The intertwining of history, memory and story is a typical feature
of Rushdie's narrative style. Postcolonial histories of India and
Pakistan have time and again been explored in his novels. In The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), he turned to Boabdil's Spain to underpin the nature
of intercommunal relations in India. The Ground Beneath Her
Feet (1999) deconstructed the West as Disorient. In his latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence (2008), Renaissance Italy becomes the mirror for
Mughal India. The poetry of Petrarch, the paintings of Botticelli, the moral
war between the Medicis and the cult of the Weepers, the politics
of Machiavelli and the architecture of Florence find parallels in the
music of Tansen, the wit of Birbal, the splendour of Fatehpur Sikri, the
universal religion of tolerance that Emperor Akbar dreamed about and the
feuds within his family. The connecting link between them is a message
of Queen Elizabeth to the Great Mughal usurped, carried
and misinterpreted by a half-Italian half-Indian cultural interloper,
Niccolò Vespucci. The origin of his clownish passage to India is a
mysterious Mughal Princess called Qara Köz, the Lady Black eyes. Like
Akbar's ideal wife Jodha Bai, the Lady Black Eyes is unsubstantial,
reminding us of the dark lady of Shakespeare's sonnets. The Enchantress of Florence is a metanarrative tale of the birth of cross cultures through
travel, trade and desire in colonial times which shaped the postcolonial
and the global world we know today.
Any traveller who has visited St. Mark Square in Venice and the Jama
Masjid in Old Delhi might have felt an eerie sense of déjà vu. The marble
floor, the pigeons strutting about against the background of a blue
sky laced with golden clouds with domes towering high and the sense of space
that emanates from these complexes are so alike that it is hard to believe that
several decades and many kilometres separate them. Indeed real connections
between Mughal India and Italy are said to have existed. It is believed that the
chief architect of the council of architects who designed the Taj Mahal was an
Italian goldsmith named Geronimo Veroneo. The accounts of the Jesuit Priest
Manriquez mention Geronimo's visit to Agra in 1640 to free Father Anthony who was
kept in a prison by the Mughal King (Galli). But there is no proof to show that
he stayed in Agra and actually worked for the emperor. As it is also rumoured
that Shah Jahan killed or blinded or cut off the hands of the architect(s) who
built the Taj Mahal in order to prevent them from reproducing such sublime
beauty elsewhere, it is clear that he would have met a cruel fate, had he chosen to
stay. However, the connections between Mughal India and Renaissance
Italy established by Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of
Florence (2008) have more to do with fantasy than reality. Rushdie's style has always been described as
forming part of magic realism, indeed even hysterical realism (Wood, 2000). But in
an interview granted to the French journal Transfuge in October 2008, Rushdie declares these labels to be confusing for the reader. "What one learns
from Bunuel or Fellini is that the fantastic has to be monitored by a very
clear comprehension of the real" (Thiltges, 2008, 50). |
