The Moor’s Last Sigh is a colorful, hard-hitting excursion into India. Squeezed into a paperback, it spans nearly a century, and through the tumultuous history of the Zogoibys as they enlarge their pepper trade in Cochin (wasn’t it with spices, the ‘hot’ pepper that it all started?) to a national scale diversification of all kinds of ‘spices’ of life, cruising through the intense political scenes of Independence movement to newly-acquired freedom to communal bloodshed to Indira Gandhi-led Emergency to the proliferation of the Mumbai Underworld Mafia in the 1980s and the 1990s with a parallel Upperworld Political communal Mafia, Rushdie, the master puppeteer creates a show where the Zogoibys, as Kalliope rightly points out, are the puppets of Mother India, the various myths that Mother India is, the various false myths Mother India is, and also the children of that passionately loving, passionately cruel Mother that are entranced and entrapped, approaching their doom with double the speed they are supposed to travel, and all by their own terrified consent. Like the Moor’s tale, my own take on the tale is anything but coherent, scattered like Moor’s loose pages all over the place, messy and chaotic. Allegorical to Mother India. Full of magical-realism, it is a realism that seems magical to the onlookers, a tragi-comedy, a tragedy to the characters, a farce to the readers, a drudge to the living. Written in 1995, this is Rushdie’s first novel after The Satanic Verses, that forced an author underground because he chose to speakofy his mind not in hush-hush barely-decipherable ambiguous impotent tones but in an in-your-face to-hell-with-you don’t-askofy-if-you-don’t-want-the-bleddy-truth profane potent portent loudspeaker style. It was not Moor who was exiled by his Mother Aurora da-Gama Zogoiby, but the Unlucky (Zogoiby in Arabic) Rushdie, the Indian bastard (or as Rushdie-Moor likes it, baas stink, turd no translation needed) of a non-Indian community who was disowned and thrown out by Mother India, hurtling towards an imminent death perhaps at double the speed of his biological life-span, cursed by another Mother-Rumpelstiltskin who wanted him all for herself. The Moor’s tale, then, is not just an allegory to Modern Mother India, or to her unfortunate children, but also particularly to one special crippled child Rushdie himself, betrayed by his mother, his housekeeper Miss Jaya He (see the point? It is a phrase in the National Anthem, loosely meaning Victory/Hail! -to who-else-but-Mom-India?), by his only lover artist Uma Sarasvati (Two Indian Goddesses in one – Uma, the wife of Shiv-who-destroys Sarasvati, the incarnation of knowledge, therefore, the brilliant girl who destroyed Moor), and lastly, by his own Muse Vasco Miranda (an allusion to another profane blasphemous Indian artist M.F. Hussain, exiled by our Mom?) for whom Moor’s mother Aurora was once his own Muse. Where to start? After all this long dithering, I haven’t startofied my review yet. When Moor’s own tale is all over the place, how do I know where to begin? When the tale itself is a pastiche, a random sticking of images and histories that has its own method to madness, when there is no clear beginning but only a vertigo where anything can come first, beware, O Readers, I too will stick-o-fy my point wherever I wish, like Moor stickofies one page of his tale to a tree and the other to a wall and a third to a well until they’re all over Benengeli, and don’t point-o-fy your fingers at me if you don’t like my jabberings lest I Jaw-Jaw at you like that now-stuffed dog. Ah, but it all began with the spicy “spices” trade, didn’t it? The Portuguese had the hots for all our hot stuff and came here crossing half the world for a pinch of pepper. And then the Jews, the exiles from their own Mothers came sailing and sat down in Cochin, becoming the Cochin Jews, and also came all the Portuguese Christians, all of them with their hidden mysteries that led them here, and went into the pepper trade. So here we come to the Portuguese Epifania and Francisco da Gama in the early 1900s with their children -Aires who married Carmen-Aunt Sahara, the flat barren desert who was never touched by her homo husband and so never reaped the fortune that lay between her legs, a legal heir, and Camoens, who married Belle who made both boobies and babies with her hubby to bring forth Mother Aurora who would marry a Cochin Jew who…. But, like Moor, I’m getting ahead of my tale. While we witness the interesting, hilarious events of the da-Gama family as Belle wages war against the dominating matriarch epiphany Epifania, what we witness in the in-house separation (Belle, Camoens, Francisco going anti-British-Simon-go-back, Epifania-Aires-Carmen going The-Brits-gave-us-what-all-we-have)is a microcosm of an India torn into two factions – an elite pro-British bunch, especially Christians/Portuguese afraid of giving up their pretty Anglican ways simultaneously rightly fearing Indians in charge of India, and an optimistic pro-Independence pro-equality, softly flirtatiously Marxist, heavily nationalistic euphoric duds bunch rallying under the suave charm of the English-pruned Nehru and the rustic-once-upon a-time-Angrezi-imitator-now-desi-by-choice little naked man Gandhi in-a-loin-cloth. The ballistic warfare in the da-Gama family that ends with Belle taking charge of the house and the business when national chaos descends and Aires and Camoens are dumped into jail for 15 years signals the victory of the INC, the Nehru-led Congress party that would replace the British in 1947. But as everyone knows, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru screwed up the nation that was put in his hands, that dilettante child of Macaulay who finally produced his dream Minuteman, Indians in blood and color, but English in choices and opinions, daydreaming of progress as the country burned and got beaten up in front of his closed sleeping dreaming eyes. For all his failures, I now think, Rushdie has been really kind to him, only mocking him with semi-seriousness (Aires, out of contempt, names his bulldog Jawaharlal Jaw-Jaw to annoy the pro-Nehru family-members): Shut up, Jaw-Jaw, you all-bark-no-bite-mutt… Like Jaw-Jaw Jawaharlal, they made plenty of noise but didn’t draw much blood. Panditji, Congress-tho is always chickening out in the face of radical acts. No soft options will be takeofied round here. Once, indeed, there were giants on our stage; but at the fag-end of an age, Madam History must make do with what she can get. Jawaharlal, in these latter days, was just the name of a stuffed dog.(At this point in the story, the dog is dead and is stuffed by Aires to keep him “alive”, a brilliant metaphor by Rushdie.While the World Wars rage and the Independence movement gains momentum, Aurora grows up mother-less, not so much as motherless, as her Mummy Belle hunts business deals during the day and tigers to feed upon at night, with Camoens tucked away in jail. And when Belle dies after Camoens is released, Aurora, the 13-year old kid unleashes her week-long mourning in isolation by maddeningly painting her room, pouring forth vivid confusing images of the family yarn and weaving them onto a carpet of colors. At 15, she chooses the quiet Arab-Jew clerk Abraham Zogoiby, as old as her father as her lover, and while her father dies, she moves in with him, because she cannot marry him. In the book, this is quite an interesting, roaring episode, a great commentary on religious/cultural clashes, of standing up to one’s family for one’s right to love, of the great complicated affair a family is within the even more complicated nuances of age-old cultural rivalries, building upon Romeo and Juliet but our lovers are no Romeo or Juliet – if they cannot marry, they will not. But they will love. Not in their sacred hearts, but in their scandalous bodies. Not from their respective captive homes, but in the freedom of their house. Let them make their own yarn. But welcome back to India. It’s an independent country now. Aurora has taken V. Miranda the artist under her wing and at the dinner table, newly-found freedom is being celebrated while Hindus and Muslims massacre each other in Kashmir. Miranda lashes out at the self-deceived foolery around him: ’Useless fucking art-johnny clever-dicks,’ he jeered. ‘Circular sexualist India my foot. No. Bleddy tongue-twister came out wrong. Secular socialist. That’s it. Bleddy bunk. Panditji sold you that stuff like a cheap watch salesman and you all bought one and now you wonder why it doesn’t work. Bleddy Congress party full of bleddy fake Rolex Salesman. You think India’ll just roll over, all those bloodthirsty bloodsoaked gods’ll just roll over and die […] […]And I’ll tell you something, Mr. Big Businessman Abie, let me give you a tip. Only one power in this damn country is strong enough to stand up against those gods and it isn’t blanket blank sockular specialism. It isn’t blanket blank Pandit Nehru and his blanket blank protection-of-minorities Congress watch-wallahs. You know what it is? I’ll tell you what it is. Corruption. You get me? Bribery […] […]One more thing, piece of good advice for you all. Get on the boats with the British! Just get on the bleddy boats and buggeroff. This place has no use for you. It’ll beat you and eat you. Get out! Get out while the getting’s good.Why is Kashmir the point of contention between India and Pakistan, and not any other state, when there were and are so many other probable candidates too? It is because immediately after Independence when many states/kingdoms (Junagadh, Hyderabad, Kashmir...) wanted to be independent nations, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was appointed to unite them under India by hook or crook. Patel succeeded, but Nehru intervened. Instead of Sardar, Nehru wanted to be the one to convince Kashmir’s Hindu king, who ruled the state’s majority population of Muslims, to join India. Bleddy Reason: Nehru was a Kashmiri Pandit. He was so much in love with his state, the dudhead wanted the glory of salvaging his darling state and he messed it up with his ineptitude. And Hindus and Muslims, torn between India and Pakistan and the chance of becoming an independent entity, slaughtered each other, sending the nation into yet another bout of shock, paranoia, enmity and accusations. The riots haven’t yet ended – they have become more frequent, all over the country. And Vasco was right. Gods are useless. Money speaks. Bleddy money speaks and bleddy gods listen. It was not an inebriated Miranda’s senseless tirade – it was a spectacular summing up of how India was doomed from the very start, and would pay heavily for the foundation it had achieved its Independence on. And the consequences, in Moor’s words, as we jump momentarily to the end of the novel which alludes to the turning points in India’s Communal history (the demolition of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in December 1992 by BJP-RSS-VHP political right-wing Hindu party, and the subsequent terror attacks by Muslim extremists in Mumbai particularly and riots all over the twin countries) are: Violence was violence, murder was murder, two wrongs did not make one right: these are truths of which I was fully cognizant. Also: by sinking to your adversary’s level you lose the high ground. In the days after the destruction of the Babri Masjid, ‘justly enraged Muslims’/‘fanatical killers’ smashed up Hindu temples, and killed Hindus, across India and Pakistan as well. There comes a point in the unfurling of communal violence in which it becomes irrelevant to ask, ‘Who started it?’ The lethal conjugations of death part company with any possibility of justification, let alone justice. They surge among us, left and right, Hindu and Muslim, knife and pistol, killing, burning, looting, and raising into the smoky air their clenched and bloody fists. Both their houses are damned by their deeds; both sides sacrifice the right to any shred of virtue; they are each other’s plagues.But warnings were given even earlier, when Aurora wasn’t even born, by Camoens, referring to the hymn beloved to Gandhi, that says Ram/Ishwar and Allah are one, the Hindu and Islamic gods are but different names for one god, predicting the events of 1992 when the Mosque was partially demolished on the argument that Lord Ram was born there 5000 years ago, where the 400 years old mosque now stood: And they say Ishwar and Allah is your name but they don’t mean it, they mean only Ram himself, king of the Raghu clan, purifier of sinners along with Sita. In the end I am afraid […] people like us will have to lock our doors and there will come a Battering Ram.’But back to old India, to the two Mothers that captured the imagination of real India, while Aurora takes hold of Moor and Moor’s life, in the middle of the 20th century. From Cochin, the story swiftly moves to Bombay as the Zogoiby family relocates there and the nation transitions from political babysteps to an enfant terrible, a socio-political menace in the dexterous, able hands of Rushdie’s flawlessly executed introduction – Aurora’s rebellious high-parapet frenzy blasphemous scandalizing dance in contempt of Maharashtra’s beloved Hindu festival, Ganesh Chaturthi, the celebration of the Elephant-headed god first used as a pretext for banned large-scale meetings by the freedom-fighter Lokmanya Tilak who fanned the flames of armed resistance against British Raj, then recently appropriated by the notorious political hard-liner party Shiv Sena to drive out poor non-Marathi migrant workers from the state, turning an innocent festival into the hotbed of religious frenzy and fanaticism and filthy opportunistic politics, where the two make unlikely but highly-compatible bedfellows. Rushdie takes a dig at Shiv Sena founder, the cartoonist-turned-militant Bal Thackeray, mocking his ugliness by adding a nickname “Mainduck” (Frog in Hindi) to his fictitious name Raman Fielding, blatantly accusing his party of all the dirty politics they have played, transitioning from champions of Marathi culture and people to moral policing (read: lathi-charging young couples, married or unmarried, for holding hands in public on Valentine’s Day and beating the hell out of them if they become a bit cozy on other days too) to aligning with BJP-RSS-VHP and inciting communal hatred. And coming to Bombay, (ooops! Mumbai now, unless you want Shiv Sena pulping you for the indiscretion) how can we forget our silver screen Mother now, Mother India, the quintessential tale of the Indian mother, Indian bride, Indian wife, Indian woman (she doesn’t exist on her own, does she?), the quintessential tale of rural agricultural India, the quintessential tale of common man which the gripped the country’s imagination, with its spectacular pair of mother (played by Nargis) and rebellious son Birju (played by Sunil Dutt) who married soon in real life. The movie becomes a source of discussion for India, a metaphor for the imagined India that was so far removed from metropolitan India and yet survived through popular myth, through Metanarratives, as the essence of India. Juxtaposing the rural movie with the metro city, the fictional mother-son with real-life lovers, Aurora says, as Nargis and Sunil Dutt visit her home: ‘The first time I saw that picture’, she (Aurora) confided to the famous movie star (Nargis) on the high terrace at Elephanta, ‘I took one look at your Bad Son, Birju, and I thought, O boy, what a handsome guy – too much sizzle, too much chilli, bring water. He may be a thief and a bounder, but that is some A-class loverboy goods. And now look – you have gone and marry-o‘ed him! What sexy lives you movie people leadofy: to marry your own son, I swear, wowie.’ ‘Even in the picture, but,’ Aurora went relentlessly on, ‘I knew right off that bad Birju had the hots for his gorgeous ma.’ And now, Rushdie’s own careful comment on the movie, which can be seen both in and out of context of the novel: In Mother India, a piece of Hindu myth-making directed by a Muslim socialist, Mehboob Khan, the Indian peasant woman is idealized as bride, mother and producer of sons; as long-suffering, stoical, loving, redemptive, and conservatively wedded to the maintenance of the status-quo. But for Bad Birju, cast out from his mother’s love, she becomes, as one critic has mentioned, ‘that image of an aggressive, treacherous, annihilating mother who haunts the fantasy life of Indian males.’ And what about the other Mother India, the one that haunted real-life India? Indira Gandhi, daughter of Nehru, first female PM of India, the one who boldly broke the sanctions on India and went ahead to test India’s first nuclear device in Pokhran, and in 1975 she imposed the Emergency when it became clear that she would be removed from her post. Like Aurora, she is the heroine and the antiheroine, the mother and the anti-mother figure of India’s story. While the poor and the honest beg and die, or are executed, the rich and the corrupt oil each other and reap its dirty wealth. Abraham Zogoiby enters the Underworld negotiations and his business grows exponentially, while Aurora’s stars as the beloved Indian artist rise and sink and rise. With Uma Sarasvati’s machinations that drive mother-and-son apart, Moor’s foray into Mainduck’s clan, his prodigal return to his father who then has no use for him and discards him for the second time, it is India we see, everywhere, everywhere. This isn’t a story about the Moor or the Zogoibys at all. It is Rushdie’s impeccable skills that make you think that it is about the characters caught up in a particularly eventful century. Even though it is about India, the surface story never flags; the two are so closely intertwined together that they cannot be told without either going missing. Each one tells the other’s tale. And so, when the characters aren’t likeable enough, or deep enough, it is because they aren’t meant to be. Generalizations are never finely woven -like a summary, they have to span over a large slice of time and eschew much of finesse. And yet, the characters are deep enough, nuanced enough to keep the reader gripped in the surface story and not just let him/her slip into the metaphorical story of India. And like the titular painting ‘The moor’s last sigh’, the final act of forgiveness that Aurora bestows upon her son Moor -India, and the Moor’s tale too is a palimpsest, a painting upon a painting, a superimposition of one tale over the other. Two tales that have merged into one, even though they are different. Why this deeper story masquerading so convincingly as the surface story, or vice-versa? Because, my dears, this is what India is. A visual deception, a deception nuanced, fine enough to send the unwary casual stroller on the wrong path. The Upperworld and the Underworld don’t just co-exist as allegories, they are the same story itself. They are not two sides of the same coin. It is not you-or-me, it is you-and-me. Their threads are so finely enmeshed that to destroy one is to destroy the other too. And so, readers, is Rushdie’s tale. The Zogoibys and India don’t just co-exist. The Zogoibys are not a metaphor for India, a microcosm, a summary of India, a representative of the land. It is not India simplified, India-for-Dummies guidebook. They and India are different, but part of the same story. Review part 2 - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
A week ago I went to see Salman Rushdie talk about his memoirs. In preparation I decided to read something by him, and picked The Moor’s Last Sigh from my shelf. The book had been there for quite some time, being picked up only to be put back again. Somehow I just did not seem to have the energy for Rushdie’s writing. The truth is that this state of mind still applied when I committed to reading the book, but this time my mind was firm, so I read it from beginning to end.There is much to admire in The Moor’s last sigh. Rushdie has an amazing talent for writing and the language is beautifully crafted. But sometimes this barrage of words feels like too much. The sentences are long, and unless you concentrate you easily get lost. Here is an example of a beautiful passage:"How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness; for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty; for its illusion of continuity, seamlessly, as the night follows the day, so to speak- whereas in reality life is a series of brutal raptures, falling upon your defenseless hands, like the blows of a woodman’s axe?” (The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie)It is a lovely passage, but even when reading these lines, you have to pay a lot of attention to punctuation in order to avoid re-reading the lines a few times. The problem is that the entirety of this densely lined book is filled with intricately wrought sentences like the above. This is fine if you are in the mood for a careful read, but in my tired Autumn mood I was not up to the challenge.In addition to the language, the story itself is also worthy of admiration. The story spans several generations, with one tale more incredible than the other. But there are so many characters and so many stories that somehow I ended up not able to root for any of the characters. And this was not because of their questionable deeds. I enjoy reading about characters who blur the lines between good and evil and cherish books that can give me insight into why ordinary people end up doing bad things. In this book there were simply too many and no real explanation for their deeds. When the main character finally came into the picture I had already had my fill of bizarre stories. I did feel some empathy towards his predicament, growing old twice as fast as other people, but not enough to really care about what happened to him.So although there is much to value in this book, for me it remained an objective admiration for a fine work of art. Only on rare moments did the book manage to captivate me or move me in any significant way. The next book I read is bound to be something completely different.
What do You think about The Moor's Last Sigh (1996)?
In ‘Moor’s Last Sigh’, Salman Rushdie has captured the spirit of Mumbai city; the way he has done it before with India in ‘Midnight’s children’. There is everything in there which you come to associate with Mumbai - Bollywood, cricket, art, politics, gang war etc.There are a lot of similarities with Midnight children. Both Saleem Sinai and Moor, for example, have joint families, find themselves attached in multiple ways to history. Midnight’s children though is on more grand scale and is definitely more recognized. In fact, Saleem Sinai’s adopted son also has a minor role to play in ‘Moor’s last Sigh’.Moor’s last sigh is sorrow he felt which he, who by the way aged twice as fast as a normal person and has a hammer head, felt as he had to leave everything behind. For more than first half, women dominate the scene and among them too, it is mostly Aurora who rules the book. For first one-third part, Moor is not even born.Moor is at same time somewhat humanized version of Mumbai and an allegory on life of Boabdil, the last moor. Boabdil was also known as Zogobi - the unlucky one; which became protagonist's surname. His looking back in regret after leaving Mumbai perfectly justifies the title. Baodil's mother on seeing him weep had said to him, "Thou dost weep like a woman for what thou couldst not defend as a man." The same remark which Merenda made when Moor refuse to make a useless effort to protect his fellow prisoner, who was introduced in last few pages just to complete the allegory.Moor's father is a business man who started from spice trade (inherited from Cochin) and then diversified; and his mother is artist – thus showing two faces of city. Mumbai also started as a trade hub (mostly spice trade in the beginning) and is home to artists from all over the country.Yet again, Rushdi spins the fact and fiction into a magical cobweb. The Moor’s Last Sigh and The Kissing of Abbas Ali Beg are actual paintings based on actual events. There was actually a medical student from Mumbai, who won Ms. Universe contest in 1967 (though similarity ends there).‘Raman Fielding’ (RAMan fielding) is Rushdi’s take on Bal Thackeray (– thus the book was not much liked by later). Both started as cartoonists; went onto become Hindu extremist heads; tried to rewrite the history and both play regional politics.The book is full of typical Rushdie Masala including references to children’s books, Bollywood histories; family feuds; magical realism and word plays (my favorite being the thing he does with Aurora’s children - Inni, Minni, Mini, Moor.)
—Sidharth Vardhan
ooh...I really, really wanted to give this a 5-star rating....I reserve that for books that strike me as indubitably amazing and that didn't strike me as having any (major) flaws, and unfortunately The Moor's Last Sigh just doesn't match up.Reading through it, I loved the book. This will be my third Rushdie novel, and I really wanted it to be as good as Midnight's Children - for a good 80% of the book, I thought it was that good, easily. I used this phrase to describe the book to a friend, but Rushdie has a vicious insouciance about his writing early on - picking out, weaving, and then discarding story threads for only infrequent later use at best; he does this with complete mastery. His characters are compelling, his environments and devices and little fixations lovely and charming.... This all continues throughout the first three (out of four) parts, when much of the book's story comes to a head.The fourth part is where things fall apart. It's by no means bad writing - still compelling - but with the way the third part wrapped up, it was necessarily robbed of a lot of interesting elements. It tries its level best to continue what can be continued and to introduce new threads relevant to the old ones, but things introduced so late just can't match up to the rest of the story. The ending, I thought, was also a poor way to go, and while it tried to riff off the idea of "The Moor's Last Sigh" (which Rushdie did over and over again in the earlier parts of the story as well) it ended up feeling a bit forced to me. It just seems...cut off. The bulk of the story concluded in part three, and so part four's attempts to wrap up what's left over just feel shallow. Midnight's Children remains my favorite of Rushdie's works. Still well worth a read and the first 80-85% of the book is Rushdie at his absolute best, I really do believe that. If you've ever liked anything he's read, you'll love that. But the ending, though a valiant effort, just drops the ball hard.
—Harald Gao
I almost stopped reading this a number of times, but I have a thing about finishing books. Salman Rushdie is one wordy motherfucker, the opposite of what I tend to enjoy. He's all for the word play, the linguistic jokes, the rhyming slang and colorful Indian colloquialisms, which are cute for a while but wear thin. His narrative is baroque, dripping with dramatic asides and rhetorical questions to the reader, teasing hooks, and a number of other devices I don't enjoy. Still, I am interested in India, and there was enough about Indian culture and history to allow me to finish it out. I read a good introduction by him to an Anglea Carter book that was more restrained and concise. But are all his full-length books like _Moor_? If so, I'm going to pass on the Salman.
—Orionisisgray
