Before and after Midnight: Salman Rushdie and the Subaltern Standard

This chapter begins with a discussion of Rushdie’s first and ill-fated literary effort, Grimus. The novel, a science fiction fantasy, was published in 1975 and had been conceived, or at least reworked, by Rushdie with an eye on the Victor Gollancz Science Fiction Prize (Weatherby 35; Appignanesi and Maitland 3). Constructed by the motif of a journey, the novel catalogs Flapping Eagle’s search for his sister and his encounter, in a different dimension, with his doppelgänger, Grimus.

The protagonist, Flapping Eagle, and his sister, Bird-Dog, belong (partially and precariously, we are told, on account of his unacceptable posthumous birth and initially ambiguous sex, and their unnatural behaviors) to the apocryphal tribe of Axona Amerindians. The narrator believes that the reason for this unbelonging is that “orphans in Axona are like mongrels among pedigree hounds. We were near-pariah from the moment my father passed on, and our natures exacerbated our plight” (Grimus 16–17). Only later does he come to understand that “the main reason, the true cause of our detachment from our tribe, was not our orphan status, not her manliness, not her taking of a brave’s name, not her general demeanour, not her at all. It was me, Joe-Sue” (17). He goes on to explain that there were three reasons for their having been ostracized:

first, my confused sex; second, the circumstances of my birth; and third, my pigmentation. . . . To be a hermaphrodite among the Axona is to be very bad medicine. A monster. . . . To be what I was, born from dead, was a dire omen. . . . As for my colouring: the Axona are a dark-skinned race and shortish. As I grew, it became apparent that I was, inexplicably, to be fair-skinned and tallish. This further genetic aberration—whiteness— meant they were frightened of me and shied away from contact. (17–18)

No longer tolerated by the tribe after Bird-Dog leaves the isolated plateau that is the home of the tribe, Joe-Sue, who has been re-christened Flapping Eagle by his sister before her departure, is politely asked to “just slip away completely,” by an unctuous “Sham-Man” (25). His journey, temporary sojourn in the town of K, and journey-within-journeys up Calf Mountain introduce an assortment of characters that include guides, whores, ice queens, and the heterogeneous being, Grimus. Following his encounter with Grimus, the island itself dissolves: “Deprived of the connection with all relative Dimensions, the world of Calf Mountain was slowly unmaking itself, its molecules and atoms breaking, dissolving, quietly vanishing into primal, unmade energy” (319).

Even in this brief summary it is possible to recognize in this early work some of Rushdie’s favored themes, the dangers of purist thinking; the pain of unbelonging; the motif of journeys over space and time, geographic and spiritual terrain; cultural and biological hybridity; alternative realities and dimensions of experience; and the entropy of social systems. In fact it is particularly a view from the future that exposes many of these as typical themes for the writer. Catherine Cundy suggests that the novel “offers an important insight into stylistic and thematic preoccupations developed more fully in the author’s later work” (12):

[When] viewed from the standpoint of The Satanic Verses . . . [it] allows us to see areas of debate which are subsequently handled with greater depth and maturity in Rushdie’s later work—ideas of personal and national identity, the legacy of colonialism, the problems of exile. (12)

James Harrison claims that “those who first encounter Grimus after reading any or all of Rushdie’s next three novels will, like a newly married couple exploring each other’s family photograph albums, recognize the early stages of what they are familiar with in a later version” (33). Critical interest in this novel most often tends to take the shape of genealogical approaches that trace the evolution of these themes and stylistic particularities in the more “significant” novels. As dismissive as Rushdie is of his early effort, critics have not been particularly kind to the novel either. It is not my goal here, however, to debate the merits and demerits of the novel (its “professional brilliance,” which Brennan concedes, or its bagginess, overworked logorrhea, and the adolescent punning he may not have outgrown entirely, for instance) so much as it is to examine those lines of thought initiated in Grimus that Rushdie goes on to pursue in his subsequent work and to examine the signifi-cance of this early work in a reckoning of his more geographically and historically “situated” later oeuvre.

According to Tim Brennan, “Grimus fails even though it is carried off with professional brilliance simply because it lacks a habitus” (Salman Rushdie 70). D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke complains that Rushdie “satirizes ideas and social systems—but in the abstract. The next stage is to locate this in the real world” (15). Fletcher protests that “Grimus explores varieties of myth without being geographically grounded” (10). In the later novels, Cundy argues, “a crucial aspect” of Rushdie’s discussion of aforementioned themes is the “use of a specific geographical setting, not only to evoke a particular atmosphere but, through it cultural and historical associations, to raise certain issues for the reader” (12–13). Critics have attempted to give to Rushdie’s airy nothing in Grimus a local habitation and a name but such a reading tends to be strained. To Goonetilleke, the Axonas “represent an aspect of American society and Rushdie satirizes it, as when he dwells on the Axona obsession with health and cleanliness, their credo that ‘all that is Unaxona is unclean’. . . recalling the era of McCarthyism and the prosecution of un-American activities” (7). The Axona fear of “breasted providers” such as Bird-Dog is read as a critique of “American masculine chauvinism” (7). Goonetilleke, however, does not pursue this parallel very far. James Harrison reads in the social structure offered by Grimus a representation of “communism in its final, ideal stage,” but he abandons this analogy to conclude that “Rushdie’s account of how the community works is purely theoretical—unrelated to the little that is actually shown of its workings” (36). Brennan attempts to read it as an allegory for the migrant arriviste with limited success: “That Flapping Eagle’s journey is just that kind of allegory is borne out by the image of ascent . . . as though scaling Calf Mountain in search of Grimus was a physical rendering of the act of climbing the ranks of British opportunity” (72).

Various attempts have also been made to read between the lines of this novel to abstract a more readily postcolonial narrative but the novel’s “admittedly flimsy. . . treatment of post-coloniality” and his “failure to engage fully with questions of migrant identity in Grimus has led to a dissipation of critical interest” (Cundy 20). Brennan suggests that “if the conflict between Third-World peoples and European colonisers is evident here, it is carried out in terms so metaphorical as to be unrecognizable” (71). Ib Johansen forecloses on a postcolonial reading because “in Grimus the clash between different systems of values and between the people of the third world and their European colonizers is largely carried out in metaphorical terms. . . . In Rushdie’s later novels, however, the outsider . . . is placed within a narrowly circumscribed historical space” (33). Brennan astutely notes that “the novel from the start takes on the aura of a kind of cryptic handbook—a series of codes that outline intellectual positions rather than pursue a narrative goal” (Salman Rushdie 71). Although the themes of migrancy, identity, hybridity und so weiter are available for contemplation and discussion, they don’t “add up” to a postcolonial narrative because they do not evoke the favored Third World postcolonial subject. Without geography, we are to assume, these issues fail to be meaningfully historical.

If Grimus lacks location and situation—it floats away from its only quasireal location, the tabletop of Amerindia, to parts unknown, and takes place in no place in times present and times past—Rushdie’s next novel, Midnight’s Children, is very carefully situated. The narrator begins by addressing the matter of location and temporal context with a combination of élan and hesitation: “I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time” (3). Responding to some off-screen injunction inserted into the text—“that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date”—he obligingly provides the date and the time of his birth. The postcolonial moment and place are proclaimed in a torrent of confession after the initial moment of hesitation: “Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence” (3). Beginning at this paradigmatically postcolonial moment, Midnight’s Children also marks the inception of Rushdie’s career as a postcolonial writer and as founding father for a whole generation of Indian writers to follow.1

Rushdie himself concedes that Grimus may have been too clever by half, that he had not yet found the right voice. It is usually assumed that he found it in Midnight’s Children, which not only won the Booker McConnell Prize in 1981 but went on to win the Booker of Bookers in 1993. Rushdie’s turn to India in this novel was a successful move; it not only gave him the habitus Grimus lacked but it also allowed him to share a preexisting forum, that of “commonwealth literature.” Regardless of other factors, it is not until the ideas and intelligence that appear in Grimus are recoded—I invoke Brennan’s aforementioned reference to the “series of codes that outline intellectual positions” in the novel—as native intelligence that Rushdie finds himself “enjoying the unique pleasure of having written, for the first time, a book that people liked” (1). The recasting of concepts such as migrancy and hybridity as issues of particular resonance in the postcolonial rather than broadly intellectual context, even as paradigmatic postcolonial issues, underscores the mechanics of this refashioning. Rushdie’s origin in the subcontinent becomes meaningful and his writing recategorized when he begins to bring his audience tales from afar (from home, albeit lost) in a new code that renders the native intelligible to a metropolitan audience. In Rushdie’s own words, the empire now writes back. Brennan, in fact, refers to Rushdie’s as “novels of information,” implying a primarily, if not exclusively, colonial relationship. In Benjamin’s terms, this transformation is poignantly captured as follows: “It is no longer intelligence coming from afar, but the information which supplies a handle for what is nearest that gets the readiest hearing” (Illuminations 89). “The prime requirement” of information, as Benjamin notes, “is that it appear ‘understandable’ in itself” (89). Now appropriately located within a recognizable context, the story becomes available “already shot through with explanation” through the conceptual rubrics of “commonwealth” and “postcolonial” literature (89). The ambiguities of intellectual concepts that have thus far been explored through metaphor and mythical structure are thus belatedly resolved by a resituation of the same ideas in a geographical and historical context now open to measures of verifiability.

David Harvey contends in his influential thesis on the condition of postmodernity that “in the midst of the growing abstractions of space . . . the identity of place was reaffirmed” (272). As I go on to argue, however, neither place nor time, geography nor history, adhere as neatly to the recognizable units of controlled space and time—units that are usually embodied through the modern nation and its historicized evolution— as the post-Grimus novels’ “situatedness” would lead one to expect. In strategic terms, when Rushdie’s narrator uses subcontinental history as his material in Shame, Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, or The Moor’s Last Sigh, he frames it flamboyantly as the world according to the narrator, re-forming history as his story, his story as history, one of myriad narrative possibilities. In juxtaposing past and present, moreover, into an interwoven blur, the novelist replaces historicism by a mode of aggressive constellation with different moments other to the present. At the same time as what Benedict Anderson calls the “radical separation between past and present” is denied, the here and elsewhere of historical event and experience are also rendered simultaneous as both geography and history are crimped together (Imagined Communities 23). The crisis of narrative caught within the throes of modernity reveals itself in a restless, shifting collage, captured within a novel conjugation of the novel form that folds time and space into each other, an aesthetic strategy that gains increasing momentum until it finds its most dramatic exposition in The Moor’s Last Sigh.

Postcolonial challenges to colonial modernity’s epistemological regime are scarcely unique to Rushdie’s work. Colonial modernity’s strategies of the classification and debasement of human beings aside,2 its mastery over the space and time of the colonized were crucial components of colonization. This control was manifested variously: in its command over space as cultivable land and territory, over the colony’s borders first as administrative units and later as independent nations; its regiment over the time of the colonized both through the production of their “negative history” (David Spurr’s phrase) and through a reorganization of their time in clock and calendar units and as labor. Rushdie’s project of a long memory for the space of the subcontinent, however, encompasses not only colonial domination of time and space in the modern moment, but a far older “history” of control over people and their fate through movement of people across space in older diasporas and the tyranny of religious conversions, expulsions, and prejudices as the collective time and space of one people is denied to its prevailing other. An understanding of the confounding intricacy of the condition of modernity, therefore, is not allowed to constitute an implicit denial of complexity to “pre-history.” A strategy of collage, montage, and aesthetic figuration dominate the representation of time and space, and indeed the subaltern, in much of Rushdie’s work.

The nation, in this configuration, is disaggregated and plural, its simultaneity not so much one of a shared imagined community that is already there as it is one of simultaneity across place and time. The “other” places of this simultaneity are not only the vaunted elsewheres of a contemporary transnational reality—although they are—but also that of the past as “another country” from which one has emigrated and of the other countries that are laid over the experience of this or that one nation. The nation, a palimpsestine of formidable complexity, is a conceptual onion: a slice through would make you cry, even as it brings tears to the eyes of Moor who watches time and space dissolve alongside the possibilities that lie within them for a different future (The Moor’s Last Sigh 433). The provisionality of this vision of community renders it unavailable for mobilization for a clear political project. Critics Brennan and Afzal-Khan have deplored this failure to provide a viable alternative that can be productively operationalized by the post-colony. Brennan argues that Rushdie’s work is a failure of ideology because of his inclusion in an elite class that cannot be committed to a national struggle while the latter locates the lapses in his “inability to mythologize history” (Afzal-Khan 144n1). Rushdie’s steadfast refusal to yield a grand design and his rejection of historical petrification have been understandably frustrating to a postcolonial critique seeking the now evaporated energy and directional impetus of Fanon. The nostalgic longing sometimes expressed for an unambiguous anticolonial narrative also constitutes a dirge of sorts on the loss of political clarity and the erosion of the hopeful certainties of the first phase of postcolonial resistance that was dominated by a clearer sense of political opposition. Unable to surrender to what Partha Chatterjee describes as “the old forms of the modern state,” Rushdie gives us a folding of different eras and places in a far more expansive temporal and spatial frame than that prompted by colonialism and its aftermath alone (11). It is within this alternative framework that one might locate his socially anonymous subaltern and a hopelessly mystifying utopia.

Rushdie may have found a “habitus” after Grimus but his improper subscription to modern units of time and space creates considerable disturbance for the expectations one might have for a properly post-colonial writer. His treatment of history, of the subaltern, and indeed of a future for the postcolonial nation has scarcely yielded the kind of political project that continues to be expected by many concerned critics. An overly cosmopolitan Rushdie has all too often eclipsed the poetic and political aspects of his work in a “native” context—both as an aesthetic project and as a multilocated text with valence beyond the transnational context. While location is not irrelevant, it is perhaps the very sense of First and Third World as monolithic rather than shot through with multiple constituencies and audiences that allow the casting of Rushdie as a First World writer in a supposedly tripartite but functionally bipolar world by his critics and as the voice of the Third World by his Western readers.3 The first casts him in the excessive and expansive space of internationalism while the other confines him to the temporally backward spatial category of the Third World. Both positions respond to the conflicted problem of representation in a shifting world that is far from abandoning its subscription to spatial distinctiveness. Rushdie may well be the poster child (and therefore sometimes the favored whipping boy) for a certain formulaic postcolonialism, but a reading more attuned to his particular treatment of “stock” postcolonial themes uncovers a more interrogatory than confirmatory stance toward them.4 Such a reading also begins to reveal the complex modes of representation that produce neither “hit-” nor “mis-” representations but those self-identical with themselves in the intrinsic logic of the text. Subalternity and hybridity, two central postcolonial concepts, appear as concerns that are obviously thematic, certainly ideological, but also aesthetic in Midnight’s Children, Shame, and The Moor’s Last Sigh. This nexus of interests leads to a contrapuntal evaluation of the novels’ traffic with these ideas: If aestheticization renders the horrible tolerable by virtue of its transformative medium, it also succeeds in conjuring up a vision of what could be against what is. The textual use of ecphrases, myth, and allegory in these novels suggests an aesthetics of representation as figuration, thus encoding the “intelligence” of the texts; while the emphasis on “unforgetting” takes place in a context both transnational and devotedly nationalist or “native” in its awareness of the forgotten subaltern and the underreported local face of hybridity. In the discussion to follow, I examine the question of representation in three different critical maneuvers: by examining the challenges for representation thrown up by the ironic relation of history to story, by discussing the aesthetic representation of subalternity in Rushdie’s works, and finally, by relocating the postcolonial issues of migration and hybridity from the transnational and postmodern to the local subcontinental and the matter of representation from the sociocultural alone to the native context of artful composition.

The expectation of representation that operates within the practical discipline has accustomed many to accept the postcolonial novel—I isolate this genre because it is predominant in postcolonial literature— as a testimonial of sorts. The postcolonial novel takes shape in the context of a historical event, and is thus, like Saleem in Midnight’s Children, “fathered by” and “handcuffed to history” (118, 9), or like the Moor’s tale, “expelled from . . . story, tumbled towards history” (5). This relationship of history to story had led to disappointments for readers and critics on both sides of the global/local divide. Greeted with great expectations (perhaps not entirely unreasonably so), the postcolonial text that had arrived was read eagerly and found disappointing by many:

Many readers wanted it to be the history, even the guidebook, which it was never meant to be. . . . These variously disappointed readers were judging the book not as a novel, but as some sort of inadequate reference book or encyclopaedia. (Imaginary Homelands 25)

The celebrated “mistakes” of Midnight’s Children are intended to reiterate that it is far “from being an authoritative guide to the history of post-independence India,” but Indian readers, perhaps uncannily aware of the representational burden borne by this sort of text, were greatly troubled by them (Rushdie, “‘Errata’” 23). It is not only the paucity of representation in historical accounts and the general anxiety over absence that place this demand on the postcolonial writer and text; it is also the “represented” constituency’s heightened awareness of the power of cultural representations in the contemporary global broadcasting machine. In the grammar of Vasco Miranda, a character in The Moor’s Last Sigh, it is not representation versus misrepresentation that is the issue, but that of hit-representation as in “‘hit-take, hit-alliance, hit-conception . . . . Opposite of mis-’” (150). Those who perceive themselves as represented are aware that these representations can be used against them in the global context. The anxieties about authenticity and resistance that surround the postcolonial text arise from an awareness of its commodity value in the global information loop where Western control of the technologies of representation is still seen as dominant.

In much of his work, however, it is clear that Rushdie attempted to forestall, if not all the disappointments that readers and critics complain of, at least the possibility of the literalist fallacy and a “mistake of categories” (“In Good Faith” 17). Among them is the device of retelling of history as rumor and gossip as well as through simultaneous affirmation and negation in ambivalent reports of historical events. In his 1999 novel The Ground beneath Her Feet, Rushdie melodramatizes the discreteness of fact and fiction in proleptic gestures of anticipatory caution against being taken literally. The novel includes such gratuitous errata as the U.S. president’s narrow escape in Dallas, Texas, and the theory that John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated on the same day and by the same bullet. In this flamboyantly alternative history, Oswald’s rifle jams, Don Quixote is actually written by Pierre Menard, the Watergate affair is a cheap, fictional novel, and so on. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, the author “starts” the Second World War a month early, in August 1939 (68). Although it is not always clear if Rushdie’s metropolitan audience always “gets it” when he trifles with subcontinental history, the disjuncture in his insertion of these errors lies in the unlikelihood of the reader mistaking them for any but deliberately planned novelistic acts, even if he had not insisted on their existence as deliberately unlike historical doppele. The “asymmetric ignorance” (Dipesh Chakrabarty’s phrase indicating that “we” must cite them; “they” need not know anything about us) of the typical First World reader places a far greater burden on the writer attempting to represent (or mis- or dis-represent) the postcolonial condition in an ironic mode.

Rushdie’s many changelings, dating back to Flying Eagle in Grimus, and his many unstable, unreliable narrators have been read in terms of an obsessive concern with subjectivity in a mode continuous with Western postmodernism. Thus, plurality and what Leela Gandhi refers to as “textual plenitude” have been read primarily, if not exclusively, through the prism of postmodernity (157). Because it is assumed, and often correctly, that “metropolitan culture designates itself as the privileged addressee—the chosen audience—of the romantic postcolonial text,” it is also assumed that the Rushdie text is itself constituted solely by this purpose (162). In this sort of reading, the text offers the mirage of opposition in a quixotic battle fought by an army of words; its migrantcentered ruminations on identity constitute no more than a beguiling, postmodern soufflé of identity, without substance or the staying power necessary for a meaningful postcolonial resistance; its message and import are presumed to be packaged and signposted for nonnatives; its true North is the West; and its antagonist the fading empire and its ambiguous legacy. The reduction of a worldwide readership to the category of transnational metropolitan, however, reduces the very plenitude of textual possibilities that supposedly enable the casting of a wide net to capture a globally metropolitan audience. The failure to conceive of an alternate addressee, necessarily indefinable because not yet conceived, hobbles the ability to transvaluate the text in a different context in which the point of reference is neither the postmodern nor the transnational.

It may well be that “one obvious reason for Midnight’s Children’s successful intervention in the Western literary scene was its familiarity to readers of other well-known satirists of nationalism and dependency,” as Brennan notes, but there is a particular indigenous context in which the novel might be resituated in order to better comprehend its generational complexity, that is, both the conditions of its conception and its temporal significance for the author’s generation in the life of the nation. The errata in the text and Rushdie’s subsequent musings on the subject have been read as “a description of a postmodern artist’s exploration of unreliable narration” by those interested in approaching the text through a postmodern frame; Cundy argues that this issue might alternatively be read as “an illustration of the ‘erratic’ process by which the migrant’s sense of history reconstitutes itself through memory” (32). The transnational and the diasporic perspectives, so plausibly advanced in certain interpretations, comprise possibilities considerably abated, however, in the absence of a consideration of the national dimension of the novel’s telling. A third interpretive possibility surfaces if we take our cue from the title itself, which suggests the notion of an encounter within a more local purview.

Midnight’s Children may be a novel about memory but the fragmentation and absence of memory is not only that of the departed immigrant but also that of a new generation that is without memory precisely because it has not commemorated its subaltern history and has nothing to remember of the nationalist struggle except through the performative life of the nation. One might thus consider the problem to be one not only of the immigrant searching for “lost time” (Imaginary Homelands 24) and one not so much of a generation that is trying to remember but that of one calling to account those who appear to have forgotten, those who ought to have created “the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation” (Benjamin, Illuminations 98). As an elaborate exercise in failed anamnesis, the narrative addresses a collective generational amnesia as much (or as little) as it does the problem of the diffused subject who is multiply and ambiguously conflicted or that of the expatriate who cannot remember but in fragments. To this generation, the story of the nation and of the nationalist struggle is available not only as historical event and record but as fairy tale, myth, and fable. Theirs is a vision not of the nation as an ideal whole but that of a legacy and inheritance of a nation already divided, not only through external political boundaries but increasingly pernicious internal ones that have marginalized certain narratives and omitted what Guha calls “the politics of the people” (“On Some Aspects” 40).

Midnight’s Children, first published in 1980, belongs as much to a new transnational current as it does to a wave of expressive discontent sweeping the country some three decades after the hopeful acquisition of self-determination by nationalist leaders. Guha reminds us that the period between the eruptions of Naxalite insurgency in the 1970s and the end of the Emergency “has often been described as a period of disillusionment and Subaltern Studies as one of its outcomes” (xi). He explains that the revolt of the 1970s “amounted to youth calling age to account” (xii–xiii). “What came to be questioned,” he elucidates, “was thus not only the record of the ruling party, which had been in power for over two decades by then, but the entire generation that had put it in power. The young born, like Saleem Sinai, ‘handcuffed to history,’ were eager to break away from that ‘history’ meant for them as the legacy of a past made up of what they regarded as utopian dreams, hollow promises, and unprincipled political behavior of their elders” (xiii). In a 1990 interview, “Imaginative Maps,” Rushdie reminds his interviewer Una Chaudhuri: “You have to remember that it [Midnight’s Children] was written very largely during and immediately after the Emergency, which were not optimistic times. And so if it bears the mark of that, it’s not surprising.” Or, as Saleem puts it, perhaps as Rushdie speaking in ventriloquus: “Today I gave myself the day off and visited Mary. A long hot dusty bus-ride through streets beginning to bubble with the excitement of the coming Independence Day, although I can smell other, more tarnished perfumes: disillusion, venality, cynicism” (546). Elsewhere, Rushdie explicitly admits that Midnight’s Children enters its subject from the point of view of “a secular man. I am a member of that generation of Indians who were sold the secular ideal” (Imaginary Homelands 16).

In situating Rushdie’s narrative within this particular generational and temporal framework, I do not seek to classify Midnight’s Children as a terrorist text that might be equated with the roughly coeval Naxalite insurgency, a movement in revolt against the disillusion and cynicism of the 1970s; nor do I wish to falsely aggrandize Rushdie’s contribution to the representation of the subaltern. My more modest aim is to underscore the inheritance of a generation of writers conflicted not only by multiple cultural influences and the temptations of transnational mobility but also by the shared local legacy of a nation conceived from its very inception by lack and absence and their disappointment at what Guha calls “the failure of the Indian bourgeoisie to speak for the nation” (“On Some Aspects” 41). Despite the reckoning of sympathetic critics and the author himself, “textual plenitude,” however inventive, cannot in the end substitute for a whole national text of the nation; at most it might be read as hysterical overcompensation for a dramatic absence in the historical national narrative, nothing less, to use a Rushdieism, than a subaltern-sized hole in the fabric of the nation. The attempts to compensate this loss will only emphasize its impossibility, as the text itself reveals, in its formalizing of the dilemma posed by history.

“Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me,” claims the narrator in the opening chapter entitled “The Perforated Sheet.” When he commences the remaking of his life, he finds that he is “guided only by the memory of a large white bedsheet with a roughly circular hole” (4). But rather more than a memory, “that holey, mutilated square of linen” is his “talisman . . . [his] open-sesame” (4). The narrator’s attempts to fill the hole in the whole leads to fantastic attempts to swallow the entirety of “intermingled lives events miracles places rumors,” everything that the elite record has suppressed (4). The diffusion of subalternity through amorphous and ill-defined personalities and groups in Rushdie’s subcontinental novels provides an umbrage rather than a representation of the missing, the presence signified through absence, the whole through the recurrent image of the hole. We, like the narrator of Midnight’s Children, are pointed in the direction but never quite directed to the precise point. One of Saleem’s earliest memories is of a painting that hung directly above his crib; in the ecphrastic description provided by the narrator, we find some of the elements of the conflicted legacy described above:

The fisherman’s pointing finger: unforgettable focal point of the picture which hung on a sky-blue wall in Buckingham Villa, directly above the sky-blue crib in which, as Baby Saleem, midnight’s child, I spent my earliest days. The young Raleigh—and who else?—sat, framed in teak, at the feet of an old, gnarled, net-mending sailor. . . whose right arm, fully extended, stretched out towards a watery horizon, while his liquid tales rippled around the fascinated ears of Raleigh—and who else? Because there was certainly another boy in the picture, sitting cross-legged in frilly collar and button-down tunic . . . and now a memory comes back to me: of a birthday party in which a proud mother and an equally proud ayah dressed a child with a gargantuan nose in just such a collar, just such a tunic. (142)

Garbed in the incongruous vestments of “English milords,” the young boy, like the painting, is a tribute to the empire and its ongoing centrality for a servile native elite that is defeated even in victory, dependent even when assumed to be independent. But what else does the pointing figure allude to?

In a picture hanging on a bedroom wall, I sat beside Walter Raleigh and followed a fisherman’s pointing finger with my eyes; eyes straining at the horizon, beyond which lay—what?—my future, perhaps; my special doom, of which I was aware from the beginning, as a shimmering grey presence in that sky-blue room, indistinct at first, but impossible to ignore . . . because the finger pointed even further than that shimmering horizon . . . driving my eyes towards another frame . . . the Prime Minister’s missive, which arrived . . . one week after my photograph appeared on the front page of the Times of India. (142–43)

This time our attention is drawn to the hopes of the nation: “Newspapers celebrated me; politicians ratified my position” (143). But beyond these allusions is another possible direction:

Perhaps the fisherman’s finger was not pointing at the letter in the frame; because if one followed it even further, it led one out through the window, down the two-storey hillock, across Warden Road, beyond Breach Candy Pools, and out to another sea which was not the sea in the picture; a sea on which the sails of Koli dhows glowed scarlet in the setting sun . . . an accusing finger, then, which obliged us to look at the city’s dispossessed. (143–44)

But the dispossessed are never concretely realized in the retelling of the nation’s story. The Koli fishermen, unnamed in the description, have already been abstracted into the image of their boats; the use of metonymy here performs an outright replacement, and one that is never remedied by a reversal that draws our attention to those who ply their trade in those dhows that glow scarlet against the sun. The narrator returns us to this image toward the close of the novel when he ends up in his old ayah’s bedroom in an apartment that stands upon the ruins of his old home; “Her bedroom occupies more or less the same cube of air in which a fisherman’s pointing finger led a boyish pair of eyes out towards the horizon” (546). As the ayah sings to his son (who is not his son), the narrator offers a single phrase fragment: “Red dhow-sails spread against the sky” (546).

No mention is made of accusations or omissions; the phrase stands on its own, brimming with suggestion, replete with omissions. As much as he tries to pickle, contain, and label, the narrator knows that he must live “with the shadows of imperfection” (548). “In words and pickles,” he has “immortalized” his memories, and now “thirty jars stand upon a shelf, waiting to be unleashed upon the amnesiac nation” (549). There is at the end, however, “one jar” that “stands empty” and that, the narrator claims, is the “jar that must remain empty. . . What cannot be pickled, because it has not taken place” (550). What has not taken place, however, might be read as much in terms of the unknown future as it might in terms of an oversight in the past: we are left then with the image of a void filled with an amorphous plenitude. The unexpected conjunction of past and present provide one of those glimpses into a conception of a possible utopia “grounded in recollection,” as Marcuse phrases it.

The book’s final long sentence spirals into an image of “the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes” (552). In their alienation from the national narrative, faceless subalterns are apt to be figured in the variform guise of an alien nation that is mysterious and menacing, a hole that threatens to draw the nation into its hungry and abysmal vortex:

Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, in all good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died. (552)

The note of terror in this culminating apocalyptic passage underscores the extent to which the narrator wishes to be but is unable to be a successful “swallower of lives” (4). In the conclusion to Midnight’s Children, it is the narrator who is reduced “to specks of voiceless dust.” Haunted to the end by the fear of his own treachery and unwitting usurpation of another’s birthright, Saleem is powerless to encompass all of the nation’s realities, has never, in fact, contained the world, and is terrified of its unknown potential. The fear of the mob within the modern form of the democracy, the nation’s anxiety over its uncontainable excess, and its dismay at the prospect of judgment coalesce in the terror of the novel’s final articulation of the fate of midnight’s children.

The absence of conventional characterization in Rushdie’s novels demonstrates his early interest in what Brennan calls “intellectual positions” rather than in individual psyche or experience. Within this scheme, subalternity is located not in subalterns but in the attribution of subalternity to a shifting pattern of circumstance and event. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, subalternity is conveyed through a catalog of rage and despair:

the face-slapping quarrels of naked children at a tenement standpipe, the grizzled despair of idling workers smoking beedis on the doorsteps of locked-up pharmacies, the silent factories, the sense that the blood in men’s eyes was just about to burst through and flood the streets, the toughness of women with saris pulled over their heads, squatting by tiny primus stoves in pavement-dwellers’ jopadpatti shacks as they tried to conjure meals from empty air. (130)

Conceived as a notion both fractal and mobile, subalternity operates as an interpenetrative logic rather than as a characteristic fixed to a group or a character. The author’s self-confessed perspectival proclivities also impact this mode of representation. Rushdie states:

When I began the novel [Midnight’s Children] . . . my purpose was somewhat Proustian. Time and migration had placed a double filter between me and my subject, and I hope that if I could only imagine vividly enough it might be possible to see beyond those filters, to write as if the years had not passed, as if I haven’t left India for the West. But as I worked I found that what interested me was the process of filtration itself. (“Errato,” 24)

This interest, coupled by the distance produced by migration and time, amalgamates aesthetic with other considerations to produce a hazy picture of that which is represented. José Ortega y Gasset uses an interesting metaphor to describe the curious machinations involved in this shift:

To see a thing we must adjust our visual apparatus in a certain way. . . . Take a garden seen through a window. . . . Since we are focussing on the garden and our ray of vision is directed toward it, we do not see the window but look clear through it. The purer the glass, the less we see it. But we can also deliberately disregard the garden, and withdrawing the ray of vision, detain it at the window. We then lose sight of the garden; what we still behold of it is a confused mass of color which appears pasted to the pane. Hence to see the garden and to see the window-pane are two incompatible operations. (9–10)

Rushdie’s interest in filtration, one might argue, is a cognate factor in the overall mode of representation in terms both poetic and political. The hazy filter intervenes in the project of presentation, not distorting or improving, neither hit- nor mis-, but as the necessary ambiguity that is intrinsic to the aesthetic mode. At the level of conceptual notion, subalternity is one of many leakages described in the novel, seeping into the national fabric as a scattered and fluid reality. It is linked, moreover, with terror, violence, and shame. Rushdie’s fondness for abstractions and corporate subjects—the major character in almost any of his novels is a crowd of sorts—expresses not the equivalence of character as symbol but of the dispersal of material suffering and pain through disjunctive, fragmented, and discontinuous iterations that frustrate the quest for homologies.

A reading, for instance, of Sufiya Zinobia (the monstrous child-woman who suffers excessively from shame, both remembered and vicarious, in the novel eponymously named for her chief characteristic) as the silent, demarcated child subaltern subject produced by Western and patriarchal historiography in the postcolony is thus likely to be tested by several limitations. On the one hand, it is tempting to approach her as a symbolic representation of the marginalized Pakistani/postcolonial subject. A character whose “chief defining characteristic was her excessive sensitivity to the bacilli of humiliation,” “Sufiya Hyder blushed uncontrollably whenever her presence in the world was noticed by others. But she also, I believe, blushed for the world” (Shame 152, 131). On the surface of it, she appears to be a functional representation of the wronged subaltern subject. We might argue that she has internalized a turbulent and corrupt history, ultimately to direct against it a fury that leaves even her stupidly astonished. Humiliated, untended, and unloved by all but her father and a curiously besotted Omar Khayyam, she has become a monstrous aberration that has learned to hate itself.

Revolting though she is, the postcolonial monster is yet protected by a patriarchal system that is determined, if not Pygmalion-like, to reform and beautify, then at least to manage and maintain. Unable to contain the violence of this subject, the agent of the state, Sufiya’s hapless bridegroom, finds that he cannot consummate his marriage with the beloved. He (arguably representative of the agency of the state, its passive toady, and spoilt scion of a corrupt elite) is ultimately destroyed by her. In this hasty reading, it is possible to conceive of Sufiya as a personification of the subaltern subject characterized by “the general attribute of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class [Sufiya’s class affiliations are meaningless given her abjection], caste, age, gender and office [she has none]” (Guha, Preface 35). But Rushdie balks at the equivalence.

Sufiya’s motivation and action are characterized by uncategorizable randomness rather than progressive design or plot movement. If her gender and her retardation suggest abjection, Sufiya’s family connections situate her, albeit not very meaningfully, as a member of the ruling class. If Sufiya has provocation to rebel, her revolt has no fixed target, no clear motive. Sufiya, moreover, is progressively dematerialized in the course of the story. “This is a novel,” the narrator reminds us, “about Sufiya, elder daughter of General Raza Hyder and his wife Bilquìs, about what happened between her father and Chairman Iskander Harappa, formerly Prime Minister, now defunct, and about her surprising marriage to a certain Omar Khayyam Shakil, physician, fat man and for a time the intimate crony of that same Isky Harappa, whose neck had the miraculous power of remaining unbruised, even by a hangman’s rope” (59). But lest we think that Sufiya’s story is a veiled allegory for the fate of the subaltern, we might consider that the narrator continues with the following: “Or perhaps it would be more accurate, if also more opaque, to say that Sufiya Zinobia is about this novel” (59).

The character’s trajectory is ultimately subservient to that of the tale; Sufiya’s fate is determined by the narrative force of ideas and principles rather than by character alone. Although Rushdie provides rather more of a psychological profile for Sufiya than we find in most of his other characters, it is as a somatogenic subject that she is introduced into the machinery of the narrative. In The Nervous System, Michael Taussig argues that “things such as the signs and symptoms of disease, as much as the technology of healing, are not ‘things-in-themselves,’ are not only biological and physical, but are also signs of social relations disguised as natural things, concealing their roots in human reciprocity” (83). If this were a novel written in the social realist mode Sufiya might serve as an illustration of the socioeconomic victimization suffered by the subaltern, but Rushdie has disavowed an interest in social realism, not because “I don’t like realism, but it seems to me that it’s a convention that has tried to impose itself as some kind of objective truth” (“Imaginative Maps”). The implication is that the form itself carries the politics of the position assumed by the author, that subalternity lies across society rather than in individuals. As the tale moves toward its atomic resolution, Sufiya is simultaneously aggrandized into mythic proportions even as she dwindles into abstraction and immateriality: “What had escaped, what now roamed free in the unsuspecting air, was not Sufiya Zinobia Shakil at all, but something more like a principle, the embodiment of violence, the pure malevolent strength of a Beast” (268). In the inadequation of epistemological knowledge and its object, “Objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder” (Adorno, Negative Dialectics 5).

Because the mythic and the monstrous are anomalous in “civilized society,”“[the] world made a huge effort of the will to ignore the reality of her, to avoid bringing matters to the point at which she, disorder’s avatar, would have to be dealt with, expelled” (219). As a matter of fact, “the more powerful the Beast became, the greater grew the efforts to deny its very being” (220). Rushdie eventually transforms her into the projectional fantasy of retribution: “as though she had never been more than a rumour, a chimaera, the collective fantasy of a stifled people, a dream born of their rage” (291). The author is uninterested in describing Sufiya in the sense in which Aijaz Ahmad uses it: “To ‘describe’ is to specify a locus of meaning, to construct an object of knowledge and to produce a knowledge that will be bound by that act of descriptive construction” (In Theory 99). We are encouraged to think of Sufiya as a principle, an embodiment, a repository rather than as a symbol whose valence is designed to cohere. Self-fractured from organic wholeness, endlessly transformed into plural selves, she becomes the unnamable, indescribable being who can be denied but cannot be ignored, who is sighted everywhere and found nowhere: “Slowly it became clear to him [Omar] that the stories of the white panther were indeed being told again; but what was remarkable was that they had begun to come from all over the country. . . . It was a large country, even without its East Wing, a land of wildernesses and marshy deltas studded with mangrove trees and mountain fastnesses and voids; and from every out-of-theway corner of the nation, it seemed, the tale of the panther was travelling to the capital” (280).

At this point, Sufiya has begun to function as contagion, as one of those disembodied ancestral voices prophesying war from every corner of the country, not as an oppressed subject whose transformation and subsequent choices can serve as a cautionary tale or as a mobilizing force. Although the latter appeals to our need for homologies in the postcolonial novel, Sufiya frustrates our attempts to fix her into subjectivity. If anything, Sufiya is de-scribed, increasingly fragmented, effectively exploded, and eventually unwritten by the logic of the narrative that claims that “the power of the Beast of shame cannot be held for long within any one frame of flesh and blood, because it grows, it feeds and swells, until the vessel bursts. And then the explosion comes” (317). It is possible to argue that it is the nature of resistance, too, to be mythologized, but Sufiya’s violence, born of shame, is unbridled by the logic of resistance; it is governed, instead, by the indiscriminate hunger for violence: “The killings continued: farmers, pie-dogs, goats. The murders formed a death-ring round the house; they had reached the outskirts of the two cities, new capital and old town. Murders without rhyme or reason, done, it seemed, for the love of killing, or to satisfy some hideous need” (287).

Again, although one finds in this description an echo of elite historical accounts of peasant rebellion that characterized peasant revolts as irrational and sporadic outbursts and crimes, denying the possibility of insurgency as “a motivated and conscious undertaking on the part of the rural masses,” and although the violence she unleashes is necessarily outside the law and inadmissible in the history of the nation-state, Rushdie’s failure to connect it plausibly with “the collective fantasy of a stifled people” disallows a reading of her career as any more than an allusion to the rage (and shame) that arise from shameless oppression (Guha, “The Prose of Counter Insurgency” 46).5 In The Prison Notebooks, Gramsci contends that “the history of subaltern social groups is necessarily fragmented and episodic. There undoubtedly does exist a tendency to (at least provisional stages of) unification in the activity of these groups, but this tendency is continually interrupted by the activity of the ruling groups; it can therefore only be demonstrated when an historical cycle is completed and this cycle culminates in a success” (54–55). A strategy of depicting subalternity as figuration, then, attempts to encompass its elusiveness and its ineluctability in the midst of the chaotic process of nation making.

Subalternity is here, and elsewhere, as in Midnight’s Children, construed as an alternative mode of migrancy that disperses and endlessly displaces the notion but never conveys the sense of a group or class approaching unification or a common destiny. When the subject of group action is broached, as it is in Rushdie’s piecemeal and brief references to tribal insurgency in the “Impossible Mountains,” it is dispatched with cursory references to raids on “military outposts and railway lines and water reservoirs” in the space of a paragraph (Shame 97, 141). Brutally and swiftly quelled by Raza Hyder, the tribals command very little space in the national narrative, serving principally to underscore the control and domination of the state and its military arm and to demonstrate the extent to which exploitative maldevelopment in the postcolony reveals another face of internal colonialism.

Rushdie’s complex relationship to the question of subalternity creates a curious crisis of representation. In an encompassing vision that is sensitive to all who are excluded from state power and the national narrative (including women, however problematically) but never accepts class-based determinism as exclusive criterion or objective conceptual groups as known, Rushdie undertakes a project alternatively in excess of the class struggle of the subaltern and far short of it. Consequently, the subaltern is neither meaningfully represented nor quite absent; Rushdie can neither represent the subaltern subject for a political program nor quite turn away from it. Like the painter Vasco Miranda in The Moor’s Last Sigh, what he represents is “a presence, and an absence. A fullness, and an emptiness. . . . Behold. He who hath eyes to see, let him see” (158). Existing palimpsestically at some level—to use one of Rushdie’s favorite conceptual metaphors—the subject is dimly present, but always overwritten decisively by other scripts that cannot erase it completely but will not allow it to emerge with clarity. These double gestures are captured not only through narrative choices but also through the choice of genre.

As a generic modality, fantastic fabulism operates not only as a preferred aesthetic choice commensurate with metropolitan tastes but also as a means of conveying this two-pronged indeterminacy. The interdependence of force and consent implied by this simultaneous inclusion/ exclusion is characterized by a stance at once critical of and constituted by the ideological force of the subcontinental nation. This double and elusive mode of representation is a gesture that might be read in deconstructive terms as placing the concept of the subaltern sous rature or in postmodern terms as provoking a crisis of meaning; equally appropriately, it signals an alternative means of de-essentialization, a cancellation/affirmation prompted by a sense of the complexity of local realities and disjunctures, and therefore, necessarily, without an accompanying program that can organize the object of oppression. In its preoccupation with the nation-state’s production of varieties of alienation, the narrative itself adopts a migratory mode as it rehearses diverse sorts of unbelonging. Despite the recurring use of a prophetic and apocalyptic tone (in Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and even The Ground beneath Her Feet), moreover, Rushdie’s is usually a backward glance in which it is the past that prophesies the present, not the present that points to a future; consequently, in this backward scope, the prospect of hope is found in the past rather than in the future, as in The Moor’s Last Sigh, denying the structural telos of history and empirical reality.

Rushdie’s subcontinental novels provide a text not of remedies and prospects but of fugitive fragments of (im)possible representation. It is the joint inability of the national narrative and the writer to adequately represent and encompass that produces the conflicted texts of Rushdie’s post-Grimus endeavors. Although it might be argued that there is no dearth of cultural expression that takes on the mantle of subaltern representation in terms more consonant with Ahmad’s notion of description, it is possible to glimpse in the reluctance outlined above a possible emancipatory stance. In a backward transfer from the novel to the world of politics, the conception of the subaltern as figurative offers a powerful mode of thinking the object ethically. The imagination of the oppressed figure as poetic rather than literal may conceivably leave its integrity intact without foreclosing on the project of addressing its needs and desires. The elasticity of this figurative representation may also pose a flexible response to the problem of ethical action in the face of an unknown future.

The representation thus presented as self-canceling is not, however, so elusive as to evade recognition of its explicit intent to indict. If Rushdie is seen as exotically political by Western critics (according to Brennan, Salman Rushdie 38) and not political enough because of his elitism, he has been seen as entirely too political by the discomfited Indian and Pakistani governments. Indira Gandhi sued over Midnight’s Children, and won, causing certain passages to be excised from subsequent editions of the novel.6 Shame was banned immediately after publication, and the local Maharashtrian government imposed a swift, if brief, ban on The Moor’s Last Sigh. Rushdie’s portraiture of the Emergency and Indira Gandhi, some speculate, is what prompted her son Rajiv Gandhi’s government to move with undue haste to ban The Satanic Verses. I will not repeat here Rushdie’s various depictions of rapacious and selfcentered “chamchas and other sellouts,” as Brennan terms them, in the latter’s detailed and illuminating discussion in a section of the same name in Salman Rushdie and the Third World, but I would underscore their valence for a domestic audience (85).

Notwithstanding the limited audience for his work in the subcontinent, the force of his representations is meaningful for what is arguably the most powerful segment of the population, the educated Englishspeaking elite that may constitute no more than 3 to 5 percent of the population but together outnumbers the population of New Zealand and Australia. Of Midnight’s Children, Tariq Ali observed that “Rushdie’s novel will not reach the South Asian masses,” but “it will be read by an English speaking intelligentsia, . . . and, in that sense, it is extremely important” (91). Rushdie’s subcontinental books are deeply political on the “other” side; as postcolonial programs grow in the universities in South Asia, students there too need to read about which attributes of South Asian “culture” one ought rightly to be patriotic about. In the context of this more local reading public in the subcontinent, however Westernized and distanced from the “politics of the people,” Rushdie’s employment of a ludic tone does not conceal the serious charge of the state’s multiple disenfranchisement of various sectors in its constituency or an indictment of those who collude in the state’s deficient and exclusionary politics. Only a view from the West, directed to the West would find these issues politically irrelevant.

In the final section of this chapter, I begin by exploring the extent to which it is possible to transvaluate the supposedly “transnational” concept of hybridity in the context of the subcontinental politics of inclusion and exclusion. In the concluding segment, however, I will suggest that hybridity is transformed into a conceptual aesthetic for collapsing time and space through a collage-montage format of citing/siting the past as utopic elsewhere in the midst of the present. This synthesis of the historical content of hybridity with a creative aesthetic composes a constellative seizure of the traces of various texts through a visual logic, and in a new trial combination that may have “nothing to say only to show,” to cite Benjamin, the best known proponent of montage theory (quoted in Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing 73).

Thus far, it is the postmodern and the First World centric senses of migrancy and hybridity that tend to predominate in an understanding of the postcolonial. In responding to the question, “Where is the post-colonial?” Harish Trivedi cynically returns the following:

Apparently the postcolonial is at home either in the metropolis . . . or in diaspora but never where he comes from. Home for him is where he himself isn’t but probably was some time ago, until he became post-colonial after which all he needs is a location. The “unhomed” of (un)Homi Bhabha inhabit, as we know, an interstitial Third Space which becomes available presumably when one has come out of the Third World. (“The Postcolonial or the Transcolonial” 270)

Migrancy and hybridity, terms so closely associated with postcolonialism as to be almost synonymous with it, are, because of the perceptions Trivedi so articulately describes, generally recognized through movements away from and out of the Third World. They are also understood, owing to an undue emphasis on novelty, as concepts of particular—by extension, exclusive—value for the present moment. Appearing alongside collateral terms such as syncreticism, hybridity, and new universalism, novelty is the dominant measure of value in the academic emporium. If the market is “the First Cause of contemporary thinking” (Malcolmson 239), Rushdie’s oft-quoted phrase is the default formula of this mode: “Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world” (Imaginary Homelands 394). Rushdie’s point, that this newness has been entering the world forever, “throughout human history,” however, seems to have been muted as he is always already read for First World consumption (394).

His contention that the world was always making itself anew, that “uncertainty [is] the only constant, change . . . the only sure thing” dovetails with the current penchant for the contemporary present as marked by unprecedented change and rarely chaotic uncertainties (405). However, Rushdie’s work repeatedly identifies not “the new wave” but the ebb and tide of history itself. The diaspora of British Muslims as a reality of this time in that place (England) as thrown into relief by the Rushdie affair, for instance, is matched up by scores of diasporas from time immemorial that appear in his works. Rushdie’s own diasporic move is one among many that his one-time fellow countrymen have been making for centuries; as Chamcha puts it, “The earth is full of Indians, you know that, we get everywhere, we become tinkers in Australia and our heads end up in Idi Amin’s fridge. Columbus was right, maybe; the world’s made up of Indies, East, West, North” (Satanic Verses 54). In a triangulated modality, the concept of hybridity (as well as that of migrancy) can be read through a premodern and extracolonial grid as well. In addition to its reconceptualization in terms temporal, spatial, and conceptual, moreover, in The Moor’s Last Sigh, the author comes to see its “potential for darkness as well as for light.”

In her critical introduction to postcolonial theory, Leela Gandhi observes that “the discourse of literary hybridity becomes a sort of guilty political rationalisation of readerly preference” (162). Commenting on the overemphasis on contemporary diasporic migrations to the First World, Stuart Hall notes that colonization “made the ‘colonies’ themselves, and even more, large tracts of the ‘post-colonial’ world, always already ‘diasporic’ in relation to what might be thought of as their cultures of origin. The notion that only the multicultural cities of the First World are ‘diasporaised’ is a fantasy which can only be sustained by those who have never lived in the hybridised spaces of a Third World, so-called ‘colonial,’ city” (“When Was the ‘Post-Colonial’?” 250). These observations, however insightful, both betray their preoccupation with metropolitan contexts. Not surprisingly, most of the interpretive activity spurred by Rushdie’s work has foregrounded the aforementioned, leading to a standard of sorts for Rushdie criticism. Without denying that the realities of intellectual production ensure that these contexts have a foundational bearing on virtually all postcolonial endeavors, it is possible to suggest a conscious redirection that illuminates other hermeneutic possibilities. The teeming abundance and multiple coding of Rushdie’s work warrants a deliberate turn toward his “other” audience and its constituency politics.7

In the first instance, one notes that it is not colonialism alone that “made the ‘colonies’ themselves, and even more, large tracts of the ‘post-colonial’ world, always already ‘diasporic’ in relation to what might be thought of as their cultures of origin” (250); nor was it the only factor in the constitution of a hybrid subjectivity in the postcolony. In the long view taken by Rushdie in some of his subcontinental fiction, and indeed by both Mistry and Roy as well, migration and hybridity are a part of the subcontinent’s distant and not just recent postcolonial past; hybrid at source, the Westward-bound migrant only enters another dimension of change. The literary hybridity alluded to by Leela Gandhi is not only one produced by colonial interaction but is itself a hybrid of various subcontinental influences. If anything, it is undue emphasis on the British colonial experience and its epistemic regimes that threaten to forestall a richer understanding of subcontinental history. Aware of this tendency to adumbrate hybridity in terms of relative purity at the source and the destination, Rushdie has repeatedly repudiated the thinness of narrowly defined national authenticity:

As far as India is concerned, anyway—it is completely fallacious to suppose that there is such a thing as a pure, unalloyed tradition from which to draw. The only people who seriously believe this are religious extremists. (Imaginary Homelands 67)

Within the context of subcontinental politics, the dangers of purist thinking assume ever more minatory proportions, as explored by Rushdie more fully in The Moor’s Last Sigh than in any of his other works. Rushdie’s descriptions of Indian culture in earlier works is also premised on a foundational sense of its cultural hybridity:

The . . . nature of Indian culture has always been multiplicity and plurality and mingling. Indians . . . assimilate the elements that are interesting and reject the rest. So Indian culture is not purist; the people . . . who talk most violently about purism in Indian culture tend to be Hindu religious extremists, and in Pakistan, similarly, the people who talk about a pure culture tend to be Muslim religious extremists. (Rushdie, “Midnight’s Children and Shame” 10–11)

Rushdie’s India begins neither with the postcolonial moment nor with British colonialism; the story of his India, produced from a commitment to “long” memory, is nevertheless also set in a dimension beyond time (in ways both similar and dissimilar to Roy’s treatment of Kerala in The God of Small Things), creating the phenomenon of temporal hybridity and border crossing.

The constant two-way migration between the ideological and temporal zones produced by the encounter with modernity is also a space for the creation of newness and startling modes of adaptation. Rushdie’s view of India as a mongrel reality encompasses this dimension as well, as demonstrated by his frequent references to the coexistence of variant temporal realities. In Midnight’s Children Saleem submits that “no people whose word for ‘yesterday’ is the same as their word for ‘tomorrow’ can be said to have a firm grip on the time” (123). In The Moor’s Last Sigh, the narrator observes: “There is a certain endemic vagueness in Bombay on the subject of time past: ask a man how long he’s been in business and he’ll answer, ‘Long.’—Very well, Sir, how old is your house?— ‘Old. From old time’” (180). Elsewhere, Rushdie suggests that “it may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, and that its loss is part of our common humanity” (Imaginary Homelands 12). Each of these perceptions, however, must contend with modern clock time for “now the remorseless ticktock reasserts itself” (Midnight’s Children 128). The struggle for the definitive version of the modern Indian nation is itself a consequence of this other mode of migratory and hybrid existence that must capitulate to the pressing need to control and regulate the excess of possibilities. Now the remorseless ticktock reasserts itself.

As if in response, every given protagonist in Rushdie’s subcontinental novels is a cultural and/or biological hybrid, and the novels abound in characters produced by ancient migrations. Rushdie’s insistence on a culturally hybrid nation is no mere perceptual preference; he has long held the view that “the idea of a pure culture is something which in India is, let’s say even politically important to resist” (“Midnight’s Children and Shame” 11; emphasis mine). His insistence on migration, hybridity, and diachrony is a message as much to those attempting to configure contemporary Indian identity along purist lines as it is to those who conceive of the native as a static, unchanging, terrigenous mold-hugger. However, as I argue in the course of my discussion of The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie’s treatment of hybridity and polyglossia takes a new turn in this novel, demonstrating a more thoughtful consideration and understanding; here Rushdie evinces a far more complicated stance toward hybridity. Thus far a predictable defender of pluralism, here Rushdie embarks—admittedly in a mood of trademark tolerance—on an examination of the hazards of indeterminacy and cultural pluralism under pressure from the need to articulate a modern, determinate identity.

Early in the novel, one finds the usual exhortations to remember India in terms of its hybrid identity:

Christians, Portuguese and Jews; Chinese tiles promoting godless views; pushy ladies, skirts-not-saris, Spanish shenanigans, Moorish crowns . . . can this really be India? Bharat-mata, Hindustan-hamara, is this the place? . . . Are not my personages Indian, every one? Well, then: this too is an Indian yarn. (87)

Minorities, too, are represented as varied and hybrid in this elaborate textual project of “unforgetting”:

But there are many Christianities here in Cochin, Catholic and Syriac Orthodox and Nestorian, there are midnight masses where incense chokes the lungs, there are priests with thirteen crosses on their caps to symbolise Jesus and the Apostles, there are wars between the denominations, R.C. v. Syriac, and everyone agrees the Nestorians are no sort of Christians. (62)

Moreover, contentious and warring though the factions may be, theirs is a Christmas perhaps more in keeping with its origins than that hybridized in its invention for Northern climes:

Christmas, that Northern invention, that tale of snow and stockings, of merry fires and reindeer, Latin carols and O Tannenbaum, of evergreen trees and Sante Klaas with his little piccanniny “helpers,” is restored by tropical heat to something like its origins, for whatever else the Infant Jesus may or may not have been, he was a hot-weather babe; however poor his manger, it wasn’t cold; and if Wise Men came . . . they came, let’s not forget it, from the East. (62)

Rushdie’s scheme of a long memory for India, going back to the purported beginning of time—the initiation of the Christian calendar in the passage above—goes even further back as he reports on a prior population related to Christianity:

They have almost all gone now, the Jews of Cochin. Less than fifty of them remaining, and the young departed to Israel. It is the last generation; arrangements have been made for the synagogue to be taken over by the government of the State of Kerala, which will run it as a museum. . . . This, too, is an extinction to be mourned; not an extermination, such as occurred elsewhere, but the end, nevertheless, of a story that took two thousand years to tell. (119)

The constellative juxtaposition of the holocaust with the vanishing of the Jewish population from Kerala performs one of those “evanescent similarities” Benjamin speaks of in “On the Mimetic Faculty,” prompting a montage-like view of nonsynchronous realities within a singular visual frame (Reflections 314).8 Many realities and many centuries jostle each other in the crowd of memories and beliefs that comprise the national story. Integral to Rushdie’s insistence that “this, too,” a slow extinction that lacks the drama or the swiftness or the scale that would draw our attention, “is an extinction to be mourned” is the suppression of that “other” extermination that remains nameless, but with which this slow seeping away is joined in a conceptual montage that can create the impression—from a long historical vantage point—of a steady and devastating stream of tragedy. Bemoaning the inability to mourn the losses that become visible only from this stance, the text offers a silent indictment of the slow accrual of prejudices that harbor the ingredients of the tragedy that is now to come if we fail to recognize its “antecedent.” The method used by the narrator here finds remarkable resonance with Benjamin’s proposition in “Theses on the Philosophy of History”:

Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian . . . grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. (Illuminations 263)

Recognizing the shape of what was an invisible extinction in casting his eyes backward, the narrator seems to urge the reader to see the shape of the tragedy to come in the refusal to recognize the nation as “essentially” hybrid. The author’s use of a technique of montage to illuminate the tragedy already written into an untold, older story is balanced at the end of the book by its use to show the redemptive possibilities that also become revealed in the overlaying of a different moment onto the present.

It is Aurora da Gama who serves as the conduit—arguably—for many of the author’s beliefs about the relation of art to a hybrid Indian culture and the challenges of representing it in its varieties and in the context of changing national politics. In one of many ecphrastic passages in Rushdie’s novels, the Indian nation is presented as “the great swarm of being” in one of Aurora’s earliest artistic efforts. Among the crowd in Aurora’s painting are figures from recent and distant history. Camoens trembles to see “it was Mother India herself” (60). Prior to independence, Aurora’s early paintings attempt to capture, “like a lizard on the wall,” the reality of Indian life as she sees it on the streets; beneath her representations lies

her own sense of the inadequacy of the world, of its failure to live up to her expectations, so that her own disappointment with reality, her anger at its wrongness, mirrored her subjects’, and made her sketches not merely reportorial, but personal, with a violent, breakneck passion of line that had the force of a physical assault. (131)

After Independence, we are told that “Aurora fell into a deep creative confusion, a semi-paralysis born of an uncertainty not merely about realism but about the nature of the real itself” (173). In a playful series of observations clearly intended to recall his own experiences as a writer, the narrator observes:

It was easy for an artist to lose her identity at a time when so many thinkers believed that the poignancy and passion of the country’s immense life could only be represented by a kind of selfless, dedicated—even patriotic—mimesis. (173)

Yet it is the fabulous that attracted attention. The narrator notes that even in the work of “committed realists” like “Premchand and Saadat Hasan Manto and Mulk Raj Anand and Ismat Chugtai . . . there were elements of the fabulous” (173). It is the “epic-fabulist manner” that captures “the dream-like wonder of the waking world” that Aurora eventually settles on as expressive of “her true nature” (174). She finds herself returning “obsessively to the mythic-romantic mode in which history, family, politics and fantasy jostled each other like the great crowds at V.T. or Churchgate Stations” (203–4). In the dream-worlds represented in her paintings, several “worlds collide” (226). The narrator describes these as “polemical pictures” that were intended not only to represent a fullness, but also something missing that can only be dreamt or imagined:

In a way these were polemical pictures, in a way they were an attempt to create a romantic myth of the plural, hybrid nation: she was using Arab Spain to re-imagine India, and this land-sea-scape in which the land could be fluid and the sea stone-dry was her metaphor—idealised? sentimental? probably—of the present, and the future, that she hoped would evolve. (227)

Many of the “high-energy, apocalyptic canvases” are superchromatic and wishful national allegories but they also depict her “Cassandran fears for the nation” (236).

The high energy and implied plenitude of this representation coupled with the infinite capacity to generate new stories is not, however, without its drawbacks. Its fragility is indicated in the frank admission of its status as “romantic myth.” Here The Moor’s Last Sigh signals a departure from unqualified advocacy of plurality. For the author who averred that the “broken mirror may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed” (Imaginary Homelands 12), that the “the novel has always been about the way in which different languages, values and narratives quarrel, and about the shifting relations between them” (420), that Saleem’s “story is not history, but it plays with historical shapes” (25), and warns us, through Iff, “Believe in your own eyes, and you’ll get into a lot of trouble” (Haroun 63), it is a significant deviation to state in The Moor’s Last Sigh:

It did not fail to occur to me . . . that what had happened was, in a way, a defeat for the pluralist philosophy on which we had all been raised. For the matter of Uma Sarasvati it had been the pluralist Uma, with her multiple selves, her highly inventive commitment to the infinite malleability of the real, her modernistically provisional sense of truth, who had turned out to be the bad egg; and Aurora had fried her—Aurora, that lifelong advocate of the many against the one, had with Minto’s help discovered some fundamental verities, and had therefore been in the right. The story of my love-life thus became a bitter parable, one whose ironies Raman Fielding would have relished, for in it the polarity between good and evil was reversed. (272)

It is the tenebrous surround of pluralism and provisionality that are evoked for contemplation now as the narrator faces one possible consequence of a world unmoored (the pun be pardoned) from certainty. If conventional morality is irrelevant, every interpretation must be permitted its day, and if truth is no longer available as a final court of appeal, what absolute value does one resort to? We are told in Haroun and the Sea of Stories that the excessively voluble Guppees who will permit anything in the name of free speech finally have their day when they confront the Chupwalas: The Guppees prove themselves worthy opponents in pitched battle: “All those arguments and debates, all that openness, had created powerful bonds of fellowship between them” (185). The Chupwalas, on the other hand, “turned out to be a disunited rabble, . . . their habits of secrecy had made them suspicious and distrustful of one other” (185). The appropriation by the so-called bad guys of a fecund store of stories, thus far associated with a positive capacity for regeneration, overtly challenges the implicit association of plurality with the positive.

The freedom from adherence to any absolute standard (of truth or any other value) is what now permits all of history to be available for refashioning not just by a liberal coterie that believes in pluralism but by any opportunist who has learned of the power of stories. By the time he gets to The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie is far more interested in the degree to which Hindu fundamentalism had begun to exploit the instability of the historical record. Tongue in cheek, Zeeny Vakil bluntly states, “‘I blame fiction . . . The followers of one fiction knock down another piece of make-believe, and bingo! It’s war!’” (351). Hobbled by his or her own long-espoused beliefs, the liberal pluralist is unable to respond with any absolute counternarrative that can be offered as a coherent and invariable option to the growing hegemony of a narrative created for purposes of control and domination. The multiple etymologies of Indian culture and the plethora of available fictions of identity permit relativism not only to the expansive pluralist but also to the fundamentalist seeking a preferred version on the grounds that if facts are disputable, the future must now rest on faith. The stunning realization offered by the writer here is that the imagination and violence can grow in the same soil. Both belong to the creative impulse Marx identifies in human nature, heading under the banner of late capitalism, creatively enough, toward its own undoing.

The rise of the Hindu nationalist movement might be located in the precise context of the struggle for the right fiction for the nation in the chaos produced by what Rushdie elsewhere calls the “Coca-Colonization” of the planet (Satanic Verses 406). Constantly prodded to make a final crossing into modernity, the postcolony still struggling to manufacture a nuclear identity is aware of the need to generate hegemonic rather than dispersed narratives in order to create an aggregate communal self that can survive as coherent and plausible within the postcolony and on the global stage where migrant postcolonials also have an investment in homeland nationalism. Busy making history from fragments of stories in its past, at a time of increasing globalization, emerging national hegemonies based on religious or uniquely cultural values tap into mass media technology’s potential for social thought control while reinforcing traditionalism and anti-imperialism. This, too, one acknowledges, is a mode of the functioning of native intelligence. The Rushdie affair as well as the rise of religious nationalisms have taught us that in the arena of global mass communication, nativists and fundamentalists are also gaining ground. The fertile imagination and endless possibilities for regeneration afforded by Indian culture are now being forced through the cold filter of a purposeful intelligence bent on exploiting its capacity for supporting new versions. But, as Neil Postman reminds us in Technopoly, “Once a technology is admitted, it plays out its hand; it does what it is designed to do” (7).

The refunctioning of information technology in the hands of rising fascist movements in the precise context of economic and cultural globalization should alert us to the fact that these phenomena, far from being cloistered and discrete, are all managed and programmed by the broadcasting machine to whose ideology they subscribe. In the precise context of the rise of Hindu fundamentalism, the kinetic dynamics of stories and history is particularly significant. Deploying selected portions of mythological texts, the movement currently in progress has tried to mobilize a massive right-wing assault against non-Hindu minorities. The project is no less than to redefine India as a Hindu nation.9 Rushdie puts the message of the movement in Raman Fielding’s words: “Now our freedom, our beloved nation, is buried beneath the things the invaders have built. The true nation is what we must reclaim from beneath the layers of alien empires” (299).

New developments in the interactions between technology and culture in the First and Third Worlds are requiring us to examine the idea of power on multiple rather than polar axes. While global capitalism and what are seen as broadcast invasions from the skies in the Third World threaten to overwhelm local cultures with a uniformity of images, regressive fundamentalisms have countered by drawing upon the techno-cultural complex hitherto used by the state and the multinational corporation to further its own hegemonic designs. Becoming manipulators of the broadcasting machine, however, these movements plug into a “thing” larger than the state, larger than themselves, and larger than the local context in which they are thought to arise.

A mediological survey of the matter reveals the careful process by which fundamentalists have achieved remarkable consensus in the Hindu community in its construction of a story to live by and to die, not to mention kill, for. Mediology, as Regis Debray defines it, is the examination of the “relations between the higher social functions (religion, politics, ideology and mental attitudes) and the technical structure used for the transmission of information” (5). The development of the “Third World” problem of fundamentalist nationalism in the frame of global capitalism on the one hand and the escalating network of information technologies on the other reveals the concurrent evolution of the Ram/ RAM Rajya in India and its diasporic outreach. The rhetoric of Hindu nationalism deploys the trope of family, capitalizing on the emotional resonance of the private contract of the family while disseminating its message within the public fora of pedagogic and instructional materials. In states where the Bharatiya Janata Party has come to power, rewriting of history textbooks is a priority project. Aware of the potential of the broadcasting machine, the movement uses comic books, pamphlets, posters, advertisements, audio and video cassettes and marshals the rage of large congregations through inflammatory public speeches with catchy slogans. Vigorous crusades in the print and electronic media in the West have also whipped up considerable overseas support from nonresident Indian populations.

Moving from tale, rumor, gossip, and from possible to plausible theory into the authoritative account, the movement has turned story into history through the vast engines of the broadcasting machine, effecting along the way a slight rise in literacy. The Hindu movement’s message is not, however, either new or aberrant in Indian history. If nineteenth-century nationalists and Mahatma Gandhi were the first to tap into the Ram story as a rallying device, postindependence filmmakers, some of them Muslim, have also helped to broadcast and consolidate the myth of Ram as national rather than Hindu hero and Sita as the ideal woman. Following the divisive years of the Emergency period imposed by Indira Gandhi, the ruling party in the congress made aggressive use of satellite technology, which had already brought more than 70 percent of the country under the direct ideological management of the state, to homogenize the many versions of the Ram story through the narcotizing medium of state television. The commercialization of state television and the privileging of the market as regulator of cultural needs subsequently ensured that the bourgeois middle-class notion of Indian identity as generically Hindu has remained dominant. If the sacral ontologies of death and infernal disorder were appropriated within a narrative of abstract nationhood, they have now been reinvoked in the religious nationalism of the Hindu right that conjures up and then promises to allay an impending national chaos in the absence of a deistic glue.

In other words, this boulder of history has been gaining momentum steadily through the course of national politics; sounded early in Gandhi’s admittedly secular nationalist but undeniably Hindu rhetoric, the name of Ram drowns out other religious heroes to evolve into the “battering Ram” of the present day (The Moor 56). The divisory strategies used by Indira Gandhi during the Emergency initiated a new phase of identitarian politics: “Before the Emergency,” the narrator of Moor tells us, “we were Indians. After it we were Christian Jews” (235). This statement is followed in the text by the grimly onomatopoeic aside: “Plank, plonk, plink” (235). Once on the roll, the boulder brooks no questions. Chaque jours vers l’Enfer nous descendons un pas. Lest we fail to see into the distance the shape of what lies in waiting, the narrator has already reminded us of another extinction that we did not recognize, but must learn to mourn.

One of the pivotal moments in the history of the movement was the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in 1992, followed by bloody Hindu-Muslim riots and the explosion in Bombay of a series of bombs— events that are documented by Rushdie in the novel without his characteristic ambiguity about fact and fiction.10 Fundamentalists claim that a mosque was built on a sacred site in Ayodhya where a temple celebrating the birth of Ram existed before 1528, and that Babar, a king of Turko-Mongol heritage, announced his conquest of India by building this mosque. In fact, “Where (and whether) Ram was actually born . . . are matters of dispute for historians” (Varshney 11). But this is an objection that strengthens rather than attenuates the force of the story in circulation. Countering the mosque committee’s call for proof that a temple was demolished on the site, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) has argued that the birthplace of Ram is a matter of faith. Sprinkling the story with random and selective references to historical personages and places, but relying for the most part on the undeniable force of faith, VHP members have been able to convince a surprising portion of the Hindu population of all classes that historical fact is irrelevant when it comes to matters of faith. “The gap between belief and evidence, has, finally, led to the argument by some historians that the ‘oral history’ or ‘popular tradition’ of the town supports the existence of the temple, though ‘documentary history’ does not” (Varshney 11).

What Rushdie seems uncannily aware of is that gaps between story and history are absorbed within the larger engines of a broadcasting machine that allows infinite versions and reproducibility but whose ideology, shaped by market considerations and the struggle for ideological and material control, promotes uniformity at some operational level. This should not suggest a homogeneity of interests in the movement that cuts across class and national lines and whose subscriptions are at once modernist and traditionalist, environmentalist and progressivist; its subscribers at once anticorruption and corrupt, anticrime and violent, inclusivist and bigoted, antisecular and, curiously, neosecular. What it suggests is the logic of the machine. Drawing unexpected allies, opportunists and poseurs, religious zealots and businessmen, vagrants and brahmins, women and professionals who attach themselves to any available node, the machine is greased by that particularly Indian particular: corruption. Mere facts cannot stay the course of the machine in its new character. The narrator in The Moor’s Last Sigh begins to argue that since Ram is an incarnation of Vishnu, the most metamorphic of gods, “The true ‘rule of Ram’ should therefore, surely be premised on the mutating, inconstant, shape-shifting realities of human nature— and not only human nature, but divine as well. This thing being advocated in the great god’s name flew in the face of his essence as well as ours,” but then he checks himself and concedes that “when the boulder of history begins to roll, nobody is interested in discussing such fragile points. The juggernaut is loose” (351). At other points in the novel Rushdie inserts factual arguments—that Hinduism is monotheistic and pluralistic and has many sacred texts beyond the Ramayana, that Ram is a north Indian rather than pan-Indian deity—but the machine has its own infernal logic. Now uncontrollable, the national organism itself is loaded with the weapons of hate and war. In Rushdie’s narrative, the demagogue Fielding is himself destroyed by the excess of a war machine he had thought to control, as the city, too, the Bombay that was central, the very crossroads of imponderably hybrid Indian cultures, begins to explode on itself.

The narrator’s references to corruption and his surprising claim to a Jewish identity when confronted with his father Abraham’s willingness to “blow into more bits than Rajiv” the enemies of “certain oil-rich countries” suggest an apprehension that the infernal machine in motion is none other than capitalism itself. Abraham’s declaration of a supreme identity that trumps religion—“I am a business person”—and his confession of motivation—“What there is to do, I do”—proclaim the market as the new god on the horizon and the invisible hand as the capitalist rather than the divine motivator (336). “Money economy,” as Simmel reminds us, connects intrinsically with the dominance of rational intellect: “Money is concerned only with what is common to all: it asks for the exchange value, it reduces all quality and individuality to the question; How much?” (411). With its “colorlessness and indifference,” money “becomes the common denominator of all values” (414). Infinitely more inspiring than the narratives of traditional religions, profit appears as the new prophet preaching the morality of self-interest. “The global capital of Millennium Three” is inaugurated by a new regime: “Not Ram Rajya but RAM Rajya—that is our ace in the hole” (342, 343). “His refusal to talk about his past, the fluidity of his changes of stride as he tried to bewitch and woo, the cold calculation of his moves” qualify Adam, the new Indian man, “the fast-track Infobahni,” as the standard bearer of the coming system as the rightful “heir” of Abraham who adopts him as his son (354, 359).

Aurora, that astute observer of Indian life, is dead by the time these events come to pass, but she has already captured the beginnings of this descent into hell. Hybridity, in the artist’s reckoning in her final pictures, now appears in terms of a Baudelairean fleur du mal:

The Moor-figure . . . appeared to lose, in these last pictures, his previous metaphorical role as a unifier of opposites, a standard-bearer of pluralism, ceasing to stand as a symbol . . . of the new nation, and being transformed, instead, into a semi-allegorical figure of decay. Aurora had apparently decided that the ideas of impurity, cultural admixture and melange which had been, for most of her creative life, the closest things she had found to a notion of the Good, were in fact capable of distortion, and contained a potential for darkness as well as for light. This “black Moor” was a new imagining of the idea of the hybrid—a Baudelairean flower, it could not be too far-fetched to suggest, of evil:

Aux objets répugnants nous trouvons des appas;

Chaque jours vers l’Enfer nous descendons un pas,

Sans horreur,à travers des ténèbres qui puent. (The Flowers of Evil 303)

These lines, taken from the fourth stanza of Baudelaire’s poem “Au Lecteur,” omit the crucial first line, “C’est le Diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent,” although the devil is suggested in the syncopated “evil.” The idea of being orchestrated by a force beyond our comprehension, an incalculable power beyond the vocabulary of modern belief systems that can no longer fathom the notion of the devil, is rarely entertained in contemporary accounts. The narrator Moor seems ready to reintroduce the possibility into the discussion; as he begins to learn more about his father’s underworld connections, he asks, “and if the reality of our being is that so many covert truths exist behind Maya-veils of unknowing and illusion, then why not Heaven and Hell, too? Why not God and the Devil and the whole blest-damned thing?” (334–45). Nor is this an ultra-Levantine devil that is only found East of the civil European line; Rushdie makes an explicit conjunction between the Eastern and Western sort of monstrosity: “But the point is they are not inhuman, these Mainduck-style Hitlers, and it is in their humanity that we must locate our collective guilt, humanity’s guilt for human being’s misdeeds; for if they are just monsters—if it is just a question of King Kong and Godzilla wreaking havoc until the aeroplanes bring them down—then the rest of us are excused” (297).

Monstrosity is thus offered not as aberration but as a fundamental component of humanity, and guilt as a collective matter of shame built out of sins of commission or omission. Well beyond the formulation of self-interest alone is the “thing” which must be reckoned with before one begins the quest for solutions. An attempt to understand the source of this monstrosity points us in several directions at once:

What is at the root? It is religion but not only religion, class but not only class, masculism but not only gender conflicts, colonialism but not only colonialism, global capitalism but not only that, and so on. The narrator eventually rejects these as misleading tergiversations that constitute false reasoning. “What truly drives us,” the narrator reveals, “is not to be found in any such bazaar-bought words. Our engines are stranger and use darker fuel” (312). Tapping into a yearning for “the outrageous, the outsize, the out-of-bounds,” the machine unleashes the “wild potency” trapped under the civil norm (305). It is the “thing” Rushdie tells us: “There is a thing that burst out of us at times, a thing that lives in us, eating our food, breathing our air, looking out through our eyes, and when it comes out to play nobody is immune; possessed, we turn murderously upon one another . . . neighbour against thing-ridden neighbour” (36).

Although Rushdie does not quote the ultimate lines of Baudelaire’s poem, the aforementioned observations are as preemptive as the latter’s outright denunciation of our attempt to distance ourselves from the dainty monster we all share:

C’est l’Ennui!—l’oeil chargé d’un pleur involontaire

Il rêve d’échafauds en fumant son houka.

Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,

—Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!

The famous apostrophe of the last line draws the reader into the drama in progress, much as Rushdie too insists on the shared fate and responsibility of us all, of human nature itself, driven by some strange, “surnatural”—to use a term from Baudelaire’s vocabulary—engine caught in the current of the times. The narrator concedes as much:

I’ll tell you what I think—what, in spite of a lifetime’s conditioning against the supernatural, I cannot stop believing: something started when Aurora Zogoiby fell—not just feud, but a lengthening, widening tear in the fabric of all our lives. (352)

The spleen “that kills interest and receptiveness,” as Benjamin phrases it, would make the reader turn away and dissociate himself from the tragedies of a fragmented and bewildering contemporary life (Illuminations 157). But Rushdie refuses to segregate causes and perpetrators. Irresistibly drawn to the repugnant, the national body’s lack of will, he seems to suggest, joins with the malignant forces of the times to produce the horrors described in the novel. Horror combined with apathy and weakness draw the city, zombie-like, toward the abyss:

When life became so cheap, when heads were bouncing across the maidans and headless bodies dancing in the street, how to care about any single early exit? How to care about the imminent probability of one’s own? After each monstrosity came a greater; like true addicts, we seemed to need each increased dose. (374)

The narrator ascribes an ambiguous agency to this unknown force that compels when he explains that “a tragedy was taking place all right, a national tragedy on a grand scale, but those of us who played our parts were—let me put it bluntly—clowns. Clowns! Burlesque buffoons, drafted into history’s theatre on account of the lack of greater men” (352). C’est le Diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent. Under the thin veneer of civilization lie unknown and foul depths: “Civilisation is the sleight of hand that conceals our natures from ourselves” (365). One recalls that the etymology of hypocrite, too, suggests the actor, the mask-wearer.

The barbarians were not only at our gates but within our skins. . . . The explosions were our own evil—no need to look for foreign explanations, though there was and is evil beyond our frontiers as well as within. (372)

In ripping off the mask, the narrator obliges us to look in the face that which the rhetoric of progress and civilization and bourgeois sorcery will not let us see. The unveiling of the naked truth is a crucial preliminary to self-knowledge, and the ability to call defeat by its name preparatory, as Jameson suggests, to the possibility of utopian thinking.11

In his essay, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Benjamin quotes an intriguing description of London by Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England:

Only when one has tramped the pavements of the main streets for a few days does one notice that these Londoners have had to sacrifice what is best in human nature in order to create all the wonders of civilization with which their city teems. . . . The greater the number of people that are packed into a tiny space, the more repulsive and offensive becomes the brutal indifference, the unfeeling concentration of each person on his private affairs. (168–69)

Although Rushdie purports to describe a national problem, it is the city of Bombay that he chooses for his ruminations on human nature and the predicament of a nation caught in the enticements and vulgarity of contemporary forces. Too, although the phrase will not appear till The Ground beneath Her Feet, the poignant and apocalyptic refrain, “The best in our natures is drowning in the worst,” reminiscent of Engels’ formulation, is suggested in the many references to human nature in The Moor’s Last Sigh as well and in the claim that “the best, and worst, were in us, and fought in us, as they fought in the land at large. In some of us, the worst triumphed” (131, 376). The ambiguities and contradictory impulses of human nature are central to Rushdie’s understanding of the problems of ongoing modernity. Alienation from one’s original nature and a desperate longing for the forgotten better part of nature surface as powerful motifs throughout Rushdie’s work.

In his remarkable discussion of aesthetics and politics in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton draws our attention to the notion of aesthetic fulfillment as a political analog; the question of pleasure thus involves “what it is to live well, to attain happiness and serenity, at the level of a whole society” (413). The aesthetic sense of satisfaction, far from being inimical to the political and ethical, enacts at the level of society itself “the best possibilities” of human nature through the principles of creativity and pleasure (413). Ethical action is relocated in this formulation to the level of the senses and of nature itself. Rushdie’s requiem for this capacity in human nature now caught in the storm of vulgar forces is elaborated, as I go on to explain, through meditations on love and death, both transcendent values in the philosophical scheme.

The alliance of history and human hubris in the volatile crucible of contemporary culture produces a dense mix so mutually interpenetrated as to render questionable any quest for absolute explanation. Like Baudelaire more than a century before him, Rushdie, too, is here a poet of the streets of a city confronting new forces. The city and its masses, the narrator among them, have developed a reciprocity that makes it, their nature, and the violence that destroys it, all part of one organic story: “Bombay was central; all rivers flowed into its human sea. It was an ocean of stories; we were all its narrators, and everybody talked at once” (350). In an unexpected and mixed personification following upon its analogy with the sea, Bombay becomes a body that bleeds, that dies: “Who,” asks the narrator, “murdered my home?” (372). The aesthetic move of personifying the city imbues it with a pulsating life and vivacity; it is at the primitive level of the body itself that the violence and the disorder of a world gone wrong must be felt. It is not simply the experience of bomb explosions that is described here but an entire world of primitive drives and of the pain and loss that are felt in the guts and enacted in the force of human nature. “What avenging demon bestrode the horizon, raining fire upon our heads?,” demands the narrator (372). “Hindus and Muslims were both attacked,” he continues. “We were our own wooden horses, each of us full of our doom” (372). The originary impulse is presented as irrelevant. Perhaps it was Abraham, his father, who lit the fuse or his partner, underworld Don Scar. Who cares, he asks, if it was “these fanatics or those, our crazies or yours; but the explosives burst out of our very own bodies. We were both the bombers and the bombs” since “catastrophe had become the city’s habit, and we were all its users, its zombies” (372, 374). As described in the work of Benjamin, the city here functions as a metaphor for human alienation. It is not surprising that the city and the narrator should both begin to come undone together: “The city I knew was dying. The body I inhabited, ditto” (374). As he turns away from the scene of a destroyed city in a final alienation, he ruefully admits that a world and vision may have ended but “the end of a world is not the end of the world” (376). The novel ends with a farewell, the keys of a lost kingdom turned in even as Boabdil Zogoiby the unlucky last sultan of the Nasrid dynasty had relinquished his keys to a Spanish queen some centuries ago.

Confronted with the incomprehensible, uninterested in prying apart cause and effect, unpersuaded by the usual attempts to justify the violence of contemporary communal politics, unable to separate history and the individual body and spirit, the author gives us neither social realism nor the solution. Instead, the very act of representing reality through the imaginative mode inculpates it. The author can neither retreat from “the unceasing storm, the continual quarrel, the dialectic of history” nor solve its internecine quarrels, at least not in the language of the given reality (Imaginary Homelands 100). Instead, he proposes two curiously evasive moves in which eros and thanatos appear as the other forces and desires that belong to human nature along with the dainty monster.12 Both are presented in escapist modes in which the narrator either expresses the need to elude the determinism of history and to exist as pure intelligence unplugged from its shocking current or conjures up a faded and tearful dream in which the contradictions of history can be sunk. Love, dreams, and death are conjoined as the author uses various characters in the novel to project these longings. It is in a nightmare-dream that Oliver D’Aeth (“Allover Death” as Aurora mockingly calls him) tells Aurora, “‘We will never gain our humanity until we lose our skins’” (95). Aware perhaps of the overly grandiose nature of the claim, the narrator adds the following: “When he woke he was not sure whether the dream had been inspired by his faith in the oneness of mankind, or by the photophobia that made his skin torment him so: whether it was a heroic vision or a banality” (95). In another reference, it is the Moor himself who conveys these desires:

When I was young I used to dream . . . like photophobic, God-bothered Oliver D’Aeth—of peeling off my skin plantain-fashion, of going forth naked into the world, like the anatomy illustration from Encyclopaedia Britannica, all ganglions, ligaments, nervous pathways and veins, set free from the otherwise inescapable jails of colour, race and clan. (In another version of the dream I would be able to peel away more than skin, I would float free of flesh, skin and bones, having become an intelligence or a feeling set loose in the world, at play in its fields, like a science-fiction glow which needed no physical form). (136)

Again, lest the reader be tempted to dismiss these meditations as irresponsible and delusionary ventriloquism on the author’s behalf, the narrator adds, “In the waking world a man’s not as easy to flay as a banana, no matter how ripe he be” (137). Later, he again acknowledges these wishes as untenable in a world afflicted by the realities of history:

In Indian country, there was no room for a man who didn’t want to belong to a tribe, who dreamed of moving beyond; of peeling off his skin and revealing his secret identity—the secret, that is, of the identity of all men—of standing before the war-painted braves to unveil the flayed and naked unity of the flesh. (414)13

Once again, the author does not so much deny historical determinism as reject its defining confinements. Compare these remarks to Frantz Fanon’s observations in Black Skin, White Masks:

The body of history does not determine a single one of my actions.

I am my own foundation.

And it is by going beyond the historical, instrumental hypothesis that I will initiate the cycle of my freedom. (231)

Rushdie’s stray ruminations on the subject in history also express the wish to be unburdened of its oppressive weight, but his position is not so much to escape its “instrumental hypothesis” in any revolutionary sense or to assert the force of individual will. It is, rather, a longing for a world without history, or even before history, a logical and practical impossibility, even in his own reckoning. Hence the immediate disavowal and sober dismissal of the longing. If Fanon’s is a going beyond, a transcendence in fact, Rushdie’s, ultimately, will be a return to the past, from which to excavate an imperfect and unrealized possibility. If Fanon looks to tear through the fabric of history to emerge unfettered on the other side, the narrator-author in Rushdie’s formulation can only cower before its might, eventually to return within its fold into a moment that appeared to have potential, a tear in its unrelentingly close fabric that reveals a prospect that held promise but would remain unfulfilled. The desire is not for escape from the world but into that world that is not yet but could have been. In Adorno’s formulation, “Artworks recall the theologumenon that in the redeemed world everything would be as it is and yet wholly other” (Aesthetic Theory 6).

The author’s final move is to leave us with the vision of a potential lost through time and through its own insufficient realization—a might-havebeen utopia, suggested through a new mode of writing reliant on a visual logic.14 Caught in the realm of the beyond, prematurely post mature, a civilizational progeria traps us in a perpetual “world-in-motion,” to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase, preventing the crucial backward glance (“Nationalism” 117). “In the fast lane, on the fast track, ahead of [his] time . . . perpetually out of breath,” the hapless protagonist of The Moor’s Last Sigh asks the reader, “How many of us feel, these days, that something that has passed too quickly is ending: a moment of life, a period of history, an idea of civilisation, a twist in the turning of the unconcerned world?” (161, 145). In the face of this double-speed existence so fast that we can scarcely look around, still less look back, the narrator sinks his faith in a lost history and a lost possibility symbolized by that monument to syncretic coexistence, the Alhambra. In the face of the heightened pace of life, so emblematically captured in the Moor’s suffering from accelerated aging, the author effects his own aesthetic mode of what David Harvey refers to as “time-space compression.” This is achieved through a somewhat transparently modernist strategy of montage as two spaces and times are bred into each other, in-forming the present through a past that never really was. What the author recuperates is not a lost reality but a forfeited promise that exists in the idea of Alhambra as an idealized concept, a ruin among things as an allegory is to thought:

The Alhambra, Europe’s red fort, sister to Delhi’s and Agra’s—the palace of interlocking forms and secret wisdom, of pleasure-courts and water-gardens, that monument to a lost possibility that nevertheless has gone on standing, long after its conquerors have fallen; like a testament to lost but sweetest love, to the love that endures beyond defeat, beyond annihilation, beyond despair; to the defeated love that is greater than what defeats it, to that most profound of our needs, to our need for flowing together, for putting an end to frontiers, for the dropping of the boundaries of the self. Yes, I have seen it across an oceanic plain, though it has not been given to me to walk in its noble courts. I watch it vanish in the twilight, and in its fading it brings tears to my eyes. (433)

The earlier reference to Benjamin’s famous assertion, “Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realms of things,” draws attention to the way in which Rushdie makes a ruin itself the allegory for a lost possibility we can now only dimly glimpse from the vantage point of our damaged lives (The Origin of German Tragic Drama 66). Visually superimposed onto each other, the Alhambra and the Red Forts at Delhi and Agra (and perhaps even the echo of Ayodhya’s Babri Masjid) create a hybrid moment of palimpsestic possibility that suggest an alternative future that has not come to pass.15 The visual game generated by this uncanny mirroring of history unleashes a creative possibility that exercises perception but is clearly hybridized beyond belief.

One asks, as Rushdie himself might, “Is this it?” Where is the poet’s ensign, the perception of the whole, the answer to the oneiroid questions posed by a monstrous history? Adorno reminds us that “to survive reality at its most extreme and grim, artworks that do not want to sell themselves as consolation must equate themselves with that reality” (Aesthetic Theory 39). If there is a utopia, it exists, for Adorno and Marcuse as it did for Benjamin, in aesthetic imagination usually as a possibility beyond historical realization. Although the novel tackles the depredations of capitalism directly, it also suggests that a change in the relations of production cannot alone solve the problem. The much more challenging question of human nature and its possibilities is left unanswered in terms of a political project that would be available for operation; on this, the narrator has “nothing to say, only to show.” Besides, Rushdie has earlier conceded the role of a sage, a gesture Benjamin, suspicious as he was of any revelation beyond the divine, would have approved enthusiastically:

Human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings in all the senses of that phrase. . . . Writers are no longer sages, dispensing the wisdom of the ages. (Imaginary Homelands 12)16

It is the author’s reference to Baudelaire and the extremely influential Fleurs du Mal that suggests a vintage for this self-perception. As Benjamin notes, “To Baudelaire, the lyric poet with a halo is antiquated” (194). In a later prose piece entitled “A Lost Halo,” Baudelaire writes:

A short while ago I was hurrying across the boulevard, and amidst this moving chaos in which death comes galloping at you from all sides at once I must have made an awkward movement, for the halo slipped off my head and fell onto the muddy asphalt pavement. . . . so here I am, just like you! (quoted in Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire 195)

In “Notes on Writing,” Rushdie warns us:

Beware the writer who sets himself or herself up as the voice of a nation. This includes nations of race, gender, sexual orientation, elective affinity. This is the New Behalfism. Beware behalfies! The New Behalfism demands uplift, accentuates the positive, offers stirring moral instruction. It abhors the tragic sense of life. Seeing literature as inescapably political, it replaces literary values by political ones. (23)

The artist trapped in a totalizing system seems no longer able to perform the god-like task of making the fragmentary whole. The writer who catalogs the fragmentary experiences of urban mass culture cannot do so without losing something of the aura of bygone times. Benjamin observes that Baudelaire “indicated the price for which the sensation of the modern age may be had: the disintegration of the aura in the experience of shock” (196). In thus relinquishing the halo and the illusion of wholeness, however, the writer may better draw attention to the disastrous and tragic conditions of the modern world. Although a pat homology between the two writers is neither tenable nor necessary, the analogy of their situations as writers confronted with a dizzying era of change (each in his own context) is not without merit for this discussion.

In wielding the matter of local place and culture with a lightness of touch, the story of the nation begins to tell the story of the world at a critical moment, a shared fate in which we are caught together. Faced with the complex machinery of the times, the writer offers a mode of perception, not the secret intelligence that will save the world, but a noumenal truth gleaned from the phenomenal. It may even seem that to ask of the postcolonial author that he or she necessarily rescue the world from history is to place on the postcolonial text, and perhaps inevitably to displace, the full weight of subaltern articulation and emancipation.

If history cannot be subjected totally to the imagination, nor can the imagination be rendered totally subservient to history. To propose that art is ideological and political is neither to claim for it an equation with political action (or its lack) nor is it to suggest its irrelevance for the political project. It is possible to posit, as Auden all too archly phrases it, that “poetry makes nothing happen,” but poetry, and literature by extension, perform a distinct sort of action that has its significance in the world of symbolic values and in structures of perception, for after all, “It survives in the valley of its saying.” It has, as Auden concludes in the second stanza of “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” “a way of happening.” If art permits humans to create worlds that can survive in their own ways of saying and transmission, it is nevertheless a world very different from the primary world of everyday things; to disregard the constitutive laws of each of these worlds as fundamentally different is to diminish the import of both. As Adorno insists, “Although the demarcation line between art and the empirical must not be effaced, and least of all by the glorification of the artist, artworks nevertheless have a life sui generis” (Aesthetic Theory 4).

If the world of economic strife and religious conflict is somehow transformed through aesthetic distance, this process nevertheless gestures at what might be, sometimes through the recollection of what might have been. In gesturing at the fundamental principle of social change, the extension of the capacity to love “to a whole form of social life,” as Eagleton defines “radical politics,” the artefact maker brings to life what has yet to exist, what the world of work does not and cannot admit (Ideology of the Aesthetic 413). It is not within the story’s capacity to concretize utopia (Adorno claims that “art is no more able than theory to concretize utopia, not even negatively”) but its insertion of that something new which has not yet occurred can conjure a vision of what to long for: “A cryptogram of the new is the image of collapse; only by virtue of the absolute negativity of collapse does art enunciate the unspeakable: utopia” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 32). Each of Rushdie’s fictional texts to date, including Grimus but perhaps excluding Haroun and the Sea of Stories, has concluded in the image of collapse, opening up the prospect of the unknown. Any engagement with the other that does not contend with the possibility of the unknown and of the unknown possibilities of liberation can only reduce the alterity of otherness to self-sameness.

The analogy of the pen with the sword may be less suitable in understanding the functionality of this sort of text than that with the telling of beads on a rosary. As an act of supplication, as a counter to the disremembering that characterizes our double-paced, information-filled lives, as the maker of a world that has never existed but could be and could have been, the text performs an offering in the belief that something is to be gained from the telling of stories, that the ritual is neither predictably meaningless, as it seems to cynics, nor transparently transformatory, as it does to naive idealists. In the end, as the narrator reminds us, “stories are what’s left of us, we are no more than the few tales that persist” (The Moor’s Last Sigh 110). When the phenomenal has passed on, it is the noumenal that offers the comfort of continuity. Unknown comfort to unknown recipients of this grace, the modes of intelligence offered constitute its only reliable authority, one we ignore at our own peril. “Politics and literature,” to quote from the author himself, “like sport and politics, do mix, are inextricably mixed, and . . . that mixture has consequences” (Imaginary Homelands 100; emphasis mine). Unlike historical events now infamous by the name of “the Rushdie affair,” the quality and timbre of these consequences in the perceptual world are not always ponderable at a given time; nor can we indulge the fantasy of direct impact without suspicion.

If skepticism about the role of this sort of elite literature in the real world must be answered by belief in its unique capacity to tell another tale than that told in history and politics, unquestioning faith in its abilities must also be tempered by a realistic apprehension of its stipulations. If the artwork challenges the status quo, it is also determined and limited by it; if it offers glimpses of a redemptive vision, it is nevertheless no substitute for a world redeemed in actuality. Having inserted itself into the gaps and limits of history, fiction arrives at its limits. An important story has been told. It is another machine that now waits at its vulnerable shores.