No Ground Beneath Its Feet

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Salman Rushdie’s latest novel is set in Akbar’s court and Renaissance Florence. NIRPAL SINGH DHALIWAL on how his glossy take could have used more grit

THE MUGHAL EMPIRE has an inordinate pull on the contemporary imagination. After a succession of assaults on India beginning in the 11th century, the Mughal dynasty had established itself over north India by the 1500s, and at its height in the 1700s, controlled all but the southernmost tip of the subcontinent. The empire has today become a byword for opulence and aestheticism. Akbar, the 16th century Mughal emperor is a central figure in Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence, a book that flits between Renaissance Europe and Akbar’s court, and the cultures in between.

It is a readable book, pacy and irreverent, but steeped in an English bourgeois romance with the Mughals, whose wealth and artistic refinement awed the precolonial westerners who first encountered them — a view that has dominated history. Sentimentalists will revel in the smells, superstitions and exotica of the novel; those with a grittier knowledge of Indian history will find it effete and superficial. Rushdie’s writing style is both fey and bombastic; reading him is like being cornered by an overexcited elderly schoolmaster.

This is most acute when the subject is sex. His mysterious Italian journeyman protagonist, Niccolo, is discovered as a stowaway, enroute to India, and attracts the attention of the ship’s captain, who then exposes himself: “The Florentine gravely expressed proper respect for the heft and circumference of the mottled member that lay before him upon his lordship’s table smelling of fennel, like a finnochiona sausage waiting to be sliced.” I laughed aloud reading that, but for the wrong reasons. All the sex in the novel — and there is a lot — is written with a similar combination of jaded prurience and juvenile glee, much like the imaginings of a dirty old man. But it is with sex that Rushdie comes closest to providing an adequate metaphor for the relationship between the Mughals and their subjects — albeit a trivial and unwitting one.

Rushdie writes of Akbar’s son Salim, and his youthful penchant for raping dancing girls: “But the dancing girls were complaining, their bruised rears, their vandalised pomegranate buds, made it harder for them to perform, the little whores.” Akbar is acclaimed as an exceptional Mughal for rescinding the levy on non-Muslims and entertaining dialogue with other faiths. His uniqueness lies in the hiatus his regime provided to the annihilating hatred of other Mughals towards those they ruled. The 800 year period that began with the 11th century invasions was an era that saw the near extinction of Indian Buddhism, the desecration of countless temples, forced conversions, and the reduction of the bulk populace to a servile peasantry — heavily taxed and deliberately starved to keep it pliant. It was an era of profound intellectual stagnation in which India made no scientific and political progress.

Like the Russian tsars, they squandered the enormous resources of their kingdoms on courtly art and lavish architecture, while Europeans developed the social ideas and technology that would enable them to conquer the globe. India was, to the Mughals, simply a vast pool of bodies from which to extract wealth and pleasure — the little whores. Rushdie doesn’t address the ugly wider reality of India under Mughal rule, fixating instead on the court and person of Akbar, who is depicted as fraught with existential doubts and the responsibilities of power. Like so many hippy dope-heads, India’s complexity provides a context for his banal navel gazing: “Was there then no essential difference between the ruler and the ruled? Could there be an ‘I’ that was simply oneself?” The real-life Akbar held discussions with Hindus, Sikhs and Christian missionaries that culminated in his creation of the Din-i-Ilahi (“Divine Faith”), a personality cult that died when he did. Rushdie’s Akbar is even less interesting than the original.

These debates don’t appear at any length; nor does Rushdie refer to India’s classical tradition with any depth. Classical India and non-Mughal Indians are merely ciphers lending exoticism and comic value — fawning servants, mystics and prostitutes. Rushdie’s Akbar sees himself as one of “the humdrum people of the East” but his engagement with India is as shallow and aloof as that of any bush-hatted Rajera bureaucrat. This Akbar, like Rushdie himself is an entirely Western construct, cloaking himself in India’s mystique to maintain a pose of worldliness and higher wisdom. The novel is at its strongest when addressing Europe of the same period.

Rushdie captures something of the filth and chaos of the continent, wracked with religious and mercantile wars. But his treatment is undermined by his constant descent into fantasy, overwrought lyricism and halfbaked attempts at sensuality. The European part of the story only reminded me of Q, a far superior
Italian novel. Set in the same era, Q vividly portrays the desperate struggles of a continent awash with blood, fighting to find a new identity as Protestantism rose and shook its foundations. It also uses sex as a device to animate the past, but depicts it in earthy and anatomical terms, underlining the mortality and physical urgency of an era in which human life was short-lived and cheap. Rushdie gives no sense of the political intensity and cruelty of the times; his obsessive diversion into fables only glosses over what really took place.

AS THE novel’s plot traverses the brothels, battlefields and courts of Europe, India and the near East, it introduces us to many beautiful women, oddball characters and mythical figures. Consequently, no character develops believable depth. Rather than explore the psychology of any individual, Rushdie leads us through a trite and exhausting carnival of giants, witches, strange tyrants and apparitions come to life. It is ultimately a sexualised fairytale: Harry Potter for adults. As such, it is an entertaining romp, but a worthless insight into history. There is a symmetry in how this novel is being released at the same time as Patrick French’s biography of Rushdie’s nemesis, VS Naipaul. Naipaul has tackled India with more courage and honesty than anyone. His description of the destruction of the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagara by the Dec can sultanates is a harrowing account of how 16th century India actually worked. With India booming, Rushdie has returned to the subcontinent wanting to be on the ball; but his romantic whimsy reveals how little he knows it, and only confirms Naipaul as its preeminent writer.
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 14, Dated April 12, 2008

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Tags: History, India, Hindus, Book, Mughal, Salman Rushdie, dynasty, Akbar, Renaissance, Florence, sex, Indian Buddhism, Protestantism, Q, VS Naipaul, Din-i-Ilahi, Patrick French’s biography, Salim, court, NIRPAL SINGH DHALIWAL, Russian tsars, Sikhs, Christian, missionaries, exotic, exotica