WHEN The Moor’s Last Sigh was published in 1995, I was living in London. Like most of my friends, I rushed out to buy a copy and proceeded to read it greedily. Virtually without exception, all of us agreed that we were face to face with a masterpiece. Each of us was affected differently by the magic of the book. My own reaction surprised me. I was filled with an intense physical craving for India. And then, I did something quite inexplicable. I grabbed an old copy of Kipling’s Kim and re-read it with a rare vim and gusto!

Reading a radical post-modern iconoclast side by side with an unreconstructed believer in white imperialism was ironical, to say the least. But to my mind, there was no contradiction. Years earlier, my friend, Cheeta Gauba had helped me look beyond Kipling’s jingoism and enjoy Kim as the first-rate scintillating novel which it is.

Over the next two years, every time I read the Moor, it became obligatory to read Kim also. Why should these two books published ninety four years apart be coupled together in my mind? I would argue that their fascination, for me at least, rises from the fact that they are written by two extraordinary artists, both of whom have been wounded by India and who are obsessed not only by the physical India, but by the metaphor that is India.

 

First, let us look at the contrasts. Kim is set almost entirely in northern India, Lahore, Ambala (or Umballa as Kipling spelled it), Lucknow, Benaras, the Shivaliks, Kulu, Simla and so on. The Moor is set on the west coast of what the geography texts call ‘peninsular’ India. Cochin and Bombay give the Moor its predominantly urban flavour (even though the smells and colours of the spice plantations of the hinterland are a persistent presence). Despite the appearance of cities in Kim, you remember it as a book of rural India – on the Grand Trunk Road and the Himalayan foothills.

Kim is a quintessentially male book. All the central characters are male – Kim, the Lama, Colonel Creighton, Mahbub Ali, Huree Babu, the chaplains, Lurgan Sahib. The Rani Sahiba and the woman of Shamlegh are unforgettable, but are really exceptions in the largely male world that Kim inhabits.

The Moor’s Last Sigh is a complete contrast in so far as the very texture of the book is feminine. The book may be named for her son. But there is no doubting that the overwhelming personality of the extraordinary, irrepressible Aurora is what it’s all about. Her petulance, energy, talent, changing moods, wide range of caprices and her amazing capacity for creating new cadences in a virtually new language dominate the book from start to finish. And it’s not only Aurora. Epifania, Belle, Uma Sarasvati, the three sisters – are all part of the strong feminine texture of the novel.

Kim deals with landlocked, agrarian India where wealth is derived from the land and the web of social relationships is feudal. It’s simply quite natural and obvious that the Rani Sahiba will support a wandering holy man and his disciple. The Moor, on the other hand, deals with coastal, mercantile India where trade and exchange (both maritime and domestic) define the social network. The Jat who loves the soil and stubble of the earth of northern India is almost a cult figure in Kim. The Parsee surname Cashondeliveri in the Moor is not merely a humorous punning effort. It draws the reader’s attention to the trading classes and castes of India for whom the goddess of wealth is supreme.

 

Beyond the specific contrasts, there is a core aesthetic experience common to both works. Kim and the Moor are concerned with the ‘metaphor of India’ – by which I mean that they deal with enduring themes in India’s historical unconscious and with motifs embedded in Indian myths. Nehru used the expression ‘legend, myth, story and song’ in the context of describing the Ganges. It is this broad, compelling palimpsest that I believe these two novels attempt to paint and project.

Both novels abound in subtleties and intricacies and lend themselves to numerous perspectives. Two common underpinnings of the metaphor of India are handled with surprising similarity by both authors, even when they differ in how they handle specific details. The anthropological and the mythic are two dimensions of the metaphor that are worth examining and exploring.

The anthropological dimension is central to Kipling’s view of India. From the very beginning, Kim concerns itself with the mosaic of the subcontinent. Kipling is doubtless trying to emphasize the importance of impartial Pax Britannica in India where perhaps like no other place in the world have so many different races, faiths, ethnic and linguistic groups existed side by side without getting homogenized. Rajagopalachari wrote on an occasion that the individual identities of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Britons and Normans have been in large measure subsumed into a broader national group. Not so in the hills and plains of Hindustan, not in Kipling’s time and not today when caste vote banks and affirmative action quotas are alive and flourishing. Virtually every character in Kim is introduced along with his religious, ethnic or caste identity. Abdulla the Mussalman, Chotu Lal the Hindu, Fook Shing the Chinese bootmaker are all to be found in the first chapter. The first questions that Kim asks the Lama are, ‘What is your caste? Where is your house? Have you come far?’ In a similar vein Mahbub Ali asks the Lama of Kim, ‘His country – his race – his village? Mussalman – Sikh – Hindu – Jain – low caste or high?’

 

Consider the castes and groups that occur in Kim – Pathan, Kabuli, Balti, Bhotiya, Khitai, Jat, Dogra, Sarsut Brahmin, Parsee, Chumar, Bunnia, Sansi, Oorya, Rajput, Punjabi, Bengali, Aka, Kamboh, Oswal, Maharatta, Betah, Od, Kayeth – it reads like a nineteenth century ethnographer’s catalogue.

Religious identities get their share of coverage. Hindus, Mohammedans, Christians (or ‘Kerlistians’?), Jains, Sikhs are to be found in addition to the Buddhist Lama. Kipling manages to introduce a Jew (in whose house in Agra the Maratha spy hides for a while) almost as if to make a point about the sheer diversity of India. Then there are sects, cults, priests galore – Akalis, Satbhais, Brahmins, Mullas, Hajjis, Temples of Teerthankers and so on.

The Sahibs too are not depicted as homogenous. They succumb to the fragmentation that India seems to extract out of them. On the very first page, we run into a ‘half-caste’ woman who ‘looked after Kim’. And not all half-castes are the same. Some have ‘bazaar-women’ for mothers. Others belong to ‘old Eurasian houses’ – the ‘Pereiras, De Souzas, D’Slivas’ of Dhurumtollah. Kim himself belonged to the lowest caste among pure Sahibs – he was Irish Catholic, the son of a colour-sergeant and a nursemaid (employed by a Colonel Sahib).

Creighton and Lurgan are the knowledgeable and wise Brahmins among the Sahibs – virtually agnostic in their religious views, but effortlessly conscious of their hierarchical superiority by virtue of their birth as Sahibs – an attitude not untypical of upper caste Indians even to this day. The chaplains – Reverend Bennett of the Church of England and Father Victor of the Church of Rome – represent the ignorant, narrow-minded, intolerant Brahmins in the Sahib world. There is an amazing symmetry between the White Brahmins and their greedy, unattractive ‘native’ counterparts. There is even a Buddhist among the Sahibs – who is juxtaposed with the Lama. The curator in the Lahore Museum (a character based on Kipling’s father) is a gentle, scholarly, modern-day Buddhist almost out of a Bertolucci movie.

 

One may view it as a curse that separates one human being from another or one may think of it as a quality that bestows a fascinating diversity – in any event the conquerors and the conquered in Kipling’s India reflect a heterogeneous mosaic. It is simply uncanny to observe how much the varied patterns of the anthropological collage dominates Rushdie’s writing in the Moor. The theme is intrusive from start to finish much more than in Midnight’s Children or other books. Rushdie’s interest in the ‘minorities’ is of course part of his larger theme relating multi-ethnic India to pluralistic Granada. But even he realizes that he may have pushed the envelope on this. As he opens the seventh chapter, he faces up to the fact that his India is a bit skewed to one extreme.

The first sentence reads, ‘Christians, Portuguese and Jews, Chinese tiles promoting godless views, pushy ladies, skirts-not-saris, Spanish shenanigans, Moorish crowns… can this really be India?’ He is hilarious in his description of Hindus and Muslims in twentieth century terms as ‘Majority’ and ‘Major-Minority’ – two species that resemble elephants, another tourist attraction of India. He deliberately wants to make the point that the lesser minorities may be marginal in numbers (as against the ‘trumpeting herds’ of the Majority and the Major-Minority), but they are central to the metaphor of India. Hence he asks the question, ‘Are not my personages Indian, everyone?’

 

There is a subtle linguistic change – the vocabulary of modern sociology and politics replaces the words commonly used by imperialist administrators and ethnographers. But the underlying cadences are quite similar. Rushdie has a ‘Northern fellow, a UP type’ appear early in the book. Sounds familiar? Kipling tries to mimic the speech patterns of Indian languages. Rushdie refers to a ‘UP accent’. Kekoo Mody is introduced not simply as an art dealer but as ‘a young Parsee’. And then there is a reference to ‘a sepoy, a common Malayali’. In Kipling’s time he might have been described not as a Malayali but as a Malabari!

The ethnic, regional and religious backgrounds of the characters are central, one way or another. Rushdie evokes it and sometimes deliberately confuses it, using telling, if comical, names: Elaichpillai Kalonjee (Malayali-Parsee combination), Mirchandalchini (possibly a Sindhi), Karipattam Tejpattam (possibly a Tamilian), and so on. Uma Sarasvati’s background is a matter of considerably controversy! Did she come ‘from a respectable – though not by any means wealthy – Gujarati Brahmin family’ or was she from Maharashtra, ‘raised in Poona where her father was a high-ranking officer in the police force.’

 

One can argue that all these are part of Rushdie’s larger purpose of establishing the analogy between pluralistic India and multicultural Granada. But I think a case can be made for a specific concern for the Metaphor of India which has a touch of Kipling about it. Kipling instinctively retrofitted the caste system on the Sahib world. Since Kipling’s time, a considerably body of scholarly work in sociology and history has focused on how caste, far from being associated with Hindu religious traditions, is in fact an Indian social institution that has a life of its own beyond the so-called Hindu fold. Rushdie introduces this motif with considerable skill. Abraham Zogoiby confronts his mother with the outlandish caste system prevalent among the tiny Jewish community in Cochin.

By far the subtlest indirect reference to the insidious caste-class phenomenon in an unexpected place is the contrast between Aurora da Gama (undoubtedly highborn) and her fellow-artist and possible lover, Vasco Miranda who came from ‘Loutulim’, presumably the village of low-born louts in Goa (maybe a deliberate pun as Loutulim is a real place in Goa with an upscale reputation). To top it all, Aurora lives in a mansion on ‘Malabar Hill’ while Vasco lives in ‘some rickety Mazagon chawl’, thus establishing relative positions using the shorthand notation of urban neighbourhood identities. Aurora goes on to gratuitously humiliate Vasco by converting him from a painter to a house painter, almost wanting to imply that it is the inalienable right of the highborn to condemn their lowly counterparts to disdainful manual labour.

 

Both the novels have an element of the re-telling of traditional Indian myths. The impish, lovable Kim is associated with Puck from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Nights Dream. That Kipling was fascinated with the character of Puck we know from his other works (e.g. Puck of Pook’s Hill). But in all candour, in my mind, I look upon Kim as closer to the Krishna figure. The boy Krishna is playful and mysterious at the same time. Everyone who associates with him, loves him and forgives him his playful pranks. It is not just his own behaviour, but in the reaction that he evokes in others older than him, that gives Kim his special Krishna-like character.

Again, intended or otherwise, the parallels between Krishna and Kim are numerous. Both the names begin with K. Krishna was born in a royal family. Kim was born a Sahib. Krishna grew up with humble cowherds and lived as one of them. Kim lived as one of India’s humble dispossessed ‘natives’, in fact becoming one of them. Krishna dallied with milkmaids. Kim flirts outrageously with every woman he comes across. Like Krishna, he charms maidens as well as married women. The Rani Sahiba says to him, ‘Now tell me of their goings and comings – as much as may be without shame. How many maids, and whose wives, hang upon thine eyelashes?’ The woman of Shamlegh, who has more than one husband, says to Kim, ‘Thou canst cast a spell by the mere winking of an eye.’ And again, ‘There is nothing I would not do for thee.’ According to tradition, Radha was a married woman, older in years than Krishna – not unlike the woman of Shamlegh.

It is the feelings that adults have towards Kim – loving, amused, protective, indulgent – that has a fascinating parallel with the way Krishna is looked upon by the people around him and by millions of Indians to this day. Vatsalya Bhava – the feeling of a parent, especially a mother, towards a loved child is one of the preferred modes of bhakti or devotion that a human can have towards his chosen manifestation of God. Yashoda, Krishna’s foster-mother is supposed to epitomize this role. Virtually all the adults who come into Kim’s life have this feeling of a fond parent towards him. Kipling uses the portrait of the mischievous, orphaned waif with all the accoutrements of blatant sentimentality to the maximum extent.

 

The Lama is of course most immediately attached to Kim. His good-natured affection is ever-present. Kim’s mischievous nature appeals to him. Let us quote the Lama, ‘I consider in my own mind whether thou art a spirit, sometimes, or sometimes an evil imp, said the Lama smiling slowly. "I am thy chela." Kim dropped into step at his side – that indescribable gait of the long distance tramp all the world over.’

‘I have known many men in my so long life, and disciples not a few. But to none among men, if so be thou art woman-born, has my heart gone out as it has to thee – thoughtful, wise, courteous, but something of a small imp.’

Kipling seems to hint at the mysterious (possibly semi-divine?) origins of his hero – at least in the eyes of the Lama. In another place, he explicitly brings up the possibility of the many incarnations of the boy-god. The lama has this to say:

‘ "As a boy in the dress of white men – when I first went to the Wonder House. And a second time thou wast a Hindu. What shall the third incarnation be?" He chuckled dreamily. "Ah, chela, thou hast done a wrong to an old man because my heart went out to thee".’

 

The scene where the Lama and Kim part at the gates of his new ‘English’ school is heart-rending. The Lama’s affection for the young Kim is palpable. The Lama says: ‘Let me see thee go... dost thou love me? Then go, or my heart cracks… I will come again. Surely I will come again.’

Kim’s name in Lahore – the name that Mahbub Ali prefers to call him by – is ‘Friend of All the World’. Clearly such an expression has a divine connotation to it! Mahbub Ali says to Kim: ‘Friend of All the World, I have met many men, women and boys and not a few sahibs. I have never in all my days met such an imp as thou art.’ In another place, Mahbub Ali says to Kim, ‘Thou art beyond question an unbeliever and therefore thou wilt be damned. So says my law – or I think it does. But thou art also my Little Friend of All the World and I love thee. So says my heart.’ It’s almost as if Kipling models Mahbub Ali after Mohammedan poets like Raskhan who were devotees of Krishna – who won and ruled their hearts.

Kim elicits a reaction of loving indulgence from virtually all the women he meets. The courtesan in Lucknow who helps him in his disguise says to Kim, ‘Thou wast born to be a breaker of hearts.’ The expression ‘breaker of hearts’ is one frequently used when referring to Krishna. Krishna is known as one who frequently plays tricks and jests with his friends and acquaintances. The courtesan describes Kim as follows:

‘Child thou art beyond all dispute the most shameless son of Shaitan that I have ever known to take up a poor girl’s time with this play, and then say "Is not the jest enough?" Thou wilt go far in this world.’ The central theme of the childhood myth of Krishna is that he was ‘lost’ to his biological mother but ‘found’ and nurtured by his foster mother. His biological mother was a princess; his foster mother was a herds-woman. The virtual adoption of Kim by the old lady of Saharanpur recreates this in an uncanny parallel. Lost to his sahib mother, it is his native Indian mother who nurtures him and breathes back energy into his tired frame.

The epiphany of this theme is captured in the haunting exchange between the new found mother and son.

‘ "Maharanee," Kim began, but by the look in her eye, changed it to the title of plain love – "Mother, I owe my life to thee. How shall I make thanks?" ’

The old lady’s reply is characterized by scolding, indulgent tones that can only be referred to as maternal. ‘Thank the gods as a priest if thou wilt, but thank me, if thou carest, as a son. Heavens above! Have I shifted thee and lifted thee and slapped and twisted thy ten toes to find texts flung at my head? Somewhere a mother must have borne thee to break her heart. What used thou to her – son?’

‘I had no mother, my mother,’ said Kim. ‘She died they tell me, when I was young.’

‘Hai Mai! Then none can say I have robbed her of any right…’

 

We can debate without end as to whether the Kim-Krishna resemblance was conscious on Kipling’s part or whether it was an unconscious result of being steeped in tales Indian and the fact that despite his imperial and imperious pretensions, Kipling was very much a child of India.

With Rushdie we have no doubts. Aurora is very consciously based on Durga, Kali, Shakti, the GreatG. There is an element of Greek myth. The Oedipal theme is part of the story. But in a way that is secondary. The identification of Aurora with the Great Goddess of Indian myth is intense, emphatic and explicit.

 

The Great Goddess in Indian tradition has not only regenerative powers, but destructive ones also – in fact she possesses and wields them simultaneously – the ultimate divine paradox, beyond human understanding. Aurora is no dulcet saccharine mother. Her love for her children is a tough love and the devotion her family has for her is pregnant with tidal passions. While the references to this theme are numerous and scattered all across the book, this excerpt from Chapter 11 gets to the heart of the ambivalent relationship between Aurora the goddess and the devoted members of her family.

‘…And we spent our lives living up, down and sideways to her predictions… did I mention that she was irresistible? Listen: she was the light of our lives, the excitement of our imaginations, the beloved of our dreams. We loved her even as she destroyed us. She called out of us a love that felt too big for our bodies, as if she had made the feeling and then given it to us to feel – as if it were a work. If she trampled over us, it was because we lay down willingly beneath her spurred-and-booted feet; if she excoriated us at night, it was on account of our delight at the sweet lashing of her tongue… we were all her slaves, and she made our servitude feel like Paradise. Which is, they say, what goddesses can do.’

The references are direct not tangential or veiled. The image of Kali with her feet on a prostrate body is common in Indian art. Clearly, Rushdie has this in mind.

 

There is a tradition that there was a dance competition between the Great Goddess and the God Shiva. In chapter 9, Rushdie draws upon this tradition as Aurora’s boundless egotism lead her to a reckless pursuit of hubris. ‘Once a year, my mother Aurora Zogoiby liked to dance higher than the gods’ … I-tho am up against a greater opponent. Shiva Nataraja himself.’

It isn’t only Aurora. There is a touch of the powerful relentless goddess in many of the female characters. Aurora paints her grandmother Epifania ‘…Epifania’s face at the top of a long and scaly neck; who could turn murderous, dancing cross-eyed and Kali-tongued…’ There is a conscious confusion of roles when Rushdie has Aurora abet the death of her grandmother, Epifania. She could have helped her and possibly saved her. She deliberately chooses not to.

Uma Sarasvati is the Moor’s lover and yet she tries to kill him. Again we have the image of the femme whose embrace can mean death as much as anything else. The Moor has this to say of her: ‘Was she a tragic heroine; or a murderess; or, in some way as yet unfathomable, both at once.’ This is an assertion of duality – a recurring theme in Indian mythology and art cleverly used by Rushdie.

The eminent psychologist Sudhir Kakar has ‘advanced the thesis that myths of Devi, the great goddess, constitute a "hegemonic narrative" of Hindu culture.’ In fact he argues that Devi is ‘one of the more dominant narratives’, ‘especially in her manifold expressions as mother in the inner world of the Hindu son.’ Kakar goes on to say: ‘It is not my intention to deny or underestimate the importance of the powerful mother in western psychoanalysis. All I seek to suggest is that certain forms of the maternal-feminine may be more central in Indian myths and psyche than in their western counterparts.’ I think this is what Rushdie means when he says that ‘motherness’ is a big ‘idea’ in India.

 

The explicit conceptualization of a mother who can be terrible and destructive is possibly uniquely Indian – at least in so recurrent and widely prevalent a manner. Kakar calls this the ‘awe and terror of this particular maternal image.’

Rushdie is fascinated with the vision of India as the physical and spiritual embodiment of the female mother principle. Aurora’s very first painting is imbued with this vision. ‘And it was all set in a landscape that made Camoens tremble to see it, for it was Mother India herself, Mother India with her garishness and her inexhaustible motion, Mother India who loved and betrayed and ate and destroyed and again loved her children, and with whom the children’s passionate conjoining and eternal quarrel stretched long beyond the grave; who stretched into great mountains like exclamations of the soul and along vast rivers full of mercy and disease, and across harsh drought-ridden plateaux on which men hacked with pickaxes at the dry infertile soil; Mother India with her oceans and cocoa-palms and rice-fields and bullocks at the water-well, her cranes on treetops with necks like coat-hangers, and high circling kites and the mimicry of mynahs and the yellow-beaked brutality of crows, a protean Mother India…’

At one point in the book, the Moor explicates as follows: ‘Mother-ness – excuse me if I underline the point – is a big idea in India, maybe our biggest: the land as mother, the mother as land, as the firm ground beneath our feet, Ladies-O, gents-O; I’m talking major mother country.’

The noted art critic Richard Blurton has this to say: ‘The actual soil of India is thought by many to be the body or residence of the divinity, especially in its feminine manifestation.’ He goes on to discuss ‘the idea of the soil of India being literally the body of the goddess, and the features of the Indian landscape – such as mountains and rivers – being her own physical features.’ It is this deep wellspring of the collective unconscious that Rushdie taps into when he describes India and overlays Aurora as the manifestation of the land itself.

 

In another context, Nirad Chaudhuri has spoken about two views of India: the Vaishnava and the Shakta. One could argue that Kipling with his Kim-Krishna theme represents the Vaishnava perspective while Rushdie with his unforgettable women – Epifania, Aurora, Uma Sarasvati – uses the Shakta lens to look at his version of India. Kipling and Rushdie have distinct historical platforms and they fall back on recurring philosophical themes to deal with them. Kipling’s India is fundamentally a happy place where everyone is, by and large, upholding his or her individual dharma. The Lama educates his chela. Kim serves his master, the Lama. Creighton and Lurgan, along with their assistants, Mahbub Ali, Hurree Babu and Kim play the ‘great game’ and maintain the edifice of the Raj. If Kim-Krishna, the incarnation of Vishnu, joins this game, then the Raj is the divine order that is protected and sustained by him. Kim holds up the Raj like Krishna held up the mountain.

The Rani Sahiba and the woman of Shamlegh take good care of wandering holy men, such charity being their dharma. Even the courtesan from Amritsar does her duty by giving generously to Kim and the Lama. As Kipling puts it, ‘Ladies of that persuasion, he knew, were generous.’ The only flies in the ointment are the two Russian spies – who too are merely doing their duty – being true to their dharma. They are suitably dealt with so that India’s happiness is not disturbed.

There is no recognition at all that Indians may possibly be unhappy or discontented under British rule. The Rissaldar is a surviving loyalist of the mutiny, not a mutineer. Only three soldiers out of six hundred and eighty, by his own admission, did not mutiny. But it’s one of these three who is an important character. It’s almost as if Kipling refuses to acknowledge any inter-racial antagonisms, betrayals, any dark clouds in an otherwise sedate, happy Hindustan.

 

In hindsight today, we might question the realism of Kipling’s vision. But once we suspend judgment and enter his world, we must admit that it is a warm, happy, healing, colourful Hindustan that he presents to us. ‘Who goes to the hills goes to his mother.’ ‘Kim will remember till he dies that long, lazy journey from Umballa, through Kalka and the Pinjore Gardens nearby, up to Simla.’ ‘And the two of them, laying him east and west, that the mysterious earth-currents which thrill the clay of our bodies might help and not hinder, took him to pieces all one long afternoon – bone by bone, muscle by muscle, ligament by ligament and lastly nerve by nerve… Kim slid ten thousand mile into slumber – thirty six hours of it – sleep that soaked like rain after drought.’

No wonder the book remains popular even among Indian readers nearly a century after it was first published. We react with palpable nostalgia and affection for Kim’s lost idyllic ‘Hind’, just as the pious Vaishnava believer does when he hears the tales of Krishna’s Brindavan and Gokul.

 

Contrast this with Rushdie’s India replete with riots, crime, narcotics, bomb explosions, sexual indulgence, political chicanery and, above all, a dark sense of foreboding. Is he describing the present or predicting a future where the dancing gods of India will portray the choreography of destruction? Rushdie’s Mother India has taken on one of her awesome, terrible forms – there is decay, corruption and presentiments of destruction building up inexorably as the book proceeds. The principal protagonists are committed to adharma – they do the opposite of their duty. Wealthy upper class persons instead of sustaining dharma peddle narcotics, incite riots and corrupt and violate one another. It is almost as if they are following the left-handed Tantrik cult of the goddess where that which is grotesque and forbidden is deliberately embraced as part of the cult’s beliefs and practices. And the central figure is the Great Goddess – verily like Kali destroying everything in her way. Mother India may even be Sitala who sends forth the scourge of smallpox among her own people.

The imperial order is Vishnu’s, the benign protector of Kipling’s India where the inhabitants are innocent children. The moral and aesthetic choices and their dreadful consequences in Rushdie’s Shakta country are of an entirely different order.

Both Kim and the Moor are works of ‘fiction’. They deliberately distort reality. The dark side of India under the Raj is ignored by Kipling. Rushdie idealizes the Bombay of his childhood and it’s historical analogue – Moorish Granada. Kipling pretends that Indians will never be ‘misguided to rebel’ as long as the great game is played well. Rushdie bypasses the central issue of historical morality. How can gentle, tolerant, civilized Granada defend itself against a ruthless, monochromatic adversary who cannot be wished away? The last Moor is despised by his mother as a weakling and is she not justified? He is strikingly similar to Indian princes who lost their kingdoms while praying, writing poetry or playing chess! (Premchand’s short story ‘The Chess Players’ has this for its theme).

 

But if there were no fiction, if there was no attempt to set before us the possibilities of the imagination, our lives would be poorer. Once the two writers decided to take on the metaphor of India they could deal with it only by a selective suspension of reality. Now I begin to see why the two books are inseparable for me as part of one comprehensive reading experience. Each is a complement of the other; each completes the other. They deal with the reality of the Indian mosaic – the fact that different peoples have been destined to dwell in a haunting, haunted peninsula which has been likened to a cul-de-sac. And these people have had mythic visions of their land as varied as the Shakta and the Vaishnava cults which in some mysterious manner do not conflict but are mutually reinforcing.

The great Kannada writer, Maasti, described India as Bahuratna Vasundhara – the earth of many gems. The ideal that our literature should mirror not only our troubled times, but also our enduring metaphor of a mosaic touched by varied mythic visions is an ideal, perhaps not worth abandoning.