Sujay Sood, sujaysood@gmail.

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Indian is as Indian does: Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh

Salman Rushdie's oeuvre provides an intriguing instance of the function of aesthetic negotiation within a world whose primary human condition seems to be that of migrancy in both the post-modern and post-colonial senses of the term. Rushdies metafictive historiographies are postmodern with a twist of jubilance. At its best, Rushdies is a high art, one that exposes as provisional any claims to central authority by revealing the contamination of the pure, the contradictions of the unequivocal, the mythology of History, and the difference at the heart of identity. As post-colonial narrative, his work negotiates the formations of nationhood, of intrinsic hybridity, of consensual collectivity, and of immigrant sensibility. A case in point, of course, is Rushdie's "blasphemous" Satanic Verses and its political consequences. Rushdie himself views the novel as an attempt to negotiate through the uprooted, disjunctive, and metamorphic nature of the migrant condition a "metaphor for all humanity" (IH 394). In fact, Rushdie emphasizes that "The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the pure" (394). India was the first country to ban the Satanic Verses, in response to a vitriolic condemnation of the book's anti-Islamic sentiment made by a Muslim Opposition member of parliament, Syed Shahabuddin, who proudly asserted the fact that he had not yet read the book, that to read such a text would in itself be an act of blasphemy.i Eight years later, The Moor's Last Sigh was also banned in India, but this time because of its mockery of Hindu sentiments, and the call for a ban was restricted to the state of Maharashtra. Specifically, it was its mockery of the "Hitlerian" figure of Bal Thackeray, the leader of the fundamentalist Hindu party Shiv Sena, that drew the ire of the Thackeray loyalists, and amusingly enough, Thackeray himself. Amusing and ironic, that Rushdie's caricature of

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Thackeray as an oversized "Mainduck" (with a hindi pun on the word frog) would end up being read humorlessly by the ex-caricaturist and lampoonist himself. Thackeray's self-aggrandizement reflects a fundamental need of the population's psyche, one that is aptly described by Moraes Zogoiby, the first person narrator of The Moor's Last Sigh: We had given much thought to the matter of our masks, finally rejecting the idea of using the faces of Bollywood stars of the time in favour of the more historic Indian folk-tradition of bahurupi traveling players, in mimicry of whom we gave ourselves the heads of lions and tigers and bears. It proved a good decision, enabling us to enter the strikers' consciousness as mythological avengers. (306) The strikers psychology seems almost to hunger for raising the mundane to the sacred. Outside the novel and in the "real" world, it is Thackeray who has exploited the Indian propensity for proxy-god worship to such an extent that his sycophants were quick to deem The Moor blasphemous although it contains none of the religious revisionism of the the Satanic Verses. Banning The Moor is a ploy that helps to accelerate the mythologization of the figure of Bal Thackeray. The ban is justified because the political Thackeray is also a god-man for the Hindu rightwing party Shiv Sena; conversely, Thackerays aspiration for avatar-like status gets consolidated by the ban. The matter is well reflected in an article by Tony Clifton, writing for Newsweek (12/11/95): "Nobody elected Thackeray, aged 69, a former newspaper cartoonist who admires Hitler. He is, as he says, the "remote control" manipulating the coalition of Hindu zealots who took power in Bombay and surrounding Maharashtra State in Elections last March." The article discusses Thackeray's maniacal "ban" on the Pakistani Cricket team from playing in Bombay. In this context, "Mainduck's" political philosophy in The Moor resonates with a humorous interpenetration of historical truth and historiographical fiction that can best be called Rushdiesque: "In [Mainducks] bizarre conception of cricket as a fundamentally communalist game, essentially Hindu but with its Hindu-ness constantly under threat

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from the country's other, treacherous communities, lay the origins of his political philosophy..." (231). The sign par excellence of this kind of world is "blasphemy." The potential for being blasphemous is not relegated simply to the world of religion; as seen in the case of The Moor/Thackeray saga, political satire as well as cricket can become sites of blasphemous charge. In the context of newly forged and shifting alliances and loyaltieswhether they be to race, religion, nationalism, capitalism, or sexthe common denominator remains the sacrosanctity of the Absolute. This Absolute parades variously under the guise of tradition, or cultural supremacy, or Profit, or even Pluralism; and its claims to liberalism and tolerance are contradicted by its fear and suppression of the interstitial, that migrant "in-between. Homi Bhabha argues, in the context of the Satanic Verses, that "Blasphemy is not merely a misrepresentation of the sacred by the secular; it is a moment when the subject-matter or the content of a cultural tradition is being overwhelmed, or alienated, in the act of translation" (225). The Shiv Sena effort to label The Moor's Last Sigh as blasphemous, then, indicates the political agenda of legitimizing a newer, militant Hindu Absolute by appealing to the sensibilities of a Hindu population whose tradition and culture has been beleaguered by colonialism. Moraes Zogoiby's characterization of Raman "Mainduck" Fielding leaves little doubt about the thrust of Rushdie's critique in this spiciest of novels. The various intolerances which were inadvertently mobilized on a global scale by the Satanic Verses are also part of the machinery which propels events in The Moor's Last Sigh. Here, the inter-racial and inter-religious themes are overshadowed by the competing and often warring concerns of capitalist corruption and nationalist fanaticism. These latter two concerns are polarized through the figures of "Mainduck" Fielding and Moraes' father, Abraham "Mogambo" Zogoiby, through the ever-imminent war of the worlds between the pro-Hindu fundamentalist "Mumbai Axis" and the pro-(black) market "Scar-Zogoiby Axis":

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"...Abraham would be a formidable antagonist in the coming war of the worlds, Under versus Over, sacred versus profane, god versus mammon, past versus future, gutter versus sky: that struggle between two layers of power in which I...and Bombay, and even India itself would find ourselves trapped, like dust between coats of paint" (318). The Bombay segment of the novel ends with the portrayal of a city rent apart by the explosive, brutal, and meaningless destruction of property and life, as the two axes collide all too haphazardly for supremacy. And as both Mainduck and Abraham fall casualties, Moraes' impression as he watches Bombay burn from the insulated window of his airplane suggests that one version of history and truth, the familiar version, is being permanently snuffed out: "As my aeroplane banked over the city I could see columns of smoke rising. There was nothing holding me to Bombay any more. It was no longer my Bombay, no longer special, no longer the city of mixed-up, mongrel joy. Something had ended (the world?) and what remained, I didn't know" (376). It is this lingering and often pervasive sense of tragic confusion that marks off Rushdie's The Moor from the others. Gone is the magical exuberance of Midnight's Children. Gone, also, is the irrepressibly comic and tongue-in-cheek volubility of the Satanic Verses. Further, this novel performs a crucial task more fully than the prior and later Rushdie novels. The Moor undertakes a sustained ethical self-examination , one that questions the ethical significance of all action. The catastrophic backdrop against which action seeks its valuation is a world contaminated by the face-off between capitalist corruption and nationalist zeal. While in conflict, both ideologies share the damning quality of bigotry; in this regard, The Moor exposes the insidious spread of extrareligious bigotry in the body politic. Moraes' confusion in (his)story stems not so much from the position of an (exiled) migrant with a homeless world as it does from his inability to discover the ethical import of his tale. The tragic dimension of this story lies in the fact that, having described a new

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world order in which bigotry is ascendant, in which "the reality of our being is that so many covert truths exist behind Maya-veils of unknowing and illusion" (334), and in which "the truth is almost always exceptional, freakish, improbable, and almost never normative" (331), Moraes the titutlar Moor is unmoored by the seeming absence of ethical vindication in these freakish truths. Moraes ethical confusion is reminiscent of Hamlets to be or not to be dilemma. While Hamlets irresolution can be linked to Shakespeares ethical exploration of the Christian and Pagan traditions, Moraes perplexity can be seen to result from Rushdies exploration of a selfhood that oscillates between two ontological possibilities: The Hindu/Indian ontology of the self/Self and the Judaeo-Christian/Western ontology of the Self/Other. These competing and contrasting world-views with their irreconcilable ethical systems sound the pulse of Rushdie's creativity. The Moor is a departure from Rushdie's earlier works by being more muted, more circumspect in its encounter with multi-valent truth, migrancy, and writing. Rushdies writing style remains playful and inventiveconsider, for instance, the typical Rushdie word-play, for example, the lexical innovation of Vasco Miranda, the "mistakes and the hittakes, the misfortunes and the hitfortunes," and even the hybrid Hindish, such as "Itho." In terms of substance, ethics has come to the very fore of The Moor and is engaged through the befuddlement of Moraes in his first-person narrative that recounts a violent family saga that is embroiled in the national politics of a newly independent India. Rushdie's journey has been that of a migrant writer who has been able to criticize while at the same time escape the confinement of the world under his critique, since he is like his principal characters--whether a Saleem Sinai, an Omar, a Saladin or a Gibreel, or a Moraes Zogoiby--a migrant, on the move, not anchored to the traditional or normative grounds of belonging; if anything, he clearly admits himself into belonging to the "new type" of human being he describes in "The Location of Brazil":

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The effect of mass migrations has been the creation of radically new types of human being: people who root themselves in ideas rather than places, in memories as much as in material things; people who have been obliged to define themselves--because they have been so defined by others--by their otherness; people in whose deepest selves strange fusions occur, unprecedented unions between what they were and where they find themselves. The migrant suspects reality: having experienced several ways of being, he understands their illusory nature. To see things plainly, you have to cross a frontier. (IH 124-125, emphases mine) This provocative description of the "new" human being seems to devalorize the settled, non-migrant populations. Spelling out the implication in Rushdies statement above, it seems that the non-migrant population roots itself predominantly or exclusively in place and in "material things, and that they are unable to see plainly? Yet, how unique and different is the migrant vision, when they are defining themselves according to the otherness defined by their othersproperly speaking, the Western non-migrant populationif all they have done is dressed themselves up in the pre-existing garb of the Other and played out a prescripted role of non-belonging? In such a case, it is not so much that a "new type" of human being has been created. It is simply that the other has been allotted its otherness. Then what are the "strange fusions" that occur in their deepest selves? What does Rushdie mean by the "unprecedented unions" between what they were (non-migrants) with what theyve become: migrants excluded from the Same by occupying the prescribed slot of the Other? Clearly, Rushdie's rhetoric engages the Self/Other dialectic as he negotiates the migrant experience. However, there is another ontological charge in Rushdies aesthetic. This charge comes from the ethics of the self/Self in Indian ontology, one which signals an important difference from the Western ontology of the Self/Other. A character caught between the competing ethical claims of these ontological frameworks would most likely reflect a sense of freefall, of lacking a center. Kathryn Hume describes these two aspects as being central to Rushdies esthetic: If, as Rushdie concludes, humans have no core capable of guaranteeing continuity, then this fear of disintegration is the logical anxiety for us to expect in

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his fiction, and Rushdie projects such a fear through his symbolism. A cluster of images embodies threats of dissolution, chief among these being void, hole, mouth, and vortex into which the self is sucked or explodes or falls--and downward plunges are very prominent in Rushdie's fiction...Rushdie's characters have been plunging in one fashion and another for some time...such a fall betokens the anxiety one experiences when facing the lack of a personal center...(215, emphasis mine) Implicit in the concept of an essential core or personal center is the Self/Other ontology of Western metaphysics. However, the very Indianness of Rushdies work suggests that the self can also be examined from the vantage point of dharmic-ethics premised in the ontology of the self/Self. Here, the essence of being is not contained within a core or center within the transitory and impermanent body. but in the extension of the Self through the three Gunas or qualities of Prakriti (Nature). The Gunas are complemented by the conscious self as witness and as the partial manifestation of the universal and eternal Self. The migrants world is one of dislocation and estrangement of habitual being; this does not mean, however, that being itself loses its core or center. In the dharmic context, the self's ethical core remains constant, and all action can be measured against the ethical directive of holding together all human action as an inexorable march towards "embracing a Vedantic unity by which the soul sees all in itself and itself in all and makes itself one with all beings:" Dharma in the Indian conception is not merely the good, the right, morality and justice, ethics; it is the whole government of all the relations of man with other beings, with Nature, with God, considered from the point of view of a divine principle working itself out in forms and laws of action, forms of the inner and the outer life, orderings of relations of every kind in the world. Dharma is both that which we hold to and that which holds together our inner and outer activities...there is the divine nature which has to develop and manifest in us, and in this sense Dharma is the law of the inner workings by which that grows in our being. (Aurobindo 162-63). In this dharmic context, Rushdie's creative work is an action that reveals the selfs complicated inner and outer life as embroiled with the exigencies of a twentieth century life.

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It would be safe to say that the critical reception of Rushdies work takes the Western ontology of the Self/Other as being normative, if not universal. While such an approach provides insight into the all that is Western in Rushdie, it remains unable to penetrate the pervasive tension between the Western and non-Western (specifically Indian) ways of being. For example , seen from the Western critical perspective, Moraes clearly remain unable to pin down an ethical vindication to the events of his life; from a dharmic perspective, however, Moraes story is a testament that can be read as a yagna or sacrifice .need major footnote and/or explanation here. The movement in Moraes' story runs almost contrary to Rushdie's description of the migrant above. Moraes is the first-person narrator, a putatively decentered being who seeks to discover the meaning of his life by writing his-story. The narrative unfolds from the end, where as readers we find Moraes resting in a shady spot within sight of the Alhambra in Spain, and in reading the ensuing pages we figuratively trace the route prescribed by his having nailed the sheets of his story at various spots--"a story I've been crucifying upon a gate, a fence, an olive-tree," a self-conscious reference to Martin Luther's act in Wittenberg-- and are led to the "treasure" of his self (3), whose value is ensconced in the fatalistic assertion that the map of his journey, the story of his life and actions could be no other than what they are for who Moraes is: "When my pursuers have followed the trail they'll find me waiting, uncomplaining, out of breath, ready. Here I stand. Couldn't've done it differently" (3). As readers, then, we are engaged in a treasure hunt whose object is known--the Moor--but whose value remains to be ascertained. But there are two readers of Moraes' story that precede us, though their journey ends before ours begins. They provide starkly contrasting reader-responses of the story being written by Moraes. There is Vasco Miranda, Moraes' imprisoner and on whose command Moraes begins to write his-story as a postponement of his execution: ""Let the last Zogoiby recount their sinful saga." Everyday, after that, he brought me pencil and paper. He had made a Scherezade of me.

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As long as my tale held his interest he would let me live" (421). There is also, and more importantly so for the ethical import of his-story, the Japanese lady named Aoi U, whose name "was a miracle of vowels...the five enabling sounds of language..."ow-ee oo-ay"" (423), his fellow-prisoner in the tower of Little Alhambra. Between the two of them they rejuvenate an ethics of primary sociality through tactility in an effort to defeat the dehumanizing conditions of their captivity: "thus, we clung to humanity, and refused to allow our captivity to define us...often, without any sexual motive, we would hold each other. Sometimes she would let herself shake, and weep, and I would let her, let her. More often she performed this service for me" (424). It is this "formidably contained woman" with her routine, discipline, and self-possession that become Moraes' mainstay, his "nourishment by day and [his] pillow by night" (423). It is this self-same woman, however, whose composure is destroyed by reading the Moor's tale: What did scare Aoi U? Reader, I did. it was me. Not by my appearance, or by my deeds. She was frightened by my words, by what I set down on paper...Reading what I wrote before Vasco spirited it away, learning the full truth about the story in which she was so unfairly trapped, she trembled. Her horror at what we had done to one another down the ages was the greater because it showed her what we were capable of doing still; to ourselves, and to her. (427) While Miranda's seeks solely for entertainment value, Aoi U ends up being horrified by the ethical violations in the tale. Two readers and two contrasting responses; the question of the moment is what kind of reader does the text demand of us? Stated otherwise, the necessary task at hand is the determination of the nature and value of the treasure, of Moraes Zogoiby and his story. The thematic of migration itself is given a new twist in The Moor's Last Sigh. The arena of the story includes Spain and India, and the characters' ethnic backgrounds are informed variously by Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism, or a mongrelization thereof. Moraes the Moor's saga is shown to originate in the fifteenth century in Moorish Spain at the time of the moor Abu Abdallah's expulsion, the last of

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the Nasrids and known as Boabdil el zogoiby (the misfortunate), by the Catholic conquests in 1492. In a climactic moment when Abraham, Moraes' father, confronts his mother with his desire to marry the Catholic Aurora Da Gama, it is revealed that his lineage goes back to the "miscegenation" between the Arab Moor Boabdil and an ejected Spanish Jew. The impurity of the Indian Jewish population is even traced back by Abraham to the first Jewish migration, the "Black jews" who escaped from Jerusalem fleeing "from Nebuchadnezzar's armies five hundred and eighty-seven years before the Christian era" (71), and who intermarried with the locals. There is, in addition to this theme of the contamination of "pure" migrancy, that of a (eternal) return, one which provides a mythological flavor to The Moor's Last Sigh, to Moraes' history. The beginning of the tale begins at the moment which is the end of Moraes' story, and the end of his story finds him where it all began--in Spain. The proper end of the novel, then, finds the Moraes the Moor posturing as Boabdil the Moor, whose dispossession from Alhambra by the Spanish Catholic reconquests marks the launching point of both the story and the lineage that is ultimately Moraes Zogoiby's ("Zogoiby" which means "misfortunate" is the epithet attached to Boabdil after his loss). A space of five hundred years separates the two Moors but apparently the song of exile remains unchanged. While Boabdil the Moor "turned to look for one last time upon his loss, upon the palace and the fertile plains and all the concluded glory of Andalus...at which sight [he] sighed and hotly wept" (80), Moraes the Moor looks upon the same Alhambra thinking, "The Alhambra...that monument to a lost possibility that has nevertheless gone on standing...like a testament...to our need for flowing together, for putting an end to frontiers, for the dropping of the boundaries of the self...I watch it vanish in the twilight, and in its fading it brings tears to my eyes" (433, emphasis mine). In this thematic of

the story, it seems that there is ultimately no migrancy that is not also a process of making a cyclical return. Furthermore, Moraes' desire to erase frontiers and boundaries, of the self as much as of culture and geography, indicates an Indian ontological

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prerogative which does nonetheless remain unfulfilled or unachieved in his tale. Thus the novel ends with the Moraes' desire to fall asleep "and hope to awaken, renewed and joyful, into a better time" (434). What all this goes to show is that migrancy in the Indian context is old as history itself, and provides an interesting counterpoint to the trope of migrancy as it is espoused as the privileged paradigm of postcolonialism in the metropolis. Why is it that the theme of migrancy, of migrant sensibility is given such weightage not only by Rushdie's erstwhile critics but by Rushdie himself? And what does it mean, in counterpoint, that The Moor's Last Sigh shows that migrancy is not a recent phenomenon, not a defining condition of twentieth century life, but one of the facts of history and a perennial aspect of existential accommodation? In this regard, to answer Krishnaswamy's question, "has the mythology of migrancy provided a productive site for post-colonial resistance or has it willy-nilly become complicit with hegemonic theorizations of power and identity?" (127), one can suggest that the latter alternative suggests itself as the compelling choice, that keeping the migrant occupied with playing the role of the "radically new type of being" (Rushdie) and expending his energies in understanding his own "newness" perpetuates his marginalization from the hegemonic power center, which is and which remains, after all, the reserve of the non-immigrants.ii In the Satanic Verses Rushdie negotiates the meaning of Koranic injunctions by reworking them in a novelistic context which allows him to perform "the subversion of its authenticity through the act of cultural translation" (Bhabha 226). This subversion is aided by a Rushdiesque device of time travel in dream sequences: The historic inception of Islam takes place in the dreams of Gibreel Farishta inhabiting London in the 1980's. This narrative collapse and concentration of various planes--historical, linear, realistic, ontological--properly complicates the nature of the "migrant" experience. In The Moor's Last Sigh, however, Rushdie's treatment of the diasporic and migrant space of the present seems at first glance to be the repetition of a disenfranchising history. The most telling

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sign of this seemingly passive historicity is the palpable lack of re-naming. In the Satanic Verses, for example, Mohammed is called "Mahound," and the prostitutes assume the names of Mohammed's wives. That history has proved Rushdie's re-naming to be a transgressive mis-naming (Khomeini's fatwah) does not alter its creative intent: "to violate the system of naming is to make contingent and indeterminate..."the institutions of naming as the expression and embodiment of the shared standpoint of the community, its traditions of belief and enquiry"" (Alisdair Macintrye in Bhabha 225). This creative re-naming act is what The Moor's Last Sigh lacks and in doing so fails to demonstrate "how newness enters the world": "For the migrant's survival depends, as Rushdie put it, on discovering "how newness enters the world". The focus is on making linkages through the unstable elements of literature and life...rather than arriving at ready-made names" (227). The generative possibility of Rushdie's novel clearly lies elsewhere than in the pervasiveness of the ready-made name of the Moor and his inevitable last sigh; it lies, arguably, in the added Indian tension in this telling of his tale. In reading Moraes' story, we find that he is firmly rooted in the places where his life unfolds; in fact, he consciously divides his narrative according to the following centers: "Cabral Island, the first of my story's four sequestered, serpented, Edenicinfernal private universes. (My mother's Malabar Hill salon was the second; my father's sky-garden, the third; and Vasco Miranda's bizarre redoubt, his "Little Alhambra" in Benengeli was, is, and will in this telling become my last)" (15). In so rooting himself in the places of his life the Moor, though he migrates, doesn't become a "new type" of human being at all; in fact, it can be argued that the Moor's Prakritic constitution remains fundamentally the same regardless of the location in which he finds himself. Rushdie has used an aging device for Moraes Zogoiby: he ages twice as fast as ordinary human beings. This means that he was born four and a half months after his conception and, consequently, dedicated his life to slowing down: "Cursed with speed, I put on slowness as the Lone Ranger wore a mask. Determined to decelerate my

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evolution by the sheer force of my personality, I became ever more languid of body, and my words learned how to stretch themselves out in long sensual yawns. Slomo...was one of my secret identities" (153). This tamasic slant becomes a dominating character trait in his life, and most likely impedes him from any attempt at action to rescue Aoi U when she is about to be shot by Vasco Miranda. Moraes realizes at this point that he wants to live and is thus unwilling to sacrifice himself to save another's life; "how we cling to life" he thinks (431). His attachment to the physical manifestation of life makes him cowardly, a trait which he shares with his namesake Boabdil the Moor and which Vasco Miranda taunts him with: "A true Moor...would attack his lady's assailant even if it meant his certain death...O false and cowardly Moor" (431). This fear of death reflects the confusion that marks Moraes' thoughts throughout the novel; his vain search for true selfknowledge remains unfulfilled as his tamasic inertia dictates the movements throughout most of his life. He is dismayed when he is cast out of his parent's home Elephanta and likens his state to a fall into Pandemonium: "The gates of Paradise were opened...I stumbled through them, giddy, disoriented, lost. I was nobody, nothing. Nothing I had ever known was of use, nor could I any longer say that I knew it" (278). His intense discomfiture and lack of certitude with regard to his knowledge stems from the fact that his habitual tamasic life has been forced into an abrupt end. His attitude here is clearly one that we can expect of the tamasic man who "seeks only somehow to survive, to subsist so long as he may, to shelter himself in the fortress of an established routine of thought and action in which he feels himself to a certain extent protected from the battle, able to reject the demand which his higher nature makes upon him" (Aurobindo, 49). There are three significant moments which prove to be exceptions to Moraes' Tamas dominated life. The first of these ensues upon his liberation by Raman "Mainduck" Fielding from imprisonment at Bombay Central. He learns that Mainduck's motive in aiding his release is simple: Moraes is to perform in a team of lite enforcers of the Mumbai Axis, a team he calls "Hazar's XI," whose task is to terrorize and beat into

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submission those who are brave enough to dissent from Mainduck's Hindu Ram-Rajya program. At this point, Moraes exhilarates in the knowledge that he can finally give vent to his true calling which he has always suspected is associated with his deformed right hand--a pugilist's dream, a deadly weapon: Something that had been captive all my life had been released...something whose captivity had meant that my entire existence up to this point all at once seemed unfulfilled, reactive, characterised by various kinds of drift; and whose release burst upon me like my own freedom. I knew at that instant that I need no longer live a provisional life, a life-in-waiting; I need no longer be what ancestry, breeding and misfortune had decreed, but could enter, at long last, into myself--my true self, whose secret was contained in that deformed limb which I had thrust for too long into the depths of my clothing. No more! Now I would brandish it with pride. Henceforth I would be my fist, a Hammer, not a Moor. (295, emphasis mine) This release marks Moraes's entry into a rajasic living, in which his actions become dominated by a passionate desire for satisfying his egoistic impulses. He relishes the beatings he and his team mete out to those who protest and agitate against Mainduck's cause, and embraces the lifestyle enforced by Mainduck on all his followers, one which includes late-night semi-nude drinking and wrestling bouts, culinary delights, and even a host of "peripheral" women. Moraes realizes that his true nature, his "secret" self, delights in the pursuit of carnal pleasures: "Can you understand with what delight I wrapped myself in the simplicity of my new life? For I did; I revelled in it. At last, I told myself, a little straightforwardness; at last you are what you were born to be" (305). But his is the basest manifestation of the rajasic nature, one which doesn't have a sattwic inclination towards seeking true self-knowledge, and towards according assimilation, measure and equilibrium in and through all action; whereas in his earlier tamasic state Moraes' paralysis was complemented by a yearning for understanding, in this rajasic state of servitude to Raman "Mainduck" Fielding, he gives himself up to a "thirst for unpossessed satisfaction [and] is therefore full of unrest and fever and lust and greed and excitement, a thing of seeking impulsions" (Aurobindo 415).

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This rajasic phase lasts a decade, at the end of which Moraes finds himself spent, "when I turned thirty, my body turned sixty, and not a particularly youthful sixty, at that" (311), and relegated to working in Mainduck's secratariat. It is at this point that he receives a secret note from Abraham which leads to a sequence culminating in the murder that is the pivotal moment of the Moor's Last Sigh. Upon finding the note under his pillow in Mainduck's house, Moraes marvels at "how great [Abraham's] power had grown; and tenses himself for the inevitable collision of the Mumbai Axis and the ScarZogoiby Axes of power. Upon reuniting with his father, the prodigal son returned is given a glimpse of the power-hungry and corrupt Zogoiby empire which has a hand in, among other things, running a vast international heroin trade and in technology espionage and funding activities for the construction of an Islamic Hydrogen bomb in the Arab world. As Abraham describes the H-bomb project to him, Moraes finds himself undergoing the second change in his self--he reacts in an unprecendented and completely unanticipated manner by refusing to abet or participate in Abraham's anti-humanitarian scheme whose sole impetus seems to be self-aggrandizement even at the cost of wreaking destruction and havoc on a global scale. Abraham's enterprise is clearly adharmic and asuric in principle; his actions demonstrate the asuric qualities of wrath, greed, cunning, the willful injury to others, pride and excessive self-esteem. Thus Abraham thunders upon being confronted by Moraes: "He was God in his paradise and I, his greatest creation, had just put on the forbidden fig-leaf of shame. "I am a business person," he said. "What there is to do, I do." YHWH. I am that I am" (336). Aurobindo's description of the deluded self-aggrandizement of the asuric man rings true of Abraham Zogoiby's Prakritic constitution: "The asuric man becomes the center or instrument of a fierce, Titanic, violent action, a power of destruction in the world, a fount of injury and evil" (457). Faced with this asuric tyrant, Moraes surprises himself by feeling an involuntary and intense recoil. : "At that moment something changed within me. It was an involuntary alteration, born not of will or choice but of some deeper, unconscious

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function of my self" (335). This response indicates a flash of Sattwa in an attempt to stand up for the dharmic law of the universe with its goal of holding together all of humanity in a movement towards harmony and self-realization. The voice that Moraes hears--"I heard a voice within me making an absolute, non-negotiable refusal" (336)--is the call of Dharma which dictates its primacy over "the bounds of what was required of [him] by family loyalty" (336). This sattwic moment is, unfortunately, short-lived. Moraes succumbs to the manipulation of his father, who reveals to him that the murderer of his mother is none other than Raman "Mainduck" Fielding. Of the several murders in the novel, that of Raman "Mainduck" Fielding's by none other than Moraes Zogoiby is of crucial significance. Moraes bashes Mainduck's face into a pulp, ostensibly avenging his mother Aurora Zogoiby's murder, which Abraham reveals to have been orchestrated by Mainduck in a jilted lover's rage. It out of a sense of family loyalty with revenge as his motive that Moraes decides to murder Mainduck. He is successful in his task but his world literally blows apart. In terms of the dharmic-ethical thematics of the novel, this explosion signifies that Moraes' act is adharmic, that it tears apart his world. It is in keeping with the narrative's logic of layered (mis)information that Moraes finds out much later, in Spain and in the company of another one his mother's jilted lovers, the pop artist Vasco Miranda, that the murderer is none other than Abraham Zogoiby himself. That this last is proved by a tell-tale palimpsest in which Abraham's portrait is buried under Aurora's Zogoiby's last and unfinished painting entitled "The Moor's Last Sigh" is yet another example of the conflation and dissolution of conflicting versions and dissolving verities, a strategy incessantly at work in the novel. On learning the "truth," Moraes regrets "pounding [Mainduck's] face until there was no face there" (418). In committing the murder, Moraes acted upon false information received from a contaminated source-his father Abraham. In the dharmic-ethical economy of the story, then, Moraes' rajasic act is performed in a tamasic ignorance, and even though he is willing to sacrifice himself

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in attaining his goal, there is nothing sattwic in his action: "I realized with a kind of abstract surprise that I was ready to die, as long as Raman Fielding's corpse lay close at hand. So I had become a murdering fanatic, too. (Or a righteous avenger; take your pick.)" (365). The logic of the story dictates our pick--Moraes falls into the aspect of nothing other than a murdering fanatic acting on incomplete and erroneous knowledge. As such, any stable point of reference in the novel vanishes with the erasure of Raman Fielding's face. In what seems to be an anti-thematic movement, whatever anchor to reality and a sane world Moraes has left hinges on the preservation of Mainduck's faciality. The episode which leaves Mainduck dead and faceless, and occurs towards the end of the novel is followed by the cinematic description of Bombay blowing apart, as seen by Moraes from his airplane, and taking with it the lives of all the major players. The concluding segment of the novel, a brief section of Moraes's visit to Vasco Miranda in Benengeli, Spain, is marked by fuzzy indeterminacy as the moor finds himself in an unfamiliar culture whose apparent manipulation of himself he can only belatedly rationalize as either mass conspiracy or delusional paranoia. It is, then, not by chance that the erasure of Mainduck's face triggers the collapse of the narrative's center of signifiance. It can be said that the polar opposition of the Mumbai Axis and the Scar-Zogoiby Axis acts as the organizing principle for meaning in the novel, somber as this may be. And at the very center of these axes, at their intersection can be seen the twin faces of Raman Fielding and Abraham Zogoiby, Mainduck and Mogambo. For it is their "faciality" which allows the signifying signs to stabilize and emit unequivocal meaning. Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of "faciality" rings true with regard to this pivotal point in The Moor's Last Sigh: The face...is a whole body unto itself: it is like the body of the center of signifiance to which all of the deterritorialized signs affix themselves, and it marks the limit of their deterritorialization...The face is the Icon proper to the signifying regime, the reterritorialization internal to the system...when the face is effaced, when the faciality

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traits disappear, we can be sure that we have entered another regime, other zones infinitely muter and more imperceptible...(MP 115). This is indeed the general movement of deterritorialization which occurs in the final pages of The Moor's Last Sigh. the Bombay of "mongrel joy," of politico-economic alliances and allegiances centered around Mainduck and Mogambo is consumed in flames. Moraes Zogoiby realizes that life, however, will continue and new faces will appear, not least of all ex-Miss India Nadia Wadia's disfigured face: "The end of the world is not the end of the world. My ex-fiance, Nadia Wadia, appeared on television a few days after the attacks, when the scars across her face were still livid, the permanence of the disfiguration all too evident" (376). Nadia Wadia's cheering message is that "the city will survive. New towers will rise...the future beckons. Hearken to its call" (377). The Moor's Last Sigh indicates Rushdie's attempt at negotiating an ethical vindication for the so-called migrant whose cosmology, or indeed, ontological make-up, is the result of the conflict between an Indian and a non-Indian universe. The interpenetration and eventual ascendance of the Indian over the Western is clearly suggested through the musings of Reverend Oliver D'aeth. Although portrayed as somewhat of a comical figure, Reverend D'aeth's realization in his dream echoes Moraes Zogoiby's sentiments at the end of the novel: ""We will never gain our humanity until we lose our skins." 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 so: whether it was a heroic vision or a banality" (95). Reverend D'aeth also comes to the conclusion which will torment Moraes throughout his life--that "India was uncertainty. It was deception and illusion" (95). The events in the novel are framed by the thematic which pits Western religion against Indian religion, the Biblical theme of the Fall against the Hindu theme of Ganesha, the West against India. With regard to this pervasive struggle, Francisco Da Gama's theory of The Transformational Fields of Conscience crystallizes the scope of the ethical crisis which informs Moraes's life and actions. The

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TFC theory cooked up by Francisco is motivated by Mahatma Gandhi's "insistence on the oneness of all of India's widely differing millions" and the search for some "secularist definition of the spiritual life, of that worn-out word the soul" (20). Though the TFC theory is shown to be the butt of jokes and the ruination of Francisco Da Gama's political career, its emphasis on ethics--"the fields acted ethically, both defining and being defined by our moral alternatives" (20)--cannot be underestimated insofar as it concerns our appreciation of the value of the treasure signified by Moraes Zogoiby. The transformational fields theory, inspired also by the Theosophical Society, reflects an Indian take on the matter of ethical being through its conception of a single, interconnected, and all-pervasive "ethical nexus" within which all existence resides: "these "fields of conscience" were nothing less than the repositories of the memory--both practical and moral--of the human species, that they were in face what Joyce's Stephen had recently spoken of wishing to forge in his soul's smithy" (20). In its suggestion of a cumulative memory informing all action, the TFC theory echoes the concept of Karmic balance in Prakriti or Nature as suggested in the Bhagvada Gita: [Will] is created and determined not by its own self-existent action at a given moment but by our past, our heredity, our training, our environment, the whole tremendous complex thing we call Karma, which is, behind us, the whole past action of Nature on us and the world converging in the individual, determining what he is, determining what his will shall be at a given moment and determining...even its action at that moment. The ego associates itself always with this Karma and it says "I did" and "I will" and "I suffer," but if it looks at itself and sees how it was made, it is obliged to say of man as of the animal, Nature did this in me, Nature wills this in me..." (Aurobindo, 211). Clearly, then, the TFC theory is based on a self/Self ontology in which there is no space for the Other of the Self/Other dialectic. Rushdie's aesthetic enterprise is saturated with the Indian experience whose polytheistic culture has assimilated, through the ages, various immigrant religions with a their "Western" Self/Other dialectic. The illusion and the uncertainty that characterizes Moraes experience with India, with his Indian story, stems from a conscience that struggles inconclusively with the Indian and the Western

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conceptions of being, knowing all along, as Reverend D'aeth knows, that India's "ethnic universalism" (Nandy) will assimilate all: "Oliver D'aeth knew enough to be sure that the frontier between the English enclaves and the surrounding foreigness had become permeable, was beginning to dissolve. India would reclaim it all" (95). In The Moor's Last Sigh, Moraes the Moor's world falls to pieces when he transgresses the ethical injunction against killing other fellow humans, when acting upon false information he performs an act that is adharmic to the core. Though the novel is peppered with murders--Epifania Menezes's by Aurora, Aurora Zogoiby's at the behest of Abraham, Philomina Zogoiby's mysterious death which also implicates Abraham, even Aoi U's by Vasco Miranda--its major theme is clearly that of individual ethical responsibility: it is the Moor's story, recounted by the Moor, and its action or denouement shows quite clearly that his murderous act is not to be condoned, and it gives the lie to his self-justification for and trivialization of his act of murder: "My assassin mood cannot properly be ascribed to atavism; though inspired by my mother's death, this was scarcely a recurrence of characteristics that had skipped a few generations! It might more accurately be termed a sort of in-law inheritance" (364). The Moor's confusion in the novel arises not least from the fact of being incapable of latching on to an unequivocal ethical determination for his existence and actions. An aspect of essential Nature informs his understanding of human being and action; and in his attention to secret identities what is revealed is nothing other than the Gunas or qualities of Prakritic or nature which inform the "true" constitution of the various characters under his scrutiny. A tiger can't change its stripes but it can hide them seems to be the maxim that concurs with Moraes's assessment of humans in general: "If, in the matter of Raman Fielding, I took it upon myself to be judge, jury and executioner, it is because it was in my nature to do so. Civilization is the sleight of hand that conceals our natures from ourselves" (365, emphasis mine). Rushdie's novel reflects the struggle Moraes ascribes to Kipling's "schizo-stories" in which "Indiannesses" struggled with

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"Englishnesses;" in one aspect of the struggle, the Indian reliance on Gunas as essential qualities of Prakritic being is processed and presented through the British (and here read Western) attention to "secret identities."iii It is not by hazard, then, that Moraes' initiation to the cult of secret identities occurs through the murals painted in his childhood room by Vasco Miranda, murals which depict an intriguing aspect of the Western Imagination's obsession with role-playing and with the superhero: Who was that masked man? It was from the walls of my childhood that I first learned about the wealthy socialite Bruce Wayne and his ward Dick Grayson, beneath whose luxurious residence lurked the secrets of the Bat-Cave, about mild mannered Clark Kent who was the space-immigrant Kal-El from the planet Krypton who was Superman, about John Jones who was the Martian J'onn J'onzz and Diana King who was Wonder Woman the Amazon Queen....Learning from the Phantom and the Flash, from Green Arrow and Batman and Robin, I set about devising a secret identity of my very own. (152) This obsession with secret identities will continue to inform not only Moraes' understanding of his self-constitution but also his understanding of others. Abraham thus becomes the "Mogambo" who runs the underworld along with the Muslim gang-boss "Scar." Abraham as Abraham suggests the mild-mannered nature of a Clark Kent; Abraham as Mogamgo, however, is clearly rajasic-asuric, pursuing power and wealth with unconscionable zeal, trading in human flesh and drugs, making his way through threats and coercion. Likewise, Vasco Miranda's ostensibly harmless cartoon-like character which nevertheless is rajasic in the extreme--with his "legendary inexhaustibility, as effective in the pursuit of commissions, bed-mates and squash-balls as of love" (155)--attempts in vain to contain the asuric monster seething within his being; Moraes remembers the disturbing moments when "we who loved him would gloss over the times when an aggressive fury would pour out of him, when he seemed to crackle with such a current of dark, negative electricity that we feared to touch him lest we stuck to him and burned up" (165). Though Miranda recedes into the background of Moraes' story soon after the independence of India (among other related events) "destroy[s] the

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fragile equilibrium at the heart of his invented self, and set[s] the madman free" (165), he and his madness becomes pivotal in the fourth and final section of the Moor's tale; as an authorial strategy this facilitates or puts in relief the ethical dimension by playing out Moraes story by and through the person of a family insider/outsider who turns out to be a cold-hearted, demented murderer. It is in this section, of course, that we find out that the entire narrative has Vas's stamp on it--it has been commissioned albeit it as extortion from Moraes the Moor. In terms of secret identities, it is significant that the two characters who are depicted without one are Raman "Mainduck" Fielding and Aurora Zogoiby. Mainduck is the unabashed leader of the pro-Hindu Mumbai Axis, and wears his program on his sleeve. All his rajasic energies are directed towards self-fulfillment and selfaggrandizement; his pursuit of Miss India Nadia Wadia, for example, has as its motive not love but conquest and image. His hunger for power is undisguised and his delusion that he is doing the right thing is unmitigated. Moraes notes more than once a Hitlerian megalomania in Mainduck but is at the same time insistent about Mainduck's humanity: "the point is they are not inhuman, these Mainduck-style little Hitlers, and it is in their humanity that we must locate our collective guilt, humanity's guilt for human beings' misdeeds; for if they are just monsters...then the rest of us are excused" (297). The ethical message here, which is suspiciously akin to an authorial intrusion as it contradicts the operative ethical uncertainty in Moraes's character, is nonetheless important and one that invokes both a dharmic-karmic and even a Levinasian Self/Other ethics.iv But the power of Mainduck lies in the fact that he is able to let others reveal and revel in their "true" selves: There was a thing that Raman Fielding knew, which was his power's secret source: that it is not the civil social norm for which men yearn, but the outrageous, the outsize, the out-of-bounds--for that by which our wild potency may be unleashed. We crave permission openly to become our secret selves. (305)

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Finally, it is notable that in the economy of murders in the story, Mainduck remains on the receiving end of things. Abraham Zogoiby, Vasco Miranda, and even Moraes himself turn out to be more asuric in their willful murders than Mainduck, whose atrocities in the quest for power remain a hazy suggestion and escape Moraes' depiction. If there is one element that makes The Moor's Last Sigh unlike any of Rushdie's previous novels, it is its inordinate attention to Art. This is facilitated by the fact that Moraes' mother Aurora Da Gama-Zogoiby is among the leading lite of India's modern painters. Her life's work comprises a series which parallels and reflects the main events described by Moraes in his literary narrative. The title of Rushdie's novel--The Moor's Last Sigh-- refers to not one but two paintings of crucial importance in the novel. The first painting is entitled "The Artist as Boabdil, the Unlucky (el-Zogoybi), Last Sultan of Granada, Seen Departing from the Alhambra...Or, the Moor's Last Sigh" (160). It is created by Vasco Miranda and portrays himself as Boabdil. This painting forms a palimpsest over Miranda's original painting, a portrait of Aurora sitting cross-legged on a giant lizard, under a "chhatri," her left breast exposed, and her arms cradling empty space instead of a baby (Inamorata). The iconography of this painting is suggestive of the depiction of a Hindu goddess, and Moraes remarks on its universal appeal: "her arms [were] cradling nothing, unless of course they were cradling the invisible Vasco, or even the whole world; unless by seeming to be nobody's mother she indeed became the mother of us all" (160). This sentiment echoes Moraes earlier comparison of his mother with the movie Mother India, in which a "stoical, loving, redemptive" mother can also become "an aggressive, treacherous, annihilating mother" (139). Aurora's image becomes, in all subsequent Miranda works, a miniaturized icon which is then painted over by the larger scale commercial artwork that is the source of Miranda's wealth and success. The second painting entitled The Moor's Last Sigh is Aurora's last painting before her murder. In a reconciliatory gesture towards her estranged and banished son, Aurora depicts him as the Moor "lost in limbo like a wandering shade" and herself as the Moor's mother "looking

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frightened and stretching out her hand" (315-16). This painting, found on her easel at the time of her death, also turns out to be a palimpsest whose dark secret--a portrait of Aurora's murderer: none other than Abraham Zogoiby--is revealed to Moraes by Vasco Miranda in Benengeli, Spain. Why does Rushdie turn to this visual medium of art--painting in his latest novel? Is it not true that "when a writer considers painting and painters, he is a little in the position of readers in relation to the writer, or the man in love who thinks of the absent woman" (Merleau-Ponty, 94)? In other words, what is it that Rushdie wishes to evoke by referring to painting, what ineffable truth is it that makes the yearning of his own artistic medium incomplete, that needs to invoke this indirect complementation of another medium of expression? Rushdie's attention to painting is given a very clear emphasis right from the very first artwork created by Aurora: it is an impossible mural composed by the child Aurora in the week of her having been grounded in her room: Every inch of the wall and even the ceiling of the room pullulated with figures, human and animal, real and imaginary, drawn in sweeping black line that transformed itself constantly, that filled here and there into huge blocks of colour, the red of the earth, the purple and vermilion of the sky, the forty shades of green; a line so muscular and free, so teeming, so violent, that Camoens with a proud father's bursting heart found himself saying, "But it is the great swarm of being itself." [She] was suggesting that the privacy of Cabral Island was an illusion and this mountain, this hive, this endlessly metamorphic line of humanity was the truth...(59-60, emphasis mine). This first artistic attempt is a veritable masterpiece which depicts all of human and natural history, ancient and modern Indian history, the imaginary world which lies beyond the bounds of rational history; but what strikes Camoens enough to make him tremble is the vision of Mother India--presented in the stead and glaring absence of any of the Western icons of divinity (no Christ, no cross, no angel, devil or saint): Mother India who loved and betrayed and ate and destroyed and again loved her children...who stretched into great mountains like exclamations of the soul and along vast rivers full of mercy and disease...Mother India with her oceans and

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coco-palms and rice-fields and bullocks at the water well...a protean Mother India who could turn monstrous...who could turn murderous, dancing cross-eyed and Kali-tongued while thousands died...(60-61). This amazing description of Aurora's painting crystallizes the secret of Rushdie's creative genius. In terms of ontological and ethical determination, we see that the Western and the Indian are very much the issue here. From a Western perspective, how does one reconcile the image of the Goddess Kali--who wears a necklace of freshly severed human heads, who kills and feeds in frenzied cannibalistic fury, and who is much revered and worshipped in India--with a Western ontology of divinity? And if, ultimately, ethics demand a recourse to the Absolute, as either an Absolute self/Self or an Absolute Self/Other, two mutually exclusive choices, what is the imperative choice dictated by the Western imagination? There is, arguably, no resolution in the Western imagination of the Self/Other which does not perform an Othering function--distancing it, making it phantasmatic, alien, unknowable, irrational--on such a fact as the Indian Kali. The Indian imagination premised on the self/Self, on the other hand, accommodates the Self/Other in all its permutations, but always on the plane of Maya.v There is one common denominator in these two universes, however, and that is the agency of artistic expression, be it literature or painting. It is not surprising, then, that in a novel whose center of signifiance collapses around the protagonist's ethical failure and irresponsibility, his inability to latch on to ethical vindication in world "swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight" between competing ontologies, Rushdie has turned to the stabilizing medium of painting. For, after all, the painting is that which gives unmeditated access to the essence of Being. But what kind of Being? Here, Merleau-Ponty's essays on the activity of artistic vision are invaluable in coming to terms with Rushdie's literary attention to painting as a source of a certain kind of ethical evocation. He undertakes a vindication of the artist's vision against the Cartesian certitude of mind; against the Cartesian faith in the connective act of thinking that spins the fabric in which ressemblance comes to be recognized, Merleau-Ponty

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proposes the primordiality of a vision in which being or the self is caught up in the continuous fabric of Being, a vision which moves through the eye and mind and body in space-time, preceding the artist from both ends of eternity. His vision of the function of artistic vision is appropriately mystical as it returns time and again to see, tracing the movement it seeks to describe in words, the order of the one eternal Being, the mystery of an eternal, multiplicitous yet indivisible Self: as a texture, [vision] is the concretion of a universal visibility, of one sole Space that separates and reunites, that sustains every cohesion (and even that of past and future, since there would be no such cohesion if they were not essentially parts of the same space). Every visual something, as individual as it is, functions also as a dimension, because it is given as the result of a deshiscence of Being. (147). This deshiscent Being has a distinctly Prakritic shading to it and echoes the "greatest secret of all" evoked by Moraes: "that one day we, too, will become as arboreal as they [the trees]. And the trees, whose leaves we eat, whose bark we gnaw, remember sadly that they were animals once" (319). Merleau-Ponty's words ring true not only for the painter, but also for Moraes, and for himself as well: "only one emotion is possible for this painter--the feeling of strangeness--and only one lyricism--that of the continual rebirth of existence" (68). The painter's destiny is to unmake the wall of the separate life of each consciousness by recapturing and converting into visible objects the "vibration of appearances" (68). Merleau-Ponty's "vision" implodes the Self/Other dialectic by collapsing the distance in space-time between the various manifestations of Being in the universe: "vision alone teaches us that beings that are different, "exterior," foreign to one another, are yet absolutely together, are "simultaneity;" which is a mystery..." (146). His concept of vision and its correlated Being bears a stunning resemblance to Hindu conception of Being, of the self/Self as portrayed in the Bhagvada Gita. The artistic gesture or Will gains in Merleau-Ponty a definite Karmic determinism (see Aurobindo, 211--above): "If I am a single project from birth, the given and the created are

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indistinguishable in me, and it is therefore impossible to name a single gesture which is merely hereditary or innate...--but also impossible to name a single gesture which is absolutely new in regard to that way of being in the world, which from the very beginning, is myself" (71). Literature as well as art, then, hearken to the mamaese and forefront the ineffable spiritual reality of Being: "there is a power of words because working against one another, they are attracted at a distance by thought, like tides by the moon, and because they evoke their meaning in this tumult..." (81). The only truths are those which can be evoked, glanced through the body's vision, but which cannot be captured in signification; and thus modern painting, Merleau-Ponty tells us, "obliges us to admit a truth which does not resemble things, which is without any external model and without any predestined instruments of expression, and which is nevertheless the truth" (94). Art as the inarticulate cry that "awakens powers dormant in ordinary vision, a secret of preexistence;" "Art as a system of equivalences, a Logos of lines, of lighting, of colors, of reliefs, of masses--a non-conceptual presentation of universal Being" (142). Art as yagna or sacrifice, an act of spiritual worship performed to the eternal mystery of the Self. Clearly, the artistic activity rents the mayasic tissue--that fabric of Self/Other-and reveals a glimpse of the infinite and eternal Being. Merleau-Ponty's Indian vision is clearly artistic, Merleau-Ponty's artistic vision is clearly Indian. It is not surprising that it aids us in apprehending Rushdie's Indian tension as reflected in his concern with art in The Moor's Last Sigh. The value of the treasure we are seeking in the person of Moraes the Moor rests, finally, in our apprehension of his life, of the story of his life, as a yagna performed in an ethical evocation of the eternal mystery of the Self.
iFor

an excellent discussion of the political motives behind Shahabuddin's engagement with Rushdie's novel, see Vijay Mishra's "Diasporic Narratives of Salman Rushdie," pp. 32-39. Mishra dissects the substance of Shahabuddin's argument for the banning of the Satanic Verses into three strands based on the Islamic faith, the Indian legal codes, and Islamic tolerance.

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iiOf

course, one might ask, what about the political history of Rushdie's Satanic Verses? It did, after all, have the most dramatic political consequences. But what is the lesson on has learnt from the fatwah incident? That the fundamentalist Islamic bigotry and censorship of art is condemnable. The power structure of the West, of England in this case, has come away unscathed. The migrant Rushdie has proved to be troublesome to the order of things and has irked a "third world" country into proving to the world at large that it is intractable with regard to religious tolerance and free intellectual expression. iiiI would say that Rushdie's Indianness versus Englishness echoes also that of E.M. Forster's, especially insofar as A Passage to India is concerned. The most telling resonance is at the level of the Indian (Hindu) festival, which remains mysterious and unexamined, and exceeds the economy of both novels. In The Moor's Last Sigh, a case in point is Aurora Zogoiby's annual dance looking over the Ganpathi Chaturthi celebrations taking place on the beach below Elephanta. This echoes the festival towards the end of Forster' s novel; in both cases, the Hindu festival remains unexamined, unprocessed by the witnessing subject. ivLevinas' attempt at resolving an ethical imperative in the aftermath of the Nazi experience remains in most instances incompatible with the Hindu dharmicethics. In this instance, however, that is the case of being always responsible for the Other's actions, there are significant echoes: "La relation intersubjective est une relation non symmtrique. En ce sens, je suis reponsable d'autrui sans attendre le rciproque, dt-il me coter la vie...je suis responsable des perscutions que je subis. Mais seulement moi!...Puisque je suis responsable mme de la responsabilit d'autrui" (L'Ethique et l'infini, 93-96). vFor a more extended discussion of the Indian and the Western conceptions of ethical responsibility, see my first chapter.