The Jew's Passage to India: Desai, Rushdie and Globalised Culture

This article focuses on the figure of the 'jew' in Anita Desai's Baumgartner's Bombay and Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh. Both authors mourn the loss of multiculturalism in twentieth-century India and invoke the 'jew' to question concepts of globalised hybridity, as well as issues of race and stereotypes, while gleaning lessons of global diasporism and racial violence from the Jewish historical experience. In both texts, the figure of the 'jew' exposes the dangers of imposing a Western paradigm on post-colonial societies wrestling with legacies of religious strife, oppression and increased fundamentalism.