Salman Rushdie’s Depiction of Cosmic World in The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury

Abstract

In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie’s world is more effective than in his other novels. He assumes the whole nation as the world of one family and that is the reason the novel works on the allegorical level. On one level, the paternal family as a national allegory works through a series of metaphoric substation leadings from a traditional division of gender roles to a definition of the modern nation based on western models of cultural, political and economic progress. On the another level the images of the mother India-ringing from the Moor’s rebellious, artistic mother Aurora to Hindu goddess to Indira Gandhi to icons of popular culture - of her religious - political and aesthetic figures of unification across historical periods. Alexndra W. Schultheis writes:

In focusing on how the image of the family captures the soul of the modern nation, Rushdie illuminates the metaphor’s circulation through discourses of national identity, asking us to rethink our easy acceptance of its terms. As the predominant metaphor for modern India, it relies on the naturalization of gender roles to accommodate India’s mythic and religious traditions and its modernity.¹