Abstract
‘Only the city is real’ (Durrell 1968, p. 14). The sentence that concludes Laurence Durrell’s prefatory Note to The Alexandria Quartet is its most memorable and its most widely quoted, but it is at odds with much of what follows. The opening page of Justine, the first novel in the Quartet, asks the question:
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
McLeod’s Introduction (2004, pp. 1–23) provides an excellent summary of the various ways in which the term ‘postcolonial London’ had been used prior to the publication of his book, as well as locating these usages in relation to major theoretical commentary on urban geography more generally.
- 2.
Mehta’s claim that Mumbai was the largest city in the world, with a population of 14 million in 2004, seems exaggerated. 2015 estimates put its population at 17–20 million people, which leaves it some way short of the claim to being the world’s most populous city, but with approximately 100,000 people migrating to Mumbai every month, it is likely to be a strong contender within a decade.
- 3.
Cf. Mehta on the difference between Mumbai and the rest of India: ‘On the map of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region issued by the region’s development authority, the land beyond the eastern boundary is marked West Coast of India. It is probably a cartographer’s impreciseness, but the distinction is significant and valid. It was not until the late nineteenth century that Bombay started thinking of itself as an Indian city. And even now there are people who would prefer it if Bombay were a city-state, like Singapore’ (2006, p. 16).
- 4.
Harare North recycles this passage, with minor changes in the wording, towards the end of the novel (Chikwava 2010, p. 205).
- 5.
I have used the term ‘Standard English’ as a shorthand for the notion of an internationally recognized ‘norm’ of English, while recognizing that it is a ‘convenient fiction’ (McArthur, T., ed. 1992, p. 982) subject to controversy and variable interpretation.
- 6.
The novel also makes a single reference to ‘Harare South—Johannesburg’ (p. 149; italics added).
- 7.
Chikwava has acknowledged Marechera as a role model (Primorac 2010, p. 259).
- 8.
Rushdie talks about the deliberate and accidental mistakes in the novel in his essay, ‘“Errata” or Unreliable Narration in Midnight’s Children’ (1991, pp. 22–5).
- 9.
See my discussion of the Sundarbans as an amphibious site in Chapter 5.
- 10.
Michael Bernstein (1980); quoted in http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/ezra-pound.
- 11.
The title of his fifth collection (1965).
- 12.
In an interview, Thayil aligns himself with writers like Rushdie who never use ‘the m-word’, saying that represents a deliberate political choice (Thayil 2013).
- 13.
The state was created from the amalgamation of a number of southern Indian princely states, which included Cochin and Travancore, in 1956, a year before Moor’s birth.
- 14.
The name is taken from Cide Hamete Benengeli, the fictional Moorish author of notebooks and papers ‘contain[ing] the history of Don Quixote’ (Cervantes 2003, p. 75), which the novel’s narrator comes across in Toledo and from which the story is supposedly translated into Castilian from Arabic, establishing a cross-cultural provenance for Cervantes’ ‘Spanish’ classic that resonates with Rushdie’s approach in The Moor’s Last Sigh. See Henighan (1998) and Burningham (2003) for discussions of Cervantes intertexts in Rushdie’s novel.
- 15.
See the discussion of spice tropology in Chapter 4 above.
- 16.
The novel points out that its association with Hinduism derives from a Muslim’s claim to have seen a vision of Rama there (1995, p. 363).
- 17.
Khomeini pronounced a death sentence on Rushdie in 1989 on the grounds that his novel The Satanic Verses (1988) contained material which blasphemed against the Prophet Mohammed. The fatwa provoked considerable criticism in the West and Rushdie was forced into hiding for a number of years. Iran rescinded its support for the fatwa on Rushdie’s life in 1998.
- 18.
Moor explains that Mr. India’s use of the name is deliberately indeterminate: ‘His name, filched from the title of an old Ava Gardner vehicle, a forgettable piece of African hokum, is carefully chosen to avoid offending any of the country’s communities; it’s neither Muslim nor Hindu, Parsi nor Christian, Jain nor Sikh’ (1995, p. 168). One of John Ford’s less acclaimed films and starring Clark Gable as well as Gardner, Mogambo (1953) is reasonably categorized as ‘African hokum’, but arguably not altogether forgettable—as Rushdie’s use of the name suggests.
- 19.
Early on in the novel Moor refers to it as the last of his story’s ‘four sequestered, serpented Eden-infernal private universes’ (1995, p. 15).
Bibliography
Adiga, A. (2008) The White Tiger, London: Atlantic Books.
Adiga, A. (2011) Last Man in Tower, London: Atlantic Books.
Ahmad, A. (2000) Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in Contemporary South Asia, London: Verso.
Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London and New York: Verso.
Bakhtin, M. (1965) Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
Bennett, L. (1966) Jamaica Labrish: Jamaican Dialect Poems, Kingston: Sangster’s Book Stores.
Bernstein, M. (1980) The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Burningham, B. (2003) ‘Salman Rushdie, Author of the Captive’s Tale’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 38, 1: 113–33.
Cervantes, M. (2003) Don Quixote [1604–5; 1615], trans. J. Rutherford, London: Penguin.
Chikwava, B. (2010) Harare North [2009], London: Vintage.
Cresswell, T. (2004) Place: A Short Introduction, Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell.
Dangarembga, T. (1988) Nervous Conditions, London: The Women’s Press.
Durkheim, E. (2006) Suicide [1897], trans. R. Buss, London: Penguin.
Durrell, L. (1968) The Alexandria Quartet, London: Faber.
Eliot, T. (1961) Selected Poems, London: Faber.
Ellmann, R. (1982) James Joyce, 2nd. edn., New York: Oxford University Press.
Ezekiel, N. (1960) The Unfinished Man: Poems Written in 1959, Calcutta: Writers Workshop.
Ezekiel, N. (1965) The Exact Name, Poems 1960 –1964, Calcutta: Writers Workshop.
Ezekiel, N. (1983) ‘A Poet’s Passage’, Bombay, 22 May – 6 June: 34–6.
Ezekiel, N. (2005) Collected Poems, 2nd edn., New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Henighan, S. (1998) ‘Coming to Benengeli: The Genesis of Salman Rushdie’s Rewriting of Juan Rulfo in The Moor’s Last Sigh’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 33, 2: 55–74.
Malkki, L. (1992) ‘National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees, Cultural Anthropology, 7, 1: 24–44.
Marechera, D. (1993) The House of Hunger [1978], Oxford: Heinemann.
Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place and Gender, Cambridge: Polity Press.
McArthur, T., ed. (1992) The Oxford Companion to the English Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McLeod, J. (2004) Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis, Abingdon, Oxfordshire and New York: Routledge.
Mehta, S. (2006) Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found [2004], New Delhi: Penguin.
Mishra, S. (1995) Preparing Faces: Modernism and Indian Poetry in English, Suva: University of the South Pacific, and Adelaide: The Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English, The Flinders University of South Australia.
Naipaul, V. (1961) A House for Mr Biswas, London: André Deutsch.
Parashkevova, V. (2012), Salman Rushdie’s Cities: Reconfigurational Politics and the Contemporary Urban Imagination, London and New York: Continuum.
Primorac, R. (2010) ‘“Making New Connections”: Interview with Brian Chikwava’, in Zimbabwe’s New Diaspora: Displacement and the Cultural Politics of Survival, ed. J. McGregor and R. Primorac, Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books: 255–60.
Rao, R. (2000) Nissim Ezekiel: The Authorized Biography, Delhi: Viking Penguin.
Reder, M., ed. (2000) Conversations with Salman Rushdie, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Rushdie, S. (1982a) Midnight’s Children [1981], London: Picador.
Rushdie, S. (1982b) ‘A Tall Story: How Salman Rushdie Pickled All India’, Arena, BBC 2.
Rushdie, S. (1989) The Satanic Verses, New York: Viking Penguin.
Rushdie, S. (1991) Imaginary Homelands; Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991, London: Granta.
Rushdie, S. (1995) The Moor’s Last Sigh, London: Jonathan Cape.
Rushdie, S. (2003) Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992–2002, London: Vintage.
Sartre, J-P. (1968) Preface to Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth [1961], trans. C. Farrington, New York: Grove Books: 7–31.
Selvon, S. (1972) The Lonely Londoners [1956], London: Longman.
Shakespeare, W. (1962) Antony and Cleopatra [1606–7], London: Ginn.
Shakespeare, W. (1964) King Lear [1605–6], London: Methuen.
Soueif, A. (2007) I Think of You, London: Bloomsbury.
Teverson, A. (2007) Salman Rushdie, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Thayil, J. (2012) Narcopolis, London: Faber.
Thayil, J. (2013) ‘“Narcopolis is a Love Letter to Bombay”, Berlin Interviews, http://berlininterviews.com/?p=689
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Thieme, J. (2016). Urban Chronotopes: London and Bombay. In: Postcolonial Literary Geographies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-45687-8_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-45687-8_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-45686-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-45687-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)