s Last

Sigh (London: Vintage, 1996), 148–149), that is, a blending together of vari-
ous genres such as comedy, musical, action fi lm, drama, and romance.
12. In an interview, Rushdie discloses that “one of the reasons [he] could tackle
such a structure [the three different storylines in The Satanic Verses] and
expect [his] readers to follow [him] is that those of us who are educated
in the cinema (and that means everybody) are very familiar with the idea
of interrupted narrations—flashbacks, dream sequences, etc., are the com-
monplaces of cinema” (Rushdie quoted in Colin MacCabe, “Salman Rush-
die Talks to the London Consortium About The Satanic Verses,” in Salman
Rushdie Interviews: A Sourcebook of His Ideas, ed. Pradyumna S. Chauhan
(Westport, CT and London: Greenwood, 2001), 213).
13. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 101.
15. Rushdie quoted in Kate Muir, “Exclusive Interview With Salman Rushdie,”
The Times, April 4, 2008, accessed April 10, 2008, http://entertainment.
timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3681048.ece.
16. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representa-
tion (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 4.
17. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 4.
24. Mitchell, “There Are No Visual Media,” Journal of Visual Culture 4.2
(2005): 257.
28. Graham Huggan, Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of
Postcolonial Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 5.
29. Huggan, Interdisciplinary Measures, 7.
30. Huggan, Interdisciplinary Measures, 7.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blade Runner. DVD. Directed by Ridley Scott, 1982; Burbank, CA: Warner Home
Video, 1997.
Brazil. DVD. Directed by Terry Gilliam, 1985; New York: Criterion, 1999.
Bridget Jones’s Diary. DVD. Directed by Sharon Maguire, 2001; New York: Mira-
max, 2001.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. DVD. Directed by Robert Wiene, 1920; Los Angeles,
CA: Image Entertainment, 1997.
Chordiya, Deepa. “‘Taking on the Tone of a Bombay Talkie’: The Function of Bombay
Cinema in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.” ARIEL 38. 4 (2007): 97–121.
Cronenberg, David. “Cronenberg Interview.” In Salman Rushdie Interviews: A
Sourcebook of His Ideas, edited by Pradyumna S. Chauhan, 167–178. West-
port, CT and London: Greenwood, 2001.
Dube, Rani. “Salman Rushdie.” In Salman Rushdie Interviews: A Sourcebook of
His Ideas, edited by Pradyumna S. Chauhan, 7–19. Westport, CT and London:
Greenwood, 2001.

Huggan, Graham. Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of Post-
colonial Studies. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008.
Kortenaar, Neil ten. ‘Postcolonial Ekphrasis: Salman Rushdie Gives the Finger Back
to the Empire’. Contemporary Literature 38, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 232-259.
The Lost Portrait. Documentary. Directed by Chris Granlund. Transmission Sep-
tember 11, 1995. London: BBC/RM Arts, 1995.
Marzorati, Gerald. “Salman Rushdie: Fiction’s Embattled Infidel.” New York
Times, January 29, 1989. Accessed February 20, 2010.http://query.nytimes.
com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE6DD1F39F93AA15752C0A96F948260&sec
=&spon=&pagewanted=6.
Millais, John Everett. The Boyhood of Raleigh. 1870. Tate Gallery.
Mishra, Vijay. “Salman Rushdie and Bollywood Cinema.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Salman Rushdie, edited by Abdulrazak Gurnah, 11–28. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation.
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
. “There Are No Visual Media.” Journal of Visual Culture 4(2) (2005): 257–266.
Muir, Kate. “Exclusive Interview With Salman Rushdie.” The Times, April 4,
2008. Accessed April 10, 2008. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/
arts_and_entertainment/books/article3681048.ece.
Peter’s Friends. DVD. Directed by Kenneth Branagh. 1992; New York: Samuel
Goldwyn Company, 2008.
Ramachandran, Hema. “Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses: Hearing the Post-
colonial Cinematic Novel.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 40.3
(2005): 102–117.
Rushdie, Salman. “A Fine Pickle.” The Guardian, February 28, 2009. Accessed
March 1, 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/28/salman-rushdie-
novels-fi lm-adaptations.
. The Enchantress of Florence. London: Vintage, 2008.
. ‘Blood Relations – An Interrogation of the Arabian Nights II.’ The Tele-
graph India, Monday 23rd October 2006. Accessed September 19, 2009.http://
www.telegraphindia.com/1061023/asp/opinion/story_6882489.asp.
. Fury. 2001. London: Vintage, 2002.
. The Ground Beneath Her Feet. 1999. New York: Picador, 2000.
. The Moor’s Last Sigh. London: Vintage, 1996.
. Midnight’s Children. 1981. London: Vintage, 1995.
. The Wizard of Oz. London: BFI, 1992.
. “A Short Tale About Magic.” In Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz, 9–57.
London: BFI, 1992.
. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta,
1991.
Shree 420. DVD. Directed by Raj Kapoor, 1955. Mumbai: Yash Raj: 2001.
Slumdog Millionaire. DVD. Directed by Danny Boyle, 2008; Los Angeles, CA:
Twentieth Century Fox, 2009
Then She Found Me. DVD. Directed by Helen Hunt, 2007; New York: THINK-
fi lm, 2008.
Thieme, John. “‘So Few Rainbows Any More’? Cinema, Nostalgia and the Con-
cept of ‘Home’ in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction.” Le Simplegadi: Rivista Internazi-
onale On-line di Lingue e Letterature Moderne 2 (2004). Accessed February 1,
2008. http://web.uniud.it/all/simplegadi/.
The Wizard of Oz. DVD. Directed by Victor Fleming, 1939; Burbank, CA: Warner
Home Video, 2005.

2 Merely Connect
Salman Rushdie and Tom Phillips
Andrew Teverson
Give me a line drawn across the world and I’ll give you an argument.
(Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line, 2002, 423)
Now the arts connect.

(Tom Phillips, A Humument, Fourth Edition, 2005, 7)
TWO PORTRAITS
In the early 1990s, Salman Rushdie, still in hiding, sat for two portraits by
the British artist, Tom Phillips.1 During these sittings, which took place over
the period of almost a year, Phillips, as well as discovering that Rushdie
was a formidable table-tennis opponent, gained a first-hand understanding
of Rushdie’s political plight—a plight made all-too-apparent by the fact that
their encounters had to take place in secret, “hedged about with the protocol
of high security.”2 Phillips responds directly, if cryptically, to this plight in
the second of the two portraits he completed as a result of these sittings: a
lithograph titled Salman Rushdie as D.I.Y. Zola (1993) (figure 2.1).
This lithograph shows the head and shoulders of Rushdie, cross-hatched
in black, white, and sepia lines, set in front of a second portrait, framed on
the wall behind him, of Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish French Officer who was
falsely accused of treason by the French army in 1894, and incarcerated
for a number of years in a penal colony in Guiana.3 On Rushdie’s shirt, in
the foreground of the portrait, is written, in large, light-brown letters that
stand out against the denser black of his clothing, the name “Jack Hughes,”
and behind Rushdie’s head and back are several vertical lines that might
represent a wallpaper pattern, but that also suggest prison bars—a detail
that, combined with the mug-shot quality of the portrait, works to imply
that Rushdie had effectively been incarcerated by the fatwa passed upon his
life by the Ayatollah Khomeini in February 1989.
The words on Rushdie’s shirt in this portrait initially confound the
viewer. Why has the highly-recognizable, because much broadcast, image
of Salman Rushdie been coupled with a name that, as almost every con-
sumer of media in the world at that time would know, is not his own? Who
is Jack Hughes, and what does Rushdie have to do with him? Arguably,
this initial bafflement is one of the intended effects of this picture puzzle:

Merely Connect 13
Figure 2.1 Tom Phillips, Salman Rushdie as D.I.Y. Zola, Lithograph, 1993.
in experiencing a momentary uncertainty about the relationship between

the image of Rushdie and his name, the viewer is forced to respond directly
to the fact that Rushdie, throughout the affair, was misnamed and misrep-
resented by both his accusers and the mass media, and was experiencing a
disjunction of identity not dissimilar to the split between name and image

14 Andrew Teverson
dramatized iconographically by Phillips in the portrait. In an interview
conducted in 1992, at about the same time this portrait was made, Rushdie
told his interviewer, Satoshi Yanai, that one of the most disturbing effects
of fi nding himself “reviled publicly on television and in the press every
single day” was realizing that his public identity no longer coincided with
his own sense of self. “One of the problems of world media,” he observed
is that information can now be spread so fast that within a day or

two this kind of demon self can be invented and disseminated all over
the planet and then suddenly you see this false Rushdie, this kind of
Frankenstein’s monster of Rushdie walking round the world and with
people reacting to it as if it was me and wanting to murder it.4
By breaking the link between the image of Rushdie and his name, Phillips is
asking viewers to re-assess the image of Rushdie absorbed from media cov-
erage, and to entertain the possibility that the freakish Rushdie of the media
circus is not necessarily identical with Rushdie as he lives and breathes.
The choice of name in this portrait is not purely arbitrary, however.
In a device beloved of earlier artists such as Marcel Duchamp, the name
“Jack Hughes” is an aural pun that makes phonetic allusion to the phrase
“J’accuse,” the celebrated title of the open letter sent to the newspaper
L’Aurore in 1898 by the novelist Emile Zola accusing the army and the gov-
ernment of framing Dreyfus and concealing evidence that would have led
to his exoneration.5 The allusion to this phrase, coupled with the portrait of
Dreyfus, implies that Phillips fi nds in the Dreyfus Affair a politically sug-
gestive historical analogy for the Rushdie Affair: like Dreyfus, Phillips sug-
gests, Rushdie is being falsely accused, and like Dreyfus he is being found
guilty by a prejudiced media.
Rushdie does not only play the role of Dreyfus, the victim, in this anal-
ogy, however, but also the role of Zola the accuser (a ‘D.I.Y. Zola’), for
it is Rushdie who blazons forth the words “Jack Hughes” on his shirt,
and Rushdie who confronts his persecutors with a glowering look of defi-
ance. This association with Zola is further compounded by the fact that
Rushdie’s situation at the time of the portrait was arguably more similar
to Zola’s situation after the publication of the “J’accuse” letter than it was
to Dreyfus’s. Zola, following his open letter was tried in a French court,
fi ned, and sentenced to prison for libel—a sentence he only escaped by
fleeing to England. Rushdie, likewise, has been unjustly persecuted for his
writings, and has been forced to escape persecution by going into hiding.
The portrait is, thus, at once an expression of sympathy with Rushdie for
the situation in which he found himself (Rushdie as Dreyfus) and a celebra-
tion of his symbolic role as a defender of liberty and free speech (Rushdie
as Zola).6
Salman Rushdie (1992) (figure 2.2), the second portrait to come out of
the series of sittings Rushdie did for Phillips, and the one that took up the

Merely Connect 15
bulk of their time together (about twelve sittings), represents what Phillips
describes, with a characteristic awareness of the many-layered aspect of
representation, as “my dream of his dreams of India and London.”7 On the
left hand side of this oil on canvas portrait, Phillips offers a depiction of
India as a bright, fertile space, denoted by walled gardens, pink neo-classi-
cal architecture, plants, and animals (a depiction that might derive in part
from Rushdie’s description of New Delhi in Midnight’s Children (1981) as
a city in which “a race of pink conquerors has built palaces in pink stone”).8
On the right of the portrait Phillips depicts London, in more muted tones,
as an urban space dominated by tower blocks and skyscrapers. Rushdie,
appropriately, appears at the conjunction of these two places, acting as
a join across cultural divides as well as the locus in which both cultures,
already hybrid in themselves, blend. From the right side of Rushdie’s head
issues a cloud of calligraphic patterns that signify the act of writing—a
cloud that dissolves, immediately above his head, into butterflies: creatures
of mutability and imaginative flight that recall Rushdie’s image of a butter-
fly cloud from The Satanic Verses (1988), borrowed in turn from the master
of magical transformations, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.9 From the left side
of his head issues a cubist nude which moves towards another pair of nude
Figure 2.2 Tom Phillips, Salman Rushdie, Oil on Canvas, 1992.

16 Andrew Teverson
figures: a pink, gelatinous woman reclining postcoitally against a tree, and
a blue, purple, and green man (presumably not one of the ‘roseate’ conquer-
ors) dancing joyfully above her, hands held wide and genitals flapping in
the wind. The image of the nudes in the top left corner is balanced by the
silhouette of a mosque in the top right. The immediate logic of the canvas
suggests that these two images are opposites, held apart from each other in
creative tension at the top two corners of the painting. Like the cityscape of
London and the terrain of India, however, these two images are also implic-
itly blended in the person of Rushdie, from whose imagination they are
issuing. This representation of the blending of the sacred and the profane
in Rushdie’s imagination symbolizes an aspect of his fiction that Phillips
sees as central to his artistic practice: his impulse to mix that which culture
would usually keep apart and his desire to test one world-view (the ‘sacred’
world-view) through its exposure to other (profane) world-views. It also
identifies, and again celebrates, that tendency in Rushdie’s work that may
be established as the ultimate source of the fatwa passed on his life: its read-
iness to cause offense by crossing the difficult political line that demarcates
areas of culture that have been identified by those with social or religious
power as ‘sacred’ and therefore immunized from satirical interrogation.
TWO BOOKS
Since the completion of these portraits of the early 1990s, Phillips has con-
tinued to reflect upon the political predicament of Salman Rushdie, and
to use his artwork as a means of expressing solidarity with Rushdie. In
1992, immediately after the completion of the portraits, Phillips worked
on a book whilst artist in residence at Harvard University’s Carpenter Cen-
tre, that was published, in very limited edition, the following year under
the title: Merely Connect: A Questschrift for Salman Rushdie. This book,
upon which Rushdie “collaborated at a distance,” is an assemblage of
diverse materials, pictorial and textual, designed, as the neologism ‘quest-
scrift’ suggests, to both celebrate Rushdie’s work and to defend it against
its ideological detractors (it is, at one and the same time, a festschrift and
a quest for justice).10 It incorporates preparations for the two portraits dis-
cussed above, as well as several other drawings and designs Phillips made
during his sessions with Rushdie; it also includes some conventional literary
materials—such as passages from Rushdie’s then forthcoming novel The
Moor’s Last Sigh (1995)—and some experimental textual materials such
as a “treated manuscript” in which, as Phillips explained to Lucy Shortis,
“Rushdie’s handwriting has been cut and reassembled to give the character
of his script without, so to speak, its characters.”11 This book is both an
overt statement and an aesthetic figuration of the ‘connection’ that had
formed between Phillips and Rushdie by 1993. It connects them in an overt
sense because it is the embodiment of Phillips’s reflections on the Rushdie

Merely Connect 17
Affair and because its title, derived from E. M. Forster’s epigraph to How-
ard’s End (1980), “only connect,” reflects their shared interest in Forster’s
work and the fact that they had both, coincidentally, met Forster when they
were nineteen.12 It also connects them on the aesthetic level because it is a
work that has been created across the boundary of the visual arts and the
literary arts. This act of boundary crossing reinforces, at the aesthetic level,
the thematic argument being made in this artist’s book more generally: if
the world-view that Khomeini represents concerns the strict segregation
of different belief systems into the ‘pure’ and ‘impure,’ this book—with
its manifold mere connections across the lines of culture—represents the
overlapping of different ways of seeing the world, and an acceptance of the
fact that the lines we draw across the world are never absolute and never
inviolable. The blending of the arts that occurs in Rushdie’s meeting with
Tom Phillips thus contributes to the political agenda of the work: it asserts
a view of culture that is based on dialogue between sites of difference, and
it rejects absolutist ideologies founded upon a belief in segregation, purity,
and isolationism.
Since 1992, Phillips has also incorporated materials from Merely Con-
nect into the ongoing project A Humument (1973–2005)—his ‘treated’
version of W. H. Mallock’s fin de siècle philosophical novel A Human Doc-
ument (1892), the pages of which Phillips has been illustrating, collaging,
decorating, and defacing ever since he fi rst found a second-hand edition of
it in a furniture repository in Peckham in 1966.13 Five pages of the 2005
edition of the Humument in particular make both a textual and a picto-
rial comment on the Rushdie Affair, a comment signaled by the fact that,
on each of these pages, Phillips, using a technique that will be familiar to
Humument readers, has picked Rushdie’s initials out from the flow of Mal-
lock’s original text and encased them in “blobular spaces” connected by
“rivers” carved through the type.14 Some of these pages are worth dwelling
on briefly, since they demonstrate the extent to which the figure of Rushdie
has become an iconic leitmotif in Phillips’s oeuvre.
Page 135 (figure 2.3), the second page in the 2005 Humument to make
direct reference to Rushdie and the Rushdie Affair (the fi rst is page 43), is a
composition of strips that have been cut from Mallock’s Human Document
and colored in shades of dusky green, blue, and purple. Beneath the color-
ing it is still possible to see the type of A Human Document (Mallock’s
text is, in Wagner-Lawlor’s terms, allowed to ‘ghost through’ as “a legible
[ . . . ] graphic background”),15 but scrawled over the top of Mallock’s text
is another script made from fragments of Rushdie’s handwriting decom-
posed using the method described by Shortis.16 This presentation of two
textualities, one laid over the other, is resonant, given Rushdie’s interest in
palimpsestic writings, competing languages, and layered narratives. Here,
visually rendered, is a reflection of the meeting of traditions that has preoc-
cupied Rushdie, formally, thematically, and culturally, in all of his works of
fiction. This page makes a more direct allusion to Rushdie, however, in the

18 Andrew Teverson
Figure 2.3 Tom Phillips, Page 135, A Humument, Fourth Edition, 2005.

Merely Connect 19
‘found’ verses, that have been recovered from Mallock’s text, and that con-
stitute a gnomic defense of poetry. These read, blob-by-blob: “understand
verse necessity / merely live the poetry / merely connect / butterfly triumph /
Poetry—let me go on”; and, conclusively, “poets defi ne value.” Three of the
motifs that Phillips associates with Rushdie appear here: the phrase ‘Merely
Connect’ that is the title of their shared artist’s book; the initials ‘sr’ that
appear at the bottom of the page as a marker of Rushdie’s presence, and the
butterflies that fi rst materialized over Rushdie’s head in the portrait Salman
Rushdie, symbolizing, in this context, poetic vulnerability as well as lin-
guistic creativity. Together, these allusions to Rushdie serve to give specific
meaning to the defense of poetry expressed in the verses: Phillips is urging
a recognition of the value of literature after the assaults upon it during the
Rushdie Affair (“poets defi ne value”), and he is demanding that writers and
artists have a right to be free from censorship and political manipulation
(“Poetry—let me go on”).
A similar defense of literature is mounted on Page 194, which incorpo-
rates the initials “sr” and the phrase “merely connect,” and also introduces
into A Humument a representation of Dreyfus, with whose political plight,
as we have seen, Phillips associates Rushdie in the portrait discussed above.
The fragment of verse used on this page further consolidates the compari-
son of Rushdie and Dreyfus by identifying them both as figures who have
been tested by catastrophe (it reads: “come the time / come the test / to /
love / my / catastrophe”). This thematic reflection upon the Dreyfus Affair
then recurs nearly fifty pages later in A Humument, on page 242; a page
divided into two differently shaped rectangles, separated by a red bar, with
the phrase “J’accuse” written in each rectangle. Again, this page incorpo-
rates the initials “sr” and again Phillips mounts a defense of artistic free-
dom, appointing himself “counsel for the fiction / counsel for the art voice
/ counsel for the text” and declaring, in this role of counselor, that attacks
on art characterized by the Rushdie Affair can only spring from a “rhetoric
of ruin.” This act of libertarian counseling is followed immediately by page
243 (figure 2.4); the most overt challenge, on Phillips’s part, to the forces
of authority that have sought to pass judgment on Rushdie and, by impli-
cation, all artists. This page is dominated by an arched portal surrounded
by a calligraphic design, and inscribed into these graphic representations
of sacred spaces and sacred writings, in bubbles of verse, is a profane and
comic rejection of inflexible and absolutist forms of orthodoxy: “Dogma /
the words of / some miraculous source? / the truth of / infallible / traditions?
/ up yours / betrayal / take a new turn. / back to reason.”
Phillips, on this page, not only offers a reiteration of his defense of Rush-
die, he does it using the same strategies that Rushdie employed to such
effect in The Satanic Verses: he counters an ideological insistence upon
the inviolability of the sacred text with an irreverent refutation of it and
in so doing proposes that no ‘dogma’ is beyond interrogation or beyond
satiric renunciation. This page is Tom Phillips’s most direct homage to The

20 Andrew Teverson
Figure 2.4 Tom Phillips, Page 243, A Humument, Fourth Edition, 2005.

Merely Connect 21
Satanic Verses—not least because it uses the same aesthetic strategies that
feature so prominently in Rushdie’s novel.
In each of the representations of Rushdie considered so far—the two
portraits, the questschrift, and the Humument pages—Phillips’s principle
concern appears to be with the Rushdie Affair. Phillips defends Rushdie,
laments the attack on his freedom, satirizes the forces that have condemned
him, and celebrates his tenacity. In these respects, his interest in Rushdie
seems to be focused primarily on the single issue of the fatwa and its conse-
quences. To see Phillips’s engagement with Rushdie and his work as being
limited in its significance to the social and political event of the fatwa,
however, is to miss the fact that Phillips’s feelings of political solidarity
with Rushdie over the Affair spring from a more fundamental recognition
that their arts connect at manifold points—not just over the fault line of the
fatwa, but also over aesthetic, philosophical, and temperamental divides.
This becomes apparent if we compare Phillips’s novel, A Humument, with
Rushdie’s pre-fatwa novel Midnight’s Children—two fictions that, despite
their manifest physical difference, share a number of thematic and aesthetic
concerns. These shared concerns would take a separate essay to explore
fully, but they include, briefly: comparable protagonists (Saleem Sinai, like
Phillips’s Bill Toge, is a questing everyman engaged upon a search for love
and meaning); a semi-autobiographical inclination to explore the develop-
ment of the self; a preoccupation with the fragmentation of experience;
a desire, channeled through the protagonists, to assemble the fragments
of experience into a coherent narrative;17 an interest in the ways in which
pictures or narratives can be framed; and a sense that textuality is so inex-
haustible that the frames used to contain narratives will always prove inad-
equate to the task.18 Perhaps one of the arterial ‘mere connections’ between
Rushdie and Phillips, however, concerns their mutual desire to, in the lan-
guage of the Humument, “Surprise / the shelves / disturb / old books”
(page 75). This imperative is followed quite literally by Phillips in his ‘treat-
ment’ of Mallock’s A Human Document—a process of textual recycling
that acts to displace a work of late Victorian fiction and re-place it in a
different context in which it can be used to reflect a different kind of world-
view.19 Rushdie, more figuratively but no less meaningfully, also repeatedly
invokes and displaces earlier traditions of representation—many of them
literary, but many of them also cinematic, photographic, and artistic. In
Midnight’s Children, for instance, as Neil ten Kortenaar has demonstrated,
Rushdie makes substantial and sustained uses of John Everett Millais’s
painting The Boyhood of Raleigh (1870); an image that hangs, as a print,
on Saleem’s bedroom wall, and which enters his idiosyncratic constella-
tion of personalized symbols. 20 In its original context, this representation
of nascent imperialist yearning celebrates the colonial impulse. It offers
a nostalgic representation of the origins of empire as an innocent boyish
adventure; it also seeks to legitimize the imperial project by implying, as
Saleem apprehends in Midnight’s Children, that the fisherman’s pointing

22 Andrew Teverson
fi nger is a fi nger of destiny, and so encodes Raleigh’s, and Europe’s, right
to the imperial mission. Reconfigured in Midnight’s Children, however, “in
a context that the painter could not have intended or even imagined,” the
painting comes to fulfill quite different functions—none of them entirely
detached from its imperial significances, but none of them identical with
them either. 21 The pointing fisherman, who, in his fi rst iteration, represents
an invitation to Raleigh to sail the seas and conquer the world, becomes,
in his second iteration, an invitation (or perhaps a challenge) to Saleem and
his generation to redefi ne that world for themselves. Likewise, the image’s
endorsement of the mission of empire, by virtue of its repetition in a novel
about postcolonial India, becomes instead a focus for the interrogation of
the mission of empire and for an analysis of the ways in which empire was
discursively produced and maintained.22 Saleem’s narrative thus transplants
the image produced by Millais into a different context, in the process desta-
bilizing the established meanings of the image, and opening it up to new
significances. In the language of Phillips, Rushdie has ‘treated’ the work of
Millais and in the act of treating it he has made it possible for the text to
be used, as Phillips claims he uses Mallock, to “ironically [ . . . ] speak for
causes against [its] grain.”23
Rushdie’s use of Millais, which mirrors Phillips’s use of Mallock, is
indicative of a further “mere connection” between them: their mutual desire
to work intertextually across the lines of image and text, which in turn
allows them to explore the points at which writing and images intersect
and overlap. In conducting this exploration they seek to understand how
the meaning of a text or image is transformed as it is translated between
different mediums of representation. How does a visual text change if it
becomes words? How does a verbal text change if the words are seen as
images? What remains of the original meaning, and what changes? What
is lost in translation? And what is gained? These speculative interrogations
are approached from different locations by Rushdie and Phillips. Phillips
‘treats’ Mallock’s novel as an artist, Rushdie ‘treats’ Millais’s painting as
a writer. The very act of defi ning them in these terms, however, draws
attention to how inadequate such rigid categorizations are; for though, in a
reductive sense, Rushdie is a writer and Phillips is an artist, it is simultane-
ously apparent that both of them meet in a hybrid space between, where
image and text become a composite form, and the categorizations that hold
them apart blur.
RUSHDIE’S IMAGETEXT
But what does it mean to say that Rushdie transgresses the borderline
between literary text and visual image? Clearly, Rushdie’s work is of a very
different formal order to Phillips’s. As will be obvious to all viewers and
readers, Phillips, in each of the compositions described above, acts as both

Merely Connect 23
wordsmith and imagesmith, and makes no strict distinction between the
two practices: words function as visual objects, and visual objects engage
in forms of discourse. 24 Rushdie’s prose, by contrast, remains almost purely
literary in form: he does not incorporate pictures or other visual materials
into his fictions, neither is he noted for his manipulation of the ‘concrete’
dimension of his textuality. On a figurative level, as is well established,
Rushdie plays with language—with the sound and shape of language and
with the structures of sentences, paragraphs, novels; but this figurative
transformation of words rarely translates into a literal manipulation of
fonts, word-sizes, or the positioning of text on the page, as it does in the
work of more graphically experimental contemporary writers such as the
poet Kamau Brathwaite.
Whilst Rushdie’s prose is conventional in a way that Phillips’s art is
not, however, it would be a mistake to argue that he does not make any
use of the visual dimension of his script, or that imagework is entirely
absent from his text work. A single page of Midnight’s Children, viewed
as if it were a picture as well as a passage of narrative, is a more complex
and distinctive entity than a single page of the average realist text or
airport blockbuster. Rushdie’s prose, throughout this novel, is wrought
from lacunae and caesura between and around words, idiosyncratic uses
of capitalization, strategic deployments of italicization, words that are
impossibly long, sentences that are cut short, and new architectures of
phrase built, like meccano, out of letters, hyphens, quote marks, semi-
colons, and exclamations. His texts are, in this respect, not tame or static,
but inventive and unruly, and their unruliness derives to a significant
degree from the fact that Rushdie exploits the plasticity of his language
in order to shape and reshape the way we read and hear it. On page fi fty
of the 1993 Jonathan Cape edition of Midnight’s Children, for instance,
the words “FULL-TILT!,” “YAAAAAAAA!,” “BLAMM! BLAMM!,”
and “EEEYAAAH!”—spoken, or imagined, by Rashid the rickshaw boy,
who has seen the fi lm Gai-Wallah and been inspired to recreate some of
its action sequences using his rickshaw in place of a horse—are seen as
much as they are read because they have been capitalized, extended, and
equipped with explosive exclamation marks. The effect of the presentation
of the words in this form is to recreate something of their aural quality
as they would have been encountered by Rashid in the cinema: impres-
sive, formulaic, and dramatic. The technique also serves to fi x the words
in readers’ minds, so that when they appear again, in different contexts,
but in the same format, they are immediately recognizable—not just as
words, but also as visual icons. For instance, when, several pages later,
readers encounter the phrase “FULL-TILT,” which is used to describe
Saleem’s Aunt Emerald’s precipitous race through the streets to reveal the
hiding place of Nadir Khan (whom Rashid had, in the earlier scene, hid-
den), readers immediately see the narrative link between Rashid’s earlier
race towards Nadir Khan, and Emerald’s race to expose him. 25 Likewise,

24 Andrew Teverson
when the phrase “PELL-MELL!”—phonetically different but visually
cognate—appears two chapters further on to describe the frantic journey
of Mustapha Kemal, S. P. Butt, and Ahmed Sinai to the bottom of the
walls of the Old Fort to reclaim their bribe money that has been spilled
by monkeys, readers understand that there is a connection between their
motion and the motion of their two forerunners, Rashid and Emerald. 26
In these passages, readers recognize the formula that Rushdie has estab-
lished to signify rapid, desperate, and narratively significant motion; they
also comprehend that something conceptually important connects these
scenes, no less surely than the rivers through the type connect phrases in
Phillips’s Humument. In this case, that conceptual connection concerns
intercommunal violence between Hindus and Muslims, and the cata-
strophic failure of efforts to prevent the partition of India along religious
lines—a failure that, in Rushdie’s memorable conceit, puts an end to the
‘optimism bug’ of the mid-1940s. Nadir Khan’s headlong fl ight is a result
of the assassination of Mian Abdullah, the Muslim leader of the Free
Islam Convocation, who has been campaigning against the creation of a
separate Muslim state, and whose death represents the abortion of Mus-
lim opposition to partition. Khan is rescued by Rashid, who is recreating
scenes from a fi lm that has been inflaming Hindu/Muslim antagonisms
by celebrating intrepid Hindu resistance to villainous Muslim cow-killers,
and he is betrayed, by Emerald, to Major Zulfi kar, whose name is “famous
[ . . . ] amongst Muslims” as “the name of the two-pronged sword carried
by Ali, the nephew of the prophet Muhammad.”27 The headlong fl ight of
S. P. Butt, Mustapha Kemal, and Ahmed Sinai, meanwhile, is caused by
the fact that they, as Muslim businessmen, are being forced to pay money
to a fanatical anti-Muslim movement known, after the demon king in
the Hindu epic The Ramayana, as the Ravana gang, in order to prevent
their warehouses being burned to the ground. In each case, it becomes
apparent, communal violence and religious intolerance has contributed
to these frantic, out-of-control motions; and in each case the frenzy in
these episodes mirrors, in little, the bigger frenzy—also inspired by com-
munal mistrust—that was leading India, ‘FULL-TILT!,’ ‘PELL-MELL!,’
towards partition. Rushdie thus uses the visual dimensions of his text,
in these passages, to help establish these words as recurrent leitmotifs
around which an idea, or set of ideas, clusters, and this in turn enables
him to circumvent the ‘what-happens-nextism’ of conventional, linear
narrative, and to create alternative forms of meaning using patterns of
recurrence, repetition, and circularity.
Rushdie also seeks to reshape the physical formations of his language
by using innovative and experimental forms of punctuation in Midnight’s
Children. Most notable, in this regard, is his employment of the three-dot
caesura, which occurs throughout the novel, and is in evidence in the very
fi rst line of its fi rst page, where it marks a performative hesitation by the
narrator and so helps establish the improvised character of his narration:

Merely Connect 25
I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time. No, that won’t
do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Nar-
likar’s nursing home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time
matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it’s important to be more . . . On
the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact.28
This practice, as Rushdie has observed, was inspired by G. V. Desani’s novel

All About H. Hatterr (1948), a fiction which taught him “the importance
of punctuating badly” in order to “allow different kinds of speech rhythms
or different kinds of linguistic rhythms to occur.”29 Under the influence of
Desani, as Rushdie told Jean-Pierre Durix in interview, “I found I had to
punctuate [ . . . ] in a very peculiar way [ . . . ] I had to use dashes too much,
keep exclaiming, putting in three dots, sometimes three dots followed by
semi-colons followed by three dashes.”30 This plastic manipulation of text
remodels the ways in which we see, read, and hear the language, and, in the
process, opens language up to new kinds of uses and new forms of expres-
sion. Such visual-linguistic modeling can thus be seen as part of a broader
project in Rushdie’s writing of endeavoring to “break up the language and
put it back together again in a different way,” which in turn functions to
re-inforce Rushdie’s anti-colonial, postcolonial mission to recover English
from colonial uses.31
Rushdie’s fiction also contests the distinction between image and text at a
more conceptual level, by drawing heavily upon visuality and visualization
in his constructions of the scenes of his fictions. In Midnight’s Children this
is done in two distinctive but interrelated ways. Firstly, it is apparent in Sal-
eem’s desire (and perhaps Rushdie’s desire) to see, or re-see, the world of his
childhood as if it were a picture; to “restore the past” to himself “not in the
faded greys of old family-album snapshots, but whole, in CinemaScope and
glorious Technicolor.”32 Secondly, it is done through the device of ekphra-
sis: the recreation, in words, of an image that either has, or is supposed to
have, an independent existence outside the text as a photograph, fi lm, art-
work, sculpture, or other visual work. The former device is apparent in the
minute and copious endeavor, on Saleem’s part, to recreate, from memory,
the Bombay of his childhood—a valiant but doomed project since words
cannot become places, and the lost past cannot be returned to the present.
The second device is apparent both in the recreation of Millais’s painting
The Boyhood of Raleigh discussed above, which is explored extensively
as an ekphrastic act by Kortennar, and in the painstaking recreation of
the (fictional) photograph of Aadam Aziz, Mian Abdullah, the Rani of
Cooch Naheen, and Nadir Khan that occurs in the chapter titled “Hit-
the-Spittoon”—a recreation that seeks to demonstrate, contrary to Padma’s
scepticism, that a picture can talk.33 In these ekphrastic skirmishes, and in
Saleem’s Proustian labours to recover his childhood impressions of Bom-
bay, Rushdie seeks to break down the boundary between text and image,
and so to bring the visual into the presence of the literary.

26 Andrew Teverson
These uses of ekphrasis, along with the endeavors to visualize the past,
and the concrete uses of language and punctuation, suggest that Rushdie is,
through his texts, striving after a pictorial dimension that defies the bound-
aries of the conventional text. As W. J. T. Mitchell observes, however, it is
never enough simply to observe the presence of interactions between images
and texts. Acts of comparison alone lead to a conceptual dead end if they are
not supported by a corresponding recognition that the relationship between
image and text “is not a merely technical question,” but also a question
that has cultural significance, because word/text intersections are “a site of
conflict, a nexus where political, institutional, and social antagonisms play
themselves out in the materiality of representation.”34 “The real question to
ask when confronted with [ . . . ] image-text relations,” for Mitchell is not a
comparative one—“what is the difference (or similarity) between the words
and the images?”—but rather a socio-political one: “what differences do
the differences (and similarities) make?,” “why does it matter how words
and images are juxtaposed, blended, or separated?”35
Part of the answer to this question, in Rushdie’s case, is that the reduc-
tions, simplifications, and exclusions implicit in the rigid compartmen-
talization of the arts are associated, by him, with exclusionary practices,
segregations, and apartheids, at the level of culture and society. To refuse
an aesthetics of purity by allowing words to peep through the screen of
the artwork, or by allowing concrete images to loom up through a web
of words, is also to challenge dividing practices in society, to argue for
an acceptance of and tolerance for the complexity of culture, and for the
imaginative strength to endure messiness without trying to reduce it artifi-
cially to clarity and certainty. Rushdie’s ekphrastic hope, in this regard, is
that writing can sufficiently reach beyond its own formal boundaries—can
approximate the visual enough—to demonstrate, at one of the most fun-
damental levels of textuality, that otherness is never absolute—that no two
ontological categories are ever so radically different that it is impossible to
discover a basis for dialogue between them.
THE LINE AND THE CROSS
The figure of the cross—in the form of the mark of ‘X’—is one of the most
recurrent visual icons in Phillips’s work. It appears, as Wagner-Lawlor notes,
in his series Terminal Greys (1971–92) “which is composed entirely of over-
lapping X’s in a gradation of grey pigments,” and in his Flags series (1974)
“which features every possible permutation of the Union Jack, the central
design element of which is, of course, an X.”36 It also appears repeatedly in
A Humument, becoming a central part of the design on a significant propor-
tion of the pages, including the page on which Phillips has drawn an ‘x’ on
a wall through the rivers of Mallock’s text, and inscribed next to it: “Tom

Merely Connect 27
was here” (page 44). The cross is a prominent and potent figure, for Phillips,
because it represents the contestation of a line. It is a symbol of the capac-
ity to ‘merely connect’—and in this mere motion, deceptively innocuous, it
poses a challenge to those forces that would seek to compartmentalize, to
hold apart, to divide. It also, according to Wagner-Lawlor, is “itself a figura-
tion of the crossing or intersection of texts and images—that is to say, a trope
of intertextuality itself, of the associative nature of Phillips’s art.”37
The cross, in a less concrete, more figurative sense is also one of the
cardinal figures of Rushdie’s fiction, in which images of crossing, of migra-
tion, of carrying across, and of transgression feature heavily. And in Rush-
die’s fiction as in Phillips’s art, the representation of crossing involves the
connection of two points, diagonally, across a borderline; it represents the
transit of a migrant across national borders, the breaching of a line of con-
trol, a wall of force, a partition or a Berlin Wall, and a recognition that
culture and community always defy the ‘twoness’ symbolized by the single
line. For Rushdie as for Phillips, therefore, the cross symbolizes the refusal
of the existing lines of culture, the rejection of the lines that have been
drawn by established discourses, and it offers the utopian and radical hope
that these lines are never absolute, that they never fully enclose a defi nitive
space, in spite of the powerful forces of history, custom, and politics that
have brought them into being and sustained them in their existence.
In their collaboration, as this essay has shown, Rushdie and Phillips
engage in an act of crossing: they bisect the line that divides language from
the visual and show that this line, the very line that ought to defi ne and
delimit their own identity as a creators, is as illusory as the rest. In cre-
ating across the boundaries of artworks and literary texts they demon-
strate that the boundary between artwork and text work is a falsification
imposed upon a complex visual/textual field, and this in turn forms part
of an argument for a more complex view of the interrelations—the mere
connections—between the arts. This dissolution of the strict line between
visual art and novel, I would suggest, is a symbol—perhaps it is the sym-
bol—of all the other transgressions that Rushdie and Phillips engage in
throughout their work. In rejecting the distinction between visual and tex-
tual work, and in rejecting the very distinction that defi nes them as art-
ists, they anticipate—and lay the formal groundwork for—their assault on
binary distinctions of all descriptions: whether cultural, political, artistic,
or ideological. If a text cannot be pure, then the identities, nationalities,
and ethnicities it reflects cannot be pure. If the borderline between novel
and picture cannot be absolute, then no borderline—no line of control,
wall of force, national border, or color bar—can be absolute. This is why
the impurity of the word/image is so vital for both Phillips’s and Rushdie’s
aesthetic: because in the impurity of the word/image resides the impurity
of culture and identity—and this is an idea that is crucial to their shared
political and moral philosophy.

28 Andrew Teverson
ACKNOWLEGEMENTS
My thanks to Tom Phillips for reading and commenting upon this essay,
and for giving his generous permission to reproduce the images used.
NOTES
1. These portraits were subsequently displayed in Phillip’s exhibition Sacred

and Profane, which took place simultaneously at the South London Gal-
lery and the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1997. They can now be viewed in
an electronic copy of the catalogue for this exhibition. See Tom Phillips,
“Portraits: Salman Rushdie,” The Tom Phillips Homepage, accessed May 1,
2010, http://www.tomphillips.co.uk/portrait/srus/index.html.
2. See Phillips, “Portraits: Salman Rushdie.”
3. There is a wealth of literature on the Dreyfus Affair, but for a concise account
see Leslie Derfler, The Dreyfus Affair (Westport, CT and London: Green-
wood, 2002).
4. Satoshi Yanai, “Rushdie Interview,” Salman Rushdie Interviews: A Source-
book of His Ideas (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood, 2001), 116. The
interview was originally held in London on May 11, 1992 in preparation for
a news broadcast.
5. For an example of an earlier use of this device, see Marcel Duchamp’s revisi-
tation of the Mona Lisa, which he titles L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), a series of let-
ters which, when sounded out in French, form the obscene suggestion “Elle a
chaud au cul.” For Zola’s letter see Derfler, The Dreyfus Affair, 127–8.
6. A parallel between the Rushdie Affair and the Dreyfus Affair is also made
implicitly by Jeremy Jennings and Tony Kemp-Welch in their 1997 study
Intellectuals in Politics: From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie (Lon-
don: Routledge, 1997). See especially, p. 17.
7. See Phillips, “Portraits: Salman Rushdie.”
8. Midnight’s Children (1981; London: Jonathan Cape, 1993), 69.
9. See Cien Años de Soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude] fi rst published
in 1967, trans. Gregory Rabassa (London: Everyman, 1995).
10. Phillips, “Portraits: Salman Rushdie.”
11. Shortis, “Eroding the Darkness: The Art of Tom Phillips.” Letter Arts Review
14.1 (1997): 7. Phillips also made further portraits of Rushdie during his time
at Harvard, principally a lithograph incorporating a line from a poem by
Rushdie, (“Not to shut up. To sing on”) and another quoting in cuneiform
the ancient Mesopotamian poem “Ludlul bel nemeqi” (“I Will Praise the
Lord of Wisdom,” also known as “Poem of the Righteous Sufferer”).
12. See The Print Collector’s Newsletter 25 (1994). The phrase ‘only connect’
appears again in Howard’s End when Margaret anticipates advising Henry
Wilcox to “[l]ive in fragments no longer. Only connect.” The desire to “live
in fragments no longer” is one that is clearly apparent in the work of both
Salman Rushdie and Tom Phillips, and the mere connections that they make
in their work is one of the antidotes to a debilitating sense of fragmentation.
The fact that the phrase, as Phillips employs it here, differs subtly from Forst-
er’s usage, however, is perhaps an indication that he is both borrowing from
Margaret’s ideal and departing from it at the same time. Margaret expresses
the belief that it is possible to overcome the fragmentary character of experi-
ence: to connect fragments together to make new wholes. For Phillips, as for
Rushdie, experience remains intractably fragmentary, and the most that can

Merely Connect 29
be hoped for is that art can ‘merely’ link the fragments together so that they
are at least in dialogue. See Forster, Howard’s End (1910; London: Every-
man, 1992), 195.
13. The title A Humument, as is perhaps obvious, is a contraction of Mallock’s
title, A Human Document. For Phillips’ reflections on the creation of A
Humument see his “Notes on A Humument,” at the end of A Humument:
A Treated Victorian Novel, Fourth Edition (London: Thames and Hudson,
2005), n.p. For an excellent description of A Humument, see also Jennifer
Wagner-Lawlor, “A Portrait of the (Postmodern) Artist: Intertextual Subjec-
tivity in Tom Phillips’ A Humument,” Post Identity 2.1 (1999): 90–91.
14. The wonderful phrase ‘blobular spaces’ belongs to William H. Gass. See
his “A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel,” Art Forum 35 (November
1996), reprinted at http://humument.com/essays/gass.html, accessed July 20,
2010. The word ‘rivers’ is used by Phillips in his “Notes on A Humument,”
and is a common printer’s term.
15. Wagner-Lawlor, “A Portrait of the (Postmodern) Artist,” 90.
16. In an email to me Tom Phillips noted that the piece of handwriting used
in Merely Connect and subsequently in A Humument was given to him
by Rushdie and is “the fi rst publication of a fragment of a then work in
progress”—The Moor’s Last Sigh.
17. Saleem represents, or believes he represents, the children of independent
India, and seeks to bring his people together using his telepathic powers.
Toge, in a more literal but no less meaningful sense, symbolizes the concept
of togetherness because the letters of his name, ‘Toge,’ can only be found
in the letters of the words ‘together’ or ‘altogether’ in the text of Mallock’s
novel.
18. Phillips, reflecting upon his capacity to rework Mallock’s A Human Docu-
ment over and over again in manifold forms, remarks upon “the inexhaust-
ibility of even a single page” of this novel (“Notes on A Humument,” n.p.).
“There was nothing I wanted to say that I couldn’t get out of it” he told Steve
Xerri in interview (“Trick or Treatment,” n.p.). Rushdie’s fiction likewise
repeatedly emphasizes the inexhaustibility of textuality. At the start of Mid-
night’s Children, Saleem observes that he has “so many stories, too many”
to tell that it is going to be impossible to fit them into a single story of his life,
and the novel accordingly dramatizes his strategies for (and his failures in)
marshalling this plethora of possibilities into a coherent fiction (Midnight’s
Children, 11).
19. In fact, Mallock’s text itself problematizes representation by presenting its
narrative as a reconstruction of a story of a love affair out of recovered frag-
ments of diaries and letters—materials which are described strikingly in the
introduction as having been ‘treated.’ See A Human Document (New York:
Cassell, 1892), iii. Whilst the main narrative of A Human Document claims to
have resolved the fragments into the ‘whole story,’ however, the narrative of A
Humument foregrounds the impossibility of making the fragments add up.
20. See Kortenaar, “Postcolonial Ekphrasis: Salman Rushdie Gives the Finger
Back to the Empire,” Contemporary Literature 38.2 (1997): 232–259. As
Kortenaar observes, neither the painting nor the painter are named in the
novel, but “[e]verything in Saleem’s description of the print points to it being
a copy” of Millais’ painting (232).
21. Kortenaar, Postcolonial Ekphrasis, 235.
22. This, at least, is the most affi rmative reading of Rushdie’s re-utilization of
this image. It is also used, as Kortenaar points out, as a means of satirizing
Saleem’s middle class parents’ aspirations for him (Postcolonial Ekphrasis,
235–236).

30 Andrew Teverson
23. Phillips, “Notes on A Humument,” n.p.
24. See, for a discussion of this, James L. Maynard, “‘I fi nd / I found myself /
and / nothing / more than that’: Textuality, Visuality, and the Production of
Subjectivity in Tom Phillips’ A Humument.” The Journal of the Midwest
Modern Language Association 36.1 (2003): 86–87.
25. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 61.
29. See Jean-Pierre Durix, “Salman Rushdie” (interview), Conversations with
Salman Rushdie, ed. Michael Reder (Jackson: University of Mississippi
Press, 2000), 10.
30. Durix, “Salman Rushdie,” 10.
31. Durix, “Salman Rushdie,” 10.
32. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism: 1981–1991 (Lon-
don: Granta, 1991), 9–10.
33. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 45–46.
34. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays in Verbal and Visual Representation (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 91.
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Derfler, Leslie. The Dreyfus Affair. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood,

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edited by Michael Reder, 8–16. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000.
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Gass, William H. “A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel.” Art Forum 35
(November 1996). Reprinted at http://humument.com/essays/gass.html.
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Jennings, Jeremy and Tony Kemp-Welch, eds. Intellectuals in Politics: From the
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Back to the Empire.” Contemporary Literature 38.2 (1997): 232–259.
Mallock, William Hurrell. A Human Document. New York: Cassell, 1892.
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London: Everyman, 1995.
Maynard, James L. “‘I fi nd / I found myself / and / nothing / more than that’:
Textuality, Visuality, and the Production of Subjectivity in Tom Phillips’s A
Humument.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 36.1
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Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays in Verbal and Visual Representation.
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. “Notes on A Humument.” In Tom Phillips, A Humument: A Treated Vic-
torian Novel. London: Thames and Hudson, 2005

Merely Connect 31
. “Portraits: Salman Rushdie.” The Tom Phillips Homepage. http://www.
tomphillips.co.uk/portrait/srus/index.html. Accessed July 20, 2010.
. Tom Phillips Blog. http://tomphillipsinfo.blogspot.com/. Accessed July 20,
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. Tom Phillips: Works and Texts. London: Thames and Hudson, 1992.
Phillips, Tom and Salman Rushdie. Merely Connect: A Questschrift for Salman
Rushdie. Cambridge: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, 1993.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism: 1981–1991. Lon-
don: Granta, 1991.
. Midnight’s Children. London: Jonathan Cape, 1993.
. The Satanic Verses. Delaware: Consortium, 1992.
. Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992–2002. London: Jona-
than Cape, 2002.
Rowe, Anne. The Visual Arts and the Novels of Iris Murdoch. Studies in British
Literature 62. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2002.
Shortis, Lucy. “Eroding the Darkness: The Art of Tom Phillips.” Letter Arts
Review 14.1 (1997): 2–13.
Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer A. “A Portrait of the (Postmodern) Artist: Intertextual
Subjectivity in Tom Phillips’s A Humument.” Post Identity 2.1 (1999): 89–103.
Xerri, Steve. “Trick or Treatment.” Fiction (July 1988). Reprinted at http://www.
tomphillips.co.uk/essaysan/xerri/index.html. Accessed July 20, 2010.
Yanai, Satoshi. “Rushdie Interview.” In Salman Rushdie Interviews: A Source-
book of His Ideas, edited by Pradyumna S. Chauhan, 109–120.Westport, CT
and London: Greenwood, 2001.

3 Beyond the Visible
Secularism and Postcolonial Modernity
in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last
Sigh, Jamelie Hassan’s Trilogy, and Anish
Kapoor’s Blood Relations1
Stephen Morton
What is the relationship between the fiction of Salman Rushdie and the
visual arts, or visual culture? What is the rhetorical function and effect
of different visual media in the fictional world of Rushdie’s texts? And in
what ways has Rushdie’s fiction provided a conceptual resource for visual
artists? To begin to address these questions, it is important to state at the
outset that visual art and visual culture do not play a conventional rep-
resentational function in Rushdie’s writing. In Rushdie’s literary fiction,
paintings, films, and photographs, as well as comic books and advertising
do not merely perform a rhetorical function, as in the literary genre of
ekphrasis, and nor does visual culture function merely as a meta-textual
device for exploring the limits of literary representation (even though it may
do that too). Rather, as I will suggest in this essay, the artwork or visual
text provides Rushdie with a conceptual space for exploring the pressures
and contradictions of postcolonial modernity: a space for inventing and
re-inventing the nation, and for testing and exploring the limitations and
aporia of India’s secular democracy.
RUSHDIE, VISUAL ART, AND THE MODERNIST TROPE OF EXILE
Reading Rushdie’s engagement with visual culture in terms of the contradic-

tions and pressures of modernity, it may be tempting to draw comparisons
with developments in modernist visual art. Consider the trajectory of the
artist Marcel Duchamp, for instance. By moving from futurist painting to
the readymade in his artistic practice, Duchamp conveyed the relationship
between the work of art and the age of mechanical reproduction and scien-
tific innovation. “When I made this Glass,” Duchamp asserted in his notes
for the Large Glass (1915–23), “I did not intend to make a picture to be
looked at, but a picture in which one could simply use a tube of paint as a

Beyond the Visible 33
means and not an end.” In other words, Duchamp wanted to abandon “the
idea of painting for painting’s sake.”2 At stake in Duchamp’s movement
away from the practice of painting as a mode of artistic expression was
the recognition that painting was not an appropriate form of representa-
tion to convey the new speed and technological innovations associated with
modernity. It was perhaps for this reason that Duchamp called for artists
to “make a painting or sculpture as one winds up a reel of moving film.”3
The relationship between Duchamp’s experimentation with different forms
of visual technology and early twentieth-century scientific developments in
chemistry and physics are well documented. As the art historian Linda Dal-
rymple Henderson has argued, Duchamp’s notes on optical experimenta-
tion for the Large Glass address scientific issues such as electromagnetism
and chemistry, atomic theory, radioactivity, electrical discharges in gas-
filled tubes, changing states of matter, the liquefaction of gases, the kinetic-
molecular theory of gases, thermodynamics, classical mechanics, systems
of measurement, meteorology, and biology, as well as the technology of the
automobile, wireless telegraphy, incandescent and neon light bulbs, power
generation (old and new), and contemporary agriculture.4
In a similar way to Duchamp, Rushdie also exploits the aesthetic pos-
sibilities afforded by new visual technologies in his literary fiction to articu-
late the experience of modernity in India. In Midnight’s Children (1981),
for example, Rushdie suggests that the murder of Lila Sabarmati and her
lover, the filmmaker Homi Catrack, by Lila’s husband, the city police
commander, combines the “noble sentiments of the Ramayana” and “the
cheap melodrama of the Bombay talkie.”5 This crime of passion follows
an account in an earlier chapter of how Homi Catrack’s film The Lovers
of Kashmir was responsible for introducing the ‘indirect kiss’ to Indian
cinema. The indirect kiss, as Vijay Mishra explains, is a “special use of
montage where a cinematic cut to flowers or birds or a half-eaten apple
just before the lovers’ lips meet is meant to indicate the actual kiss that has
taken place, but which the spectator is forbidden to see.”6 Significant also
is Rushdie’s rewriting of the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre at Amritsar as a
film script, in which Saleem Sinai’s grandfather sneezes and covers the bod-
ies of the protesters in Mercurochrome as he does so. In this comic scene,
Rushdie draws attention to the way in which cinema as a representational
form constructs historical events and manipulates cause-effect relations.
By suggesting that the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre was caused by Ahmed
Sinai’s sneezing a red substance on the peaceful demonstrators rather than
an act of colonial violence precipitated by the military orders of the British
General Dyer given to his troops to fi re at the protesters, Rushdie draws
attention to the unreliability of his narrator and foregrounds the difference
between his fictional narrative of India’s history and dominant narratives
of Indian history, which present themselves as the truth.
Rushdie’s framing of historical events in terms of the media of Bom-
bay cinema is further exemplified in the opening chapter of The Satanic

34 Stephen Morton
Verses (1988). In this chapter, the narrator depicts the novel’s two pro-
tagonists, Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta, falling from Air India
Flight 420—a symbol of postcolonial modernity—after it has been blown
up by a Sikh terrorist group above the English Channel. The destruction
of the plane and the miraculous survival of Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel
Farishta develop this philosophical dimension of the novel further by rais-
ing questions about the possibility of reincarnation or life after death. For,
as Saladin and Gibreel fall from the plane, Gibreel’s body is taken over by
an invisible force that commands him to fly and sing a song in “a language
he did not know to a tune he had never heard.”7 This song is taken from
Raj Kapoor’s Bollywood classic Shree 420 (1955), a film about an eco-
nomic migrant from the countryside who arrives in Bombay and saves the
city’s homeless underclass from exploitation by the corrupt business elite.
By transporting this song from Bombay in 1950s India to London in the
1980s, Rushdie reframes the imperial metropolis as a global city that is
transformed by the migrant citizens who inhabit it. The responses of Gibreel
and Saladin to their apparently miraculous survival are significant because
they represent two different ways of thinking about religion in the novel.
Whereas “Gibreel never doubted the miracle,” Saladin Chamcha “tried to
reason it out of existence.”8 Chamcha’s secular and sceptical approach to
their survival seems to be supported by the narrator’s subsequent descrip-
tion of Gibreel as an Indian movie star, whose “big break arrived with the
coming of the theological movies.”9 This reference to theological movies is
significant because it draws attention to the novel’s artifice, and suggests
that the story of Saladin and Chamcha’s survival is itself a fictional con-
struct, which could be part of a movie script.
There is another similarity between Rushdie’s literary fiction and the
artistic practice of Marcel Duchamp. For like Duchamp’s artwork, Rushdie’s
fiction is also marked by the condition of exile—a condition that is often
associated with modernism. In The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (2007), T. J.
Demos argues that a “spirit of expatriation” and a “commitment to itiner-
ancy” infuse Duchamp’s artwork. In Demos’s reading, Duchamp “deployed
an art of mobile objects and disjunctive spaces, constructing experimental
installations and mixed-media assemblages that were extremely sensitive
to matters of location, framing and decontextualization.”10 For Demos, the
experience of exile “crystallized [ . . . ] within the structural and phenomeno-
logical conditions of [Duchamp’s] artwork itself.”11 In his portable museum,
la boîte-en-valise, for example, Duchamp transported miniature versions of
his life’s work within a suitcase, when he “fled the Nazi invasion of Paris
and became a refugee.”12 In a similar vein, Rushdie’s fictional evocation of
South Asia “in CinemaScope and glorious Technicolor” is underpinned by
the experience of exile, as he explains in “Imaginary Homelands” (1991):
It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates,

are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back,

even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look
back, we must also do so in the knowledge—which gives rise to pro-
found uncertainties—that our physical alienation from India almost
inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the
thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, imaginary
homelands, Indias of the mind.13
It is significant that the index to Rushdie’s imaginary homeland, which

opens this essay, is a photograph of the Bombay home into which he had
not yet been born. For it is this black and white photograph “dating from
1946” that framed Rushdie’s memory of Bombay—the city of his child-
hood—and prompted him to write fiction that attempted to restore the
past, “not in the faded greys of old family-album snapshots, but whole, in
CinemaScope and glorious Technicolor.”14 Just as Duchamp relied on dif-
ferent visual technologies to document his artwork, so Rushdie relied on
photographs, as well as his own memories of going to the Metro Cinema in
Bombay as a child to create “imaginary homelands” in his literary fiction.
There are of course problems with such comparisons. The comparison of
Rushdie and Duchamp as artists in exile, for instance, may run the risk of con-
firming Aijaz Ahmad’s suspicion that Rushdie’s writing replicates the modern-
ist trope of exile associated with writers such as James, Conrad, Pound, Eliot,
Joyce, and Stein.15 Such comparisons between the visual elements of Rushdie’s
fiction and the preoccupations of European modernists such as Marcel Duch-
amp are particularly limited because they overlook the specificity of India’s
postcolonial modernity, and the difficulties of synchronizing Indian modern-
ism in the literary and visual arts with the national histories of other modern-
isms.16 It is this specificity that Rushdie highlights in his engagement with
Indian visual art in The Moor’s Last Sigh, as I will now suggest. Against the
charge that Rushdie’s use of visual media functions as a form of ‘depthless’
postmodern pastiche, I want to argue that Rushdie’s engagement with Indian
modernism in The Moor’s Last Sigh valorizes the redemptive potential of the
artwork in the face of the violence associated with neo-liberal globalization
and religious fundamentalism in postcolonial India.
CRITICAL SECULARISM AND INDIAN

MODERNISM IN THE MOOR’S LAST SIGH
If Saleem Sinai’s narrative in Midnight’s Children mirrors Nehru’s cosmo-

politan vision of a secular Indian nation, the narrator of Rushdie’s sixth
novel The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) seems to be much less optimistic about
this cosmopolitan, secular vision of India’s postcolonial future. Written
from the fi rst-person perspective of Moraes ‘Moor’ Zogoiby, the novel
traces the downfall of the Zogoiby family, as well as the rise of right-wing
Hindu politics in Bombay during the 1990s. Like Saleem Sinai, Moraes is

36 Stephen Morton
likened to Scheherazade, the female storyteller of The Arabian Nights, in
the sense that Saleem and Moraes are under pressure to complete a story in
order to survive. This recurrent narrative motif in Rushdie’s fiction situates
his writing in relation to a literary tradition that has its roots in eighth-
century Baghdad, but it also serves to establish Rushdie’s concern with
the precarious position of the writer’s relationship to political power and
authority in the twentieth century.
The narrative starts at the end of the story, with Moraes recounting his
escape from incarceration by his mother’s former lover and rival, Vasco
Miranda, and Vasco’s demand that Moor write a story about his life, or face
death. In this respect, as some critics have suggested, The Moor’s Last Sigh
could be read as an allegory of Rushdie’s own position as a writer living in
exile and under house arrest after the Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence.
Yet such a reductive biographical reading would be to ignore the multiple
histories of diaspora, hybridity, modernity, and violence that inform and
inflect The Moor’s Last Sigh. Like Midnight’s Children, The Moor’s Last
Sigh is concerned with the position of the minority in a postcolonial nation
state that promises to respect the rights of minority groups. But whereas
Midnight’s Children is concerned with the position of the Indian Muslim
before and after independence and partition, The Moor’s Last Sigh traces
the crisis of Prime Minister Nehru’s secular ideology from the Emergency
period (1975–77) to the riots that followed the destruction of the Babri
Masjid, a major Muslim mosque in Ayodhya, in December 1992. And
where Saleem Sinai is born into an Indian Muslim family, with a Chris-
tian ancestry, Moraes Zogoiby is the son of Christian and Jewish parents.
Moraes is, as he explains at the end of the novel using a compound noun
that recalls James Joyce’s description of the protagonist Leopold Bloom as
a jewgreek in Ulysses, a ‘cathjew.’17
Rushdie’s choice of an Indian protagonist with both a Jewish and Catho-
lic background is significant, then, because that protagonist symbolizes the
experience of the minority in a postcolonial nation state that claims to
tolerate cultural difference. As Jawaharlal Nehru argued in The Discovery
of India (1946), “ideas of cultural and religious toleration were inherent
in Indian life.”18 Just as the Jewish experience of anti-Semitism in Europe
reveals the limitations of European modernity vis-à-vis its claims to human
freedom, so the experience of communal violence in India for minority
groups such as Muslims reveals the limitations of India’s secular modernity,
and its claim to recognize the rights of minority groups. If the Holocaust
signifies the failure of European modernity, and its liberal principles of
freedom, equality, and tolerance, Rushdie in The Moor’s Last Sigh suggests
that events such as the Emergency and the destruction of the Babri Masjid
by Hindu groups signals the failure of Nehru’s liberal vision of postcolonial
modernity, particularly his promise to recognize the equal rights of all reli-
gious communities within India.
As well as being the son of the Zogoiby family, a family that descends
from the fifteenth-century Portuguese colonist Vasco da Gama, Moraes

Zogoiby is an Indian Jew, and as such he represents a minority within Indian
society. By invoking the history of the Jewish diaspora to India, Rushdie
also draws a parallel between the experience of other minority groups in
India, such as Muslims, and the experience of the Jews in twentieth-century
Europe. Moraes’s father Abraham Zogoiby is a “family employee,”19 and a
descendent of what his mother calls the “White Jews of India, Sephardim
from Palestine [who] arrived in numbers (ten thousand approx.) in Year 72
of the Christian Era, fleeing from Roman persecution.”20 Indeed, it is Abra-
ham’s identity as a Cochin Jew that prompts his mother’s resistance to his
marriage to Aurora da Gama. For while the Jewish population of Cochin
have historically co-existed with other ethnic groups in India, such as the
majority Hindu population, they have also defi ned their ethnic identity as
separate. One of the ways in which Cochin Jews attempted to defi ne their
identity as separate, as Nathan Katz explains, is to become accepted as a
caste within mainstream Indian society. 21 This attempt has involved the
observation of strict moral and social codes regarding diet and the use of a
sacred language, but also compulsory endogamy.22 Such strict moral codes
would certainly account for Flory Zogoiby’s resistance to her son’s mar-
riage to Aurora da Gama. Yet, as Abraham subsequently discovers from
reading an old Spanish manuscript, the Zogoiby family is itself the product
of an exogamous relationship between the exiled Sultan of Boabdil and an
ejected Spanish Jew: “two powerless lovers making common cause against
the power of the Catholic Kings.”23 This act of miscegenation, as Abraham
describes it, might seem to valorize hybridity and cosmopolitanism. But,
as suggested below, Rushdie’s use of the history of the Cochin Jews also
reveals something about the limitations of Nehru’s secular, cosmopolitan
vision of India’s postcolonial modernity.
In a speech delivered at the Cochin synagogue at the celebration of its
quarter centenary on December 15th, 1968, the then prime minister of India,
Indira Gandhi, is quoted as saying that “Secularism in India does not mean
animosity towards religion [ . . . ] It implies equal respect for all religions
[ . . . ] It is a matter of pride for us in India that all the great religions in the
world are respected in our country.’24 It is precisely this liberal ideology of
secularism and tolerance that Rushdie subjects to scrutiny in The Moor’s
Last Sigh, a novel that was written in the aftermath of the destruction of
the Babri Masjid in Ayodyha on December 6th, 1992, and the subsequent
riots and bombings that happened in January 1993. Rushdie locates the
origins of the crisis in India’s secularist discourse in the Indian Emergency.
Following Indira Gandhi’s emergency suspension of civil law in 1975,
Moraes declares “Before the Emergency we were Indians. After it we were
Christian Jews.”25 Moreover, by tracing India’s history through the geneal-
ogy of the Zogoiby family and Aurora Zogoiby’s paintings, Rushdie draws
a parallel between the disintegration of Moorish Spain, and the expulsion
of Jews and Moors by the Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand in the
fifteenth century, and the sweeping away of Nehru’s secular pluralist vision
of India by the right-wing ideology of Hinduvata. As Aamir Mufti puts it,

38 Stephen Morton
“The political rise of violent Hindu nationalism in Bombay and Maharash-
tra in the form of the Shiv Sena, which re-appears here as ‘Mumbai’s Axis’
or the MA, is thus figured as a sort of Reconquista, with the ‘mongrel’
Bombay of the Nehruvian decades consumed by the violent religious, eth-
nic, and linguistic rigidities of ‘Maharashtra for Mahrashtrans.’”26
Against this Reconquista in postcolonial South Asia, it is Aurora Zogoi-
by’s paintings that continue to idealize Bombay as a cosmopolitan space. 27
This idealization of a cosmopolitan Bombay and its subsequent destruction
by the forces of right-wing Hindu nationalism is linked, in other words, to
Rushdie’s fictionalized history of Indian modernism in the visual arts. To
assess the wider significance of Rushdie’s fictionalized art history in The
Moor’s Last Sigh for understanding India’s postcolonial modernity, it is
instructive to consider the parallels between the history of Indian mod-
ernism and Rushdie’s fictionalized history of Bombay which is mediated
in part through his representation of the Bombay art world. One of the
formative movements in the emergence of modern Indian art was the work
of the Progressive Artists Group in Bombay during the 1940s and 1950s.
Rejecting the orientalist and realist conventions of visual representation
associated with the Bengal school of painting, this loose grouping of paint-
ers was overtly individualist in its approach to art practice and sought to
develop a hybrid style that negotiated with the internationalist style of
western modernism while also addressing the conditions of social and cul-
tural life in post-independence India. The artist F. N. Souza, for example,
adopted a social realist style in his early paintings to depict “labourers in
the fields, workers in the factories, beggars, prostitutes, pimps and [ . . . ]
the loathsome bourgeoisie.”28 Yet he also went on to reject this socialist
stance in his painting after the Communist Party secretary denounced his
work as an example of bourgeois aesthetics. It was perhaps in response to
such criticisms that Souza asserted a modernist belief in self-expression:
“I don’t believe that a true artist paints for coteries or for the proletariat.
I believe with all my soul that he paints solely for himself. I have made my
art a metabolism. I express myself freely in paint in order to exist. I paint
what I want, what I like, what I feel.”29 What is interesting about Souza’s
statement here is the way in which it asserts the autonomy of the individual
artist. For artists such as Souza, the autonomy of the artist was symboli-
cally linked to the independence of the Indian nation state.30 By expressing
himself freely in his painting, in other words, Souza also expressed the
political and cultural independence of the Indian nation state.
The cosmopolitanism of the Progressive Artists Group in Bombay is also
important for understanding the relationship between Indian modernism
and Nehru’s political project of secular socialism. In an essay on the work
of Francis Newton Souza, published in the Indian magazine of architecture
and art Marg (1949), the art historian Hermann Goetz situates F. N. Souza
as a rebel artist by virtue of his identity as a religious minority—for Souza
was from a Goan Catholic background. As Goetz explains:

A Hindu may dream of the golden age of the Rishis, of the Guptas, of
Shivaji, a Muslim of the glorious days of Balban, Akbar or Shajahan,
and both may yearn for the idyll of the Indian village with which they
are connected by ties of blood. Their cultural background is broad
and variegated enough so that they may fi nd some convenient niche
in tradition. Islam has also been democratic and despotic, orthodox
and freethinking. Hindu tradition permits of even wider interpreta-
tions. And both have found national states expressing their individual
ideas. But not so the minorities, Parsis, non-orthodox Muslims, Jews,
indigenous Christians. They have been loyal to the country and are
today children of its soil, but they have preserved their identity only as
closely-knit groups which leave little liberty to their members. Thus the
dissenters have attempted a revolution from within and formed more
liberal groups which stand in the front ranks of Indian modernism.31
By linking the emergence of Indian modernism to the work of artists who

sought to break with the traditional ties of their ethnic and religious commu-
nities, Goetz connects the work of the Progressive Artists Group to the ‘lib-
eral’ ethos of Nehruvian secularism. Kekoo Gandhy makes a related claim
about the cosmopolitanism of the Bombay art world during the 1940s and
1950s in his reflections on the history of the Progressive Artists’ Group.32 In
Gandhy’s account, it was partly the arrival of Jewish refugees from Europe
in Bombay in the late 1930s that helped to foster the development of the Pro-
gressive Artists Group. The Austrian painter Walter Langhammer provided
an informal training for many of the artists in the Progressive Arts Move-
ment; the German businessman Emmanuel Schlesinger became one of the
main collectors of Indian art in Bombay during this time; and Rudolph von
Leydon worked as an art critic for the Times of India. In Kekoo’s account,
the arrival of these three figures in Bombay was crucial for the formation
of the Progressive Artists Group because “in those days, Indian artists had
no other means of going abroad or of following trends in Europe.”33 This
is not to say that the work of the Progressive Artists Group simply imitated
European modernism. On the contrary: in Kekoo’s account, artists such
as Souza and Ara boldly declared “we are what we are. We don’t want to
copy the West. We are products of our immediate environments and want
to establish our identity by being contemporary.”34
In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie evokes the cosmopolitanism of the
Bombay art world and the modernism of the Progressive Artists Move-
ment in the paintings of the fictional artist Aurora Zogoiby. Significantly,
the fi rst-person narrator, Moraes ‘Moor’ Zogoiby intimates that his
mother Aurora Zogoiby may have had an affair with the Indian Prime
Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and that Moraes may be the illegitimate off-
spring of Nehru and his mother. This detail may appear to parallel the
biography of the Hungarian-Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil, who may
also have had an affair with Nehru. 35 Indeed, Rushdie himself admits in

40 Stephen Morton
a review of an exhibition of Amrita Sher-Gil’s paintings at the Tate Mod-
ern in 2007 that Sher-Gil “‘gave [him] permission’ to imagine [Aurora
Zogoiby’s] personality, to invent a woman painter at the very heart of
modern art in India.”36 Such parallels are of course limited by the differ-
ences between the painterly style and ethos of Amrita Sher-Gil and that
of Aurora Zogoiby, who as Rushdie explains, is “an entirely imaginary
20th-century Indian woman painter.”37 For whereas Amrita Sher-Gil is
perhaps best known for her figurative paintings of scenes of village life
in rural India, Aurora Zogoiby develops a palimpsestic mode of artistic
expression, which function as an allegory for the narrative of the postco-
lonial nation. Moreover, what is particularly important about Aurora’s
relationship with Nehru in The Moor’s Last Sigh is the suggestion that
Aurora’s artwork develops a painterly language for exploring the pos-
sibilities and limitations of Nehruvian secularism. Of all Aurora’s paint-
ings, it is perhaps her paintings of Mooristan and Palimpstine that evoke
the Nehruvian ideal of India as a secular, cosmopolitan nation. In these
paintings, Moraes asserts that Aurora was “seeking to paint a golden age”
in which “Jews, Christians, Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains”
co-existed. 38 The paintings are described as “polemical” in the attempt
to “create a romantic myth of the plural, hybrid nation” and the use of
“Arab Spain to re-imagine India.”39 Yet this didacticism is offset by the
paintings’ aesthetic quality: “with the vivid surrealism of her images and
the kingfi sher brilliance of her coloring and the dynamic acceleration of
her brush, it was not easy to feel preached at, to revel in the carnival with-
out listening to the barker, to dance to the music without caring for the
message in the song.”40 By establishing a connection between the surreal
aesthetics of Aurora’s paintings and the hybrid politics of a postcolonial
nation state based on the liberal principles of secularism and tolerance,
Rushdie thus implies that The Moor’s Last Sigh—like Aurora’s art—is a
mirror of India’s postcolonial future.
If Aurora’s paintings stand as a mirror image of Nehru’s secular vision
of postcolonial India, they also reflect the elitism of his nationalist project.
During the naval strike in Bombay of 1946, for example, Aurora directs the
driver of her imported American motor car to
the heart of the action, or, rather, of all that grand inaction, being set down
outside factory gates and dockyards, venturing alone into the slum-city of
Dharavi, the rum-dens of Dhobi Talao and the neon fleshpots of Falkland
Road, armed only with a folding wooden stool and sketchbook.41
Aurora is able to efface her class position as an independently wealthy, upper

middle class visual artist during the industrial action. However, once the
Congress Party leadership calls off the strike—a decision that prompts the
anger of the sailors—Aurora realizes that her position as an artist is unten-
able: “Aurora was not a sailor [ . . . ] and knew that to those angry boys she
would look like a rich bitch in a fancy car—as, perhaps, the enemy.”42

Moraes’s analysis of the bourgeois character of Aurora’s artwork is fur-
ther hinted at in his account of her painting of Mooristan and Palimpstine
in chapter thirteen. In this painting, the “real-life Bombayites on the beach”
are described as “a cavalcade of local riff-raff—pickpockets, pimps, fat
whores, hitching their saris up against the waves [ . . . ].”43 By incorporating
the masses into her painterly evocation of late twentieth-century Bombay,
Aurora could be seen to offer a transparent representation of Bombay soci-
ety. Yet the description of these different social characters as “local riff-
raff” suggests that these characters are criminalized and subordinated to
the artist’s survey of the city. Such a representation might suggest that the
painter inhabits an elite position in relation to the working class subjects
depicted in the painting. Yet the fact that these characters are painted from
the vantage point of the “Mughal palace-fortresses in Delhi and Agra”44
complicates this reading somewhat by suggesting that the painter identifies
with the minority subject position of an Indian Muslim.
Aurora’s juxtaposition of Moorish Spain in the fifteenth century and late
twentieth-century Bombay is significant also because it traces the destruction
of two cosmopolitan societies, whose culture and economy have benefited
from migration. Just as the Spanish Catholic monarchy expelled Moors and
Jews from Alhambra in the fifteenth century, so groups such as the Shiv Sena
attempted to expel Muslims from Bombay in the early 1990s. Moreover,
if Aurora’s paintings embody the golden age of Bombay’s cosmopolitanism
and Nehruvian secularism, Moraes’s stuffed dog on wheels Jawaharlal (an
allusion to the former Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru) signifies the
obsolescence of Nehru’s secular democratic ideal in late twentieth-century
India. As Rustom Bharucha puts it, “Rushdie’s critique of contemporary
India is cast in a time warp, and as such, is almost as redundant as that
stuffed old dog-on-wheels Jawaharlal, who is trundled through the last pages
of the novel, an object of pathos rather than derision.”45
Like Aurora Zogoiby’s early paintings, The Moor’s Last Sigh may at times
seem nostalgic for a golden age of secularism, which never really existed.
Indeed, the end of secularism that Rushdie in both Midnight’s Children and
The Moor’s Last Sigh attributes to the 1975 state of emergency declared by
Indira Gandhi overlooks the way in which secularism conceals a structure of
intolerance towards populations deemed to be minorities from the foundation
of the Indian nation state. For the principle of toleration, as the South Asian
historian Partha Chatterjee points out “is the willing acceptance of something
of which one disapproves.”46 Tolerance in this definition conceals a power
relationship between the dominant and the subaltern, or the majority and the
minority. In the contemporary U.S., the political theorist Wendy Brown argues
that tolerance is part of a “discourse that identifies both tolerance and the
tolerable with the West and marks non-liberal societies and practices as candi-
dates for an intolerable barbarism that is itself signaled by the putative intoler-
ance ruling these societies.”47 This discourse of tolerance was also implicit in
Jawaharlal Nehru’s attempt to separate religion and the state in the foundation
of the Indian nation-state. One of the problems with this state discourse of

42 Stephen Morton
secularism, as Ashis Nandy contends, is that “the modern nation state has no
means of ensuring that the ideologies of secularism, development, and nation-
alism themselves do not begin to act as faiths intolerant of others.”48 Nandy is
right to emphasize that secularism offers no guarantee of protection against
intolerance towards minority groups. For in the aftermath of the destruction of
the Babri Masjid, the Supreme Court of India “not only failed to recognize the
profound threat that the Hindu Right presents to Indian secularism, but actu-
ally endorsed their vision of Hinduvata as secular.”49 Yet the problem is not
exactly with secularism, development, or nationalism per se (as Ashis Nandy
suggests), but the social and historical context in which the discourses of secu-
larism and tolerance came into being during the partition of India. As Aamir
Mufti puts it, “The abstract, ‘secular’ citizen has its Enstehung, its moment of
emergence, in a violent redistribution of religious identities and populations.”50
Historians estimate that up to a million people were killed, and millions dis-
placed, in acts of communal violence that were committed by both the Hindu
and Muslim populations during the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947.
What the event of South Asian partition revealed was that the apparently uni-
versalist notion of secularism underpinning India’s constitution was based on
a tacit assumption that the majority Hindu population were natural citizens
of India, whereas the minority Muslim population had to demonstrate their
loyalty to the Indian nation.51 As a result, it was the Muslim population who
were marked as a minority group that should be tolerated in Nehru’s secular
nationalist discourse.
VISUAL TRANSLATIONS OF RUSHDIE IN CONTEMPORARY ART
If “the abstract, ‘secular’ citizen has its [ . . . ] moment of emergence [ . . . ] in

a violent redistribution of religious identities and populations,”52 Moraes’s
reflections on the significance of Aurora Zogoiby’s paintings in The Moor’s
Last Sigh can be read as an attempt to recuperate the damaged ideals of
Nehruvian secularism and cosmopolitanism in the aftermath of communal
violence. As Minoli Salgado puts it,
most of Aurora’s paintings are destroyed and the Moor’s exile is partly
driven by his search for the one’s that remain. Nehruvian secularism is
not dead but preserved as a damaged ideal that brings hope and com-
fort to the banished narrator, suggesting that Rushdie is all too aware
of the limited agency of political idealism to effect social change. 53
Like the Progressive Artists’ expressions of individual autonomy in the

1940s, Rushdie’s valorization of the aesthetic in The Moor’s Last Sigh
offers a space for exploring the limitations and possibilities of secularism,
and for contesting the fundamentalist politics upon which acts of commu-
nal violence are based.

It is Rushdie’s defense of the aesthetic form as an autonomous space for
exploring the contradictions and pressures of postcolonial modernity that
artists such as Jamelie Hassan and Anish Kapoor address in their work.
In her Trilogy series (1990), the visual artist Jamelie Hassan stages the
public reception of Rushdie’s novels Midnight’s Children, Shame, and The
Satanic Verses through an act of visual translation. In the installation titled
Midnight’s Children, for example, Hassan re-presents the fi nal paragraph
of Rushdie’s novel in a spiral on the wall of the installation. In Rushdie’s
novel, this fi nal paragraph articulates the way in which Saleem Sinai—a
self-appointed Scheherazade of the postcolonial Indian nation—is physi-
cally overwhelmed by the one thousand and one children of midnight. In
Hassan’s installation, this quotation is juxtaposed with a series of Arab cof-
fee cups at the bottom of which the photographs of children are inscribed.
Viewers are encouraged to interpret these photographs as images of the
dispossessed children of Palestine who lost their country in 1948.54 In this
way, Hassan reframes Saleem Sinai’s anxieties about the fragmentation of
the Nehruvian secular nation by evoking the loss of the Palestinian nation
following the nakba of 1948. By contrast to this reframing of Rushdie’s fic-
tion, Hassan’s third installation in her trilogy, entitled The Satanic Verses,
refers directly to the reception of Rushdie’s fourth novel (figure 3.1).
Figure 3.1 Jamelie Hassan The Satanic Verses (from The Trilogy, 1990). Installa-
tion photograph courtesy of the artist and Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario.

44 Stephen Morton
The installation includes large-scale newspaper photographs of the book
burning of Rushdie’s novel in Bradford town square on January 14th, 1989,
and a pile of several copies of The Satanic Verses assembled on the gallery
floor—an assemblage which encourages viewers to reflect on the failures of
reading at stake in the so-called Rushdie Affair.
If Hassan’s Trilogy draws attention to the global reception and transla-
tion of Rushdie’s fiction, Rushdie’s collaboration with the sculptor Anish
Kapoor, Blood Relations, draws attention to the vulnerability of the writer
in the face of political violence. The sculpture is a solid bronze bath, formed
of two boxes, which are joined together by a crude seal of red wax. One of
the boxes contains a solid mass of bright red synthetic red wax evoking the
blood of the title (figure 3.2).
Inscribed on the inside walls of bronze bath are a series of words taken
from Rushdie’s short text “Blood Relations,” which was published in The
Telegraph India on October 23rd, 2006 and dedicated to Anish Kapoor.55
This essay raises questions about the relationship between Scheherazade,
the female storyteller of The Arabian Nights, and the King Shahryar, the
figure whom Scheherazade tries to prevent from executing all the women in
his kingdom in a fit of jealous rage by telling the King stories. Scheherazade,
Figures 3.2. and 3.3 Anish Kapoor, Blood Relations, 2006. Bronze and wax, 100 x
432 x 151. Collaboration with Salman Rushdie. Photo: Dave Morgan. Courtesy of
the artist and Lisson Gallery.

Figures 3.2. and 3.3 Anish Kapoor, Blood Relations, 2006. Bronze and wax, 100 x
432 x 151. Collaboration with Salman Rushdie. Photo: Dave Morgan. Courtesy of
the artist and Lisson Gallery.
as I have already suggested, provides Rushdie with a literary paradigm for

many of his narrators, including Saleem Sinai and Moraes Zogoiby. Yet in
“Blood Relations,” Rushdie raises questions about Scheherazade’s complic-
ity with the violent acts of the tyrannical King Shahryar, whom she tries
to appease through an interminable cycle of stories. By inscribing some of

46 Stephen Morton
the words from Rushdie’s text on the walls of his bloody bronze sculpture,
Kapoor also raises questions about the role of art and writing in relation to
the violence of modern forms of political sovereignty. And by reframing the
story of Scheherazade in the context of the twenty-fi rst-century global con-
juncture, Kapoor, like Rushdie, suggests that art has the capacity to redeem
the failures of a secular, democratic and tri-continental politics in the face
of the violence precipitated by the forces of neo-liberal globalization and
religious fundamentalism.
NOTES
1. This essay expands and develops some of the arguments presented in my criti-
cal study Salman Rushdie and Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008). I would like to thank Jamelie Hassan for permission to
reproduce a photograph of The Satanic Verses installation and Nicole McCabe
of the Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario for providing me with a copy of this
photograph. I am also very grateful to Anish Kapoor for permission to repro-
duce a photograph of the sculpture Blood Relations, and to Melissa Digby-Bell
and Clare Chapman for providing me with a copy of this image.
2. Marcel Duchamp, Notes and Projects for the Large Glass, trans. George H.
Hamilton, Cleve Gray, and Arturo Schwarz (London: Thames & Hudson,
1969), 7.
3. Duchamp, Notes and Projects for the Large Glass, 86.
4. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Contexts: Science and Technol-
ogy in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1998), xxi.
5. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Picador, 1981), 255.
6. Vijay Mishra, “Rushdie and Bollywood Cinema,” in The Cambridge Com-
panion to Salman Rushdie, ed. by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2007), 16.
7. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, (London: Vintage, 1988), 9.
8. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 9.
10. T. J. Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge: MIT, 2007), 2.
11. Demos, Exiles of Marcel Duchamp, 3.
12. Demos, Exiles of Marcel Duchamp, 3.
13. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991,
(London: Granta, 1991), 10.
14. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 10.
15. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso,
1992), 134–135.
16. See Geeta Kapur, When was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural
Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000).
17. Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (London: Vintage, 1996), 428.
18. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1946), 387.
20. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 70–71.
21. Nathan Katz, Who are the Jews of India? (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2000), 60.
22. Katz, Who are the Jews of India?, 72.

24. Katz, Who are the Jews of India?, 57.
26. Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Postcolony: The Jewish Question and
the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2007), 246.
27. Mufti, Enlightenment in the Postcolony, 246–247.
28. Yashodaria Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 79.
29. Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art, 79.
30. See Karin Sitzewitz, “The Aesthetics of Secularism and Visual Art in India”
(PhD diss., Columbia University, 2006).
31. Dr. H. Goetz, “Rebel Artist: Francis Newton,” Marg 3.3 (1949): 36.
32. Kekoo Gandhy, “The Beginnings of the Art Movement,” Seminar
528 (2003), accessed September 15, 2009, http://www.india-seminar.
com/2003/528/528%20kekoo%gandhy.htm.
33. Gandhy, “The Beginnings of the Art Movement.”
34. Gandhy, “The Beginnings of the Art Movement.”
35. Yashodhara Dalmia, Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life (New Delhi: Viking Penguin,
2006), 94–97.
36. Salman Rushdie, “The Line of Beauty,” Guardian Review, Saturday Febru-
ary 17, 2007, 12.
37. Rushdie, “The Line of Beauty.”
45. Rustom Bharucha, In the Name of the Secular: Contemporary Cultural
Activism in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 4.
46. Partha Chatterjee, “Secularism and Toleration,” in A Possible India: Essays
in Political Criticism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 228–262.
47. Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and
Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 6.
48. Ashis Nandy, “The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tol-
eration,” in Secularism and its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1998), 33
49. Brenda Cossman and Ratna Kapur, Secularism’s Last Sigh? Hindutva and
the (Mis)rule of Law (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), xvi.
50. Aamer Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism and the
Question of Minority Culture,” Critical Inquiry, 25.1 (Autumn 1998), 119.
51. Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 132–133.
52. Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul,” 119.
53. Minoli Salgado, “The Politics of the Palimpsest in The Moor’s Last Sigh,” in
The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie, ed. by Abdulrazak Gurnah,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 156.
54. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Inscriptions of Truth to Size,” in Jamelie
Hassan Inscription (Regina: Dunlop Art Gallery, 1990), 27.
55. See Salman Rushdie, “Blood Relations—An Interrogation of the Arabian Nights
II,” The Telegraph, Monday October 23, 2006, Accessed September 19, 2009,
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1061023/asp/opinion/story_6882489.asp.

48 Stephen Morton
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London: Verso, 1992.

Bharucha, Rustom. In the Name of the Secular: Contemporary Cultural Activism
in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Brown, Wendy. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Chatterjee, Partha, “Secularism and Toleration.” In A Possible India: Essays in
Political Criticism, 228–262. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Cossman, Brenda and Ratna Kapur. Secularism’s Last Sigh? Hindutva and the
(Mis)rule of Law. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Dalmia, Yashodaria. The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives. Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2001.
. Amrita Sher-Gil: A Life. New Delhi: Viking Penguin, 2006.
Dalrymple Henderson, Linda. Duchamp in Contexts: Science and Technology
in the Large Glass and Related Works. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1998.
Demos, T. J. The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge: MIT, 2007.
Duchamp, Marcel. Notes and Projects for the Large Glass. Trans. George H. Ham-
ilton, Cleve Gray, and Arturo Schwarz. London: Thames & Hudson, 1969.
Hassan, Jamelie. “The Triology,” mixed media installation, 1990 (Art Gallery of
Windsor, Ontario). In Jamelie Hassan, Inscription (Regina: Dunlop Art Gal-
lery, 1990).
Kapoor, Raj (dir.)., Shree 420. London; new York: Yash Raj Films, 2000.
Kapur, Geeta. When was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice
in India. New Delhi: Tulika, 2000.
Katz, Nathan. Who are the Jews of India? Berkeley: University of California Press,
2000.
Gandhy, Kekoo. “The Beginnings of the Art Movement.” Seminar 528 (2003).
Accessed September 15, 2009. http://www.india-seminar.com/2003/528/528%20
kekoo%gandhy.htm.
Goetz, Dr. H. “Rebel Artist: Francis Newton.” Marg 3.3 (1949): 36
Mishra, Vijay. “Rushdie and Bollywood Cinema.” In The Cambridge Companion
to Salman Rushdie, edited by Abdulrazak Gurnah, 11–28. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2007.
Morton, Stephen. Salman Rushdie and Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity. Bas-
ingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Mufti, Aamer. “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism and the
Question of Minority Culture.” Critical Inquiry, 25.1 (Autumn 1998): 95–125
. Enlightenment in the Postcolony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of
Postcolonial Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
Nandy, Ashis. “The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolera-
tion.” In Secularism and its Critics, edited by Rajeev Bhargava, 321–344. Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1998.
Nehru, Jawaharlal. The Discovery of India. Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1946.
Pandey, Gyanendra. Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2006.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Picador, 1981.
. The Satanic Verses. London: Vintage, 1988.
. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta,
1991.
. ‘The Line of Beauty.’ Guardian Review, Saturday February 17, 2007, 12.

. “Blood Relations—An Interrogation of the Arabian Nights II.” The Tele-
graph India, Monday October 23, 2006. Accessed September 19, 2009. http://
www.telegraphindia.com/1061023/asp/opinion/story_6882489.asp.
Salgado, Minoli. “The Politics of the Palimpsest in The Moor’s Last Sigh.” In The
Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie, edited by Abdulrazak Gurnah,
153–167. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Sitzewitz, Karin. “The Aesthetics of Secularism and Visual Art in India.” PhD
diss., Columbia University, 2006.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Inscriptions of Truth to Size.” In Jamelie Hassan
Inscription, 9–34. Regina: Dunlop Art Gallery, 1990.

4 Living Art
Artistic and Intertextual Re-
envisionings of the Urban Trope in
The Moor’s Last Sigh
Vassilena Parashkevova
In its attempt to reclaim the past, early modern Indian art was informed by
a marked paradox. This past, as Daniel Herwitz points out, was at once the
product of colonialism’s “museumising” imagination that petrified Indian
cultural moments for the western gaze and, yet, a past “living on each and
every street corner.”1 During its history, modern Indian art has offered
various ways of “working through”2 this contradiction, including a “quest
for indigenism,”3 a westernization, whether strategically selective, revi-
sionist, or wholesale, and a modifying eclecticism.4 In the process, artistic
practices and historiographies have uncovered and drawn on pre-colonial,
non-hierarchical interactions between Indian and western painting.5 Met-
ropolitan artistic modernism, seen as based in its provocative reflexivity,
on a distancing from realism, has been revealed as “provincial” or a “local
rebellion,” incapable of the same degree of provocation outside the West, in
cultures where realism was rarely dominant.6 While Ella Shohat and Robert
Stam posit non-western modernisms as “alternative” to and challenging the
verities of their western counterpart,7 Benita Parry warns that articulations
of “alternative modernisms” imply “the existence of an ‘original’ that was
formulated in Europe, followed by a series of ‘copies’ or ‘lesser inflections’”
and points out colonialism’s uneven temporalities manifest in the export
of modern technology combined with a fostering of social backwardness
that have positioned the art of what she terms “peripheral modernisms” as
simultaneously modern and traditional, ahead of and behind the times.8
I will argue that in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995)9 these
complexities in the experience of the postcolonial artist are opened out and
lived as manifest contradictions of Bombay and Indian modernity through
the figuring of what I will refer to as “living art”—art in the process of
being lived and life in the process of artistic representation as dynamically
informing and transforming each other. Bombay, in particular, and the
urban trope, more generally, undergo a series of artistic transformations

Living Art 51
as articulated through the mediating commentary of the narrator, Moraes
Zogoiby (Moor), on the paintings of his mother, the Bombay artist, Aurora
Zogoiby. Her pre-independence works, the charcoal sketches of British-
ruled Bombay, foreground the colonial museumizing gaze by representing
the city as paralyzed by the naval mutiny of 1946 when “that super-epic
motion picture of a city [i]s transformed overnight into a motionless tab-
leau.”10 After veering between imaginary, mythological themes, and a
patriotic “mimesis”11 in the decades after independence, Aurora fi nds a
solution in making Moor the central figure of her work. Aurora’s treatment
of the urban trope can be traced in her vision of the juxtaposition and/or
collage of post-independence Bombay and medieval Moorish Granada as
connected through and foregrounding the Moor figure, itself inspired by
history, biography, and legend; by the last of the Nasrid Sultans, Boabdil
and her only son, Moraes Zogoiby.
The city is thus doubly represented through the media of visual and
verbal narratives. Urban representation is further complicated through the
double status of Moor, a narrator and a narrated figure, and of Aurora, an
artist and a character in Moor’s narrative. On the one hand, it is Moor’s
perspective on the multiply-envisioned city to which the reader has access
and which is, therefore, privileged. On the other hand, the Moor’s perspec-
tive is that of the viewer/model, who is also “the talisman and centrepiece”12
of the work of art and can only offer a “wrong-side-of-the-canvas version
of the fi nished work.”13 The novel’s figurations of living art thus drama-
tize the postcolonial contradiction between a museumized and a lived/
living past, allow a meta-discursive commentary on this contradiction in
the forms of art criticism (Moor’s commentary on Aurora’s paintings) and
life-writing (Moor’s story of his life), and intervene, in this way, into the
specific codes of visibility and visual subjectivity that have produced it.
Living art portrays not only self/representation at work—in the mode of
Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1656), cited in the novel as an influence,
in its “sight-lines,” on one of Aurora’s “Moor” paintings14 —but also art’s
stepping out of the canvas, acquiring a full-fledged existence, at once as and
amongst its prototypes, and entering postcolonial historicity.
This essay seeks to explore the ways in which The Moor’s Last Sigh and,
particularly, its treatment of the urban trope, inhabits and transforms the
very visual structures and artistic categories it critiques as a postcolonial
strategy of living art. To this end, I focus on the novel’s re-employment
of Christian iconography, orientalist paintings, artistic periodizations, and
the raising of exclusivist visions of the city, and make conclusions about the
ways in which these re-employments are geared towards the interrogation
of the larger structures within which the city is caught: colonial histori-
ographies, Christian and Hindu fundamentalist practices, the othering of
Islam, Nehruvian secularism and state centralization, and multinational
capitalism’s effects on place.

52 Vassilena Parashkevova
BOMBAY, GRANADA, WITTENBERG: A TRIPTYCH ORATORY
Traditionally associated with European and particularly Christian culture,

the diptych and triptych forms are commonly employed to stand for the
interconnectedness of and dynamics between, respectively, two or three
images or ideas. The concept of the diptych relies on a correspondence
between the media of text and painting, between the linguistic and the
visual arts. In Ancient Greece and Rome, diptych stood for a book or a
notebook, consisting of two writing tablets hinged together as well as to
a hinged pair of painted or carved panels. As artistic formats, diptychs
involve the construction of meaning through the pairing of images, such as
double portraits, tapestry panels, altarpiece wings, images in manuscripts,
printed books, or sculptural groupings. A major element of the diptych
format is the principle of duality, which invites the comparison of juxta-
posed images as each other’s reflections, inversions, or variations. Both
diptychs and triptychs can be interpreted as visual books that may or may
not include an outside image, painted on the reverse of the two side wings.
The specificity of the triptych as a format is its inclusion of an inside central
panel, which is structurally most significant and thus presupposes a posi-
tion to which all other images direct the viewer’s eye.
While in Christian iconography both diptychs and triptychs foreground
unity as a structural and thematic principle, the di/triptych nature of Rush-
die’s text enables, as we shall see, the existence of mutually contradictory
narratives, the unsettling of boundaries and the suspension of linear tem-
porality. The urban cartographies of the novel open up the order of the
map, which is no longer a horizontal surface, but a dynamic, folding and
unfolding, configuration. Whereas both text and painting attempt to frame
the narrative, the itinerant characters “slip” from one panel into another
and the city expands and contracts across panel frames. In Rushdie’s pan-
oramic/textual triptych, modern Bombay encounters a simulacrum of medi-
eval Moorish Spain. This utopian/heterotopian “Mooristan/Palimpstine”
is an idealized place of intercultural tolerance and “home” for the Moors,
which Moraes, also known as “Moor,” and Aurora Zogoiby repeatedly
attempt to re-articulate in text and painting. Moor begins his story at a
fortress in the Andalusian village of Benengeli, where he is imprisoned by
the artist Vasco Miranda in the early 1990s. Like Scheherazade, he has to
sustain his captor’s interest in order to stay alive. From this position at a
Mooristan denied (as we shall see, the ideal of Mooristan/Palimpstine is
frustrated in the village of Benengeli), he looks back at the story of his fam-
ily and the history of India and his home city, Bombay, from the beginning
of the twentieth century to his captivity and subsequent escape.
Bombay occupies a central position in the novel’s cartography—it is situ-
ated between the Indian port of Cochin and the Spanish village of Benengeli
and negotiates its present on the borderline between past and future hege-
monic narratives, respectively, colonial in Cochin and global capitalist in

Living Art 53
Benengeli. Like the side panels of a pictorial triptych, Cochin and Benengeli
flank Bombay as landscapes inviting historical and aesthetic comparisons
with the central urban panel. The title of the novel points to the legend of
the Christian reconquest of Granada in which the Moorish ruler, Boabdil,
sighed in despair as he cast a last glance at the city he had lost to the Catho-
lic Monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella. Encapsulated in the title,
the moment of Granada’s fall becomes the prism through which the narra-
tor articulates the violent history of post-independence Bombay.
The novel thus responds to the construction of the fall of Granada as
a visual event as well as a historical narrative that functions, stilled at the
scene of the Moor’s last sigh for his city, as the exterior panel of the story’s
cartographic triptych that guides the reader’s understanding of the central
urban panel inside. The visual event has been posited as the constituent
element of visual culture,15 the effect of a network of cultural meanings,
values, and power relations that both constitute and are articulated by par-
ticular agents of sight. Whereas the term event presupposes discreetness
in time and space, and risks re-inscription into the categories of the singu-
lar and the monolithic, Rushdie’s novel borrows this precedent in order to
parody such categories and recontextualizes it within visual discourses of
Indian, and specifically, Bombay, history.
The scene of Granada’s surrender and the moment of the Moor’s last
sigh have been the object of many artistic works and reproductions, includ-
ing most notably Spanish painter (and Francisco Goya’s brother-in-law)
Francisco Bayeu’s ceiling fresco Surrender of Granada (1763) in the then
new Royal Palace of Madrid16 and, over a century later, the orientalist
paintings Surrender of Granada (1882) and Sigh of the Moor (1892) of
the Spanish painter and museum official, Francisco Pradilla, commissioned
for the Conference Room of Madrid’s Palace of the Senate.17 These works
have been on display as surrounded by, or part of, images of Christian and
Spanish national iconography and stand as milestones in the careers of the
artists, who were eventually to be promoted, respectively, to the status of
court painter and to the position of director of Madrid’s Museo del Prado.18
In Bayeu’s fresco, winged angels float above and oversee Boabdil’s bow-
ing capitulation outside the walls of Granada. Pradilla’s paintings are the
result of his historical research, including an 1879 trip to Granada, where
he copied in watercolor a wooden relief entitled “The Delivery of the Keys
of the City of Granada by King Boabdil to the Catholic Monarchs.”19 In
his Surrender of Granada, a small downtrodden Muslim group headed
by Boabdil on a black horse stands to the left, facing an overwhelming
Christian force, headed by the victorious monarchs (Isabella on a white and
Ferdinand on a brown horse), that stretches all the way back to the walled
city of Granada in the distance, whilst also appearing to overflow on the
right. The two groups are emphatically distinct, further separated by a rut-
ted track. Even Bobadil’s horse seems to be bowing, while in the process of
moving towards the absolutely still Christian side. It is also interesting to

note that the main conflict seems to be between Boabdil and Isabella, as the
contrasting colors of their horses seem to suggest, with a clear Manichean
indication of white/Christian moral superiority, while the figure of Ferdi-
nand is made less significant, placed behind that of Isabella and serving to
symbolically reinforce her power. As María Castro points out, Pradilla’s
paintings have contributed to the spatial and psychological separation of
Islam and the Christian West by projecting uniformity onto the Christian
side and disorder and exteriority onto the Muslim figures. 20 Pradilla’s Sigh
of the Moor carries over from the previous painting’s story of surrender to
the narrative of Boabdil’s ‘afterlife,’ presenting the viewer with the backs of
the Moorish exiles on the hill outside Granada, now barely distinguishable
in the distance, with the faceless Moor ‘museumized’ for future generations
at the point of an eternal departure.
Within the oeuvres of the artists, these works are also in the midst of
imagery of Christian and classical European mythology, including, in
Bayue’s case, a portable oratory, in triptych form, for the Príncipe de las
Asturias (1785–86). 21 While Rushdie’s novel cannot be seen as a direct
response to this particular work, his recontextualization of Granada’s fall
and the legend of Boabdil’s sigh parodies the contexts and formats that
have contained these events, thereby mounting on them a critique of the
ideas of spatial/temporal linearity and unity of vision as structural and
thematic principles in Christian iconography as well as of Ferdinand and
Isabella’s crusading Catholicism that has contributed to the othering of
Islam. The novel’s pictorial triptych ironically refashions the idea of a por-
table oratory. A travelling altarpiece that can be folded and unfolded, this
form is also etymologically related to the orator’s art of public speaking,
where the motifs of portability and travel point to the simultaneous rigid-
ity and reconstitutability of the oratorical message in new contexts. These
motifs complement the protagonist’s role of a modern-day half-Moorish,
half-Jewish Luther—he has nailed the pages of his story, we are told, “to
the landscape in [his] wake,” thus repeatedly “crucifying” it. 22
Moor’s oratory, then, employs and subverts what could be seen as par-
allel overarching Christian narratives—the triptych format, the Catholic
reconquest of Granada, and Roman Catholicism—that have articulated,
contained, and ritually re-asserted the moment of their conquest of the
Other. Moor’s oratory/“theses” enact symbolical returns to moments of
rupture: to Granada in 1492 as a world crisis in intercultural and inter-
religious tolerance, and to Wittenberg in 1517 as the beginning of a reli-
gious, cultural, and political revolution that shattered the authority of the
Church. Essentially diagnostic and reformative in its backward glances,
Moor’s quest is at the same time a parody of what Charles Taylor refers to
as modern “religious mobilizations.” While modern mobilizations, such
as the forms of Christian and Hindu fundamentalisms we are witness-
ing today, are characterized by symbolic returns to “purer forms,” Tay-
lor argues that it is precisely these attempts to reclaim purer pasts that

Living Art 55
become, paradoxically, “the sites of the most startling innovation” in their
reaction to modern conditions, modern perceptions of threat, and modern
novelties. 23 While Moor’s Lutheran oratory seeks to critique the Christian
reconquest of 1492 from within Christianity’s own discourses and prec-
edents of self-reformation, this position is itself open to critique. Luther,
as Robert Glenn Howard argues, liberalized divine authority by offering
it to each individual and, though “making the unerring texts accessible to
individuals,” by “claiming that there was only one truth that was commu-
nicated, Luther made fundamentalism possible.”24 The novel inhabits, as
we argued earlier, the very structures and formats it critiques, and one of
these is the form of a modern, secular mobilization. The following sections
of this essay explore The Moor’s Last Sigh’s engagement with the interplay
of secular and communal/fundamentalist historiographies in the context of
modern Indian history and the multiple, competing layers of visualization
it involves.
HISTORIOGRAPHIC TRIPTYCHS AND

CARTOGRAPHIC RE-ENVISIONINGS
The novel’s portable triptych mock-oratory needs to be seen within its

Indian historical contexts, as a response to the colonial discursive construc-
tion of what has been referred to as “the Orientalist triptych of Indian his-
tory.”25 Barbara and Thomas Metcalf note that Indian history was forged
in a framework created by the British as they themselves devised a national
history for their own emerging nation:
In this vision, ancient ‘Hindus’ had once created a great civilization.

With the advent of Islamic rulers in the early thirteenth century, Indian
culture rigidified, political life gave way to despotism, and the gap
between foreign ‘Muslim’ rulers and a native ‘Hindu’ populace of neces-
sity made for a fragile structure. [ . . . ] Stage three brought modern
British colonial rule with its enlightened leadership, scientific progress,
and [ . . . ] tutelage to independence. This tripartite schema was explicit
in much British writing, and it often underlay even anti-colonial Indian
nationalist historiography. Even today it has been tenaciously persistent
as unrecognized ‘common sense’ in historical writing; and [has been]
treated as fact in Hindu nationalist ideologies.26
It is between the historiographical “layers” or “frames” of this colonial

discursive triptych that Rushdie’s characters fi nd themselves trapped. In
the novel, the Hindu nationalist movement, led by Raman Fielding, taps
into Bombay’s geological accretions of antagonism, articulating a fiction of
an ethnically pure city. Abraham Zogoiby, the upholder of a rival claim to
Bombay, engages in similar excavations, but in order to unearth the city’s

profitable secrets and to play upon Hindu-Muslim animosity. In eventually
colliding with each other, Bombay’s warring urban fictions explode the
very orientalist triptych of history out of which they have risen. The tri-par-
tite cartography of the novel—Cochin, Bombay, Benengeli—offers a hori-
zontal re-envisioning of the vertical/geological/historiographical triptych
articulated in orientalist discourses. Simultaneously, Bombay’s Armaged-
don signals the destruction of the ideal of urban tolerance as the analogy of
the precedent of Arab Granada’s fall to Catholicism: “Just as the fanatical
‘Catholic Kings’ had besieged Granada and awaited the Alhambra’s fall, so
now barbarism was standing at our gates.”27 Rushdie’s Moorish Granada,
however, is a sentimentalized urban landscape, a place of tolerance and
enlightenment that is seen to have been disrupted by the Christian recon-
quest. As Richard Fletcher notes, although the interaction between Islamic
and Christian civilizations in the medieval West was extremely fruitful,
Moorish Spain was more often a land of turmoil than it was a land of tran-
quillity. 28 Rushdie himself acknowledges that Moorish Granada existed on
the basis of an Islamic imperialism.29
The novel borrows a further legend from medieval Spanish history,
which bears upon the tale of the protagonist: the story of El Cid Campe-
ador, the mercenary soldier, hero of Spanish national mythology. Whereas
El Cid has been extolled as a crusading warrior who waged wars of recon-
quest against the Moors, in his time, there was hardly any sense of nation-
hood, crusade, or reconquest in the Christian kingdom of Spain. El Cid
(Rodrigo Díaz) was a successful professional soldier, who was as ready to
fight alongside Muslims against Christians as vice versa.30 Rushdie’s novel
thus juxtaposes an idealized Moorish Granada and an internally torn ver-
sion of the Cid’s Spain to look upon Bombay and its grand-scale Hindu-
Muslim antagonisms.
The protagonist and narrator, Moraes Zogoiby, embodies elements
from both myths. Disowned by his mother, he is banished from his Edenic
Bombay into the world of Bombay Central, where he is caught between
the city’s warring Hindu and Muslim gangs, serving both before he is
forced to flee the city. He is also a Moor figure, nostalgically recreat-
ing his city in narrative. The text appropriates confl icting myths of the
medieval Spanish past alongside components of their official, historically
verified versions, thus problematizing both the authenticity of historical
accounts and the sentimental wish for return to the golden-past city. Iron-
ically, what breathes life into the story within is a sigh, an expression of
grief and desperation. The novel, then, parodies the nostalgic myth of a
Golden Age of peaceful Muslim-Christian-Jewish co-existence. It situates
the story at a moment outside the longed-for city of Granada, but at the
same time, fi xes the gaze upon it.
Moor’s story begins in the port of Cochin. Here, in the many conflicts of
the day, the narrator historicizes the collision between Abraham Zogoiby’s
and Raman Fielding’s fictions of Bombay, developed in the central panel.

Living Art 57
Historian Paul Brass notes several tensions, particularly relevant to The
Moor’s Last Sigh, in Indian political culture shortly after independence.
First, while the leadership of the country respected British political tra-
ditions, some (especially Jawaharlal Nehru) were also influenced by the
Soviet model. Secondly, while the leaders quite self-consciously maintained
many features of the colonial legacy, they realized those had to be adapted
to the social structure of Indian society. Thirdly, many politicians, who
proclaimed their adherence to secularism, actually harboured Hindu com-
munal sentiments. Finally, although soon after independence, the leading
opposition parties were the Communists and the Socialists, these ideolo-
gies bore little relation to the social structure of Indian society.31 In the
novel, the nationalist/pro-British conflict between Francisco and Epifania,
Moor’s great grandparents, also divides their sons, Camoens and Aires.
Rushdie shows the blind spots of both positions: Francisco announces that
the British must go, while standing “beneath the oil-paintings of his suited-
and-booted ancestors.”32 Epifania continues to believe in “the omnipotent
beneficence of the British” even after the Russian Revolution, World War
I, and the Amritsar massacre.33 In Francisco, Gandhi’s “insistence on the
oneness of all India’s widely differing millions”34 and Nehru’s internation-
alist modernist building project combine to produce an idealistic, Quixotic
quest that is doomed to failure.
At fi rst a follower of his father, Camoens later embraces communism,
only to fi nd out that it is “not the Indian style.”35 Through the figure of
Camoens, Rushdie critiques the emerging Indian nation’s imitation of for-
eign models, which results in a discrepancy between rhetoric and practice.
Camoens, a veritable personification of Indian political life around inde-
pendence, tries on various roles. He is a “millionaire fl irting with Marx-
ism,” “a nationalist whose favourite poems [are] all English,” and one who
is equally convinced that “the British imperium must end and the rule of
princes along with it.”36 Finally, Camoens turns to Nehruvian ideals, busi-
ness and technology, progress, modernity, and the city, but wears Gandhi-
style clothes.
Cochin, Bombay, and Benengeli are linked through Jawaharlal Nehru’s
ideas in the figure of Moor himself. Nine months to the day before he was
born, Moor’s mother had spent a night with the Prime Minister. Respec-
tively, Moor’s life follows the history of his country and his home city,
Bombay, by virtue of a tentative, illegitimate genealogical link. He carries
the misbegotten line of Nehru’s political ideas—a narrative that parallels,
as we shall see, the transformation of the Edenic Malabar-Masala Bombay
into Bombay Central and the adulteration of the ideal of Moorish Granada
into the hellish ghost-town of Benengeli.
Rushdie looks for the roots of Hindu-Muslim hostility in the secular
ideology existing at independence. Historically, secular nationalists empha-
sized the need to remove religion and the sense of community from the
center of Indian politics and to establish the independent Indian state as a

neutral force standing above these antagonistic forces.37 In the novel, the
politics of state centralization and the failure to recognize religious plu-
ralism contribute to the persistence of Hindu-Muslim antagonistic senti-
ments in Bombay. The city is partitioned in this way into two mutually
hostile fictions, the articulations of exclusivist urban discourses. This Bom-
bay diptych is thus nestled within the narrative’s overall triptych structure.
Though Bombay is central within the triptych, its centrality is problema-
tized by the urban split. Whereas the criminal entrepreneurial da Gama-
Zogoiby Axis dominates the urbanscape—Abraham Zogoiby’s skyscraper
towers over Bombay—the Hindu nationalist Mumbai’s Axis inhabits the
city’s underground, eroding the visibility of its rival, and Moor fi nds him-
self caught between the two cartographies of the competing urban fictions,
produced respectively by Abraham’s “criminal entrepreneurial” aspirations
for a Bombay of gold and Fielding’s “political criminal” ideology of a pure
Hindu Bombay.38
The name of Moor’s father ironically echoes the Old Testament Abra-
ham, who is associated, most notably, both with the notion of fatherhood
and with the readiness to sacrifi ce his own son. He is the anti-image of
the “National Father,” fashioned after Mogambo, 39 the villain of the
Bombay masala movie Mr India, and as such, the combination of “a
potpourri of elements” that is designed to appeal to the broadest range
of audiences. Whereas the biblical Abraham is considered to be the
patriarch of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, Abraham Zogoiby care-
fully chooses the nickname Mogambo, so as to avoid offending any of
the country’s communities and to succeed in manipulating all. Despite
being a Cochin Jew, he craftily unites the Muslim gangs controlling the
city’s organized crime.
Moor’s fall from Malabar-Masala Bombay into the “Bombay Central
lock-up” is presented as a descent from the sentence of his own story into
an “outlandish, incomprehensible text” that has been lying beneath it.40 In
this way, he is assimilated into the text of his father’s fiction of the city: “the
stomach, the intestine of the city.”41 Having slipped, in what seems to be a
carnivalesque inversion, off the upper and into the lower half of the city,
Moor becomes part of another urban fiction: Raman Fielding’s Mumbai.
In his essay, “A Dream of Glorious Return,” Rushdie names Bal Thack-
eray, the head of the Shiv Sena, as the prototype for his fictional character,
Raman Fielding.42 In the novel, the leader of the militant Hindu move-
ment, Mumbai’s Axis, is a caricaturist, rather than an artist, similar to Bal
Thackeray, who is a newspaper cartoonist turned politician. Cricket is at
the roots of Fielding’s political philosophy and his movement, Mumbai’s
Axis. Rushdie caricatures Hindu nationalism by portraying it as empty
politics of game-playing, as a team involved in a meaningless war game
that needs to undermine the value of sportsmanship in order to win. Hindu
communal politics mirrors the us-them division of sports culture, in which
Fielding’s crack teams are involved in nothing more than fan hooliganism.

Living Art 59
When choosing a name for his political movement, Fielding hesitates
between a Hindu cricketer—“Ranji’s Army, Mankad’s Martiners”—and a
Hindu goddess—“Mumba-Ai, Mumbadevi, Mumbabai,” fi nally succeed-
ing in “uniting regional and religious nationalism” through the choice of
the latter.43 The absurdity of the Mumbai’s Axis (MA) origins is in the
combination of Hindu pride and the affiliation to a game introduced by the
colonizer, especially since Fielding swears by a “beautiful goddess-named
Mumbai” as opposed to “this dirty Anglo-style Bombay.”44 Fielding’s divi-
sive politics construct an exclusivist image of the city that relies on essen-
tialist representational practices: the fiction of ethnic purity and the belief
in a golden age.
While in a formal sense, the narrative of Bombay occupies a central posi-
tion in the text, its centrality proves to be an impossible goal. Centrality is
what both Abraham’s fiction of a corporate Bombay and Fielding’s fiction
of a pure Marathi Mumbai aim to achieve, thus producing, ironically, a
bi-focal city. After having continuously ground, scraped, and abraded each
other in this way, Bombay’s economic and political monoliths spectacularly
explode: Fielding’s MA building and Abraham’s Cashondeliveri Tower are
both bombed and numerous buildings in the centre of the city are destroyed,
leaving the streets covered in bodies. Bombay “bl[ows] apart” and Moor
wonders if the city is “simply murdering itself.”45
Bombay’s Armageddon signals the destruction of the ideal of urban tol-
erance, echoing the precedent of Arab Granada’s fall to Catholicism. Rachel
Trousdale notes that as a secular western-educated Muslim, Rushdie is
both vehemently opposed to and unwelcome among the Hindu national-
ists.46 It can also be argued that Rushdie is at pains to demonstrate even-
handedness in his critique of Christian and Hindu fundamentalisms in this
novel as well as of Muslim exclusivist fictions of the city in The Satanic
Verses. The greatest villain and betrayer of the city, however, and thus the
main object of critique in The Moor’s Last Sigh, is Abraham Zogoiby: a
Jew of Moorish origin who stands at the head of a mostly Muslim axis
of capitalist self-interest. The critique of Abraham’s intercommunal league
grows into a broader attack on anonymous multinational capitalism in the
vision of Benengeli.
Moor embarks on a Quixotic quest to fi nd the true Mooristan/Palimps-
tine, thus escaping Bombay’s imprisonment, only to stumble upon an “anti-
Jerusalem”47 in the phantasmal Spanish village of Benengeli. Named after
Cide Hamete Benengeli, the fictional author of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don
Quixote, the right-wing panel of the novel’s triptych evokes the idea of
inhabiting fictions, of reading of oneself, which is the self-imposed fate
of Cervantes’s protagonist. The name of the only taxi-driver willing to
take Moor to Benengeli is “Vivar,” an echo of the hero of Spanish national
mythology, celebrated in the popular ballad tradition for hundreds of years,
Rodrigo Diaz, or El Cid Campeador, or the Cid of Vivar. In the novel,
the figure of Vivar is reduced from the legendary status of the Cid to the

Hollywood stereotype of an incomprehensible “Third-World” New York
taxi driver: the “broken argot of dreadful American fi lms”48 that he speaks
is the only language in which Moor and he can communicate.
Travelling to the city “whence [the Moors] have been cast out, centu-
ries ago,”49 Moor fi nds himself in a place where his only connection with
Bombay is Vasco Miranda, the plagiarist of his mother’s art, whose name
is suggestive of the project of discovery and colonial exploitation, through
his namesake, Vasco da Gama. Moor’s route to Benengeli foregrounds the
idea of urban inauthenticity, but not, for instance, as the concept of cul-
ture’s or origin’s mongrel nature celebrated in all of Rushdie’s work, but
as usurpation, imposture, and plagiarism. A series of stand-ins frustrate
expectations. The image of Benengeli as an impostor replaces the ideal of
Mooristan. Vasco Miranda’s commercial art, an empty imitation of Aurora’s
paintings, is divested of their political significance. His “ugly, pretentious
house,” the “Little Alhambra,” betrays the idea of a “New Moorisalem.”50
Benengeli’s neighboring town of thieves, Avellaneda, shares its name with
that of Cervantes’s slanderous contemporary, the author of the illegitimate
sequel of the Quixote, the second book of Don Quixote’s adventures pub-
lished before Cervantes’s own Part II.
Benengeli is a fraud, a geographical and historical elapse. On his pas-
sage from Bombay to Benengeli, the protagonist metaphorically “slips” off
the edge of the urban panel. The failure of Rushdie’s protagonist to reach/
achieve the urban goal asserts the novels’ dissociation from epic fate and
historic teleology, but it also points to Rushdie’s critique of the destruc-
tion of the urban ideal through the negation of Mooristan/Palimpstine in
Benengeli, a canvas/fiction which strips the notion of cultural inauthentic-
ity of its inspiring potential. In Benengeli, the idea of the cosmopolitan city
of cultural hybridity is reduced to the trope of the discourse of globaliza-
tion—the global village—and seen against the effects on place of contem-
porary multinational capitalism. In this way, Rushdie’s extended critique of
international commercial self-interest, as embodied by the unifying figure
of Abraham Zogoiby, bridges Bombay and Benengeli to transform the lat-
ter into a grotesque vision of empty, anonymous multiculturalism. Such
is the vision of Benengeli’s Street of Parasites: it is full of non-Spaniards,
who have no interest in the local customs and who behave more like city-
dwellers rather than village people. It is flanked by a lot of expensive bou-
tiques, bearing international brand names, and eating places that offer all
the national cuisines of the western world.
The Benengeli section of the text experiments with and deliberately
exaggerates a variety of narrative conventions, such as those of the genre of
detective fiction, to parody this culture of empty pastiche. Many of these
conventions are interwoven in the episode of Moor’s captivity in Vasco
Miranda’s fortress and are, thus, indicative of Moor’s imprisonment in
the same degraded culture. By juxtaposing the Granada precedent and the
destruction of Bombay, Rushdie offers a broader critique of Hindu and

Living Art 61
Christian fundamentalist fictions and the orientalist-triptych understand-
ing of Indian history. Bombay’s centrality in the triptych, a format that
foregrounds the Christian concept of unity, ironically stands for the impos-
sibility of a totalizing goal. Bombay is a binary city—divided into visible
and invisible; rhetoric and practice; Abraham’s and Fielding’s; Malabar
Masala and Bombay Central.
TRIPTYCH CANVASES: LIFE PAINTING

AND INTERTEXTUAL HISTORIOGRAPHIES
The novel offers a further mock-triptych, at once pictorial and re-histori-

cizing, in Moor’s theoretical division of Aurora’s so-called “Moor paint-
ings” into three distinct stages: the “early” pictures (1957–77); the “high”
years (1977–81); and the undated “dark Moors” (MLS, 218). This linear
periodization, however, is problematized by the narrator’s frequent paral-
lels between her paintings and those of a number of European artists—El
Greco, Velazquez, Rembrandt, Goya, Munch, Picasso, Braque, Chirico, and
Dali—and the diversity of artistic movements with which they are associ-
ated. The list includes a sizeable presence of Spanish painters, reinforcing
Rushdie’s engagement with Spanish history; the Cubist and Surrealist gene-
alogies of modern art; and Jewish affi nities, such as those of Rembrandt, in
his paintings and etchings of his Jewish neighbours, which break with the
medieval stereotypical portrayal of the despised Jew.51 In this way, Aurora’s
art comes to stand for a vision of Bombay and Indian history that inter-
rogates traditional European art-historical narratives and periodizations as
well as providing a subversive alternative to both Abraham Zogoiby’s and
Raman Fielding’s exclusive versions of Bombay.
Rushdie cites as Aurora’s prototype the French-trained Indian-Hun-
garian artist, Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–41), 52 who claimed to have come to
appreciate Indian painting and sculpture through modern European art.53
In Sher-Gil’s blending of a “Western idiom” with “Indian subject matter,”
we can recognize Aurora’s creative fusion of the Alhambra and Bombay’s
Malabar Hill in “a re-imagining of the old Boabdil story [ . . . ] in a local
setting, with [her son as the Moor] playing a sort of a Bombay remix of the
last of the Nasrids.”54 Yet, Sher-Gil is best remembered with the haunting,
romanticized image of the Indian villager,55 including a painting entitled
Mother India, exemplary, in its treatment of “Indian subjects, stripped of
all individuality and endowed with archetypal characteristics of suffer-
ing, warmth and dignity.”56 In contrast, Aurora is “the city girl, as much
the incarnation of the smartyboots metropolis as Mother India [is] village
earth made flesh.”57 As a post-independence Bombay artist of a Portuguese/
Roman Catholic background she could be more productively compared to
one of the founders of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group (1947), F. N.
Souza, born in Portuguese Goa, in a Roman Catholic family.58 Aurora’s

interest in “making religious pictures for people who have no god”59 as a
parodic revision of her Catholic ancestry parallels Souza’s passion for cari-
caturing Catholic rituals and the figure of Christ in his paintings. Aurora’s
modernist elitism, however, is a further parodic reflection of the Progres-
sive Group’s inability to live up to its fi rst manifesto and bridge “the art-
ists’ community and the people.”60 Through her work, Rushdie exposes the
post-independence split of Indian society into “modernizing elites and non-
modernising subalterns,”61 mirrored in the split in Bombay’s fabric into
Abraham’s modern panoptic Cashondeliveri tower and Raman Fielding’s
“stomach of the city.”
The multiple intertextual roles of the narrator/narrated figure of the
Moor inform the development of the urban trope in the text. Moor is vari-
ously cast as Boabdil, El Cid, Othello, Cervantes, or Don Quixote. The
city’s mirror canvases provide critical commentaries on parallel historical
events and reconfigure the urban trope through a number of historical, geo-
graphical, and artistic journeys. The re-imagining of the history of Bombay
and India through these multifarious routes has led critics, such as Cath-
erine Cundy, to denounce Rushdie’s stance as “limitlessly mongrelised and
relativist,”62 while others, such as Stephen Baker, to defend it as a form
of multiculturalism that is a “realistic portrayal of the construction of a
post-colonial culture.”63 As I have argued, Rushdie’s fictional city is geared
towards the critique of fundamentalist practices and the loss of the ideals
of independence. Yet Aurora’s paintings of the city, specifically as based
on the various splits in the Moor figure, also point to Rushdie’s engage-
ment with the interplay between Indian secular and religious/communal
historiographies. Nehru’s vision of a democratic India where “individuals
would be emancipated from their religious and affective ties and reborn
as secular citizens,” as Neeladri Bhattacharya points out, became one of
the prerequisites for developing a secular—scientific and objective—history
to counter communal narratives that posited strict boundaries between
communities. In these secular revisionings, heroes were “uncrowned” and
villains “rehabilitated,” so that “the heroes of one history [became] the vil-
lains of another.”64 Rushdie parodies such intergeneric inversions in Moor’s
duplicitous embodiments of Boabdil as ruler and as mercenary soldier, in
Granada’s transition from Muslim to Christian rule, in Moor’s fall from
Abraham’s secular Bombay to Fielding’s communal Bombay, and in Moor’s
simultaneous roles as a Boabdil and a Luther. While Moor is easily hijacked
and reprogrammed as a protagonist in confl icting narratives, he ironically
appears to be cast in the role of a “double agent,” serving each of the polar-
ized forces of the city in the manner of Spain’s El Cid.
Aurora’s paintings offer a re-periodization of Indian history through the
artistic re-envisioning of the Moor figure in relation to the city. The “early
Moors” (1957–77), produced between Moor’s birth and the election that
sweeps Mrs. Gandhi from power, encompass, historically, the last years
of Jawaharlal Nehru’s premiership and Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. These

Living Art 63
works are characterized by a series of fantastic substitutions, carnivalesque
inversions, or various corporeal transformations and experimentations with
roles. The paintings parody the familio-political rule of Nehru-Indira as an
Oedipal self-re-imagining of an effectively dynastic period of Indian history.
I use the term self-re-imagining as Aurora casts herself and her son in the
roles of these political leaders and interweaves public history and her own
and Moor’s private lives in her paintings. In Moor’s commentary on, and
periodizations of, these paintings, as I argued earlier, the narrative offers a
form of life-writing. In A Light to Lighten the Darkness, Aurora and Moor
pose “as a godless Madonna and child.”65 Courtship changes Moor into
a peacock and crowns “a dowdy pea-hen’s body” with Aurora’s head. In
another painting of the period, parent and child swap roles, so that Aurora is
the young Eleanor Marx and Moor her father Karl. In To Die upon a Kiss,
Aurora paints herself “as murdered Desdemona, flung across the bed,” while
Moor is “stabbed Othello, falling towards her in suicided remorse.”66
In his essay “Dynasty” (1985), Rushdie comments on the “continuing
saga of the Nehru family” as part of a potent national mythology in which
the Nehru family itself and the West are also implicated:
We have poured ourselves into this story, inventing its characters, then
ripping them up and reinventing them. In our inexhaustible specula-
tions lies one source of their power over us. We became addicted to
these speculations, and they [ . . . ] took advantage of our addiction.
Or: we dreamed them, so intensely that they came to life.67
While the novel traces the rise of Hindu fundamentalism “back to those
days of dictatorship and state violence”68 through Aurora’s “early Moors,”
the construct of nation as family is lampooned in Moor’s ironic descrip-
tions of his family’s root-searching story: “its somewhat overwrought Bom-
bay-talkie masala narrative, its almost desperate reaching back for a kind
of authentification, for evidence.”69 Another mock-authentification device,
the paratextual family-tree chart inserted between the contents page and
the text of The Moor’s Last Sigh, is the insistent “official” synthesized
equivalent of the narrative it precedes. The surreal Mooristan/Palimpstine
topos in Moor’s story and Aurora’s Moor sequence develops against and
outside as well as in parallel to this mock-originary map of family history.
Moor’s role as Othello in Aurora’s art invites comparisons between the
city in The Moor’s Last Sigh and Venice in Shakespeare’s plays The Merchant
of Venice and Othello. As Maurice Hunt suggests, Shakespeare’s Venice in
these two plays does not correspond to English Renaissance commonplaces
about the city—at once the model of republican government, the alternative
to monarchy for disaffected subjects of Elizabeth I and the corrupt sister
of Rome, the generic Italian locus of charlatans, lechers, and courtesans.
Shakespeare’s Venice activates a disturbing paradigm dependant upon the
city’s multicultural reputation. It encapsulates the dynamic relationship

between a persecutory Christian culture and what it regards as a potentially
savage alien, a Turk, a Moor, a Jew, who exists both outside and within the
city.70 Respectively, the duplicitous image of Venice in English Renaissance
discourses corresponds to the split in the stereotype of Moors as others. In
the novel, Moor can be seen as literally inhabiting a visual/discursive racial/
ethnic category. The darkness of his skin makes him an outsider in Bombay,
a fact also emphasized through the metaphorical significance of the selec-
tion rhyme that his siblings’ and his nicknames form—“Eeny Meeny Miney,
three quarters of an unfinished line followed by a hollow beat, a silent space
where a fourth word should be.”71 Moor occupies a discursive periphery,
“the end of the line,” that is both linguistic and genealogical. The represen-
tation of Moor as an Indian ‘Othello fellow’ participates in the novel’s over-
all critique of Christian/Hindu fundamentalist practices which is informed
by urban representation. Moor’s transformation into a mercenary soldier
echoes both the Othello and the Boabdil intertexts.
Aurora’s artistic vision of Bombay as Mooristan/Palimpstine grows
darker during the “high years,” after the Emergency ends and Moor’s sis-
ter, Ina, dies. In Moor and Ina’s Ghost Look into the Abyss, the whole city
is being sucked into a “harshly delineated zig-zag crack” and in “his palace
on the hill, the harlequin Moor look[s] down at the tragedy, impotent, sigh-
ing, and old before his time.”72 Re-envisioning Boabdil’s eternal departure
in Spanish orientalist art, this painting juxtaposes the Catholic reconquest
of Granada and the devastating effect of Indira Gandhi’s rule on India.
The “high period” of the Moor series expresses, in the narrator’s read-
ing, Aurora’s “prophetic, even Cassandran fears for the nation” in “high-
energy, apocalyptic canvases” (236).
The later ‘Moor in exile’ sequence, part of the “dark Moors” period, fol-
lows Moor’s fall into Bombay Central, the world of Raman Fielding and,
historically, the development of Hindu fundamentalism. There, the palace on
the hill disappears completely as does the “notion of ‘pure painting’ itself.”74
Instead, Aurora introduces more and more elements of collage: “The unify-
ing narrator/narrated figure of the Moor was usually still present, but was
increasingly characterised as jetsam, and located in an environment of bro-
ken and discarded objects [ . . . ] that were fixed to the surface of the work
and painted over.”75 There is no longer a position above the city, no stable,
if sentimentalized, stance from which it can be observed. The Moor figure
is increasingly indistinguishable from its urban setting—a “human rag-and-
bone yard,”76 composed entirely as a collage, made out of Bombay’s debris.
From a central image in the early Moors, through an image occupying
a distanced position of critique, outside and above it, in the high years, it
becomes, in the dark Moors an anonymous, impersonal, and almost invis-
ible figure, that is no longer “a symbol—however approximate—of the
new nation,” but a “semi-allegorical figure of decay.”77 Rushdie accedes,
through his heroine, that “the ideas of impurity, cultural admixture and
melange [are] in fact capable of distortion, and [contain] a potential for
darkness as well as for light.”78

Living Art 65
Commentators on Bombay art and cinema since independence com-
ment on a similar movement from a narrative of arrival to Bombay,
“featuring modern consciousness as a painful mastering of life in the
metropolis” through a “struggle to inherit the city” (whilst coming “face
to face with the truth of the “citizen subject” in India”) to the cataclys-
mic events of the communal riots of 1992–93, after the destruction of
the Babri mosque in Ayodhya by pro-Hindutva fanatics.79 In Fiza (2000),
a fi lm set during the riots, “the hero performs a double patricide of the
Muslim and Hindu politicians,” before dying in the arms of his sister.80
Thus later narratives inevitably return, like Rushdie’s novel, to an Oedi-
pal image of the city’s self-annihilation.
The tri-partite division of Aurora’s work, however, destabilizes a num-
ber of bi-partitions. The discursive diptych or bifurcation of Bombay into
Malabar Masala and Bombay Central, as articulated in Moor’s narrative of
his own life, also informs the biographical orientation of Aurora’s work. In
addition, the transition of Aurora’s work from the black and white charcoal
sketches of Bombay history into the colourful surreal world of the Moor
paintings is reminiscent of the tumultuous cinematic passage of Dorothy
Gale from the black and white emptiness of Kansas into the Technicolor
world of Oz in The Wizard of Oz, a significant influence on Rushdie’s work.
In his monograph on the film, Rushdie declares Dorothy’s song, “Over
the Rainbow,” “the anthem of all the world’s migrants,” a “celebration of
Escape,” a “great paean to the Uprooted Self” and a “hymn” to “Elsewhere.”
Rushdie is critical of “the scriptwriters’ notion [of] the superiority of ‘home’
over ‘away’” and asserts, instead, that home is “anywhere, and everywhere,
except the place from which we began.”81 In the novel, Aurora’s hybrid trope
of Mooristan/Palimpstine spells out contemporary definitions of diaspora in
the combination of the ideas of a “home” and an “elsewhere” and in declar-
ing the impossibility of return to the “place from which we began.”
The Moor’s Last Sigh, then, evokes 1492 as the moment which set Moor-
ish diasporas in motion. As we have seen, however, it employs hegemonic
visual structures and forms in order to interrogate them rather than to
posit itself as a return to a purity of origins or a modern, secular mobili-
zation. Rushdie employs a further artistic metaphor to envisage the text’s
indebtedness to narratives of 1492. The story of Boabdil, he says in an
interview, was employed “merely [as] background” to the novel and “done
rather like Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly paintings.”82 This analogy is a further
reinforcement of the triptych principle of linking separate panels as well as
an allusion to a fragmented, episodic structure, problematizing centrality,
hierarchical order, and teleology. In Australian Ned Kelly’s duplicitous vil-
lain-hero status we can recognize, once again, an ironic engagement with
the epic transformations of the protagonists of secular historiographies and
the processes that translate them into figures of national significance by
having them step off one canvas or order and into another.
I will end on one of the novel’s ‘travelling’ images, at once poignant,
sardonic and melancholy, that epitomizes Rushdie’s engagement with living

art. In the Cochin narrative, pro-British Aires names his British bulldog
“Jawaharlal.” After the dog dies, Aires has “little furniture-wheels screwed
into the undersides of his paws, so that his master could continue to pull
him on a lead.”83 Moor inherits the dog and, in its afterlife, it accompanies
him on his journey from Bombay to Benengeli. The image of the stuffed
British bulldog who shares his name with the fi rst Prime Minister of India
can be interpreted as a constant reminder of those early post-independence
secular ideals that, in the novel, are drowned in the violence of Bombay’s
Armageddon. After the destruction of the city, Jawaharlal is “just the name
of a stuffed dog.”84 The image is also symbolic of the tendency in Indian
political history after Nehru to nationalize issues, which can lead to their
simplification or museumization in slogans.85 The stuffed dog stands for
the taxidermy of political ideals illustrating how competing historical can-
vases succeed each other in a series of symbolic mobilizations. Working
through these processes, postcolonial living art negotiates its modernity in
the moments between canvases.
A version of part of this essay previously appeared in Commonwealth Essays

and Studies 31, 2, (2009): 44–56, and I am grateful to the editor, Marta
Dvorak, for her kind permission to reprint selected elements of it here.
NOTES
1. Daniel Herwitz, “Reclaiming the Past and Early Modern Indian Art”, Third
Text 18.3 (2004): 216.
2. Ibid., 223.
3. Geeta Kapur, Contemporary Indian Artists (New Delhi: Vikas, 1978), 43.
4. See R. Siva Kumar, “Modern Indian Art: A Brief Overview,” Art Journal
58.3 (1999): 14-21.
5. Ibid., 14.
6. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, “Narrativizing Visual Culture: Towards a
Polycentric Aesthetics” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff
(London: Routledge, 37-59, 2002), 42.
7. Ibid., 40.
8. Benita Parry, “Aspects of Peripheral Modernisms”, ARIEL 40. 1 (2009):
28-32.
9. Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (London: Vintage, 1996). Subsequent
references to the novel will be cited parenthetically in the text.
10. Ibid., 129.
11. Ibid., 173.
12. Ibid., 174.
13. Ibid., 219.
14. Ibid., 246
15. Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Subject of Visual Culture” in The Visual Culture
Reader, 6.
16. Xavier Bray, “Francisco Bayeu, Saragossa”, Exhibition Review, The Burling-
ton Magazine 138.1120, (1996): 479.
17. María A. Castro, “Separation and Displacement in Francisco Pradilla’s Ori-
entalist Paintings: La Rendición de Granada (1882) and El Suspiro del Moro

Living Art 67
(1892)” in One World Periphery Reads the Other: Knowing the ‘Oriental’
in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula, ed. Ignacio López-Calvo (New-
castle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010, 244-256), 244.
18. See Janis Tomlinson, “Bayeu y Subias, Francisco (1734-95)”, The Oxford
Companion to Western Art, ed. Hugh Brigstocke (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2001), accessed December 9, (2010), http://www.oxfordlineon-
line.com.
19. Castro, Separation, 249.
20. Ibid., 254.
21. Bray, “Francisco Bayeu”, 480.
22. Rushdie, Moor, 433, 3.
23. Charles Taylor, “Religious Mobilizations”, Public Culture 18.2 (2006): 281-
2. Taylor discusses, for instance, Protestant fundamentalism’s self-conceptu-
alization as a return to the purity of the Reformation sola scriptura, which in
turn saw itself as a return to primitive Christianity (281).
24. Robert Glenn Howard, “The Double Bind of the Protestant Reformation:
The Birth of Fundamentalism and the Necessity of Pluralism”, Journal of
Church and State 47, no. 1 (2005): 91-2.
25. Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf, A Concise History of India
(Cambridge UP, 2002), 2-3.
26. Ibid.
27. Rushdie, Moor, 372.
28. Richard Fletcher, Moorish Spain (London: Phoenix, 1994), 172-4.
29. See ed. Michael R. Reder, Conversations with Salman Rushdie (Jackson: UP
of Mississippi, 2000), 156.
30. Richard Fletcher, The Quest for El Cid (London: Hutchinson, 1989), 4.
31. Paul R. Brass, The Politics of India since Independence (Cambridge UP,
2001), 3-17.
33. Ibid., 22.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., 31
36. Ibid., 32-3.
37. Brass, Politics of India., 229.
38. Rushdie, Moor, 352
39. Ibid., 168.
40. Ibid., 285.
41. Ibid., 287
42. Salman Rushdie, Step across This Line (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002)
196.
44. Ibid., 293.
45. Ibid., 371.
46. Rachel Trousdale, “‘City of Mongrel Joy)’: Bombay and the Shiv Sena in
Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh”, Journal of Commonwealth
Literature 39, no. 2 (2004): 97.
48. Ibid., 385.
49. Ibid., 376.
50. Ibid., 409.
51. Steven Nadler, Rembrandt’s Jews (U of Chicago P, 2003) 221.
52. Rushdie, Step Across, 205.
53. Kumar, Modern, 16.
55. Kapur, Contemporary, 127.

56. Herwitz, “Reclaiming,” 226-7.
61. Herwitz, “Reclaiming,” 216.
62. Catherine Cundy, Contemporary World Writers. Salman Rushdie (Man-
chester UP, 1997), 113.
63. Stephen Baker, “‘You Must Remember This’: Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s
Last Sigh”, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 35.1 (2000): 51.
64. Neeladri Bhattacharya, “Predicaments of Secular Histories”, Public Culture
20, no. 1 (2008): 57-61.
66. Ibid., 224-5.
67. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-91
(London: Granta, 1992) 48.
69. Ibid., 77-8.
70. Maurice Hunt, “Shakespeare’s Venetian Paradigm: Stereotyping and Sadism
in The Merchant of Venice and Othello”, Papers on Language and Litera-
ture 39, no. 2 (2003): 162-3.
72. Ibid., 235-6.
73. Ibid., 236.
74. Ibid.,, 301.
75. Ibid. 302.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid., 303.
78. Ibid.
79. Geeta Kapur and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “Bombay/Mumbai 1992-2001” in
Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, ed. Iwona Blaz-
wick (London: Tate, 2001, 16-39) 18-20.
80. Ibid., 31.
81. Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz (London: British Film Institute, 2004),
23, 57.
82. Reder, Conversations, 156.
84. Ibid., 352.
85. Brass, Politics, 26.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baker, Stephen. “‘You Must Remember This’: Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last
Sigh.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 35 (2000): 43-54.
Bayeu, Francisco. Surrender of Granada. Private collection; exh. Museo Camon
Aznar, Saragossa, 1763.
Bhattacharya, Neeladri. “Predicaments of Secular Histories.” Public Culture 20
(2008): 57-73.
Brass, Paul R. The Politics of India since Independence. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001.
Bray, Xavier. “Francisco Bayeu, Saragossa.” Exhibition Review, The Burlington
Magazine 138 (1996): 479-81.

Living Art 69
Castro, María A. “Separation and Displacement in Francisco Pradilla’s Orientalist
Paintings: La Rendición de Granada (1882) and El Suspiro del Moro (1892).”
In One World Periphery Reads the Other: Knowing the “Oriental” in the
Americas and the Iberian Peninsula, edited by Ignacio López-Calvo, 244-256.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010.
Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote. trans. Tobias Smollett. Ware: Wordsworth
Editions, 1998 [1605-15].
Cundy, Catherine. Contemporary World Writers: Salman Rushdie. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1997.
Fletcher, Richard. The Quest for El Cid. London: Hutchinson, 1989.
. Moorish Spain. London: Phoenix, 1994.
Herwitz, Daniel. “Reclaiming the Past and Early Modern Indian Art.” Third Text
18 (2004): 213-228.
Howard, Robert Glenn. “The Double Bind of the Protestant Reformation: The
Birth of Fundamentalism and the Necessity of Pluralism.” Journal of Church
and State 47 (2005): 91-108.
Hunt, Maurice. “Shakespeare’s Venetian Paradigm: Stereotyping and Sadism in
The Merchant of Venice and Othello.” Papers on Language and Literature 39
(2003): 162-184.
Kapur, Geeta. Contemporary Indian Artists. New Delhi: Vikas, 1978.
Kapur, Geeta and Ashish Rajadhyaksha. “Bombay/Mumbai 1992-2001.” In Cen-
tury City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, edited by Iwona Blaz-
wick, 16-39. London: Tate, 2001.
Kumar, R. Siva. “Modern Indian Art: A Brief Overview.” Art Journal 58 (1999):
14-21.
Metcalf, Barbara D. and Thomas R. Metcalf. A Concise History of India. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “The Subject of Visual Culture.” In The Visual Culture Reader,
edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff, 3-23. London: Routledge, 2002.
dir. Mohamed, Khalid. Fiza. Trans UK, 2000. DVD.
Nadler, Steven. Rembrandt’s Jews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Parry, Benita. “Aspects of Peripheral Modernisms.” ARIEL 40 (2009): 27-56.
Pradilla, Francisco. Surrender of Granada. Palacio del Senado, Madrid.
. Sigh of the Moor 1892. Rodriguez Bauzá private collection, Madrid. 1882,
in situ.
ed. Reder, Michael R. Conversations with Salman Rushdie. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2000.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-91. London:
Granta, 1992.
. Step across This Line. London: Jonathan Cape, 2002.
. The Wizard of Oz. London: British Film Institute, 2004.
Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. “Narrativizing Visual Culture: Towards a Polycen-
tric Aesthetics.” In The Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff,
37-59. London: Routledge, 2002.
Taylor, Charles. “Religious Mobilizations.” Public Culture 18 (2006): 281-300.
Tomlinson, Janis. “Bayeu y Subias, Francisco (1734-95).” In The Oxford Com-
panion to Western Art, edited by Hugh Brigstocke. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001. Accessed December 9, 2010. http://www.oxfordlineonline.com/.
Trousdale, Rachel. “‘City of Mongrel Joy’: Bombay and the Shiv Sena in Midnight’s
Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39
(2004): 95-110.
Velazquez, Diego. Las Meninas. Museo del Prado, Madrid, 1656.

5 In Search for Lost Portraits
The Lost Portrait and
The Moor’s Last Sigh
Joel Kuortti
INTRODUCTION
There is an intriguing relationship between Salman Rushdie’s novel The

Moor’s Last Sigh (1995)1 and a BBC documentary film, The Lost Portrait
(1995).2 The film mingles the narrative of Rushdie’s novel and his commen-
tary on the book with his mediated journey to India in search for a lost
portrait of his mother. This is a portrait that was allegedly painted before
Rushdie’s birth by an Indian painter, and subsequently re-used as a canvas
for another painting by another emerging artist. Furthermore, the film docu-
ments the painting of Rushdie’s own portrait by yet another Indian artist. All
in all, the film captures the metaphorical literary quality of layered narrative
in very concrete terms. In my essay, I discuss both the metaphorical visual
elements in the novel, and the film’s narration in Rushdie’s search for the
lost portrait. These overlap and contradict each other, yet they both evolve
around the possibility and necessity of palimpsest reality. I will discuss what
the literary, artistic, and philosophical corollaries of such an approach might
be, and how this appears in Rushdie’s work in more general terms.
PALIMPSEST REALITY
The underlying idea of Rushdie’s novel The Moor’s Last Sigh is visible
already in one of its cover images, which displays an illustration by Dennis
Leigh (figure 5.1).3 The dark-colored, fragmented image depicts figuratively
a scene in the novel in which the painter Vasco Miranda paints (himself
as) an equestrian character over the portrait of Moor’s, Moraes Zogoiby’s,
mother Aurora:
[I]n his three days’ sequestration he [Vasco Miranda] had painted

over my mother’s image, hiding it beneath a new work, an equestrian
portrait of the artist in Arab attire, [ . . . a] strange new depiction
of Vasco Miranda in fancy dress, weeping on a great white horse.
(emphases added)4

In Search for Lost Portraits 71
Figure 5.1 Detail of the cover of The Moor’s Last Sigh by Dennis Leigh. Repro-
duced with permission.
This is one of the key moments in the novel, laying out the underlying idea of
the palimpsest. Palimpsest is a recurring trope in Rushdie’s writing, a method
to portray layered images, here characterizing metaphorically the overall
structure of narrative—or, indeed, history and reality in general. A working
definition of palimpsest in Rushdie’s usage can be found in a comment by
the anonymous narrator of Shame (1983): “A palimpsest obscures what lies
beneath.”5 Etymologically the term comes from the Latin word palimpses-
tus which is further derived from Greek palimpsēstos (παλίμψηστος), ‘scraped
again,’ for historically valuable writing materials such as parchment or tablet
were commonly re-used after earlier writing had been erased.6 From this
ancient practice for procuring writing or painting material, the term has
taken on other, more metaphorical roles, and in this ‘palimpsestuous’7 man-
ner it appears frequently especially in modern literature. Thus, apart from
Rushdie’s fiction, we can find palimpsest being used for example in H. D.’s
Palimpsest (1926),8 or Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1985).9
We encounter the metaphoric use of palimpsest early on in Rushdie.
Already in Grimus (1975), his least successful novel, Virgil Jones contem-
plates on the possibility of multiple dimensions of reality existing simulta-
neously: “If you concede that conceptual possibility, [ . . . ] you must also
concede that there may well be more than one [dimension]. In fact, that an

72 Joel Kuortti
infi nity of dimensions might exist, as palimpsests, upon and within and
around our own, without our being in any wise able to perceive them.”10
What is perceived here as a layered construction is ‘reality’ itself, not a
mere work of art. This layeredness can, as I have analyzed in Fictions to
Live In, be argued to be the overall epistemological stance of Rushdie’s fic-
tion.11 In this view, authenticity—just as well as truth or essentialist ideas
of identity—becomes an impossibility, and truth and reality are actually
hidden, “without our being in any wise able to perceive them.”12 What is
visible is pure fakery, pure fiction, fiction in the negative sense of insin-
cere fabrication. In this understanding, although literary fiction is consid-
ered the foremost playground for imaginative, imaginary, even deceptive
representations, it does not mean that any other form of representation—be
it politics, history, or even physics—has any more direct route to ‘truth.’
Correspondingly, in Shame the history of Pakistan is interpreted in terms
of the palimpsest:
It is well known that the term ‘Pakistan,’ an acronym, was originally

thought up in England by a group of Muslim intellectuals. P for the
Punjabis, A for the Afghans, K for the Kashmiris, S for Sind and the
‘tan,’ they say, for Baluchistan. [ . . . ] So it was a word born in exile
which then went East, was borne-across or trans-lated, and imposed
itself on history; a returning migrant, settling down on partitioned
land, forming a palimpsest on the past.13
This ironic representation of the founding of Pakistan underlines the idea of

history as a “palimpsest on the past.” Here, a particular historical moment
leading to the declaration of independence in 1947 is “thought up” and then
“imposed [ . . . ] on history.” History is not transmitted directly through
time but it is doubly constructed, fi rst in the making—prior to the event,
then in its writing—in the posteriority of the event. As a history graduate
from Cambridge, Rushdie is well versed in this aspect of theoretical appli-
cation of the palimpsest. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, then, Rushdie restores
palimpsest to its ‘original’ non-metaphoric function when an old painting
is used as a canvas for a new work of art.13
PALIMPSEST AND EKPHRASIS
In The Moor’s Last Sigh, the metaphoric, palimpsest, and narrative nature
of reality comes through very clearly in the descriptions of Aurora’s paint-
ings.15 In this, Rushdie uses the literary device of ekphrasis. In his aptly
named review of Rushdie’s novel, “Palimpsest Regained,” J. M. Coetzee
defi nes ekphrasis as “the conduct of narration through the description
of imaginary works of art.”16 This is a device that Rushdie has applied

frequently in his works, except that the works of art depicted are not neces-
sarily straightforwardly “imaginary,” as Coetzee’s defi nition would have it.
In Midnight’s Children, for example, there is a description of the painting
The Boyhood of Raleigh (1870) by Sir John Everett Millais. Neil ten Korte-
naar comments on the ekphrastic nature of this representation:
We cannot say that the print in Saleem’s room is Millais’s painting—there

are slight discrepancies that either point to Saleem’s imperfect memory
or indicate that the painting is a variation on Millais’s—but we can say
that the print is based on Millais’s tribute to empire and that Rushdie can
expect readers familiar with the painting to recognize it.17
With a certain degree of undecidability (i.e., imperfect memory and varia-

tion), so common in Rushdie’s writing, the ekphrastically represented
painting both is and is not equivalent with the original. It both is and is not
imaginary, just like history in general. Thus the ekphrastic representation
in Rushdie embodies the palimpsest reality—reality as a palimpsest.
As to Aurora’s ‘Moor paintings’ in The Moor’s Last Sigh, they often
display this kind of uncertainty as a common feature. They do not present
the world in straightforward binaries but vacillate between alternatives,
alternative interpretations that are, nevertheless, interwoven:
The water’s edge, the dividing line between two worlds, became in
many of these pictures the main focus of her concern. [ . . . ] At the
water’s edge strange composite creatures slithered to and fro across the
frontier of the elements. Often she painted the water-line in such a way
as to suggest that you were looking at an unfi nished painting which
had been abandoned, half-covering another. But was it a waterworld
being painted over the world of air, or vice versa? Impossible to be sure.
[ . . . ] Around and about the figure of the Moor in his hybrid fortress
she wove her vision, which in fact was a vision of weaving, or more
accurately interweaving. (second to last emphasis original)18
This undecidability is perhaps the one single feature that dominates The
Moor’s Last Sigh. It is the decisive impossibility to decide between two
alternatives, the essential resistance to enter the world of Manichean bina-
rism. The space-time between the different realities is the truly unknown
moment of the present. One instance where this collapsing together of dif-
ferent dimensions takes place is when Moraes escapes from his ‘Bombay’
to ‘Spain.’19 The place for which he abandons his familiar Bombay, Spain,
is no less fantastic than its forerunner. Already before his journey there, it
had become one of the places which have molded his personality, in a way,
through Aurora’s paintings. At one point Aurora illuminates her vision of
the place of her paintings as follows:

74 Joel Kuortti
Call it Mooristan [ . . . ]. Water-gardens and hanging gardens, watch-
towers and towers of silence, too. Place 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. (emphases added)20
In her idiosyncratic language, Aurora is once again describing the palimp-

sest. To say that this place, Mooristan or Palimpstine, exists in Spain
would be distorting reality. There are a number of points where the link
with Andalusia can be established, but then again, it is infiltrated with
Indian and other elements. It is both not-quite-Alhambra and not-quite-
Chowpatty. What is more, upon his arrival in Spain Moraes is not sure
whether he had completely arrived, or whether the place was not exactly
right, “almost, but not quite.”21 Although I cannot dwell on the issue here,
this not-quiteness resembles Homi Bhabha’s idea of colonial mimicry, for
Bhabha describes the mimic man as “almost the same but not quite [ . . . ]
[a]lmost the same but not white.”22
The ekphrastic element, bound up with the palimpsest, is there centrally
also in the film The Lost Portrait, even though it is eventually revealed to
be an impossibility. Next I will discuss how these two devices feature in
that documentary fi lm.
THE LOST PORTRAIT
In his 1993 interview with Rushdie, the Irish novelist John Banville records
Rushdie commenting on the issue of the lost portrait prior to the publica-
tion of The Moor’s Last Sigh:23
Under an unknown picture somewhere in India there is hidden a por-

trait of Salman Rushdie’s mother. The story goes like this. An artist,
hired by Rushdie’s father to paint Disney animals on the walls of the
child Salman’s nursery, went on to do a portrait of Mrs. Rushdie.
When the painting was fi nished, Rushdie père did not like it. The artist
stored the picture in the studio of a friend of his, another artist, who,
running out of canvases one day, painted a picture of his own over it.
Afterward, when both had become famous artists, the friend could not
remember which picture he had painted over the other’s canvas, or to
whom he had sold it.21
Banville chronicles the main components of the story in a chronological

order: the painting of the portrait, the discarding of the painting, the stor-
ing of the painting, the repainting of the canvas, the forgetting about the
painting, and fi nally the re-remembering of the painting. This description
of the line of events is very close to the opening of the film in which Rushdie

himself recounts the events, complete with quotations from The Moor’s
Last Sigh. Rushdie’s account is, however, more detailed and it gives the
names of the painters in question. According to this account, the portrait
was allegedly painted by the Indian painter Krishen Khanna, and the can-
vas was re-used by the painter M. F. Husain:25
Krishen Khanna [ . . . ] wrote me a letter in which he told this story

about how he had once painted my mother’s portrait. [ . . . ] And in this
letter he said that my father had not liked the picture and had refused
to buy it. Anyway, the picture was rejected and Krishen left it in the
studio of another friend of his, another young artist starting out who
grew up to become distinguished Indian painter M. F. Husain, [ . . . ]
and Husain sometime later [ . . . ] ran out of canvases and, seeing this as
a rejected canvas, picked it up and painted a picture of his own over the
top of it which he managed to sell. So now somewhere floating around
Bombay or India is this picture [ . . . ] by M. F. Husain and underneath
it there is Krishen Khanna’s portrait of my mother.26
Rushdie’s familiarity with Indian art and artists comes through in this and
other comments, as well as in the ekphrastic points in his work. 27 In the
end, this enables the whole search for the lost portrait. Still under the fatwa
issued by the late Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, Rushdie is himself
unable to travel to India. Therefore it is Krishen Khanna who takes up the
task to look for any traces of the painting. The fi lm records this search to
libraries, galleries, and specialists.
One person who is interviewed in the fi lm is Husain himself, the painter
whom Khanna claims to have used his portrait as a canvas for another
painting. The issue evolves into a kind of contest between Khanna and
Husain as Khanna claims that Husain had once said that he might know
where the painting might be:
I’ve talked to Husain about this. I’ve mentioned the fact that Salman
was thinking deeply about this thing and was moved by this experi-
ence and that he’s a sort of semi-obsessive about this painting. And he
[ . . . ] was intrigued. [ . . . ] I don’t think he was all that serious when
he said [ . . . ], “I think I know where this painting is.” [ . . . ] And then
he, oh, he juggled with his words and he was rather dismissive of the
whole subject.28
Here the quest seems to be close to a turning point which would result in
fi nding the picture. However, Husain is reluctant to cooperate and fi nally
says: “Nothing at all. I don’t want to talk about it.”29 This refusal is inter-
preted by another interviewee30 as Husain’s unwillingness to return to the
time in which he was still poor: “Nobody likes to look back on poverty.
So he didn’t like to look back on those days. Because he could be sensitive

76 Joel Kuortti
about such a matter as ‘borrowing’ a canvas.”31 Rushdie only briefly com-
ments on the refusal: “Perhaps he got worried that we’re going to scratch
his picture off. Perhaps he’s protecting his work.”32
In his interviews, Rushdie has clearly made the connection between the
historical and the fictional events. The autobiographical dimension of the
incident in the novel—as in all of Rushdie’s writing33 —is one element that
has also been discussed in Rushdie criticism. 34 Rushdie himself recurrently
denies the autobiographical elements any decisive interest, in his or other
writers’ work, and comments for example that “[w]e now seem to believe
that the only way of understanding a text is to understand the writer’s
life,”35 and that “[t]his biographical obsession [ . . . ] is not interesting.”36
In my analysis, then, the actual historicality of the event is not of concern,
except to the extent that it has allegedly served as an initiating point for the
story itself, and it became something else as Rushdie comments: “I made
various attempts to write about it without success until, until it became a
story of a different mother and a different son. Not my mother, not me,
and an entirely different kind of circumstance in which a portrait was lost
underneath another painting” (emphases added).37
Another point where the fictional and autobiographical accounts over-
lap is in the description of the reasons for the refusal of the portrait.
Rushdie tells about the possible reasons for his father’s refusal in the fi lm
as follows: “Now, I am not entirely sure why he didn’t like the picture
and my father’s not around to ask any more, and when I ask my mother
she affects not to remember. I have a suspicion as to why that was. It was
perhaps that the picture was too sensual for my father’s taste” (emphasis
added). 38 What Rushdie here sketches is a kind of a moral or moralistic
motive in his father’s (assumed) perception of the portrait as “too sensual.”
This perception is challenged when Khanna offers his own reminiscences
of the picture: “It wasn’t a voluptuous painting by any manner. I think
the color was [ . . . ], if I recall, she was in a red sari and the background
was green; it was like a cobalt green. Those are the main colors and her
skin was like wheaten color, shot with a little orange in places” (empha-
sis added). 39 The claim that the picture in Khanna’s recollection was not
“voluptuous” seems to suggest that the moralistic opposition would have
been unfounded. There is no way of ascertaining the original moment of
refusal—if indeed there was one—and the diverging stories remain there
as a palimpsest portrayal of the issue.
One further delineation of the matter is to be found in the novel
itself. There Abraham Zogoiby’s disagreement with Vasco’s painting
is fundamentally philosophical or aesthetic. He cannot accept that the
artist had chosen to paint something different than what was commis-
sioned, namely “a portrait of my carrying wife and child.”40 At variance
with that, Vasco had not included the child in the picture but “had
depicted [Aurora] sitting cross-legged on a giant lizard under her chha-
tri,41 cradling empty air. Her full left breast, weighty with motherhood,

was exposed,” and when Abraham shouted at him about the omission,
“Vasco waved away all naturalistic criticisms.”42 The imaginative is
positioned over the realistic, and when this position is refused, Vasco
turns the portrait into a palimpsest by painting it over. Moraes does not
consider realistic representation in such high regard as his father, and
rather shares Aurora’s “instinctive dislike of the purely mimetic,”43 a
view allowing artistic notions a more prominent role: “the story unfold-
ing on [Aurora’s] canvases seemed more like my autobiography than the
real story of my life.”44 The reality-effect of such expression is so strong
that, after Aurora’s death, Moraes thinks that if only that painting
could be found and the earlier layer be discovered, then he could have
her back, if not in life then in art. Similarly, in the fi lm, Rushdie consid-
ers the writing of his novel as a solution for the quest for the portrait:
“In a funny way I think that writing this novel is a piece of sympathetic
magic. I think it is entirely possible that as a result of writing the novel,
the picture will turn up” (emphasis added).45
In the end, neither Moraes nor Rushdie can accomplish their search.
Neither the palimpsest art nor reality divulge their layers for a singular
translation. Where in the novel Vasco violently forces the restorer Aoi
Uë to rediscover Aurora,46 in the fi lm the prospective of regaining the
earlier image by X-ray photographs or by removal of the top layer are
considered. The possibilities are judged meager as another interviewed
expert comments in the fi lm: “You have to decide which is the better one;
whether the top one is the better or the earlier one is the better one. You
have to decide which are to keep and which are to sacrifice.”47 Khanna
laughs ironically at the prospect: “Sounds very bitchy, but [ . . . ] one way
of discovering this picture is to take all the paintings of the right size and
strip them. Hahaha!!! Who’s to know—who’s to know which is which,
whether the masterpiece is underneath or on top.”48 The search for the
lost past proves to be full of complications, from the incompatible stories
to confl icting interests, from theoretical impasses to practical dilemmas. I
will fi nally turn to consider how The Lost Portrait chooses to come over
this impending, inevitable failure.
ANOTHER PORTRAIT IS FOUND
The issue of the quest for the portrait in the film is reminiscent of the nos-
talgia for the lost past as critiqued in postcolonial theory. While ultimately
unattainable, this longing retains a strong hold on people’s lives, as they
are remaking them. It means a longing for a past that never existed, a
recreation of a lost moment in time.49 Psychologically, it is an attempt at
overcoming a traumatic experience. Translated into the social and politi-
cal sphere of postcolonial nations, it means an overcoming of the traumas
of colonial past. The film The Lost Portrait appears as another attempt at

78 Joel Kuortti
healing but it is not, however, only about the search for the lost portrait
of Rushdie’s mother. Beside that, it documents the painting of Rushdie’s
own portrait in London by yet another Indian artist, Bhupen Khakhar.50
When we fi rst see Khakhar in the film, he is sketching Rushdie, comment-
ing on The Moor’s Last Sigh: “What I like about your work is that it is so
many things happening at the same time. [ . . . ] I can bring some portions
of that in the painting because it overlaps, it exaggerates, it goes into a
total fantasy” (emphases added).51 In the painting, then, Khakhar follows
this observation and includes in his own characteristic style scenes from
the novel in the perimeter around Rushdie in the center. The result is not
a palimpsest as such but a kind of a narrative mural, even a cartoon-like
chain of overlapping multitude of simultaneous events.
During the film, Rushdie’s portrait develops from the fi rst sketches to
the fi nal painting. Towards the end of the fi lm, Khakhar is looking at the
painting with Rushdie and they talk about how it will be fi nalized. When
Khakhar says that “I am going to take this back to India and then work over
the other parts [ . . . ] and then post it back,”52 Rushdie comments: “Let’s
hope it doesn’t become another lost portrait if it’s going to be posted.”53
This scene reveals the extent to which nostalgia is always already a lack:
even when the painting is unfi nished, its loss is already mourned—even
though here seemingly ironically. There is, however, a marked concern in
Rushdie’s comment for the safety of the painting when mailed back and
forth between India and England. The story ends, fi nally, with the arrival
of the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery in London, which bought it
in its collections “for a whopping £10,000.”54
Khakhar makes an appearance also in The Moor’s Last Sigh as Accoun-
tant, the painter, and homosexual lover of Moraes’s Great-Uncle Aires.
Khakhar’s homosexuality earned him the title of “the enfant terrible of
Indian art,” as well as the dismissive designation of “gay painter.”55 Rush-
die’s interest in Khakhar’s work is apparently not only personal, for as art
historian Geeta Kapur observes, Khakhar is “the major dissenting figure of
the postcolonial world, especially with regard to the problem of representa-
tion.”56 The novel gives an ekphrastic description of one of Khakhar’s more
controversial early works:
In that last year of his life, Great-Uncle Aires became the Accountant’s
regular model, and in my opinion his lover as well. The paintings are
there for all to see, above all the extraordinary You Can’t Always Get
Your Wish, 114X114 cms., oil on canvas, in which a teeming Bom-
bay street-scene—Muhammad Ali Road, perhaps—is surveyed from
a fi rst-floor balcony by the full-length nude figure of Aires da Gama,
trim-and-slim as a young god, but with the unfulfilled, unfulfi llable,
unexpressed, inexpressible longings of old age in every brush-stroke of
his painted form.57

When this description is compared with Khakhar’s 1981 painting You Can’t
Please All, the similarities are remarkable: a teeming (Baroda) street-scene,
a full-length trim-and-slim nude male figure on balcony, fabulous imagery
in a seemingly realistic setting.58 It is not for nothing that this Accountant is
nominated as “without a doubt the present-day inheritor of Aurora’s fallen
mantle.”59 A resilient social critic, Khakhar himself became accepted late in
life, and celebrated only posthumously.60
Yet, there is no question that at the same time Rushdie does not merely
duplicate Khakhar’s painting but represents it in an altered form. The idea
of multiple dimensions penetrates Rushdie’s writing on all levels. In the
same way, Khakhar’s characteristic style of representation features also in
his representation of Rushdie. The central figure is a solitary male figure in
a pensive mood. The salient color here as well as in You Can’t Please All is
blue, and the images in the perimeter are fabulous representations of scenes
from The Moor’s Last Sigh.61 Furthermore, Khakhar is said to have fi rst
painted Rushdie’s upper body naked, but due to his protests, had agreed to
paint him in “a transparent shirt.”62 The anecdote is intriguing especially in
relation view of Khakhar’s work and the way in which Aurora and Vasco’s
paintings are described in the novel, and—if true—suggests certain timid-
ity on Rushdie’s part. Whatever the fact in this matter might be, in the
picture Rushdie is wearing a see-through garment.
The film ends with Rushdie freeing the painting from its mailing wrap-
per in the National Portrait Gallery. Upon his fi rst view of the completed
work, Rushdie comments:
Oh, I think it is every bit as astonishing as I thought it would be. The

face obviously hasn’t changed that much, a bit younger than me, a bit
weirder [ . . . ] but that’s very striking. But what I’m very excited about
is the way in which the surrounding area is developed, the Bombay and
the Cochin landscape at the top. I think it’s beautiful.63
The outcome is clearly pleasing for Rushdie, and he analyzes the last phases
of the process. The picture is not realistic—thus inviting the comment on
it being weirder—and is influenced by Khakhar’s earlier recollections of
(a younger, slimmer) Rushdie. Standing in front of the picture, content
and moved, Rushdie pays special attention to the bottom left corner of the
painting where there is a figure of a painting woman:
Bhupen’s always been very good at doing pictures inside pictures

[ . . . ] and here we have, I guess, Aurora painting the painting we
are seeing. I don’t know whether he’s going to call it a picture of me
or a picture of The Moor’s Last Sigh. I think it clearly is both in a
way. Now, I think it’s [ . . . ] I’m very [ . . . ] I am very, very pleased
(emphases added).64

80 Joel Kuortti
The idea of “pictures inside pictures” captures Rushdie’s narrative tech-
nique superbly. The interwoven, overlapping, palimpsest stories in all of
Rushdie’s writing are similarly stories within stories. And in the end—when
the portrait is named Salman Rushdie: The Moor—it is both.
CONCLUSION
I have discussed some visual elements in the novel The Moor’s Last Sigh
together with the story of Rushdie’s search for the lost portrait of his
mother in the film The Lost Portrait. These narratives overlap and contra-
dict each other, yet they both evolve around the possibility and necessity of
palimpsest reality. While The Lost Portrait might not be very exceptional
as a documentary fi lm, it does introduce some interesting topics in relation
to Rushdie’s writing, namely: critique of realism, emphasis on the layered
nature of narrative, and denial of singularity. The quest itself demonstrates
that the past is not retrievable as Rushdie comments nonchalantly on the
fi nal failure to locate the portrait: “I think it’s ok, [ . . . ] she can spend her
time in secret somewhere. One shouldn’t solve all of the mysteries of one’s
life.”65 The permeating idea of palimpsest is clearly present in the contem-
plations within the film. Finally, it can be said that the film captures the
metaphorical literary quality of Rushdie’s layered narrative style in very
concrete visual terms. This comes through especially in the depiction of the
painting of Rushdie’s own portrait.
NOTES
1. Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995).
2. Chris Granlund (dir.), The Lost Portrait, transmission date September 11,
1995 (London: BBC/RM Arts, 1995).
3. Dennis Leigh (aka James Foxx, lead singer of Ultravox) has also painted a
highly similar palimpsest image for Leslie Forbes’s novel Bombay Ice (Lon-
don: Phoenix House, 1998). I am grateful for the permission to use the pic-
ture for illustration here.
4. Rushdie, Moor’s, 158
5. Salman Rushdie, Shame (London: Picador, 1984 [1983]), 87.
6. See Robert Allen, The New Penguin English Dictionary (London: Penguin, 1986),
656; for the use of palimpsest in postcolonial criticism, see also Bill Ashcroft,
Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, Post-colonial Studies: The Key Concepts, Sec-
ond Edition. (London and New York: Routledge, 2007 [2000]), 174–176.
7. This expressive term is coined by Sarah Dillon in Palimpsest: Literature,
Criticism, Theory (London and New York: Continuum, 2007), 3.
8. Palimpsest is “a parchment from which one writing has been erased to make
room for another,” H. D. [Hilda Doolittle], Palimpsest (Boston and New
York: Houghton Miffl in, 1926), epigraph (n. p.); the source H. D. uses here
is Henry W. Auden and A. E. Taylor’s A Minimum of Greek: A Hand Book
of Greek Derivatives: For the Greek-less Classes of Schools and for Students
of Science (Toronto: Morang, 1906), 106.

9. “[Quinn] had written two or even three lines on top of each other, producing
a jumbled, illegible palimpsest,” Paul Auster, City of Glass, in Auster, New
York Trilogy (London: Faber & Faber, 1987 [1985]), 62.
10. Salman Rushdie, Grimus (London: Paladin, 1989 [1975]), 52 (emphases added).
11. Joel Kuortti, Fictions to Live In: Narration as an Argument for Fiction in
Salman Rushdie’s Novels (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998).
12. This is not a new or in any way a postmodern feature, and certainly it is
not Rushdie’s stylistic invention. Layered narrative structure and questions
about narrative truth can be found in texts from many periods, by various
writers and from diverse literary traditions: François Rabelais’s Pantagruel
(sixteenth-century France), Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (seventeenth-
century Spain), Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (eighteenth-century Ire-
land/England), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (nineteenth-century
England), and Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (twentieth-century
Soviet Union). Of these examples, only Brontë has not been referred to as a
possible influence on Rushdie.
13. Rushdie, Shame, 85–86 (emphases added). For palimpsest in the context of
The Moor’s Last Sigh and history, see Rudolf Beck, “‘The Re-discovery of
India’: Palimpsest, Multiplicity and Melodrama in The Moor’s Last Sigh,” in
New Worlds: Discovering and Constructing the Unknown in Anglophone
Literature, ed. Martin Kuester, Gabriele Christ, and Rudolf Beck (München:
Vögel, 2000), esp. 26–29.
14. Cf. Mona Narain, “Re-imagined Histories: Rewriting the Early Modern in
Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies
6.2 (2006): 55–68.
15. See e.g. Matt Kimmich, Offspring Fictions: Salman Rushdie’s Family Novels,
Costerus, new series, 177 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008), 225.
16. J. M. Coetzee, “Palimpsest Regained: The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman
Rushdie,” New York Review of Books 43.5, March 21, 1996, 14, accessed
September 7, 2009. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1598.
17. See Neil ten Kortenaar, “Postcolonial Ekphrasis: Salman Rushdie Gives the
Finger Back to the Empire,” Contemporary Literature 38.2 (1997): 232
(emphases added).
18. Rushdie, Moor’s, 226–227
19. Here, the single quotation marks denote the anti-essentialist non-singularity
of the references. Later on, this practice will be only implied but not repre-
sented in the text; see also Claudia Anderson, Bombay Between Reality and
Imagination in the Novels of Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, and John
Irving, Augsburg University, Dissertation, 2001 (n.p.: Books on Demand,
2001), 143–153.
20. Already in Grimus there is analogously the town of X in Morispain, (Rush-
die, Grimus, 34).
21. Rushdie, Moor’s, 384
22. Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Dis-
course,” in Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York and Lon-
don: Routledge 1987), 89.
23. As far as I have been able to ascertain, the fi rst time the issue of the portrait
gets to be mentioned is in Gerald Marzorati, “Rushdie in Hiding,” New York
Times Magazine November 4, 1990: 31–33, 68, 78 and 84–85, accessed
September 7, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/04/magazine/rush-
die-in-hiding.html?pagewanted=print, para. 49: “He was telling me about
what may be his next novel, [ . . . ] weaving a number of disparate narrative
strands—an autobiographical story about a lost portrait of his mother done
by a prominent Indian painter, an account of the Moors being driven from

82 Joel Kuortti
Granada in 1492. Already, he said, he has typed up a kind of treatment of the
book” (emphasis added).
24. John Banville, “Interview with Salman Rushdie,” The New York Review
of Books 40.5, March 4, 1993, 34–36; repr. in Conversations with Salman
Rushdie, ed. Michael R. Reder (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2000), 152 (second italics original).
25. M. F. (Muqbool Fida) Husain (1915–2011) and Krishen Khanna (born in
1925) are central figures in contemporary Indian art.
26. Granlund, Portrait, 1:30–3:10 min; the transcript and approximate timing is
my own, made from a video recording of the fi lm.
27. See Amita Malik, “Mumbai Diary: Rushdie in Velvet Pants,” Outlook
Magazine October 19, 1998, accessed September 7, 2009. http://outlook-
india.com/article.aspx?206382. Although Rushdie has not made an impact
as an art critic, he has written an article for The Observer Magazine about
the American painter Harold Shapinsky who was ‘found’ by the Indian
enthusiast Akumal Ramachander, see Rushdie, “Magnificent Obsession,
“The Observer Magazine May 26, 1985, 10–12, reprinted as “The Painter
and the Pest,” in Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and
Criticism 1981–1991 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 152–156; see
also Lawrence Weschler, “A Reporter at Large: A Strange Destiny,” The
New Yorker December 16, 1985, 47–86, repr. as “Shapinsky’s Karma,”
in Lawrence Weschler, A Wanderer in the Perfect City: Selected Passion
Pieces (St. Paul: Hungry Mind Press, 1998), 3–62; and Greg Lanning (dir.),
The Painter and the Pest, Bandung documentary, transmission date June 2,
1985 (UK: Bandung for Channel Four, 1985).
28. Granlund, Portrait, 38:50.
29. Granlund, Portrait, 9:40–10:10.
30. Although the interviewees are not named in the fi lm, this is most likely the
art critic Dnyaneshwar Nadkarni, who says he appears in the fi lm in his
discussion of the fi lm in Husain: Riding the Lightning (Bombay: Popular
Prakashan, 1996), 178–179. Nadkarni calls the fi lm a “bizarre story” about
“a stupid wild goose chase,” in which Husain is unnecessarily portrayed
unfavorably whereas Khanna is equally unreasonably advocated (178–179).
33. On autobiography and Rushdie, see e.g. Anderson Bastos Martins, “Writing
Home: Autobiography in Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul,” Acta Scien-
tiarum: Language and Culture 30.1 (2008): 85–95, accessed September 7,
2009. http://www.periodicos.uem.br/ojs/index.php/ActaSciLangCult/article/
viewFile/4059/2903; Allen Carey-Webb, “(Dis)Integrating Nation and Self:
Midnight’s Children and Postcolonial Autobiography,” in Allen Carey-Webb,
Making Subject(s): Literature and the Emergence of National Identity (New
York, London: Garland, 1998), 145–186; Janet Mason Ellerby, “Fiction
under Siege: Rushdie’s Quest for Narrative Emancipation in Haroun and the
Sea of Stories,” Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal of Children’s Lit-
erature 22.2 (1998): 212; and Una Chaudhuri, “Imaginative Maps: Excerpts
from a Conversation with Salman Rushdie,” Turnstile 2.1 (1990): 36–47,
accessed September 7, 2009. http://www.subir.com/rushdie/uc_maps.html.
34. See e.g. Pradeep Trikha, “The Moor’s Last Sigh: Creativity and Contro-
versy,” in Salman Rushdie: Critical Essays, vol. 2, ed. Mohit Kumar Ray
and Rama Kundu (New Delhi: Atlantic, 2006), 67.
35. Mary J. Loftus, “Rushdie Hour,” Emory Magazine (Spring 2008), accessed
September 7, 2009. http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/2008/
spring/rushdie.html.

36. Rushdie, “Salman Rushdie Creativity Conversation, Part XV: Salman
Rushdie on Autobiography and the Novel,” Emory University, April 16,
2009, accessed September 7, 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-
SGfvPDPCjo&feature=channel.
40. Rushdie, Moor’s, 157.
41. Chhatri is Hindi for an umbrella or, here, a canopy (see 149).
49. See e.g. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward
a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge and London: Harvard University
Press, 1999), 118; John Clement Ball, Satire and the Postcolonial Novel: V. S.
Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie (London and New York: Routledge,
2003), 10; Rajeswari Mohan, “Dodging the Crossfire: Questions for Postcolo-
nial Pedagogy,” College Literature 19.3–20.1 (1992–1993): 28.
50. Bhupen Khakhar (1934–2003) was another important figure in contempo-
rary Indian art, and he holds a specific place in view of Rushdie’s works.
He, for example, contributed eight illustrations for a limited edition of the
privately printed work by Rushdie in 1989—Two Stories (“The Free Radio”
and “The Prophet’s Hair”)—and he appears in disguise as Bhupen Gandhi
in The Satanic Verses (London: Viking/Penguin, 1988), 53.
54. “Glitterati: Literary Dude, Half Nude,” Outlook Magazine November 8,
1995, accessed September 7, 2009. http://www.outlookindia.com/glitterati.
asp?fodname=19951108.
55. See Sadanand Menon, “You Can’t Please All,” The Hindu Magazine Sep-
tember 14, 2003, accessed September 7, 2009. http://www.thehindu.com/
thehindu/mag/2003/09/14/stories/2003091400280200.htm.
56. Menon, “You Can’t Please All”; for more on Khakhar’s position within Indian
art see e.g. Geeta Kapur, “An Essay on Contemporary Art in India,” in the
exhibition “subTerrain: Artists Dig the Contemporary,” in the “body.city: A
Dossier with New Perspectives on India” Festival, House of World Cultures,
Berlin (2003), accessed September 7, 2009. http://archiv.hkw.de/de/dossiers/
body.city/c_texte_1.html, and Geeta Kapur, “The Uncommon Universe of
Bhupen Khakhar,” in Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, ed. Kobena Mercer
(London: Iniva, Institute of International Visual Arts and Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2007), 110–135; cf. Homi K. Bhabha, who describes Khakhar’s char-
acters as “playful postprimitivistic figures,” “Halfway House—Art of Cul-
tural Hybridization,” ArtForum 35.9 (May 1997): 12, accessed September 7,
2009. http://fi ndarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_n9_v35/ai_19587058/.
57. Rushdie, Moor’s, 202–203.
58. Oil on canvas 1756 x 1756 mm, purchased 1996, information from Tate Gal-
lery, “Bhupen Khakhar, You Can’t Please All,” T07200, accessed September
7, 2009. https://213.121.208.204/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961
&workid=21821&searchid=13057&tabview=image.

84 Joel Kuortti
60. Timothy Hyman, “Bhupen Khakhar: Artist Celebrated for His Startling,
Visionary Images of Homosexual Love,” The Independent August 27, 2003,
accessed September 7, 2009. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/
bhupen-khakhar-548654.html; see also Timothy Hyman, Bhupen Khakhar
(Mumbai: Chemould and Ahmedabad: Mapin, 1998).
61. Oil on linen, 1219 mm x 1219 mm, purchased, 1995, information from
National Portrait Gallery, Bhupen Khakhar, “Salman Rushdie: The Moor,”
(1995), NPG 6352, accessed September 7, 2009. http://www.npg.org.uk/col-
lections/search/portrait.php?locid=56&rNo=2.
62. “Glitterati: Literary Dude, Half Nude,”
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Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry and John Irving. Augsburg University, Dis-
sertation. n.p.: Books on Demand, 2001.
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Concepts. 2000. Second Edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2007.
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Derivatives: For the Greek-less Classes of Schools and for Students of Science.
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Ball, John Clement. Satire and the Postcolonial Novel: V. S. Naipaul, Chinua
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85–95. Accessed August 27, 2009. http://www.periodicos.uem.br/ojs/index.
php/ActaSciLangCult/article/viewFile/4059/2903.
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drama in The Moor’s Last Sigh.” In New Worlds: Discovering and Construct-
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Christ, and Rudolf Beck, 17–33. München: Vögel, 2000.
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com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_n9_v35/ai_19587058/.
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K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 85–92. 1987. New York and London:
Routledge, 1994.
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1847.
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Grove Press, 1967 [1966–1967].

Carey-Webb, Allen. “(Dis)Integrating Nation and Self: Midnight’s Children and
Postcolonial Autobiography.” In Allen Carey-Webb, Making Subject(s): Litera-
ture and the Emergence of National Identity, 145–186. New York and London:
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Mancha. Trans. J. M. Cohen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950 [1605–1615].
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Rushdie.” Turnstile 2.1 (1990): 36–47. Accessed August 27, 2009. http://www.
subir.com/rushdie/uc_maps.html.
Coetzee, J. M. “Palimpsest Regained: The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie.”
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27, 2009. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1598. 40 para.
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Continuum, 2007.
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1926.
Ellerby, Janet Mason. “Fiction under Siege: Rushdie’s Quest for Narrative Eman-
cipation in Haroun and the Sea of Stories.” Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical
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“Glitterati: Literary Dude, Half Nude.” Outlook Magazine November 8,
1995. Accessed September 7, 2009. http://www.outlookindia.com/glitterati.
asp?fodname=19951108.
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ber 11, 1995. London: BBC/RM Arts, 1995.
Hyman, Timothy. Bhupen Khakhar. Mumbai: Chemould and Ahmedabad: Mapin,
1998.
. “Bhupen Khakhar: Artist Celebrated for His Startling, Visionary Images
of Homosexual Love.” The Independent August 27, 2003. Accessed Sep-
tember 7, 2009. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/bhupen-
khakhar-548654.html.
Kapur, Geeta. “An Essay on Contemporary Art in India”. In the exhibition “subTer-
rain: Artists Dig the Contemporary,” in the “body.city: A Dossier with New Per-
spectives on India” Festival, House of World Cultures, Berlin (2003). Accessed
September 7, 2009. http://archiv.hkw.de/de/dossiers/body.city/c_texte_1.html.
. “The Uncommon Universe of Bhupen Khakhar.” In Pop Art and Vernacu-
lar Cultures, edited by Kobena Mercer, 110–135. London: Iniva, Institute of
International Visual Arts and Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007.
Kimmich, Matt. Offspring Fictions: Salman Rushdie’s Family Novels. Costerus.
New series, 177. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008.
Kuortti, Joel. Fictions to Live In: Narration as an Argument for Fiction in Salman
Rushdie’s Novels. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998.
Lanning, Greg (dir.). The Painter and the Pest. Bandung documentary, transmis-
sion June 2, 1985. UK: Bandung for Channel Four, 1985.
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tember 7, 2009. http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/2008/spring/
rushdie.html.
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October 19, 1998. Accessed September 7, 2009. http://outlookindia.com/arti-
cle.aspx?206382.
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nytimes.com/1990/11/04/magazine/rushdie-in-hiding.html?pagewanted=print.
60 para.
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mag/2003/09/14/stories/2003091400280200.htm.
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http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&worki
d=9515.
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College Literature 19.3–20.1 (1992–1993): 28–44.
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Prakashan, 1996.
Narain, Mona. “Re-imagined Histories: Rewriting the Early Modern in Rushdie’s
The Moor’s Last Sigh.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 6.2 (2006):
55–68.
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6352 (1995). Accessed September 7, 2009. http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/
search/portrait.php?locid=56&rNo=2.
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trans. M. A. Screech. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006 [1532].
Rushdie, Salman. Grimus. 1975. London: Paladin, 1989.
. “Magnificent Obsession.” The Observer Magazine (May 26, 1985): 10–12.
Reprinted as “The Painter and the Pest.” In Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands:
Essays and Criticism 1981–1991, 152–156. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.
. The Moor’s Last Sigh. London: Jonathan Cape, 1995.
. “Salman Rushdie Creativity Conversation, Part XV: Salman Rush-
die on Autobiography and the Novel.” Emory University (April 16,
2009). Accessed September 7, 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-
SGfvPDPCjo&feature=channel.
. The Satanic Verses. London: Viking/Penguin, 1988.
. Shame. London: Picador, 1984.
. Two Stories (Includes “The Free Radio” and “The Prophet’s Hair”) UK:
Privately published, 1989.
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volumes. York: Ann Ward (vol. 1–2), London: R. & J. Dodsley (vol. 3–4) and
London: T. Becket & P. A. DeHondt (vol. 5–9), 1759–1767.
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63–70. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2006.
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Paul: Hungry Mind Press, 1998.

6 Paint, Patronage, Power,
and the Translator’s Visibility
Jenni Ramone
Paint her into the world [ . . . ] for there is such magic in your brushes
that she may even come to life, spring off your pages and join us for
feasting and wine.
(Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence, 120)
This decadent description of the effect the paintbrush has on its viewer is
typical in Rushdie’s works: paintings evoke extreme reactions, especially
in their patrons. This is exemplified by both Dashwanth’s paintings of the
lost princess Qara Köz in The Enchantress of Florence (2008), and Vasco
Miranda’s painting of a naked, pregnant Aurora in The Moor’s Last Sigh
(1996). Both of these artists transform the subject by painting them: Dash-
wanth’s painting literally re-awakens the princess who had been lost from
memory in the royal family’s stories. Aurora’s story is conveyed by her
son only when Vasco’s obsessive desire for her leads him to imprison an
art restorer, Aoi Uë, who is ordered to uncover the painting. The original
image had been painted over with a more conventional work when it was
rejected as obscene by its patron, Aurora’s husband. The transformations
of Aurora and Qara take place in the visual medium of painting, yet they
evoke similar textual transformations, or translations, common to Rush-
die’s body of work as a whole. This essay engages with translation as a
compelling feature of Rushdie’s writing, arguing that the translator’s role is
transformed in works that engage with visual culture. This transformation
enables the translator’s transgressive power to be demonstrated more effec-
tively, as they wrest control away from their patron. Power in patronage is
normally enabled because the painter, writer, or translator works within
the parameters defi ned within the patron’s world-view. By reading these
translations into art through the framework of visual culture, the postco-
lonial urge to transform through retelling becomes clear: as Ella Shohat
and Robert Stam point out, visual culture represents a breaking away from
Eurocentrism.1 The intentions of visual culture as a theoretical framework
match Rushdie’s, and an analysis of The Enchantress of Florence and The
Moor’s Last Sigh demonstrates the power of the translator as a figure for
transgressive transformation in its positive, political, postcolonial sense.

88 Jenni Ramone
In Rushdie’s work, translation always involves temptation and transgres-
sion, aspects of translation practice which are implied by the symbolic origin
of translation and language difference within the world-views of the three
Abrahamic religions. The construction of the tower of Babel, leading to the
subsequent division of human speech, was caused by human transgression:
the tower was built in an effort to gain knowledge of God. The division of
human speech gave birth to a temptation to translate, hard to resist, just
as the tower of Babel was constructed when the temptation to transgress
became too strong to resist. Talking about his work, Rushdie describes
translation as primarily a migratory event, occurring when the migrant
is “carried across” a geographical boundary, replicating the etymological
meaning of the word “translation” in the physical movement of the body.
This idea, equating translation with migration, has been the focus of much
of the work published on Rushdie which alludes to translation in any way.
Homi Bhabha’s discussion of The Satanic Verses (1988) in The Location
of Culture (2004), for instance, sees Saladin Chamcha as a “borderline fig-
ure of a massive historical displacement—postcolonial migration—that is,
not only a “transitional” reality, but also a ‘translational’ phenomenon.”2
However, what emerges from a close reading of Rushdie’s fiction is a far
more complex relationship between the texts and translation theory. One
of the ways in which Rushdie’s work is inseparable from the act of transla-
tion is in its constant preoccupation with translator figures: Saleem Sinai in
Midnight’s Children (1981), Salman the Scribe in The Satanic Verses, the
character-narrator retelling the story of Hamlet in “Yorick” (1994), Aoi Uë
in The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Dashwanth in The Enchantress of Florence,
for example, can all be understood as translator figures. Whereas the fi rst
three translator figures in this list respond to Eurocentric histories and sto-
ries by telling new stories and employing new narrative techniques, Aoi Uë
and Dashwanth carry out visual work under their patron’s guidance until
they are able, by their medium, to transgress.
Patronage determines the eventual product; the work created must please
its patron, as André Lefevere has suggested: “ideology is often enforced by
the patrons, the people or institutions who commission or publish transla-
tions” and other works.3 In Rushdie’s novels, artworks are commissioned
by a patron who ultimately sanctions the work, initially restricting the free-
dom of the artist or translator. This restriction is figured explicitly in The
Enchantress of Florence, where the artist Dashwanth who is hired to depict
the lost princess Qara Köz becomes trapped in his canvas. It is also made
literal in The Moor’s Last Sigh, where Vasco Miranda, at one time impris-
oned by the work that he was commissioned to produce, turns jailer and
forces Moor to translate his life story into textuality from a prison cell, and
into a story that is pleasing to the captor who has commissioned the work.
He is accompanied by art restorer Aoi Uë who is also held captive and is
ordered to restore and uncover Vasco’s original painting, destroying the
‘translated’ image which has been painted on top. In this role, she becomes

Paint, Patronage, Power, and the Translator’s Visibility 89
a translator figure, who is at the same time Moor’s narratee and thus the
translator of his text too. Appropriate to dominant imaginings of an unob-
trusive translator, Aoi is invisible throughout the majority of this text (the
reader only becomes aware of her in the last chapter of the novel). Even so,
her reception of Moor’s text has just as strong an impact on the way that it
is written as Vasco’s more visible control. Visual culture studies is interested
in the culture of gazing or looking; the point at which Aoi enters the text
represents Moor’s unwillingness to engage with the visual, to look at him-
self. He sees himself as physically flawed, enters Vasco’s fortress shrouded
in robes rendering him anonymous, and metaphorically, too, he has dif-
ficulty looking at the events that form his own life story. He then admits
to the reader that he is writing under the direct gaze of someone—of the
translator figure, Aoi—and that the text thus far has been contaminated by
her gaze and Vasco’s. He realizes that in order to correct the effect of this
contamination, he must disrupt the Eurocentric assumption of linearity in
his verbal text and recreate it in visual form: this is why he disperses the
pages of his work across the landscape instead of retaining the conventional
verbal cohesion in a linear narrative in a book.
ART AS TRANSLATION
In The Moor’s Last Sigh, as an art restorer, Aoi’s role is to remove the top
layer of paint from a canvas in an inversion of a palimpsest, the later work
being discarded to reveal what remains protected beneath. Her task means
that she becomes a priest figure, working in the invisible, separate space where
the translator is meant to reside, a space resembling purgatory: “that thin
film [ . . . ] separated the earlier picture from the later. Two worlds stood on
her easel, separated by an invisibility.”4 Aoi Uë is “orderly” and works with
“formality, precision,” and “neatness” to a timetable to which she and Moor
“rigorously adhere.”5 A translator should, according to Lawrence Venuti,
remain invisible, leaving the original visible, because “the more invisible the
translator [ . . . ] the more visible the writer or meaning of the foreign text,”
the original.6 If Aoi is revealing a painting, then that seems to be the opposite
of invisible work, because she endeavors to reveal the painting underneath.
In fact, revealing the first painting is an act of translating invisibly, because
what becomes apparent is the original: the later work—the translation—is
effaced. This later work is a translation in every sense: because the original
painting was deemed offensive, the second picture was produced as a re-
interpretation (or translation); when the first image was censored, a different
translation rendered the same message acceptable.
Aoi Uë and narrator Moor are imprisoned and rendered invisible by their
containment in a cell: under their jailer’s instructions, Aoi’s task is to reveal
a painting, and Moor’s is to write his life story. Aoi Uë is “a miracle of
vowels [ . . . ] the five enabling sounds of language.”7 She instructs Moor on

90 Jenni Ramone
how to write and to stay sane in the confi nes of their cell. She reads Moor’s
text and perhaps as powerfully as Vasco determines its contents because
for Moor to offend such a morally good figure as Aoi with the tales he tells
about his life is unthinkable. In this sense, she is the ultimate translator.
She is also described as Moor’s “fellow-captive,”8 which equalizes the rela-
tionship between writer figure and translator figure: author and translator
are equally present in the text as opposed to “the individualistic concep-
tion of authorship” as dominant.9 Art restoration and translation have a
corresponding purpose: art restoration is performed to preserve “history
and culture,”10 while similarly, Lefevere claims that translation occurs in
order to “represent a foreign text in one’s own culture.”11 The methodology
employed is also comparable: the translator translates a text according to
the target language, which is dependent on the historical period and the
linguistic characteristics of that time; the art restorer has a similar need to
“fi nd a suitable modern equivalent” to “the pigments and binder used in a
piece of artwork.”12
Dashwanth is a painter who, through his patron, is forced to become a
translator of others’ desires in The Enchantress of Florence: “The emperor’s
own life-giving powers had been temporarily exhausted by the immense
effort of creating and then sustaining his imaginary wife Jodha, and so in
this instance he was unable to act directly, and had to rely on art.”13 It is
Dashwanth who mediates, like a translator, to produce the work conceived
of by the emperor but that only Dashwanth has the ability to create. Spe-
cifically, Dashwanth is instructed to paint the stories told by the wandering
messenger Vespucci, stories of a princess who had been lost from the his-
torical records. Obediently, Dashwanth painted canvases so powerful that
“All Ferghana sprang to life.”14 Although this princess had been forgotten
or, being absent from all records, was perhaps little more than the work of
the storyteller’s imagination, the painter’s art recreated the princess: “The
painting itself worked a kind of magic, because the moment old Princess
Gulbadan looked at it in Akbar’s private rooms she remembered the girl’s
name,” Qara Köz.15 In the visual medium of art, despite the lack of textual
support from historical records, the translator demonstrates his power: his
work creates the historical figure who had been absent before. Yet even
though the painter has a power that his patron, without him, could never
achieve, he remains trapped by the invisibility required of translators. He
conveys this by creating an image of the princess and her relationships with
others. Qara Köz was forgotten because her memory had been obliterated
by her more powerful and still remembered half-sister, Khanzada. Dash-
wanth’s painting reveals that Khanzada ordered Qara Köz to accompany
her into a forced marriage and in turn, Qara Köz compelled The Mirror,
a slave girl, to accompany her, too. The three girls are painted in a circle,
each one grasping the wrist of the next: “The slave-girl could sometimes
imprison the royal lady. History could claw upwards as well as down.
The powerful could be defeated by the cries of the poor.”16 Perhaps the

emperor should have interpreted this image as a threat that the translator
can demand visibility, in the same way as the lost princess; he did not, and
Dashwanth eventually takes back his art in a dramatic statement when he
literally becomes his fi nal painting.
Translation, Lefevere suggests, “needs to be studied in connection with
power and patronage.”17 The patron determines what work will be created
and the form it should take. Often, the result is a sanitized or inoffensive
text or painting, and certainly a piece of work that reflects the world-view
of the patron. For Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi it is such ideological
compulsions that determine the translator’s selectiveness during transla-
tion: there is a “temptation to erase much that is culturally specific, to
sanitize much that is comparatively odorous.”18 So Dashwanth is taking a
risk with his career as court artist and with his life when he paints a canvas
making the dangerous suggestion that a former king may have fallen to his
death and to Hell, a crime in artwork “punishable by death, containing as
it did the suggestion that His Majesty might be headed the same way”19
as his ancestor. Dashwanth is permitted this and other reckless acts of the
paintbrush in The Enchantress of Florence because of the persuasive power
of the stories his canvases tell. Vasco Miranda in The Moor’s Last Sigh was
subject to a more rigid patron who ordered him to destroy his painting of a
pregnant Aurora: he follows orders bitterly by painting a second image over
the fi rst. Just as inflexibly, Vasco later controls both Moor, who is told he
must write the story of his life, and the art restorer Aoi Uë, who is forced
to remove this later image to reveal the original. Dashwanth translates his
patron’s stories into painting, and while Moor translates his stories when
he authors a text produced for a controlling patron, Aoi Uë translates a
sanitized and sanctioned painting into a censored one. The impact of all
three resulting works tells history in a particular way, and tells history for
public consumption.
TRANSLATE OR DIE
Lefevere mistrusts a translation endowed with power to influence, and this

is an especially potent concern if the translation has been created under
duress. Members of the ‘receptor culture’ (those who will read the text or
perceive the painting after it has been translated) must be able to trust an
individual translator; otherwise, they may not know whether or not “the
imported text is well-represented.”20 However, the receiving public cannot
make this judgement effectively if the translator remains invisible, as Venuti
has described. There are, for Venuti, constraints other than ideological ones
at work between the translator and their patron. Traditionally, the transla-
tor is not fairly compensated for their work, either in terms of recognition,
or in the amount that they are paid. According to Venuti’s collated fig-
ures, translators work under exploitative contracts for “below-subsistence

92 Jenni Ramone
fees.”21 Aoi Uë’s exploitation is literal; in order to complete this particular
contract, Aoi is held in chains, and the eventual result of her employment
is her death. Dashwanth is also constrained: his position as court painter
was only created to protect him from bodily harm after “he covered the
walls of Fatehpur Sikri with [ . . . ] caricatures of the grandees of the court
so cruelly accurate that they all became determined to hunt him down as
soon as possible and cut off these satirical hands.”22 This graffiti is notably
(explicitly) visual rather than textual. The emperor “commanded Dash-
wanth to join the imperial art studio immediately, and forbade any person
in the court to do him harm.”23 This patronage of a hated, radical artist
demonstrates both the patron’s power and his protection: Emperor Akbar
commands Dashwanth to produce artworks under threat, but this is also
his only way to be protected following the graffiti caricatures he created.
Becoming almost imprisoned as a result of his rebellious work, the relation-
ship between patron and artist replicates the prisoner’s typical relationship
with their captor which is one of dependence, of fear combined with sub-
mission. Here the similarity of this partnership to the relationship between
Moor and Vasco again comes to mind: Moor’s submission to Vasco’s rule is
as much a result of their previous connection when Vasco was a playful and
irreverent guardian as it is due to Moor’s physical constraint.
The product of such a relationship will surely be problematic, reflecting
the artist’s restriction. Indeed, good translations, Ann Dacier wrote, are
created in an environment free from “constraints.”24 Neither Dashwanth
nor Aoi Uë are free from constraints, yet they refuse to conform to the
demands of their patron who requires something resembling the safe, bland
copy that Dacier suggests the talented translator avoids. Working in the
visual medium, artists can fi nd ways to fight back: while Dashwanth takes
suicidal risks, Aoi Uë inserts coded messages into her letters home, enabling
the translator to circumvent an ideology she distrusts by rebelling against
it. Working in the textual medium, Moor is less able to resist, and so his
text is produced for his patron and reader until he is able to overthrow
Vasco, and then in that moment the text becomes visual: it is strewn across
the landscape and in this configuration resembles an installation more than
a cohesive, linear narrative.
The Emperor Akbar epitomizes the power of patronage: he saw Dash-
wanth’s value—as an imperial tool as well as a talented artist—and pro-
claimed: “we do not want such a talent extinguished by an angry nobleman’s
sword.”25 But Dashwanth’s freedom as an artist is limited; not only his posi-
tion, but also the subject matter of his art, is under the king’s instruction:
Dashwanth quickly became one of the brightest stars of Mir Sayyid Ali’s
studio and made his name painting bearded giants flying through the
air on enchanted urns, and the hairy, spotted goblins known as devs,
and violent storms at sea, and blue-and-gold dragons, and heavenly
sorcerers whose hands reached down from the clouds to save heroes

from harm, to satisfy the wild, fantastic imagination—the khayal—of
the youthful king. 26
In the relationship between artist and patron, the artist remains simply an
employee, literally a hired hand, while the patron retains the glory associ-
ated with the vision that inspires the painter’s creations, where, “although
his hand held the brush it was the emperor’s vision that was appearing on
the painted cloths.”27
Like the later British colonial project which constructed India through
its ideologically-motivated translations, the Mughal Empire as conceived
in The Enchantress of Florence was created through patronized art. Dash-
wanth’s unwillingness to be a part of a process that he sees as irrevers-
ible resembles Aoi’s: Aoi is also forced to complete work which “had little
appeal.”28 Gayatri Spivak endorses this position of powerlessness in the
process of translation, suggesting that a translator should “adopt a proce-
dure of ‘love’ and ‘surrender’ towards the original.”29 If translators must
surrender to their texts, they take on the function assigned by Dryden, the
role of a slave, a “wretched translator” who is “tied to the thoughts” of
the master who invented the original.30 This position accurately describes
the role of Aoi Uë, forced to work in captivity. At the same time, explicitly
defi ning her translator role as ‘slave’ is an acknowledgement of the recip-
rocal nature of her relationship with her master, in Hegel’s conception of
the master-slave relationship, where “the consciousness for-the-Master is
not an independent but a dependent, consciousness.”31 Thus, according to
Benjamin Graves, “the slave ironically shares in the master’s power because
the master defi nes himself only in opposition to the slave; that is, the master
needs the slave in order to legitimate his comparative privilege.”32 In Aoi
Uë’s case, Vasco is both legitimated as master by her slavery, and in addi-
tion, he gains power by the work that she produces. The original and the
translation are mutually dependent. Empowering the slave in this way, Spi-
vak’s instruction can be read anew: by willingly adopting this procedure of
love and surrender, a translator can achieve the translation that they desire
to produce. Aoi’s apparent submissiveness is undercut by her subversive
messages in letters home. The translator can subvert their patron’s instruc-
tions in order to achieve a desired translation.
Venuti’s well supported assertion that in general, all translations are
“judged by the same criterion—fluency”33 suggests that to a degree, all texts
possess the status of holy texts, and that any mistranslation which results in
an interruption of fluency is treated as if it is a desecration. Norman Shapiro’s
argument is that invisibility is the ideal for which translators strive: “A good
translation is like a pane of glass. You only notice that it’s there when there
are little imperfections—scratches, bubbles. Ideally, there shouldn’t be any. It
should never call attention to itself.”34 Venuti suggests that in attempting to
render the text fluently, “the more invisible the translator” becomes.35 This
state of invisibility is bound to have an impact on the amount of prestige

94 Jenni Ramone
afforded to the translation: if a translator remains invisible, then their work
is seen as something inferior to ‘writing,’ so far subordinate that it sometimes
goes entirely unacknowledged. Bassnett and Trivedi perceive “translation as
rewriting [ . . . ] or translation as ‘new writing.’”36 If translation is rewriting,
then translating or rewriting a text renders the translator responsible for the
text they produce, and in turn they must be seen as the author of that work,
and the translation becomes an alternative ‘original’ text. It logically follows
that this should be reflected by the translator’s rights and responsibilities as
understood either in public (in the public response to translated works) or
in legal terms (in the working conditions comprising translators’ contracts).
Venuti suggests that this is not the case, however, and that “the translator is
[ . . . ] subordinated to the author.”37 This subordination is enacted both by
readers: “many newspapers [ . . . ] do not even list the translators in headnotes
to reviews, [and] reviewers often fail to mention that a book is a transla-
tion,”38 and by publishers who often retain copyright of translated works.
Venuti suggests that the ideal of “the translator’s invisibility” is based on the
“individualistic conception of authorship,” suggesting that the author’s work
is “viewed as an original and transparent self-representation, unmediated.”
The translation, in opposition to this, is “derivative, fake, potentially a false
copy.”39 In order to become invisible, though, the translator must perform an
act of “illusion,” making the author visible in a text which they have not really
written, and becoming invisible, in an act which Venuti says is equivalent to
self-effacement.40 This illusion—not the act of translation—is the act of decep-
tion, a transgression performed in order to produce a perfect translation.
Dashwanth’s level of visibility fluctuates. He had been invisible in society
and in the community, “an apparently ignorant” boy “whose father was
one of the emperor’s palanquin bearers.”41 Dashwanth was employed in an
invisible role as a draughtsman but was determined to become visible by
grappling with his invisibility: his “genius was bursting out of him. At night
when he was sure nobody was looking he covered the walls of Fatehpur
Sikri with graffiti.”42 Dashwanth’s act represents a demand to become vis-
ible: during this period of invisibility (when “nobody was looking”), he cre-
ated the work that made him visible, and indeed from this point onwards,
he would be “recognised as the fi nest of the Indian painters.”43 Yet even
after his talent has been acknowledged, his patron ensures that he remains
largely invisible, and instead of becoming a public figure, Dashwanth’s exis-
tence conveys the kind of postmodern alienation and invisibility associated
with contemporary office workers: in later years, Dashwanth “sat in his
little cubicle at the art studio staring for hours at an empty corner, as if it
contained one of the monsters he had depicted.”44
TRANSLATOR AS TRANSGRESSOR
The artist, the translator, is a transgressive figure by nature, who has within
reach the power of translation, which can be “potentially subversive”

because of its ability to influence, as Victor Hugo suggests.45 When a read-
ership rejects the translation, they do so by casting the translator as a “trai-
tor,” a “robber,” a “seducer,” or a “betrayer.”46 In such a context, according
to Lefevere, “translation nears the edge of the impossible.”47 Translators do
translate, though, and to do this, they must employ transgressive methods.
Rather than translation being impossible, then, instead, translation without
transgression is impossible. Translators have admitted to significant altera-
tions of texts in order to produce an “elegant translation”48 or to suppress
“customs where they may appear shocking.”49 The original is transformed
by these editorial decisions in order to render it acceptable to the cultural
or historical expectations of the target readership.
This kind of editing practice resembles the way that Frank Kermode
describes the Jewish tradition of rewriting religious material, known as
midrash. Midrash is “an interpretive tradition”50 like translation, and
according to Kermode is a practice whereby “ancient texts were revised
and adapted to eliminate or make acceptable what has come to be unin-
telligible or to give offence.” This involves “sometimes very free” altera-
tions employed when “updating texts” or “translating them into another
language.” Kermode suggests that “an unfamiliar foreign expression, or
the interpretation of a difficult part of the law, or a story which, in the
course of time, had come to seem ambiguous or even indecent [ . . . ] might
prompt midrash.”51 Kermode’s response to midrash in effect presents it as
a surreptitious method of altering a text in accordance with the interests
of those who wield power. This interpretation aligns midrash with colo-
nial translation, suggesting that in both colonial and midrashic revisions
the translator gains extraordinary power to alter the text, motivated by
ideological justifications or in an apparent attempt to render a more com-
monsensical version of a text to a contemporary readership. As Kermode
suggests, “to rewrite the old in terms of a later state of affairs is an ancient
Jewish practice,”52 and this is exactly what Moor does when he writes his
life story from within a prison cell, under the patronage of Vasco (and his
pistol), the withdrawal of whose support may not mean only the abrupt end
of the text, but also the end of Moor’s life. Negotiating his Catholic and
Jewish heritages informs the revisionary process by which he rewrites and
re-presents the story of his life.
The imprisonment scene in The Moor’s Last Sigh is rich with Judaeo-
Christian images, from the “sackcloth” of martyrdom to requests for
“absolution”53 and the reference to Jehovah, whose name, the Tetragram-
maton, like the name of God, is ineffable, unsayable, in the Jewish faith.
Tetragrammaton translates to mean ‘the four-letter word,’ something too
offensive to speak. This is a four-letter word transcribed as ‘YHWH,’
unpronounceable without the vowels to insert between the consonants,
which are provided by the ‘miracle of vowels,’ Aoi Uë. This image is entirely
textual (or linguistic) instead of visual: this textual bias is then opposed
by an apparently incongruous cartoon image which functions to re-affi rm
the presence of visual culture in the prison-cum-art studio location. Moor

96 Jenni Ramone
performs this obscenity, the unsayable, with light-hearted abandon: “Pop-
eye the sailor-man—along with Jehovah—had it just about right. I yam
what I yam an’ that’s what I yam.” Here Rushdie translates Jehovah as ‘I
am’ which is a common interpretation, and Moor confi rms the reference
by repeating Jehovah’s communication to Moses in the form of the Burning
Bush: “Tell them, I AM hath sent me to you.” Thus Moor, mixing Biblical
and cartoon figures with his “nutty cathjew confusions” deliberately and
mischievously taunts language and the unsayable, having been enabled by
Aoi Uë (who provides the necessary vowels as well as the visual medium by
her association with art) to do so. Moor longs for linguistic change in order
to rewrite his family story with Aoi’s help: “we were consonants without
vowels: jagged, lacking shape. Perhaps if we’d had her to orchestrate us, our
lady of the vowels.”54 Visual and textual practices require each other.
Aoi is also transgressive, but she unwillingly transgresses against her
own professional principles: she is forced into an act of “destruction, rather
than the preservation of art,” which has “little appeal.”55 Her transgression
causes the successful creation of the text, however; during the destruction
of one painting (or text) to reveal another, she creates a new text, written
by Moor under her enabling influence. In this way, the translator’s abil-
ity to create a brand new original is sustained. The text created by Moor
fills the gap left by the missing child in the painting which Aoi uncovers.
The text replaces the Madonna’s missing child, standing in for the figure
of Christ; the text born is a rewriting of Christ’s nativity. In addition, the
Nativity scene is evoked by the primitive environment reminiscent of the
biblical barn, where the “sleeping-place was a straw palliase covered with
sackcloth.”56 Moor’s words recall the agony of labor, and at the same time,
conjure other figures popularly depicted at the Nativity scene: “my breaths
hee-hawed donkey-fashion as I wept.”57 This Christian birth scene is an
unsayable event for Moor’s Jewish half. In acknowledgement of his trans-
gression, in place of words, Moor, evoking the image of a woman in labor,
“stamp[s], flail[s], weep[s].”58 The “practical” Aoi Uë plays the part of the
father, comforting Moor as he “shook in her arms.”59 In imprisonment
Moor is made inarticulate and can only overcome his inarticulacy because
of Aoi Uë’s ‘enabling’ presence.
Even a faithful translation “takes the greatest liberties.”60 Whatever kind
of translation is undertaken—faithful or free—the very act of translation can
be undertaken only because of the translator’s transgression. Transgression
may be a form of textual self-defense, performed in order to permit the pro-
duction of a translation. As George Steiner argues, there is often a connection
between textual alteration and self-preservation: “in the creative function of
language, non-truth or less-than-truth is, we have seen, a primary device.
The relevant framework is not one of morality but of survival.”61 When
Dashwanth is called “the miscreant”62 he is immediately deemed transgres-
sive. Dashwanth becomes trapped in his art due to the forced act of transla-
tion, and in this way, his story too conveys the combination of visual and

textual cultures. And the translator’s sudden visibility in their work enables a
re-imagining of the translator’s role. In both texts a forced act of translation
enables visual and textual cultures to combine.
Though the translator is instinctively transgressive, he or she is restricted
by their patron to produce work to order. Ultimately, in both The Enchant-
ress of Florence and The Moor’s Last Sigh, this results in the physical con-
junction of the artist and their work. Moor narrates and writes down his
complete life story from inside the prison cell, which he enters in the last
chapter of the novel. The body of this narrative is the text of The Moor’s
Last Sigh and the lifespan of Moor’s body is only as long as his text. The
whole of his text (which is also his body) is read, a page per day, by Aoi Uë,
who becomes (along with the reader) a voyeur, in the manner described by
Ross Chambers, who suggests that “the narrator, in producing himself as
eavesdropper/voyeur and sharing his knowledge of others’ business with
the narratee, simultaneously implicates the latter in this invasive act.”63 For
Dashwanth, too, the creative work dictates his physical being: “He became
even scrawnier than usual and his eyes began to bulge. His fellow painters
feared for his health. ‘He looks so drawn,’ Abdus Samad murmured to Mir
Sayyid Ali. ‘It’s as if he wants to give up the third dimension of real life
and flatten himself into a picture.’”64 Eventually, the other artists “saw him
succumb to the fi nal madness of the artist, heard him pick up his pictures
and embrace them, whispering Breathe.”65 In the end, “he had somehow
managed to vanish. [ . . . ] He had simply disappeared as if he had never
been, and almost all the pictures of the Qara-Köz-Nama had vanished with
him, except for this last picture.”66 Inevitably, the invisible translator is
consumed by the work that they have produced: a “hidden section of the
painting was revealed [and] [ . . . ] there, crouching down like a little toad,
with a great bundle of paper scrolls under his arm, was Dashwanth the
great painter.”67
CONTRA-DICTION
The work produced in both The Enchantress of Florence and The Moor’s
Last Sigh is primarily in the visual medium: Akbar is clearly keen to cre-
ate a visual documentation of history with the help of his workshop of
artists, but even Moor’s written text was only ordered as an afterthought
when Moor turned up searching for Vasco; the recovery of the painting was
Vasco’s fi rst priority. In spite of this, the patrons are preoccupied with lan-
guage and textuality, and in addition, the novels are both self-consciously
concerned with textual structure.
In The Enchantress of Florence, this is played out in linguistic uncer-
tainty, in questioned, halted, or repeated language. The novel is con-
structed to convey an underlying sense of repetition and the sense of
linguistic uncertainty by the pause that begins each new chapter: each

98 Jenni Ramone
chapter is named, but the name is only partial, because it corresponds
with the fi rst few words of the chapter that is about to begin. The reader
is forced to read the same words twice as each new chapter begins and
in this way the textual structure is made explicit, and the pause between
each chapter is tangible while it is also a repetition. There is a need for
the novel to be explicitly textual and self-consciously about uncertainty
in textual and linguistic matters because of the visual subject matter,
which cannot necessarily be contained or described adequately by the
text. Names and terms of address are also problematized:
Abul-Fath Jalaluddin Muhammad, king of kings, known since his

childhood as Akbar, meaning ‘the great,’ and latterly, in spite of the
tautology of it, as Akbar the Great, the great great one, great in his
greatness, doubly great, so great that the repetition in his title was not
only appropriate but necessary in order to express the gloriousness of
his glory.68
This tautological naming was a potential catastrophe for an emperor,

because “names were things of power, and when they did not fit the thing
named they acquired a malign force.”69 If his public designation was con-
fused, his private one was even more complex: “He, Akbar, never referred
to himself as ‘I,’ not even in private, not even in anger or dreams. He was—
what else could he be?—‘we.’ He was the defi nition, the incarnation of
the We. He had been born into plurality.”70 Almost as if challenging the
combined linguistic rules and the empire’s customs—a process resonating
with the powers of postcolonial translation—Akbar began to play with
his linguistic identity: “’I,’ he practised under his breath. Here ‘I’ am. ‘I’
love you. Come to ‘me.’”71 Akbar is a contradiction, “huge and strong”
with “girlish” features, a “philosopher-king: a contradiction in terms”72
who inevitably sets forth policies of contra-diction or anti-language: in the
spirit of his uncomfortable linguistic identity, he patronizes art in order
to replace a similarly flawed textual history—flawed because it is missing
Qara Köz, of course—with a more complete visual representation.
The products created in both texts are at once textual and visual, ulti-
mately. Qara Köz was invisible because she did not have a verbal identity:
“all records of her birth had been obliterated” and she was a “princess
without a name.”73 Until she is given a name in the novel (as a result of
Dashwanth’s painting) she remains somewhat insubstantial. Visual culture
is employed and this renders her verbal; it corrects a prior lack of text. In
The Moor’s Last Sigh, the palimpsest being both restored and destroyed by
Aoi Uë, and the fragmentary text recounting Moor’s life, which is eventu-
ally strewn across the landscape, are created together. Moor’s text becomes
visual when it is scattered outside for others to fi nd, and Aoi’s work is made
visible and verbal because it is contained in Moor’s written text. Aoi has
a “heroic role”74 within the text, implying that the translator’s role in the

creation of a text is heroic, that the translator becomes somehow similar
to a main character. If this is the case, the translator loses her invisibility.
The translator becomes visible in order to perform her heroic role, and
is assigned characteristics and motivations like any other character in the
text. Aoi’s are the typically heroic attributes of “courage, inventiveness and
serenity.:75 Her “inventiveness,” resembling the translator’s craft, “glow[s],”
“like a beacon” illuminating the text from “darkness” (of incomprehen-
sion, perhaps) and providing something for Moor to “cling to” so that he
does “not sink” under his despair in captivity.76 Aoi is “a beacon” because
this allows her to fulfill another translator’s task, of preventing the text
from being lost.
BODY/TEXT
In both texts, visual and verbal cultures collide because of a need to ques-
tion Eurocentric storytelling forms and structures. Unlike the western tra-
dition of the bildungsroman, where the self is in continual development,
Moor tears through layers of his identity, questioning every act and influ-
ence on the pages of his life story, acknowledging “the burning spice-fields,
Epifania dying in the chapel while Aurora watched [ . . . ] crookery, mur-
der.”77 Meanwhile, Aoi Uë tears away strips of the paint which cover the
picture of Moor’s mother and his origin. Moor understands that his life
is “horror” only through the gaze of the translator, Aoi Uë, who because
of her position as translator is “so unfairly trapped” in his story.78 In The
Moor’s Last Sigh, textual and bodily shredding becomes a midrashic exer-
cise. Moor rewrites the text of his life story for a specific audience, namely
his captor, Vasco, and Aoi Uë, whose shock at the events of his life renders
her gaze an editorial one, leaving him asking, “has it been such a bad life,
then?”79 Aoi Uë’s translation from one visible painting to another is also
a midrashic revision, providing the audience with a version of the (visual)
text it fi nds pleasing. The painting which is discarded was itself a revi-
sion in midrashic terms, because it was painted in order to hide (but also
to revise and re-present) what was offensive. The prison cell hosts a con-
tinual restaging and retranslation of the same text to omit what offends.
The prison cell also heightens the emotional connection between translator
and text: unable to separate the text from life because those two states are
becoming interdependent (and may only be “separated by an invisibility”),
“at the worst moments of the tale [Aoi Uë] would bury her face in her hands
and shake her head.”80
In the fi nal section of The Moor’s Last Sigh, Moor’s life and the text of
his life story have become difficult to separate; the fi nal section is presented
as an italicized afterword, disassociating it from the character Moor. In this
fi nal section, Moor’s is the narrative voice, but what he narrates is no longer
his own life, but the life of the text. Moor’s “breaths are numbered”81 like

100 Jenni Ramone
the pages of his manuscript, or like the verses, chapters, and books of the
Bible. As with the organization of the Bible, which as Kermode describes,
begins with Genesis and ends with apocalypse,82 Moor is conscious of a
predetermined ending, which is “numbered [ . . . ] in reverse” and towards
which “the countdown to zero is well advanced.” Numbered in reverse,
the text remains unconventional. Moor has “fi nished” his writing, and is
“freed” of his “shackles,” both the iron chains around his feet and those
less visible ones which controlled the labored production of his text.83 Once
the text has been completed, Moor is compelled to leave it in the care of
humanity, so that they can “know everything there is to know.”84 His desire
for the text echoes religious devotion; it is constructed from “the love that
endures beyond defeat,” and “that most profound of our needs,”85 a pro-
found need which can be imagined as a kind of faith. Embodying his text,
Moor echoes Christ’s destiny as “the defeated love that is greater than what
defeats it.” His journey is a “pilgrimage,” and the objective is to nail the
story to the landscape in an act reminiscent of Martin Luther nailing his
reformation tract to the church door, and also of the crucifi xion: he was
“happy to shed th[e] load” that is his flesh in order to “give the knowledge”
to those who would read his text.86
Moor dies in order to create a text which tests his faith, and if he does
not symbolize Jesus precisely, then his conversion experience involves heavy
Judeo-Christian symbolism suggesting that the transgressive act of conver-
sion involves a communication with those objects of faith: the “thorns” that
tear at his skin, and the “wounds” that he ignores in search of his higher
purpose, which is the distribution of his text. Moor dies hoping to “awaken”
after taking some ritual “wine” in an act of communion or redemption,
“into a better time.”87 The result of this text’s creation is a transgression
of the boundary between the body and the text occurring at “the end” of
“frontiers” and the end of “the boundaries of the self.”88 Moor and his text
become fused, and while Moor’s body dies in this afterword to the text, his
life is contained in the papers which remain distributed across the landscape.
The boundary between man and God is also questioned by Moor’s act of
communion where, after replicating Christ’s wounds, he takes an informal
holy communion at the gravestone without the mediation of a priest figure
whose presence (as well the location of the church altar) enables the transub-
stantiation ritual to be conducted according to tradition.
Moor is one in a tradition of imprisoned writers (fictional or not) whose
writing materials take on an elevated significance in the prison cell. Impris-
oned, Wole Soyinka became his writing materials: he renames his ink “Soy-
ink,”89 and therefore, the text is written using the substance of his body. Once
it exists, that body of text is also the body of the writer. Moor becomes his
text, just as Dashwanth becomes his painting, and this is where the textual
and visual media at work in both novels become distinct: while Moor pre-
serves the memory of visual art through recording it in his text, Dashwanth
creates what will become a textual history after its portrayal in visual art:

the lost princess in the end “was actually entering the book, moving out
of the world of earth, air and water and entering a universe of paper and
ink.”90 Her storyteller had the power to leave the text, though: “Vespucci’s
story was concluded. He had crossed over into the empty page after the last
page.”91 And this explicit engagement with the textual is again appropriate
because Dashwanth is in the end a very textual or linguistic painter; not
only did his paintings dictate what would come to be the written histories,
he also wrote verse into paintings that were based on verse in the fi rst place;
Qara Köz was inspired by a poem, and Dashwanth “painted a part of the
last verse into the pattern of the fabric of Qara Köz’s garment.”92 Under his
patron’s power, Dashwanth was forced to make such decisions surrepti-
tiously, to retain the prized translator’s invisibility. Only when his work
was completed could he make himself visible in that work when he became
a part of it, and by doing this he retains power over the painting to equalize
the roles of patron and painter, translator of the patron’s ideas, to redress
the notion that a translation is inferior to the original. Where the translator
remains invisible, the translation is not valued. In the face of over-zealous
patronage, the translator becomes visible within the text and takes posses-
sion of that visual-linguistic text.
At the end of the text, Moor leaves his story “nailed to the landscape.”93
In the opening lines of the novel, Moor says, “I have lost count of the days
that have passed since I fled the horrors of Vasco Miranda’s mad fortress
[ . . . ] and left a message nailed to the door.”94 The fi rst chapter acts as
both epilogue—because it provides information not supplied at the end
of the novel—and prologue, because it cannot be part of the main text,
which we know began at Vasco’s command in the prison cell. Moor says
at the end of this chapter, that “there are no secrets any more”95 but Aoi
Uë is kept secret. Aoi is not introduced or referred to at all throughout the
majority of the text, meaning that she remains an invisible editor, transla-
tor, and reader of the text until the very last chapter, at which point the
sense of the novel is recast by her presence. In this sense, The Moor’s Last
Sigh conforms to Kermode’s claim that, “in much the same way as the end
of the Bible transforms all its contents, our sense of, or need for, an ending
transforms our lives ‘between the tick of birth and the tock of death’ and
stories simulate this transformation.”96 The awareness of and need for the
ending visible in the fi nal chapter of The Moor’s Last Sigh transforms the
contents of the novel. The text is always being written from that end point
and with that known ending in mind, just as Kermode describes the Bible
as a “familiar model of history” because when “Christians took over the
Jewish Bible” their “account of the ending” recast the text so that the Bible
ends with Apocalypse.97 Because of this, like the narration of The Moor’s
Last Sigh, the way that we read what comes in the middle is transformed.
The reason provided for Aoi’s very late introduction to the text is that
she and Moor “met so near the end” of their stories, so there was “nei-
ther time nor space” for her story to be told “in full.”98 However, she has

102 Jenni Ramone
been present throughout the story; Moor began narrating (and the text
of The Moor’s Last Sigh began) when he was given pencils and paper in
this prison cell. Until this point, Aoi has performed the role of the per-
fect, ‘invisible’ translator. Aoi Uë becomes visible where she was previ-
ously invisible because she has transgressed. Like Dashwanth’s rejection
of three dimensions for two, Aoi’s presence in the text renders the bound-
ary between verbal and visual cultures imprecise but in both novels, the
boundary is breached when the patron loses control over those in his dic-
tatorial employ: the visual and the verbal combine at the loss or rejection
of the patron, because only at this point is the formerly hidden translator
or artist is rendered visible, and made powerful.
NOTES
1. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, “Narrativizing Visual Culture: Towards a

Polycentric Aesthetics,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff
(London: Routledge, 1998), 27.
2. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge Classics, 2004),
320.
3. André Lefevere, ed. Translation / History / Culture (London: Routledge,
1992), 14.
4. Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (London: Vintage, 1996) 426–427.
6. Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation
(London: Routledge, 2008), 1.
9. Venuti, Translator’s Invisibility, 6.
10. Emma Sharp, “Art Restoration: A Chemical Perspective,” accessed March
11, 2006, http://www.chemsoc.org/ExemplarChem/entries/2001/esharp/
default.htm.
11. Lefevere, Translation / History / Culture, 1.
12. Sharp, “Art Restoration.”
13. Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence (London: Jonathan Cape,
2008), 120.
14. Rushdie, Enchantress, 120.
18. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, eds. Post-Colonial Translation (London:
Routledge, 1999), 7.
24. Cited in Lefevere, Translation / History / Culture, 13.

29. Cited in Bassnett and Trivedi, Post-colonial, 9.
31. Benjamin Graves, “The Master-Slave Dialectic: Hegel and Fanon,” accessed
September 13, 2008, http://www.postcolonialweb.org/sa/gordimer/july6.
html.
32. Graves, “Master-Slave.”
34. Cited in Venuti, Translator’s Invisibility, 1.
36. Bassnett and Trivedi, Post-colonial, 8.
41. Rushdie, Enchantress, 117–118.
44. Rushdie, Enchantress, 119–120.
46. Bellay cited in Lefevere, Translation / History / Culture, 22.
48. D’Ablancourt cited in Lefevere, Translation / History / Culture, 9.
49. Prevost cited in Lefevere, Translation / History / Culture, 14.
50. Frank Kermode, Poetry, Narrative, History (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990),
10.
51. Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 81–82.
52. Kermode, Poetry, Narrative, History, 47.
59. Rushdie, Moor’s Last Sigh, 426.
60. Dacier cited in Lefevere, Translation / History / Culture, 12.
61. George Steiner, After Babel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 239.
63. Ross Chambers, Room for Maneuver (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991), 26.

104 Jenni Ramone
78. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 428, 427.
82. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000), 6.
89. Wole Soyinka, The Man Died (London: Arrow, 1972), 277.
96. Kermode, Sense of an Ending, 196.
97. Kermode, Sense of an Ending, 193.
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Hugo, Victor: Oeuvres completes de William Shakespeare. Paris: Garnier, 1865.
Kermode, Frank. The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (The
Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1977–1978). Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1979.
. Poetry, Narrative, History. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.
. The Sense of an Ending. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Lefevere, André, ed. Translation / History / Culture. London: Routledge, 1992.
Perrot d’Ablancourt, Nicolas. Lucien. De la traduction. Amsterdam: Mortier,
1709.
Prevost, Antoine. “Preface”. In Pamela, Samuel Richardson, 1760.
Reder, Michael, ed. Conversations with Salman Rushdie. Jackson: University of
Mississippi Press, 2000.

Rushdie, Salman. The Moor’s Last Sigh. London: Vintage, 1996.
. The Enchantress of Florence. London: Jonathan Cape, 2008.
Schuon, Frithjof. Understanding Islam. Trans. Donald MacLeod Matheson. Lon-
don: Unwin, 1986.
Sharp, Emma. “Art Restoration: A Chemical Perspective.” Accessed March 11, 2006.
http://www.chemsoc.org/ExemplarChem/entries/2001/esharp/default.htm.
Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. “Narrativizing Visual Culture: Towards a Polycen-
tric Aesthetics.” In The Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff,
27–49. London: Routledge, 1998.
Soyinka, Wole. The Man Died. London: Arrow, 1972.
Steiner, George. After Babel. Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1992.
Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. Second
Edition. London: Routledge, 2008.

7 Show and Tell
Midnight’s Children and The
Boyhood of Raleigh Revisited
Neil ten Kortenaar
This essay revisits an article of mine which discussed the ekphrastic

description of The Boyhood of Raleigh, an 1870 painting by Sir John
Everett Millais, in Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel Midnight’s Children. The
narrator of Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai, had a print of Millais’s
painting on his bedroom wall as a child in post-independence Bombay,
and he begins his account of that childhood with a description of the
painting. In my article and in the revised version published as a chapter in
my book on Rushdie’s novel,1 I discussed the ekphrasis, the verbal repre-
sentation of a visual image, in terms of colonial mimicry and considered
Millais’s painting as an imperial text to which Rushdie’s novel was the
postcolonial riposte. Empire and colony, history, and art are indeed at
issue in the ekphrasis, but what was missing from my discussion was the
significance of the contest between the different media of painting and
narrative fiction. This article supplements my earlier pieces by consider-
ing the significance of that contest.
Rushdie’s ekphrastic description resembles a rewriting of an imperial
text such as postcolonial criticism has often focused on. In this case, how-
ever, the original is not literally a text, and to read the painting as a text is
to privilege the verbal over the visual and prematurely to declare a winner
in the contest between the two media. The difference between word and
image means that Rushdie’s is not a rewriting in the way that, say, Jean
Rhys rewrites Charlotte Bronte or J. M. Coetzee rewrites Daniel Defoe. W.
J. T. Mitchell has argued that the contest between the two artistic media in
ekphrasis is always a figure for the relation between self and other. Paint-
ing is an ‘other’ that Rushdie’s novel desires and wants to claim for itself,
but also fears and wants to overcome, an ‘other’ not reducible to Europe
or to Empire. Indeed, Mitchell argues that the relation of a text to image
is frequently one of cultural domination, in which the textual “‘self’ is
understood to be an active, speaking, seeing subject,” while the other “is
projected as a passive, seen, and (usually) silent object.”2 In that schema,
Saleem the narrator’s relation to the Victorian painting has the potential of
replicating colonial domination in reverse.

Show and Tell 107
THE BOYHOOD OF RALIEGH AND THE REALM OF WORDS
The contest between painting and writing has a long history in European
literature, going back at least to Homer, and, as Garrett Stewart shows,
there is also a long tradition in western fine art that takes as its subject the
acts of reading and of listening to stories.3 “The Boyhood of Raleigh” is an
example of such reverse ekphrasis, the visual representation of a verbal rep-
resentation: Millais’s painting features two aristocratic Elizabethan lads at
the feet of an old salt, in rapt attention to what he is telling them. By paint-
ing a scene of oral storytelling, Millais began the ekphrastic contest before
ever Rushdie entered the lists. The author of Midnight’s Children has but
picked up the gauntlet that Millais himself threw down.
To understand what it is about painting that Rushdie seeks for his own
art, we must ask what it is about verbal narrative that Millais wants to appro-
priate for his. What is it words can do that images cannot? One answer is
that words can express thoughts and thereby create the sense of an interior
space where thinking takes place. Painting, by contrast, is limited to exte-
riors. Michael Fried has made an influential distinction between two large
themes in European painting: theatricality and absorption.4 Western paint-
ing, portrait painting in particular, has long featured subjects who pose for
the viewer. The subjects dress their parts, strike attitudes, and cast their gaze
in such a way as to make clear they know they are being watched. Their
portraits are staged. Starting in the eighteenth century, however, European
painters began to eschew this theatricality and chose subjects who appeared
unaware that they were being watched by the painter and the viewer. A
favorite way to avoid theatricality was to suggest the subject’s attention was
absorbed elsewhere, for instance, in reading or listening to a book being read
or to a story being told. In depicting the inward-turned gaze, the painting
could capture the unselfconscious subject who is figuratively elsewhere. The
attraction of absorption as a theme for painting (and Millais comes late to
the theme) is that it suggests an interior space, found between the covers of
a book or behind the eyes of a reader. Fried explains that “Images such as
these are not of time wasted but of time filled (as a glass may be filled not
just to the level of the rim but slightly above).”5 In Millais’s painting, the sea
in the background, which comes to just above the heads of the boy listeners,
is a visual counterpart of the space within them being filled with words and
mental images that the painting cannot depict (figure 7.1).
The Boyhood of Raleigh deliberately eschews theatricality, drama, and
narrative itself. There is no action, beyond the emphatic gesture of point-
ing. The painting does not depict a heroic deed or a scene familiar from his-
tory, nor does it travel to far climates. It does not show us anything Raleigh
is famous for doing. Nor does it show us what fills the boy’s dreams, only
the boy dreaming. Millais depicts a moment when stories inspired listen-
ers, but is not concerned with reproducing the inspirational content. He
appears to be conceding victory to the verbal arts and admitting that stories

108 Neil ten Kortenaar
Figure 7.1 Sir John Everett Millais, The Boyhood of Raleigh. Reproduced with
permission from the Tate Gallery.
have more power than his own art. Indeed, without the accompaniment of
words in the form of the title, viewers would not even be able to understand
the subject of the painting.
The title instructs viewers to regard the painting within the context of a
narrative they are already familiar with. Viewers will assume that the set-
ting of the painting is England and the sailor is pointing west to the New
World. The painting, we understand, depicts the moment when the young
Raleigh fi rst conceived the dream of making history: the sailor’s stories of
the New World will inspire the boy to go himself in search of El Dorado
in the voyage that the adult Raleigh will later record in The Discovery
of Guiana. H. C. G. Matthew writes, “The Boyhood of Raleigh relied
for its effect not on clues in the painting, like the Pre-Raphaelite works of
the 1850s, but on the viewer’s knowledge of context. Only an informed
viewer could understand the imperial significance of this picture.”6 View-
ers will presume they know the story told by the sailor because they know
about Raleigh. Only to such viewers may the tableau be said to speak. The
moment of origin depicted in the painting requires knowledge of the end
for its significance; viewers can only imagine the story told by the sailor or

Show and Tell 109
the dream of the boy Raleigh because they (think they) know the story later
written by Raleigh. In that sense, the origin always comes after the end and
owes all its significance to the end.
But what is the sailor telling of? He could be describing wild lands
inhabited by savages and monsters, the proper realm for adventure. If so, in
order to make the genuinely new something his audience in England could
understand, he would have had to fit it into familiar notions of the outland-
ish in order to fulfi ll expectations of what constitutes story.7 He would be
confi rming dreams his audience already had. But the sailor could also be
telling of the cruel perfidy of the Spanish, as E. Edwards suggested in his
Life of Sir Walter Ralegh, published three years before Millais’s painting.
In that case he would be one of the “multitude of Devonshire sailors, who
had roamed about in all parts of the world, and could tell thrilling tales
of suffering, for religion’s sake, either endured by themselves at the hands
of the Spanish Inquisition, under whose grip they had fallen (whether by
fortune of war or by shipwreck), or heard of, as among the familiar inci-
dents of life.”8 Or he could be speaking of the hardships he had known as
an ordinary seaman before the mast or of the freedom he had known as a
pirate beyond the reach of the law. In short, viewers do not know what the
sailor is talking about, and yet will presume that they do.
For what the sailor is talking about does not matter. Millais’s paint-
ing, which relies on contemporary cultural literacy, is itself at least in part
responsible for creating that literacy. Viewers of The Boyhood of Raleigh
will assume that they know who Raleigh was, and the assumption con-
fi rms Raleigh’s fame. Long before the late twentieth-century phenomenon
of celebrity, Millais’s Raleigh was famous for being famous. What Raleigh
actually accomplished on the far side of the ocean matters as little as the
stories of the sailor. The events that constitute Raleigh’s significance are
not the exploits and exploitations the boy will grow up to perform but
the British Empire in Millais’s own time. Bruce Lenman describes how
the late Victorians projected onto the Elizabethans heroic origins for their
own Empire, inventing a heroic Elizabethan era especially to inspire young
boys.9 Millais’s painting is of a piece with the slightly later stories of G.
A. Henty and the stories and poems of Kipling. These origins invented by
the Victorians for their own Empire were false, Lenman argues: almost no
Elizabethans were concerned with transatlantic colonies and the atypical
few who were had something wrong with them. Of Raleigh Lenman says,
“At an early stage he showed signs of being pathologically violent, and he
developed—like all the Elizabethan courtier-projectors, from the Catho-
lic Stukeley to his fellow Protestant Humphrey Gilbert—into a compulsive
propagandist for ideas which bore little or no relationship to reality.”10 Of
Sir Richard Grenville, Raleigh’s contemporary, Lenman argues:
Victorian Britons, wholly misunderstanding their own warped and indi-

rect connections with the lost world of Grenville, saw him as a flawless

exemplar of all that was best in them, which he was not. Like other mem-
bers of this prominent but utterly atypical group, he was a pathological
personality. Almost without exception, they were physically extremely
brave, but they were nearly all ruthless gamblers in politics, and com-
pulsive killers as well as habitual liars. To treat these men as defining
‘English identity’ is to insult the intelligence of their contemporaries.11
Lenman further argues that there was no inevitable continuity between

the Elizabethan adventurers and the Victorian British Empire. Raleigh’s
Virginia “was a colony only in the sense that it was an incipient nest of pri-
vateers, though men like White (John) and the younger Hakluyt dreamed
it might be more. To see it as the foundation stone of the British Empire is
nonsense. It had no connection with such a thing. Even to incorporate it
into the saga of ‘England’s Sea Empire’ in the period 1550–1642 is to con-
struct non-existent continuities, as well as a non-existent empire.”12
Lenman explains of Raleigh and his ilk, ‘Because these unbalanced odd-
ities have tended to leave literary remains, the silent majority tends to be
ignored by modern scholarship.”13 Raleigh had good reason not to trust
that his fi rst voyage, from which he had returned only with pyrites, would
satisfy his backers in England. His account of that voyage is therefore filled
with embroidered fantasies based not on his experience but on what he
thought his audience wanted to hear. He spends much of his account assur-
ing his readers that, just beyond the mountains where he had not been, lay
the fabulous kingdom of El Dorado, Amazon warriors, “cannibals, which
are of that barbarous nature, as they will for three or four hatchets sell
the sons and daughters of their own brethren and sisters,” and “a nation
of people whose heads appear not above their shoulders.”14 Whatever the
sailor may be recounting or the boy dreaming of in Millais’s painting, the
historical Raleigh, even after he had been to the Americas, was only capa-
ble of reproducing the fantastic stories from the classical tradition he had
learned in school.
V. S. Naipaul has judged Raleigh’s compulsion to fantasy every bit as
harshly as Lenman does. In A Way in the World (1994) he portrays the
author of The Discovery of Guiana as a liar with a tendency to believe his
own deceptions, the fi rst of a long line of self-deceivers, imperial and post-
colonial alike, who fill the history of Caribbean. Unlike Lenman, however,
Naipaul argues that the themes of fantasy and plunder in Raleigh’s life were
not atypical but were the origins of a long continuous history of imperial
and later postcolonial exploitation.15
Because viewers will fi nd whatever they seek in Millais’s painting, it is
possible to fi nd even this wretched Raleigh there. Paul Barlow fi nds that the
dead birds behind the seated sailor introduce a tragic theme:
The birds, so carefully placed beneath the anchor, imply both the lure
of the exotic and the threat of death, a conjunction central to the nar-
rative of imperial adventure and, more directly, to the life of Ralegh

Show and Tell 111
himself—whose voyages were undertaken under sentence of the execu-
tion by beheading, a sentence eventually carried out. The young Ralegh,
then, seated behind the protecting sea-wall, adopting a self-defensive,
almost foetal, pose, is entranced by the expansive confidence of the
experienced sailor pointing vigorously out to sea, whose own body-lan-
guage (legs apart, pointing authoritatively) is the antithesis of Ralegh’s.
But behind him, on the wooden spar on which the sailor so confidently
sits, lie the dead creatures, and the rotting wood and rusting anchor:
fragments of a powerful ship, once like the young Ralegh’s toy model
over on the other side of the painting. In other words the youthful
dream (the toy) gives way to crumbling relics of the reality. Behind the
mature man to whom the boys look up are decay and death.16
Roger Bowdler concurs: “The boy’s face is not without fear; doom can be
sensed, passing across his mind as the reality of maritime endeavour and
the imperial adventure sink in.”17 Alison Smith notes that the dead birds
appear prophetically “as if about to be decapitated by an anchor that cuts
a swathe into the composition.”18
What matters is not what the viewer projects onto the painting but the
act of projection. There are two boys in the painting, presumably broth-
ers (Millais’s two sons were the models), and the second boy is in excess
of the myth of Raleigh. F. G. Stephens, a contemporary art critic, assumed
the second listener was intended as a contrast to Raleigh, being one “whose
intelligence is not of the vision-seeing sort, but rather refers to the visions of
others.”19 Bowdler agrees: “While the younger Raleigh concentrates on the
sailor’s tale, the elder is lost in awe at the prospect of discovery and adven-
ture.”20 Smith writes that “Walter’s gaze is transfixed on the seaman suggest-
ing the impact of what he hears on his imagination, while the other boy looks
up quizzically as if merely interested.”21 In other words, critics agree that the
boy in the center of the painting pays too close attention to the words of the
story, while the boy on the left, whom all assume is Walter, is transported by
the act of concentration not into the story but into an inward space which
he fills with his own desire. The inward gaze of the boy who grew up to be
Raleigh, the critics all assume, is not focused on the sailor’s actual words at
all. They but provide the occasion for his dreaming.
It is not the sailor’s fi nger that directs the boy Raleigh’s thought, but
the boy’s thoughts that supply the object pointed to. The boy uses the
sailor’s words as a pretext to follow his own desire. And the viewer is
asked to do the same. Millais’s Raleigh is a blank onto which different
things can be projected. Millais does not envy verbal narrative its capac-
ity to imitate thoughts but rather the interior space it carves out that can
then be fi lled with thoughts and words, desires, and fears. His painting
does narrative storytelling one better: he creates by suggestion an empty
space, empty even of words, which can then be fi lled with whatever the
viewer’s heart projects on to it. The vacuum is the message. Words would
only get in the way.

Fried explains that when the subject of a painting does not pose but
is absorbed elsewhere, the beholder of the painting can stop playing the
role of viewer. Images of absorption are able “to neutralize or negate the
beholder’s presence, to establish the fiction that no one is standing before
the canvas.”22 Moreover, freed from being a spectator, the beholder can
identify with the rapt subject, whose spiritual solitude and contemplation
of something within correspond to the beholder’s own condition. The psy-
chic interior opened up within the subject of the painting corresponds to a
space the beholder senses within himself (let us assume, for argument’s sake,
that the viewer of The Boyhood of Raleigh is male). Paintings of subjects
attending to a story are “images not merely of absorption but of rapture
and transport, and not merely images but infi nitely seductive tokens of the
states themselves.”23 The image of a figure absorbed in a story comes “close
to translating literal duration, the actual passage of time as one stands
before the canvas, into a purely pictorial effect: as if the very stability and
unchangingness of the painted image are perceived by the beholder not as
material properties that could not be otherwise but as manifestations of an
absorptive state—the image’s absorption in itself, so to speak—that only
happens to subsist.”24 Millais’s painting depicts the moment of viewing.
The Boyhood of Raleigh works therefore much as that other blank
screen, the perforated bed sheet, does in Rushdie’s novel. Occupying the
same threshold position with respect to the novel as a whole that the print
of the pointing fisherman occupies with respect to Saleem’s account of his
childhood is the large sheet with a hole in the center held up as a veil before
the young and ostensibly sick Naseem Ghani when Dr. Aadam Aziz, Sal-
eem’s grandfather, is called by her father to examine her. The hole in the
sheet provides only a mediated view of the patient, but that mediation is
precisely what constitutes its significance. The sheet functions as a motor
of desire, much more successful than if the daughter were fully accessible or
if she were fully hidden. The veil could not have inspired desire had access
to the desired object not been withheld. Had Dr. Aziz been given complete
access to the patient, she would have remained metaphorically invisible: he
might never have seen her as more than a patient. So, too, Millais’s sailor
inspires in his boy listeners fantasies of desire by pointing to something
unseen and asking them to imagine, and Millais’s painting inspires in boy
viewers a similar desire by showing them nothing and asking them to imag-
ine what they will.
One boy pays attention to the sailor’s story and does not become famous.
The other retreats into an inward space in order to become Raleigh. The
sailor’s story nourishes dreams in at least one of his listeners of leaving
the world of stories behind. Millais’s painting is about the power not of
story as such—stories only inspire more stories—but of the act of turning
inward invited both by stories and by the painting itself, a turn that ide-
ally, as in Raleigh’s case, will become a turning outward. George Douglas
Hazzledine’s The White Man in Nigeria, published in 1904, in a passage

Show and Tell 113
cited verbatim in Chinua Achebe’s 1964 novel Arrow of God, similarly
declares that British boys must read the histories of Drake, Nelson, Clive,
and Mungo Park but then leave books behind and follow their imperialist
models into the world. 25 Youthful reading should not prepare the boys for
the ‘desk’ or the ‘counting-house,’ that is, for more reading, for reading is
only valuable as a preliminary to action. So, too, Millais’s painting exhorts
the boy viewer (who may know the painting from one of its many prints
hung in British and colonial schools) to turn away from his contemplation
of fi ne art (and from stories and history books) and go out and make his-
tory such as Raleigh did before him.
MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN AND THE REALM OF IMAGES
In Rushdie’s account in Midnight’s Children, the British brought Millais’s

image of Raleigh to late colonial Bombay and accorded him such authority
that the middle class postcolonial elite into which Saleem was born sought
to appropriate some of that significance for themselves by putting Millais’s
Raleigh before the eyes of their young sons. This is how Saleem opens Book
Two, the account of his childhood:
The fisherman’s pointing fi nger: unforgettable focal point of the picture

which hung on a sky-blue wall in Buckingham Villa, directly above the
sky-blue crib in which, as Baby Saleem, midnight’s child, I spent my
earliest days. The young Raleigh—and who else?—sat, framed in teak,
at the feet of an old, gnarled, net-mending sailor—did he have a walrus
moustache?—whose right arm, fully extended, stretched out towards
a watery horizon, while his liquid tales rippled around the fascinated
ears of Raleigh—and who else? Because there was certainly another
boy in the picture, sitting cross-legged in frilly collar and button-down
tunic [ . . . ] and now a memory comes back to me: of a birthday party
in which a proud mother and an equally proud ayah dressed a child
with a gargantuan nose in just such a collar, just such a tunic. A tailor
sat in a sky-blue room, beneath the pointing fi nger, and copied the
attire of the English milords [ . . . ] “Look, how chweet!” Lila Sabar-
mati exclaimed to my eternal mortification, “It’s like he’s just stepped
out of the picture!”
In a picture hanging on a bedroom wall, I sat beside Walter Raleigh
and followed a fisherman’s pointing fi nger with my eyes; eyes straining
at the horizon, beyond which lay—what?—my future, perhaps; my spe-
cial doom, of which I was aware from the beginning, as a shimmering
grey presence in that sky-blue room, indistinct at fi rst, but impossible
to ignore [ . . . ] because the fi nger pointed even further than that shim-
mering horizon, it pointed beyond teak frame, across a brief expanse
of sky-blue wall, driving my eyes towards another frame, in which my

inescapable destiny hung, forever fi xed under glass: here was a jumbo-
sized baby-snap with its prophetic captions, and here, beside it, a letter
on high-quality vellum, embossed with the seal of state—the lions of
Sarnath stood above the dharma-chakra on the Prime Minister’s mis-
sive, which arrive, via Vishwanath the post-boy, one week after my
photograph appeared on the front page of the Times of India.
Perhaps the fisherman’s fi nger was not pointing at the letter in the
frame; because if one followed it even further, it led one out through
the window, down the two-storey hillock, across Warden Road, beyond
Breach Candy Pools, and out to another sea which was not the sea in
the picture; a sea on which the sails of Koli dhows glowed scarlet in the
setting sun [ . . . ] an accusing finger, then, which obliged us to look at
the city’s dispossessed. 26
As I discussed in my earlier analyses of this passage, Saleem’s is an

idiosyncratic reading of the painting that locates it in a highly personal
frame, an exotic locale (exotic from Millais’s frame of reference), and a
future when Empire had acquired new meanings. That reframing is no
doubt the most important aspect of this postcolonial ekphrasis, but it is
not all that is going on here. Saleem wants something from the painting
for his own art: the vividness and seeming immediacy of the image. He
has what Mitchell calls the “ekphrastic hope” of being able “to make us
see” the world of his childhood. 27
Much in Saleem’s description is vivid in a painterly sense: the emphasis
on color (sky-blue, glowing scarlet), material (teak, frilly collar, glass, vel-
lum), detail (button-down tunic), and the movement of the viewer’s gaze
(focal point, driving eyes, eyes straining). This painterly diction might be
just enough to suggest the painting to a reader who already knows it, but is
surely insufficient if the reader does not know it. Moreover, Saleem misre-
members the sailor as a fisherman mending nets, a mistake that might inter-
fere with a reader’s memory of Millais’s painting. Saleem tells us he does not
have Millais’s painting before him as he writes and makes a great show of
being unsure whether he remembers it accurately: was there a second boy?
did the sailor have a walrus moustache? Millais’s painting, which depicts a
past distant in time and space, and which is integral to Saleem’s own past,
remains as insubstantial as a ghost. Saleem, it would appear, does not want
readers to recall Millais’s painting in detail. Such detail might make the
world of Methwold Estate whose description he then embarks upon pale
by contrast. He wants a mere suggestion of the painting. Only gradually do
the details of the painting become fi rmer in Saleem’s memory—“Because
there was certainly another boy [ . . . ] and now a memory comes back to
me”—and correspondingly more explicit for readers.
Mitchell writes that, in ekphrasis, the image acts “like a sort of unap-
proachable and unpresentable ‘black hole’ in the verbal structure, entirely
absent from it, but shaping and affecting it in fundamental ways.”28 Saleem’s

Show and Tell 115
ekphrasis leaves Millais’s painting indistinct, and the blurring then affects
the boundary between image and text. Figure and ground change places
with alarming ease. Where is Saleem in this passage? The adult barely
remembers the painting, then recalls sitting as a child before the painting,
then, remarkably, is a child in the painting itself. The fisherman mending
nets in the painting is repeated by the tailor sewing cloth before the paint-
ing. The one tells stories to children, the other clothes them. The fi rst-per-
son narrator becomes the third-person subject of narration (Baby Saleem,
midnight’s child, who else, a child with a gargantuan nose, he, one), then
becomes the first-person subject again (I, us), as Saleem shifts between the
adult and the child; between the rememberer, the viewer, the subject of
the painting, and the boy dressed as the subject of the painting; between
the twentieth century, the nineteenth (as viewed by the twentieth), and the
sixteenth (as viewed by the nineteenth); and between India and England
(England as viewed by Saleem in India, but also England where Rushdie is
writing the novel). The deictic “here [ . . . ] here” further blurs the textual
and the visual spaces: “here” could refer to a place in memory (presuming
that memory is an image like a painting), to the page on which Saleem
writes, or to the page the reader reads. Saleem moves from his present into
memory, from the bedroom into the painting, and then out of the painting
into the city.
One might think that the dizzying movement in and out of the paint-
ing would frustrate a reader trying to picture what is being described. The
result, however, is the opposite: the idiosyncratic ekphrasis facilitates the
reader’s own gradual immersion into the text. Saleem begins his account of
childhood by referencing an actual painting that some readers of English
language literature of his own generation will be familiar with, then moves
to an invented image (the newspaper clipping announcing Saleem’s birth,
accompanied by a photo of him as a newborn, and Nehru’s letter of con-
gratulations), and then to a view of the real Bombay outside his window
(which corresponds to the view outside Rushdie’s own window as a boy).
Saleem’s hope is that the image of the painting, already familiar to varying
levels, has sufficiently primed his readers’ imaginations to allow them to see
the fictional world as vividly.
It is by having images emerge tenuously from an indistinct background
that Saleem paints pictures in readers’ minds. Saleem starts his account of
Methwold’s Estate by describing representational objects such as readers
have before them: the Millais painting, a newspaper page, a letter, which
point to things that have connotations for readers: Raleigh, Nehru, and
India. Saleem’s description of the painting emphasizes the process whereby
the painted scene gradually becomes more vivid before the eye of memory
and, hopefully, before the eye of the imagination. Saleem identifies a sky-
blue crib in a sky-blue room, in which hangs a picture with a “shimmer-
ing” and “watery” horizon, against which ripple “liquid” tales. The blue
of the wall erases the horizon within the painting: there is blue not just

above but all around. The sailor’s fi nger appears to provide a fi xed point,
but if one follows it, it leads only to another watery horizon. The narrative
asks rhetorical questions—what? who else?—that point to a space where
the answer will be before an answer is given. Readers are thus prepared to
expect an answer to appear. Out of the blue, as it were, Raleigh and his
companions emerge from the sky and the watery surface as in daydreams:
“From the shimmering grey presence in that sky-blue room, indistinct at
fi rst, but impossible to ignore.” From a similar insubstantiality, Saleem and
his childhood friends will soon achieve a similar reality for readers.
In a discussion of how words on white pages create visual images in
readers’ minds, Elaine Scarry has argued that “mental motion is some-
how assisted by mystifying or destabilizing the relation between figure and
ground.”29 The indistinctness recreates the experience of reading. Saleem’s
narration works by starting where the reader is, asking the reader to pic-
ture what he or she already knows and even what he or she is currently
doing: looking downward at a book in the lap. Everyone in the scene Sal-
eem paints—the tailor, Raleigh, the other boy, and the fisherman—is sit-
ting and looking down, just as the reader is. Saleem draws attention to
eyes and to sightlines. “Look!” exclaims Lila Sabarmati. Saleem follows
the fisherman’s pointing fi nger with his eyes (and the reader follows the ink
on the page). Scarry explains that, when words successfully create moving
images in the reader’s mind, the reader’s eyes “are also in motion, rolling
from left to right and back again, skating down the page, darting back to a
detail missed, then forward again. Their actual motion is incorporated into
the motion of fictional persons so that our somatic mimesis of what is hap-
pening in the book works to substantiate and vivify motions on the mental
retina that are wholly imaginary.”30
As so often in Rushdie’s novel, the description of the painting focuses on
seemingly autonomous and oversized body parts: the feet of the sailor, the
pointing fi nger, the extended arm, the crossed legs, the fascinated ears, the
gargantuan nose, the walrus moustache. The fi rst scene in Saleem’s account
of his childhood thus reverses the Lacanian mirror stage: Millais’s whole
is broken down into discrete parts. The fisherman’s pointing fi nger, which
provides the title of this fi rst chapter of Book Two, is one of ten fi ngers
scattered throughout the novel—the “mosque’s long pointing fi nger” (394),
the pointing fi nger of a black cloud (82), Saleem’s own mutilated fi nger
(144), the long fi nger of the peninsula of Bombay itself (105), Evie Burns’s
“Finger, chewed off nail and all” (227), Amina’s (113), Dr. Narlikar’s (156),
Padma’s (142), and betel juice stains in the shape of a fi nger (45)—eleven if
one includes the “longlost fi nger” between Saleem’s legs (142). But there are
other hands and other fi ngers not in the text but alongside it that readers
will be half-conscious of: they may not be following the printed text with
a fi nger, but their hands are likely to appear on the periphery of vision at
either side of the book while the eyes scan the print. Once again Saleem’s

Show and Tell 117
narration appeals to physical elements that the reader will be aware of and
builds his picture from them.
Saleem’s description starts with the reader’s sensory world and adds
incrementally to it. Nothing too dramatic: a series of flat surfaces not
unlike the page of the book, starting with the fisherman’s net, moving to
the printed page of the newspaper, the photo on the page, the sheet of glass,
the letter, and fi nally the sails that catch the light of the sun. The largest
gesture is the extended arm and pointing fi nger. Scarry explains that this is
also how Homer’s words paint mental images: by starting with the reader’s
own sensorium and adding slight movements “until the very membrane of
the mind, like a moist linen cloth stretched taut, like a silken trampoline,
acquires the pliancy and suppleness that enable it to receive” the images
being described.31
In the ekphrastic contest with Millais’s painting, Saleem makes words
paint images. He insists on the three frames of the painting, the newspaper
and letter, and the window:
Boyhood of Times of Letter from View out

Raleigh India Nehru window
Each of the frames repeats the rectangular book that readers have before
their eyes. The two sheets with writing upon them in the central frame
directly echo the symmetrical pages that readers of the novel have open
before them.
Saleem is an avid reader of Superman (262) and other comic books, the
best modern example of the combination of words and images, and the
series of frames—Millais’s painting, two printed texts, and a window—
resemble the panels in a comic strip. The panels on the left and right present
wordless images that imply words: the sailor in The Boyhood of Raleigh is
missing a speech bubble, and the view out the window illustrates the title of
the song “Red Sails in the Sunset.” The two documents in the center more
directly combine text and image (the photo of Baby Saleem) and may be
read as the speech bubble absent from the panel on the left.
If we read the frames in a linear fashion from left to right, which is the
order in which they are presented, the direction in which we are reading the
English language text, and the direction in which we would most comfort-
ably read a series of panels in a comic book, then we can imagine that the
panels are related to each other as an earlier moment to a later one or an
earlier action to a later action. 32 The image of Empire on the left would be
to the texts about Saleem in the middle and to the city glimpsed through
the frame on the right as before is to after or even as cause is to effect. The
view on the right of the setting sun, suggesting as it does the decline of the
Empire on which the sun was never supposed to set, marks the end of the
narrative whose beginning is represented in the left-hand panel. We could

also, however, imagine that the panels represent different aspects of a single
whole that readers must reconstitute in their imagination.
The progress from one panel to the next in a comic strip invokes what Scott
McCloud calls ‘closure,’ the imaginative leap across the space between panels
in order to make a connection: “Comics panels fracture both time and space,
offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure
allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, uni-
fied reality.”33 The way that the imagination fills in the gutter between panels
is the comic book version of the perforated sheet held up between Aadam
Aziz and Naseem Ghani at the beginning of the novel. McCloud actually
compares the gutter between panels to a curtain whose coming down invites
readers to imagine the continuity.34 The viewer’s or the reader’s imagination
must supply what is missing between two frames. The panels in a comic strip
can only convey visual representation, whether in the form of images or text,
but the gutters between the panels appeal to none of the senses, which means,
argues McCloud, that, paradoxically, “all of our senses are engaged.”35 In
other words, between the panels is where we might ‘hear’ the story that we see
the fisherman telling or the song “Red Sails in the Sunset.”
It seems strange to say Saleem and Rushdie leave blank spaces for read-
ers to fill with their own projections—after all, both are compulsive fi llers
of space, spewers of words, and lovers of excess and superfluity. They are
the declared enemies of reticence and empty pages. But excess can mimic
the effects of austerity. Saleem’s and Rushdie’s words move between full-
ness and emptiness; the cornucopia of suggestions serves to clear a space for
projection. In particular, Saleem’s ekphrastic description, by deliberately
misremembering and drawing the reader’s attention to that which does not
carry meaning in Millais’s painting, to the unnamed boy in the center,
repaints the Victorian canvas as a blank space.
Millais’s painting, I argued, worked by creating a blank upon which
readers could project desire. But it mattered that the space not appear
blank. Saleem pays both less and more attention to Millais’s painting than
is usual. Less because he disregards what cultural literacy would direct
him to see and gets details about the painting wrong. More because he
focuses instead on what is actually there in the painting, in the center but
not central: the boy who is not Raleigh, a detail that readers who do know
the painting may even be forgiven for having forgotten. Saleem does not
identify with Raleigh but with this other, unnamed boy, who is closer to a
literal blank. The second boy is not dressed in the bright colors of the sailor
and Raleigh. He is smaller than Raleigh, almost formless and all in black;
he resembles nothing so much as Raleigh’s shadow, that which is not itself
there but is required to prove the solidity of Raleigh. It is this second boy,
however, who occupies the very center of the painting. All the lines of per-
spective—the sailor’s two arms, his leg, and the central horizon between
land and sea—converge on the magical space between this boy’s face and
the sailor’s other hand, the left hand which is not pointing but holding the

Show and Tell 119
boy’s attention in its grip. This second boy, and not the horizon pointed to
by the sailor, is in the position of the painting’s vanishing point, that which,
at once there and not there, the eye is directed towards, even by the arm
pointing in the opposite direction.
The second boy constitutes almost a Rorschach blot at the center of the
painting. In the gratuitousness of his presence, he is a sign of the real. Yet
he is also a blank slate onto which a viewer like Saleem can project his
desires. The area of darkness that is the boy also corresponds to the hole in
the center of the talismanic bedsheet. The ‘black hole’ that Mitchell says an
ekphrastic image creates in a text is precisely what Saleem fi nds and values
in Millais’s painting. In my previous article, I read the boy as a figure for
the postcolonial, that which is everywhere defi ned against the imperial.
Here, however, I would like to emphasize how much the boy in Saleem’s
description is actually without meaning, a blank sheet inviting the reader
to project desire. Postcolonial critics who assume they already know what
Raleigh means may fi nd that, like the Victorian imperialists whom Lenman
mocks, they are merely concocting a figure from a combination of cultural
presuppositions and a heavy dose of projection. Lenman’s argument that
there is no inevitable continuity between the Elizabethans and the Victo-
rian Empire is explicitly a counter to the postcolonial understanding that
Empire is one and always the same everywhere.
Millais envies verbal narrative its capacity to express thoughts, but then
suggests that it is a mistake to attend too closely to words; what is impor-
tant is an interior space where the imagination can create its own images,
and painting can do this as well or better than words can. Saleem is confi-
dent he can paint pictures as powerful as Millais’s and even uses Millais to
help him do so. But even as he causes vivid mental images to emerge from
the white sheet with black type, he shifts the contest to another terrain alto-
gether. He repaints The Boyhood of Raleigh as an explicitly blank canvas,
for he understands that what matters is neither the story nor the teller but
sparking the reader’s imagination.
Saleem disobediently identifies with the second boy in Millais’s painting,
the boy in the middle who, as critics then and now have noted, is not of the
visionary sort and attends too closely to the story of another. Of course, Sal-
eem’s identification with the wrong boy is precisely how he engages Millais in
the contest. This second boy will never be a Raleigh because he loves stories
for their own sake. All that he can become is perhaps another storyteller. As
a boy, Saleem identified with the young listeners in Millais’s scene, but he
does not grow up to be Raleigh or Millais but rather the sailor. He declares
that, as narrator, his is “as peripheral a role as that of any redundant oldster:
the traditional function, perhaps, of reminiscer, of teller-of-tales” (534).
Mitchell argues that ekphrasis is never binary but triangular: the text
mediates between the object of description and the audience.36 As we have
seen, that triangulation is already turned inside out by Millais, whose
painting contains teller and audience. Both the Victorian painter and the

postcolonial writer remain haunted, however, by a third: the figure of the
oral storyteller. Orality appears primordial to both Millais and Rushdie:
the story as it was before there were books like Raleigh’s or Rushdie’s,
maybe even before there was painting. The middle class artist and writer
both envy orality its direct contact to the folk (those who, by defi nition,
are illiterate). Both take oral storytelling as a model for community based
on face-to-face communication and on bodily presence that can seem more
real because more immediate than the solitary activities of writing, reading,
painting, and viewing. Writing, reading, and painting all lack the bodily
elements that orality relies on: gesture, tone, embodied mimicry.
We may therefore see Saleem’s contest with Millais as a cover for the real
contest: that between the writer and the oral storyteller. Saleem’s identifica-
tion with the second boy suggests that the choice represented by Millais’s
two boys, between paying too much attention to story and leaving story
behind in order to act on the world, is a false dichotomy. Stories have power
in themselves. They are not the opposite of action, but forms of action.
And because Saleem’s own art is verbal, he can lay a stronger claim to the
power of story than Millais can. Every night Saleem reads what he has
written that day aloud to Padma, a worker in the pickle factory in which
he lives, and then sleeps with her (325). He uses the tautness of the muscles
in her hairy arms and thick thighs as a guide to her boredom or her inter-
est and therefore to the success of his story (325). His “relationship to the
oral narrative” is therefore, Rushdie himself has suggested, “very direct.”37
Saleem’s ekphrasis, like his entire narration, is explicitly patterned on oral
storytelling. It is filled with rhetorical questions (“and who else? [ . . . ] and
who else? [ . . . ] what?”) and repeats the speech of others, especially speech
that lends itself to histrionics (“Look, how chweet!”).
Saleem the narrator is not, however, a literal oral storyteller; he is not
physically present before his readership. Saleem (and Rushdie) go to unusual
lengths to restore the body to the novel in the form of scatological and gro-
tesque corporeal imagery, but the whole to which the membra disjecta add up
to remains missing. Indeed, that missing something is key to Saleem’s strat-
egy. In the contest with oral story, Saleem and Rushdie borrow a technique
from Millais, whose painting suggests that the sailor’s story matters less than
the inward attention that it has fostered in a receptive listener, an attention
that can tune out the speaker and focus on something within. The blank
screen is a greater symbol of how Rushdie’s art works than is the stream of
words. And Millais’s painting helps him create that empty space.
NOTES
1. “Postcolonial Ekphrasis: Salman Rushdie Gives the Finger Back to the

Empire,” Contemporary Literature 38.2 (1997): 232–259; Self, Nation, Text
in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Uni-
versity Press, 2004).

Show and Tell 121
2. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” in Picture Theory: Essays on
Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1994), 157.
3. Garrett Stewart, The Look of Reading: Book, Image, Text (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 2006).
4. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the
Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
5. Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 51.
6. H. C. G. Matthew, “Portraits of Men: Millais and Victorian Public Life,” in
Millais: Portraits, ed. Peter Funnell et al. (London: National Portrait Gallery
Publications, 1999), 158.
7. David Armitage, “Literature and Empire,” in The Oxford History of the
British Empire, Vol. 1 British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Sev-
enteenth Century, ed. Nicholas Canny (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998), 105.
8. Quoted by Paul Barlow, Time Present and Time Past: The Art of John Ever-
ett Millais (Hants: Ashgate, 2005), 148.
9. Bruce Lenman, England’s Colonial Wars 1550–1688: Conflicts, Empire and
National Identity. (Harlow: Longman, 2001).
10. Lenman, England’s Colonial Wars, 77.
13. Lenman, England’s Colonial Wars, 87–88.
14. Walter Raleigh, The Discovery of Guiana (Middlesex: Echo Library, 2006),
17, 34.
15. V. S. Naipaul, A Way in the World (New York: Knopf, 1994).
16. Barlow, Time Present, 149–150.
17. Roger Bowdler, “Ars Longa, Vita Brevis: Life, Death and John Everett
Millais,” in John Everett Millais: Beyond the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood,
ed. Debra N. Mancoff (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 225.
18. Alison Smith, “The Grand Tradition,” in Millais, ed. Jason Rosenfeld and
Alison Smith (London: Tate, 2007), 158.
19. Quoted in John Guile Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett
Millais (London: Methuen, 1905), 222.
20. Bowdler, “Ars Longa,” 224.
21. Smith, “Grand Tradition,” 158.
24. Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 49–50.
25. George Douglas Hazzledine, The White Man in Nigeria (London: Edward
Arnold, 1904), 44–45. Cited in Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God (Oxford:
Heinemann, 1986), 33.
26. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Knopf, 1981), 142–144.
27. Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” 152.
29. Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux,
1999), 177.
30. Scarry, Dreaming by the Book, 148.
31. Scarry, Dreaming by the Book, 177.
32. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (New York: Harper Collins, 1994),
74.
33. McCloud, Understanding Comics, 67.

37. Salman Rushdie, “Midnight’s Children and Shame,” Kunapipi 7.1 (1985):
8.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Achebe, Chinua. Arrow of God. Oxford: Heinemann, 1986.

Armitage, David. “Literature and Empire.” In The Oxford History of the British
Empire. Vol. 1 British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth
Century, edited by Nicholas Canny, 99–123. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998.
Barlow, Paul. Time Present and Time Past: The Art of John Everett Millais. Hants:
Ashgate, 2005.
Bowdler, Roger. “Ars Longa, Vita Brevis: Life, Death and John Everett Millais.” In
John Everett Millais: Beyond the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, edited by Debra
N. Mancoff, 207–33. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
Coetzee, J.M. Foe. Toronto: Stoddart, 1986.
Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of
Diderot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.
Hazzledine, George Douglas. The White Man in Nigeria. London: Edward Arnold,
1904.
. Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004.
Lenman, Bruce. England’s Colonial Wars 1550–1688: Conflicts, Empire and
National Identity. Harlow: Longman, 2001.
Matthew, H. C. G. “Portraits of Men: Millais and Victorian Public Life.” In
Millais: Portraits, edited by Peter Funnell et al., 137–179. London: National
Portrait Gallery Publications, 1999.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: Harper Collins, 1994.
Millais, John Everett. The Boyhood of Raleigh. 1870. Tate Gallery.
Millais, John Guile. The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais. London:
Methuen, 1905.
Mitchell, W. J. T. “Ekprasis and the Other.” In Picture Theory: Essays on Ver-
bal and Visual Representation, 151–181. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1994.
Naipaul. V. S. A Way in the World. New York: Knopf, 1994.
Raleigh, Walter. The Discovery of Guiana. Middlesex: Echo Library, 2006.
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. New York: Knopf, 1981.
. “Midnight’s Children and Shame.” Kunapipi 7.1 (1985): 1–19.
Scarry, Elaine. Dreaming by the Book. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999.
Smith, Alison. “The Grand Tradition.” In Millais, edited by Jason Rosenfeld and
Alison Smith, 148–169. London: Tate, 2007.
Stewart, Garrett. The Look of Reading: Book, Image, Text. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2006.

8 “Nobody from Bombay should be
without a basic film vocabulary”
Midnight’s Children and the Visual
Culture of Indian Popular Cinema
Florian Stadtler
“Midnight’s Children was really born [ . . . ] when I realized how much I

wanted to restore the past to myself, not in the faded grays of old family-
album snapshots, but whole, In CinemaScope and glorious Technicolor.”1
Rushdie’s remarks in his 1982 essay “Imaginary Homelands” on the gen-
esis of Midnight’s Children (1981) immediately flag the importance of cin-
ema as part of its narrative world. Rushdie highlights how the language of
cinema is intricately interwoven with the novel’s artistic project. As critic
Vijay Mishra has noted, “in Rushdie’s postmodern poetics, Bollywood is
both an evanescent presence and a structural reference point.”2 Building
on Mishra’s argument, this essay will explore Indian popular cinema as
an important tool for Rushdie’s articulation of India’s postcolonial moder-
nity.3 I will argue that the medium of film, more specifically Indian popular
cinema, fi nds its way into the narrative argument of Midnight’s Children
structurally, metaphorically, and through characters connected with the
Indian film industry. This essay will explore how Rushdie draws on the
visual culture of commercial Hindi cinema and will argue that Indian pop-
ular cinema functions in the novel as a shaping agent in an articulation of
India’s post-independence national conceptualization of itself.
Rushdie’s use of Indian popular cinema is interlinked with a process
of recuperation of his memories of Bombay, a city inextricably connected
with India’s commercial film industry. More concretely, characters related
to the film industry feature prominently in the novel, such as the movie
producer Homi Catrack or Saleem’s Uncle Hanif, the film director of the
fictional film The Lovers of Kashmir, which launches his wife Pia’s career
as a Hindi film starlet. Bombay as it is articulated in the novel is not only
filtered through Rushdie’s memories, but street scenes and popular cul-
tural productions such as advertising slogans, fi lm posters, Hindi fi lms,
and music, which are in turn mediated by his first person narrator, Saleem
Sinai. I thus argue that through his narrator, Rushdie translates Indian
popular cinema’s visual culture, which he remembers vividly from his own

124 Florian Stadtler
childhood memories, into the narrative. Rushdie uses cinema in the novel
as a structuring device, where passages of the novel are narrated through
filmic devices and the visual culture of Indian popular cinema is inextrica-
bly linked to Saleem’s shifting perspectives, functioning as a metaphor for
the presentation of a heightened form of reality expressed through melo-
drama. This enables Rushdie to introduce into the novel a fi lm vocabulary
that he uses as a given. He uses long-shots, montages, close-ups, fade-outs;
he intercuts and dissolves scenes; sometimes he portrays the action in the
style of a docu-drama, sometimes a Hindi film melodrama or action movie.
I argue that these cinematic visuals translated into the narrative impact
on the manner in which the reader/audience picturizes the narrative. For
Rushdie this cinematic vocabulary has become an extra set of techniques
available to the novelist:
I think there’s one thing particularly which the development of film

since the New Wave has done for audiences and even for readers: It
has made people much more sophisticated about accepting what might
once have been thought to be very strange techniques. For instance, if
you want to intercut two scenes in prose now, people know what you’re
doing and don’t think of it as being confusing. The whole experience
of montage technique, split screens, dissolves, and so on, has become a
film language which translates quite easily into fiction and gives you an
extra vocabulary that traditionally has not been part of the vocabulary
of literature.4
The novel’s narrator makes full use of this additional vocabulary at his dis-
posal and deploys these cinematic techniques naturally in the telling of the
story. Sometimes he makes this explicit by referring to close-ups and fade-
outs directly. On other occasions, as will be discussed later, these instances
are developed more subtly, for example in the narration of the Jallianwala
Bagh massacre at Amritsar where the cut between scenes is denoted by
ellipses. As Saleem signals, these techniques show that as a Bombayite he
is totally in command of them, and that “nobody from Bombay should be
without a basic film vocabulary.”5
CINEMATIC TOOLS OF REPRESENTATION

IN MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN
Rushdie uses Hindi cinema’s visual culture to articulate in the novel a

vision of post-independence India that fi nds its echoes in Indian popular
cinema, a cinema of attractions that reflects the realities of modern post-
colonial India. Since independence, Indian popular cinema has provided
many of the centrally defi ning images of postcolonial India and according
to Nalini Natarajan, “presents ‘India’ for its audience and shapes [ . . . ] the

“Nobody from Bombay should be without a basic film vocabulary” 125
collective imaginary, however hegemonic and exclusive.”6 Following Nat-
arajan, I argue that in Midnight’s Children Indian popular cinema becomes
a site for the imaginary construction of national identity and is, as Sumita
S. Chakravarty remarks, “the displaced site of national exploration.”7
Rushdie uses cinema as a representational tool that directly borrows
from Indian popular cinema, replicating and subverting narrative scenarios
and relying on particular character types. Throughout the narrative, Saleem
functions as the camera-eye and the narratorial ‘I.’ He focalizes the story
and is the filter of events, which influences how history is narrated through
his memory in the novel, where Saleem’s shifting perspective is clearly influ-
enced by cinema. He initially introduces this in his description of Amritsar
and his grandfather’s survival of the 1919 massacre in filmic parameters,
using close-ups and jump cuts. Denoted by ellipses, Saleem cuts between
scenes and intersects Aadam Aziz’s thoughts with the surroundings he per-
ceives, which allow for a more immediate portrayal of the horrors of the
Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Saleem’s self-conscious reference to long-shot
and close-up renders the narrative as though it were a film script, prompt-
ing the reader to picturize it as such.8 By deploying these cinematic devices,
Saleem interrelates the row between Nazeem and her husband, who tries to
persuade her to come out of purdah and act like a ‘modern’ Indian woman,
with the historical events of April 1919. Here the action is visualized in a
series of scenes where the narrative of an historical event is intercut with the
personal story of Aadam Aziz’s survival of the event.
Over the decades, Indian popular cinema has developed its own unique
style with the emergence of a number of different genres, such as the ‘Social,’
‘Mythological,’ and ‘Historical’ film.9 In particular, the ‘Social’ films and
their adapted variations fi nd their echoes in Midnight’s Children, which
Rushdie uses as a means of exploring his version of India’s multiplicity.
During the 1950s the genre of the ‘Social’ became an important vehicle to
articulate a vision of a postcolonial Indian modernity. These fi lms signifi-
cantly determined the narrative strategies and formal conventions of Hindi
cinema, which provide Rushdie’s narrator Saleem with a template for his
own narrative. The 1950s ‘Social’ is a particular genre with which commer-
cial filmmakers sought to address contemporary issues in the immediate
post-independence era.10
Indian popular cinema distinguishes itself aesthetically from other cin-
emas through its agglomeration of multiple genres and differing modes of
representation that include song-and-dance sequences, fight scenes, com-
edy, melodrama, romance, and action sequences, to construct a narrative
whole that leads to a distinct visual ‘filmi’ style. This style is determined
by the film’s mise-en-scène, its ‘staging of events,’ which includes lighting,
setting, costume, and performance; the cinematography—use of shot, the
angle, the lighting; the editing, which influences how the shots are agglom-
erated; and sound. As Rachel Dwyer notes, these “four elements are used
together to give a film its own style or formal system.”11 Arguably, then,

the ‘multi-genre’ idea and Indian popular cinema’s unique mise-en-scène
result in its distinctive visual culture. Midnight’s Children draws on the
‘multi-genre’ concept of Indian popular cinema for its own aesthetic rep-
resentation of modern India. Saleem’s episodic and fragmentary narrative
that so loosely resembles the ‘multi-genre’ Bombay talkie challenges a uni-
tary interpretation of history and is a reflection of his own vision of India
as an eclectic inclusive nation, a vision directly challenged by the Widow,
represented as a screen villain, appearing black and green and green and
black in an homage to the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz (1939). The
filmic structuring of the novel draws on analogies to mythic texts to articu-
late the concept of an Indian modernity. This is intimately connected with
what Saleem describes as “a sort of national longing for form—or perhaps
simply an expression of our deep belief that forms lie hidden within reality;
that meaning reveals itself only in flashes.”12 These analogies become in the
novel’s epic melodramatic structuring the instances where the real and the
metaphoric are brought together through filmic melodrama.
MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN AND THE MELODRAMATIC

STRUCTURING OF INDIAN POPULAR CINEMA
As Rosie Thomas has argued, “Hindi films are structured according to

the rules of melodrama, which require a universe clearly divided between
good/morality and evil/decadence.”13 I argue that Saleem exports this moral
universe via Hindi cinema into the narrative of his own social upward and
downward mobility as he navigates the family space, questions his mother’s
virtue, becomes a social outcast through his own sexual longings for his
sister, and is destroyed as he recognizes the mother-of-the-nation Indira
Gandhi’s betrayal and her transformation into the annihilating Widow. In
this respect, Indian popular cinema’s moral universe and its melodramatic
routing are the narrative template for Saleem’s staging of the family unit,
which he extends as a metaphor for the nation. As an avid consumer of
filmic productions, Saleem focalizes much of the action through this type
of melodrama and is manipulated by it as much as he uses it to manipulate
his audience.
As Ashish Rajadhyaksha has illustrated, in the post-independence era,
Indian popular cinema, by “equating realism with certain objectified
values and symbols (e.g., of ‘rationality’, ‘science’ or ‘historicity’) also
wrought what in retrospect would be the far more significant change
in Indian fi lm: the shift from the reformist social [ . . . ] into an idiom
of melodrama.”14 I would argue that this shift in the aesthetic values of
India’s commercial cinema is also reflected in Saleem’s narrative, which
positions itself in that in-between space and harnesses it for the picturiza-
tion of the story. Furthermore, as the narrative progresses, Saleem com-
plicates the interplay between melodrama and realism. In this respect,

fi lms such as Raj Kapoor’s Awaara (1951), Shree 420 (1955), or Mebhoob
Khan’s Mother India (1957) are important reference points for the visual
aesthetic of Saleem’s narrative and offer a different comment on his views
on reality, history, family, its symbolic connections with nationhood, and
an Indian conceptualization of modernity. Saleem as viewer and narra-
tor is manipulated by these narrative and visual markers and rendered
somewhat neurotic, trapped as he is between realistic, melodramatic,
and fantastic conceptualizations of selfhood. To understand these shifts
within Saleem’s narrative, it is important to consider further the manner
in which 1950s Hindi cinema deployed melodrama.
Rajadhyaksha argues convincingly that a certain form of melodrama
emerged from this period in the context of the nationalist movement in
India, where the family often functions as a stand-in for the nation. These
films ask questions about tradition and modernity and attempt to fi nd
answers by looking beyond an older ancient mythic tradition. Ultimately
these films have to confront the questions of, as Rajadhyaksha puts it,
“indigenous modernism in India, racked as it has been by the question
of whether/if/how it relates/should relate to the “tradition” even as each
constantly perceives the other in its image.”15 For Rajadhyaksha this epic
melodrama “had a developed idea about both realism and modernism, very
much in its own terms, with both concepts emerging directly from allegories
of either nation, the national struggle, or in less defi ned terms, of freedom
and oppression.”15 In this instance, melodrama becomes a heightened form
of realism through which, according to Rajadhyaksha, earlier fi lmic genres
like the mythological were restaged in the new “ideological container of
the nationalist allegory and its several more abstracted metaphors.”16 Sal-
eem/Rushdie emulates this in his own narrative structuring in Midnight’s
Children, using Hindi-film-style melodrama to portray the larger-than-life
characters in Saleem’s family and their family life and developing the links
to wider connections between nationhood and selfhood. This type of struc-
turing, then, becomes an important tool for Saleem in his ever more desper-
ate quest for meaning and his attempts to prove his absurd claim that he is
through the moment of his birth “mysteriously handcuffed to history, my
destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country.”17
As already mentioned, Saleem himself is manipulated by Hindi-cinema-
style melodrama, by making his family members analogous to character
types in Indian popular cinema, placing them in a melodramatic universe
that invests the family with symbolic currency as a stand-in for the nation.
In these instances, the family functions as an organizing cluster in the nar-
rative and is the locus of both confl ict and resolution, premised on the
centrality of the mother figure and played out within the private sphere
of Saleem’s own family and the wider context of the public sphere where
Indira Gandhi is represented as the Mother of the Nation. The imaginary
space of Indian popular cinema thus becomes a crucial reference point in
the narrative, as Saleem exports the moral codings of the ‘Social’ films of

the 1950s into his narrative. In order to elaborate its argument the ‘Social’
as a form was adapted to appeal to wider audiences, but also to reflect a
wider spectrum of issues relevant to the newly independent nation. Accord-
ing to Ravi Vasudevan, “the social, initially conceived of as a conventional
middle class genre, had become an omnibus form in which different social
groups were being catered to by different elements of the film.”18 Arguably,
Rushdie uses a similar strategy in his deployment of Indian popular cinema
in the narrative. The ‘Social’ fi lms of the 1950s and their melodramatic
routing influence how meaning in the narrative is organized. As Vasude-
van explains, in the films, “nationalist discourses of that time about social
justice and the formation of a new personality were then routed through
familiar, if modified, cultural, and narratorial reference points. These were
family dramas, iconic and tableau modes of representation.”19 Midnight’s
Children makes recourse to some of these family dramas’ tableaux and
stock narrative devices, such as the representation of motherhood and fam-
ily, the character of the good ayah, or children switched at birth. Arguably
then, Saleem reframes the conventions of Indian popular cinema that were
harnessed in the 1950s and re-imagines them effectively for his narrative of
the failures of India’s postcolonial promise.
Rushdie uses these devices ironically, yet deploys them in view of underlin-
ing the vision of the Nehruvian ideal of postcolonial independent India and
how this ideal failed. The eclecticism of Saleem’s legacy is achieved through
the melodramatic switching of children at birth. This conceit allows for
Saleem’s identity to be a motley agglomeration of various ancestries, which
mirrors India’s own. Saleem is and is not his parents’ son. He is the illegiti-
mate child of the departing British colonialist William Methwold who has
acquired a taste for lower class Indian women, namely the wife of the street-
singer Wee Willie Winkie. Spurred on by her crazed love for the Marxist
petty criminal Joe d’Acosta, hospital nurse Mary Pereira switches him with
another baby after their birth. Saleem leads a privileged life, whereas his rival
Shiva, whose place Saleem has involuntarily usurped, has to lead the tough
life of a street beggar. Saleem’s multiple parentage and the inherent multiplic-
ity within himself mirrors his own multiplicity: fathered by the departing
British colonialist William Methwold, he is born to a Hindu mother, raised in
a Muslim household by a Christian ayah. In this respect, his motley identity
is emblematic of Nehru’s secular vision of postcolonial India, a vision also
reflected in the city of his birth, Bombay, and as outlined above, in Indian
popular cinema’s ‘Social’ films of the 1950s that are a further articulation
of this vision. Saleem’s identity is patched together and all these elements
are part of a fractured, destabilized, and unstable notion of selfhood that
resembles the motley identity of the vagabond-hero played in 1950s Hindi
cinema by Raj Kapoor in films like Shree 420.
The social films of the 1950s are an important reference point for Rush-
die and the 1955 film Shree 420 has particular echoes with the novel. The
opening song of the film features prominently at the beginning of The

Satanic Verses but as Rushdie points out in “Imaginary Homelands,” it
could very well be considered Saleem’s theme song. 20 In the song “Mera
Joota Hai Japani,” Shree 420’s vagabond-hero Raj makes much of his
eclectic mix of attire, yet professes his Indian heart (Japanese shoes, Eng-
lish trouser, Russian hat, Indian heart), about which he sings on his journey
to Bombay. The song’s refrain translates as follows:
Oh my shoes are Japanese,

The trousers English, if you please
On my head red Russian hat–
My heart’s Indian for all that. 21
The song arguably echoes throughout Midnight’s Children in its own ques-
tioning of the nature of Indian identity and holds a deeper significance in
its articulation of multiple identities, how they are enacted on the hero’s
body and how these various identities are performed. How this impacts on
national identity formations is emulated by Saleem’s own identity negotia-
tions and navigation of the novel’s moral universe, confronted with his own
social upward and downward mobility. Through his attire, Raj gestures
towards the coalescence of various transnationally produced commodities
united on his body, which he integrates with his Indian identity. This ges-
tures towards a wider correlation with ideas of difference and how within
these identity formations, selfhood is open to infinite re-arrangements and
becomes a signifier for the nation, absorbing all kinds of difference where
identity becomes a composite product.22 As Sumita S. Chakravarty argues
in her analysis of the 1950s filmic hero, “by transforming the social mar-
ginality of the filmic hero into the centrality of the Indian citizen, material
needs are displaced onto a more intangible (emotional) level of experi-
ence.”23 Saleem’s journey similarly mirrors Raj’s as both quest for truth and
meaning, but it is also echoed in the Europe-returned, German-educated
doctor Aadam Aziz, who has to reconcile his traditional Kashmiri identity
with his ideas of modernity, influenced by his university studies in Heidel-
berg, and his awakened sense of a national Indian identity in which he can
reconcile these seemingly contradictory identities.
Shree 420, an exemplary 1950s ‘Social,’ combines structurally a num-
ber of fi lmic genres, ranging from slapstick comedy, to suspense drama
and melodramatic love story. Produced and directed by actor Raj Kapoor,
the fi lm narrates the story of the recent graduate Raj, who walks to Bom-
bay from Allahabad to seek his fortune. As a vagabond, Raj is uncon-
nected and uprooted and can navigate the city across the class divide. He
experiences the corrupt world of the urban rich and fi nds respite among
the poor shantytown dwellers. He falls in love with the virtuous school
teacher Vidya (knowledge), but is led astray by the vampish Maya (illu-
sion) who entraps him to become a conman for the ruthless capitalist Seth
Dharmanand who embroils Raj in a scam to defraud his former homeless

friends who had fi rst given him shelter in the city. Confronted with these
serious moral choices, Raj unmasks the evil of an exploitative capital-
ism, renounces his own corruption, giving up his business partners to the
police, and instead champions a system of honest cooperation to build
the new India. The city in this fi lm is represented as a corrupt, evil, and
claustrophobic space in which Raj has to confront a set of moral choices
as part of a wider value system that he needs to navigate. Saleem as an
avid consumer of Hindi cinema borrows similar melodramatic routings,
placing characters in situations where they are confronted with moral
choices that determine their sense of self. More importantly, Saleem as a
character, rather than narrator, is also determined by this moral universe,
manipulated by its melodrama and forced to make similar choices, and
fails. Thus, by fulfi lling a dual function in the story as narrator and char-
acter, Saleem thus exports a Hindi-fi lm-cinematized moral universe into
his narrative and subverts it. Saleem’s method bears some resemblance to
Rosie Thomas’s explanation of the audiences’ engagement with the moral
universe of Hindi fi lms:
The Hindi film audience expects a drama that puts a universe of fi rmly
understood—and difficult to question—rules into crisis and then
resolves this crisis within the moral orders. This means that transgres-
sion must either be punished or, more excitingly, made ‘acceptable,’
that is, be rigorously justified by, for example, an appeal to human
justice, a mythological precedent, or a perceptible contradiction within
the terms of the moral code. 24
This is illustrative of similar processes in Midnight’s Children. For exam-

ple, Saleem’s narration of the Sabarmati case emphasizes his actions as a
warning to his mother, whose unfaithfulness he presumes after voyeuristi-
cally gazing on her meeting with her former husband at the Pioneer Café.
Midnight’s Children plays with the idealistic representation of the mother
in whom virtue and tradition are enshrined. Saleem develops the question
of motherly love and betrayal into one of the novel’s prime preoccupations.
This is played out in the Sinai family narrative and their immediate sur-
roundings and mirrored in the wider context of the nation through the
betrayal of the idea of India by the Mother of the Nation, recast in Saleem’s
narrative as the Widow. In this respect, the novel binds up the image of
the mother and motherhood with family and nation, virtue and betrayal.
As Thomas underlines, “the use of the mother figure [ . . . ] points up a
metaphor that is never far from the surface in Indian discourses of both
femininity and nationalism: mother as motherland, Mother India, Mother
Earth.”25 I would argue that these considerations preoccupy Saleem’s nar-
rative of his own mother and subvert this vision in his revelation of Indira
Gandhi, as the annihilating version of ‘Mother India,’ an image that in
India’s post-independence iconography has been harnessed by one of Hindi

cinema’s most acclaimed and successful fi lms, Mehboob Khan’s 1957 epic
Mother India.
Arguably then, Saleem represents women as visual spectacle in a pre-
conceived gendered role fulfilling a symbolic function in the imagining of
community. In these instances, women circulate as mothers or daughters,
drawing on the female character types as they are perpetuated in popular
cultural representations, such as Indian popular cinema. As part of that
process, ‘woman’ becomes an important cultural signifier in an imagining
of India’s postcolonial modernity. In these instances, as Nalini Natarajan
has explained, “Woman’s body is a site for testing out modernity, in the
first moment; in the second as ‘Bharat Mata’ or ‘Mother India,’ a site for
mythic unity in the face of fragmentation; and in the third, as ‘daughter of
the nation,’ a site for countering the challenge posed by ‘Westernization,’
popularly read as ‘women’s liberation.’”26 This is best exemplified in a film
such as Mother India, a central intertext to Rushdie’s disillusioned sequel
to Midnight’s Children, The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995). Saleem’s questions
around motherly honor and his presumptions about motherly betrayal lead
him to cast the self-styled Mother-of-the-Nation, Indira Gandhi, as a villain,
analogue with the grotesque screen villains of Indian popular cinema.
MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN AND THE VISUAL

AESTHETICS OF INDIAN POPULAR CINEMA
The mixture of different genres that are fused in the novel, bringing together
different narrative forms and media, highlight the multiplicity that Rushdie
associates with India, for example in the fi lmic picturization of the novel’s
family melodrama, the panoramic landscape of Kashmir, the Gangetic
plains, the cityscapes of Amritsar, Delhi, Dhaka, and Bombay, and the
verbal entertainment of Saleem’s sheer word power and storytelling inven-
tiveness. Underlying this fi lmic visualization is however a further argument
about fantasy and realism, and Saleem articulates this through his fi lm
director uncle’s aesthetics. Arguably, this tension bears on Saleem’s own
narrative choices. Uncle Hanif tries to combine the commercial aesthetics
of Indian popular cinema with social-realist subjects, a project in which
he fails. Hanif makes his directorial debut in commercial cinema, devising
the indirect kiss for his hit film The Lovers of Kashmir, a similar ploy used
by many commercial filmmakers to introduce the erotic through sugges-
tion to avoid censorship. 27 However Hanif is quickly disillusioned with the
glitzy world of the film industry and instead prefers writing scripts about
social problems and ordinary people. While Saleem is staying with them,
he is writing a script about “The Ordinary Life of a Pickle Factory,” which
ironically doubles Rushdie’s narrative frame for the novel—Saleem is after
all writing down his life story in his former ayah’s pickle factory where he
works as a pickle taster.

Hanif and his aesthetics serve to subvert the idiom of Indian popular
cinema on which the novel relies and provides an ironic comment on Sal-
eem’s own narrative methods and his reliance on similar devices for his
narrative structuring:
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.28
Of course, there is some irony in Saleem’s reflections, considering that these

are written from the perspective of his ten-year-old self, fully convinced
of his magic abilities. However, I would argue that what at fi rst sight may
appear like a joke Rushdie has with his reader, impacts more deeply on the
whole narrative. While Hanif decides to dispense with fantasy to rework
the idiom of Indian popular cinema for realism, Saleem locates his story
between the tensions of realism and fantasy, myth and reality, in which
he sees his life and India caught up. Thus the devices he deploys which are
directly borrowed from Indian popular cinema become an indispensable
tool for Saleem to articulate his own negotiations of reality, memory, and
myth. Furthermore, he dissolves some of the more fantastical elements,
which may appear unbelievable in a medium familiar to parts of his audi-
ence to help them suspend their disbelief.
For example, Saleem borrows directly from his uncle’s mise-en-scène in
his description of his mother’s meeting with Nadir Khan her former hus-
band, in the Pioneer Café. In the scene, Saleem replicates the indirect kiss of
his uncle’s film, emulating the mood of his Hindi film melodrama. Saleem
follows his mother by hiding himself in the boot of her car and spies on her,
voyeuristically gazing through the windows of the café, as their love scene
plays out similarly to the one in his uncle’s film:
through the dirty, square, glassy cinema-screen of the Pioneer Café’s

window, I watched Amina Sinai and the no-longer-Nadir play out their
love scene; they performed with the ineptitude of genuine amateurs.
On the reccine-topped table, a packet of cigarettes: State Express
555. [ . . . ] Unable to look into my mother’s face, I concentrate on the
cigarette-packet, cutting from two-shot of lovers to this extreme close-
up of nicotine.
But now hands enter the frame—fi rst the hands of Nadir-Quasim,
[ . . . ] next a woman’s hands [ . . . ] fi ngertips avoiding fi ngertips,
because what I’m watching here on my dirty glass cinema-screen is,
after all, an Indian movie, in which physical contact is forbidden lest it

corrupt the watching flower of Indian youth; and there are feet beneath
the table and faces above it, feet advancing towards feet, faces tumbling
softly towards faces, but jerking away all of a sudden in a cruel censor’s
cut. 29
Before Saleem slips back to the car, to stow away in the boot again, he
witnesses this ‘movie’s’ climax as his mother passes a glass of lassi over to
Nadir, imitating the indirect kiss and the subliminal eroticism of Hanif’s
film, and thus, as Saleem observes, “life imitated bad art.”30 The scene here
is focalized through Saleem’s camera-eye visualized in his head and offered
up for consumption to his reader/viewer. The scene is not only visualized
cinematically, but also mediated through Saleem’s gaze. Saleem as a boy
becomes here party to an illicit meeting on which he secretly gazes. He
fi nds it difficult to comprehend his mother’s actions, and instead flees into
the idiom of Indian popular cinema, into a story world and melodramatic
universe to which he can relate. However, ironically, this universe does not
allow for mothers to act as lovers, which leads Saleem to mistakenly pre-
sume her unfaithfulness. In this instance, Saleem functions as the camera-
eye that bestows a value judgment on the action. He reveals that through
his consumption of Indian popular cinema he has been manipulated by
melodrama and does the same with his audience, making it complicit with
his voyeuristic gazing, and leading it to doubt the virtue of his mother.
Saleem makes explicit once again the visual nature of the scene by intro-
ducing directly the language of cinema (two-shot, close-up). This passage
indicates how Saleem adapts the melodramatic idiom of Hindi cinema to
visualize his narrative for his readers. While Saleem develops it into an aes-
thetic marker throughout the narrative, rooting it in this popular cultural
medium, it is also deployed with irony as the reader becomes aware of the
tensions between realism and fantasy that are fused in melodrama. Argu-
ably then, Rushdie deploys this cinematic idiom self-consciously in Saleem’s
story, creating situations where the reader fi nds “melodrama piling upon
melodrama; life acquiring the colouring of a Bombay talkie.”31
CINEMATIC PERSPECTIVE AND MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN
In “Book Three” of the novel, cinema becomes an even more developed

leitmotif as Saleem turns it into a metaphor with which he explains to
his reader the narrative’s shifting perspective. At the beginning of “Book
Three,” Saleem Sinai suffers from memory loss after his family is wiped
out in the 1965 Indo-Pak war. In his amnesiac state he has become dissoci-
ated from history, just living in the present moment. Simultaneously, Sal-
eem’s focus becomes narrower and narrower the more his narrative moves
towards the present and the more he realizes that he is not central to the

history of India, but that this role of centrality belongs to Indira Gandhi.
By the end, Saleem has become peripheral in his own story, returning back
to the same initial position of enunciation of the novel’s opening.
At the beginning of “Book Three,” Saleem uses the trailer technique,
partly to distract Padma, his fellow pickle factory worker to whom he has
been narrating his story, from continuing to cry for the loss of Saleem’s
family, emphasizing that his story is not fi nished yet and that “there are
still next attractions and coming-soons galore.”32 Saleem then allows his
story to fast-forward, emulating the cinematic visualization of the passage
of time: “I permit myself to insert a Bombay-talkie-style close-up—a calen-
dar ruffled by a breeze, its pages flying off in rapid succession to denote the
passing of the years,”33 over which he superimposes a number of long-shots
depicting political events in Pakistan, until his narrative has jumped for-
ward from the 1965 war between India and Pakistan to 1970, just before
the secession of East Pakistan to become independent Bangladesh. Through
this device, the link of him being handcuffed to history is also broken, as
Saleem becomes detached from his self, denoted in the text by a shift from
fi rst-person to third-person narration. Saleem connects this shift in per-
spective with the Bombay talkie device of amnesia:
With some embarrassment, I am forced to admit that amnesia is the

kind of gimmick regularly used by our lurid fi lm-makers. Bowing
my head slightly, I accept that my life has taken on, yet again, the
tone of a Bombay talkie; but after all, leaving to one side the vexed
issue of reincarnation, there is only a fi nite number of methods of
achieving rebirth. So, apologizing for the melodrama, I must dog-
gedly insist that I, he, had begun again; that after years of yearning
for importance, he (or I) had been cleansed of the whole business;
that after my vengeful abandonment by Jamila Singer, who wormed
me into the Army to get me out of her sight, I (or he) accepted the
fate which was my repayment for love, and sat uncomplaining under
a chinar tree; that, emptied of history, the buddha learned the arts
of submission, and did only what was required of him. To sum up: I
became a citizen of Pakistan. 34
Although the twenty-two-year-old Saleem is aware that amnesia is a melo-

dramatic cliché, in this instance he uses Indian popular cinema’s narrative
strategies in order to reposition himself in his own narrative. Saleem uses
the device much more self-consciously than his ten-year-old self as he in his
role as narrator initiates the shift in the story’s focalization, and his camera-
eye/narratorial ‘I’ switches to the more detached third-person. Saleem gives
up his Indian citizenship to take up Pakistani citizenship and plays on the
irony of the association of the name Pakistan, the “Land of the Pure.” At
the end of “Book Two,” Saleem has entered a state of impurity through his
sexual longings for his sister Jamila. Thus, his amnesia, and his adoption

of Pakistani citizenship, are part of a cleansing process before Saleem can
reclaim his selfhood. Therefore, the Bombay talkie cliché of amnesia has
a specific, ironic purpose to articulate how in the absence of family his
sense of self is erased and can be remade. Ultimately, Saleem needs to re-
establish himself in a community, which he finds in the Magicians’ Ghetto
in Delhi. This then allows him to reconstitute his family beyond blood-
ties to recuperate a sense of self, which he achieves with Parvati the Witch
and Baby Aadam and, after their death, in the pickle factory of his former
Ayah through the love of Padma. The cliché, then, becomes the tool with
which Saleem re-invents his life and roots, beyond blood ties that breaks
the metonymy of family as nation, melodramatically explored in Indian
popular cinema and taken literally by Saleem through his own consump-
tion of this cinema.
Cinematic perspective becomes an even more important motif towards
the end of the novel, when Saleem confronts and re-evaluates his own posi-
tion in the world, after he endures forced sterilization and the destruction
of the magical gifts of the Midnight’s Children in the Widow’s hostel in
Benares. Linking his remarks to an earlier analogy between cinema and a
sense of perspective, Saleem contemplates:
I refuse absolutely to take the larger view; we are too close to what-is-
happening, perspective is impossible, later perhaps analysts will say
why and wherefore, will adduce underlying economic trends and politi-
cal developments, but right now we’re too close to the cinema-screen,
the picture is breaking up into dots, only subjective judgements are
possible. Subjectively, then, I hang my head in shame.35
After his horrific experiences, Saleem has moved to the most personal,
close-up, and intimate position with his audience, confronted with his own
shame of having betrayed the Midnight’s Children and having to face the
responsibility of their destruction. Cinema serves here as an analogy for
his perspective of reality and events, the impact of which he fi nds himself
unable to judge. Saleem provides us with the most immediate indictment
of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency rule, which is clearly embedded in the direct
and indirect treatment of history in the novel and its critique of India’s polit-
ical elite. By the end of the novel, when in its climax Saleem is confronted
with the figure of Indira Gandhi, the Midnight’s Children are invested with
meaning through their destruction at the hand of the Widow. Saleem loses
the fight for centrality and brings about the destruction of the Midnight’s
Children and their magical gifts. They are thus invested with the meaning
Saleem craves, powerful symbols of hope betrayed and possibilities denied,
but at this moment, this wider picture remains obscure for Saleem. Instead,
Saleem transforms the cinema screen into an analogy for the negotiation of
reality, truth, and history, which, as mentioned, he already refers to earlier
in his narrative:

Reality is a question of perspective; [ . . . ] Suppose yourself in a large
cinema, sitting at fi rst in the back row, and gradually moving up, row
by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually
the stars’ faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume gro-
tesque proportions; the illusion dissolves—or rather, it becomes clear
that the illusion itself is reality36
Arguably then, the cinema screen and film viewing become a tool with which
Rushdie’s audience can unlock Saleem’s narrative strategy. For Rushdie,
“the movement towards the cinema screen is a metaphor for the narrative’s
movement through time towards the present.”37 This connects with Saleem’s
uncle’s aesthetic negotiation of realism, melodrama, and fantasy. For Saleem,
the cinema screen is the central metaphor for his shifting perception of real-
ity and for the manner in which the events that he has witnessed are filtered
through memory. The further Saleem’s narrative moves from the past to the
present, the more it becomes partial—fragmentary and biased—through a
loss of perspective, by being too close to the screen. In this respect, Saleem,
like Lifafa Das and Nadir Khan’s painter friend, fails in his attempt to rep-
resent the whole of India’s reality as the total picture fragments into tiny
grains on the cinema screen. This process of fragmentation, as this essay has
illustrated, directly relates to the presentation of a heightened sense of reality
as it is stylized in Indian popular cinema, which Saleem draws on directly to
explain the incongruities in his own narrative in his fight against absurdity,
for his centrality and his struggle for meaning. In this respect cinema and
the visual culture of Indian popular cinema function in the novel as devices
to interrogate the official histories of colonial and postcolonial India. Indian
popular cinema then, needs to be considered as an important text within
Midnight’s Children, where the mythic and epic routed through filmic melo-
drama and filmic narrativization are harnessed for novelistic conventions,
challenging conventions of historiography and fiction.
NOTES
1. Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” Imaginary Homelands: Essays

and Criticism, 1981–1991, Second Edition. (London/Harmondsworth:
Granta/Penguin, 1992), 9–10.
2. Vijay Mishra, “Rushdie and Bollywood Cinema,” in The Cambridge Com-
panion to Salman Rushdie, ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), 26.
3. I use the term ‘Indian popular cinema’ or ‘Hindi cinema,’ rather than Bollywood,
as this essay focuses on films from 1950s Bombay-based commercial Indian cin-
ema, which in the main produced films in Hindi. These films were produced in
a period when the term ‘Bollywood’ did not yet exist or have currency.
4. Jean W. Ross, “Contemporary Authors Interview: Salman Rushdie,” in
Conversations with Salman Rushdie, ed. Michael Reder (Jackson: Univer-
sity Press of Mississippi, 2000), 6–7.

5. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Vintage, 1995), 33.
6. Nalini Natarajan, “Woman, Nation, and Narration in Midnight’s Chil-
dren,” in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: A Book of Readings, ed. Meenak-
shi Mukherjee (Delhi: Pencraft, 2003), 167.
7. Sumita S. Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947–
1987 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 4.
8. See Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 32–37.
9. For explorations of the genres of Indian popular cinema see Ravi S. Vasude-
van, “Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: The Hindi Social Film of the
1950s as Popular Culture,” in Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, ed. Ravi
S. Vasudevan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 99–121. See also
Ravi S. Vasudevan, “The Melodramatic Mode and the Commercial Hindi
Cinema: Notes on Film History, Narrative and Performance in the 1950s,”
Screen 30.3 (Summer 1989): 29–50.
10. See Vasudevan, Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, 99–105.
11. Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel, Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi
Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 42. However Dwyer suggests that
the major questions if Indian popular cinema has a coherent aesthetic and its
own original distinctive style still need to be addressed. See Dwyer and Patel,
Cinema India, 42.
13. Thomas, “Melodrama and the Negotiation of Morality in Mainstream Hindi
Film,” 163.
14. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The Epic Melodrama: Themes of Nationality in
Indian Cinema,” Journal of Arts and Ideas 25–26 (1993): 56.
15. Rajadhyaksha, “The Epic Melodrama: Themes of Nationality in Indian Cin-
ema,” 59.
16. Rajadhyaksha, “The Epic Melodrama: Themes of Nationality in Indian Cin-
ema,” 59.
17. Rajadhyaksha, “The Epic Melodrama: Themes of Nationality in Indian
Cinema,” 60.
18. Vasudevan, Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, 113.
19. Vasudevan, Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, 116.
22. See Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 203–204.
23. Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 204.
Film,” 164.
Film,” 167.
26. Natarajan, “Woman, Nation, and Narration in Midnight’s Children,” 169.
37. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 13

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chakravarty, Sumita S. National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947–1987.

Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.
Chauhan, Pradyumna S., ed. Salman Rushdie Interviews: A Sourcebook of his
Ideas. Westport, CT & London: Greenwood Press, 2001.
Dwyer, Rachel and Divia Patel. Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film.
London: Reaktion Books, 2002.
Mishra, Vijay. “Rushdie and Bollywood.” In The Cambridge Companion to Sal-
man Rushdie, edited by Abdulrazak Gurnah, 11–28. Cambridge: Cambridge
Natarajan, Nalini. “Woman, Nation, and Narration in Midnight’s Children.”
In Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: A Book of Readings, edited by Meenakshi
Mukherjee, 165–181. Delhi: Pencraft, 2003.
Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. “The Epic Melodrama: Themes of Nationality in Indian
Cinema,” Journal of Arts and Ideas 25–26 (1993): 55–70.
Reder, Michael, ed. Conversations with Salman Rushdie. Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 2000.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991, Sec-
ond Edition. London/Harmondsworth: Granta/Penguin, 1992.
. Midnight’s Children. London: Vintage, 1995.
. The Wizard of Oz. London: BFI, 1992.
Thomas, Rosie. “Melodrama and the Negotiation of Morality in Mainstream
Hindi Film.” In Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World,
edited by Carol Breckenridge, 157–182. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1995.
Vasudevan, Ravi. “The Melodramatic Mode and the Commercial Hindi Cinema:
Notes on Film History, Narrative and Performance in the 1950s” Screen 30.3
(Summer 1989): 29–50.
Vasudevan, Ravi S., ed. Making Meaning in Indian Cinema. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press India, 2000.
FILMOGRAPHY
Awaara. Dir. Raj Kapoor. R. K. Films, 1951.

Mother India. Dir. Mehboob Khan. Mehboob Productions, 1957.
Shree 420. Dir. Raj Kapoor. R. K. Films, 1955.
The Wizard of Oz. Dir. Victor Fleming. MGM/Warner Bros., 1939.

9 Visual Technologies
in Rushdie’s Fiction
Envisioning the Present in the
‘Imagological Age’
Cristina Sandru
You know Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which
makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter’s products stand
before us as though they were alive, but if you question them, they
maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words;
they seem to talk to you as if they were intelligent, but if you ask them
anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go
on telling you just the same thing forever.
(Plato, Phaedrus, 2740–2768)
Thus spoke Socrates in Plato’s dialogue on love and the art of rhetoric, leav-
ing us to wonder what this ‘thing’ is that literary texts simultaneously with-
hold from and endeavour to reveal to their readers. But perhaps the point is
that often prose fiction narrative seeks to emulate the art of ‘showing’ rather
than practice the rhetoric of ‘telling,’ for the image, or the suggestion of it,
may be more immediately potent and more directly signifying. For that
reason, perhaps, it can be more easily hijacked by the purveyors of mean-
ing, whether political or cultural in a more general sense. Where words cre-
ate philosophical systems, ‘ideologies’ that reflect on the substance of the
real, images and their manifold visual derivatives seek to mirror that real,
to offer it up for contemplation in a seemingly unmediated form. Yet their
immediacy and transparency is more often than not an illusion, for visual
representations are just as much constructed as narrative ones; in Milan
Kundera’s wry coinage, they form ‘imagologies’ rather than ideologies, col-
lections of suggestive prompts that titillate the senses rather than rationally
devised systems of ideas.
With more than a nod to this concept of ‘imagology’ developed by
Kundera in his 1991 novel Immortality, the following chapter attempts
a selective reading of Salman Rushdie’s fictional use of modern technolo-
gies of representation to interrogate public and private constructions of
place, history, and identity. From their earlier incarnations as instruments

140 Cristina Sandru
of ideological control—but also resistance—in Midnight’s Children (1981)
and Shame (1983), to the pervasive ‘colonization by images’ featuring in
novels such as The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) and Fury (2001), vari-
ous techniques of visual representation appear as deeply ambivalent meta-
phors for contemporary society’s excessive reliance on signifying systems.
Photography, film, and advertising (with its twin sister, propaganda) are
constant presences in Rushdie’s novels; in this chapter, I read them as both
instruments of cultural critique and symptoms of a leveling globalization,
both potential preservers of memory and magnifying (often distorting)
lenses of an obsessive contemporary pursuit of fame and immortality.
The main textual emphasis will be on two of Rushdie’s most critiqued
novels, which are often seen as less accomplished than either his early fic-
tion, or the more recent Shalimar the Clown (2005) and The Enchantress
of Florence (2008), namely The Ground Beneath Her Feet (hence GBF)
and Fury. The reasons for this choice stem from the ambivalent position of
enunciation from within which they have been composed: partaking of the
culture that has produced the visual technologies which the novels textu-
alize, they act as semi-ironic commentaries on the transformative impact
of these technologies on the fabric of contemporary life, urban landscape,
experience of self, and construction of private and collective history. The
interpretive framework is a comparative one, bounded at one end by Kun-
dera’s use of visual tropes similar in kind but illustrative of a significantly
different artistic positioning, and, on the other, by Rushdie’s own earlier
novels, where such visual technologies were subordinated, by and large, to
a narrative urge to ‘tell’ rather than to ‘show.’
To return to the original quote that opened this chapter, one of the chief
ways in which visual arts and narrative have come together in imaginative
fiction is in the textualization of images, or what is known as the technique
of ekphrasis. The verbal representation of a visual representation, which is
at the heart of ekphrasis, is in essence a mise-en-abîme technique, a self-
reflexive embedding of images or concepts referring to the textual whole.
Its purpose is multifold: it can function as doubling and mirror, reinforc-
ing obliquely suggested correspondences as, for instance, in Rani Har-
rapa’s act of weaving historical tapestries in Rushdie’s Shame, which can
be seen to function as the symbolic equivalent of the act of writing itself;
or it can highlight the discrepancy between different types of representa-
tion, as in the newspapers’ reports of the war between India and Pakistan,
‘adjusted’ on both sides for propagandistic purposes, and the metaphor of
the cinema screen that Rushdie uses in Midnight’s Children in anticipation
of the historical events described later on in the narrative.1 This dispar-
ity, or dissemblance, between visual and verbal representation, and their
specific memory-altering mechanisms, is also illustrated in Saleem Sinai’s
ekphrastic recollection of certain “memories of a mildewed photograph,”2
featuring Saleem’s grandfather Aadam Aziz, the Rani of Cooch Naheen,
Mian Abdullah-Hummingbird, and Nadir Khan. While describing the

Visual Technologies in Rushdie’s Fiction 141
photograph, Saleem also tries to recollect fragments of their conversation,
yet the visual details he provides almost always seem to contradict the con-
tent of his verbal retrospection, until, in the end, he ultimately exhausts
his memory of the image, declaring that “the photograph has run out of
words.”3 As Edward Barnaby astutely concludes his much longer analysis
of this episode, “the ambivalence of Saleem’s ekphrastic account of this fic-
tional photograph dramatizes [Susan] Sontag’s critique of photography in
general as ‘open to any kind of reading’ as well as her argument that ‘only
that which narrates can make us understand.’”4 And, I should add, it also
places photography at the crossroads between testimony and artifice: the
question whether this most modern of visual technologies is the bearer of
‘objective’ historical witness or, rather, a prefabricated, ‘arranged’ or oth-
erwise doctored public record will resurface later in Rushdie’s novels, and
is at the heart—as we shall see presently—of Kundera’s own interrogation
of the medium in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984).
Ekphrasis can additionally facilitate a certain degree of estrangement,
or defamiliarization, whereby intensely political fictions incorporate more
or less transparent visual cues “as reflections on the novel’s own politically
fraught relations [ . . . ] to [the] extratextual world.”5 Thus, in Rushdie’s
Shame, the space of the private acts as a cracked mirror of the public, a
veil beneath which hides the alternative version of that which the official
account cannot reveal because too lurid, or violent, or shameful. The novel
is therefore duly filled with ghostly imprints and double exposures; the
trope of the monster, the visual embodiment of the repressions and hid-
den places of the culture within which it emerges, highlights that which
ought to have remained a secret but has come to light and taken form. For
although Sufiya Zebobia is a ‘real’ character, the monster within is but an
‘image,’ an icon, a symbolic visual form metonymically depositing the entire
nation’s shame. The eruption of stifled and humiliated emotion which ends
apocalyptically a much darker novel than Midnight’s Children is therefore
symbolic of the processes whereby official History begets itself—by violent
suppression and erasure. It is therefore possible to see Pakistan’s rewritten
history as “a duel between two layers of time, the obscured world forc-
ing its way back through what-had-been-imposed.”6 It resurfaces in the
unlikeliest of places, in the rumor and gossip and embroidered shawls of
the ‘invisible’ female world, so that what is not shown and said center-stage
assumes as much, if not more, importance than the deceptive texture at the
forefront. “All stories are haunted by the ghosts of the stories they might
have been,”7 we are told by the much-prone-to-musing narrative voice, and
so these alternative ghostly versions, confi ned to the space of the zenana,
unearth the real motivations behind historical fact, as Rani Harappa’s eigh-
teen shawls tellingly show. Their showing ‘speaks out,’ as it were, against
the misrepresentations of official historiography that both her husband and
his political enemy are guilty of, the general corruption and criminality
of the regime holding the power. They occupy a marginal position in the

142 Cristina Sandru
narrative in terms of the textual space they claim, and they always ‘speak’
obliquely; but they are central insofar as they bear witness to, recuperate
and preserve that which official historiography occludes, deforms, or mis-
represents for political purposes.
As this latter instantiation of ekphrasis suggests, central to Rushdie’s
use of visual technologies in his fiction is, on the one hand, a preoccupa-
tion with memory and the role played by artifacts (whether objects, pho-
tographs, films, or other types of visual representation) in preserving and
relaying a meaningful past, and, on the other, the potential for distortion,
falsification, and commodification inherent in the very act of producing
these representations. This is particularly the case in his two most histori-
cally-located early novels, Midnight’s Children and Shame, where the pub-
lic and the private mirror each other: real events in India and Pakistan’s
checkered histories (the partition riots, the war between the two post-
Partition states, the Bangladeshi war, the Emergency period, the Bombay
Language riots of 1957, the autocratic nature of the power establishment in
both states, etc.) are often embedded in the unreliable, partial, deeply voy-
euristic accounts of their main narrators, Saleem Sinai and Omar Shakil.
In many ways, ‘what they see is what we get,’ so to say, for bearing witness
and observing are the key elements that enable the successful deployment of
their subsequent narration. Even the history of Saleem’s family ancestors,
which he obviously could not have witnessed, is gauged and then described
by recourse to various visual icons: the sentimental Victorian painting in
the child’s bedroom described in the second chapter of Midnight’s Chil-
dren (The Boyhood of Raleigh); the reluctance of his grandmother to have
her photograph taken (with all its myriad ramifications into the history of
India’s relationship with the colonizing western power, the latter’s drive to
‘modernization’ and the role played by photography in driving this process
forward by enabling the master’s ‘clinical eye’ to be deployed over the mas-
sive occupied territory in travel guides, topography, etc.8); and the blazon
‘Heidelberg’ embroidered on his grandfather’s medicine bag (again speak-
ing tomes about Aadam Aziz’s own ambivalent position in-between the
need to respect India’s traditions and his desire to rid it of superstition and
fanaticism). In the course of the novel, then, Bollywood cinema and Lifafa
Das’s peepshow accompany Saleem’s narration with their own spectacle
and artifice, providing illustrations and/ or counterpoints to the private
and public events that he strives so hard to retain, connect, explain, and
interpret for his audience.
I will not insist further on the various ways in which Rushdie’s early
novels, while warning of the potential for misappropriation that all ‘objects
of memory’ are in danger of, strongly posit the act of recording—whether
in narrative or visual form—as an absolutely crucial kernel of imaginative
and spiritual resistance to the onslaught of ideologically and politically-
motivated constructions of the past which official powers call History. My
focus here will shift, instead, to the obverse side of Rushdie’s use of visual

technologies in his later fiction, revealing their potential for distortion and
falsification, their manipulation as part of the spectacle’s validation of ide-
ology and commodification of culture. GBF and Fury examine the con-
temporary as it emerges at the intersection of ideological coordinates and
the dictates of consumerist culture. The novels’ pivotal element of thematic
continuity is the metamorphosis of ideological mind-control into a ‘coloni-
zation by images’, i.e., the transformation of the texture of contemporary
life under the impact of modern technologies of representation. Photogra-
phy, the world of spectacle and show, television, advertising, and the world
wide web, as both symptoms of globalization and malignant outgrowths of
an obsessive pursuit of fame and immortality, function as common loci of
cultural critique in both novels.
It is here that Kundera’s development of the concept of ‘imagology’ and
his own interrogation of visual technologies in The Unbearable Lightness
of Being (ULB) and Immortality (1992) will serve as both starting point
and useful comparative springboard. As in Rushdie’s novels, visual repre-
sentation in Kundera’s fiction is seen as the key to both the maintenance
and manipulation of memory. Photography occupies an especially ambigu-
ous position, functioning in his novels as the central metaphor for contem-
porary society’s excessive reliance on signifying systems. As simultaneously
preserver and destroyer, record and distortion of reality, the photograph
aptly illustrates the over-determination of signs, their slippery nature and
unreliability. Although its apparently unmediated ‘showing’ proclaims its
transparency—and implicit association with the truth of the case—the
photograph can become a means of manipulation infi nitely more effective
than textual inscription. Whereas narrative incorporates its own signify-
ing instability in the telling, photography pretends to offer an unmediated
version of reality, even as it wears the disguise of its technical and artistic
code—with its carefully controlled handling of space, point of view, and
color. It thus “enacts the tension between capturing reality and the photo-
graphic convention that codifies reality.”9
In ULB, this concern with photographic representation is primarily ethi-
cal and ideological: by constantly juxtaposing the two sides of this Janus-
faced medium, the writer places it squarely on the borderline between ethical
testimony and ideological manipulation, between the private and the public.
Like Umeed Merchant in Rushdie’s GBF, the novel’s protagonist, Tereza,
uses photography as an escape from the sadness and constraints of her pri-
vate universe, and a means of immersing herself in the public space of his-
tory in order to become the detached voyeuristic chronicler of its tragedies
and losses. The eye of the camera becomes a space of hiding, a means of
concealing the self from the invasive world outside, against which it provides
a protective shield and, significantly, also a weapon of control. Behind the
camera Tereza feels empowered: she can become the subject of the strip-
ping gaze, rather than its object. Seen in this context, her photographing of
the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and that of her husband’s mistress are

144 Cristina Sandru
symbolically on a par—acts of control and empowerment, whereby the seen
becomes the seer. That Tereza’s photographs—her creative strength and pro-
tective shield—are later on in the novel revealed to have been used by party
officials to identify and incriminate participants in the demonstrations is yet
another example of how treacherously ambivalent visual representation can
be.10 Furthermore, Tereza links the loss of individual identity with the viola-
tion of her nation’s body by the tanks of the Soviet invader: when the Swiss
editor dismisses her political photographs in favor of pictures taken on a nud-
ist beach, Tereza likens the naked families to the pictures of Czechs among
Russian tanks, both symbolic of the shame and vulnerability that go with the
loss of private and national identity, a shame very similar in nature to that
experienced by Sufiya Zenobia in Rushdie’s eponymous novel, which leads to
the outburst of cathartic violence at the end.
Kundera’s 1991 novel, Immortality, extends the author’s ironic gaze to
the principal signifiers of our contemporaneity: “television, rock, public-
ity, mass culture and its melodramas,” that, together, shape a “world of
singers, cars, fashions, fancy food stores, and elegant industrialists turning
into TV stars.”11 The image and the ‘soundbite’ are shown to be depthless
surfaces whose presence determines the contours and rhythms of contem-
porary metropolitan life, sealing the triumph of representation over the
thing represented. In this sense, Immortality is principally a novel about
representation, about how public images shape individuals to the extent
that they seek to model their very selves in accordance with these. Visual
stereotypes are shown to have become so much a part of the texture of
everyday public life that they now control the space of the private as well:
fashion styles, gestures, stardom, they all erase the essence of individual
uniqueness, by unconsciously prescribing certain ‘models’ to follow and
typecasting them as the unacknowledged pacesetters of lifestyle. The
‘authentic’ self is replaced by a desire to become part of this public world of
images, a tendency that Rushdie’s proliferating Vina Apsara look-alikes in
GBF highlight conclusively.
On all levels, from the most intimately private to the most public and
political, the novel projects the picture of a post-industrial western world
devoted to depthless frivolity and surface seduction of image over substance.
In a hyper-real contemporary culture, the referent no longer matters, and
a Baudrillardian procession of simulacra have replaced traditional ideolo-
gies. Kundera calls this new phenomenon ‘imagology,’ and devotes much of
the book’s philosophical substance to debating its mechanisms:
Imagology! [ . . . ] something that goes by so many names: advertising

agencies; political campaign managers; designers who devise the shape
of everything from cars to gym equipment; fashion stylists; barbers;
show-business stars dictating the norms of physical beauty that all
branches of imagology obey [ . . . ]. In the last few decades imagology
has gained a historic victory over ideology.12

Advertising and propaganda are shown to be the principal elements of
the imagological arsenal that has turned ideology into imagology in the
East as much as in the West. The reduction of ideas to isolated slogans and
suggestive images, Kundera tells us, is the work of public opinion man-
agers: agit-prop activists, journalists, fashion designers, ad agencies, and
political campaign managers. These imagologues both project and control
truth by opinion polls and ‘soundbites’ which have replaced real conversa-
tion and public debate. Appropriately, Kundera exemplifies this phenom-
enon by placing the figure of his Moravian grandmother, whose experience
of reality is immediate (she lives in a village), into sharp contrast with the
modern urban citizen of the developed West (who works in an office in
front of a computer, than jumps in the car to drive to his apartment where
he will spend the evening watching TV). While “nobody could fool [that
Moravian woman] by maintaining that Moravian agriculture was thriving
when people at home had nothing to eat,” the Paris everyman is overjoyed
to hear from a TV announcer that his country has been voted in an opinion
poll as the safest in Europe, even while three thefts and two murders have
been committed on his street that very day.13 The modern individual’s sense
of reality thus becomes a function of the public image that forms it.
Kundera further illustrates this transformation of the private into the
public by returning to the trope of photography, and extending its bearings
to include the concept which gives the novel its title. The section entitled
“Immortality”—a clever and often humorous mix of historical fact, gossip,
and fabulation—projects the lives of Goethe and Bettina Brentano in the
argumentative web of the novel in order to examine the nature of fame. The
narrative voice inquires rhetorically:
Has the character of immortality changed in the epoch of cameras?

I can answer that without hesitation: essentially, no; for the photo-
graphic lens had existed long before it was invented; it existed as its
own non-materialized essence. Even when no lens was aimed at them,
people already behaved as if they were being photographed.14
The desire to be photographed, to have one’s picture taken and displayed,

to be in the spotlight of the public eye, are revealed to be as many facets
of the universal human desire for immortality. It is this which animates
fashion stars and media celebrities, writers and politicians, Kundera says,
and its apex has been reached in the contemporary world where media
technologies can provide ‘instant celebrity’ as readily as the food industry
provides instant coffee or instant soup.
This cult of celebrity, which Rushdie’s GBF will explore on a much larger
scale, is the contemporary version of the same desire for immortality that
has moved Goethe’s Bettina. But there is a significant difference: “fame,
now decoupled from the ancient yearning for immortality, relies on the
magic of technological speed to gain instant possession of a virtual space

146 Cristina Sandru
whose extension is proportional to its loss of temporal depth.”15 Immor-
tality now resembles an eternal, huge, well lit photograph; a huge poster
behind which swarm “hundred[s of] journalists with microphones jostl[ing]
each other and an army of university professors [ . . . ] bus[ily] classifying,
analysing, and shovelling everything into articles and books.”16
This hypertrophy of the image not only transforms the realm of the pri-
vate, but affects the texture of political life as well: “history is converted
into spectacle,” “people become customers of reality,” and “every subject
is depreciated into an article of consumption [and] promoted into an item
for aesthetic appreciation.”17 It entails an aestheticization of politics which
Žižek later diagnosed as the most prominent disease of a post-ideological
universe, whose symptomatology includes a general loss of responsibility
on the part of public leaders, and the elevation of image-campaigns into a
political necessity. Television is, naturally, at the forefront of image-forma-
tion, serving to induce a certain type of public response and stirring those
affects that are the least self-reflexive and critical. Truth thus becomes a
‘regime of truth’ in the Foucauldian sense, i.e., the manifestation of the
most widely held belief in a particular historical-cultural moment, and the
image conforms to what the public desires, while shaping that very desire
insidiously. When imagology—under the form of consumer desires and
‘public truth’—has been thoroughly internalized by its subjects, the last
remains of individuality will have vanished and Guy Debord’s ‘society of
the spectacle’ will have emerged instead.
“We live in a culture that routinely eroticizes and glamorizes its con-
sumer technology [ . . . ] We also live in the Age of Fame, in which the
intensity of our gaze upon celebrity turns the famous into commodities,
[ . . . ] a transformation that has often proved powerful enough to destroy
them.”18 The quote above, taken from Rushdie’s 2003 collection of essays
Step Across this Line (2002), is illustrative of this transformation of ide-
ology into imagology, most problematically illustrated in GBF and Fury.
While they provide an embodiment of the sometimes liberating physical
and imaginative fluidity of the postmodern world, they chiefly highlight the
writer’s preoccupation with the cultural sites and experiences of globaliza-
tion and its characteristic economy of symbolic constructs and commodity
consumption. In GBF and Fury Rushdie orchestrates a complex interplay
of fashionable cultural/critical discourses, exposing their cliché-istic nature
but, crucially, also unveiling those interstices which house the potential for
a renewed imagination. Rock music, for instance, becomes in GBF the met-
aphoric homeland of the migrant sensibility, its hypnotic power recalling
Kundera’s warning about the manipulative character of popular cultural
forms, but also revealing its capacity to forge spiritual connections and
give voice to the transformative impulses of the imagination. Together with
cinema, photography, television, and computer technology, rock ’n’ roll is
inextricably bound in the fabric of the modern imaginary, and instrumental
in the creation of an ambiguous cultural landscape, where plural forms of

identification co-exist with unprecedented levels of social homogenization.
Rushdie’s fiction is itself part of this landscape, embodying with consum-
mate skill the divisive experience of living a present haunted by the memory
of the past, in an exuberant prose that harbors underneath its passionate
surface pervasive elements of critique and satire.
As Kundera’s ULB anticipated obliquely the writer’s later preoccupation
with the makings of the ‘imagological age,’ so is the critique of contempo-
rary pop culture which forms the ideatic substance of GBF and Fury already
present in Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses (1983). In both nov-
els, communication networks under the form of advertising, cinema, and
television play a crucial role in “the technological modernisation and com-
mercialisation of ancient religion and myth”19 and contribute to the creation
of that “remote-control culture”20 of show and spectacle so characteristic of
the post-industrial West. The culture of compulsive channel-hopping, inter-
nalized by the younger generations in order to skip “life’s boring, trouble-
some, unlikable bits, going fast-forward from one action-packed climax to
the next”21 brings into being a “composite video monster,”
a Procustean bed for the twentieth century [which] chopp[s] down the
heavyweight and stretche[s] out the slight until all the set’s emissions,
commercials, murders, game-shows, the thousand and of varying joys
and terrors of the real and the imagined, acquire an equal weight 22
GBF houses precisely one such monster, brought to life by the collage-
like plastering of mythical references upon the media-constructed fads of
the contemporary. The novel skillfully sets in motion a cluster of rhetorical
devices hovering on the bathos of newly-fangled popular modes—most evi-
dent in the ‘odes’ to music and love, for instance—only to deflate them with
a pretentious mimicry of the meta-discourses of fashionable cultural theory.
By parodying these latter discourses, however, Rushdie casts his ironical
net on a much larger sphere of cultural practices, exposing the underlying
similarity between the low-mimetic forms, and the proliferating meta-com-
mentaries thriving on their raw material. On the diegetic level, GBF thus
marks a turning point in Rushdie’s writing, reversing the priority of the
narrative, and installing the immediacy of a critical cultural consciousness.
Thus, the narrative voice comments on the Sauronic incident that opens the
novel and sets the scene of the events’ retroactive unfolding:
But by then, Vina was already passing into myth, becoming a vessel
into which any moron could pour his stupidities, or let’s say a mirror
of the culture, and we can understand the nature of this culture if we
say that it found its truest mirror in a corpse.23
This pseudo-theoretical assumption will be developed in the course

of the novel into a set of disenchanted meditations on the condition of

148 Cristina Sandru
contemporaneity. ‘High culture’—whose inadequation to the dynamics
and speed of contemporary life has rendered it sterile and obsolete—has
been supplanted by an indiscriminate and ‘moronic’ low culture, a process
generically fueled by the extinction of critical distance in a world dominated
by large-scale entertainment and political shows. The direct consequence
of this irreversible process is the emergence of a culture of excess, waste,
and eclecticism, the end product of America’s globalizing might, which, as
Kundera’s Parisian streets aptly illustrate, stamps its colonizing presence
far more insidiously than any direct imposition would. When he describes
his book of photographs entitled The Trojan Horse, Umeed Merchant com-
ments on the consequences of the U.S. wars in Southeast Asia:
the war in Indochina hadn’t ended at the time of the ignominious U.S.
withdrawal. They’d left a wooden horse standing at the gates, and
when the Indochinese accepted the gift, the real warriors of America—
the big corporations, the sports culture of basketball and baseball, and
of course rock ’n’ roll—came swarming out of its belly and overran
the place. Now, in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, too, America stood
revealed as the real victor [ . . . ] Almost every young Indochinese per-
son wants to eat, dress, bop and profit in the good old American way.
MTV, Nike, McWorld. Where soldiers had failed, U.S. values [ . . . ]
had triumphed. 24
His photographs document the endlessly reproductive signifiers of contem-

porary desire and status, foregrounding the increasing tension between the
fi nite materiality of ‘objects’25 and their de-realized ‘immortality’ forged in
the virtual spaces of public display and mediatization.
In GBF, too, as in Kundera’s ULB, photography is therefore emblematic
for the dominance of the sign-image over the thing represented. As Tereza’s
camera-work in the Prague uprisings of 1968 demonstrates, the ethical
commitment of the photograph is a function of its unconditional showing,
its faithful, unquestioning, and uncompromising allegiance to speed and
immediacy. At the same time, however, the resulting image allows for very
little reflexive space; pressed tight against what actually happens, the pho-
tograph is also subtly complicit with it, reflection and interrogation coming
belatedly, after the fact. This self-assertive actuality pre-emptive of critical
distance carries within the potentia of its perversion, but also the ‘hidden
exposures’ that the surface image conceals, which, if appropriately manipu-
lated, can throw illuminating light on the object represented.
From early on in his career, Umeed Merchant (a.k.a Rai)—the novel’s
principal narrative-commentatorial voice—has been interested in double-
exposures and, as the novel progresses, he abandons journalistic realism
in favor of imaginative photography, superposing intimations of the world
beyond on the bland surface of actuality. By working with mirrors, reflec-
tions, and shadows, he summons to life ‘other’ worlds and creates illusory

identities, whose ontological reality is, at best, unstable. The image of the
phantom woman which appears in all of Umeed’s photos is also that which
Ormus Cama perceives in his fractured vision of a mythic underworld that
wrestles with the real for the control of his mind and soul. After Ormus’s
accident, the struggle assumes the status of an ontological rift. The vision
that besets Ormus from the very beginning of his life—his head filled by
the strange sight and voice of his dead twin brother Gayomart—grows into
a full-fledged parallel universe that he inhabits every time he chooses not to
wear the patch on his eye. When he does so, he “step[s] out of the frame”26
of the real to incarnate the fourth function of ‘outsidedness’ posited by Sir
Darius Cama, and, simultaneously, steps into his creator’s poietic extra-
textual universe to offer clues on the ‘intended authorial meanings’, thus
heightening the ontological instability of the text. He expostulates on the
existence of the alternative worlds that his uncovered vision projects, which
he sees as
variations, moving like shadows behind the stories we know. [And] it

could just be that I found a way of stepping outside the picture. [ . . . ]
You have to break the rules, deny the frame story, smash the frame.
[ . . . ] It could be I found the outsidedness of what we’re inside. [ . . . ]
The route through the looking glass. The technique for jumping the
points, from one track to the other. Universes like parallel bars, or
tv channels. Maybe there are people who can swing from bar to bar,
people can [ . . . ] channel-hop. Zappers [ . . . ] Exercising a kind of
remote control. 27
The motif of the remote control that Rushdie qua narrative voice had
previously associated with contemporary culture returns in Ormus’s specu-
lations to position the range of actuality within the self-substantial frame
of cultural constructs. The technological artifice builds a simulacrum
of transcendence and the cultural screen replaces, or, to be more exact,
becomes experience. The ironic aside that the narrative voice imparts to
the presumed reader completes the text’s subversion of itself: “Remote
controls for tv sets were new then. They were just beginning to be used
as similes and metaphors.”28 Such deliberate meta-critical comments, and
the self-conscious parody of his own rhetorical mechanisms, are crucial
aspects of Rushdie’s critique of contemporary cultural forms, creating a
distancing-effect similar to Ormus’s ‘stepping out of the frame.’ So is his
constant toying with dual ontological surfaces, of which one is saturated
with the haunting presence of a past space-time that constantly undermines
the actuality of the present. The semiotic instability created by novel’s mul-
tilayered spaces and significations showcases the mystifying phenomenon
whereby the image-projection acquires the status of lived reality.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the cult of celebrity, which goes
hand in hand with one’s status as a public figure. Ormus and Vina’s

150 Cristina Sandru
imperceptible metamorphosis from modern ‘gods of entertainment,’ pas-
sionate lovers, and living rock legends into empty shells of imagology
trapped within the constructed nature of fame and glory, is illustrative of
this slow, but powerful erosion of the real. The public spectacle that is the
outward sign of celebrity becomes an autonomous, self-contained ontologi-
cal zone, in which everything that is not circumscribable to its discursive
order ceases to signify:
In a way they [Ormus and Vina, and their ‘legendary’ band, VTO]
had ceased to be real. To Auxerre and Sangria, they had become little
more than signs of the time, lacking true autonomy, to be decoded
according to everyone’s own inclination and need. [ . . . ] Only the
show was real. 29
The status of celebrity transforms them into iconic figures, ‘void’ signs to be
filled with publicly-constructed meanings. Exacerbated metaphoric pres-
ences, they become the repository of an immense pressure of obsessions,
illusions, and needs, the outlets of which produce a hysteria of identification
and empathy—a kind of Princess Diana phenomenon avant-la-lettre—when
Vina Apsara dies in an earthquake. The hyperbolic dimension takes hold of
the novel’s fi nal chapters as the icon spirals into multiple partial reflections
of the departed celebrity, in a craze of impersonation that produces a cul-
tural whirlwind of simulacra. Vina look-alikes pop up in all dimensions—
the hippie Vina, the heavy metal Vina, the rap Vina, the transsexual Vina,
even Star Trek Vinas.30 She is gradually emptied of substance and reality,
expelled into the hyper-real space of technological simulation—the huge
300 television studio controlled by a “space-odyssey command complex”
that “looks like a minimalist version of Mission Control, Houston”31—that
Ormus, unable to cope with Vina’s very real death, frantically ransacks in
search of his departed love.
The elevation of the talented individual to the status of symbol and cul-
tural repository has as a consequence the collapse of the self into its manner
of presentation. After her death, ‘Vina Divina’ is made into an advertising
object catering to the infi nitely sophisticated needs of contemporary con-
sumerist culture—she fi lls the pages of glossy magazines and becomes the
main protagonist of “video games and CD-ROMs and instant biographies
and bootleg tapes.”32 Television debates are set up to discuss her ‘life and
work,’ public rituals that Rushdie parodies in a series of brilliantly staged
mock-shows engaging all manner of celebrities who compete in significant
pronouncements with the parallel mythologizing popular trend. In these
shows, the reader meets a dignified literary critic who devises sophisticated
theories “about great celebrity being a Promethean theft of fi re”33 only to be
ridiculed by the younger ‘wolves’ in the field, the fashionably postmodern
academics Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby, having suddenly emerged out
of Fitzgerald’s novel. Amid all the noise and hype, the voice of the fictional

critical theorist comes into play in the guise of Rémy Auxerre (a thinly dis-
guised Baudrillard) who pronounces the ‘immediatisation of history,’ i.e.,
the replacement of experience and affect by televised simulation, a process
whereby genuinely aggrieved people perform their desires and pain, “rush-
ing to be part of a phenomenon they have seen on tv.”34 The postmodern
disgrace culminates in the harnessing of human emotion to the dictates of
capital, which caters for the needs (as much created, as fed) of its consum-
ers in the Vina look-alike Quakette dolls, the not-yet-fully-hyper-realized
predecessors of the more sophisticated ‘Puppet Kings’ in Fury.
What Rushdie mocks is the “turning [of] the condition of globalisa-
tion into a fetish.”35 Thus, while the narrative insists on the immediacy of
these leveling cultural referents, the projection of alternative worlds, bat-
tling visions, and competing discursive systems (both upheld and ironically
subverted) foregrounds the numerous disjunctions in the texture of lived
reality, most prominently that between private experience and public dis-
play. This dichotomy is taken to its logical extreme in the articulation of
self-canceling discourses in which both assertions and negations on the
validity of a certain state of facts are simultaneously true. The list of con-
tradictory orders of things is also, in the subtext, a scathing critique of the
media industry’s endless fabrication of realities to suit various ideological
interests, a mass-scale adjusting of history that makes the similar doctor-
ing in Orwell’s 1984 appear an innocent child-game. In the contemporary
world, ‘style is substance,’ ‘art is a hoax’ and any number of incommensu-
rate discursive regimes can co-exist in a politically correct universe gone
fashionably relativistic:
That extremist is a moderate! That universal right is culturally spe-

cific! This circumcised woman is culturally barbaric! [ . . . ] The novel
is dead! [ . . . ] God is dead! East is West! Up is down! Yes is No! In is
Out! Lies are Truth! Hate is Love! Two and two makes five! And every-
thing is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.36
By this time, the discourse has turned positively dystopian, mitigated to a

certain extent by Ormus and Vina’s affective and spiritual bond, which—in
the teeth of misunderstanding, invasive publicity, and death—obstinately
refuses to break.
Rushdie’s Fury is in many ways a much less accomplished novel than
either its predecessors or the ones to follow. Yet its strangely ‘prophetic’
character, signaling the portents of the imminent September 11 catastro-
phe, has earned the novel the reputation of both requiem and augury; and
indeed, in more ways than one, Fury is the swan-song of a civilization
whose imagological propensities have cut it so loose from the texture of
the ‘real’ that only a sign of unspeakable violence in its midst could shake
it from its self-sufficient complacency. At the same time, it is also ‘the
chronicle of a time foretold’ in, among others, the uncanny resemblance

152 Cristina Sandru
of the virtual puppet-wars in Fury’s fictional universe with the contem-
porary digitalized form of warfare, whose immediate counterpoint and
mirror image is global terrorism. 37
In many respects, Fury grows organically out of GBF: in it, displace-
ment has reached its fi nal form, there is no other mutation in view, and
the realm of excess is, as expected, once more America. New York at the
dawn of the third millennium is figured as a city of unprecedented plenty,
an intricate ‘system of objects’ whose vocabulary is that of computer tech-
nology, advertising, cell phones, and recherché produce. It is a city of
noise (DeLillean ‘white noise’ included), a multidimensional universe con-
structed by ceaseless “plundering[s] and jumbling[s] of the storehouse of
yesterday’s empires,”38 a city whose “magic, hybrid heart”39 conceals its
deep-seated fear and slow-burning rage. Written a decade after Kundera’s
Parisian-set Immortality, the New York of Fury is a dream of America
gone hideously amiss, a nightmare version of the land of promise that
feeds its globalizing might with anti-depressive medication. The fractured
universe of Jamesonian floating affects which is the fictional space of Kun-
dera’s earlier novel is populated in Fury by solipsistic individuals doping
themselves on Prozac and Halcion, the ‘Numsculs’ and ‘Lobotomisers’ of
real pain and real feeling.
Indeed, the central intellectual purchase of the novel can be said to lie in
its relentless interrogation of the nature and metamorphoses of the contem-
porary ‘real.’ The dominant rhetoric of culture is inscribed, once again, in
the unchallenged immediacy of the present, which is accepted as the ulti-
mate ground of reference. The collapse of critical consciousness—the criti-
cal distance that one is supposedly able to interpose between oneself and
the world—is carried in Fury to its extreme consequences. The fashionable
anti-American rhetoric is part of it, and so are quasi-formulaic Baudrillard-
ian syntagms such as: “Nobody remembered the original. Everythings’s a
copy, an echo of the past [ . . . ]”40 Rushdie’s very prose appears to burst
at the seams in such burdensome combinations as “riverane abundance”
or “Gangetic, Mississippian inexorability”41 as the ubiquitous surfeit of
signs threatens to spiral out of hand and take full possession of the text.
The heavy load of pre-digested meta-critical commentary often reads like
a fictional enactment of the “demise of culture” that Walter Benjamin was
signaling in One Way Street (1997), the result of which is the displace-
ment of critical consciousness by the immediacy of infotainment. ‘Real’
immediacy, however, is shown to remain one step behind—condemned to
enact and repeat the simulated world of the TV or computer screen. Rush-
die’s prose compulsively mimics this instantaneity of the real, invoking an
entire collection of culture industry signifiers: the hit movies Gladiator and
The Cell, the Elian Gonzales soteriological hysteria, the property boom,
and the craze of commercial ads. The America he is ranting against, with
its “self-satisfied rhetoric” and talk in “super-strings of moronic cliché,”42
Rushdie thoroughly apes in the quality of his discourse.

Thus the novel chronicles—in step with the latest sociological and cul-
tural theories—a substantial change in the texture and rhythms of contem-
porary life. From a university don to a doll-maker: this unlikely conversion
in Malik Solanka’s career clearly stands for a fundamental change in cul-
tural patterns. ‘Dolls’ are not only a fictional stand-in for Baudrillard’s
procession of simulacra, but also the new molders and controllers of his-
torical reality. If in GBF the ‘spectacle’ was still populated by flesh and
blood human beings, in Fury it is a doll called Little Brain that takes the
world of TV shows by storm. The ironic twist is that Solanka’s initially
smart, sharp-tongued creation gradually becomes, under the pressure of
media-frenzy, a popular icon with the “intellect of a slightly over-average
chimpanzee.”43 The Vina dolls in GBF, which sing and are then swallowed
up by a vibrating stand that cracks open like an earthquake, are still ‘mod-
eled’ on the real circumstances of Vina’s death. In Fury, dolls model reality
and bring it into being, often with gruesome effects, the appalling murder
of the three young women who had wanted to “cross the frontier and look
like toys”44 being an illustrative case in point. As in Kundera, this frontier
is fragile and hard to maintain—an eye-patch that can be easily removed,
a game that spirals out of its carefully delineated territory, or a quiet pro-
fessor who becomes an overnight celebrity; in all cases the trespassing has
painful and violent consequences.45
An extreme instance of this trespassing of boundaries is enacted when
the internecine conflict on the fictional island Swiftianly named Lilliput-
Blefuscu (modeled on the historical Fiji) literally copies the internet ver-
sion of Malik Solanka’s doll-world. Malik writes a second story, about a
race of puppet-kings created by a Magus figure named Akasz Kronos, on
the planet Galileo-1. The simulacra ironically backfi re on the ‘real’ as the
living dolls from the imaginary planet Galileo-1 intervene in the public
affairs of actually existing Earth: the revolutionaries of Lilliput-Blefuscu
see their struggles hyperbolically mirrored in the sci-fi internet story of
the new Solanka doll series, take on the name of the characters, put on the
masks and the uniforms of the puppet kings, and invade the scene of ‘real’
historical confrontation. Solanka’s fictional characters take to the streets,
make celebrity public appearances, sing the national anthem at ball games,
publish cookbooks, and guest-host the Letterman show; as a consequence,
they become the trendiest products of America’s voracious culture industry,
its hyper-real theme park.
Rushdie’s ‘apocalyptic’ tone has been interpreted by many as a pro-
phetic judgment on America’s core of hollowness, and a prefiguration of
the September 11 attacks. Disturbing as Rushdie’s American picture cer-
tainly is, it would be nonetheless much too convenient to adopt the latest
fashionable ethical stand and profess one’s worthy contempt of its narrow
ignorance and superficiality. For the America of Fury is not an altogether
destructive place. After all, it is only by coming into this space of ‘the death
of all limitations’ that Malik Solanka can fi nd and confront the cause of

154 Cristina Sandru
his existential fury. It is an ‘unselfi ng of the self’ that Solanka looks for
when he succumbs to the American Dream of endless renewal and recre-
ation, an evasion from the haunting memory of a past that his residence
and life in Cambridge could not quite suppress. The multiplicities of New
York’s universe provide “the raw material he needed to transmute through
the alchemy of his reborn art.”46 He takes refuge in that most instanta-
neous and ‘actual’ of contemporary media: the world wide web, the cre-
ative potential of which allows for a measure of imaginative freedom never
before experienced. This multispaced universe accommodates any number
of incommensurate ontological orders: all forking paths can be taken and
all alternative storylines can be actualized simultaneously. The triumph of
spatiality over the tyranny of time fi nds its metaphoric embodiment in the
mighty, inexhaustible hyperlink, which, like the music of GBF, allows for
the unfettered expression of difference.
Rushdie’s two millennial novels mirror ‘the signs of the time’ in more
ways than one. Meta-theoretical commentaries often disperse the story as
such, and, as narrative gives way to the symbolic dominance of visual tech-
nologies, everything is made excessively explicit: every meaning is unveiled,
every link speculated and abused. Fuelled by the artificial pathos of senti-
mentality, this ‘plastered’ layer attempts to fi ll all textual gaps, leaving little
space for an imaginative completion of meaning—a major fault of these
two Rushdie novels, critics concur. My contention is, instead, that insofar
as style is vision, this visually excessive writing is thoroughly consistent with
Rushdie’s intentions. If these are novels of excess, chronicling the impact of
visual technologies of the real on the texture of lived existence, then they
should be written from within the expressive horizon of the culture that
has produced these technologies. As such, they will abuse mythology and
high culture, they will sound like cheap theory or Bollywoodian filmi gana,
they will mix registers and cultural references, they will trespass aesthetic
boundaries. And, while they clearly show the potentially disturbing con-
sequences of the dominance of the visual sign over systematic ideological
constructions, they also question the more pessimistic Kunderian view that
a screen of popular images and stereotypes frustrates our access to history
and the real. Rushdie’s novels show, rather, that the shape of the present is
the result of interwoven imaginary orders and competing representations
of identity and memory. His protagonists are not fi nally lost in the collid-
ing worlds that battle for the control of their minds and souls. Caught in
the maelstrom of the immediate, they resurrect what might appear obsolete
ideas of common humanity and try to graft them onto the ever-accelerating
present in order to recuperate the shards of meaning that can build an
inhabitable inner space. What Rushdie’s novels endeavor, each in its dif-
ferent way, is to write into being this space, “to reinscribe our human,
historic commonality; to touch the future on its hither side.” In that sense,
“the intervening space ‘beyond’ becomes a space of intervention in the here
and now,”47 inhabited by the agency of a multivalent imagination: musical,

pictural, architectural, and narrative. The sense of awe at the indestructible
beauty of the Taj Mahal, which no tourist publicity has managed to spoil,
prompts Rushdie’s reflection in Step Across This Line, the essayistic com-
panion of his millennial fiction:
And this, fi nally, is why the Taj Mahal must be seen: to remind us that
the world is real, that the sound is truer than the echo, the original
more forceful than its image in a mirror. The beauty of beautiful things
is still able, in these image-saturated times, to transcend imitations.48
NOTES
1. “Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the
more concrete and plausible it seems—but as you approach the present, it
inevitably seems more and more incredible. Suppose yourself in a large cin-
ema, sitting at fi rst in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by row,
until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars’
faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions;
the illusion dissolves—or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is
reality [ . . . ]” (Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Vintage,
1995), 109).
4. Edward Barnaby, “Airbrushed History: Photography, Realism, and Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of
Literature 38.1 (2005): 10.
5. Neil ten Kortenaar, “Postcolonial Ekphrasis: Salman Rushdie Gives the Fin-
ger Back to the Empire,” Contemporary Literature 38.2 (1997): 232.
6. Salman Rushdie, Shame (London: Picador, 1983), 87.
7. Rushdie, Shame, 116.
8. For an excellent (and much more extensive) discussion of this aspect, see
Barnaby, “Airbrushed History.”
9. Brenda Cooper, Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a
Third Eye, (London: Routledge, 2004), 108.
10. A similar phenomenon has occurred, as Gupta shows, with photographs
taken during the British occupation of India which were later appropriated
by the Indian nationalist government: “For example, British photographs of
the aftermath of the Sepoy Rebellion in 1858, which were originally taken
to document the savagery of uncivilized India, were eventually incorporated
into nationalist history textbooks and recaptioned to vilify the British occu-
piers” (Narayani Gupta, “Pictorializing the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857,” in Traces of
India: Photography, Architecture and the Politics of Representation, 1850–
1900, ed. Maria Antonella Pelizzari (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2003), 238).
11. Milan Kundera, Immortality (Faber & Faber: London, 1991), 157.
12. Kundera, Immortality, 127.
15. Maria Nemcová Banerjee, Terminal Paradox: The Novels of Milan Kun-
dera, (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), 271.

156 Cristina Sandru
17. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Dell, 1978), 110.
18. Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line (London: Vintage, 2003), 110.
19. M. D. Fletcher, ed., Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman
Rushdie (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 194.
20. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Vintage, 1998), 405.
23. Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (London: Vintage, 1999),
6.
24. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 441.
25. This includes the likes of Vina Apsara or Princess Diana, pop and fi lm stars,
fashion celebrities, or political figures, whose corporeal death projects them
into ‘instant immortality.’
29. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 558–559.
35. Jaina Sanga, Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors: Migration, Transla-
tion, Hybridity, Blasphemy and Globalisation (Westport, CT: Greenwood,
2001), 132.
37. See Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on Septem-
ber 11 and Related Essays, (London: Verso, 2002).
38. Salman Rushdie, Fury (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001), 43.
39. Rushdie, Fury, 86.
45. Dubdub, Solanka’s closest Cambridge friend, and a thinker of endearing
paradox, goes on to teach at Princeton, becomes a popular success, submits
to celebrity and ends up killing himself.
47. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 7.
48. Rushdie, Step Across, 187.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Banerjee, Maria Nemcová. Terminal Paradox: The Novels of Milan Kundera.

London: Faber & Faber, 1991.
Barnaby, Edward. “Airbrushed History: Photography, Realism, and Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Lit-
erature 38.1 (2005): 1–16.
Benjamin, Walter. One Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott
and Kingsley Shorter. London: Verso, 1997.
Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Cooper, Brenda. Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third
Eye. London: Routledge, 2004.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New
York: Zone, 1967; Reprinted 1995.
Fletcher, M. D., ed. Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rush-
die. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994.
Grewal, Inderpal. “Salman Rushdie: Marginality, Women and Shame.” In Read-
ing Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, edited by M. D.
Fletcher. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994.
Gupta, Narayani. “Pictorializing the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857.” In Traces of India: Photog-
raphy, Architecture and the Politics of Representation, 1850–1900, edited by
Maria Antonella Pelizzari, 216–239. New Haven: Yale Unversity Press, 2003.
Back to the Empire.” Contemporary Literature 38, no. 2 (Summer 1997):
232–259.
Kunder, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Trans. Michael Henry Heim.
London: Faber & Faber, 1985.
. Immortality. Trans. Peter Kussi. Faber & Faber: London, 1991.
Orwell, George. 1984. London: Penguin, 1989.
Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Eds. Edith Hamilton and H. Cairns.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1963. Pp. 520-21. 274D-276B.
. Phaedrus. In The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Eds. Edith Hamilton and
H. Cairns. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1963. Pp. 520-21. 274D-276B.
Rushdie, Salman. Shame. London: Picador, 1983.
. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. Harmonds-
worth: Granta Books& Penguin, 1992.
. The Satanic Verses. London: Vintage, 1998.
. The Ground Beneath Her Feet. London: Vintage, 1999.
. Fury. London: Jonathan Cape, 2001.
. Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992–2002. London: Vin-
tage, 2003.
Sanga, Jaina. Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors: Migration, Translation,
Hybridity, Blasphemy and Globalisation. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Dell, 1978.
Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and
Related Essays. London: Verso, 2002.

10 Bombay/‘Wombay’
Refracting the Postcolonial Cityscape
in The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Ana Cristina Mendes
Her name was India. She did not like this name. [ . . . ]
‘India’ still felt wrong to her, it felt exoticist, colonial, suggest-
ing the appropriation of a reality that was not hers to own, and she
insisted to herself that it didn’t fit her anyway, she didn’t feel like an
India, even if her colour was rich and high and her long hair lustrous
and black. She didn’t want to be vast or subcontinental or excessive
or vulgar or explosive crowded or ancient or noisy or mystical or in
any way Third World.
(Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown, 5–6)
In the essay “On Being Photographed” (1995)1 Rushdie muses over the por-
traits he has sat for throughout his career and describes his experience with
the celebrity photographer Richard Avedon: “Outside a photographic stu-
dio in south London, the famous Avedon backdrop of bright white paper
awaits, looking oddly like an absence: a blank space in the world.”2 “In
Avedon’s portrait gallery,” the writer continues, “his subjects are asked to
occupy, and defi ne, a void.”3 The American photographer’s portraits are
characterized by their atemporality and minimalism—the subject Rushdie
is seen looking straight at the camera, placed in front of a plain white décor
stripped of ornaments. Even though in appearance the portraitee seizes the
whole picture frame in Avedon’s works, Rushdie draws our attention to the
fact that all the portraits he has been the subject of necessarily construct
their own limited versions of ‘the writer’ as their perceptual frameworks
are ideologically informed:
I remember [the photographer] Lord Snowdon rearranging all the fur-

niture in my house, gathering bits of ‘Indianness’ around me: a picture,
a hookah. The resulting picture is one I have never cared for: the writer
as exotic. Sometimes photographers come to you with a picture already
in their heads, and then you’re done for.4
As Rushdie ponders, sensory perception always occurs within a frame. In

the end, if one presumes the predatory nature of photography, both Avedon’s

Bombay/‘Wombay’ 159
and Lord Snowdon’s visual renderings of the author leave something out of
the equation through operations of framing and focus:
There is something predatory about all photography. The portrait is the

portraitist’s food. [ . . . ] If you believe the language—and the language
itself never lies, though liars often have the sweetest tongues—then the
camera is a weapon: a photograph is a shot, and a session is a shoot,
and a portrait may therefore be the trophy the hunter brings home from
his shikar. A stuffed head for his wall.5
“I’ve always been interested in photography,” Rushdie declared in an inter-

view around the time of the publication of The Ground Beneath Her Feet
(1999). In his own words, the author was involved in this novel in “writ[ing]
about the business of representation, the business of image-making, about
what it is to take a picture of the world, what it is to [ . . . ] walk up to the
world and take its photograph.”6 Hence, the understanding that photo-
graphs always necessarily convey a mediated representation to the observer
is central to the depiction of Bombay7 in The Ground Beneath Her Feet,
especially since the city is portrayed via a spectator-photographer narrator.
Still, Rushdie clarifies in an interview:
I didn’t want Rai to be just a recording eye, because he doesn’t absent

himself and the whole idea of an eye on the camera is that you erase
yourself, and this guy constantly tries to push himself into the story
and wreck it even. . . . Having him as a photographer, allows me to
do a number of things, to talk about the nature of representation, and
how it can be artificial even when it is seemingly not. . . . It allowed me
also to talk about the public life of the period. I’ve spent my life look-
ing at photographs, I am very interested in it, I felt I had something to
say about it.8
This essay focuses on the ways images of Bombay are in the writer’s case
bound to affective practices. Besides addressing the issue of photography
as representation and affective practice, a correlated purpose of the chap-
ter at hand is to bring together two apparently unconnected texts, penned
more than half a century apart by two seemingly unrelated authors: Ben-
jamin’s essay on the project of European modernity epitomized by the city
of Paris under the Second Empire—“Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth
Century” (1935)—and Rushdie’s novel, set during its fi rst half in the Indian
metropolis of Bombay depicted as an example of a former European colony
in belated quest of a modernity disavowed by colonialism. This image of
Bombay, today one of the vast megalopolises that are contributing to recon-
ceptualize the idea of the city, is the rationale for the present brief incursion
into the meanings of the city in modernity. Even if an European city might
appear an atypical starting point for addressing the representation of an

Asian postcolonial city,9 the essay “Paris, the Capital” can productively act
as a counterpoint to Rushdie’s text chiefly because Benjamin’s Paris, the
urban center of European modernity, generates in itself a discourse that
might be transposed to postcolonial urban contexts.10
It is thus feasible to draw intertextual relations between both the 1935
essay and the 1999 novel. At this juncture, juxtaposing these texts results
in the cross-fertilization of their ideas and spaces, in true Benjaminian fash-
ion. For the most part, the arguments to follow are based on the 1935
exposé “Paris, the Capital,” written in German and translated into Eng-
lish by Howard Eiland. This text remained unpublished during Benjamin’s
lifetime and was posthumously incorporated into The Arcades Project,
an immense archive of critical writings on bourgeois culture, specifically
focusing on the urban life of the French capital in the nineteenth century,
which the German author accumulated throughout his career. The essay
was penned as an exposé or summary of The Arcades Project, “hence
its highly concentrated, almost stenographic style.”11 In the 1939 version
(“Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century”), rewritten in French, Benja-
min drops the defi nite article in the title and includes an introduction and a
conclusion, apart from further changes that transformed the exposé into a
less fragmentary text. The motivation for establishing intertextual relations
between Rushdie’s novel and Benjamin’s 1935 (rather than 1939) text lies in
the fact that the latter eschews the direct references to photography, one of
the thematic concerns here. Likewise, the appropriateness of The Ground
Beneath Her Feet for a cross-pollination with “Paris, the Capital” derives
not from the former’s comprehensive depiction of Bombay—indeed, the
city features much more prominently in novels such as Midnight’s Children
(1981) or The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995). Rather, the novel was selected for
this comparative study because it filters the city through the voyeuristic
gaze—or rather the photographic lenses—of a spectator-photographer nar-
rator who, in addition, might be seen as acting as a revised postcolonial ver-
sion of Benjamin’s Parisian flâneur.12 Moreover, supplementary intertextual
connections might be put forward between this particular text and visual
representations of both the Indian metropolis—now an established mega-
lopolis—and the Paris of the Second Empire that Benjamin describes.
Necessarily, “Paris, the Capital” did not predict the phenomenon of
postcolonial megalopolises intent upon a postcolonial autonomy and a
departure from a modernity that was not their own. With this assump-
tion in mind, two main aims structure the opening of this essay: fi rstly,
to demonstrate the relevance of Benjamin’s theorization in the analysis
of contrasts and commonalities between geographically disparate urban
experiences; and secondly, to reread Benjamin’s essay and Rushdie’s novel
on the basis of their cross-fertilization, in other words, to assess the extent
to which reading these texts against each other, within the context of their
representation of the city, invites a re-interpretation of them both. On the
one hand, Rushdie’s metamorphosis of Bombay from a colonial city into

a postcolonial urban center characterized by a sort of modernity within
postcoloniality permits an updating of the senses that Benjamin’s essay
allots to modernity. On the other hand, Benjaminian lenses allow for a
fresh look at Bombay as an urban site of deferred (western) modernity.13
Thus, in the pursuit of its purposes, this chapter establishes thematic links
between Benjamin’s approach to Paris and Rushdie’s construction in The
Ground Beneath Her Feet of Bombay as ‘Wombay,’14 namely the concepts
of modernity and of the flâneur, operative in both texts.
The idea of ‘modernity’ refers broadly, though not exclusively, to the
industrial makeover of society by technology. It entails a narrative of prog-
ress and the belief in a teleological unfolding, in which there is a break
with a previous ‘irrational tradition’ via the employment of reason to soci-
etal organization. Besides bearing the legacy of the western Enlighten-
ment, according to which truths are attainable through scientific discovery,
modernity is also associated with the expansion and global reach of indus-
trial capitalism. Europe thus assumed a central role in numerous accounts
of modernity processes and capitalist transitions in non-western nations.
In fact, European imperialism had circulated the belief that only the model
of modernity which arose in the West could accomplish truth, reason, and
progress, while alternative, non-western models were downgraded. In this
respect, Homi Bhabha notes that the ideological construction of ‘moder-
nity’ deploys terms such as “progress, homogeneity, cultural organism, the
deep nation, the long past” to “rationalize the authoritarian, ‘normalizing’
tendencies within cultures in the name of the national interest or the ethnic
prerogative.”15 If modernity, when grafted onto colonized territories and
later newly independent postcolonial nations, implied that these should dis-
card their ‘traditional’ (therefore ‘irrational’) systems of organization and
rely—or mimic—the European model in the name of progress, then moder-
nity would lead to homogeneous processes and results worldwide.
Writing against a western-based understanding of modernity, Lisa Rofel
proposes the notion of ‘other modernities,’ a notion that assists in an analy-
sis of the interrelations between two modernities, one located in nineteenth-
century Paris and the other associated with mid-twentieth-century Bombay.
In an examination of such disparate temporal and spatial contexts, the
term ‘modernity’ needs to be problematized; in particular, its universaliz-
ing thrust must be questioned. In this sense, Rofel’s study Other Moderni-
ties (1995), which assesses the evolving conceptualizations of modernity in
China since the 1950s, illuminates Rushdie’s preliminary temporal frame
of reference in The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Bombay, as depicted in the
fi rst half of the novel through Rai’s narrative camera-eye, fits the profile
the cultural anthropologist draws of “places marked by a deferred rela-
tionship to modernity.”16 Looking at modernity from an alternative angle,
she argues that its associated project is constructed diversely in particular
historical periods, political backgrounds, and socio-spatial frameworks.
She problematizes the teleological discourse of modernity by questioning it

as an imagined individual and collective future:17 her defi nition of moder-
nity as “an imaginary and continuously shifting site of global/local claims,
commitments, and knowledge, forged within uneven dialogues about the
place of those who move in and out of categories of otherness”18 reads into
it a sense of diverse and embryonic interpretations of what ‘modern’ is or
is expected to be. Modernity involves contested meanings and is therefore
to be regarded as an imaginary narrative which individuals engender about
themselves in relation to others. The project of modernity entails disjunc-
tures: western modernity is not a universal project that results in the same
‘stories’ of progress everywhere. In this perspective, the experiences of indi-
viduals when confronted with modernity do not always fit universally into
that invented narrative, as is the case with Rushdie’s flâneur—the narrator
Rai—whose encounter with modernity is different from that of the other
characters in the novel. The flâneur, described by Benjamin as someone
strolling leisurely through the nineteenth-century Parisian arcades, refers
conventionally to the individual who would rather, like Rai, observe than
experience directly the urban way of life. Even though the flâneur takes
part physically in the urban-generated text that he scrutinizes, he differ-
entiates himself radically from the crowd that populates the streets of the
city. Underscoring a fleeting autonomy, he refuses to be incorporated into
the surrounding mass.
Early on in his childhood, the flâneur Rai resolved to become a pho-
tographer. His father led him to photography by offering him a camera
on his thirteenth birthday,19 and he elects as his artistic subject Bombay.
Along with the camera, he inherited his father’s passion for that city and for
photography materialized in “his collection of old photographs of the edi-
fices and objets of the vanished city,”20 as well as his “Paillard Bolex, [his]
Rolleiflex and Leica, [his] collection of the works of Dayal and Haseler.”21
He needs a lens to help him decode the meanings of the city. “Photog-
raphy is [Rai’s] way of understanding the world”22 because the world he
visualizes—Bombay—is too multifarious to be apprehended directly. One
of Rai’s western artistic influences is Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, the inventor
of the heliograph, the earliest known permanent form of photography from
nature in 1826. When Niépce died in 1833, Louis Daguerre continued his
work and made the fi rst public announcement concerning the invention of
photography in 1839. As a result, a commonly held version of the history
of the medium—a very inaccurate one according to Rushdie’s narrator and
challenged in 1952 by the photohistorian Helmut Gernsheim 23 —had it that
Daguerre was the sole creator of the early version of photography that came
to be known as the daguerreotype. Rai sets the historical record straight—
“[l]et us now praise unjustly neglected men”—and returns Niépce to his
due place as the inventor of photography against that usurpation in “our
collective memory” by Daguerre, “who sold their invention, their magic
box, the ‘camera,’ to the French government after Niépce’s death.”24 In
Rai’s eyes, the French inventor was “[t]ruly, a father of the New”25 and he

continues his elegiac praise of Niépce by comparing the discovery of the
First Photograph26 to the opening of a Pandora’s box.27
Referenced both in Rushdie’s novel, as one of Rai’s influences, and in
Benjamin’s essay, the French photographer Félix Nadar is renowned for
his photographs of Parisian catacombs and the underground sewer system
captured with the aid of artificial lightening. It is here that Benjamin iden-
tifies “Nadar’s superiority to his colleagues” because with him “for the
fi rst time, the lens was deemed capable of making discoveries.”28 Perhaps
most notably, Nadar’s photographic studio in Paris was legendary for the
portraits of nineteenth-century celebrities such as Daguerre and Charles
Baudelaire, the latter a cornerstone figure in “Paris, the Capital” as the
epitome of the flâneur roaming the Parisian arcades. Baudelaire was one
of Nadar’s most frequent subjects in the mid-1850s, notwithstanding his
resistance to considering photography as an artistic medium. The poet’s
commentary on photography at the opening of Le salon de 1859 (1859) dis-
plays his ambiguous position concerning the medium. Some of Baudelaire’s
concerns about the status of the artist in the age of mechanical reproduc-
tion are presented here, for instance when he writes that “the badly applied
advances of photography, like all purely material progress for that matter,
have greatly contributed to the impoverishment of French artistic genius.”
Thus, despite the modernity of photography, he disparages its ubiquity and
almost overpowering notoriety at the time. He posits the “photographic
industry” as “the refuge of all failed painters with too little talent, or too
lazy to complete their studies.”29 Still, this attack directed at photogra-
phy should be read in the context of the anti-bourgeois aesthete’s deeply
ambivalent appreciation of progress and modernity. Baudelaire critiques
the medium on the basis of the high degree of reality fashioned by a pho-
tographic image:
In the domain of painting and statuary, the present-day credo of the

wordly-wise, especially in France [ . . . ], is this: “I believe in nature,
and I believe only in nature.” [ . . . ] “I believe that art is, and can only
be, the exact reproduction of nature.” [ . . . ] “Thus if an industrial
process could give us a result identical to nature, that would be abso-
lute art.” An avenging God has heard the prayers of this multitude;
Daguerre was his messiah.30
The list of Rai’s artistic influences also includes “Atget’s Paris.”31 The
French photographer Eugène Atget despised conventional turn-of-the-cen-
tury portrait photography, of the sort Nadar did of Baudelaire and others,
and dedicated himself to methodically recording the streets of Paris. Wan-
dering through the city, he inaugurated urban photography by document-
ing the emptiness of the Parisian urban setting and directing the lens of his
massive large-format camera at commercial spaces such as the iron and
glass arcades, giving them an equal standing as an emblem of European

modernity to the Eiffel Tower, completed in 1889. In Magasin, avenue des
Gobelins (1925), a series of notable photographs of store windows taken
at the Gobelins complex, Atget’s city is represented through the reflected
images originating from the windows of commercial spaces. Here, he pur-
portedly fuses images of the front of clothing stores with the corresponding
urban backdrop, a blending effect that he explores further in works such
as Boutique automobile, avenue de la Grande Armée (1924–25) and Coif-
feur, avenue de l’Observatoire (1926).32
Benjamin describes thus Atget’s uniqueness: “He looked for what was
unremarked, forgotten, cast adrift. And thus such pictures work against
the exotic, romantically sonorous names of the cities; they suck the aura out
of reality like water from a sinking ship.”33 In fact, the German intellectual
was equally intent on structuring and generating a newfangled discourse
of his own, analogous to the modern city as a recent form of experience.34
Benjamin’s purpose in much of his later work was less to convey a logical
argument than to use various intertexts and references. A case is point is
“Paris, the Capital,” one of his various semi-fragmentary texts; indeed, in
Rajeev Patke’s words, “his method came to resemble his object of study”
which in its turn “reinforces the self-reflexive relation between modern cit-
ies and the discourse they generate.”35 If Benjamin reads cities as texts, 36 it
is not surprising that the configuration of a text such as “Paris, the Capital”
should match its particular urban representation. According to the author,
the Paris of the Second Empire and its related modes of urban experience
acted as representatives of the features of modernity. His sense of ‘moder-
nity’ corresponds to a “world dominated by its phantasmagorias.”37 Given
that phantasmagoria, a fashionable entertainment in Europe throughout
the nineteenth century, implied visual illusions, Karl Marx draws on this
distinctive aspect to express the delusional characteristics of commodities.
Hence, Benjamin extends Marx’s usage of the expression ‘phantasmagoria,’
explicitly the phantasmagorical attributes of the commodity, to describe
the entirety of Parisian cultural products.
The Parisian arcades were (and are) interconnecting pedestrian ways
linking buildings, lined with retail shops, often encased by marble pan-
els, and covered with elaborate iron and glass roofs. For the most part,
they were erected in the French capital in the fi rst half of the nineteenth
century, aided by the inception of iron construction, to cater for the
considerable boost in commodity production, most markedly within the
textile industry. 38 Perceiving that these shopping and strolling spaces
adumbrated a transformation that occurred a century afterwards, the
German thinker posits them not only as signaling the dawn of indus-
trial capitalism, but also as responsible for creating the street culture of
fl ânerie. While “Paris, the Capital” depicts Paris as the capital of nine-
teenth-century Europe, the city’s arcades, the forerunners of shopping
centers, stand for microcosms of capitalist culture and were therefore to
be visualized as phantasmagorical images.

By focusing on an urban space which came into existence through mate-
rial technology, Benjamin discloses his continuing concern with the effects
of scientific advancements on culture. If, for him, the interconnectedness
between technology, modernity, and the city was embodied by the archi-
tectural structure of the Parisian arcade, Georges Eugène Haussmann was
European modernity personified. Upon his appointment as Prefect of the
Seine by Napoleon III, from 1853 to 1870, Haussmann set about one of the
most grandiose ventures in European urban planning history: the large-
scale reconstruction of Paris. He had new avenues built, which brought with
them the renovation of infrastructures, such as sanitation and transporta-
tion services, and the demolition of numerous old Parisian ‘quartiers.’39 The
Prefect of the Seine conferred upon himself the title of ‘artiste démolisseur,’
or ‘demolition artist,’ and viewed the flattening of the old neighborhoods as
a calling.40 The axial vistas of the new Parisian boulevards might further-
more be read as Haussmann’s homage to centralized power41—in order to
lionize the new Napoleonic empire, he transformed the French capital into
a thoroughly regimented urban space for the bourgeois, a cityscape whose
monumentality would not only rival other major European capitals, but
which would furthermore evoke the stateliness of Augustan Rome. One of
the consequences of this process of urban expansion—based on a Robin
Hood-in-reverse model of compulsory purchase—was that the bourgeoisie
was able to make handsome profits through fraudulent property specu-
lation.42 Another outcome of the creation of new property developments
was, according to Benjamin, the estrangement of the Parisians from their
city—the inhabitants of the French capital become cityless because “[t]hey
no longer feel at home there, and start to become conscious of the inhuman
character of the metropolis.”43 In fact, with the Haussmanization of Paris,
the city was peopled by the crowd, i.e. a multitude of individuals unrelated
to one another, through which rambled the flâneur.
Benjamin expands on this figure in “Paris, the Capital” via the poetry
of Baudelaire, which he considers to be illustrative of the evolving city.
The critic also uses the example of the French poet himself to foreground
the flâneur as an individual who, similarly to Rai in The Ground Beneath
Her Feet, was not wholly part of the bourgeoisie nor of the urban crowd,
although he meandered through both:
For the fi rst time, with Baudelaire, Paris becomes the subject of lyric
poetry. [ . . . ] It is the gaze of the flâneur, whose way of life still con-
ceals behind a mitigating nimbus the coming desolation of the big-city
dweller. The flâneur still stands on the threshold of the metropolis as
of the middle class. Neither has him in its power yet. In neither is he at
home. He seeks refuge in the crowd.44
The city thus became a tableau to be contemplated at a distance by that

threshold figure. Such perception of the urban space as landscape was fi rstly

brought on by the panoramas and, later, through the Parisian flâneur’s
gaze, the city continued to widen.45 The flâneur came to prominence for the
most part thanks to Haussmanization since this architectural transforma-
tion of Paris allowed him to be a wanderer in the city amid the surrounding
crowd. The wave of modernity called forth by Haussmann bears in this
respect striking resemblances to what would occur in post-independence
Bombay, the setting for Rushdie’s flâneur.
While Paris was considered to be the capital of nineteenth-century
Europe (which meant in Eurocentric terms the capital of the world), the
commercial and entertainment capital of India stands at present as a herald
of the almost immeasurable megalopolises that point toward a redefi nition
of the concept of the city. In Rushdie’s novel, Bombay is a city haunted, in
a constructive sense, by its tangible colonial legacy. The imperialist-created
topography of the city resulted from the fact that it was a “great metropoli-
tan creation of the British,”46 or “a British city built in India,” as Rushdie
himself characterized it during an interview to the BBC, made up of the
engagement (he refutes outright the reductionism of the ‘clash of civiliza-
tions’ explanation) between East and West.47 Hence, growing up in that
city is like “floating in the amniotic fluid of the past.”48 Space is inevitably
a construction, never a simple setting. The cultural legacy of the British
Empire is an inextricable part of India; as such, it can never quite be dis-
carded.49 Indeed, present-day Bombay is a city erected upon reclaimed land.
It was originally an archipelago of seven islands transformed from 1817
onwards into a single peninsula through a massive project of water drain-
age and embankment erection developed under British colonial rule.
For Rushdie’s narrator, Bombay, the setting of the fi rst half of The
Ground Beneath Her Feet, is ‘Wombay’ (as in ‘womb’). The novel unravels
the spatialized cultural politics of Bombay’s imperial nostalgias, as well
as the emergence there of hybrid spaces resulting from “overlapping ter-
ritories” and “intertwined histories.”50 It provides an affective geography
of a city that, in the time of Rushdie’s childhood, was undergoing a con-
struction boom and a revolution in urban planning. This was taking place
in the midst of cultural and political changes, at a time of key historical
transition—immediately after independence and partition in 194751—when
India was attempting to obliterate the structural remnants, which neces-
sarily included architectural ones, of its very recent colonial heritage. In
interviews, Rushdie frequently voices a nostalgic yearning for that mother
metropolis destroyed by the tectonic shifts of postcolonial modernity and,
in this sense, The Ground Beneath Her Feet stands as an attempt to map
projected, fictional representations of Bombay and, in the process, claim
geographic, affective space and restore the past:
The Bombay of [ . . . ] the fifties and the fi rst half of the sixties, was
a city going through a kind of golden age. [ . . . ] When I was grow-
ing up in Bombay, there wasn’t a single skyscraper in town. In fact, I

remember the fi rst skyscraper being built on Malabar Hill; the peo-
ple in the city used to contemptuously refer to it as Matchbox House
because it looked like a giant matchbox standing on its side. We all told
each other that it would never catch on. One of the many things about
which we were wrong.52
Elsewhere, he confides: “I think that the truth is that all cities in novels are,
in a way, imaginary cities. This Bombay I believe to be deeply rooted in the
real Bombay, but nevertheless it’s my Bombay. . . . So in the end it’s a city of
words, and it’s my job to make that alien city one which the reader can enter
whether he’s ever been there or not.”53 Echoing this elegy for a vanished
city, Rushdie’s narrator, as a child growing up in the Bombay of the 1950s
and early 1960s, betrays a longing for a very different city than the one that
was coming into being. Rai witnesses the struggle in the city over adopting
modernity, involving an attempt to discard the colonial influence. To satisfy
a need of instant modernity, “the city needed every builder it could get”;54
still, ‘other modernities’ implied that in Rai’s eyes the particular modernity
Bombay was striving for brought in its wake loss and devastation instead
of progress: “The destruction of your childhood home—a villa, a city—
is like the death of a parent: an orphaning. A tombstone ‘scraper’ stands
upon the site of this forgotten cremation. A tombstone city stands upon the
graveyard of the lost.”55
“Forget Mumbai. I remember Bombay,”56 the narrator states bluntly.
Similarly, in the essay “Günter Grass” (1984) Rushdie writes: “I grew up
on Warden Road; now it’s Bhulabhai Desai Road. [ . . . ] Of course, the new
decolonised names tell of a confident, assertive spirit in the independent
State; but the loss of past attachments remains a loss. What to do? Shrug.
And pickle the past in books.”57 Elsewhere, by pickling the official facts of
Indian history in Midnight’s Children, Rushdie’s narrator Saleem suggests
that there are always fault-lines between a collective identitarian narrative,
subsumed under the homogenizing thrust of ‘nation,’ and the rendition of
histories of a nation filtered through individual, subterranean memories.
This outspoken nostalgic response seems to illustrate a trend in the contem-
porary critical scene that Aamir Mufti identifies as ‘auratic authenticity,’
in other words, a sense of the alienation-inducing inauthenticity of post-
colonial culture. Such perceived lack of authenticity can be counteracted,
following the tenets of auratic criticism, by the aura attached to specific
cultural practices. As Mufti argues,
Modes of transition to modern forms of culture that have been medi-

ated through the experience of colonial subjugation share the inability
to produce narratives of cultural continuity that can absorb the dislo-
cations of modernity. In such contexts, the question of tradition takes a
distinct form, with the past appearing not exactly to be dead and bur-
ied, even if present in ghostly form, but murdered and still remaining,

as Gayatri Spivak has suggested, inappropriately and insufficiently
mourned. Tradition is, in the fi rst instance, the realm in which a cul-
tural object has restored to it its aura, but here it is also that which has
become alien and distant, a marginal and threatened fragment of life,
but a fragment out of whose lineaments one might attempt to recall
what was once all of life.58
Rai’s conflicted representation of Bombay gestures towards a recovery of

an unretrievable world while embracing the multifariousness of the metrop-
olis. This portrayal of Bombay as ‘Wombay’ as against Mumbai might be
construed precisely as a gesture, on the narrator’s part, to come to terms
with these evidences of non-modernity. In this perspective, this representa-
tion seems to be an attempt to balance the tension between a certain desire
for the rootedness of culture and the evidence of the fragmentary nature of
experience. In effect, in the microcosm of the Merchant family, in Rai and
his parents’, V. V. and Ameer Merchant, diverse ways of experiencing the
city, and in their different entrepreneurial projects for its modernization,
The Ground Beneath Her Feet sets a contrast between alternative ways of
negotiating Bombay. An interesting parallel might be drawn here with M.
Christine Boyer’s idea of the city as the theater of our collective memory:
[The city] carries in the weaving and unraveling of its fabric the memory
traces of earlier architectural forms, city plans, and public monuments
[ . . . ] its physical structure constantly evolves, being deformed or for-
gotten, adapted to other purposes or eradicated by different needs. The
demands and pressures of social reality constantly affect the material
order of the city, yet it remains the theater of our memory. 59
V. V. Merchant, an England-educated architect, but also “excavator

and local historian,”60 displayed a genuine passion for the (pre-)history of
Bombay;61 in fact, “it was as if he were more interested in the infant’s con-
ception than in her actuality.”62 He catalogued the buildings and “objets
d’art” belonging to “the vanished city” in a photo album which is “sec-
ond to none” and got high on cartographic representations “of the early
town.”63 V. V. pictured Bombay as Work of Art, in Boyer’s sense, since he
endeavored “to secure the turbulent present by tying it to the great artistic
inheritance of the past, and mirroring through stylistic references the secu-
rity and traditional order of pre-industrial and pre-revolutionary times.”64
Representing the City as Work of Art would thus be an attempt to circum-
vent the anxieties resulting from “the turmoil of progress” and “political
revolution.”65 In reality, in the midst of “one of the greatest upheavals in the
history of nations, the end of the British Empire,” he somewhat paradoxi-
cally “burrowed away into the underground memory of the city the British
built.”66 For V. V., the “digger of Bombay,”67 the city was a palimpsest;
accordingly, if Bombay is the product of consecutive stratification, he as

local historian was to devote himself to extensive archaeological excava-
tions in search of its buried strata. In other words, V. V.’s sense of duty
towards a Bombay already sunk into oblivion demanded that he unlayered
the traces of former times and places.
The entrepreneur and cosmopolitan Ameer, in direct opposition to her
provincial husband,68 directed an upwards gaze at the city: “[w]hile he
dreamed of unknown depths, she brought into being a dream of heights.”
In post-independence Bombay, she was one of the most prominent
“developers”—“to use the new word of those days”69 —for whom the long-
awaited modernity would come embodied in western-style skyscrapers;
indeed, Ameer projected onto Bombay the image of modernity she saw
reflected in the glass windows and skeletal metal frames of North Ameri-
can skyscrapers. During a family outing at Juhu beach, she shared with her
son Rai her daydreams of progress for the future Bombay in the form of
glass and steel boxes:
“Skyscraper,” she named it. “How’d you like to own a penthouse at the
top?” Skywhatter? Where was a penthouse pent? These were words I
did not know. I found myself disliking them: the words, and the build-
ing to which they belonged. [ . . . ] “Looks like a big matchbox to me.”
I shrugged. “Live in it? As if.”
[ . . . ] “You don’t know anything,” she cried, rounding on me like
an eight-year-old. “Just wait on and see. One day they’ll be all over
the place.” [ . . . ] “They’ll be here,” she waved an arm gaily. “All
along here.” That set me off too. “Beachscrapers,” I said. “Sandscrap-
ers,” she agreed. “Camelscrapers, cocoscrapers, fishscrapers.” We
were both laughing now. “And I suppose chowscrapers at Chowpatty
Beach,” I wondered. “And hillscrapers on Malabar Hill. And on Cuffe
Parade?”
“Cuffescrapers,” laughed my mother. [ . . . ]
“Where are you going to put them, anyway?” Emboldened by her
good humour, I delivered an unanswerable last word on the subject.
“Here, nobody’ll want them, and in town, there are houses everywhere
already.”
“No room, then,” she mused, pensively.
“Exactly,” I confirmed, turning towards the water. “No room at all.”70
In particular, Ameer’s neologisms such as “Chowscrapers,” “Hillscrap-

ers,” and “Cuffescrapers,” resulting from the fusion between “skyscrap-
ers,” one of the markers of western modernity, and place-names of
autochthonous origin—albeit denouncing the past colonial age—like
Chowpatty Beach and Malabar Hill, are set in stark contrast to her
husband’s retracing of the history of Bombay through the study of top-
onyms. Unlike V. V., whose gaze was horizontal, Ameer had visions “of
the ‘scrapers,’ the giant concrete-and-steel exclamations that destroyed

forever the quieter syntax of the old city of Bombay.”71 Following Boyer’s
tripartite aesthetic model for conceptualizing the city, while V. V. saw
Bombay as Work of Art, Ameer perceived it as Panorama. In the under-
standing of Rai’s mother, a “modern panoramic view” of the city “was to
be judged by the standards of [ . . . ] efficiency, functionality, and optimal-
ity without the permanence and continuities of history or the imposition
and weight of past models.”72
Signalling the clash between technology and tradition that Bombay was
facing at the time, Ameer visualized the city crowded with “high-rise apart-
ment blocks.”73 It is then possible to establish a parallel between the fic-
tional Ameer’s and the real Haussmann’s understanding of modernity, the
former “the master builder”74 of Bombay and the latter a self-proclaimed
‘artiste démolisseur.’ In this respect, both the Ameerization of Bombay and
the Haussumannization of Paris correspond to Boyer’s representational
form of the City as Panorama, where “the architect and city planner cut the
fabric into discrete units and recomposed them into a structured and uto-
pian whole: disorder was replaced by functional order, diversity by serial
repetition, and surprise by uniform expectancy.”75
Due to V. V.’s and Ameer’s alternative and irreconcilable modes of engag-
ing with Bombay, this “daughter they never had”76 was to be responsible for
the break-up of the couple:
All his life my father had faced the internal struggle between his love for
the history and glories of the old Bombay and his professional involve-
ment in the creation of the city’s future. The prospect of the destruc-
tion of the most beautiful stretch of seafront in the city drove him into
permanent, but unfortunately silent, opposition to his wife.77
Their son, in blatant contrast to his parents’ proactive stance, was a passive
bystander in the face of the city’s transition from “its golden age” of the
years between 1937 and 1947, when Bombay could rival ancient Rome,78
to a different city altogether after independence. Before the city was hit
by the destructive waves of sudden modernity, it was its monumentality
and apparent eternalness that Rai recalled. He invested Bombay with an
authority that the city seemed to have lost in the present by comparing it
favorably with the capital of the Roman Empire:
When you grow up, as I did, in a great city, during what just happens
to be its golden age, you think of it as eternal. Always was there, always
will be. The grandeur of the metropolis creates the illusion of perma-
nence. The peninsular Bombay into which I was born certainly seemed
perennial to me. Colaba Causeway was my Via Appia, Malabar and
Cumballa hills were our Capitol and Palatine, the Brabourne Stadium
was our Colosseum, and as for the glittering Art Deco sweep of Marine
Drive, well, that was something not even Rome could boast.79

Rai, despite being “a Bombay chokra [boy] through and through,” was
driven to seek his fortunes elsewhere. Since his parents “had possessed the
city so completely,” he felt the agonizing need to break away from Bom-
bay’s overpowering embrace and “award [himself] the sea,”80 i.e. America.
Might it be that Rai is unhomed at home because his vision of the metropo-
lis is informed by his western artistic influences? The fact is that his par-
ents’ obsessive love for the city made it unbearably suffocating. Bombay
had become the anthropomorphized ‘Wombay’: the city eventually came
to resemble the maternal womb and Rai “had to go abroad to get [himself]
born.”81 He confesses: “Many youngsters leave home to fi nd themselves;
I had to cross oceans just to exit Wombay, the parental body,” and con-
cludes: “I flew away to get myself born.”82
While still in India, going through the process of constructing his artistic
identity, the narrator-photographer’s gaze was intentionally directed away
from the subterranean perspective of both the Bombay of his father and
the Paris of Nadar. Rai was not interested in the cryptic historicities or the
covert spaces of the metropolis, and his vision was also far removed from
the bird’s-eye-view of the city as seen from his mother’s Matchbox Houses
or as refracted through the lenses of the early Indian photographer Raja
Deen Dayal. For sure, he acknowledged as his “fi rst artistic influences” the
portraits of the city taken from the air by “Bombay’s first great photogra-
phers” only because they allowed him to formulate his own creative model
as against theirs. In effect, they displayed an image of Bombay that he did
not share and even rejected: “[t]heir images were awe-inspiring, unforget-
table, but they also inspired in me a desperate need to get back down to
ground level.”83 In opposition to the “sweeping panoramas” captured from
the top of the Rajabai tower or from the air, Rai’s artistic pursuit was
instead of a mode of approaching metropolitan visuality in all its vitality,
simultaneity, and immediacy. Similarly to cinematic modes of representa-
tion, Rushdie’s photographer-flâneur yearned to show—and conquer—the
heterogeneous synchronicity of the postcolonial metropolis:
I yearned for the city streets, the knife grinders, the water carriers, the
Chowpatty pickpockets, the pavement moneylenders, the peremptory
soldiers, the whoring dancers, the horse-drawn carriages with their
fodder thieving drivers, the railway hordes, the chess players in the
Irani restaurants, the snake-buckled schoolchildren, the beggars, the
fishermen, the servants, the wild throng of Crawford Market shoppers,
the oiled wrestlers, the moviemakers, the dockers, the book sewers, the
urchins, the cripples, the loom operators, the bully boys, the priests,
the throat slitters, the frauds, I yearned for life.84
At this stage, it is again possible to sketch a parallel between the diverse

modes of visualizing Bombay throughout The Ground Beneath Her Feet
via the Merchant family and the three urban archetypes, each with its

specific aesthetic and ideological conventions, that Boyer identifies as dif-
ferent “way[s] of seeing, knowing and representing the city.”85 In this sense,
the characters in the novel adhered to a tripartite representational pattern
of the city: fi rst, the City as Work of Art realized in the picture frame con-
nected to V. V.’s representation of the city; second, the City as Panorama,
the modern city designed as a panorama of fragments, where the bird’s-eye-
view of the panorama acts as a metonym for modern society, corresponding
to both Ameer’s vision of skyscrapers and early photographic depictions of
Bombay; and third, the City of Spectacle, epitomized by the cinema or TV
screen, filtered through Rai’s lenses in his fi rst artistic approach to photog-
raphy, but which he will ultimately discard.
Rai’s intention in capturing all-encompassing images capable of reflect-
ing the heterogeneities of Bombay entailed the desire to seize and take pos-
session of the city, in other words, to colonize it through his photographer’s
gaze: “I seized for myself the maelstrom of straw baskets at Crawford Mar-
ket, and took possession, too, of the inert figures who were everywhere,
sleeping on the hard pillows of the sidewalks, their faces turned towards
urinous walls, beneath the lurid movie posters of buxom goddesses with
sofa-cushion lips.”86 The exhibitionist Bombay resisted the artist’s coloniz-
ing onslaught, even if it seemed to lure him in. While it was unproblematic
to be “a lazy photographer in Bombay” and shoot “an interesting picture,”
it was nearly impossible to take a “good one.”87 As with Benjamin’s flâneur,
the cityscape exerted on Rai a pattern of temptation-attraction-repulsion.
He is faced with the disjunction of surface and depth—what he captured in
his photographs was in effect nothing more than mere surface, lacking the
depth he had yearned for. Looking at his photographs as visual manifesta-
tions of surface, Rai ponders the desire and impossibility of attaining the
essence and meaning beneath the surfaces of Bombay:
The city seethed, gathered to stare, turned its back and didn’t care.
By showing me everything it told me nothing. Wherever I pointed my
camera [ . . . ] I seemed to glimpse something worth having, but usually
it was just something excessive: too colourful, too grotesque, too apt.
The city was expressionistic, it screamed at you, but it wore a domino
mask. [ . . . ] There was too much money, too much poverty, too much
nakedness, too much disguise, too much anger, too much vermilion,
too much purple.88
Christopher Pinney foregrounds this disjunction with reference to photo-

graphic portraiture in India: “If colonial photographic practice attempted
to fi x identities on India which could be read externally, popular Indian
postcolonial practice seems bewitched,” as Rai’s photographic ventures do,
“by the difficulty of establishing a relationship between a slippery surface
and an unknowable interior.”89 Rushdie’s narrator seems to be in line with
a longstanding Platonic and Kantian legacy wherein images are disparaged

as deceitful shadows, evoking superficiality, and the ‘interiority’ that sup-
posedly lay underneath was to be privileged.90 Beyond the superficiality of
Bombay’s surfaces that Rai sensed, he was confronted with the unfeasibility
of representing the postcolonial city in its overabundance and multiplicity,
because in the end, with all its surfaces, it turned out to be indecipherable.
Until the day Rai flew to America, he rambled through the streets of
Bombay. Acting as a sort (dis)enchanted flâneur, he approached the city
from the perspective of a solitary and free-floating individual—detached
from the crowd not unlike Benjamin’s flâneur—who used photography as
a way to bring about “the artist’s conquest of the city.”91 Yet, the narrator-
photographer’s takeover of his own city discloses one of the apparently
insoluble paradoxes of re-appropriating a Third World city as creative mate-
rial, be it Bombay or—one might even say—Los Angeles. Indeed, it might
be the case here that “the urbanization of artistic sensibility”92 unveils an
exoticization—acknowledged or not—in the representation of the post-
colonial urban space. Rai as flâneur is not characterized in the novel in
similar terms to the de-classed artist figure of Baudelaire whom Benjamin
elected as the representative of nineteenth-century European flânerie, even
though the Parisian poet subsisted on a lavish inheritance from his father
for a period of time, similarly to Rai’s situation. In fact, Rushdie’s narrator
becomes “a young gentleman of means” as the sole heir of the Merchant
& Merchant family business “with its thick folder of architectural con-
tracts and its important interest in the Cuffe Parade and Nariman Point
developments,”93 but rebels against the prospect of following his mother’s
footsteps and sells the company to a consortium of developers to pursue a
career as a professional photographer. While the Benjaminian concept of
the flâneur glosses over power relations to some extent, Rai’s upper class
affiliation within an economically fractured Third World metropolis may
have complicated his unbounded access to the city as well as undermined
the complete invisibility he deemed necessary to the exercise of his art.
The city parades both its exotic allure and its inscrutability. In the face
of the surfaces of the postcolonial metropolis which are “too colourful, too
grotesque, too apt,” Rai suffered from a creative block which might betray
not only the flâneur’s detachment from an overcrowded Bombay—and at this
nexus Rushdie’s depiction of his narrator as postcolonial flâneur both meets
and overlaps with Benjamin’s theorization—but also an insidious—yet failed—
attempt at exoticizing it. In the midst of an exoticist inventory of the multifac-
eted cityscape, the narrator includes “whores, tightrope walkers, transsexuals,
movie stars, cripples, billionaires, all of them exhibitionists,” but “all of them
obscure”; his account of the city also comprised “the thrilling, appalling infin-
ity of the crowd at Churchgate Station in the morning” whose “same infinity
made the crowd unknowable.” Like the tiffin boxes which the ‘dabbawalas,’
the lunch runners of Bombay, carried around the city and which “guarded
their mystery,” the city was inscrutable and one could only grasp its shiny
façade. Rai’s status as artistic flâneur marks him as alien and allows him only

a glimpse of the complexities of Bombay. The rush of color, sound, and motion
provoke an artistically unproductive sensory overload in the narrator. Photo-
graphing the impenetrable metropolis amounts to seeking to define himself.
Ultimately, in what was to become a turning point in his quest for his artistic
self, he realized that “[t]here was far, far too much light” in the inscrutable city
and thus decided to “look at the darkness instead.”94
Admittedly, the narrator evokes a vision of an eternal Bombay. In fact,
the twofold foci resting on the Bombay of The Ground Beneath Her Feet
provide two contending essentialized visions—one of the eternal and
Rome-like city and another of the unknowable and obscure city—and
hence disclose a double orientalist representation of the metropolis. This
depiction of Bombay might be seen as an elite one,95 in the way that Rai’s
catalog comes to resemble a pastiche of orientalist clichés and eventually
flattens the distinctiveness of the city. By having the city self-represent itself
as kaleidoscopic and uncolonizable by the photographer’s gaze, refusing
to be a stuffed head for Rai’s wall, The Ground Beneath Her Feet con-
fronts the reader with her expectations of an orientalist representation of
the city as exhibition, whereby Bombay is envisioned as “a place of specta-
cle and visual arrangement.”96 In this respect, Elleke Boehmer had already
discerned in 1998 a critical tendency to consider Rushdie’s writing (and
writing that bears a resemblance to Rushdie’s) as “singular, delightful,
intriguing, and somehow more important and ‘true’ than other kinds of
fiction,” and regarded this trend as “a new kind of orientalism, very much
like another way of scrutinizing the loud, rich, wild and various manifesta-
tions of the Other, the effect of which it is to reify a view of other worlds as
exotic, chaotic, teeming, crowded with noise and fury.”97
A concluding remark could be made regarding not only Rushdie’s seem-
ingly exoticist description of the postcolonial cityscape through the eyes of
his flâneur character Rai, but also a certain strand of photographic repre-
sentations of Bombay and India in general. For example, Sebastião Salgado’s
compositionally striking photographs captured in Bombay in 1995, such as
the one depicting a large-diameter steel pipeline—a symbol of modernity—
transporting drinking water to the affluent districts of Bombay, and which
literally bypasses the cluttered slum of Mahim, and the jigsaw-puzzle group
portrait taken in the shantytown of Dharavi could be interpreted as beto-
kening an exoticist form. Here, Salgado moved further north, up the penin-
sula, to the suburbs of Mumbai and their shantytowns, away from both the
High Victorian buildings erected by the British and the glamorous Bom-
bay that Rushdie eulogizes. Salgado’s stylizing and aestheticizing of Third
World urban poverty and desolation reveals some of the contradictions at
the heart of the artistic appropriation of the “too colourful” and “too gro-
tesque” postcolonial cityscape. Critiquing the image of exotic India, Alain
Willaume, one of the editors of the collection India Now (2008), proposes
a renovated photographic vision of the subcontinent on the occasion of the
sixtieth anniversary of independence:

India and photographers have one common enemy: the cliché. India is
one of the most photographed countries in the world, and it is one of
those whose image seems to have remained unchanged since anyone
can remember. Astonished and dazzled by this extraordinary world, a
vast eclectic army of imagemakers—travellers and sightseers, amateurs
and professionals—has pursued a single dream as it focuses on the
picturesque poverty and the hypnotic culture of everyday life. For its
worshippers, the ‘eternal’ India demands nothing more than the exclu-
sion of all traces of modernity from the frame.98
In this respect, Salgado does focus on the powerful impact of the steel pipe-
line, but arguably as a symbol of failed modernity.
Through self-reflexivity, Rushdie plays with his audience’s idea of the
writer as a privileged native informant for a western readership. Such were
in all probability the expectations which led Lord Snowdon to compose
his portrait of Rushdie by “gathering bits of ‘Indianness’ around [him].”
Revisiting the author’s own words about the anxiety of representation, or
rather authorial self-representation, “sometimes [readers] come to you with
a picture already in their heads, and then you’re done for.”99
NOTES
1. Salman Rushdie, “On Being Photographed,” in Step Across This Line: Col-
lected Non-Fiction 1992–2002 (London: Vintage, 2003), 112–117.
2. Rushdie, “On Being Photographed,” 113.
5. Rushdie, “On Being Photographed,” 113. See Susan Sontag’s similar
approach to photography: “there is something predatory in the act of taking
a picture. To photograph someone is to violate them, by seeing them as they
never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it
turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed” (Susan Sontag,
On Photography (London: Penguin, 1979), 14).
6. Quoted in Peter Kadzis, “Salman Speaks,” in Conversations With Salman
Rushdie, ed. Michael R. Reder (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press,
2000), 226.
7. Bombay became Mumbai in 1995, but most of Rushdie’s representations of
the city either date from before then or refer to a time before then.
8. Quoted in Nirmala Lakshman, “A Columbus of the Near-at-Hand,” in Sal-
man Rushdie Interviews: A Sourcebook of His Ideas, ed. Pradyumna S.
Chauhan (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood, 2001), 284–285.
9. Even though the setting of Rushdie’s novel is the Bombay of the late 1930s
onwards, i.e. before independence, the narrator’s depiction is of a postcolo-
nial city because it is to some extent a reflection upon the continuing effects
of colonialism on the cityscape.
10. Rajeev Patke, “Benjamin in Bombay? An Extrapolation,” Postmodern Cul-
ture 12.3 (2002): 3, accessed February 28, 2008, http://jefferson.village.vir-
ginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.502/12.3patke.txt.

11. Note 1, Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,”
trans. Howard Eiland, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935–
1938, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, and Gary
Smith (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2002), 44.
12. Fury’s protagonist Malik also bears a clear resemblance to the flâneur.
13. Patke, “Benjamin in Bombay?”, para. 2.
14. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (New York: Picador, 2000), 101.
15. Homi Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” in Nation and Narra-
tion, ed. Homi Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 4.
16. Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Social-
ism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 3.
17. Rofel, Other Modernities, 13.
18. Rofel, Other Modernities, 3.
23. “The First Photograph.” Permanent Exhibitions, Harry Ransom Center, The
University of Texas at Austin, accessed February 28, 2008, http://www.hrc.
utexas.edu/exhibitions/permanent/wfp/.
26. The First Photograph is on display at the Ransom Center of the University of
Texas at Austin. A more detailed overview of the experimental procedure Rai
depicts can be found on the website of the Ransom Center; it is worth quoting
at length given the striking similarities between the description provided online
by the Center and Rushdie’s literary rendering of the same process: “In the
window of [Niépce’s] upper-story workroom at his Saint-Loup-de-Varennes
country house, Le Gras, he set up a camera obscura, placed within it a pol-
ished pewter plate coated with bitumen of Judea [ . . . ], and uncapped the lens.
After at least a day-long exposure of eight hours, the plate was removed and
the latent image of the view from the window was rendered visible [ . . . ]. The
result was the permanent direct positive picture you see here—a one-of-a-kind
photograph on pewter. It renders a view of the outbuildings, courtyard, trees
and landscape as seen from that upstairs window” (“The First Photograph”).
27. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 209–210. This might be an indirect
allusion to Rushdie’s celebrity status and to a certain degree of paparazzi
harassment that the writer has endured over the years.
28. Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 35.
29. Charles Baudelaire, “The Modern Public and Photography,” in Classic
Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven: Leete’s Island
Books, 1980), 87.
30. Baudelaire, “The Modern Public and Photography,” 86.
32. As M. Christine Boyer notes about the modernists’ artistic credo, “high art, the
other of popular culture, would be inspired and contaminated with lesser visual
forms: the circus, billboard advertisements, the reflected images from shop win-
dows, as well as the machine aesthetic, the speed of automotive travel, and the
power of electricity were all sources from which the modern visual sensibility
of modernism drew sustenance” (M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective
Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge
and London: MIT Press, 1996), 61). For example, the American photographer

Man Ray, another of Rai’s creative influences, used photo-montage with the
motifs of the Eiffel Tower and electricity, recognisable markers of modernity, as
well as neon advertisements, unmistakably part of popular culture.
33. Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 1927–1934, eds. Michael W.
Jennings, Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. (Cambridge
and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 518.
34. Patke, “Benjamin in Bombay?,” 5.
35. Patke, “Benjamin in Bombay?,” 3.
36. Patke, “Benjamin in Bombay?,” 3–4.
38. Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 32–33.
39. Note 44, Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 48.
41. Boyer, The City of Collective Memory, 38.
45. Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 35. In Benjamin’s
description, “[p]anoramas were large circular tableaux, usually displaying
scenes of battles and cities, painted in trompe l’oeil and originally designed
to be viewed from the center of a rotunda” (note 11, “Paris, the Capital of
the Nineteenth Century,” 45). The panorama was regarded by Benjamin as
the predecessor of the cinema because it frequently strove to capture the
sequence of changes making up a day.
47. Quoted in “Rushdie ‘May Write Book on Fatwa,’” BBC News, July 29,
2008, accessed July 30, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7530137.stm.
In Midnight’s Children, the Englishman William Methwold, a character
who re-appears in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, “dreamed the city into
existence” (Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Vintage, 1995), 110). As
Rushdie declares in an interview, metropolises are invented spaces: “Cities
are artificial—they aren’t organic like a field. The real point about them is
that they contain an infi nite number of confl icting, incompatible realities”
(quoted in John Mitchinson, “Between God and Evil,” in Salman Rushdie
Interviews: A Sourcebook of His Ideas, ed. Pradyumna S. Chauhan (West-
port, CT and London: Greenwood, 2001), 95).
49. In reality, Bombay was “the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding,
and yet the most Indian of Indian cities” (Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh
(London: Vintage, 1996), 350).
50. Said, Edward. Culture and Impreialism (London: Vintage, 1993), 56.
51. Independent India and Pakistan came into being in August 1947 and Rush-
die himself was born two months earlier. In Midnight’s Children the narra-
tor muses on the birth of the newly independent India, “a nation which had
never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a
world which [ . . . ] would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal
collective will—except in a dream we all agreed to dream” (Rushdie, Mid-
night’s Children, 112).
52. Quoted in Vijaya Nagarajan, “Salman Rushdie on Bombay, Rock N’ Roll,
and The Satanic Verses,” Whole Earth Review (Fall 1999), accessed July 30,
2008, http://wholeearth.com/issue/98/article/90/salman.rushdie.on.bombay.
rock.n’.roll.and.the.satanic.verses.

53. Quoted in Michael Silverblatt, “Bookworm With Michael Silverblatt, Guest: Sal-
man Rushdie,” in Salman Rushdie Interviews: A Sourcebook of His Ideas, ed.
Pradyumna S. Chauhan (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood, 2001), 200.
55. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 168. Near the end of Midnight’s
Children, Saleem also nostalgically laments the destruction of the cityscape
of his childhood Bombay brought about by ‘modernization’ programs: “my
God, look, atop a two-storey hillock where once the palaces of William
Methwold stood wreathed in bougainvillaea and stared proudly out to sea
[ . . . ] look at it, a great pink monster of a building, the roseate skyscraper
obelisk of the Narlikar women, standing over and obliterating the circus-ring
of childhood [ . . . ] yes, it was my Bombay, but also not-mine” (Rushdie,
Midnight’s Children, 452).
57. Rushdie, “Günter Grass,” in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism
1981–1991 (London: Granta), 277.
58. Aamir R. Mufti, “The Aura of Authenticity,” Social Text 64. 18.3 (2000):
88.
76. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 78–79.
77. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 155. In an interview, Rushdie says:
“When you are born and brought up in a city, you assume the city has always
been there. But when I started digging into it I discovered [that] when I was
growing up in the Fifties in Bombay, all those streets were really quite new.
Warden Road, Malabar Hill, they were only 15 or 20 years old, and 15 or 20
years later they started getting knocked down. [ . . . ] So that gave me the idea
of having Rai’s parents both being in love with the city, but in love with dif-
ferent phases of the city. His father is interested in the past, his mother in the
future” (quoted in Lakshman “A Columbus of the Near-at-Hand,” 279).
79. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 78. This representation of Marine
Drive, a three-kilometre-long boulevard along the bay in South Bombay is in
accordance with its alternative place-name, with obvious imperial connota-
tions: the ‘Queen’s Necklace.’
82. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 101. Rushdie argues: “I think that
sense of displacement, dislocation, starting again, having to redefi ne yourself

etc., that is the commonplace experience of life in the city” (quoted in Lak-
shman, “A Columbus of the Near-at-Hand,” 283); as he clarifies, in The
Ground Beneath Her Feet he is “writing about people who leave, and for
whom the dream is not of Home but of Away” (280).
84. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 80, Also, in The Satanic Verses,
Saladin “grew increasingly impatient with that Bombay of dust, vulgarity,
policemen in shorts, transvestites, movie fanzines, pavement sleepers, and
the rumoured singing whores of Grant Road. [ . . . ] He was fed up of textile
factories and local trains and all the confusion and superabundance of the
place” (Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (New York and London: Viking, 1989),
37).
88. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 211. Interestingly, in Shalimar the
Clown, Rushdie depicts the city as a difficult metropolis to grasp, very much
akin to Bombay in The Ground Beneath Her Feet: “In such a city there
could be no grey areas, or so it seemed. Things were what they were and
nothing else, unambiguous, lacking the subtleties of drizzle, shade and chill.
Under the scrutiny of such a sun there was no place to hide. People were
everywhere on display, their bodies shining in the sunlight, scantily clothed,
reminding her of advertisements. No mysteries here or depths; only surfaces
and revelations. Yet to learn the city was to discover that this banal clarity
was an illusion. The city was all treachery, all deception, a quick-change,
quicksand metropolis, hiding its nature, guarded and secret in spite of all its
apparent nakedness. In such a place even the forces of destruction no longer
needed the shelter of the dark. They burned out of the morning’s brightness,
dazzling the eye, and stabbed at you with sharp and fatal light” (Rushdie,
Shalimar the Clown (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005), 5).
89. Christopher Pinney, “Visual Culture,” in The Material Culture Reader, ed.
Victor Buchli (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 81.
90. Pinney, ‘Visual Culture’, 81.
95. In The Satanic Verses, Zeeny accuses Saladin of not knowing the ‘real’ Bom-
bay: “What do you know about Bombay? Your own city, only it never was. To
you, it was a dream of childhood. Growing up on Scandal Road is like living
on the moon. No bustees there, no sirree, only servant’s quarters. Did Shiv
Sena elements come there to make trouble? Were your neighbours starving in
the textile strike? [ . . . ] How old were you when you met a trade unionist?
How old the fi rst time you got on a local train instead of a car with driver?
That wasn’t Bombay, darling, excuse me. That was Wonderland, Peristan,
Never-Never, Oz” (Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 55–56). Interestingly, the
privileged position of the protagonist in the city echoes Rai’s. Zeeny also
tries to reclaim Saladin for Bombay (in a way that seems a personal note
to Rushdie himself and his reminiscences of the imaginary Bombay of his
childhood): “You should really try and make an adult acquaintance with this
place. Try and embrace this city, as it is, not some childhood that makes you
both nostalgic and sick. Draw it close. The actually existing place. Make its
faults your own. Become its creature; belong” (Rushdie, The Satanic Verses,
541). In the last paragraphs of The Satanic Verses, Saladin sees to the ‘real’

Bombay and seems to have learned to accept Bombay as his ‘home’: “He
stood at the window of his childhood and looked out at the Arabian Sea.
The moon was almost full; moonlight, stretching from the rocks of Scandal
Point out to the fair horizon, created the illusion of a silver pathway, like a
parting in the water’s shining hair, like a road to miraculous lands. He shook
his head, could no longer believe in fairy-tales. Childhood was over, and the
view from this window was no more than an old and sentimental echo. To
the devil with it! Let the bulldozers come. If the old refused to die, the new
could not be born” (Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 546–547).
96. Timothy Mitchell, “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order,” in Colonial-
ism and Culture, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1992), 297.
97. Elleke Boehmer, “Post-Colonial Literary Studies: A Neo-Orientalism?,” in Ori-
ental Prospects: Western Literature and the Lure of the East, eds. C. C. Barfoot
and Theo d’Haen (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998), 240.
98. Alain Willaume, “Facing India,” in India Now: New Visions in Photog-
raphy, eds. Alain Willaume and Devika Daulet-Singh (London: Thames &
Hudson, 2008), 13.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Atget, Eugène. Boutique automobile, avenue de la Grande Armée. 1924-25.

MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art.
. Coiffeur, avenue de l’Observatoire. 1926. MoMA, The Museum of Mod-
ern Art.
. Magasin, avenue des Gobelins. 1925. MoMA, The Museum of Modern
Art.
Baudelaire, Charles. “The Salon of 1859.”InCritical Theory Since Plato, edited by
Hazard Adams, 622-623. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971.
. “The Modern Public and Photography.” In Classic Essays on Photography,
edited by Alan Trachtenberg, 83–89. New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1980.
Benjamin, Walter. “Little History of Photography.” 1931. Trans. Rodney Livingstone.
In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 1927–1934, edited by Michael
W. Jennings, Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, 507–530. Cam-
bridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.
. “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” 1935. Trans. Howard Eiland.
In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935–1938, edited by Michael W.
Jennings, Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, 32–49. Cambridge
and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002.
Bhabha, Homi. “Introduction: Narrating the Nation.” In Nation and Narration,
edited by Homi Bhabha, 1–7. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.
Boehmer, Elleke. “Post-Colonial Literary Studies: A Neo-Orientalism?.” In Orien-
tal Prospects: Western Literature and the Lure of the East, edited by C. C. Bar-
foot and Theo d’Haen, 239–246. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998.
Boyer, M. Christine. The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and
Architectural Entertainments. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1996.
“The First Photograph.” Permanent Exhibitions, Harry Ransom Center, The Uni-
versity of Texas at Austin. Accessed February 28, 2008. http://www.hrc.utexas.
edu/exhibitions/permanent/wfp/.
Kadzis, Peter. “Salman Speaks.” In Conversations With Salman Rushdie, edited by
Michael R. Reder, 216–227. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000.

Lakshman, Nirmala. “A Columbus of the Near-at-Hand.” 1999. In Salman Rush-
die Interviews: A Sourcebook of His Ideas, edited by Pradyumna S. Chauhan,
279–289. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood, 2001.
Mitchell, Timothy. “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order”. In Colonialism
and Culture, edited by Nicholas B. Dirks, 289–317. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1992.
Mitchinson, John. “Between God and Evil.” 1988. In Salman Rushdie Interviews:
A Sourcebook of His Ideas, edited by Pradyumna S. Chauhan, 93–97. West-
port, CT and London: Greenwood, 2001.
Mufti, Aamir R. “The Aura of Authenticity.” Social Text 64. 18.3 (2000):
87–103.
Nagarajan, Vijaya. “Salman Rushdie on Bombay, Rock N’ Roll, and The Satanic
Verses.” Whole Earth Review (Fall 1999), accessed July 30, 2008. http://
wholeearth.com/issue/98/article/90/salman.rushdie.on.bombay.rock.n’.roll.
and.the.satanic.verses
Patke, Rajeev. “Benjamin in Bombay? An Extrapolation.” Postmodern Culture
12.3 (2002): 35 paragraphs. Accessed February 28, 2008. http://jefferson.vil-
lage.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.502/12.3patke.txt.
Pinney, Christopher. “Visual Culture.” In The Material Culture Reader, edited by
Victor Buchli, 81–103. Oxford: Berg, 2002.
Rofel, Lisa. Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999.
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30, 2008. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7530137.stm.
Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York and London: Viking, 1989.
. “Günter Grass.” 1984. In Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism
1981–1991, 273–281. London: Granta, 1991.
. The Ground Beneath Her Feet. New York: Picador, 2000.
. “On Being Photographed.” 1995. In Step Across This Line: Collected
Non-Fiction 1992–2002, 112–117. London: Vintage, 2003.
. Shalimar the Clown. London: Jonathan Cape, 2005.
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1993.
Silverblatt, Michael. “Bookworm With Michael Silverblatt, Guest: Salman Rush-
die.” 1996. In Salman Rushdie Interviews: A Sourcebook of His Ideas, edited
by Pradyumna S. Chauhan, 199–208. Westport, CT and London: Greenwood,
2001.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. 1977. London: Penguin, 1979.
Willaume, Alain. “Facing India.” In India Now: New Visions in Photography,
edited by. Alain Willaume and Devika Daulet-Singh, 13. London: Thames &
Hudson, 2008.

11 Screening the Novel,
the Novel as Screen
The Aesthetics of the Visual in Fury
Madelena Gonzalez
INTRODUCTION
Salman Rushdie has never made any secret of his fondness for the cinema
and it is significant that it is to an iconic Hollywood movie that he has
always attributed his desire to become a writer: “When I fi rst saw The Wiz-
ard of Oz it made a writer of me.”1 Much of the Rushdiean corpus is in fact
concerned with the visual arts in varying ways. The reader may be familiar
with the many filmic references in Midnight’s Children (1981) and the scene
in the “Pioneer Café” which creates the illusion of an Indian movie, 2 or the
detailed description of the canvases of Aurora Zogoiby in The Moor’s Last
Sigh (1995), which, like Rai’s photographs in The Ground Beneath Her
Feet (1999), come to life thanks to the narrator’s use of the rhetorical figure
of hypotyposis. Rushdie’s prose consistently strives for a visual quality or
effect that is often conveniently explained away by magic realism. The puz-
zling, for some, departure from this generic mode in Fury, at the same time
as the extension of the preoccupation with the visual in the novel, pose a
number of interesting questions concerning its aesthetics. Saturating his
text with references to film, television, and the internet, Rushdie attempts
to reproduce in Fury (2001) the visual excessiveness of contemporary life.
The models that he takes, Sex and the City, Tomb Raider, Buffy the Vam-
pire Slayer, and Pulp Fiction, to name but a few, suggest the complacent
eclecticism of the postmodern and its random cannibalization of different
cultural styles. This chapter will try to analyze the nature of such an aes-
thetics. Does it correspond to a desire for the novel to take the place of pho-
tography or film within the conventions of pulp realism, or an attempt to
return to an ur-realism and make the narrator a mere Balzacian secretary
of society? Or, is the author using it as an opportunity to comment on the
proliferation and importance of images in our lives, or indeed the cinematic
quality of our experience in the society of the spectacle?
If, as Guy Debord suggests, the image has become the fi nal form of com-
modity reification, to what extent can the novel’s obsession with the visual
be interpreted as a manifestation of either Frederic Jameson’s postmodern
pastiche3 or Linda Hutcheon’s “complicitous critique,” the “compromised

Screening the Novel, the Novel as Screen 183
politics of postmodernism?”4 Following the latter, can it be argued that by
making the novel itself part of the spectacle, the author provides a comment
upon it, in line with Scott Lash’s A Critique of Information: “There is no
escaping the information order, thus the critique of information will have
to come from inside the information itself”?5 As I aim to show, the recourse
to a certain type of mimetic realism becomes a means to draw attention
to the fictional quality of contemporary experience—the fi rst few pages of
the novel being a case in point, as a camera-eye pans through the streets of
contemporary New York. The scene is set in a very specific and recogniz-
able time and place, which at the same time takes on the air of the hyperreal
Baudrillardean simulacrum, characterized by the weakening of historicity
and the waning of affect. The aimless perambulations of the main protago-
nist, Malik Solanka, reconfigure the nineteenth-century fl âneur as alien-
ated postmodern subject, living within the culture gap produced by the
disorienting speed of technological change and the flow of fast capitalism.
However, certain self-conscious formal gestures seem to suggest a desire
for connection with a dimension outside and above the third order of simu-
lacra which Baudrillard associates with the postmodern age. In the same
way that Solanka is both participant in, and spectator of the society of the
spectacle, the reader is also encouraged to consume the novel ironically and
self-consciously, thanks to a certain number of self-reflexive visual effects,
notably, montage.
In a move which is reminiscent of the “The Camera Eye” and “Newsreel”
sections in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, Rushdie storyboards different
plotlines and invents cameo roles for his characters within a consumerist
celebrity culture, converting the fictional form into a series of juxtaposed
clichés (stereotypes and pictures, although the illustrations we fi nd in Dos
Passos are missing), which he invites us to read metonymically, as if we were
in front of a screen. He starts from the premise that the image is paramount
and precedes the word. Challenging the novel-reader’s habitual horizon of
expectation, he appears to be transcribing the book of an already-existing
film or perhaps offering a shooting script, instead of a full-blown narrative,
or, indeed, gesturing towards the paradigm of web culture with its con-
comitant preference for the lateral rather than the linear and endless variety
instead of consistency. Some of the uneasiness and dissatisfaction felt by
many readers may be due to the novel’s troublingly faithful reproduction
of our modern technological “culture of interruptions”6 and the disruption
of borders between different modes and genres, which makes the reading
pact a precarious one.
Part murder mystery, part romance, part science-fiction, part satire,
Fury plays with the possibilities of this border disruption but in a much
less celebratory manner than that which characterized the championing
of hybridity in The Satanic Verses, for example. Perhaps Rushdie intends
the different modes he has downloaded into his MP3 player of a novel7 to
be a paean to the creative richness made available by cyberspace, an idea

184 Madelena Gonzalez
expressed in a recent interview about his latest book, Luka and the Fire of
Life and the video games which inspired it: “I’m interested in something
like Red Dead Redemption where you can travel anywhere you choose. It
has an open framework and endless diversions and offers greater agency
to players.”8 The preoccupation with agency is a constant in the work of
an author who has always tried to blend the tradition of oral storytelling
with postmodern self-reflexiveness in order to give the reader the illusion
of participating actively in his fiction. However, Fury’s obsession with the
mimetic reproduction of the society of the spectacle seems, at fi rst sight,
to contribute to the loss of the real, confiscating from both characters and
readers the big emotions, suggested by the title, and enveloping them in
global McCulture. The novel’s fundamental generic instability, which, I
would argue, cannot be homogenized under the convenient label of magic
realism tends to suggest the formal limits of the visual aesthetics Rushdie
seems to be trying to capture, rather than validate it as a workable fictional
mode and, in doing so, raises the problem of the status of the novel in the
modern mediaverse.
By imitating the techniques of the visual and seeking to apply them to
the novel, Fury foregrounds the artificial and selective quality of all forms
of representation. In attempting to effect a crossover between two different
media, the visual and the written, the novel highlights the gaps between
the two, as well as the aporia or lack of substance of contemporary real-
ity for which the realist aesthetic is shown as attempting unsuccessfully
to compensate. The constant references to virtual reality and, indeed, the
convergence of the novel’s poetics with the world of simulacra that it inhab-
its, make of it a screen for showing the fi lm of the book at the same time
as it gestures towards its own frame. To what extent this can be seen as
strategic or merely complacent is largely dependent on the novel’s aesthetics
and hinges on the degree of self-consciousness and irony it displays. Are
we to see it as partaking fully of the paradox of the postmodern condi-
tion, striving to imitate reality and all the time illustrating the loss of the
real by that very imitation? Is Fury merely a series of fleeting snapshots of
the reduced aesthetics of the twenty-fi rst century, or does it show how the
depth of felt reality, the transcendental possibilities of the imagination and
the sublimative power of language are in danger of being replaced by the
one-dimensionality of the image in our daily interaction with events, due
to the ubiquitousness of the screens which increasingly, and unceasingly,
mediate all experience?
BALZAC MEETS BAUDRILLARD: THE MIMETIC,

THE MAGIC AND THE SIMULACRUM
The novel begins with the bird’s-eye-view of the main protagonist, as he

looks down from his window onto the spectacle below. It is a privileged,

totalizing stance, implying superiority to, and separation from what he
sees, but Solanka, the former professor, historian of ideas and retired doll-
maker, will be sucked into the simulacrum, thanks to the implication of
his creative genius in a money-spinning web saga. The detailed description
of his environment, which lasts for the fi rst five pages, is reminiscent of
Balzacian beginnings, notably of Eugénie Grandet and Le Père Goriot, in
both of which a distant aerial view of a city or town gradually zooms in
on a neighborhood and then a particular house.9 For Balzac, environment
is a determining and unique factor and the same is true of Rushdie’s novel,
criticized by some as overly specific: “Fury fossicks in the trash cans of the
here and now. The stuff it digs up might, in a few years, guide the research-
ers of I love 2000,”10 “Fury is immediately obsolete.”11
In fact, what Lilian R. Furst pinpoints as characteristic of the nine-
teenth-century French author, could equally well be applied to the begin-
ning of Fury and indeed to the novel in general: “obsessive inventories of
every detail that seem to delay the beginning of the action proper—until
we come to understand on rereading, that description of environment is
already action in Balzac.”12 The “obsessive inventory,” the lists, the sheer
accumulation of detail in the fi rst few pages, the “phenomenal flurry of
passing signifiers,” spoken of by Anshuman Mondal13 and so annoying to
James Wood,14 reflect a desire to anchor the text in the referential, for sheer
number helps to create a reality effect, according to Roland Barthes, as
does the recourse to insignificant detail that is the sign of the dominance of
the referent over the signified and contributes to this same reality effect.15
So the “weightless volume of reference” to which Wood refers is in fact
necessary to maintain the referential illusion, as indeed his accusation of
“muscleless gossip, this bare recording of social facts”16 would seem to sug-
gest. For some, the novel’s documentary leanings were a plus point: “The
opening pages are best, with Rushdie displaying his journalistic skills in his
depiction of life in New York City,”17 and it is surely relevant that one of
the main characters, if not to say the hero’s alter-ego, Jack Rhinehart, is a
journalist and thus a recorder and a reporter whose work mimics that of
the narrator of the novel: “He [ . . . ] began to write [ . . . ] lucrative profiles
of the super-powerful, super-famous and super-rich for their weekly and
monthly magazines.”18 This aspect highlights the role played by observa-
tion and the visual in the aesthetics of the novel, reminding us of the nine-
teenth-century aspiration to the photographic in the opening pages of such
classics of realism as Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale.
As can be seen from the following extract taken from the fi rst page of
Fury, the action is situated in a world of things, rather than ideas, and it is
these things which confer on it a quality of tangibility, while also underlin-
ing the blatant consumerism of the society described:
Stores, dealerships, galleries struggled to satisfy demand for ever more

recherché produce: limited-edition olive oils, three-hundred-dollar

corkscrews, customized Humvees, the latest anti-virus software, escort
services featuring contortionists and twins, video installations, outsider
art, featherlight shawls made from the chin-fluff of extinct mountain
goats. So many people were doing up their apartments that supplies of
high-grade fi xtures and fittings were at a premium. There were waiting
lists for baths, doorknobs, imported hardwoods, antiqued fi replaces,
bidets, marble slabs.19
The premise of a world accessible to description and denomination and

the ambition of exhaustiveness are also characteristics of a realist world-
view. The way the novel imitates and reproduces fragments of contempo-
rary culture, furnishing us with clips and sound bites, snippets of gossip
and overheard conversations, which are part of the incessant noise of
the city, is another aspect of the reality effect. These features certainly
help to provide a sound track as well as visuals, all of which contribute
to animating the scene. Similarly, the recourse to different idiolects and
character types is a way of bolstering up verisimilitude. Instead of the
unreliable fi rst-person narrators of The Moor’s Last Sigh or The Ground
Beneath Her Feet, who, by their own admission, are untrustworthy, in
Fury the reader is quickly introduced to secondary characters who help
to authenticate the novelistic universe with their own particular voices.
This is the case, for instance, of Malik’s neighbor, the attractive young
Mila: “Hey, sir? Sir, excuse me? [ . . . ]. You walk a lot. I mean, five or six
times a day, I see you walking someplace. I’m sitting here, I see you come,
I see you go, but there’s no dog, and it’s not like you come back with lady
friends or produce.”20
What these features point towards is an attempt at a form of mimesis
or dramatic representation and a propensity to enhance the reality effect
by coupling it with the use of the third-person past tense in a time- and
place-specific text. In his essay on John Berger, Rushdie attacks Natural-
ism, however, and proposes a more subtle and ambitious defi nition of real-
istic writing: “‘realism’ [ . . . ] is not a set of rules to write or paint by. It
is, rather, an attempt to respond as fully as possible to the circumstances
of the world in which the artist works.”21 Equally, in one of his numerous
interior monologues, Solanka refutes the role of photographic recorder of
reality: “Naturalism, the philosophy of the visible, cannot capture us, for
we exceed.”22 The confused responses elicited from critics as to the generic
category of the novel show it to be disturbing of expectations and raise
some interesting questions related to this point. For Gabriela Notaras, it
displays “a highly stylised version of magic realism,”23 and for Tom Shone
its poetics are schizophrenic: “what we have is Salman Rushdie’s talent,
neatly bifurcated: on the one hand, magic, and on the other, realism—but
unfortunately, the two aren’t on speaking terms at the moment.”24 As for
James Wood, he categorically rejects any pretention to realism:

Striving to be vivid, this writing produces only something smaller than
life, because distanced and mediated by anterior images: when a man
is described as having Bugs Bunny teeth, you see Bugs Bunny, you do
not see the man [ . . . ]. This cartoonishness, which has been Rushdie’s
weakness throughout his career, and which has been lucky enough over
the years to be flattered by the term ‘magical realism,’ only proves that
he is incapable of writing realistically and thus oddly confi rms the pres-
tige of realism, confi rms its difficulty, its hard challenge, its true rigor.
It needs to be said again and again, since Rushdie’s style of exuberance
has been so influential, that such vividness is not vivacious, that it in
fact encodes a fear of true vivacity, a kind of awkwardness or embar-
rassment in the face of the lifelike. 25
It is perhaps important at this point to distinguish between pulp realism,

which, in the words of Edward Barnaby in his analysis of the realist novel,
“naturalizes a dysfunctional society for its mass audience,” being “gen-
erated solely for consumption,” and “avant-garde realism” that “seeks to
disrupt the process of consumption and draw attention to the culture that
enables it.”26 It may prove easier to understand Rushdie’s narrative choice
if we interpret the mimetic leanings of the novel as a reflection of a world
where reality itself is fictional, as Wood does in fact concede: “Perhaps
Rushdie, in comparing his characters to film actors and the like, is making
a point about the society of the spectacle, about the ineradicably mediated
nature of the contemporary American world?”27 As Barnaby reminds us,
“the novel’s relationship to spectacle is difficult to discern. The realist novel
is both a depiction of the relationships and forces that emerge in industrial
society, as well as a commodity produced by that society.”28 I will examine
this point in more detail later in this essay, but if one were to read Fury
within this framework, as a form of double coding, it could be Rushdie’s
espousal of a certain type of mimetic realism, albeit mimesis as a conven-
tion, as a representation of the thing, rather than the thing itself, that helps
to draw attention to the disappearance of the real from contemporary expe-
rience. Indeed, for Mondal, this may be one of its strong points:
This depthless form reflects an obsession with surfaces where style

is more important than substance, the dazzling multiplicity of which
exhausts itself in the dull patina of mediocrity and disposability. While
some reviewers found this a weakness (especially James Wood in his
review of Fury), it could be argued in fact that it is a strength, a perfect
coincidence of form and content. 29
In his study of the urban text Julian Wolfreys suggests that “the word
‘representation’ should [ . . . ] be placed under erasure, at least when used in
relation to the city text and the writing of the urban space, given that certain

city texts in their appreciation of alterity and aporia signal the exhaustion of
the idea of representation, conventionally understood.”30 In the light of such
a remark it pays to examine some of the technical aspects of Rushdie’s formal
project that engages in a process of screening the novel by imitating the tech-
niques of the visual, seeking to apply them to the novelistic mode and, in so
doing, we will argue, problematizes the process of representation.
SCREENING THE NOVEL: THE BOOK OF THE FILM
According to analysts of the postmodern, such as Frederic Jameson, we

live in “a culture [ . . . ] overwhelmingly dominated by the visual and the
image”31 and Fury is very self-consciously situated in such a world, a New
York and an America of self-referential parody, a recuperation of an infi nity
of recycled narratives. As one reviewer states: “the cameras are always on
[ . . . ]. In Fury everything that happens is like a movie, or reminds someone
of a movie [ . . . ]. But then, in Baudrillard country the movies are reality”.32
Characters have ‘back-stories’ rather than pasts and their lives have a fi lmic
quality, even if, like the plumber, Schlink, they have only the most minor
of walk-on roles: “A novelistic life, Solanka was forced to concede. Filmic,
too. A life that could be a successful mid-budget feature fi lm.”33 The novel
is saturated with such references that help to create a frame for its poetics
and provide an indication of how to read it. As Furst explains,
The screen for the visual picture is the equivalent of the frame for the
verbal narrative. If the author, narrator, and text form three sides of
that frame, readers form its fourth, completing dimension through
their capacity to construe as real the fictional illusion contained within
the frame.34
In this instance, the frame is based on a mimetic premise, but it proposes

the imitation of a society where all experience is mediated and where simu-
lated or coded structures have replaced the authentic:
the age of simulacra and counterfeits, in which you can fi nd any plea-
sure known to woman or man rendered synthetic, made safe from dis-
ease and guilt—a lo-cal, lo-fi, brilliantly false version of the awkward
world of real blood and guts. Phoney experience that feels so good that
you actually prefer it to the real thing.35
These meditations of Solanka’s are particularly disturbing when taken in

the context of the events he has just been describing: the incestuous rape
(by her father) of Mila, with whom he is now romantically involved. While
lamenting this state of things, his very words evade the corporeal, threat-
ening to empty out the affect from experience and to replace it with the

flattened surface of indifference. The images projected onto the screen of
the novel flicker on and off, sharing the rapid, ephemeral weightlessness of
the cinematic nature of contemporary life in western consumer societies
where the real and its simulacrum are no longer easily distinguishable one
from the other.
Since Midnight’s Children, Rushdie has frequently been associated with
a visual aesthetics in the minds of critics, but how, precisely, does this man-
ifest itself in the context of a novel? As David Lodge reminds us,
A cinematic novelist, then, is one who, as it were, deliberately renounces

some of the freedom of representation and report afforded by the verbal
medium, who imagines and presents his material in primarily visual
terms, and whose visualisations correspond in some significant respect
to the visual effects characteristic of fi lm.36
Fury possesses the fragmented, lacunary quality of the fi lm script where

the camera is there to fill in the gaps between the words, of which there
are many. In the space of two chapters (six and seven), we move from the
cameo of an enraged Asian cab driver, to the murder of the society girls, to
Solanka’s divorce, to a childhood scene in Bombay, a series of juxtaposed
images that we are invited to join up by reading metonymically, as if we
were in front of a screen. If, as Lodge reminds us, the writer must “do
through language what the film-maker can do by moving his camera and
adjusting his lens,”37 it is also up to the reader to make the “leaps of faith”
or contiguous links from fragment to fragment that narrative juxtaposi-
tion suggests.38 In that sense, Fury provides the reader with an experience
of cognitive and aesthetic defamiliarization, similar to that which can be
found in Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy and its fragmentary quality is in part
due to an equivalent aspiration to copy other media.
However, the references to the “lateral leaps” and “variation” of the
“brave new electronic world”39 suggest that the novel exists in an environ-
ment where storytelling has become technical and technological, due to
its commercialization, as Solanka’s successful ‘Little Brain’ project proves;
the original philosophical premise of his doll gets lost in a multimillion-
dollar international franchise, and provides a mise-en-abyme of the ills of
celebrity culture: “This creature of his own imagining, born of his best self
and purest endeavour, was turning before his eyes into the kind of monster
of tawdry celebrity he most profoundly abhorred [ . . . ] a creature of the
entertainment microverse.”40 The novel imitates in its poetics the combina-
tory and condensatory tendencies of visual media, as if it were providing
a ‘treatment’ of a concept, ‘fury,’ for example, an outline for an internet
saga, “The Coming of the Puppet Kings,”41 or the possible ‘development’
of an idea for a film script, “The Murder of the Society Girls,” rather than
the fully-fledged idea or concept itself, or indeed, the real thing. Thus,
for example, the putative detective plot is mooted and then more or less

abandoned by the end of the first part, just as certain characters’ back-sto-
ries are fleshed out, that of Mila’s boyfriend, Eddie, for example, and then
put in storage with the character. This is a fictional mode that relies on an
aesthetics of sampling and zapping, where new layers of images constantly
overlay others, obscuring the original with endless imitations.
It is important to point out at this stage that what is often imagined to
be the seamless naturalism of film is in fact artificial, a convention of refer-
entiality, as Peter Reynolds explains:
Most adaptations of literature in performance do not draw attention

to the fact that they are fictional rather than real, or that the point of
view from which the action is observed is not the only one available.
Illusionism deliberately masks the subjective nature of the performance
text and presents it instead as an objective reality. What the spectator
sees and hears is what he or she is allowed to see.42
In this sense, the conventions of fi lm do not much differ from the conven-
tions of mimetic realism in the novel. While the third-person omniscient
narrator acts as director, stage-managing the dramatic monologues of dif-
ferent characters and their dialogue with Solanka, the flâneur provides the
filter for perception, thanks to his own interior monologues. The subtle
movement between different voices creates a metonymic link that validates
these narrative instances, thanks again to the principle of contiguity, as in
the following extract, where the narrative switches from Mila’s fi rst-person
tale of her traumatic childhood to a seemingly unconnected description of
the flâneur’s environment:
The weather had changed. The heat of the early summer had given
way to a disturbed, patternless time. There were many clouds and too
much rain, and days of morning heat that abruptly turned cold after
lunch, sending shivers through the girls in their summer dresses and the
bare-torsoed rollerbladers in the park, with those mysterious leather
belts strapped tightly across their chests, like self-imposed penances,
just below their pectoral muscles. In the faces of his fellow citizens Pro-
fessor Solanka discerned new bewilderments; the things on which they
had relied, summery summers, cheap gasoline, the pitching arms of
David Cone and yes, even Orlando Hernández, these things had begun
to let them down.43
Here the narrative acts as fi lmic voiceover, filling in the background details.
What Furst describes as characteristic of realist novels corresponds well to
Solanka’s voice in Fury: “the describing voice is that of a traveler; a sur-
veyor of both spaces and libraries, who gives a ‘fragment,’ a ‘piece,’ a ‘slice
of life,’ a ‘picture,’ a ‘case,’ a ‘cutting,’ a ‘class,’ a ‘detail.’”44 The end result
is visual, as she points out: “Density is the outcome of agglomeration, a

metonymic enumeration of one detail after another that produces an over-
determined image in an apotheosis of totalization.”45
The flâneur, then, is instrumentalized by the narration as a surrogate
camera, enabling the book of the fi lm of the city to be written: “This about
New York Professor Solanka liked a lot—this sense of being crowded out
by other people’ stories, of walking like a phantom through a city that was
in the middle of a story which didn’t need him as a character.”46 However,
as this quotation shows, the flâneur is also there to comment. For Wood,
this creates an awkward effect in Rushdie’s text:
Like a good number of contemporary novels, Fury makes use of the

idea of an overloaded fl âneur—a man goes out to record, with all the
writer’s fi neness of observation on his side, what the writer would have
seen were the writer able to speak autobiographically, like the ‘I’ of a
Romantic poem [ . . . ]. Yet this is a difficult form to sustain, because
it is managed and propelled largely by writerly tact and brilliance. In
ordinary hands, where such brilliance is missing, the fl âneur novel
becomes merely a chance for the writer to have his say about some mat-
ters that occupy him; the novel becomes a series of ambulatory essays
of variable interest and quality.47
This accusation may be partly founded, for there are times when Solanka’s
solipsistic running commentary sounds pontificatory and his ritual invo-
cation of fury seems more of a performative gesture towards filling the
void than a convincing conceit. Thus, a tense phone call to the wife he has
abandoned in London is followed by a reflection on emotion, rather than
emotion itself, distancing the narrative from the personal sphere: “Human
life was now lived in the moment before the fury, when the anger grew, or
the moment during—the fury’s hour, the time of the beast set free—or in
the ruined aftermath of a great violence, when the fury ebbed, and chaos
abated, until the tide began, once again, to turn”.48 However, like “‘a figure
with a pair of eyes, or at least a field-glass’ that Henry James sees standing
at each of the millions of windows of the house of fiction,”49 Solanka’s role
is largely to serve as a vehicle for emphasizing the selective nature of all
forms of representation, the effect of metaphorical ‘screening’ or obscuring
which is the unavoidable consequence of any attempt at the visual repre-
sentation or ‘literal’ transposition of events to the screen. As Furst explains,
there are fallacies embedded in the traditional mirror analogy of mimesis
and it would be a mistake to consider the artist’s eye as a “passively reg-
istering camera”50 for, according to Reynolds, the camera does indeed lie:
“The concrete reality of novel images on stage and the photographic real-
ity of those on screen is literally more than meets the eye, and far from
unproblematic.”51 This means that artificiality is encoded within mimesis
and its reality effect, as Furst implies, “The mirror that guarantees the
representational authenticity of nineteenth-century realism can now only

be conceived as a fairground contraption that makes reality an effect that’s
is all mirrors.”52
This is another way of saying that representation is performative, rather
than given, and throws into question the possibility of the literal translation
of reality into words or images that is often the premise behind adaptation:
There are those, for instance [ . . . ] who believe that the adapter’s role
is, as it were, to serve the original author, and to be as faithful to the
spirit of his or her work as possible. [ . . . ] the task should mirror that
of the translator (and arguably of the author of realist fiction on which
so many adaptations are based) and the adapter should aim for what
Michael Meyer, translator of Ibsen and Strindberg, has described as a
clear glass screen that is held up against the original work and through
which the audience are permitted to gaze with an undistorted view. 53
In the context of Fury, the “clear glass screen,” echoing Orwell’s “Good
prose is like a window pane,”54 can be reconfigured ironically as an aware-
ness of the frame and thus of artificiality. The novel’s narrative voice,
whether omniscient or focalized, is a site of translation, and doubly so in
this instance, where the flâneur-observer is adapting the visual perception
of his surroundings for a linguistic medium. The result is not so much trans-
parency as a problematization of that transparency, a trait which, accord-
ing to Barnaby, is already inherent in realism and echoes Furst’s comments
on mirrors:
Authentic literary realism provides the reader with a discursive under-

standing of the socially conditioned act of seeing—the possibilities for
vision—undertaken by the characters depicted. This affords the reader
a heightened consciousness of historical process and the act of repre-
sentation. As a literary stance, realism can thus be read as meta-spec-
tacle: a making-visible of the process whereby consciousness becomes
distorted or concealed by the proliferation of discourse and image that
objectify reality.55
By choosing a spectator-narrator, Rushdie encodes awareness of the spec-

tacle and the act of seeing in his novel and makes readers conscious of their
spectator status within the frame of the book, but also within a society
where authenticity has been superseded by its mediated representation, a
point to which I will now turn my attention.
THE NOVEL AS SCREEN: ENGAGING WITH THE SPECTACLE
The majority of reviewers reproached Fury with its reproduction of, and
complicity with, the society of the spectacle. According to Notaras, “The

book has all the subtlety and depth of a tabloid newspaper headline”;56 for
Boyd Tonkin, “it mimics our current condition of frantic over-stimulation
as much as it explains it”;57 while for Brooke Allen, “Fury is [ . . . ] a pan-
dering to contemporary mores disguised as a critique of them.”58 Wood
feels that “Fury speaks the language of corruption [ . . . ]. It has appar-
ently been corrupted by the very corruption that it decries” and is thus
fatally compromised: “It is one thing to write an allegory or an apologia
about how America has compromised one’s soul, but it is quite another
to publish a novel that so emphatically re-enacts that compromise.”59 As
will be noticed, all the critics pick up on the way the novel appears to be
uncritically reproducing a certain image of contemporary western society.
The implication is that it provides an unproblematic representation of a
flattened world with the aesthetics to match: “The prose is, without excep-
tion, flat and unoriginal, so that the details that Solanka observes lack any
flame.”60 This is certainly correct up to a certain point, but only provides a
partial explanation for the novel’s poetics of simulacra.
Once again, clues are to be found by looking more closely at some of
the more confusing aspects of the novel. According to Wood, “the nearer it
reaches the real, the greater the surface of the real it desecrates.”61 However,
the referential world of the novel is precisely the world of simulacra which
Solanka recognizes as the society of spectacle in all its consumerist glory:
O Dream-America, was civilization’s quest to end in obesity and trivia,

at Roy Rogers and Planet Hollywood, in USA Today and on E!; or in
million-dollar-game-show greed or fly-on-the-wall voyeurism; or in the
eternal confessional booth of Ricki and Oprah and Jerry [ . . . ] ; or in
a spurt of gross-out dumb-and-dumber comedies designed for young
people who sat in darkness howling their ignorance at the silver screen;
or even at the unattainable tables of Jean-Georges Vongerichten and
Alain Ducasse? [ . . . ]. Who settled for George W. Gush’s boredom
and Al Bore’s gush? Who let Charlton Heston out of his cage and then
asked why children were getting shot?62
In marrying the referential and the simulacral, Fury is reminiscent of pop

art, re-interpreted by Hal Foster as an exposé of “complacent consump-
tion,” rather than “an embrace of the simulacral commodity-sign”63 in a
society of “serial production and consumption.”64 According to Foster, “If
you enter it [society] totally, you might expose it; that is, you might reveal its
automatism, even its autism, through your own excessive example.”65 This
suggests the possibility of a strategic re-enactment or reproduction of the
society of the spectacle through art. Chapter twelve of the novel is entirely
taken up by an extract from Solanka’s science-fiction web saga in progress,
printed in different type and entitled: “Let the Fittest Survive: The Coming
of the Puppet Kings.”66 The end of the chapter attempts to imitate an inter-
net site, inviting us to read as if from a screen, and reproduces some of the

typographical particularities of the electronic medium: “Click on the links
for more PK info or on the icons below for answers to 101 FAQs, access to
interactivities, and to see the wider range of PK merchandise available for
INSTANT shipping NOW. All major credit cards accepted.”67 In seeking
to effect a crossover between two different languages or media, the visual
and the written, the novel accentuates the gaps between the two and sug-
gests the possibility of an ironic, self-reflexive, if not to say metafictional,
reading. The novel becomes a screen reproducing, but also exposing, the
artificiality of an image-obsessed society by heightening the reader’s aware-
ness of the materiality of that frame or screen.
Strategic complicity also characterizes the Baudelairean flâneur, who,
as Chris Jenks explains, is not necessarily continuous with the commod-
ity form itself: “On the contrary he is part of the solution. Baudelaire is
speaking on behalf of his time [ . . . ]. But he is speaking reflexively; per-
haps as an ironist but never as a crude apologist.”68 Such reflexiveness is
discernible in the novel’s implicit criticism of the society of the spectacle
and consumerism:
And as well as presenting the dream of an ideally beautiful America in

which all women were babes and all men were Marks, after doing the
basic work of selling pizza and SUVs and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter,
beyond money management and the new ditditdit of the dotcoms, the
commercials soothed America’s pain [ . . . ] the agony of the howling
void within each watching, semi-conscious self.69
If we are to believe Jenks again, the modern flâneur can indeed be re-
invented as a critical force:
As Harrison and Wood playfully suggested: “Were the Baudelairean

fl âneur displaced from the Paris of the 1860s to be reincarnated in the
New York of the 1960s, he might have recognised his ironic but fasci-
nated regard in the paintings of Roy Lichtenstein or an Andy Warhol.
Their work shares with the theoretical work of Roland Barthes and even
of Guy Debord the tendency to treat the modern as a form of surface,
which is revealing of meaning and value by virtue of its artificiality.”70
Faced with the alienating ascendancy of the information order and the spec-
tacle of conspicuous consumption, imitative irony seems to be one of the
few resources that can fill the discursive hole left by the death of meaning,
originality, and feeling. In such a context, the novel’s realist aesthetics is
shown trying, but failing to compensate for the lack of substance displayed
by contemporary reality. The political drama played out on the South Pacific
island of Lilliput-Blefuscu that Solanka visits in the penultimate chapter of
the novel, only to fi nd his own face reproduced on the masks of the rebels
inspired by his web saga, illustrates the triumph of Baudrillard’s empire of

simulation: “Here in the Theatre of Masks the original, the man with no
mask, was perceived as the mask’s imitator: the creation was real while the
creator was the counterfeit!”71
As Barnaby remarks: “fiction that involves mimicry risks literal associa-
tion with the discourses that it replays, in which case any critical distance
from the spectacle that the novel achieves would collapse and the text would
simply reinforce those discourses to the reader.”72 However, a solution may
lie in the way a certain type of ‘avant-garde’ realism can actively engage
with the spectacle: “A dialogue between the concept of realism and spec-
tacle prevents this collapse of meaning by emphasising the novel’s depiction
of social relationships mediated by visual culture as opposed to its mere
rendering of visual objects as part of a naturalistic setting.”73 This dialogue
exists in Fury, where the characters are placed in a “spectatorial relation-
ship”74 to reality and indeed to themselves and others. Thus, instead of liv-
ing spontaneously, they direct their lives according to the scripts on offer,
so that the dramatic potential of the momentous is smoothed out into déjà
vu, as, for instance, when Solanka is threatened by Mila’s armed and dan-
gerous boyfriend:
For Eddie, his movie-hoodlum riffs possessed more authenticity than

any more natural pattern of speech [ . . . ] at his disposal. In his mind’s
eye he was Samuel L. Jackson, about to waste some punk. He was a
man in a black suit, a man named after a colour, slicing up a trussed-up
victim to the tune of “Stuck in the Middle with You.”75
It is worth noting in passing that the weight of pastiche and uncritical

complicity is laid on the shoulders of the character, allowing the narrative
voice to distance itself from the artificial state of affairs that prevails: “The
experience on offer in the movie theatres now felt more real than what
was available in the world outside.”76 By drawing attention to the collapse
between realism and representation, the novel heightens awareness of the
one-dimensionality that characterizes an image-dependent world.
Rushdie’s transformation from postcolonial poster boy into the mimic
man of Baudrillardean theory, although unexpected, may nevertheless
reveal possibilities for questioning a westernized, neo-imperialist con-
sumer capitalism and its dissemination via a multitude of screens. The
pure mimetism of the beginning of chapter eleven that reproduces a seem-
ingly perfect pastiche of the slam-cum-rap, Black-Hispanic idiom of a
local radio talk show, in fact takes on a distancing function because its
seamless imitation is self-consciously framed within quotation marks and
by the fl âneur’s musings. In this sense, it resembles one of the non-chron-
ological chapters or frames in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, which seems to be
a narrative in itself, initially unconnected to the rest, but whose function
is to foreground the artificial status of the medium. The thematic con-
cerns of the passage are also linked to the society of the spectacle, as its

references to The Matrix and the fatal exchange between human beings
and machines would seem to suggest:
“In the future, sure theen’, they don’t listen no more to this type talk
radio. Or, jou know what’ I theen’? Porhap’ the radio weel listen to oss.
We’ll be like the entortainmon’ and the machines weel be the audien’,
an’ own the station, and we all like work for them.”—“Yo, lissen up.
Dunno what jive sci-fi crap ol’ Speedy Gonzalez there was handin’ out.
Sound to me like he rent The Matrix too many times.”77
Thus the “purportedly plain artlessness” of mimesis “turns out, on reread-

ing, to be a screen for a complex, inventive, self-conscious artistry”78 and
pastiche veers into parody, with more than a hint of indirect or Menippean
satire. By encouraging a meta-spectacular awareness in its readers, the text
re-instates agency and fosters the empowerment necessary to respond to the
conditions of the spectacle and fi nd a critical stance in relation to the simu-
lacrum. Indeed, fictionalizing hyperreality may be a way of trying to recon-
nect with the real, thanks to the imagination, as Eugene L. Arva suggests:
“Re-presenting postmodern hyperreality (the excess of reality provided by
an omnipresent process of simulation and excessive layers of simulacra) as
fictional reality is what I call writing the vanishing real by a deliberate and
rigorous, but also playful, use of imagination.”79 Ultimately, it is Solanka’s
imaginative reconfiguration of this excessive reality as its fantastic double
in his “Galileo-1” web saga that provides him with a metaphor for the tran-
scendental and the sublime, the “Galileo moments”80 or crucial live-or-die
situations that defi ne humanity and that are threatened with extinction by
the hyperreal.
CONCLUSION
Resolutely visual and cinematic like Rushdie’s earlier novels, Fury relies
heavily on mimetic realism, unlike those previous works. However, the soci-
ety that he is describing is one where everything is always already on show,
if not to say, fictional. Thus the aesthetics of the novel is fi nally aporetic,
striving for the authentic amidst the artificial, struggling to give some sub-
stance to a world which “value[s] the signifier above the signified.”81 Fury
also shares some of the pitfalls of the cinematic mode in the very light-
ness of its being, its ephemeral and superficial nature, its “here today, gone
tomorrow” feel. It exhibits a certain existential pessimism, complicated by
the ambiguous tragic-comic ending which leaves Solanka frolicking on a
children’s bouncy castle, and may, at times, appear dangerously close to “a
tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”82
Can the articulation of emptiness suggest ways of coming to terms
with this emptiness? Possibly, late-capitalist consumer society needs such

“walking shadows” or “poor players,” as Solanka, “strutting and fretting
their hour upon the stage,” not merely as a temporary distraction from its
plight of affectlessness, but as a way of grasping all that has been lost. Con-
sciousness of this loss, its acute visualization, the distorted mirror image
Fury’s poetics of simulacra holds up to the commodified paradigm of con-
temporary experience, may suggest a way of rediscovering real emotion and
a sense of catastrophe, compromised by an apparently post-cathartic age.
One cannot help wondering how the events of 9/11, the confrontation with
tangible tragedy at the heart of New York, the very epicenter of postmod-
ern fakery depicted in Fury, might have altered Rushdie’s narrative, either
exacerbating its mimetic tendencies and its struggle for representation, or,
on the contrary, tipping the novel further into escapist cyber fantasy as a
way of dealing with the shock of the unprecedented event in the desert of
the post-real.
NOTES
1. Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz (London: BFI, 1992), 18.
2. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Picador, 1981), 216–218.
3. See Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capital-
ism (London: Verso, 1991), 16–19.
4. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge,
1991), 2.
5. Scott Lash, A Critique of Information (London: Sage, 2002), vii.
6. Steven Connor, “Postmodernism and Literature,” in The Cambridge Com-
panion to Postmodernism, ed. Steven Connor (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2004), 77.
7. Boyd Tonkin evokes “an almost MP3 level of compression”; see Boyd Tonkin,
“Fury! The Savaging of Salman Rushdie,” The Independent, September 7,
2001, accessed June 23, 2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/
profi les/fury-the-savaging-of-salman-rushdie-668424.html.
8. Sukhdev Sandhu, “A Page in the Life: Salman Rushdie,” The Telegraph,
October 11, 2010, accessed November 20, 2010, http://www.telegraph.
co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/8048310/A-Page-in-the-Life-Salman-
Rushdie.html.
9. Rushdie acknowledged this debt in a recent interview, “Step Across This
Line,” Round table discussion, Fête du livre (Aix-en-Provence, October 18,
2008), no text available.
10. Tonkin, “Fury! The Savaging of Salman Rushdie.”
11. James Wood, “The Nobu Novel: Salman Rushdie’s Fury,” The New Repub-
lic, September 24, 2001, 33.
12. Lilian Furst, All is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction (Dur-
ham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), viii–ix.
13. A. Anshuman Mondal, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury: The Rein-
vention of Location,” in The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie, ed.
Abdulrazak Gurnah (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 176.
14. Wood, “The Nobu Novel,” 33.
15. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in French Literary Theory Today, ed.
Tzvetan Todorov, trans. Ronald Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982), 11–12.

17. Matt Thorne, “Rich Man’s Blues,” The Independent on Sunday, August 26,
2001, 15.
18. Rushdie, Fury (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001), 56.
21. Rushdie, “John Berger,” in Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie (Lon-
don: Granta, 1992), 210.
23. Gabriela Notaras, “A Glib Satire of Contemporary Life in the US,” World
Socialist Website, September 12, 2003, accessed June 23, 2009, http://www.
wsws.org/articles/2003/sep2003/rush-s12.shtml.
24. Tom Shone, “Rage Ruins Rushdie’s Day: His New York Novel Sputters,”
The New York Observer, August 26, 2001, accessed June 23, 2009, http://
www.observer.com/node/44908.
25. Wood, “The Nobu Novel, “34.
26. Edward Barnaby, “The Realist Novel as Meta-Spectacle,” Journal of Narra-
tive Theory 38.1 (Winter 2008): 41.
28. Barnaby, “The Realist Novel as Meta-Spectacle,” 40.
29. Mondal, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury,” 176.
30. Julian Wolfreys, Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake
to Dickens (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 95.
31. Frederic Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern,
1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), 100.
32. GoodReports.Net 2001, “Fury By Salman Rushdie,” October 20, 2001,
accessed April 13, 2009, http://www.goodreports.net/reviews/fury.htm.
34. Furst, All is True, 66.
36. David Lodge, Working with Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nine-
teenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature (London: Ark, 1986), 96.
37. Lodge, Working with Structuralism, 97.
38. See Julie Scanlon, “Why do We still Want to Believe? The Case of Annie
Proulx,” Journal of Narrative Theory 38.1 (Winter 2008): 95.
42. Peter Reynolds, “Introduction,” in Novel Images: Literature in Performance,
ed. Peter Reynolds (London: Routledge, 1993), 1.
51. Reynolds, “Introduction,” 3.
52. Furst, All is True, 25–26.
53. Reynolds, “Introduction,” 9.
54. George Orwell, “Why I Write,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and
Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 1, An Age Like This, 1920–1940 (Harmond-
sworth: Penguin, 1982), 30.

56. Notaras, “A Glib Satire of Contemporary Life in the US.”
57. Tonkin, “Fury! The Savaging of Salman Rushdie.”
58. Brooke Allen, “Fury by Salman Rushdie,” The Atlantic Monthly, Sep-
tember 18, 2001, accessed April 13, 2009, http://www.powells.com/
review/2001_09_18.html.
63. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Cen-
tury (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 130.
64. Foster, The Return of the Real, 131.
65. Foster, The Return of the Real, 131.
68. Chris Jenks, “Watching Your Step: The History and Practice of the Flâneur,”
in Visual Culture, ed. Chris Jenks (London: Routledge, 1995), 148.
70. Jenks, “Watching Your Step,” 148. Will Self also makes the connection
between Debord and the critical stance of the fl âneur in a recent inter-
view where he explains how drifting can be a way of disrupting the
phantasmagoric falseness of the modern city; see Beth Harper & David
Belaga, “Interview with Will Self,” La Clé des Langues (ENS LSH), May
29, 2009, accessed June 23, 2009. http://cle.ens-lsh.fr/1245750692171/0/
fiche article/.
76. Rushdie, Fury, 230–231.
79. Eugene Arva, “Writing the Vanishing Real: Hyperreality and Magical Real-
ism,” Journal of Narrative Theory 38.1 (Winter 2008): 72.
82. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 5.5 26–28, in The Complete Works of Wil-
liam Shakespeare, ed. John Duver Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1981), 880.
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Abrams, David. “Mr Rushdie Comes to America.” January Magazine, Septem-

ber 2001. Accessed April 13, 2009. http://januarymagazine.com/fiction/rush-
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Allen, Brooke. “Fury by Salman Rushdie.” The Atlantic Monthly, September 18, 2001.
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Arva, Eugene, L. “Writing the Vanishing Real: Hyperreality and Magical Real-
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Barnaby, Edward. “The Realist Novel as Meta-Spectacle.” Journal of Narrative
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Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Paris: Seuil, 1970.
. “The Reality Effect.” In French Literary Theory Today, edited by Tzvetan
Todorov, trans. Ronald Carter (“L’Effet du réel,” in Littérature et réalité, Roland
Barthes, Leo Bersani, Philippe Hamon, Michael Riffaterre, and Ian Watt; Paris:
Seuil), 11–17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Connor, Steven. “Postmodernism and Literature.” In The Cambridge Companion
to Postmodernism, edited by Steven Connor, 62–81. Cambridge: Cambridge
Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.
Furst, Lilian R. All is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction. Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 1995.
Good Reports.net. “Fury By Salman Rushdie.” October 20, 2001. Accessed April
13, 2009. http://www.goodreports.net/reviews/fury.htm.
Harper, Beth and David Belaga. “Interview with Will Self.” La Clé des Langues
(ENS LSH), May 29, 2009. Accessed June 23, 2009. http://cle.ens-lsh.
fr/1245750692171/0/fiche article/.
Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1991.
Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Lon-
don: Verso, 1991.
. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998.
London: Verso, 1998.
Jenks, Chris. “Watching Your Step: The History and Practice of the Flâneur.” In
Visual Culture, edited by Chris Jenks, 142–160. London: Routledge, 1995.
Lash, Scott. A Critique of Information. London: Sage, 2002.
Lodge, David. Working with Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth-
and Twentieth-Century Literature. London: Ark, 1986.
Mondal, Anshuman. A. “The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury: The Rein-
vention of Location.” In The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie,
edited by Abdulrazak Gurnah, 169–183. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007.
Notaras, Gabriela. “A Glib Satire of Contemporary Life in the US.” World Social-
ist Website, September 12, 2003. Accessed June 23, 2009. http://www.wsws.
org/articles/2003/sep2003/rush-s12.shtml.
Orwell, George. “Why I Write.” In George Orwell, The Collected Essays, Jour-
nalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 1, An Age Like This, 1920–1940,
23–30. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982.
Reynolds, Peter. “Introduction.” In Novel Images: Literature in Performance,
edited by Peter Reynolds, 1–16. London: Routledge, 1993.
. “John Berger.” In Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: , Salman Rush-
die, 209–212. London: Granta, 1991.
. The Wizard of Oz: London: BFI, 1992.
. Fury. London: Jonathan Cape, 2001.
. “Step Across This Line.” Round table discussion, Fête du livre, Aix-en-
Provence, October 18, 2008; no text available.
Sandhu, Sukhdev. “A Page in the Life: Salman Rushdie.” The Telegraph, October
11, 2010. Accessed November 20, 2010. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/
books/bookreviews/8048310/A-Page-in-the-Life-Salman-Rushdie.html.
Scanlon, Julie. “Why do We still Want to Believe? The Case of Annie Proulx.”
Journal of Narrative Theory 38.1 (Winter 2008): 86–110.
Shone, Tom. “Rage Ruins Rushdie’s Day: His New York Novel Sputters.” The
New York Observer, August 26, 2001. Accessed June 23, 2009. http://www.
observer.com/node/44908.

Thorne, Matt. “Rich Man’s Blues.” The Independent on Sunday, August 26, 2001,
15.
Tonkin, Boyd. “Fury! The Savaging of Salman Rushdie.” The Independent, Sep-
tember 7, 2001. Accessed June 23, 2009. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/
people/profi les/fury-the-savaging-of-salman-rushdie-668424.html.
Wolfreys, Julian. Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to
Dickens. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998.
Wood, James. “The Nobu Novel: Salman Rushdie’s Fury.” The New Republic,
September 24, 2001, 32–36.

12 Media Competition and
Visual Displeasure in
Salman Rushdie’s Fiction
Mita Banerjee
Literature, it has been argued, is the sole medium which possesses the abil-
ity to reflect, and hence contain within itself, other media. As Sandra Poppe
has noted, literature has responded to the challenge posed by other media
(such as the advent of photography and fi lm towards the end of the nine-
teenth century) by becoming newly aware of its own faculties and preroga-
tives. In this reflection, which is at once a reflection by literature of other
media and a reflection of literature about itself, language is said by Poppe
to be paramount. She writes,
With language as its medium, literature has the possibility to address

other arts, to describe them and integrate them into its plot. Yet, lan-
guage also brings with it another faculty [ . . . ]. Through language,
characteristics can be named, trains of thought and arguments can be
comprehended, themes can be discussed. Language as a nuanced means
of expression provides man with the ability to reflect, to compare. It is
this faculty which makes for literature’s advantage over other media.1
While this statement may in itself be open to discussion, posit as it does

a certain media hierarchy, a hierarchy in which literature reigns supreme,
the aim of this essay is to inquire whether the assumption of such literary
supremacy does not also hold true for literary genres or movements which
originally began as counter-discourses to all kinds of ‘establishments,’ lit-
erary and otherwise. The idea of ‘literary media reflections’ (literarische
Medienrefl exionen) as potential literary supremacy seems to hold true,
I will propose in the following, for Salman Rushdie’s oeuvre in particu-
lar. Uncannily, it is this literary bias which renders Rushdie, in this one
instance, curiously un-postmodern, and which links him to modernist writ-
ers such as Virginia Woolf. As Poppe has suggested, “In her 1926 essay The
Cinema, Virginia Woolf judges the visual medium rather harshly. Cinema,
she argues, is for barbarians, those who passively expose themselves to the
constant stream of images.”2
It must of course be conceded that one ‘case’ (such as Rushdie’s) is hardly
enough to presuppose a potential bias on the part of an entire genre such as

Media Competition and Visual Displeasure 203
postcolonial literature, in favor of literature as a medium. Yet, even as this
caveat must certainly be made, it seems curious that the caricature of media
conceived as ‘dull’ in comparison with literature surfaces, for instance, in
Hanif Kureishi’s depiction of a TV-addict from Eastern Europe in Gabriel’s
Gift (2001). My aim in this essay is hence twofold. First, I want to map
the idea of the ‘visual turn’ onto the discussion on media competition in
a world where literature has long become only one medium among many.
Second, I am interested in the ways in which the depiction of media literacy
can come to function as a criterion of (cultural) difference: thus, a given
community’s inadeptness at using a certain medium marks this community
as culturally illiterate. The critique of the media user or the user of a certain
medium hence becomes a critique of the medium itself; stereotyping here
works both on an ‘ethnic’ and a medial level.
It is interesting to note that in Rushdie’s oeuvre two references to visual-
ity (especially to fi lm) occur at the same time. As a host of critics have sug-
gested, Rushdie’s prose at times engages in ‘fi lmic writing.’ His prose hence
mimics other media, which it transforms into a literary aesthetics. Yet, as I
will try to argue in this essay, there is nevertheless a running commentary—
and a commentary running through Rushdie’s oeuvre—which stereotypes
certain social and cultural groups (such as women and Eastern European
immigrants) according to their use of certain media. It is this paradox which
this essay sets out to explore: How can one and the same author practice in
his narratives the art of ‘filmic writing,’ mimic in his work the visual aes-
thetics of film and photography, while at the same time depicting women,
and Eastern European women in particular, as stupid (because passive)
consumers of the unsophisticated medium of television? Filmic writing is
thus constantly at odds with the discourse of media competition, a compe-
tition which, I will suggest, can be traced in both Kureishi’s Gabriel’s Gift
and in a number of Rushdie’s novels, in his early work The Satanic Verses
(1988) as much as his more recent novels, Fury (2001) and Shalimar the
Clown (2005). The long-standing, colonialist idea of native ‘backwardness’
or primitivism is thus mapped onto a universe of media competition. Media
illiteracy becomes a metaphor of a deep-seated, much more fundamental
cultural incomprehension. What this mapping of an assumed difference
onto the sphere of media competition or media illiteracy may suggest is the
significance that media have for our time and society. In this essay, I will
hence be concerned with the ways in which the discipline of media studies
may intersect with postcolonial as well as cultural studies.
At the same time, the visual turn may have triggered a media back-
lash on the part of literature as a medium. What may be implicit in the
idea of literature’s ability to contain all other media within itself is less a
dialogue in which each mediums’ diverse faculties are related to the fac-
ulties of other media, but a competition in which one medium becomes
supra-mediary, and is credited with being a cultural reservoir far above
the cultural comprehensiveness of other media. Seen from this vantage

204 Mita Banerjee
point, other media—and television in particular, as the younger, some-
what duller brother of fi lm—are seen as Johnny come latelies in an age of
media variety (Medienvielfalt). 3
TV ADDICTS FROM EASTERN EUROPE
What may be interesting in this context is that Eastern Europeans may

actually have come to be the skeletons in the closet of postcolonial litera-
ture. Even more importantly for my purposes here, however, may be the
fact that their depiction as culturally ‘backward’ is conveyed through the
idea of media illiteracy. In Kureishi’s Gabriel’s Gift, then, Hannah, the nar-
rator’s au pair is portrayed as follows:
What she certainly could do was watch TV [ . . . ]. Hannah had a queer

look, for her eyes, instead of focusing on the same point in the normal
way, pointed in different directions. He wondered if she might be able
to watch two television programmes simultaneously, on different chan-
nels, on each side of the room.4
Curiously enough, such depiction, ironic as it is, given the young narrator’s
aversion to being babysat in the first place, seems to reproduce a stereotype
common of western mainstream depictions of Eastern Europeans after the
fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. Eastern Europeans, it was argued, were a dire
case of media starvation: a craving for the capitalist trinity of what in West
Germany was ridiculed as the East German mantra after the downfall of
communism: ‘Video, Marlboro, and Coca-Cola.’ In Hannah’s case, this star-
vation for anything western links media illiteracy with culinary barbarism:
Hannah, whose only qualification with children was the possibility

that she might once have been a child herself, at least knew how to eat.
[ . . . ] Hannah could eat for England; she saw any amount of food in
front of her as a challenge [ . . . ]. Once, Gabriel found her squeezing a
tube of tomato puree down her throat.5
Squeezing tomato paste down one’s throat hardly qualifies as culinary

literacy; Kureishi’s Eastern European immigrant is hence unable even to
authenticate the act of watching TV with proper junk food. Hannah’s TV
addiction and her obesity may mark her as couch potato, but the habit of
staring at a blank screen and the absence of potato chips mark her inadept-
ness at carrying this act of cultural literacy through. What this ascription
of media illiteracy (and culinary barbarism) implies is that the postcolo-
nial is emphatically distinguished from the postcommunist. As David
Chioni-Moore has emphasized, from the vantage point of contemporary

postcolonial fiction, the ‘post’ in ‘postcolonial’ is said to be radically differ-
ent from the ‘post’ in ‘postcommunist.’6 He writes,
In view of [many] postcolonial/post-Soviet parallels, two silences are

striking. The fi rst is the silence of Western postcolonial studies today
on the subject of the former Soviet sphere. And the second, mirrored
silence is the failure of many scholars [ . . . ] specializing in formerly
Soviet-controlled lands to think of their regions in [ . . . ] postcolonial
terms [ . . . ] South does not speak East [ . . . ].7
What interests me here is that in Gabriel’s Gift this distinction between the
postcolonial and the postcommunist should be made through the ascription
of media illiteracy and the presumed addiction of Eastern Europeans to the
dull medium of television.8 My aim is to inquiry whether the ascription of
media illiteracy has not become a form of media minstrelsy: the assumption
that those communities which are deemed to be other have no command
whatsoever of a media language which has come to be the lingua franca of
the new millennium. I believe that, in Gabriel’s Gift as much as in Rush-
die’s work, such media distortion—as the ascription of media illiteracy—is
mapped onto the bodies of those who, arguably, remain outside the literary
universe of true postcoloniality, a universe which, characteristically, seems
to be male.
UN-POSTCOLONIAL COUCH POTATOES
A gendered ascription of media illiteracy recurs in Rushdie’s fiction, and

it can be traced in virtually all his novels to date. Yet, unlike in Kureishi’s
Gabriel’s Gift, it is not Eastern Europeans that are the butt of the joke
(except in Fury, to which I will return below), but ‘postcolonial’ (or rather,
not properly postcolonial) women. Rushdie’s fiction pits two kinds of visu-
ality against each other: the visuality of metaphor of which literature as a
medium is the master, and the dull visuality of the TV screen. In the latter
case, medium and message are collapsed into one another, in an uncanny
if differently connoted replay of Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum that
the medium is the message. In Rushdie’s fiction, what seems to be ridiculed
is the act, on the part of pre-postcolonial women, of staring at a screen
which, given the dullness of its content, might as well be blank. Film or TV
fare, the visual content transported through the screen, is hardly addressed;
what matters more is the act—and misguided act—of TV consumption.
Even more importantly, this media illiteracy or consumption of a medium
conceived by the literary narrative as dull is itself symptomatic of a much
deeper lack: the failure to conform to the dictum of hybridity which is so
symptomatic of Rushdie’s postcolonial credo.

206 Mita Banerjee
Female caricature is tied in Rushdie’s oeuvre to the fiction of certainty.
These female literary incarnations of what the narrative posits as the wrong
kind of postcoloniality, moreover, could not be more disturbing in their
collapsing of intellectual dullness with physical obesity. These women’s
weight, the narrative stresses, is what anchors them in a world of free-
floating signifiers; their bulkiness hence signifies what is in fact a lack of
cultural differentiation. They are both physically and intellectually unable
to move; and it is due to this inability that they are literally left behind by
Rushdie’s narrative. The fi rst incarnation of such a doubling of female obe-
sity with TV addiction occurs in The Satanic Verses. For Hind, the search
for certainty leads only to the reality of obesity:
As she devoured the highly spiced dishes of Hyderabad and the high-
falutin yoghurt sauces of Lucknow her body began to alter, because all
that food had to fi nd a home somewhere, and she began to resemble the
wide rolling land mass itself, the subcontinent without frontiers [ . . . ].
Mr. Muhammad Sufiyan, however, gained no weight: not a tola, not
an ounce.9
This passage pits the female nostalgia for home and cultural certainty
against the male embracing of cultural hybridity. This male agility, in turn,
is both intellectual and physical; as this passage suggests, the male migrant
becomes cosmopolitan, the female immigrant becomes obese. It is her nos-
talgia for home, literally, which makes Hind as obese as unattractive; she
simply cannot go with the flow (of postcolonial hybridity). What is more,
the incessant intake of food from ‘home’ parallels an incessant intake of
canned entertainment from India. A true couch potato of a pre-postcolo-
nial kind, Hind watches video tapes from ‘home’:
To deny the ghosts outside [ . . . ], she stayed indoors, sending others

out for kitchen provisions and household necessities, and also for the
endless supply of Bengali and Hindi movies on VCR through which
(along with her ever-increasing hoard of Indian movie magazines) she
could stay in touch with events in the ‘real’ world.10
In the case of Hind’s TV addiction what is at stake is not the nostalgic nego-
tiation of ‘home’ and diaspora which Shuchi Kothari and Nabeel Zuberi
have recently traced for Indian diasporic audiences of Bollywood fi lm but
rather a complete lack of cultural (read: postcolonial) enlightenment. As
Kothari and Zuberi observe, however, viewing ‘traditions’ in the diaspora
must be regarded as a highly complex process:
Of course, some of us believe that most of these Bollywood films ped-

dle patriarchal and conservative fantasies in their mediation between
diaspora and homeland. Nevertheless we understand their emotional

affect and must acknowledge that our affection for the codes and styles
that have formed the hegemonic South Asian media system and its
address to the spectator-listener-consumer. The melodramatic excess
of these films offers familiar pleasures, though we may at the same time
have a critical or ironic attitude to their ideologies.11
Kothari and Zuberi hence emphasize the fact that diasporic audiences’
‘visual pleasure,’ to use Laura Mulvey’s term in a postcolonial context,
does not automatically entail or imply the acquiescence on the part of these
diasporic audiences to the fi lms’ often conservative values. Hind, like the
viewers discussed in Kothari and Zuberi’s study, watches Hindi movies
from home; yet, as this passage indicates were it read against the grain,
Hind too negotiates Indianness as she watches not only Hindi movies but
Bengali ones as well. Hers, too, is a dynamic, hybrid Indianness, even if it is
not quite a cosmopolitan one. In Rushdie’s work, on the other hand, visual
pleasure can, paradoxically, only be literary pleasure; taking pleasure in
the visuality of film and television signals only cultural benightedness. I am
hence concerned with the ways in which the assumption of the ‘dullness’
of a certain medium is collapsed into the assumption of the dullness of the
consumers of this medium.12 What is at stake here, then, may in fact be
different modes of media consumption: there can be, if we read Rushdie’s
narrative with the grain, no sophisticated watching of a dull medium.
Thus, Hind has clearly overslept the enlightenment, a fact of which both
the medium and the content of her media consumption seem symptomatic.
Rushdie’s is not so much a critique of Islam here than it is a critique of all
cultural cohesion and lack of hybridity or ambivalence.13 Hind is said by the
narrative to cling to a world which is no more and which perhaps never was
to begin with. Symptomatic of Rushdie’s introduction of a media hierarchy
is that this cultural artificiality should be tied to and expressed through TV
as a medium. The visuality of TV is hence implicitly portrayed as a lesser
medium; a medium moored in consumption, not reflection (video, Marl-
boro . . . ). What seems questionable, however, is that this media hierarchy
should be gendered. In Rushdie’s as much as in Kureishi’s work, it is women
who have succumbed to the lure of what is (at least according to the postco-
lonial writers’ literary imaginaries) a brainless medium. What links Rush-
die’s Hind to Kureishi’s Hannah is that she, too, remains outside the scope
of the postcolonial, a lack for which her habits of media consumptions are
seen as symptomatic. To take up David Chioni Moore’s memorable phrase,
Hannah is not postcolonial because she is postcommunist; Hind, on the
other hand, is not postcolonial because she fails to exchange the video tape
for the book, and—even more importantly—because she fails to exchange
the dull visuality of television for the supreme metaphoricity of literature.
Precisely in the same year that Gabriel’s Gift was published, Rushdie in
Fury introduces an Eastern European character into his postcolonial fiction.
This implies that even if the question whether the post- in postcommunist is

208 Mita Banerjee
the post- in postcolonial is ultimately negated by postcolonial fiction in its
emphatic distinction of the postcommunist from the postcolonial, Eastern
Europeanness is nevertheless addressed—and it is addressed through the
concept of media variety (Medienvielfalt) as a battle ground.
WOMEN AS LITTLE BRAINS: FURY
The shift from The Satanic Verses to Fury is half a literary career, and
one of unprecedented acclaim in the realm of postcolonial literature. Rush-
die, the shunner of all certainties and conventions, was knighted in 2007.
What, then, of the brainless medium and those who have been enthralled
by it, twenty-three years after The Satanic Verses? Curiously enough, in an
uncanny echo of both Kureishi’s Hannah and Rushdie’s Hind, the female
addict to a brainless medium recurs in Fury, and she recurs as an East-
ern European woman aptly nicknamed ‘Little Brain.’ Yet, the make-over
of Hind in Fury at fi rst seems complete: Mila Milo, the young Serbian
woman, is both slim and attractive; there is in her no trace of Hind’s bulki-
ness and intellectual inertia, or so it would seem. Nevertheless, there is in
Fury the same distinction, in both gender and media terms, between lit-
erature and TV, or popular culture more generally. For at the center of the
narrative is Professor Malik Solanka, the literary master and, crucially, the
manipulator of popular culture. This is a variation of ‘literarische Medien-
reflexionen’: not only can literature as a medium contain and reflect other
media (especially the visual dullness of television), but the literary master
can metamorphose into to TV magnate without any training whatsoever.
Solanka, the literary master, cannot only invent a (literary) figure which
seems to have been made for television, but he can go on to write his own
screenplay with symptomatic ease:
Then to the consternation of his fellows [ . . . ] he resigned his tenured

position at King’s, Cambridge [ . . . ]. Soon afterward he plunged into,
yes, television; which drew down much predictably envious scorn, espe-
cially when the BBC commissioned him to develop a late-night series
of popular history-of-philosophy programs whose protagonists would
be Professor Solanka’s notorious collection of outsize egghead dolls, all
made by himself.14
Crucially, it is his literary mastery which makes him a commander of

other media. Not only—or so the proponents of a media hierarchy would
allege—can literature contain all other media, but the literary master (the
author) can automatically excel in the making of all other media formats.
This, of course, would seem to completely negate all assumptions about
fi lmic auteurs such as, for instance, François Truffaut or Pedro Almodo-
var. This is the difference between fi lmic writing (fi lmisches Schreiben)

and literary supremacy. As Christian von Tschilschke has argued, the
assumption of ‘fi lmisches Schreiben’ no longer privileges one medium (lit-
erature) over another (other media), but instead conceives of media rela-
tions as dialogical:
The traditional hierarchy among media, which rested on the convic-

tion that literature is superior to film, has been overcome, and has
made way for the idea of a complex interconnectedness of different
media, each of which is of equal value to the others, yet commands its
own artistic means of expression which can be differentiated in media-
related terms.15
In Rushdie’s oeuvre, ‘filmisches Schreiben’—and the adequate, legitimate

visuality of film—is radically denied; literature does not try to mimic fi lm
but instead pronounces value judgments both over the dullness of fi lm (as
television’s format) and the imbecility of those who have succumbed to
its lure. Besides, Professor Solanka renounces the literary—resigning from
King’s College to work for television—not because he has discovered his
love for the differently visual, but because he wants to put the assump-
tion of literature’s supremacy over all other media to the test. He wants to
manipulate television with the power of the literary.
Remarkably, moreover, Solanka is not only a commander of media both
sophisticated and dull, but his literary craftsmanship is also tied to the idea
of a culinary connoisseur, in an exact reversal of Hannah and her tube of
tomato paste. Professor Solanka, the literary master, knows what to watch
(or rather, what not to watch) and what to eat:
Across the street from Pythia’s phony Assyrian palace, the city’s best
simulacrum of a Viennese Kaffeehaus was just opening its doors. [ . . . ]
Approaching the counter with its refrigerated display of the great cakes
of Austria, he passed over the excellent-looking Sacher gâteau and
asked, instead, for a piece of Linzertorte.16
Paradoxically, in this brave new world of media competition, postcoloni-

ality—as the training in European literary culture, even if this training
was originally ‘administered’ by the colonial education system—becomes
an asset, an asset which elevates postcoloniality above postcommunism. In
Fury, literary sophistication—the prerogative of the literary author over the
mere ‘writer’ of screenplays—is conceived as a certain savoir vivre which
can also be translated into all other walks of life, especially the fi ne din-
ing to which the postcolonial and cosmopolitan past qualifies the male
protagonist. In order to demonstrate its supremacy, literature must at least
address other media, if only to assert their deficiency. This declaring of
supremacy by default, moreover, recurs not only on a media, but also on a
gender level. In order for Solanka to assert his male supremacy as a literary

210 Mita Banerjee
author, he needs a female disciple, and a disciple who turns out to be illit-
erate in all matters other than popular culture. In Fury, significantly, this
disciple turns out to be Eastern European to boot.
What of the modern-day incarnation of Hind? In Mila Milo, Hind has
been subjected to a process of beautification, and this beautification and
rejuvenation seem themselves to have a cultural cause. For unlike in the
case of Hind, there seems to be an excuse for Mila’s media illiteracy: her
Eastern Europeanness. There is, in Mila, an intellectual alertness to which
Hind could never have aspired. Even as she is portrayed by the narrative in
her addiction to a brainless medium, she is spared the wrath of caricature
to which Hind falls prey in The Satanic Verses. She is spared, it could be
argued, precisely owing to her deference to both literature as a medium
and Professor Solanka as the literary master. Mila, the Eastern European
TV addict, kneels at Solanka’s feet; she remakes herself in the image of his
creation and, fi nally, becomes his creation. Crucially, this deference to the
author—the superior brain from which Little Brain has sprung—must be
read in both gender and media terms:
At fi rst he tried to resist thinking of Mila as Little Brain come alive

[ . . . ]. At fi rst he told himself it would be wrong to do this to Mila,
to dollify her thus, but then—he argued back against himself—had
she not done it to herself, had she not by her own admission made
early-period Little Brain her model and inspiration? [ . . . ] Shyly, then,
Solanka began to allow himself to see her as his creation. 17
Here, the TV addict has literally remade herself in the image of popular
culture: Mila, too, is what she watches; if such visual verisimilitude is true
of Hind to some degree (her bulk signifying her allegiance to the cultural
inertia of what she watches), the make-over is even more complete in the
case of Mila. Solanka, the creator of Little Brain, cannot distinguish at
fi rst between his made-for-TV creation and its real-life incarnation: “Mila
removed her sunglasses and looked him provocatively in the eye, and at
once he remembered who it was she resembled. [ . . . ] ‘Oh, my, excuse me,
it’s Little Brain. Excuse me, but it’s my doll.’”18
Mila may be redeemed by her beauty (which is a far cry from Hind’s
disgusting exterior, but she is ultimately irredeemable either in gender or
media terms. What emerges in the image of a potentially Oedipian relation-
ship between the literary master turned screenwriter and his TV consum-
ing Eastern European disciple is a hierarchy—in intellectual and in media
terms—which is hardly redeemed by the sexual tension at its core:
He might play the part of Machiavelli, Marx, or, most often, Galileo,
while she would be, oh, exactly what he wanted her to be; would sit by
his chair and press his feet while he delivered himself of the wisdom of
the great sages of the world; and after a little time at his feet, she might

move up to his aching lap, though they would make sure, without a
word being said, that a plump cushion was always placed between her
body and his.19
Media hierarchy as media tension is sexualized here; yet, different as they

may seem, both Hind and Mila are ultimately belated in media terms. One
should have worshipped at the altar of cultural hybridity and does not;
the other agrees to worship at the altar of both literary mastery and the
literary master, and is rewarded by the ascription of physical beauty in
this, Rushdie’s most American narrative. What remains open to question is
whether this addiction to popular culture is seen by the narrative as being
fundamentally American, thus sharing the assumption of ‘Americaniza-
tion’ as the triumphant ascendancy of popular culture. Significantly, Mila’s
visual parroting of TV formats is matched by the lack of lyricism in her
speech. There is no room for metaphor here; Americanization—here, the
Americanization of Eastern Europe—encompasses both media and linguis-
tic socialization. Her speech is as empty as the medium she has learned it
from, or so the narrative would suggest:
Oh, wow. I even have all the videotapes of [Little Brain‘s] Adventures,
and for my twenty-fi rst birthday my dad went to a dealer and bought
me the fi rst-draft script of the Galileo episode, you know, before they
cut all the blasphemy out?, that’s like my most treasured possession.
[ . . . ] Oh my God. I have to tell you, Professor, you totally rock. And
your L.B., this little lady right here, has been my like total obsession
for most of the last ten years. I watch every move she makes. And as
you spotted, she’s only the basis and inspiration for my whole current
personal style. 20
As in the sad case of Hind, the videotape as a medium signals the advent
of brainlessness. Solanka, the literary master, is associated by the narra-
tive with the culture (and cultural literacy) of Old Europe; by the same
token, Mila’s is the media illiteracy or TV addiction of the New World. The
supremacy of literature (and the potential superiority of European culture),
on the other hand, is re-instituted by Mila’s unquestioning deference at
Solanka’s feet, or rather, on his lap.
MEDIA CONSUMPTION GONE AWRY:

RELIGIOUS RIOTS IN SHALIMAR THE CLOWN
There seems to be one exception to this gendered universe of media incom-

petence and literary mastery. In Shalimar the Clown, 21 there is a woman
who proceeds to capitalize on her own media addiction: Hasina institution-
alizes the public watching of films, and turns from media consumer to, if

212 Mita Banerjee
not media magnate, then at least to the local controller of fi lm screenings.
Significantly, the narrative stresses the progression from media consumer to
media magnate: Hasina sells, after all, the gratification of a medial desire to
which she, too, is prone. What she is lacking is both the aloofness from the
medium and the literary mastery: she remains steeped in the dull visuality
of popular culture, unable to conceive of an alternative kind of metaphoriz-
ing as the supreme visuality of literature.
In Shalimar the Clown, television at fi rst seems symptomatic, even
emblematic for the onset of modernity; yet, as the narrative will go on to
prove, it may be emblematic of the wrong kind of modernity: “Bombur
Yambarzal’s wife bought the fi rst television in the locality and set it up in a
tent in the middle of Shirmal.”22 Two aspects are significant in this context.
First, the visuality of television is opposed to the visual metaphoricity of
language, and the latter—and this is where Shalimar the Clown elaborates
the argument proposed in Fury—connects literature to theater. It is the the-
atricality of both literature and drama, as well as the ‘liveness’ of their per-
formance, their enacting rather than screening of narratives, which elevates
them over the canned entertainment of television. There can be no theatri-
cality on television; only the hypnotic dullness of the fl ickering image. It is
for this reason that Bombur Yambarzal, the husband of the self-appointed
television magnate of the village, has been so opposed to television:
Ever since the commencement of television transmissions at the begin-

ning of the 1960s the panchayat of Pachigam had taken the view that as
the new medium was destroying their traditional way of life by eroding
the audience for live drama, the one-eyed monster should be banned
from their village. 23
This media opposition between theater and television also turns out to be
gendered. For even if Hasina is not quite as dull as Hind given her “entre-
preneurial spirit,”24 media opposition nevertheless signals a going awry of
gender relations. The victory of television over theater—even if this vic-
tory will turn out to be short lived—is accompanied by what the narrative
portrays as an effeminizing of the waza, Hasina’s husband. In Fury, the
television addict, Mila, deferred to the supremacy of literature by kneeling
at the literature professor’s feet; in Shalimar the Clown, on the other hand,
Hasina refuses to admit to the superiority of language both literary and
theatrical and hence, if only in the figurative terms of media consumption
and media opposition, unmans her husband.
The waza of Shirmal, however, was swept along by the entrepreneur-

ial spirit of his bride, the red-haired widow Hasina ‘Harud’ Karim, a
woman with a strong desire for self-improvement and two secretive
sons, Hashim and Hatim, who had learned the electrician’s trade in
Srinagar and were keen to bring the village into the modern age. “Give

everyone a free show for a couple of months,” Hasina Karim urged her
new husband, “and after that you can start charging for tickets and
nobody will argue about the cost.”25
Television as a medium is unable to truly contain communal differences; it

merely dulls them for the duration of the screening, and for that duration
only. While both literature and theater—precisely through the richness of
their hybrid images—are said by Rushdie’s narrative to be able to heal the
ruptures caused by communalism, television is implied to add oil to the fire of
communal violence. Television, Shalimar the Clown suggests, is not sophisti-
cated enough to negotiate communal boundaries. Theater, on the other hand,
can contain communal tension, even communal violence, precisely through
the impurity, the deliberate mixing, of its metaphors. It is a medium which
is deeply hybrid and which, through the hybridity of its language, contains
and dismantles as absurd any strife for cultural purity. It is for this reason
that it is so detrimental that Bombul Yambarzal should have been enthralled
by the media barbarism of his hard-headed wife. In Shalimar the Clown,
television, not religion, is opium for the people; and precisely because it dulls
their senses and does not soothe them, communal tension, after the visual
drug wears off, erupts all the more violently. Television may be hypnotic, but
it is hypnotically dull. Even if the film screenings—through the act of com-
munal watching—at first seem to assuage the turbulence of communalism,
this assuaging cannot last precisely because there is, in complete contrast to
Kothari and Zuberi’s assumption about diasporic Bollywood audiences and
their complex viewing strategies, no negotiation between the medium and
the message. The television audience does not negotiate its own identity in
connection or counter-distinction to the message conveyed by the television
screen; it only forgets itself, lulled in by the images which in fact convey no
message at all. The screenings are only a semblance of a pan-ethnic India:
Once the Yambarzals’ TV soirées got going in Shirmal, evening life

changed, even in Pachigam, whose residents proved perfectly willing to set
aside the long history of difficulties with their neighbors in order to be able
to watch comedy shows, music and song recitals, and exotically choreo-
graphed ‘item numbers’ from the Bombay movies. In Pachigam as well as
Shirmal it became possible to talk about any forbidden subject you cared to
raise, at top volume, in the open street, without fear of reprisals; you could
advocate blasphemy, sedition or revolution, you could confess to murder,
arson or rape, and no attention would be paid to what you said, because
the streets were deserted—almost the entire population of both villages
was packed into Bombur the waza’s bulging tent to watch the damn-fool
programs on ‘Harud’ Yambarzar’s shining, loquacious screen.26
There is in Shalimar the Clown no literary master, or so it seems. Yet here

the opposition between two kinds of visuality seems to recur in gendered

214 Mita Banerjee
terms. There is, in the narrative, the supreme visuality of theater, as the
enacting of culturally significant messages which, unlike television’s mere
lulling of communal instincts, will soothe its audience’s troubled souls.
Pandit Pyarelal Kaul tells his wife,
Today our Muslim village, in the service of our Hindu maharaja, will
cook and act in a Mughal—that is to say—Muslim garden, to celebrate
the anniversary of the day on which Ram marched against Ravan to
rescue Sita. What is more, two plays are to be performed: our tradi-
tional Ram Leela, and also Budshah, the tale of a Muslim sultan. Who
tonight are the Hindus? Who are the Muslims? Here in Kashmir, our
stories sit happily side by side on the same double bill, we eat from the
same dishes, we laugh at the same jokes. 27
Crucially, this supreme visuality of theater, the theatricalizing of communal

concord rather than discord, is closely linked to a deeply hybrid culinary
vision. Theater can hence contain Kashmir in its entirety, can encompass
and unite both Hindu and Muslim communities. The idea of the ‘double
bill’ is of course ironic here: theater can appropriate the language of film,
the idea of blockbusters and double bills, without stooping to the baseness
of film’s own images and visuality. Theater, like literature, tells stories, sto-
ries which defy cultural purity and are adulterated or hybridized in the best
and most cherished terms of Rushdie’s fiction.
Hasina’s husband, who acquiesces to his wife’s introducing—indeed, aiding
and abetting—the reign of television into the village, is neither a professor of
literature nor a theater director; he is a chef. In Rushdie’s oeuvre, the culinary
is deeply linked to the literary; cooking is a form of storytelling, and it, too, is
deeply hybrid. Literary mastery, in Rushdie’s work, is not only the savoir vivre
of polyglot male protagonists, but also their mastery of an all-encompassing
culinary repertoire. As in Midnight’s Children, the art of storytelling is intri-
cately connected to (Indian) cuisine; if Rushdie compared, in Midnight’s Chil-
dren, the art of storytelling to the culinary uniqueness of a chutney (no two
chutneys being alike), it is no wonder that Bombur Yambarzal, the chef, should
have developed cooking to monomaniacal perfection:
[Yambarzal] was a lonely man for whom cookery was his single pas-
sion in life, who approached it with an almost religious fervor and who
demanded of others the same level of dedication he himself brought to
his work, and who was therefore constantly and vociferously disap-
pointed by the ease with which his fellow human beings were drawn
away from the ecstatic devotions of the gastronomic arts by such petty
distractions as family life, weariness and love.28
No wonder, then, that it should be love that proves to be the chef’s own
undoing. Reading this description against the grain of its own irony, this

passage may in fact turn out to be more ambivalent than it may at fi rst
seem. Even if the marriage to Hasina turns Yambarzal from a lonely
man to a contented one, this change turns out to be detrimental precisely
because Hasina does not ultimately appreciate his art. Rather, the nar-
rative goes on to put Hasina’s (media) “entrepreneurship”29 against his
artistic monomania. In the end, it is the shift to new media which turns
out to be the community’s undoing. Vastly different as these two liter-
ary narratives are, Rushdie’s Hasina may actually turn out to be akin to
Kureishi’s Hannah: if Hannah’s idea of haute cuisine is mainly to squeeze
tomato paste down her throat, Hasina is also dismissive of her husband’s
mastery of the culinary medium.
Shalimar the Clown hence takes up all of the aspects of media competi-
tion I have tried to establish so far. First, literary visuality (here mapped
onto the oral visuality of storytelling, with literary visuality and oral narra-
tive meeting in the supreme vividness of metaphor) is seen as vastly superior
to popular culture, to the trite imagery of television. Second, literary and
oral metaphor can both grasp and reconcile multiethnic tension, whereas
television serves only to fuel such tension. Finally, the difference between
the superior visuality of literature and the (detrimental) triteness of tele-
vision is gendered. Crucially, where the storytelling in Rushdie’s fiction,
inaugurated by the deliberate impurity of The Satanic Verses, is deliberately
adulterating, Hasina’s public screenings only serve to unleash the powder
keg of religious fundamentalism. TV screening leads to a community’s
undoing; where storytelling can contain cultural hybridity, perhaps in the
irresolvable ambivalence of its metaphors, TV cannot. Thus, Hasina’s sup-
posed mastery of the medium to which she is addicted hardly serves to
redeem her from the company of the likes of Hannah and Hind. What
distinguishes her from Mila, however—the sole female figure who may be
truly interesting from the vantage point of both the story and the male
protagonist as literary connoisseur—is that she should be so dismissive of
her husband’s gift of storytelling, and hence implicitly also of the superior
visuality of the literary.
The medial unmanning by Hasina of her husband, the cook, brings
about the village’s ultimate destruction. If theater contains and heals com-
munal tension, television does not. Even more problematically, it is Hasina,
the media magnate or magnate of new media, who decides to segregate her
audience. It must be noted however that this choice of segregated viewing
practices is not voluntary on Hasina’s part; it is, rather, an attempt to pla-
cate the fundamentalists:
In the months that followed the LeP grew bolder and moved its activi-
ties into Srinagar itself. Women teachers were doused with acid for
failure to adhere to the Islamic dress code. Threats were made and
deadlines issued and many Kashmiri women put on, for the fi rst
time, the shroud their mothers and grandmothers had always proudly

216 Mita Banerjee
refused. Then, in the summer of 1987, the LeP posters appeared in
Shirmal. Men and women were not to sit together and watch television
anymore. That was a licentious and obscene practice. Hindus were not
to sit among Muslims. And of course all women must instantly put on
the veil. Hasina Yambarzal was outraged.30
Hasina’s part in the downfall of her own community is deeply ambivalent.

In the end, she is destroyed by her (understandable) choice not to don the
burqua, and in the violence which erupts following the segregation of the
‘TV soirees,’ takes the community with her to its doom. The pitting by
the narrative of media and gender against one another is disturbing: if it
had not been for Hasina’s ‘unmanning’ of her husband and the consequent
introduction of television to Shirmal, none of this may have happened. In
the end, we are left with a highly problematic case of strange bedfellows. In
literary universe, the male literary masters oppose television because it is a
dull medium; and the fundamentalists oppose television because it triggers
‘licentiousness.’ The losers in this game of media competition are women.
What is disputable about Shalimar the Clown is that the narrative seems to
indict the fundamentalists but does not ultimately acquit Hasina the media
magnate. Precisely because the narrative links the portrayal of her media
entrepreneurship to her ‘masculine’ appearance and the emasculation of her
husband, she seems to be partly to blame for the havoc which ensues. In the
end, the verdict on Hasina is pronounced by a woman, Firdaus Noman:
When news reached Pachigam that the television tent was not for view-
ing by Muslims only, Firdaus could not restrain herself. “That Hasina,
excuse me if I mention,” she told Abdullah, “people say she’s a very
pragmatical lady but I’d put it another way. In my opinion she’d sleep
with the devil if it was in her business interest to do so, and she’s got
that dope Bombur so twisted up that he’s think it was his good idea.”
Two nights later the Yambarzal tent was full of Muslim-only TV watch-
ers enjoying an episode of a fantasy serial in which the legendary prince
[ . . . ] found himself in the land of Kopatopa on the occasion of their
new year celebrations. [ . . . The audience was] so busy wishing one
another a happy Kopatopan new year that they didn’t instantly notice
that some person or persons had set fi re to the tent.31
FEMALE VIEWERS AND THE BRAVE NEW WORD OF NEW MEDIA
The message implied by this ascription of media illiteracy is twofold. First,

the language of media may have become the new lingua franca of the new
millennium. Where before communities were subordinated by the ascrip-
tion to them of linguistic distortion and what Houston Baker has called
the ascription of cultural ‘non-sense,’32 the assumption of such cultural

illiteracy, as both Kureishi’s Gabriel’s Gift and Rushdie’s fiction indicate,
is now mapped onto the language of media. If the (theatrical) practice of
minstrelsy which was then adapted to literature argued that black people
could not speak because they lacked the mental capacity to process what
they could have said, the same is true for the practice of what may be called
media minstrelsy in contemporary postcolonial literature. Here, women
are said to be inept at the mastery of the supreme medium of literature
because they lack the intellectual capacity to consume any other medium
that television.
Secondly, in postcolonial literature it is women who bear the brunt of
this ascription of media illiteracy, an ascription which may serve as a form
of narrative punishment: for precisely because they are seen as un-post-
colonial, they are being punished with and through media caricature. At
the same time, literature—as a medium whose mastery turns out to be
male—is singled out as the one medium which can contain all others, true
to the idea of ‘literary media reflections’ (literarische Medienrefl exionen)
as literature’s reigning supreme in the brave new world of a confusing new
media landscape. Thus, reading Rushdie’s work in media terms once again
seems to prove Aijaz Ahmad’s early assumption that the ‘postcolonial sub-
ject’ in both literature and theory is curiously devoid of either gender and
location. According to Ahmad, “In Bhabha’s postcolonial writing [as much
as in Rushdie’s fiction], the postcolonial who has access to [ . . . ] monu-
mental and global pleasures is remarkably free of gender, class, identifiable
political location.”33 True to the logic of domination, this lack of marking
may actually imply ‘the postcolonial subject’ to be male. The postcolonial
subject, in other words, is male by default. What is striking is that this defi-
nition of postcoloniality as (inherently) male should be mapped onto a clear
media hierarchy in Rushdie’s fictional universe: not only is the postcolonial
subject male, but he is a literary master all well.
This media caricature of women as being un-postcolonial omits the ques-
tion of alternative viewing strategies, the sense in which viewing does not
automatically imply complicity in reactionary messages. What may be at
stake is the concept of the resistant reader which Kothari and Zuberi have
traced for Bollywood film. Thus, women’s nostalgia for ‘home’ does not
automatically entail their complicity in a (potentially fundamentalist) purg-
ing of this home from all traces of hybridity. What is direly needed, and
what seems to be conspicuously absent in the work of Rushdie, the literary
master of postcoloniality, is a gendered reading of ‘home’ and ‘nostalgia.’ If,
historically, it is women who have borne the burden of upholding tradition in
diaspora, as Tanika Sarkar and Nivedita Menon have argued for both Hindi
and Muslim communities in India, it is no wonder that their viewing strate-
gies may turn out to be deeply ambivalent. As Menon suggests,
It is by now a phenomenon well recorded by feminist scholarship and

politics that communities vest their honor in ‘their’ women, and that

218 Mita Banerjee
cultural policing begins with fi rst marking and then drawing women
‘inside’ the community. Particularly when a community feels its iden-
tity or existence under threat, its proud assertion of identity always
appears marked on the bodies of ‘its’ women fi rst.34
If it is women who are told to maintain cultural ties at the price not only
of their own ‘honor,’ but also the community’s survival in diaspora, it is no
wonder that, for women, the shift into a mere celebration of hybridity and
cultural adulteration may not a facile, but a deeply ambivalent one. Women
may be differently postcolonial, and it is this difference which may inform
their alternative ways of media consumption, and their consumption of dif-
ferent media. It is in his ignorance of these strategies of media negotiation
that the literary master, in his assumption of female media illiteracy, may
turn out to be dull. At the same time, as the caricatures of both Kureishi’s
Hannah and Rushdie’s Mila indicate, this postcolonial male bias may also
be a deeply western assumption. In complete opposition to these female
caricatures of Eastern European women as being doubly un-postcolonial, it
may be the male postcolonial literary master who is at a loss to comprehend
these complex viewing strategies of new media which he, after all, may turn
out to be illiterate in. And it may be he who, pace glasnost and perestroika,
may have been belated, and who will be punished by the brave new world
not only of old, but of new media as well.
NOTES
1. Sandra Poppe, “Literarische Medienreflexionen. Eine Einführung,” in Lit-

erarische Medienrefl exionen: Künste und Medien im Fokus moderner und
postmoderner Literatur, eds. Sandra Poppe and Sascha Seiler (Berlin: Erich
Schmidt Verlag, 2008), 9, my translation.
2. Poppe, “Literarische Medienreflexionen. Eine Einführung,” 11, my translation.
3. Some of the terms used in this essay are derived from the German discipline
of Medienwissenschaft (media studies); in order to evoke” debates prevalent
in this discipline in relation to these terms, they will be both translated and
given in the German original. For a detailed discussion of both literary media
reflections and the (German) discipline of media studies, see Christa Karpen-
stein-Eßbach, “Medien als Gegenstand der Literaturwissenschaft: Affären
jenseits des Schönen,” in Bildschirmfiktionen: Interferenzen zwischen Lit-
eratur und neuen Medien, ed. Julika Griem (Tübingen: Narr, 1998), 13–32.
4. Hanif Kureishi, Gabriel’s Gift (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), 11.
5. Kureishi, Gabriel’s Gift, 9–10.
6. Chioni Moore’s pun here is on an early essay by Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is
the ‘Post’ in ‘Postcolonial’ the ‘Post’ in ‘Postmodern’?” in Dangerous Liai-
sons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, eds. Anne McClin-
tock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1997), 420–444.
7. David Chioni Moore, “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post in Post-Soviet?
Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique,” in Baltic Postcolonialism, ed. Vio-
leta Kelertas (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 17.

8. For a vastly different account of post-communist media negotiation, see the
work of Marcel Cornis-Pope.
9. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Penguin, 1989), 246.
10. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 251–252.
11. Shuchi Kothari and Nabeel Zuberi, “Das Herz bleibt indisch: Bollywood
und die südasiatische Diaspora,” in Bollywood—Das Indische Kino und die
Schweiz, ed. Alexandra Schneider (Zurich: Edition Museum für Gestaltung
Zürich, 2002), 46, translation provided in the catalogue.
12. A paradigmatic example of this collapsing of medium, genre, and audience
may be the genre of country music. As Barbara Chin has suggested, it is
often assumed by a middle class mainstream that those who listen to country
music cannot help it: “[S]ince the term cultural ‘tastes,’ with its allusion to
a sensual, natural response, is easily conceived of as an innate rather than
socially constructed quality, those whose taste is ‘bad’ seem to deserve their
fate, while those with good taste seem to merit the distinction which the
social order confers upon them. [ . . . ] The authenticity of the music, then, is
seen as either impossibly degraded or impossibly innocent, but this double-
binding condemnation never questions the authentic, uncultured ‘nature’ of
country music’s benighted listeners” (232). If in Chin’s example, the consum-
ers of country music are what they are listening to, the same argument seems
to apply for the depiction of television in Rushdie’s oeuvre: these culturally
illiterate characters are what they watch.
13. This essay does not address the debate on the alleged blasphemy of The
Satanic Verses, which has been amply documented. Rather, what is at stake
here is the novel’s distinction between those die-hards and the inevitable
fate of hybridity heralded by Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta. For
a detailed accounts of the ‘Rushdie debate,’ see Ruvani Ranashinha, “The
Fatwa and Its Aftermath,” in Salman Rushdie, ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 45–59; Madelena Gonza-
lez, Fiction after the Fatwa: Salman Rushdie and the Charm of Catastrophe
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), as well as Robert Rawdon Wilson, “The Rush-
die Affair,” Queen’s Quarterly 101.3 (1994): 83–96.
14. Salman Rushdie, Fury (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 14.
15. Christian von Tschilschke, Roman und Film: Filmisches Schreiben im fran-
zösischen Roman der Postavangarde (Tübingen: Narr, 2000), 45.
21. I am indebted to Ana Mendes for this aspect.
22. Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown (New York: Random House, 2005).
23. Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown, 244.
25. Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown, 243–244.
32. Houston A. Baker Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987), 21.
33. Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,” Race and Class 36 (1995): 13.

220 Mita Banerjee
34. Nivedita Menon, “Between the Burqa and the Beauty Parlor? Globalization,
Cultural Nationalism, and Feminist Politics,” in Postcolonial Studies and
Beyond, ed. Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and
Jed Esty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 209.
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Contributors
Mita Banerjee is Professor and Chair of American Studies at the Univer-

sity of Mainz, Germany. Her research interests include postcolonial
literature (The Chutneyfication of History: Salman Rushdie, Michael
Ondaatje, Bharati Mukerjee and the Postcolonial Debate; Heidelberg:
Winter University Press, 2002), ethnic American literature (Race-ing the
Century, Winter, 2005), and the American Renaissance (Ethnic Ven-
triloquism: Literary Minstrelsy in Nineteenth-Century American Lit-
erature, Winter 2008). She has recently edited the collection Virtually
American? Denationalizing North American Studies (Winter, 2009).
Mita Banerjee is director of a newly founded Center for Comparative
Indigenous Studies at the University of Mainz. She is currently working
on a project which explores the intersection between naturalism and
naturalization in nineteenth-century American fiction.
Madelena Gonzalez is Professor of Anglophone Literature at the University

of Avignon. Her recent publications include: Fiction after the Fatwa:
Salman Rushdie and the Charm of Catastrophe (2005), Translating
Identity and the Identity of Translation (2006), Théâtre des minorités:
Mises en scène de la marge à l’époque contemporaine (2008), Generic
Instability and Identity in the Contemporary Novel (2010), and Authen-
ticity and Legitimacy in Minority Theatre (2010). She has published
widely on contemporary literature and culture and is currently head of
the Avignon-based, interdisciplinary research group, Cultural Identity,
Texts and Theatricality (ICTT).
Neil ten Kortenaar is the director of the Centre for Comparative Literature
at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Self, Nation, Text in
Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” (McGill-Queen’s, 2004) and
Postcolonial Literature and the Impact of Literacy (Cambridge, 2011).
Joel Kuortti is Professor of English at the University of Turku, and Adjunct

Professor of Contemporary Culture at the University of Jyväskylä. His
research is on postcolonial theory, Indian literature in English, transcul-

224 Contributors
tural identity, hybridity, and cultural studies. His publications include
The Salman Rushdie Bibliography (Lang, 1997), Place of the Sacred:
The Rhetoric of the Satanic Verses Affair (Lang, 1997), Fictions to Live
In: Narration as an Argument for Fiction in Salman Rushdie’s Nov-
els (Lang, 1998), Indian Women’s Writing in English: A Bibliography
(Rawat, 2002), Tense Past, Tense Present: Women Writing in Eng-
lish (Stree, 2003), Writing Imagined Diasporas: South Asian Women
Reshaping North American Identity (Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2007), Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-colonial Studies in Transition
(ed. with Jopi Nyman) (Rodopi, 2007).
Ana Cristina Mendes is a researcher at University of Lisbon Centre for Eng-

lish Studies (ULICES) in Portugal. Her interests span postcolonial cultural
production and its intersection with the culture industries. Her publica-
tions include O Passado em Exibição (Cosmos, 2011) and the co-edited
book Re-Orientalism and Re-Orientalism and South Asian Identity Poli-
tics: The Oriental Other Within (Routledge, 2011), as well as articles on
Indian and British Asian film, and on Indian Writing in English published
in Third Text and Journal of Commonwealth Literature.
Stephen Morton is Senior Lecturer in English in the Faculty of Humanities

at the University of Southampton. His publications include Gayatri Spi-
vak: Ethics, Subjectivity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Polity,
2007), Salman Rushdie: Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Routledge, 2003), Ter-
ror and the Postcolonial, co-edited with Elleke Boehmer (Blackwell,
2009), Foucault in an Age of Terror, co-edited with Stephen Bygrave
(Palgrave, 2008), and articles in Textual Practice, Interventions, Wasa-
firi, Public Culture, and New Formations.
Vassilena Parashkevova is Bibliography Editor of Journal of Common-

wealth Literature and Associate Lecturer in English Literature at Lon-
don South Bank University. Her research and publications focus on cities,
space, place and transnationalism in South Asian, British, and South
Asian diaspora writing and, specifically, in the work of Salman Rushdie.
She has also taught postcolonial literature at University of Southampton
and King’s College London.
Jenni Ramone is the author of Postcolonial Theories (Palgrave Macmillan,

2011). She is Senior Lecturer in English at Newman University College,
Birmingham, and teaches on Newman’s online MA in Colonial and
Postcolonial Literature. Her research interests include postcolonial lit-
erature and theory, especially postcolonial and diaspora literature from
South Asia and the Middle East, and theories of translation and retell-
ing. Her PhD thesis from Loughborough University, 2007, considered

Contributors 225
Rushdie and theories of translation. Recent work includes a co-edited
book on the Richard & Judy Book Club phenomenon (Ashgate, 2011),
and her current research project examines women’s life-writing in the
postcolonial diaspora.
Cristina Sandru currently works as managing editor for The Literary Ency-
clopedia (www.litecyc.com). She previously taught at the universities of
Northampton and of Wales, Aberystwyth; the School of Slavonic and
Eastern European Studies, University College London; Goldsmiths’,
University of London, and “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu. Her main
research interests are in comparative literature, postcolonial theory
and literature, and East-Central European cultures. She has published
articles and reviews in Critique, Euresis, Echinox, The New Makers of
Modern Culture Routledge series and English, and co-edited the volume
Re-routing Postcolonialism: New Directions for the New Millenium
(Routledge, 2009). Since 2007 she has been on the editorial board of the
Journal of Postcolonial Studies.
Florian Stadtler is research associate at The Open University. From

2008–10 he has been working on the major cross-institutional AHRC
project “Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad,
1870–1950.” He has published on South Asian Literature in English,
British Asian history and literature, Salman Rushdie, and Indian popu-
lar cinema. His monograph Fiction Film and Indian Popular Cinema:
Rushdie’s Novels and the Cinematic Imagination is forthcoming with
Routledge. He is reviews editor for the magazine of international con-
temporary writing Wasafiri.
Andrew Teverson is Director of Studies for English Literature and Creative

Writing at Kingston University (UK). He is the author of Salman Rush-
die (Manchester University Press, 2007), and co-editor of the forthcom-
ing volume Postcolonial Spaces: The Politics of Place in Contemporary
Culture (Palgrave, 2011). His current research is on folk narrative and
fairy tale in postcolonial contexts, and he is completing a book on fairy
tale for the Routledge New Critical Idiom series.

Index
A Brass, Paul 69
adaptation 13, 204
Allen, Brooke 205 C
Arabian Nights, The 15, 48, 56 capitalism 63, 71–72, 142, 173, 176,
Arva, Eugene L. 208 195, 207
art restoration 102 Castro, María A. 66
Atget, Eugène 175–176, 192 celebrity 121, 157–158, 161–162, 165,
Auster, Paul 83 168, 188, 195, 201
autobiography 89, 94 Cervantes, Miguel de 71–72
authorship 20, 102, 106 Chirico, Georgio de 73
Avedon, Richard 170 Christian iconography 63, 64, 66
Ayatollah Khomeini 24, 29, 48, 87 Coetzee, J. M. 84–85, 118
Colonialism 62, 171, 187
B collaboration 13, 15, 17, 39, 56
Balzac, Honoré de 197 commodity 158, 176, 194, 199,
Baker, Houston 229 205–206
Baker, Stephen 74 consumerism 197, 206
Banville, John 86 cosmopolitanism 49–51, 53–54
Barlow, Paul 122 Cronenberg, David 14
Barnaby, Edward 153, 199, 204, 207 Cundy, Catherine 74
Barthes, Roland 197, 206 cyberspace 195
Baudelaire, Charles 175, 177, 185, 206
Baudrillard, Jean 20, 163, 165, 195, D
200, 206–207 Daguerre, Louis 174–175
Bayeu, Francisco 65 Dayal, Raja Deen 174, 183
Benjamin, Walter 19, 164, 171–177, Dali, Salvador 73
184–185, 189 Debord, Guy 20, 158, 194, 206, 211
Berger, John 198 diaspora 48–49, 77, 218, 229–230,
Bhabha, Homi K. 86, 100, 173, 229 230, 236–237
Bhattacharya, Neeladri 74 diptych 18, 64, 70, 77
bildungsroman 111 documentary 15, 18, 82, 86, 92, 197
blasphemy 223, 225, 231 Dos Passos, John 195, 201
Bollywood 46, 135, 148, 154, 166, Dreyfus, Alfred 24
218, 225, 229
Bombay talkie 14, 22, 45, 75, 138, E
145–147 Edwards, E. 121
Bowdler, Roger 123 El Greco 73
Boyer, M. Christine 180, 182, 184, 188 ekphrasis 19, 37–38, 44, 84, 118–119,
Braque, Georges 73 126–127, 131–132, 152–154

228 Index
F J
fame 121, 152, 155, 157–158, 162 Jameson, Frederic 194, 200
fatwa 24, 28, 33, 87 Jenks, Chris 206
filmic writing 215
Flaubert, Gustave 197 K
Fletcher, Richard 68 Kapoor, Anish 15, 17–18, 55–56, 58
Forbes, Leslie 92 Kapoor, Raj 46, 139–141
Foster, Hal 205 Kapur, Geeta 90
Fried, Michael 19, 119, 124 Kermode, Frank 107, 112–113
Furst, Lilian R. 197, 200, 202–204 Khakhar, Bhupen 90–91, 95
Khanna, Krishen 87–89, 94
G Kortenaar, Neil ten 19, 33, 41, 85
gender 16, 220–222, 224, 228–229 Kundera, Milan 151–153, 155–160,
Gilliam, Terry 14 164–165
globalization 19, 47, 58, 72, 152, 155, Kureishi, Hanif 215–217, 219–220,
158 227, 229–230
Goya, Francisco 65, 73
Granada 18, 63, 65–66, 68–69, 71–72, L
74, 76, 81, 94 Leigh, Dennis (aka John Foxx) 82
Granlund, Chris 15, 18 Lenman, Bruce 121–122, 131
Lash, Scott 195
H Lefevere, Andre 100, 102–103, 107
Hassan, Jamelie 18, 55–56 literacy 121, 130, 215–216, 223
Haussmann, Georges Eugène 177–178, Lodge, David 201
182
Hazzledine, George Douglas 124 M
Herwitz, Daniel 62 magic realism 194, 196, 198
H. D. [Hilda Doolittle] 83 Mallock, W. H. 29, 31, 33–34, 38
Hindi cinema 19, 135–140, 142, 145, Marx, Karl 176, 222
148 McCloud, Scott 130
Hindu fundamentalism 66, 71, 75–76 media consumption 219, 224, 230
historicity 63, 138, 195 melodrama 45, 136–139, 142–146,
Howard, Robert Glenn 67 148
Huggan, Graham 17 Metcalf, Barbara D. 67
Hunt, Maurice 75 Metcalf, Thomas R. 67
Husein, M. F. 87, 94 metonymy 147
Hutcheon, Linda 194 midrash 107, 111
hybridity 16, 48–49, 72, 195, 217–219, Millais, John Everett 19, 33–34, 37, 85,
223, 225, 227, 229–231, 236 118–119, 121–132
hyperreality 208 mimesis 23, 128, 198–199, 203, 208
Mishra, Vijay 14, 45, 135
I Mitchell, W. J. T. 15–16, 21, 38, 118,
ideology 16, 48–49, 69–70, 100, 104, 126, 131
155, 157–158 modern Indian art 50, 62
imagery 66, 91, 132, 227 Mondal, Anshuman A. 197, 199
imagetext 16 Munch, Edvard 73
imagology 151, 155–158, 162
Indian modernism 47, 50–51 N
Indianness 170, 187, 219 Nadar, Félix 175, 183
Indian popular cinema 19, 135–140, Nadkarni, Dnyaneshwar 94
143–149 Naipaul. V. S. 122
interdisciplinarity 17 nationalism 50, 54, 70–71, 142
internet 165, 194, 201, 205 nationhood 68, 139
intertextuality 39 Nehruvian secularism 18, 51–54, 63

Index 229
New York 164, 166, 195, 197, 200, satire 159, 195, 208
203, 206, 209 Scarry, Elaine 128–129
Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore 174–175, 188 Shakespeare, William 75
Nolan, Sidney 77 Sher-Gil, Amrita 51–52, 73
Notaras, Gabriela 198, 204 Shone, Tom 198
Shohat, Ella 62, 99
O simulacrum 20, 64, 161, 195, 197, 201,
orality 132 208, 221
Orwell, George 163 simulation 162–163, 207–208
Slumdog Millionaire 13
P Smith, Alison 123
palimpsest 18, 29, 52, 82–86, 88–90, Snowdon, Lord 170–171, 187
101,110, 180 Sontag, Susan 153, 187
Parry, Benita 62 Souza, Francis Newton 50–51, 73–74
pastiche 19, 47, 72, 186, 194, 207–208 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 105, 180
patronage 19, 99–100, 103–104, 107, Stam, Robert 62, 99
113 Steiner, George 108
Picasso, Pablo 73 Stewart, Garrett 119
Phillips, Tom 17, 24–36, 38–40
photography 13, 15–16, 19–20, 152– T
155, 157–158, 160, 170–172, Taylor, Charles 66
174–175, 184–185,187, 194, television 15–16, 20, 26, 155–156,
214–215 158–159, 162, 194, 215–217,
popular culture 15, 20, 188–189, 220, 219–221, 224–229, 231
222–224, 227 textuality 33, 35, 38, 41, 100, 109
portable oratory 66 Tonkin, Boyd 205, 209
postcommunism 221 transgression 16, 39, 100, 106–108,
postmodernism 195 112, 142
Pradilla, Francisco 65–66 triptych 64–68, 70–71, 73, 77
Progressive Arts Movement 18, 51 Trousdale, Rachel 71
R U
Rajadhyaksha, Ashish 138–139 undecidability 85
Ray, Man 189
Ray, Satyajit 14 V
realism 62, 92, 138–139, 143–145, Velazquez, Diego 63, 73
148,160, 194–199, 202–204, Venuti, Lawrence 101, 103, 105–106
207–208 Victorian Empire 131
Rembrandt 73 visuality 13, 15–17, 20, 37, 215, 217,
Reynolds, Peter 202–203 219, 221, 224, 226–227
Rofel, Lisa 173
Rorty, Richard 16 W
Rushdie Affair, The 26, 29, 31, 33, 40, Wizard of Oz, The 14, 77, 138, 194
56 Wolfreys, Julian 199
Wood, James 197, 199, 203, 205–206
S
Salgado, Minoli 54 Z
Salgado, Sebastião 186–187 Žižek, Slavoj 158


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Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture

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1. Testimony from the Nazi Camps 10. Before Auschwitz

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19. Making Space in the

20. Critical Approaches to American

21. Salman Rushdie and

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Edited by Ana Cristina Mendes

NEW YORK LONDON

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ISBN13: 978-0-415-88545-4 (hbk)

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1 Editor’s Introduction: Salman Rushdie’s “Epico-Mythico-

2 Merely Connect: Salman Rushdie and Tom Phillips 12

3 Beyond the Visible: Secularism and Postcolonial Modernity

4 ‘Living Art’: Artistic and Intertextual Re-envisionings

5 In Search for Lost Portraits: The Lost Portrait

6 Paint, Patronage, Power, and the Translator’s Visibility 87

7 Show and Tell: Midnight’s Children and

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9 Visual Technologies in Rushdie’s Fiction:

10 Bombay/‘Wombay’: Refracting the Postcolonial

11 Screening the Novel, the Novel as Screen:

12 Media Competition and Visual Displeasure

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2.1. Tom Phillips, Salman Rushdie as D.I.Y. Zola, Lithograph,

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the difference between a constructed concrete object or ensemble (frame,

After Richard Rorty’s “linguistic turn,” Mitchell identifies an emergent “picto-

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Rushdie and his fiction have on many occasions provided an inspiration

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1. Salman Rushdie, “A Fine Pickle,” The Guardian, February 28, 2009,

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Now the arts connect.

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in experiencing a momentary uncertainty about the relationship between

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is that information can now be spread so fast that within a day or

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Figure 2.2 Tom Phillips, Salman Rushdie, Oil on Canvas, 1992.

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This practice, as Rushdie has observed, was inspired by G. V. Desani’s novel

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