Aurora as a symbol of resistance (missed blog)

Aurora perhaps epitomizes Rushdie’s own convictions, his imagination and finally a vision that is manifested in a number of ways; in acts of defiance, in fantasies, in perversity and finally in her paintings. Art unlike any other paradigm is one which goes beyond temporal and spatial constructions; it is in a sense universal in its message and purpose. It is hence fitting that Aurora must use art as her medium of expressing her loss, hope,  a violent resistance and her sheer inability to bend to the will of any who wish to contain her.

Her rejection of realism and embodiment of a surrealist approach to her paintings is not only a representation of her voracious imagination but is emblematic of Rushdie’s ideas about the world, the role he plays as an interpreter of history and his uncertainty about the reality of reality. Aurora seems to peel away the layers of reality to bring attention to what may not be visible yet is just as real, and emphasizes the inversion placed on reality itself where fantasy and the imagination might be more realistic then anything we come across in the world that has been muddled with deception, politics, the fragility of nationalistic thought and what it entails. It may also be a representation of the events that took place in India during the resistance and the uncertainty that surrounded them. We see a physical embodiment of these ideas in her mocking dance “speaking incomprehensible volumes with her hands, the great painter danced her defiance, she danced her contempt for the perversity of humankind”.

While one side of her character seems to embody the writer’s views, Rushdie does develop her character as separate from the rest and from his own, one troubled by a failed motherhood, by pain and by loss. Just as her father Cameons' notices when she first introduces him to her work that despite all the meaning and history that seemed to be embedded in her paintings in essence “Aurora’s art was the simple tragedy of her loss”. Similarly it seems as though she attempts to fill the void of her own failures and incompetence by creating alternate realities in her painting and more than that, by creating possibilities in her work, which is what she seems to do with her “Moor paintings”. Hence Aurora becomes a symbol of resistance for the larger narrative of mother India (whether it in essence will remain) and of the political movement. At the same time she shows resistance at a more individual level “so that her own disappointment with reality, her anger at its wrongness, mirrored her subjects”.