Cambridge University Press & Assessment

978-1-316-51414-6 — Salman Rushdie in Context

Edited by Florian Stadtler
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Contents

List of Contributors page x

Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction: Rushdie’s Contexts – Contextualizing Rushdie 

Florian Stadtler

  
 Salman Rushdie, Biography, and Autobiography 
Pavan Kumar Malreddy
 Salman Rushdie and the Fatwa 
Anshuman A. Mondal
 Archival Rushdie 
Sam Goodman
 Salman Rushdie as Public Intellectual 
Ruvani Ranasinha

     

 Salman Rushdie and the Urdu Tradition 
Amina Yaqin
 Art-Historical Magic Realism and Rushdie’s
Twenty-First-Century Politics 
Felicity Gee
 Salman Rushdie and Intertextuality 
Joel Kuortti

vii

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Cambridge University Press & Assessment
978-1-316-51414-6 — Salman Rushdie in Context
Edited by Florian Stadtler
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viii Contents
 Salman Rushdie and Visual Art and Culture 
Ana Cristina Mendes
 Rushdie, Sound, and the Auditory Imagination 
Daniel O’Gorman

     

 Salman Rushdie and History 
Wendy Singer
 Religious and Ideological Mythologies in Salman
Rushdie’s Novels 
Manav Ratti
 Revisiting the City in Rushdie’s Fiction 
Stuti Khanna
 Nationalism and Transnationalism in Salman
Rushdie’s Novels 
Birte Heidemann
 Rushdie and Globalization 
Ágnes Györke
 Salman Rushdie and Diasporic Identities 
Jenni Ramone
 Rushdie and Secularism 
Florian Stadtler
 Orientalism, Terrorism, and Counterinsurgency in Salman
Rushdie’s Novels 
Stephen Morton
 Salman Rushdie’s Upwardly Mobile, Globally Migrating
Middle Classes 
Nilufer E. Bharucha
 Scheherazade and Her Cousins: Rushdie’s Women Handcuffed
to Contexts 
Feroza Jussawalla
 Filmi Contexts: Rushdie and Cinema 
Florian Stadtler

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Cambridge University Press & Assessment
978-1-316-51414-6 — Salman Rushdie in Context
Edited by Florian Stadtler
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Contents ix
 Salman Rushdie and World-Historical Capitalism 
Treasa De Loughry
 The Anthropocene and Ecological Limits in the Works of
Salman Rushdie 
Robert P. Marzec

    

 Salman Rushdie and Postcolonialism 
Harish Trivedi
 Salman Rushdie and Cosmopolitanism 
John Clement Ball
 Salman Rushdie and Postmodernism 
Peter Morey

  , ,  

 Salman Rushdie’s Audiences, Reception, and the
Literary Market 
Ursula Kluwick
 Adapting Rushdie: Radio, Screen, and Stage 
Florian Stadtler

Works by Salman Rushdie 

Select Bibliography 
Index 

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 

Salman Rushdie and Visual Art and Culture

Ana Cristina Mendes

Salman Rushdie’s narrative technique characteristically involves complex

verbal pyrotechnics and intertextual references on almost every page,
consistently striving for a very distinctive visual quality. To trace the
allusions in Rushdie’s work is a seductive exercise in cultural-literary-
historical excavation. In The Moor’s Last Sigh (), the character of
Vasco Miranda describes paintings by the artist Aurora da Gama
Zogoiby as ‘exponents of an “Epico-Mythico-Tragico-Comico-Super-
Sexy-High-Masala-Art” in which the unifying principle was
“Technicolor-Story-Line”’. This description also seems fitting for
approaching Rushdie’s own form of writing. This chapter considers the
writer’s visual style of storytelling by highlighting the broader context of
how his work engages with visual art and culture. It begins by examining
Rushdie’s playful and political mobilization of visual intertexts in The
Moor’s Last Sigh through the links between the character Aurora Zogoiby
and the Hungarian Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil (–). It then
juxtaposes this interweaving of visual intertexts in the  novel with The
Golden House (), Rushdie’s thirteenth novel, by considering the
visually established connection between the DC Comics supervillain
Joker and the then soon-to-be-elected president of the United States,
Donald J. Trump, a connection that becomes a form of topical visual
satire. Beyond this engagement with the visual on a narrative level in his
novels and short stories, Rushdie has collaborated with artists such as
Anish Kapoor and Tom Phillips (resulting in a series of portraits mostly
incorporated into Phillips’s book Merely Connect). Many others have
created visual artworks based on Rushdie himself and his fictional work,
for example, Jamelie Hassan, Bhupen Khakhar, and Eric and Heather
ChanSchatz. The last section of this chapter analyses Rushdie and
Kapoor’s collaboration Blood Relations, a project that attempts a conver-
gence of verbal and visual media, eliciting debates around visual represen-
tation, political engagement, and aesthetic autonomy in the face of

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violence. This collaboration links to Rushdie’s broader visual activism as a
performative and embodied enactment of social justice.
The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie’s dynastic saga of the da Gama-Zogoiby
family of Cochin spice traders, is narrated by Moraes ‘Moor’ Zogoiby, ‘a
magic child, a time traveller’. Rushdie’s text spins the family yarn as part
of the texture of contemporary Indian history; this family history has not
one thread but many, existing in many different patterns. Through
Moraes’s quest to record his family’s history, the narrative centres on the
Moorish-Portuguese-Jewish-Catholic Indian past, destabilizing the more
familiar Muslim-Hindu binary (and underscoring the novel’s timeliness in
the face of current Hindu ethnonationalism and other communalist ten-
dencies). Ekphrasis – the verbal representation of visual representation – is
used to illustrate the palimpsest-like character of history, in both the
representation and recreation of the history of India and the family history
of the first-person narrator. The palimpsest – a metaphor that emerges
from the novel’s interplay with paintings – is central to Rushdie’s reima-
gining of India’s history by juxtaposing twentieth-century India and
fifteenth-century Moorish Spain. The key representational function of
the palimpsest in the novel extends to the paintings that Rushdie describes,
as they are palimpsests as well, made up of layer upon layer of images in
which Aurora Zogoiby, Moraes’s mother, through a mise en abyme device,
mirrors the microcosm of her family’s life, the microcosmic space of
domesticity, in the macrocosm of India and its history. Aurora’s vision
of ‘Mooristan’ or ‘Palimpstine’ corresponds to an allegorical space in which
‘worlds collide, flow in and out of one another, and washofy away’, a new
space of identification marked by plurality and impurity. The palimpsest
element also resurfaces through the painting The Moor’s Last Sigh (or ‘the
Aurora painting’) by Vasco Miranda, Aurora’s protégé, where he paints
over her image an equestrian portrait of himself, ‘in Arab attire [. . .]
weeping on a great white horse’. The rejection of Vasco’s initial creation
and this new palimpsest painting heralds ‘the launch of that extraordinary –
and in many ways meretricious – career during which [. . .] no new hotel
lobby or airport terminal was complete until it had been decorated with a
gigantic V. Miranda mural’.
Through this palimpsestic overlapping of trajectories and drawing on
the visual to accentuate this imbrication of cultural multiplicities, the novel
points towards understanding the Indian postcolonial self as hybrid. As
Minoli Salgado argues, ‘Characters from the novel are simultaneously
written into and shown to emerge out of other fictions, and visual art
and written discourse are brought into palimpsestic alignment – each
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Salman Rushdie and Visual Art and Culture 

writing into and over one another.’ Salgado notes the palimpsestic
pattern characterizing the crafting of characters in the novel. This pattern
results from the crisscrossing and superimposing of other written fictions
(including Rushdie’s) and visual art forms – intersecting the visible and the
readable – which works to signify postcolonial hybridity through allegory.
The vision of the central artist figure of the novel, Aurora Zogoiby (née da
Gama), Moraes’s mother, is exemplary in this respect as ‘a vision of
weaving, or more accurately interweaving’. Because of the tight interweav-
ing of different cultural threads, fusing Indian pictorial traditions and
visual imageries from outside the subcontinent, no single thread is ever
univocal, and traces of earlier threads remain visible, even if effaced.
Aurora’s artistic vision is necessarily palimpsestic and hybrid. As the
narrator discloses, his mother was ‘seeking to paint a golden age’ in which
the ‘Jews, Christians, Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains’ who densely
crowd her canvases are also made to inhabit India, side by side, in this
alternative version of the world. Hers is a palimpsestic vision, a ‘romantic
myth of the plural, hybrid nation’, that works allegorically to represent
India’s postcolonial modernity.
Through Aurora’s artistic visuality, India is portrayed as a creation made
out of differing, multiple realities all woven together by the artist’s imag-
ination: ‘One universe, one dimension, one country, one dream, bumpo’-
ing into another, or being under, or on top of.’ India is represented as a
universe where views clash and yet draw from each other, resulting in the
palimpsestic hybrid vision Rushdie has described as an ‘Epico-Mythico-
Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art’. History is exposed as nar-
rative, existing only as a human construct, and paintings – also narratives –
are sources for historiography (see Chapter ). Beyond the subversion of
the boundary between what is real and what is fiction, there is an under-
scoring of the inevitable narrativity of all experience. This fictionality is
particularly evident in ‘the Moor series’ of paintings, developing over three
periods (–, –, and –), that portray her son Moraes as
the last Moorish king of Granada, Muhammad XII, or Boabdil (a Spanish
corruption of Abu Abdullah), who ruled the only remaining Muslim-
controlled city in Iberia until his surrender in . Detailing the stages
of artistic development of Aurora’s ‘the Moor series’ and discussing how
these paintings mirror social and political developments in postcolonial
India, Richard Begam observes: ‘Rushdie treats Aurora not simply as a
modernist artist but also as a representation of modernism itself’; Begam
goes on to argue that her works ‘synthesize all the major movements of
modern art, including fauvism, surrealism, Dadaism, expressionism, and
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abstractionism, while her late painting looks forward to what is sometimes
called postmodernism’. Beyond larger questions of collective identity, if
we also think of The Moor’s Last Sigh as a Bildungsroman – a narration in
retrospect by Moraes, locked up by Vasco – these paintings are a way to
raise issues of individual identity, specifically identity erasure and recon-
stitution, regarding the eponymous hero of the novel. Moraes describes
these paintings of himself as ‘polemical pictures’ as they constitute his
mother’s ‘attempt to create a romantic myth of the plural, hybrid nation
[. . .] using Arab Spain to re-imagine India’ – they are polemical because
they do not simply reinscribe a new postcolonial reality.
As Aurora’s allegorical paintings of Mooristan and Palimpstine evolve –
reflected via the surreal aesthetics of her teeming canvases, in large part
constituted through ‘doubles’ and ‘ghosts’, the cultural and political con-
tradictions and anxieties of postcolonial modernity in the newly indepen-
dent state – a unique aesthetic genealogy of modernism in India also
unfolds. Through this fictional female artist figure, represented as deeply
immersed in the Bombay art scene, Rushdie invokes the legacy of the
Progressive Artists Group of Bombay. This movement emerged in the
aftermath of independence in  and included artists such as Francis
Newton Souza, S. H. Raza, H. A. Gade, V. S. Gaitonde, S. K. Bakre,
M. F. Husain, K. H. Ara, Krishen Khanna, Ram Kumar, Gulam Rasool
Santosh, and Tyeb Mehta, who sought to distance themselves from the
nationalist Bengal School of Art formed during British rule.
Aurora’s career is loosely modelled on Amrita Sher-Gil, a renowned
painter influenced by the Bengal School and known for her ‘determinedly
village-oriented’ vision and her overall dedication to painting ‘true’ Indian
life. In a review of an exhibition of Sher-Gil’s paintings at the Tate
Modern in , entitled ‘The Line of Beauty’, republished in extended
form in his collection Languages of Truth: Essays, – (),
Rushdie discusses using the real-life Hungary-born artist as inspiration
for crafting his character of Aurora Zogoiby. It is worth quoting at length
from this review as it illuminates the extent to which Rushdie’s work is
informed by a close engagement with the visual arts:
In the mid-s, when I began to think about my novel The Moor’s Last
Sigh, I soon realised that it would contain an account of the character (and
also the work) of an entirely imaginary th-century Indian woman painter.
I thought about my friendships and acquaintanceships with a number of
fine contemporary artists – Krishen Khanna, Bhupen Khakhar, Gulam
Mohammad Sheikh, Nilima Sheikh, Nalini Malani, Vivan Sundaram,
Anish Kapoor – and of others I did not know personally but whose work
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Salman Rushdie and Visual Art and Culture 

I admired – Pushpamala, Navjot, Sudhir Patwardhan, Gieve Patel, Dhruva
Mistry, Arpana Caur, Laxma Goud, Ganesh Pyne. The work of all these
painters helped me think about the pictures my fictional Aurora Zogoiby
might create. But the figure that, so to speak, ‘gave me permission’ to
imagine her personality, to invent a woman painter at the very heart of
modern art in India – to believe in the possibility of such a woman – was an
artist I never met, who died tragically young, and whom I first encountered
in a luminous painting by Vivan Sundaram, her nephew. That artist was
Amrita Sher-Gil.
However, Sher-Gil’s essentialist, ‘authentic’ vision of a rural India (possibly
best captured in her paintings of Indian women villagers) – her artistic
manifesto intent on celebrating a distinctly indigenous Indian cultural
heritage – is clearly to the distaste of the ‘arch-cosmopolitan’ Aurora.
The India that Rushdie presents in Aurora’s paintings redefines the
boundaries of cultural fixity and authenticity. This idea of India echoes
the eclectic art theory of Zeeny Vakil, Saladin’s first lover from The Satanic
Verses (), the art critic who published the provocative book The Only
Good Indian, contesting ‘the confining myth of authenticity, that folklor-
istic straitjacket which she sought to replace by an ethic of historically
validated eclecticism’. It is not surprising that Dr Vakil should resurface
in the diegesis of The Moor’s Last Sigh as the ‘brilliant young art theorist
and devotee of Aurora’s oeuvre’ selected as a curator of the artist’s collec-
tion following her death. Dr Vakil’s scholarly argument that Indian
culture was ‘based on the principle of borrowing whatever clothes seemed
to fit, Aryan, Mughal, British, take-the-best-and-leave-the-rest’, fits seam-
lessly with the palimpsestic hybridity of Aurora’s paintings.
To further distinguish between Sher-Gil’s romanticized vision of village-
Indianness and Aurora’s eclectic and urban version of India, Rushdie
mobilizes the cinematic intertext of Mother India, the classic  Hindi
film directed by Mehboob Khan featuring Bombay cinema superstar
Nargis, who went on to become a member of the Indian Parliament in
the s (see Chapter ). Mother India, as Rushdie states in an
interview, ‘was the big attempt to make a kind of Gone With the Wind
myth of the nation, and took the biggest movie star in India at the time,
Nargis, and asked her, basically, to impersonate the nation. And the nation
was invented as a village woman who triumphed over horrible hard-
ships’. Recurrently harnessed in post-independence iconography, the
representation of India as a mother, or Bharat Mata, Rosie Thomas
suggests, ‘points up a metaphor that is never far from the surface in
Indian discourses of both femininity and nationalism: mother as
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motherland, Mother India, Mother Earth’. In this version, Aurora is
represented as adhering to the Nehruvian ideals of India as a secular,
cosmopolitan nation, in contrast to Gandhian ideals.
Published in , twenty-two years after The Moor’s Last Sigh,
Rushdie’s condition-of-America novel The Golden House offers an inter-
esting juxtaposition and sense of continuity to the writer’s mobilization of
visual intertexts. In the North America Rushdie depicts, new forms of
populism, nativism, and xenophobia thrive in the lead-up to the election of
a man referred to as ‘the Joker’. In this more recent novel, Rushdie turns to
comics, particularly to the supervillain Joker from the DC Universe, while
grounding his narrative in a long-term interest in cinema. Films are an
essential anchor in the novel: the Hollywood superhero films based on the
Joker figure offer a key intertext, and the novel is narrated by the aspiring
filmmaker René Unterlinden. By choosing a filmmaker-narrator who seems
to be storyboarding different plot lines within the novel, Rushdie makes
readers conscious of their spectator status within the narrative of a markedly
visual book. As in The Moor’s Last Sigh, visual arts contribute to the political
arguments about the nation in the contemporary moment. Entangling fact
and fiction in ways that speak to how reality seems to become more like
fantasy, the novel deals with billionaire profligacy and details the tragedy of a
particular family, the Goldens, against the backdrop of the tragedy of
contemporary America during the Obama administration.
The Golden House stands in a long line of the many adaptations of DC
villain Joker, Batman’s arch-enemy, since their first appearance in comic-
book form in . As one of the various iterations of the character, the
figure of the Joker was used to protest the Obama administration through
a resignifying of the iconic ‘Hope’ poster from the  presidential
campaign (designed by Shepard Fairey, and evocative of the  stylized
image of Che Guevara by Jim Fitzpatrick). This image of Obama as Joker,
created by Firas Alkhateeb, based on a portrait of Obama featured in Time
and Heath Ledger’s performance of the Joker as a symbol of ruthless
violence and anarchism in the film The Dark Knight (directed by
Christopher Nolan in ), conflates Joker and Obama as an anarchist
who not only refuses to follow the established order but seeks to destroy it,
introducing chaos to his world. (Alkhateeb uploaded the image to a social-
media website; the word ‘socialism’ was later added by an unknown
person.) Todd Phillips’s  film Joker, released two years after the
publication of The Golden House, pits those ‘left behind’ by austerity
politics against ‘the elites’. The film presents a different character to that
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Salman Rushdie and Visual Art and Culture 

of a crime genius character: Joker is depicted as a troubled, unhappy
character, struggling with mental health issues, who appears to be pushed
to violence, contrasting with the typical intelligent, malicious, and cynical
villain. Performed by Joaquin Phoenix, this Joker represents isolation,
depression, and suffering.
In his  essay ‘Outside the Whale’, Rushdie asserts that ‘there can be
no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss’;
‘we are all irradiated by history, we are radioactive with history and
politics’. With characteristic prescience (of the type that saw the publi-
cation of Fury before /) and aligned with the topicality of visual satire,
Rushdie uses the Joker figure to characterize Obama’s successor as some-
one with a distorted perception of reality. Set in Trump’s America, even if
avant la lettre (Rushdie started to write the novel two years before Trump’s
election on  November ), the novel represents a crisis of sovereignty.
It shows how political struggle is no longer a race to the middle of the
political spectrum but a struggle between political entrepreneurs who have
understood how to capitalize on the destabilization of the ‘system’, on the
promise to break its equilibrium – to liberate us from the age-old con-
straints of party politics.
Rushdie seems to be writing the book of Unterlinden’s film. The setting
is established in a particular and recognizable time and place. For the most
part, the plot is set in the United States, detailing the social micro-
dynamics that led to the Joker’s election after an era of optimism and
hope under Barack Obama. The diegetic time of the novel begins on the
day of Obama’s inauguration. The narrative camera eye takes us to the
streets of New York, where the eccentric and enigmatic foreign billionaire
Nero Golden (we later find out he is Indian) and his three sons – Petya/
Petronius, Apu/Apuleius (a combined allusion to Indian filmmaker
Satyajit Ray and his Apu trilogy and Apuleius’s The Golden Ass), and D/
Dionysus – have taken up residence. In the meantime, the supervillain
Joker initiates – and wins – a presidential run against Batwoman.
Unterlinden’s description of the context that saw the triumph of the
Joker is presciently about our present time of profound crises and different
‘bubbles’:
In one of those bubbles, the Joker shrieked and the laugh-track crowds
laughed right on cue. [. . .] In that bubble knowledge was ignorance, up was
down, and the right person to hold the nuclear codes in his hand was the
green-haired white-skinned red-slash-mouthed giggler who asked a military
briefing team four times why using nuclear weapons was so bad.
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In this tragic context, Batwoman stands for Hillary Clinton during the
 US presidential campaign, and the Joker visibly translates into the
soon-to-be-elected president of the United States, Donald J. Trump
(which, as Julia Hoydis notes, makes Trump ‘a minor character’ in the
novel). The Joker’s character is described primarily through visual traits:
‘after the election the Joker – his hair green and luminous, his skin white as
a Klansman’s hood, his lips dripping with anonymous blood – now ruled
them all. The Joker had indeed become a king and lived in a golden house
in the sky.’ (This description seems to be blending the Tim Burton and
Nolan versions of the Joker character, from  and , respectively,
and is, at the same time, reminiscent of the nightmarish image of the
nation as the dehumanized Widow with her green and black hair in
Midnight’s Children ().) The narrator continues: ‘The citizens reached
for clichés and reminded themselves that there were still birds in the trees
and the sky hadn’t fallen and it was, often, still blue.’ Grounded in
political urgency, this passage forges an explicit intertextual link with the
opening of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
As one of the characters in The Golden House, the filmmaker Suchitra,
says: ‘America had left reality behind and entered the comic-book universe
[. . .] D. C. [. . .] was under attack by DC.’ In this post-Obama era,
Washington is under attack by DC Comics, a division of Warner Bros,
one of the giant North American comic-book publishing houses. Rushdie
draws attention to the fictional quality of contemporary experience –
within what increasingly resembles a fictional DC Universe, a supervillain
‘in the purple frock coat and striped pantaloons’ reigns supreme, but ‘The
Caped Crusader was nowhere to be seen – it was not an age of heroes.’
The imaginary assigned to the idea of a hero is context-bound, tightly
linked to social constructs such as morality, justice, and devotion. Rushdie
remediates the DC Universe graphic narrative of Joker and Batman and
adapts it to verbally represent ‘Joker’s world’ after he triumphs over
Batwoman – the ‘world of what reality had begun to mean in America,
which was to say, a kind of radical untruth: phoniness, garishness, bigotry,
vulgarity, violence, paranoia’.
The Golden House is a political novel that matters in our current
moment. Drawing on a superhero narrative, Rushdie offers a prescient
cultural critique of our contemporary age as one where the heroes we came
to know through comic books are nowhere to be found. Still, there is hope
and optimism, and the novel incites readers to action and to forging our
political futures against supervillains. The capacity to resist excessive
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power, of the comic-book villain type, is complex – it involves the ability
to reimagine the future.
Rushdie and the artist Anish Kapoor’s joint artistic project Blood
Relations, exhibited in  at the Lisson Gallery, London, consists of
two bronze cubes, coffin-like structures joined by a pool of red wax, where
the first two paragraphs of Rushdie’s short text ‘Blood Relations, or an
Interrogation of the Arabian Nights’ (dedicated to Kapoor) are
inscribed. The decision to collaborate started with a conversation in
. On the years-long artistic process of collaboration, Kapoor
observes: ‘We come at this from slightly different perspectives vis-à-vis
narrative. That is the tension that makes it interesting. That is the thing
that made this a work that I would never have made, and makes it a work
perhaps you [Rushdie] would never have made.’ Rushdie’s words in the
sculpture, which can be read only by circling the coffin-like structures,
are an adaptation of the first two paragraphs of Scheherazade’s tantalizing
tale, the frame narrative of The Arabian Nights. (Scheherazade spent
, nights telling stories to the Persian King Shahryar to keep herself
alive, a number that is referenced in Rushdie’s  novel Two Years
Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights.) As a revisiting of The Arabian
Nights, Blood Relations allows Rushdie and Kapoor, the first through his
verbal narrative and the second through his blood-stained visual creation,
to tell the untold story of the raped and massacred virgins sacrificed to
the Persian king in a fit of jealous rage. Both artists engage critically with
this particular past and the way it has been written. Violence, whether
generated by personal agendas or state-sponsored, is the focus. In
Rushdie’s verbal retelling, ‘It began, or so the story goes, when Shah
Zaman [Shahryar’s brother] found his wife in the arms of a palace cook,
whose chief characteristics were that he was (a) black, (b) huge and (c)
covered in kitchen grease’; Shah Zaman killed her and her black lover
and eventually discovered his sister-in-law, Shahryar’s queen, likewise
enjoying the company of a ‘blackamoor’:
Ah, the malice and treachery of womankind, and the unaccountable attrac-
tion of huge, ugly, dripping black men! [. . .] King Shahryar and King Shah
Zaman duly took their revenge on faithless womankind. For three years,
they each married, fucked and then ordered the execution of a fresh virgin
every night. [. . .] All those beautiful young bodies, decapitated; all those
tumbling heads and bloody, spurting necks.
The visual and the readable are invoked in the same revisionist context to
speak truth to power. As Kapoor relates, blood offers a common ground:
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‘The works I was making in the studio were as series of “blood
paintings”.. . . Blood is also an abiding entity in your [Rushdie’s] writing,
that existed before. Red is a colour I’ve worked with a great deal.’ In
Rushdie’s words, ‘The fact that we were talking about bloody matters led
me quite naturally to the extremely bloody matter that is the frame-
narration of the Arabian Nights. The story of Scheherazade, rather than
any of the stories inside. It struck me that a quite staggering number of
people get killed in the frame story.’ In Kapoor’s visual translation in
Blood Relations, the melding of two bronze boxes where Rushdie’s sen-
tences are inscribed – sentences that unravel continually before turning
sharp, right-angled corners – suggests the spilling over, the bloody over-
flow from these serial executions, the intermingling of history and counter-
history, canonical narratives and their revisionist, postcolonial adaptations,
as well as issues of tolerance and freedom, political engagement and
aesthetic autonomy, in the face of violence.
This chapter has explored the broader context between Rushdie’s own
forms of writing and their connection with visual storytelling and aes-
thetics. His fictional worlds uphold his aesthetic commitment to politics.
Beginning with The Moor’s Last Sigh, this chapter has analysed how
Rushdie skilfully employs visual art to represent the making of postco-
lonial identity and the multilayered notion of Indian-ness Moraes repre-
sents in the novel. Through Aurora’s paintings of her son Moraes ‘Moor’
Zogoiby, Rushdie puts forth a palimpsestic aesthetic, conjuring issues of
hybridity and authenticity of cultural origins or wholeness. Resisting
static images of India’s history in The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie uses
painting as a site of cultural representation and artistic creation charac-
terized by oppositions and disunities. In The Golden House, Rushdie
turns to the comic-book universe, specifically the DC Universe, to
denounce post-truth politics and the global (and memetic) rise of pop-
ulisms steered by Trump, the Joker. Finally, this chapter has turned its
attention to Rushdie and Kapoor’s collaboration, Blood Relations, to
emphasize the writer’s concern with the unwritten moments of the past
and his unwavering defence of the artist’s autonomy in the face of
sovereign violence.
Rushdie’s oeuvre has conventionally been described in terms of the
hybrid and the secular, a combination where resistance to political-
ideological uniformity, dogmatism, and coercion is invariably valorized.
A common thread that emerges in Rushdie’s invocation of visual cultural
artefacts is the central role of the artist in reforming and deforming cultural
boundaries and exposing the capillaries of power.
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Salman Rushdie and Visual Art and Culture 

Notes
 Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (; London: Vintage, ), –.
 For an examination of the interplay between ‘the visible’ and ‘the readable’ in
Rushdie’s work (considering his engagement with visual forms such as pho-
tography, painting, film, and TV) and the aesthetic border-crossing qualities
of this oeuvre, see Ana Cristina Mendes, ‘Salman Rushdie’s “Epico-Mythico-
Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art,” or Considerations on
Undisciplining Boundaries’, in Salman Rushdie and Visual Culture:
Celebrating Impurity, Disrupting Borders, ed. Ana Cristina Mendes (New
York: Routledge, ), –; and Mendes, ‘Film and Television:
Showcasing Pictures of India’, in Salman Rushdie in the Cultural
Marketplace (London: Routledge, ), –.
 On display at the National Portrait Gallery, London, Khakhar’s  oil
painting (Ahmed) Salman Rushdie (‘The Moor’) is a portrait of Rushdie
depicting the author surrounded by scenes from The Moor’s Last Sigh.
 I am using Nicholas Mirzoeff’s expansive understanding of visual activism: ‘In
, we could use visual culture to criticize and counter the way that we were
depicted in art, film, and mass media. Today, we can actively use visual
culture to create new self-images, new ways to see and be seen, and new ways
to see the world. That is visual activism.’ Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to See the
World: An Introduction to Images, from Self-Portraits to Selfies, Maps to Movies,
and More (London: Pelican, ), –.
 Rushdie, Moor’s Last Sigh, .
 For a detailed study of Rushdie’s ekphrastic descriptions in Midnight’s
Children, see Neil Ten Kortenaar, ‘Postcolonial Ekphrasis: Salman Rushdie
Gives the Finger Back to the Empire’, Contemporary Literature , no. 
(): –.
 Rushdie, Moor’s Last Sigh, .
 Ibid., .
 Ibid.
 Minoli Salgado, ‘The Politics of the Palimpsest in The Moor’s Last Sigh’, in
The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie, ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, .
 Rushdie, Moor’s Last Sigh, .
 Ibid.
 Ibid., .
 See Richard Begam, ‘Rushdie and the Art of Modernism’, in Modernism,
Postcolonialism, and Globalism: Anglophone Literature,  to the Present, ed.
Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses (New York: Oxford University
Press, ), –, . For another illuminating study of the artist figure
in Rushdie’s fiction, see Stuti Khanna, ‘Art and the City: Salman Rushdie and
His Artists’, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature , no. 
(October ): –.
 Begam, ‘Rushdie and the Art of Modernism’, .
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 Rushdie, Moor’s Last Sigh, .
 Ibid., .
 Ibid., .
 Salman Rushdie, ‘The Line of Beauty’, The Guardian Review,  February
, .
 Rushdie, Moor’s Last Sigh, . Later, Rushdie would recognize that this
unidimensional Sher-Gil does not actually correspond to the whole picture,
and acknowledge that there are more commonalities between these two artist
figures than he had conceded in the novel: ‘I did not know much about her in
those days. I knew she was half-Hungarian, and I had seen some of her
paintings of scenes of village life . . . And while I was writing my book,
I resisted knowing more. I conjured up an imaginary Amrita for myself – a
woman much influenced by Gandhian ideas, who dedicated herself to paint-
ing the ‘true’ life of India, the life of the villages – and decided that my Aurora
would be in many ways her antithesis, an unrepentant urbanite and sophis-
ticate. It was only after the book was done that I permitted myself to know the
real Amrita a little better, and I discovered at once that she and my Aurora had
much more in common than I suspected. Indeed, in some ways – her sexual
proclivities, for example – Amrita Sher-Gil was a more bohemian, less
inhibited figure than the flamboyant woman I had made up’ (Rushdie, ‘The
Line of Beauty’, ).
 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (; London: Vintage, ), .
 Rushdie, Moor’s Last Sigh, .
 Rushdie, Satanic Verses, .
 Rushdie, Moor’s Last Sigh, . For a revealing analysis of the metacritical
deployment of the Mother India intertext in The Moor’s Last Sigh, see Vijay
Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (New York: Routledge, ),
–; and the chapter ‘The Moor’s Last Sigh: Rewriting Mother India’, in
Florian Stadtler, Fiction, Film, and Indian Popular Cinema: Salman Rushdie’s
Novels and the Cinematic Imagination (New York: Routledge, ), –.
 Colin MacCabe, ‘Salman Rushdie Talks to the London Consortium about
The Satanic Verses’, in Salman Rushdie Interviews: A Sourcebook of His Ideas,
ed. Pradyumna S. Chauhan (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, ),
–, .
 Rosie Thomas, ‘Melodrama and the Negotiation of Morality in Mainstream
Hindi Film’, in Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World,
ed. C. A. Breckenridge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ),
–, .
 Salman Rushdie, ‘Outside the Whale’, in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and
Criticism, –, st ed. (London: Granta, ), –.
 Salman Rushdie, The Golden House (; London: Vintage, ), –.
 Julia Hoydis, ‘Realism for the Post-Truth Era: Politics and Storytelling in
Recent Fiction and Autobiography by Salman Rushdie’, European Journal of
English Studies , no.  (): –, .
 Rushdie, Golden House, .
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Salman Rushdie and Visual Art and Culture 

 Ibid.
 ‘Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm
has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats,
to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road
into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to
live, no matter how many skies have fallen.’ D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s
Lover (London: Penguin, ), .
 Rushdie, Golden House, 
 Ibid.
 Ibid., .
 Images of the installation are available at Kapoor’s official website: http://
anishkapoor.com//blood-relations.
 James Bone, ‘Salman, Anish and an Indian Summit’, The Times,
 September , . The Times Digital Archive, www.gale.com/intl/c/
the-times-digital-archive.
 Ibid.
 Salman Rushdie, ‘Did These Women Truly Love Their Blood-Soaked
Lords?’, The Times,  October , . The Times Digital Archive, www
.gale.com/intl/c/the-times-digital-archive.
 Bone, ‘Salman, Anish and an Indian Summit’, .
 Ibid.