Aurora's Art and its relationship with Motherhood and Nationhood

Rushdie employs paintings to illustrate the complex personality of the fundamental character of Aurora, who through several angles plays the role of encapsulating the emotional essence of the novel. She is a brilliantly talented artist who lacks conventional maternal instincts and sentiments and portrays an eccentric form of motherhood similar to Isabella (page 44), thus symbolically acting in opposition to the domestic structure of Mother India (pages 60, 61).

The concept of the nation as a mother is fundamental to India (pages 136, 137). She is at times witnessed as regretting her negligence as a mother but does use her art as a lens to view her progeny.  A collection of paintings on ‘Mooristan’ have her son Moraes embedded in them, while simultaneously depicting her endeavour to create the image of the colony as one of hybridity on various levels by blending reality with the ‘romantic myth of the plural, hybrid nation.’

Aurora’s works of art are lucid in indicating Rushdie’s attempt to highlight the loss of domestic empire and the role of aesthetics in critiquing the notions of religion and nationhood. Her art especially denounces fundamentalism, her opposition to extremism further supported by her dance against the gods at the annual Hindu festival. She is in a way aiming to attack the dark forces prevailing in India through her art, building upon the part women play as guardians of nationhood and aesthetics (pages 79, 80).

Aurora expresses her love for India and her political position through her art but the text gives rise to questions about whether this art is positing the idea of an alternative nation. She is attempting to relate to the broader picture and the failure of the romantic notion of a pre-colonial India. She also uses her art as a medium of expression for her grief at being motherless, a reflection of her sorrow at the inability to regain the India the people have lost (pages 60,61).

“Aurora’s art was the simple tragedy of her loss, the unassuaged pain of becoming a motherless child.”

The paintings also point to Camoens lack of success at fulfilling his role as a patriarch and father through the book’s use of irony. He initially displays pride at his daughter’s skill ¹but later exhibits anxiety at her state of mind² (page 60):

“a proud father’s bursting heart” ¹

“at her tender age she could have heard so much of the world’s anger and pain and disappointment and tasted so little of its delight” ²

The novel’s overall pessimism and gloomy tone is backed up by Aurora’s paintings, which become increasingly more depressing, illustrating her bottled up motherly emotions and her broader fears for the nation of India. Her last work of art is a display of her son’s isolated, nomadic and tortured state of mind and gives rise to the novel’s name. Nationalist narratives are vividly cocooned in her paintings, echoing the relationship aesthetics has to nationalism and exile.