Research can also lead to reinvention, of which there are characteristic examples here. These thoughts were not fit for a king."Īkbar's story, meticulously researched, is only one strand in Rushdie's rich weave. He does not wish to be divine, but is "mired in contradiction" and wonders whether discord and iconoclasm might be the "wellsprings of the good. error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path." Goodness as individual responsibility, then, is the road the emperor contemplates. Rushdie has Akbar reflect: "Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in unthinking obeisance to a deity but rather, perhaps, in the. Let's take just one: the religion this illiterate visionary founded to bring together diverse elements of the world's great faiths in a nation of conflicting beliefs. "Our" Akbar? Idealist or pragmatist, opportunist or a moderniser ahead of his time? In his entrancing tapestry, also woven around Akbar, Salman Rushdie seeks answers to many of the questions history has left open. She was referring to a romanticised portrayal of the great Mughal emperor in a new Bollywood film. Not our Akbar at all," a Pakistani friend complained.
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