| Abstrakt: |
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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
