The Enchanter and his Enchantress

Anyone who knows me would know that I am an avid reader. Indeed, books are my original passion. Music, movies, chocolates, food, blogging etc all developed later. But if there’s one passion I was born with, its reading. So I have often wondered how I have never blogged on any book as yet. While reviewing my favourite book Midnights Children is beyond my capacity right now, I’ll blog on Rushdie’s latest offering..The Enchantress of Florence.

Any book of Rushdie obviously gathers enormous expectations. And from the amount of research he claimed to have put behind this one (8 years), one expected aanother masteriece. So, does he succeed? Well, yes and no.

A Rushdie novel is always a unique, partly comical partly satirical blend of fable, fiction and fact, wherein his creative genius is evident. And this delicious concoction, this heady cocktail, gets all its fizz by the literary genius that he is, by the way he manipulates, twists, turns, moulds, and indeed enchants the English language into revealing forms of expression which we never imagined existed. His descriptions, his imagination, his metaphors, as also his evident Indianness in whatever he writes leaves one spellbound. However, for the cocktail to be perfect, the headiness of the drink and the taste and fizz of the soda must be in perfect proportion. Here unfortunately, theres too much of magic and too little of realism, way too much of description, of fable, of fantasy, and too less of actual story, of facts. And that’s where he falters.

The story is that of Akbar the Great, and of a foreigner Mogor del’Amore (the Mughal of love). The book starts fantastically, as Rushdie weaves the character of Akbar and erects the Mughal capital of Sikri in front of our eyes. The foreigner claims to be a descendant of the Mughals, the son of the Enchantress, who was a sister of Babars. He then tells Akbar her entire tale, of how she ended up being in Florence. The book is a tale of Akbar’s civilization in the East and of Medici’s rule in Florence, the then capital of the Renaissance.

While the concept is fantastic, Rushdie makes the mistake of being too self-indulgent, with the reader facing a virtual verbal diarrheoa of sorts. The book seems more like a K serial, hardly moving at all chapter after chapter. One wonders what did he research on all these years.

Why do I still love it? Many reasons. Its still vintage Rushdie, for one. A literary delight; amazing language, fantastic descriptions and all that jazz. That’s reason enough for me. The character of Akbar that Rushdie carves is just brilliant. He moves him away from the Mughal’e’Azam caricature into a much more Rushdiesque interpretation; a proud person who even thinks of himself as ‘we’ and not ‘I’, a king who has his own set of whims and fancies, with a slightly comical edge to him, and yet an extremely responsible king and a deeply philosophical person. You enjoy imagining such an Akbar. That entire chapter on the artist who paints the enchantress for Akbar is brillllllliant. Read the book just for that one chapter.

And finally, the philosophy in the book is fantastic. The book is about the East and the West. However, it is not about a clash of civilizations at all; infact its more about their similarities. As Mogor ironically puts it, 'The curse of the human race is not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike.’ Another gem, while the Emperor is musing about religion, goes ‘If there had never been a God, it might have been easier to work out what goodness was. Goodness might not lie in self-abnegation before an Almighty but in the slow, clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.’

Yes, there is a lot in this book which is fantastic. Its just that much much more could have been delivered. ‘Witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits or magic wands. Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough,’ says Akbar in this book. And while Rushdie does manage to prove it, he can only cast a weak spell.

The book was shortlisted for the Booker nominations but was not amongst the final few which got nominated. That about sums it up.

Celebration time???

India finally got the NSG waiver!!!! The nuclear deal is now more or less definitely through!!! It should have been a monumentous occasion. a historical feat..a red letter day for me. Yes I do feel great. And yet, I do not. How can I, when there is Kashmir which is also happening, when there is Kosi which is also happening, when there is Singur which is also happening? I wonder if this is what Gandhiji would have been feeling, to a larger extent perhaps, on the 15^th of August 1947?