“No longer a memoirist but a voyeur”: Photographing and narrating Bombay in Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet

摘要

This paper examines the relationship between photography and narration in Salman Rushdie's 1999 novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet in order to consider the changing representation of Bombay in the author's work. In this novel, Rushdie places a photographer-narrator at the centre of his attempts to negotiate tensions between aesthetics and politics, offering a renegotiation of the relationship between the migrant and his homeland which has been a central concern of his work thus far. I suggest that Rai's photography enables Rushdie to establish a relationship between his changing representational strategies, his own altered position in relation to his place of birth, and the social transformations taking place within Bombay. At the same time, Rushdie positions the crisis in Rai's narration of Bombay as a strategic act of resistance to the rise of exclusionary politics within that city during the 1990s.