The Defeat of Many by One

The Defeat of Many by One

In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie uses the complex and changing character of the Moor to represent a complex and changing image of India. By making the eclectic family history of the Da-Gama Zogoiby family the central theme in the first two parts of the novel, Rushdie portrays India as a culturally and religiously pluralistic society. This pluralistic society is layered by violence caused by the corruption of multiplicity by various characters and the threat of Hindu fundamentalism. As pluralism is defeated by fascism in Part Three of the novel, the nature of the violence changes drastically and is symbolized by the Moor’s significant character change: “The Moor whose tragedy-the tragedy of multiplicity destroyed by singularity, the defeat of Many by One-had been the sequences united principle” (Rushdie 408). The defeat of pluralism is not only the uniting principle in Aurora’s sequence of paintings, but also in Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. Rushdie’s vision of India is essentially the battle between multiplicity and singularity and the consequential violence that has plagued India’s history.

In the first two parts of the novel, Rushdie portrays the positive aspects of pluralism through the story of the Da-Gama Zogoiby family. The Moor’s grandfather, Camoens describes an ideal pluralistic world:

A free country Belle, above religion because secular, above

class because socialist, above caste because enlightened, above

hatred because loving, above vengeance because forgiving, above

tribe because unifying, above language because many tongued,

above colour because multi-coloured, above poverty because

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...lent singular vision, he ends rather optimistically. The Moor, at the end of his story and at the end of an explosion of violence lays his head down in hope for a better time. In the distance he sees the Alhambra, the Moors’ “triumphant masterpiece and their last redoubt” (Rushdie 433). Rushdie uses this beautiful metaphor of the Alhambra, “that monument of lost possibility that nevertheless has gone on standing” to convey the message that pluralism still has a fighting chance in India. (Rushdie 433) Rushdie suggests that just like the Moorish masterpiece withstood a fierce oppositional force and the test of time, so will India and its uniquely resilient and diverse society.

Works Cited

Embree, Ainslee. Utopias in Conflict. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990.

Rushdie, Salman. The Moor’s Last Sigh. New York: Vintage International, 1995.