Postcolonial politics of the possible: City and nation in the fiction of Salman Rushdie

Abstract

This article focuses on the relationship between the city and the nation in the early novels of Salman Rushdie and argues that Rushdie's invocation of the city of Bombay is the crucial means by which he seeks to critique narrow nationalist politics. It begins by unravelling the interdependence of two seemingly contrary visionary models of the post‐independence Indian nation backed by Gandhi and Nehru: the rural and the urban, respectively. The discussion draws out the ambiguity underlying the Nehruvian model that, even as it aligns itself with urbanization as the way forward for the new nation, continues to believe in an authentic national soul and spirit that inheres in its villages. Similar dualisms appear in contemporary cinema and this paper examines Rushdie's challenge to them in his inventive redeployment and transformation of popular cinematic tropes in Midnight's Children. Finally, the paper traces the disillusion, voiced in The Moor's Last Sigh, with the Bombay of the 1990s that attempts to cleanse itself of “outsiders”, in the shift from the trajectory of return, as found in Rushdie's earlier novels, to that of flight in his later ones – to American cities that seem to offer an alternative to parochial neo‐nationalist politics.

Keywords:

• Bombay
• Mumbai
• New York
• cinema
• Gandhi
• Nehru
• nationalism

Notes

1. The architect and planner Le Corbusier (delightfully parodied in Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh) who designed Chandigarh in the early 1950s was also the guiding hand of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne or CIAM, according to the manifestoes of which Brasília was designed in the late 1950s. Both cities were built to signify a break with the colonial past and embody the new nation's future; both stand, however, as architectural set‐pieces representing “merely [their] own monumental disconnection” from their surroundings (Holston 57).

2. While the nation in Midnight has a traumatic, recent “birth”, the city in Rushdie is by contrast always talked about in terms of a much longer history. It is described as a palimpsest, highlighting the gradual accumulation of layers of civilization, each imparting something of significance to the city and contributing to its rich plurality.

3. See Partha Chatterjee's useful discussion of the inability of nationalist thinking to envisage with any degree of rigour the desired Indian city of the future. (“Are Indian Cities” 178–80).

4. See Aamir Mufti's argument that the conflict between Nehruvian and Gandhian theory and politics at the level of content “actually conceals their functional interdependence” (83–84).

5. A notorious initiative by Sanjay Gandhi in 1976 to “cleanse” Delhi of its slums by, quite simply, bulldozing them.

6. The Babri Masjid, a 16th‐century mosque in Ayodhya allegedly built on the site of a Ram temple, was destroyed by Hindu fundamentalists on 6 December 1992. Widespread rioting in Bombay in December and January, and a series of coordinated and highly destructive bomb blasts in March 1993, followed.