The Moor's Last Sigh

The Moor’s Last Sigh Review

The Moor’s Last Sigh, published in 1995 while Rushdie was still living under the fatwa, is the novel in which he returned to the Bombay epic mode of Midnight’s Children — and in some ways surpassed it in warmth, humor, and emotional depth. Where Midnight’s Children is narrated by a man whose identity is precisely coextensive with the Indian nation, The Moor’s Last Sigh is narrated by a man whose identity is precisely excessive: too mixed, too hybrid, too various for any single national narrative to contain.

Moraes “Moor” Zogoiby is the product of four generations of tangled Bombay history: Jewish and Catholic blood, spice merchants and criminals, saints and reprobates. He ages at twice the normal rate — a magical condition that functions as the novel’s central metaphor for the accelerating losses of modern Indian life — and tells his family’s story from a castle in Spain, racing to finish before his body gives out. His mother Aurora, a brilliant, difficult, politically engaged painter, dominates the novel with her large, infuriating, utterly compelling presence. Their relationship — devoted, competitive, destructive — is the novel’s emotional core and its greatest achievement.

Aurora’s paintings of the Moor — her son as the last Moorish king of Granada, looking back at the paradise he has lost — give the novel its controlling image: the Al-Andalus of medieval Spain, where Christian, Muslim, and Jew coexisted in productive tension, as the fantasy that underlies Bombay’s own cosmopolitan self-image. As the novel moves through the 1970s and 1980s, that cosmopolitan Bombay is systematically destroyed by religious nationalism — specifically by the figure of Raman Fielding, a Hindu chauvinist politician transparently modeled on Bal Thackeray — and the Zogoiby family is caught in the wreckage.

The novel’s last hundred pages, set in Spain where Moor is trying to recover a stolen painting, are somewhat less fully realized than the Bombay sections — Rushdie’s imagination is most at home in the city he left. But the preceding three hundred pages are among the richest in his work: dense with Bombay’s languages, cuisines, film culture, and architecture, animated by Aurora’s enormous and difficult vitality, and informed by a grief for a pluralist culture that is losing the argument to its worst enemies. The Moor’s Last Sigh is the Rushdie novel that most rewards readers who have been put off by his more controversial work.

Aurora Zogoiby

No single character in Rushdie’s fiction matches Aurora Zogoiby for sheer vitality and formal function. She is a painter, the matriarch of the Zogoiby family, and the figure around whom The Moor’s Last Sigh organises itself — at once a character in the narrative and a kind of authorial double: a maker of images who uses her son as her most enduring subject. The series of paintings Aurora produces over her career — in which Moor figures as the last Moorish king of Granada, Boabdil, looking back at the paradise he has lost — give the novel its controlling metaphor and its title.

Aurora’s character allows Rushdie to do something he does less fully elsewhere: render a woman of enormous creative power and moral ambiguity who is not finally reduced to any of the roles — mother, lover, political symbol — that the men around her try to assign her. She is the most convincing artist-character in his fiction, and the portrait of her relationship with her gifted, overshadowed son is the novel’s emotional core.

Bombay Pluralism and Its Destruction

The Moor’s Last Sigh is Rushdie’s elegy for a Bombay that existed and was destroyed. The city’s Jewish community — the Bene Israel, the Baghdadi Jews, the Cochin Jews — appears throughout the novel, as does its Catholic community, its Parsi community, and its Muslim minority. Moor’s blood carries all of these in it: he is the product of centuries of Bombay’s capacity to produce hybrid identities.

The destruction of this pluralism is embodied in Raman Fielding, the Hindu nationalist politician transparently based on Bal Thackeray and the Shiv Sena, who builds a movement on the premise that Bombay belongs to Marathis and Hindus and that its cosmopolitan traditions are a form of corruption. Rushdie wrote this in 1995; by the early 1990s, the communal violence he describes had already occurred, and the Bombay of his childhood was already gone.

The Whitbread and the Booker Shadow

The Moor’s Last Sigh was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1995 — the year it lost to Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road. It was also a finalist for the Whitbread Novel Award. The novel arrived while Rushdie was still living under the fatwa, and its publication required the same security arrangements that had attended all his appearances and events since 1989. That he wrote a novel of this warmth and inventiveness under those conditions is part of what the book means.

The Spice Dynasty and the Fall of Tolerance

The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) is narrated by Moraes Zogoiby — “the Moor” — who ages at double speed, living a compressed life across a single half-century. Through his da Gama–Zogoiby family, a Bombay spice-trading dynasty of mixed Portuguese, Jewish and Indian blood, Rushdie traces a parallel history of twentieth-century India, with the Moor’s mother Aurora painting that history onto vast allegorical canvases. The title invokes Boabdil, the last Muslim ruler of Granada, who wept as he surrendered the Alhambra; Rushdie threads that loss of a tolerant, plural Andalusia through the rising communal violence of modern Bombay. The novel won the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel and was, for a time, banned in India for its satirical portrait of a Bal Thackeray–like demagogue.