That poet of the British Raj, Rudyard Kipling, famously wrote that the East and West shall never meet. Having lived as a journalist, poet and writer of well-loved fiction amidst the grandeur and squalor of the Sub-continent, Kipling had seen enough to reach this pessimistic conclusion.
In the latest addition to his literary oeuvre, Salman Rushdie sets out to bring about in The Enchantress of Florence what Kipling thought was impossible: the meeting of East and West. He tries to show that the East and West may be geographically apart, but the everyday concerns, obsessions, vanities, aspirations, cogitations, follies and foibles of the people of high and low station in both parts of the globe may not be as different as they appear at the superficial level.
In the story, the great Mughal emperor Akbar sits on the peacock throne of Fatehpur Sikri in India. In Florence, the Medicis rule the roost, helped by the elevation of a Medici scion to the papal seat in Rome. Threading the two glorious cities is the outrageous tale of a roguish, yellow-haired Florentine, a self-proclaimed Mughal of love, who may be the progeny of a lost Mughal princess, or a fraud and trickster.
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