After the big- budget fantasy double- bill of Gandhi and Octopussy, we have had the blackface minstrel- show of The Far Pavilions in its TV serial incarnation, and immediately afterwards the grotesquely overpraised Jewel in the Crown. I should also include the alleged . And lest we begin to console ourselves that the painful experiences are coming to an end, we are reminded that David Lean’s film of A Passage to India is in the offing. I remember seeing an interview with Mr Lean in The Times, in which he explained his reasons for wishing to make a film of Forster’s novel. Rama Rao, will no doubt feel suitably humbled by the great man’s opinion. Eastern and Western Cultural Commingling in Rushdie. Most of Salman Rushdie. East, west : stories / By: Rushdie. Analyzing “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers”. Scribd is the world's largest social reading and publishing site. These are dark days. Having expressed my reservations about the Gandhi film elsewhere, I have no wish to renew my quarrel with Mahatma Dickie. As for Octopussy, one can only say that its portrait of modern India was as grittily and uncompromisingly realistic as its depiction of the skill, integrity and sophistication of the British secret services. In defence of the Mahattenborough, he did allow a few Indians to be played by Indians. True, Indian actors were allowed to play the villains (Saeed Jaffrey, who has turned the Raj revival into a personal cottage industry, with parts in Gandhi and The Jewel in the Crown as well, did his hissing and hand- rubbing party piece; and Sneh Gupta played the selfish princess, but unluckily for her, her entire part consisted of the interminably repeated line, . Meanwhile, the good- guy roles were firmly commandeered by Ben Cross, Christopher Lee, Omar Sharif, and, most memorably, Amy Irving as the good princess, whose make- up person obviously believed that Indian princesses dip their eyes in black ink and get sun- tans on their lips. Now of course The Far Pavilions is the purest bilge. The great processing machines of TV- soap opera have taken the somewhat more fibrous garbage of the M. Kaye book and pureed it into easy- swallow, no- chewing- necessary drivel. Thus, the two central characters, both supposedly raised as Indians, have been lobotomized to the point of being incapable of pronouncing their own names. The man calls himself . Around and about them there is branding of human flesh and snakery and widow- burning by the natives. There are Pathans who cannot speak Pushto. Book Review - Salman Rushdie, Author: Salman Rushdie, Reviewed by: C.J.S. Book Review Salman Rushdie . East west wikipedia the free encyclopedia ![]() And, to avoid offending the Christian market, we are asked to believe that the child . It would be easy to conclude that such material could not possibly be taken seriously by anyone, and that it is therefore unnecessary to get worked up about it. Should we not simply rise above the twaddle, switch off our sets and not care? I should be happier about this, the quietist option . I should also mind less were it not for the fact that The Far Pavilions, book as well as TV serial, is only the latest in a very long line of fake portraits inflicted by the West on the East. The creation of a false Orient of cruel- lipped princes and dusky slim- hipped maidens, of ungodliness, fire and the sword, has been brilliantly described by Edward Said in his classic study Orientalism, in which he makes clear that the purpose of such false portraits was to provide moral, cultural and artistic justification for imperialism and for its underpinning ideology, that of the racial superiority of the Caucasian over the Asiatic. The Wizard of Oz has 642 ratings and 48 reviews. Then Rushdie adds in a short story based around the future auction of the ruby slippers. Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a novelist and essayist. Cinema, nostalgia and the concept of “home” in Salman Rushdie’s fiction. Auction of the Ruby Slippers” (1992). Title: Salman rushdie at the auction of the ruby slippers pdf Created Date: 7/9/2015 6:14:25 PM. Let me add only that stereotypes are easier to shrug off if yours is not the culture being stereotyped; or, at the very least, if your culture has the power to counterpunch against the stereotype. If the TV screens of the West were regularly filled by equally hyped, big- budget productions depicting the realities of India, one could stomach the odd M. When praying to the mountains is the norm, the stomach begins to heave. Paul Scott was M. Kaye’s agent, and it has always seemed to me a damning indictment of his literary judgement that he believed The Far Pavilions to be a good book. Salman Rushdie At The Auction Of The Ruby Slippers Pdf FilesEven stranger is the fact that The Raj Quartet and the Kaye novel are founded on identical strategies of what, to be polite, one must call borrowing. In both cases, the central plot- motifs are lifted from earlier and much finer novels. In The Far Pavilions, the hero Ash (. And the rape of Daphne Manners in the Bibighar Gardens derives just as plainly from Forster’s Passage to India. But because Kaye and Scott are vastly inferior to the writers they follow, they turn what they touch to pure lead. Where Forster’s scene in the Marabar caves retains its ambiguity and mystery, Scott gives us not one rape but a gang assault, and one perpetrated, what is more, by peasants. Smelly persons of the worst sort. ![]() So class as well as sex is violated; Daphne gets the works. It is useless, I’m sure, to suggest that if a rape must be used as the metaphor of the Indo- British connection, then surely, in the interests of accuracy, it should be the rape of an Indian woman by one or more Englishmen of whatever class. So much more evocative to conjure up white society’s fear of the darkie, of big brown cocks. You will say I am being unfair; Scott is a writer of a different calibre from M. What’s more, very few of the British characters come at all well out of the Quartet . Like Kaye, he has an instinct for the cliche. Sadistic, bottom- flogging policeman Merrick turns out to be (surprise!) a closet homosexual. His grammar- school origins give him (what else?) a chip on the shoulder. And all around him is a galaxy of chinless wonders, regimental grandes dames, lushes, empty- headed blondes, silly- asses, plucky young things, good sorts, bad eggs and Russian counts with eyepatches. The overall effect is rather like a literary version of Mulligatawny soup. It tries to taste Indian, but ends up being ultra- parochially British, only with too much pepper. And yes, Scott is harsh in his portraits of many British characters; but I want to try and make a rather more difficult point, a point about form. Indians get walk- ons, but remain, for the most part, bit- players in their own history. Once this form has been set, it scarcely matters that individual, fictional Brits get unsympathetic treatment from their author. The form insists that they are the ones whose stories matter, and that is so much less than the whole truth that it must be called a falsehood. It will not do to argue that Scott was attempting only to portray the British in India, and that such was the nature of imperialist society that the Indians would only have had bit parts. It is no defence to say that a work adopts, in its structure, the very ethic which, in its content and tone, it pretends to dislike. It is, in fact, the case for the prosecution. I cannot end this brief account of the Raj revival without returning to David Lean, a film director whose mere interviews merit reviews. I have already quoted his masterpiece in The Times; here now are three passages from his conversation with Derek Malcolm in the Guardian of 2. January 1. 98. 4: Forster was a bit anti- English, anti- Raj and so on. I suppose it’s a tricky thing to say, but I’m not so much. I intend to keep the balance more. I don’t believe all the English were a lot of idiots. Forster rather made them so. He came down hard against them. I’ve cut out that bit at the trial where they try to take over the court. But I said no, it just wasn’t right. They wouldn’t have done that. As for Aziz, there’s a hell of a lot of Indian in him. They’re marvellous people but maddening sometimes, you know. But he’s warm and you like him awfully. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way . I’ve changed her, made her more sympathetic. Forster wasn’t always very good with women. One other thing. I’ve got rid of that . You know, when the Quit India stuff comes up, and we have the passage about driving us into the sea? Forster experts have always said it was important, but the Fielding- Aziz friendship was not sustained by those sorts of things. At least I don’t think so. The book came out at the time of the trial of General Dyer and had a tremendous success in America for that reason. But I thought that bit rather tacked on. Anyway, I see it as a personal not a political story. Forster’s lifelong refusal to permit his novel to be filmed begins to look rather sensible. But once a revisionist enterprise gets under way, the mere wishes of a dead novelist provide no obstacle. And there can be little doubt that in Britain today the refurbishment of the Empire’s tarnished image is underway. The continuing decline, the growing poverty and the meanness of spirit of much of Thatcherite Britain encourages many Britons to turn their eyes nostalgically to the lost hour of their precedence. The recrudescence of imperialist ideology and the popularity of Raj fictions put one in mind of the phantom twitchings of an amputated limb. Britain is in danger of entering a condition of cultural psychosis, in which it begins once again to strut and posture like a great power while in fact its power diminishes every year. The jewel in the crown is made, these days, of paste. Anthony Barnett has cogently argued, in his television- essay . But it was Margaret Thatcher who, in the euphoria of the Falklands victory, most plainly nailed her colours to the old colonial mast, claiming that the success in the South Atlantic proved that the British were still the people . For every text, a context; and the rise of Raj revisionism, exemplified by the huge success of these fictions, is the artistic counterpart to the rise of conservative ideologies in modern Britain. And no matter how innocently the writers and filmmakers work, no matter how skilfully the actors act (and nobody would deny the brilliance of, for example, the performances of Susan Wooldridge as Daphne and Peggy Ashcroft as Barbie in the TV Jewel), they run the grave risk of helping to shore up that conservatism, by offering it the fictional glamour which its reality so grievously lacks. The title of this essay derives, obviously, from that of an earlier piece (1.
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