• Deva Nand

Rushdie traverses geographical, political and cultural boundaries in the course of his writing only to return to the Indian homeland in The Moor’s Last Sigh. In this novel the Indian nation assumes a fundamental thematic focus. The experience of alienation within a third world context is deliberated upon. Rushdie takes a look at the history of India fraught with turbulence in the last century in The Moor’s Last Sigh, the deliberation on the nation that that began in Midnight’s Children is carried forward in The Moor’s Last Sigh. Whereas Midnight’s Children ended with the Emergency, The Moor’s Last Sigh moves into the crises of the 1980s and 1990s, furthering the political critique. The Moor’s Last Sigh locates itself in modern India and draws upon Spanish history, which forms the backdrop and a recurrent motif in the text. The ‘Moor’ of the title of the novel is historically Sultan Boabdil, the last Arabic-Islamic ruler of Granada, the final bastion of Moorish governance in Spain. The legend goes that when King Boabdil surrendered the city to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain in 1492, he turned back and released a sigh at the spot that continues to be called ‘Suspiro del Moro’ — the Moor’s sigh. It is this sigh that is referred to in the title. Medieval Spain had been a blend of Eastern and Western culture.

Rushdie, politics, history, fundamentalism, diversity, pluralism, imperialism, monoculturalism, palimpsest

"A Return to Roots: Revisiting the Imagined Homeland in The Moor’s Last Sigh", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.7, Issue 9, page no.750-757, October-2020, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2009400.pdf

"A Return to Roots: Revisiting the Imagined Homeland in The Moor’s Last Sigh", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.7, Issue 9, page no. pp750-757, October-2020, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2009400.pdf