How Extremists Give Permission to Relinquish Moral Responsibility
Salman Rushdie's fifth novel is a family saga warning of the dangers of political extremism and how quickly societies can change.
Our morality is a choice that can’t be blamed on other ideological commitments. Whatever our politics or religious beliefs, we still have values that keep us tethered to them.
Salman Rushdie’s novel The Moor’s Last Sigh follows four generations of Moraes Zogoiby’s family. His family saga overlaps with India’s political saga from the repression of India’s future democratic leaders through the rise of modern totalitarian parties like the BJP.
Early in the novel, one of the characters cites a section of one of the anti-colonialist leaders, Jawaharlal Nehru’s, speeches he gave after he was reimprisoned:
“Intimidation and terrorism have become the chief instruments of government. Do they imagine that they will thus instill affection for themselves? Affection and loyalty are of the heart. They cannot be extorted at the point of a bayonet.”
It’s an early thematic warning for the repressive political climate later in the novel.
When Politics Takes Over Religion
As the novel’s end approaches, India’s politics become more authoritarian. New parties like the BJP, a Hindu nationalist party, have come to power in part by coopting Hinduism for its own goals. Those goals include subjugating India’s Muslims and placing Hindus at the top of a hierarchy of purity and civic value.
Zeeny, a friend of Moraes, issues a scathing refutation of the mutilation that Hindu supremacy movements do to the religion they claim to faithfully represent:
“Point one: in a religion with a thousand and one gods they suddenly decide only one chap matters. Then what about Calcutta, for example, where they don’t go for Ram? And Shiva-temples are no longer suitable places of worship? Too stupid. Point two: Hinduism has many holy books, not one, but suddenly it is all Ramayan, Ramayan. Then where is the Gita? Where are all the Puranas? How dare they twist everything in this way? Bloody joke. And point three: for Hindus there is no requirement for a collective act of worship, but without that how are these types going to collect their beloved mobs? So suddenly there is this invention of mass puja, and that is declared the only way to show true, class-A devotion. A single, martial deity, a single book, and mob rule: that is what they have made of Hindu culture, its many-headed beauty, its peace.”
Hinduism has many gods to worship and a rich literary history of legends and mythology. That diversity is cast aside by political extremists who want to use their twisted version of religion to command earthly power.
The rise of radical parties is the latest version of a government trying to force its populace to love it instead of the party trying to earn its people’s respect. By coopting a religion, parties like the BJP can pitch themselves as pure manifestations of their country’s best future, even though those parties defile the religions they use. It’s a dirty trick that creates a zero-sum game among pure and impure citizens.
Few things are more dangerous than being counted among the “impure” when a party like this comes to power. Extremism is an excuse to relinquish old moral commitments and unleash cruelty on opponents of any kind.
It can also be easily delivered at the end of a bayonet.
Musing About Success in War
The modern radical movements of the story arrive at a time of turmoil for the narrator, who ends his story by emulating his family’s practice of “falling asleep in times of trouble, and hope[ing] to awaken, renewed and joyful, into a better time.” Moraes is a consistent believer in the power of love and remains hopeful for better times by the end of the novel.
However, he remains clear-eyed about the madness of different forces within society preparing to go to war with each other. His family’s story includes the partition of India and Pakistan, a bloody separation into the two countries that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths among Muslims and Hindus caught on the wrong sides.
Extreme Hindu movements didn’t end with partition. The belief that India should be a multicultural democracy never stopped being attacked by those who believed there was one type of proper Indian citizen. Extremists, lost in their ideologies, couldn’t imagine how their enemies could believe themselves to be correct. It was easy to think their opponents were idiots.
That simple thinking leads to a dangerous miscalculation that is as common and dangerous in real life as it was in Rushdie’s novel. In our polarized era, the short list of questions the narrator had about the warring extremists remains haunting:
“And if both sides went to war because they believed the enemy was easy to vanquish? And if both sides were wrong? What then? Armageddon?”