The Moor’s Last Sigh encapsulates a history and passage of
family chronology that is rife with a tumultuous disorder which subverts this
apparently orderly lineage. This subversion in the text is not only found at
its very base; in its very contours, but also in its portrayal of home, of religion
and divinity.
The hybridity and excess of everything (religions, peoples, ancestral ties) prevalent throughout the
text creates a lack of any stability, which engenders a desire for order and attempts to find a secure home— especially
in the narrator’s mother Aurora. She personally seeks to find it in a specific
source; that is, in Mother India. India, with its plethora of peoples and
religions, contains a dominating Hinduism which cuts off the possibility of
ties for Christian Aurora and her family. This religiosity essentially serves
as an impetus for their exilic state.
Thus breeds Aurora’s own resistance in the form of her art
and her dances. Aurora uses these facets as an exilic figure reacting against
and fighting an exile-inducing religion so as to sustain a home without this
damning facet pervading and preventing it. Yet there is more to her: in a text
where the notion of ‘Mother’ India is key for salvation, as something to fight
for, where “motherness…is a big idea in India, maybe our biggest,” she is the
representative of Mother India. She is the mother convoluted, the mother
struggling for a place; resisting the foreign infiltrators; eating her children
alive.
It is this Mother India trying to remove its discord within
itself and rebelling against it that has Aurora unleash her own hatred and
mockery of the dominating Hindu religion. Ganesha, the elephant god, is the Hindu god mainly referenced in the text; Aurora the child would break his icons in her sleep.
Aurora the woman is seen indulging in her “profane gyrations against the jolly
jiving of” “many Dancing Ganeshas” “against whom Aurora competed.” She “liked to dance higher than the gods”; she
is described as “the almost divine figure”; one view that we can take here is
the idea that Aurora as Mother India here sets off her own competition against
the exile-inducing religion, using her own “perversity” against the holiness of
the “crowds of the devout.”
That it is Ganesha she sets off against is interesting; he
is the remover of obstacles and is invoked before ceremonies and rituals. That he is the
one Aurora competes with could imply her despising him playing the remover of
obstacles in a convoluted nation where for her, one may say, religion should
take a backseat and let nationality and Mother India as a plurality—without a
dominant religion or religiosity—surpass patriotism and nationhood as a uniting
force. That Ganesha is an elephant
reminds us also of Eperfina’s “elephant teeth” – Eperfina, whom Aurora watched
die without attempting to save her. The elephant definitely holds its own
symbolic value in the text.
So the use of “Peesay Safed Hathi” or ‘mashed white
elephants,’ as the family’s “oath of choice” doesn’t come as a surprise to the
reader. White elephant symbolizes abundance where there is no abundance and
could clash against Aurora’s own destructive nature; it could also be the
religion again competing with her, Mother India, as a source of progress or
move towards betterment. A white elephant also again ties in with religion as
part of Vedic tradition (an older form of Hinduism) in India where the god
Indra rode Airavanta, the white elephant, especially in battle. Without
intending to stretch my point, I could relate this to Aurora’s own battle as a
nation against overpowering religion that pushes her aside; that exiles her in
favor of itself.
Hence follows her desire that this white elephant be “mashed”
by her own “divinity” – this elephant figure is reminiscent of a hated religious
grandmother, of a religion that exiles her and competes with her as Mother
India. The irony of her doom being marked by the family oath as her last words,
along with her body being found beside a shattered dancing Ganesha effigy—both fallen
dancing – does not proffer much hope for
Indian unity in either religion or nationhood. But more on that later.
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