Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture - Celebrating Impurity, Disrupting Borders (PDFDrive)
Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture - Celebrating Impurity, Disrupting Borders (PDFDrive)
TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE
Salman Rushdie
and Visual Culture
Celebrating Impurity, Disrupting Borders
Edited by
Ana Cristina Mendes
Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture
Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature
List of Figures xi
Contributors 223
Index 227
Figures
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
2 Ana Cristina Mendes
media.1 In addition to his fi lm 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 fi lm 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 fi lm 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 fi lms 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 fi lmmaker 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
Considerations on Undisciplining Boundaries 3
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”
4 Ana Cristina Mendes
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
ANGLES OF APPROACH
NOTES
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.
Considerations on Undisciplining Boundaries 11
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)
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.
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 butterfl ies: 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
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 fi fty 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
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
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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.
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
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
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.
Beyond the Visible 45
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.
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.
9. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 24.
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.
19. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 69.
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.
Beyond the Visible 47
23. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 82.
24. Katz, Who are the Jews of India?, 57.
25. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 235.
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.”
38. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 227.
39. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 227.
40. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 227.
41. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 129.
42. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 133.
43. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 226.
44. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 226.
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
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
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
64 Vassilena Parashkevova
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
66 Vassilena Parashkevova
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.
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.
32. Rushdie, Moor, 18.
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.
43. Rushdie, Moor, 231.
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.
47. Rushdie, Moor, 388.
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.
54. Rushdie, Moor, 225.
55. Kapur, Contemporary, 127.
68 Vassilena Parashkevova
56. Herwitz, “Reclaiming,” 226-7.
57. Rushdie, Moor, 139.
58. Kapur, Contemporary, 3.
59. Rushdie, Moor, 220.
60. Kapur, Contemporary, 9.
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.
65. Rushdie, Moor, 220.
66. Ibid., 224-5.
67. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-91
(London: Granta, 1992) 48.
68. Rushdie, Moor, 52.
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.
71. Rushdie, Moor, 140.
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.
83. Rushdie, Moor, 199.
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.
. The Moor’s Last Sigh. London: Vintage, 1996.
. 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
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:
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:
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
In Search for Lost Portraits 73
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:
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 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
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,
In Search for Lost Portraits 77
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.
The issue of the quest for the portrait in the fi lm 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 fi lm, 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
In Search for Lost Portraits 79
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:
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:
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 fi lm 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 fi lm. 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.
In Search for Lost Portraits 81
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, “Magnifi cent 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).
31. Granlund, Portrait, 38:55.
32. Granlund, Portrait, 39:00.
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.
In Search for Lost Portraits 83
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.
37. Granlund, Portrait, 4:30–4:50.
38. Granlund, Portrait, 1:55–2:10.
39. Granlund, Portrait, 2:15–2:35.
40. Rushdie, Moor’s, 157.
41. Chhatri is Hindi for an umbrella or, here, a canopy (see 149).
42. Rushdie, Moor’s, 157.
43. Rushdie, Moor’s, 174.
44. Rushdie, Moor’s, 227.
45. Granlund, Portrait, 0:55–1:05.
46. Rushdie, Moor’s, 420.
47. Granlund, Portrait, 40:05–40:15.
48. Granlund, Portrait, 11:15–11:25.
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.
51. Granlund, Portrait, 4:00–4:20.
52. Granlund, Portrait, 36:50–37:00.
53. Granlund, Portrait, 37:20–37:25.
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
59. Rushdie, Moor’s, 202.
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,”
63. Granlund, Portrait, 45:10–45:35.
64. Granlund, Portrait, 45:40–46:10.
65. Granlund, Portrait, 36:45.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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
Paint, Patronage, Power, and the Translator’s Visibility 91
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
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
Paint, Patronage, Power, and the Translator’s Visibility 93
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”
Paint, Patronage, Power, and the Translator’s Visibility 95
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
Paint, Patronage, Power, and the Translator’s Visibility 97
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:
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:
Paint, Patronage, Power, and the Translator’s Visibility 101
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
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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:
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 transfi xed 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.
112 Neil ten Kortenaar
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.
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
118 Neil ten Kortenaar
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
120 Neil ten Kortenaar
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
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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
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 infi nite 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 fi lmic hero, “by transforming the social mar-
ginality of the fi lmic 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
130 Florian Stadtler
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
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 fi lm The Lovers of Kashmir, a similar ploy used
by many commercial fi lmmakers to introduce the erotic through sugges-
tion to avoid censorship. 27 However Hanif is quickly disillusioned with the
glitzy world of the fi lm 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.
132 Florian Stadtler
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 fi lm; 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
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
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 finds 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:
136 Florian Stadtler
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
FILMOGRAPHY
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
Visual Technologies in Rushdie’s Fiction 143
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:
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
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
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
fi lled 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
Visual Technologies in Rushdie’s Fiction 151
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:
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).
2. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 45.
3. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 46.
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.
13. Kundera, Immortality, 128.
14. Kundera, Immortality, 57.
15. Maria Nemcová Banerjee, Terminal Paradox: The Novels of Milan Kun-
dera, (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), 271.
16. Kundera, Immortality, 92.
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.
21. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 402.
22. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 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.’
26. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 203.
27. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 350.
28. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 350.
29. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 558–559.
30. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 490.
31. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 517.
32. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 486.
33. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 484.
34. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 485.
35. Jaina Sanga, Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors: Migration, Transla-
tion, Hybridity, Blasphemy and Globalisation (Westport, CT: Greenwood,
2001), 132.
36. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 353.
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.
40. Rushdie, Fury, 142.
41. Rushdie, Fury, 178.
42. Rushdie, Fury, 115.
43. Rushdie, Fury, 98.
44. Rushdie, Fury, 74.
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.
46. Rushdie, Fury, 170.
47. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 7.
48. Rushdie, Step Across, 187.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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:
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
160 Ana Cristina Mendes
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 definite 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
Bombay/‘Wombay’ 161
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 profi le
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
162 Ana Cristina Mendes
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
Bombay/‘Wombay’ 163
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:
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
164 Ana Cristina Mendes
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.
Bombay/‘Wombay’ 165
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 Bombay of [ . . . ] the fi fties 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
Bombay/‘Wombay’ 167
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 fi ltered 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,
[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
“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
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
Bombay/‘Wombay’ 171
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
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
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.
3. Rushdie, “On Being Photographed,” 115.
4. Rushdie, “On Being Photographed,” 115.
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.
176 Ana Cristina Mendes
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.
19. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 160.
20. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 79.
21. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 155.
22. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 210.
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/.
24. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 209.
25. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 209.
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.
31. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 222.
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
Bombay/‘Wombay’ 177
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.
37. Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 26.
38. Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 32–33.
39. Note 44, Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 48.
40. Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 42.
41. Boyer, The City of Collective Memory, 38.
42. Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 42.
43. Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 42.
44. Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” 39.
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.
46. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 31.
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).
48. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 108.
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.
178 Ana Cristina Mendes
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.
54. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 81.
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).
56. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 158.
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.
59. Boyer, The City of Collective Memory, 31.
60. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 62.
61. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 31.
62. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 79.
63. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 79.
64. Boyer, The City of Collective Memory, 49.
65. Boyer, The City of Collective Memory, 34.
66. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 62.
67. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 60.
68. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 164.
69. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 63.
70. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 64.
71. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 154.
72. Boyer, The City of Collective Memory, 45.
73. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 74.
74. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 79.
75. Boyer, The City of Collective Memory, 46.
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).
78. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 78.
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.’
80. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 76.
81. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 76.
82. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 101. Rushdie argues: “I think that
sense of displacement, dislocation, starting again, having to redefi ne yourself
Bombay/‘Wombay’ 179
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).
83. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 80.
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).
85. Boyer, The City of Collective Memory, 33.
86. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 211.
87. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 211.
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.
91. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 386.
92. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 386.
93. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 214.
94. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 211.
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’
180 Ana Cristina Mendes
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.
99. Rushdie, “On Being Photographed,” 115.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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 find 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?
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
188 Madelena Gonzalez
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.
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
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
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
Screening the Novel, the Novel as Screen 191
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:
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
192 Madelena Gonzalez
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:
The majority of reviewers reproached Fury with its reproduction of, and
complicity with, the society of the spectacle. According to Notaras, “The
Screening the Novel, the Novel as Screen 193
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:
If we are to believe Jenks again, the modern flâneur can indeed be re-
invented as a critical force:
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 fi ll 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
Screening the Novel, the Novel as Screen 195
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:
“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
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
Screening the Novel, the Novel as Screen 197
“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.
198 Madelena Gonzalez
16. Wood, “The Nobu Novel,” 33.
17. Matt Thorne, “Rich Man’s Blues,” The Independent on Sunday, August 26,
2001, 15.
18. Rushdie, Fury (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001), 56.
19. Rushdie, Fury, 3.
20. Rushdie, Fury, 4.
21. Rushdie, “John Berger,” in Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie (Lon-
don: Granta, 1992), 210.
22. Rushdie, Fury, 128.
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.
27. Wood, “The Nobu Novel,” 36.
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.
33. Rushdie, Fury, 48.
34. Furst, All is True, 66.
35. Rushdie, Fury, 232.
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.
39. Rushdie, Fury, 186.
40. Rushdie, Fury, 98.
41. Rushdie, Fury, 161.
42. Peter Reynolds, “Introduction,” in Novel Images: Literature in Performance,
ed. Peter Reynolds (London: Routledge, 1993), 1.
43. Rushdie, Fury, 114.
44. Furst, All is True, 151.
45. Furst, All is True, 152.
46. Rushdie, Fury, 89.
47. Wood, “The Nobu Novel,” 35.
48. Rushdie, Fury, 129.
49. Furst, All is True, 49.
50. Furst, All is True, 9.
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.
Screening the Novel, the Novel as Screen 199
55. Barnaby, “The Realist Novel as Meta-Spectacle,” 43.
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.
59. Wood, “The Nobu Novel,” 36.
60. Wood, “The Nobu Novel,” 35.
61. Wood, “The Nobu Novel,” 35.
62. Rushdie, Fury, 87.
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.
66. Rushdie, Fury, 161.
67. Rushdie, Fury, 168.
68. Chris Jenks, “Watching Your Step: The History and Practice of the Flâneur,”
in Visual Culture, ed. Chris Jenks (London: Routledge, 1995), 148.
69. Rushdie, Fury, 34.
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/.
71. Rushdie, Fury, 239.
72. Barnaby, “The Realist Novel as Meta-Spectacle,” 45.
73. Barnaby, “The Realist Novel as Meta-Spectacle,” 45.
74. Barnaby, “The Realist Novel as Meta-Spectacle,” 48.
75. Rushdie, Fury, 231.
76. Rushdie, Fury, 230–231.
77. Rushdie, Fury, 143.
78. Furst, All is True, 190.
79. Eugene Arva, “Writing the Vanishing Real: Hyperreality and Magical Real-
ism,” Journal of Narrative Theory 38.1 (Winter 2008): 72.
80. Rushdie, Fury, 188.
81. Rushdie, Fury, 153.
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.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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,
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:
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.
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’:
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:
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 fi lm 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.
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:
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
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
Media Competition and Visual Displeasure 211
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
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.
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.
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
[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
Media Competition and Visual Displeasure 215
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
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
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
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ahmad, Aijaz. “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality.” Race and Class 36 (1995):
1–20.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Is the ‘Post’ in ‘Postcolonial’ the ‘Post’ in ‘Postmod-
ern’?” In Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives,
edited by Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, 420–444. Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Baker, Houston A., Jr. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1987.
Chin, Barbara. “Acting Naturally: Cultural Distinction and Critiques of Pure Coun-
try.” In White Trash: Race and Class in America, edited by Annalee Newitz and
Matt Wray, 231–247. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Chioni Moore, David. “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post in Post-Soviet? Toward
a Global Postcolonial Critique.” In Baltic Postcolonialism, edited by Violeta
Kelertas, 11–44. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.
Cornis-Pope, Marcel. “Literary Imagination in the Post-Cold War Era: Developing
Alternative Models of Cultural Interaction.” Literary Research / Recherche lit-
téraire 18.36 (2001): 389–401.
Gonzalez, Madelena. Fiction after the Fatwa: Salman Rushdie and the Charm of
Catastrophe. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005.
Karpenstein-Eßbach, Christa. “Medien als Gegenstand der Literaturwissenschaft:
Affären jenseits des Schönen.” In Bildschirmfiktionen: Interferenzen zwischen
Literatur und neuen Medien, edited by Julika Griem, 13–32. Tübingen: Narr,
1998.
Kathari, Shuchi and Zuberi, Nabeel. “Das Herz bleibt indisch: Bollywood und die
südasiatische Diaspora. In Bollywood—Das Indische Kino und die Schweiz,
edited by Alexandra Schneider,” 162–69. Zurich: Edition Museum für Gestal-
tung Zürich, 2002.
Kureishi, Hanif. Gabriel‘s Gift. London: Faber & Faber, 2001.
McLuhan, Marshall and Fiore, Quentin. The Medium is Massage. 1967. London:
Penguin, 2008.
Menon, Nivedita. “Between the Burqa and the Beauty Parlor? Globalization, Cul-
tural Nationalism, and Feminist Politics.” In Postcolonial Studies and Beyond,
edited by Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, Antoinette Burton, and Jed
Esty, 206–229. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1989.
Poppe, Sandra. “Literarische Medienreflexionen. Eine Einführung.” In Literarische
Medienrefl exionen: Künste und Medien im Fokus moderner und postmoderner
Literatur, edited by Sandra Poppe and Sascha Seiler, 7–23. Berlin: Erich Schmidt
Verlag, 2008.
Ranasinha, Ruvani. “The Fatwa and Its Aftermath.” In Salman Rushdie, edited by
Abdulrazak Gurnah, 45–59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Picador, 1981.
Media Competition and Visual Displeasure 221
.The Satanic Verses. London: Viking, 1988.
. Fury. New York: Modern Library, 2001.
. Shalimar the Clown. London: Jonathan Cape, 2005.
Sarkar, Tanika and Urvashi Butalia, eds. Women and the Hindu Right. New Delhi:
Kali for Women, 1995.
Seiler, Sascha and Sandra Poppe, eds. Literarische Medienrefl exionen. Berlin:
Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2008.
von Tschilschke, Christian. Roman und Film: Filmisches Schreiben im französis-
chen Roman der Postavangarde. Tübingen: Narr, 2000.
Wilson, Robert Rawdon. “The Rushdie Affair,” Queen’s Quarterly 101.3 (1994):
83–96.
Contributors
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).
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.
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