Re-Imagined Histories: Rewriting the Early Modern in Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh

Abstract

This essay argues that Salman Rushdie's novel presents a re-imagined history of India through the palimpsest of the early modern antecedents of its Jewish-Catholic protagonists. Conceptually, a palimpsest refers to the erasure or partial erasure or alteration of a text to provide room for a new imprint. Previous critical evaluations of the novel have tended to center on its postcolonial appeal to the aesthetic of difference and to the political locations of hybridity in a multicultural society. Yet Narain points out that this is a novel written in the shadow of the fatwa and intense Hindu-Muslim riots in India and as such, it responds strongly to the religious dimensions of history. Rushdie shifts the focus away from the binaries of Hindu and Muslim that inform the metanarratives of both radical fundamentalist Indians as well as multicultural assimilationists. Instead, he deliberately focuses on an early modern Moorish-Portuguese-Jewish Indian past that challenges and destabilizes the familiar dichotomies of Indian political discourse. Narain argues that Rushdie's palimpsest of the early modern influx of the Jews and Portuguese to India gains an agency that reconfigures both an allegorical and actual past and retrieves history from its passive shelf to inform a contentious present. The essay also interrogates the epistemological problem of postcoloniality's usage of the early modern as an alternative to colonial modernity.