Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands

The fact that Rushdie wrote The Moor's Last Sigh while he himself was in exile shapes and leaks into the story itself throughout the book in many ways. The influences of Rushdie's own experiences with India and being an outcast are thrown into sharp relief when the book is read with reference to Rushdie's essay Imaginary Homelands. 

At the very beginning, Rushdie remarks:

...it's my present that is foreign, and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time.

The obsession with past is an immense theme in the book as a large part of it deals with the family history of the Moor which always seems to have certain parallels with whatever situation unfolds in the 'current day' of the narrative. The name of the book, the beginning of the book, the end of the book all make sense only in context of the fall of Islamic Spain and a certain historical knowledge of the past. Even the effects of the curses of his grandmothers on the Moor give an explicit and immense importance to the past in shaping the circumstances of the present.

The obsession with time, quite obviously linked to the obsession with past, also plays a large role in the way the book unfolds. The most obvious association here is the Moor's condition of living his life in double-time; growing twice as fast for half the time that others get. Rooted-ness implies a certain stability; the instability of Rushdie's own condition 'in the mists of lost time' are mirrored in the actual literal time that is lost by the Moor, an exaggeration that helps reveal nature of this condition quite sharply. The other way instability is shown is in the discontinuity of time in the narrative--we start at the end of the events unfolding in 'current' time and then go to the history that preludes the Moor's time, and then see 'current' events again, and by the end of the book we are back at the beginning. The refusal of the narrative to stay within one time again indicates a lack of grounded-ness, a sense of being un-tethered and having the ability to move not only in between places but also in between times.