“City of Mongrel Joy”: Bombay and the Shiv Sena in Midnight’s Children and the Moor’s Last Sigh

Abstract

Salman Rushdie’s novels contain a scathing critique of the failure of pluralist intellectuals and politicians to live up to their rhetoric. By emphasizing the fragmented and incomplete form cosmopolitanism takes in India, Rushdie shows how those who claim to promote unity are, in fact, complicit in the creation of communalism and violence. The examples Rushdie treats are taken from the political life of the city of Bombay, but, I will argue, the critique global: while Rushdie subscribes to the ideal of a productive, inclusive cosmopolitanism, he shows that his ideal, when only partially achieved, can have terrible, unintended consequences. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Camoens Da Gama advocates an impossible ideal: he is a Communist and attempts to bring Leninism to Cochin, but he is unwilling to abandon his life of privilege. When tasked with his inconsistency, he says that he wants everyone to live the same life of luxury: ‘‘Cabral Island for all,’’ he says, speaking of his luxurious home. The impossibility of Camoens’s goal (Cabral Island naturally depends upon a fleet of servants for its upkeep, and the money to pay them comes from the capitalist ventures of the Da Gama spice trade) suggests why Rushdie’s idealistic characters fail: their dreams are only superficially inclusive. To Camoens, ‘‘Cabral Island’’ takes precedence over ‘‘for all’’. Rushdie’s examination of inclusivity, which is only partial, of Cabral Island Communism, suggests that such partial solutions only make the problem of inequality worse, destroying what they were designed to preserve.