Mother India

Abstract

Rushdie’s imagining of the nation in The Moor’s Last Sigh is situated in a drastically changed historical context in comparison to the representation of the nation in Midnight’s Children, which takes the Nehruvian secular and inclusive nation as its main model and point of reference. In Midnight’s Children Rushdie criticises the Nehruvian nation’s élite and its patriarchal character but does not advocate placing something radically different in its place. Indira Gandhi’s Emergency threatened the democratic basis of the Nehruvian nation and was therefore vehemently condemned in the novel, but after the reinstatement of democracy in 1977 a tougher generation was predicted as taking the place of the midnight’s children. It is not suggested, however, that their vision of India was to differ fundamentally from that of Nehru. Midnight’s Children still pleads for a fulfilment of the promises of equality and justice made by the Nehruvian nation-state. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, in contrast, the Nehruvian consensus is depicted as crumbling and Hindu nationalism is portrayed as the new dominant force in the late twentieth century, a force which imagines India as an exclusive Hindu nation. What The Moor’s Last Sigh does not explicitly mention, however, is that there are many formerly quiescent, disadvantaged groups, castes, and regional communities which have demanded participation in the shaping of the nation and the distribution of the nation-state’s resources since the 1980s.¹