Enabling spaces and the architecture of hybridity in Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence

Abstract

This article analyses how Rushdie represents the relationship between cultural hybridity and the spaces that enable such hybridity to flourish. One of its central arguments is that elements of Mughal architecture and Mughal aesthetics, in particular those exemplified by the palace complex at Fatehpur Sikri, are mirrored in the narrative style and structure of the novel The Enchantress of Florence. It contextualizes Rushdie’s representations of the Mughal ruler Akbar and his reign in nationalist historiography in order to show how these spatial models provide Rushdie with a means of exploring a form of hybridity which is distinct from the unruly hybridity he has championed in earlier novels. Its final section explores the gendered aspects of spatial design in The Enchantress of Florence, in particular the creation of an enabling space by the female protagonist Qara Köz.

The exploration of the concept of cultural hybridity lies at the heart of Rushdie’s work, and Mughal India (in particular Emperor Akbar’s reign) has been portrayed in Indian historiography as one of the historical periods in India when cultural hybridity flourished. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that Rushdie wanted to set one of his novels in Akbar’s sixteenth-century India. The 2008 novel The Enchantress of Florence ¹ charts the characters’ journeys from Asia to Europe and America but Akbar’s city Fatehpur Sikri holds a special significance. In this article, I will analyse how Rushdie represents the relationship between cultural hybridity and the spaces that enable such hybridity to thrive. I argue that elements of Mughal architecture and Mughal aesthetics, in particular those exemplified by the palace complex at Fatehpur Sikri, are mirrored in the narrative style and structure of the novel. These spatial models provide Rushdie with a means of exploring a form of hybridity which is to some extent distinct from the rowdy hybridity he has championed in earlier novels such as Midnight’s Children (1981), The Satanic Verses (1988), and The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995). In the final section, I will examine the gendered aspects of spatial design in The Enchantress of Florence, in particular the creation of an enabling space by the female protagonist Qara Köz, who is Akbar’s great aunt, allegedly the foreigner’s mother, and the eponymous enchantress of Florence.

For the purposes of this article, the term hybridity mainly draws on Rushdie’s own use of the term as a malleable and open concept with which all forms of cultural intermingling can be described. ² In his essay “In Good Faith” written in defence of his novel The Satanic Verses, Rushdie claims that his novel “celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. […] Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world” (Rushdie, 1992: 394; emphasis in original). The city predominantly associated with this dynamic and eclectic form of hybridity in Rushdie’s work is, of course, Bombay – “Bombay, most cosmopolitan, most hybrid, most hotchpotch of Indian cities” (Rushdie, 1992: 404). Mughal hybridity as represented in The Enchantress of Florence is different from Bombayesque hybridity; it is associated with the search for harmony in uniting different styles, ideas, and cultural practices. Mughal synthesis is a more considered and planned experiment, an élite endeavour, rather than the chaotic and vibrant hybridity of Bombay’s streets.

In order to understand the mutually constituting relationship between hybridity and space in The Enchantress of Florence and explore the ways in which certain places, in particular Fatehpur Sikri, are represented as spaces enabling the encounter of cultures and the mixing and fusion of cultural traditions, it is necessary to recall the representation of Akbar and his reign in nationalist historiography.

Akbar: “syncretistic genius” in historiography ³

The Mughal emperor Akbar, who ruled from 1556 to 1605, is represented in historiography as one of the most successful and significant rulers of the subcontinent. Rushdie’s representation of Akbar in The Enchantress of Florence focuses on all the aspects for which the king is renowned in historical accounts from the sixteenth century to the present. What attracts most attention in history writing, however, is Akbar’s eclectic philosophy, the policy of religious toleration and his invention of a religion.

The words most commonly used to describe the significance of Akbar’s reign are synthesis and syncretism. In this regard, Abraham Eraly’s account is representative of the way in which Akbar is depicted in historiography as seeking unity through cultural synthesis:

Akbar’s ambition was to gather the diverse peoples of the subcontinent under his benevolent wings, to enable them, through religious and cultural syncretism, to live in peace and amity. In this vision, and in his intellectual openness and rationalism, this sanguinary medieval autocrat was a thoroughly modern man, ahead of his time, and in some ways ahead even of our time. (Eraly, 2000: 163)

The championing of political and religious synthesis is interpreted as the chief source of the Mughal state’s legitimacy:

The conceptual architecture of this legitimacy was without doubt the creation of Abul Fazl. His endeavour synthesizes elements from the vast landscape of evolving political practices, conscious and unconscious social ethos, a mosaic of religious and secular streams and their strands, positing of an alternative reconstitution of history [sic], and the construction of ‘harmony’ as the encompassing ideological frame that would remain the keystone of the Mughal state’s legitimacy. (Mukhia, 2004: 41)

The propagation of harmony through cultural synthesis during Akbar’s reign is one of the reasons that makes this historical period so attractive to nationalist history writing.

Rushdie’s account of Akbar bears great similarity to that proposed by nationalist historiography, the paradigmatic representative of which is Jawaharlal Nehru’s history book, The Discovery of India, written during the 1940s. Secular nationalist discourse such as Nehru’s is explicitly directed against both imperialist historiography, which emphasizes India’s disunity and communal enmity, and Hindu nationalist historiography, which also depicts Indian history as an eternal struggle of Hindus against Muslims. It aims at providing a historical narrative that emphasizes communal harmony. Akbar is one of the heroes of this nationalist narrative of India since his approach sought to bring ancient Indian syncretism to a new cultural and philosophical flourishing and successfully merge Hindu and Muslim traditions in India:

As a warrior he conquered large parts of India, but his eyes were set on another and more enduring conquest, the conquest of the minds and hearts of the people. […] In him the old dream of a united India again took shape, united not only politically in one state but organically fused into one people. […] He even tried to start a new synthetic faith to suit everybody. It was in his reign that the cultural amalgamation of Hindu and Moslem in north India took a long step forward. Akbar himself was certainly as popular with the Hindus as with the Moslems. The Mughal dynasty became firmly established as India’s own. (Nehru, 1989: 259-260)

Nehru echoes the popular view that Mughals are foreign Muslim invaders but considers Mughal rule “Indian” because of Akbar’s synthesizing endeavours. ⁴

Like Jawaharlal Nehru, Rushdie is drawn to the idea of Indian culture as composite and hybrid, and in his novels this hybridizing potential is portrayed as an important cultural resource, which is unique and inspiring in its depth, scope, and longevity. However, rather than uncritically celebrating hybridity, Rushdie is also always interested in showing the dangers and pitfalls in cultural intermingling, since an unequal distribution of power can lead to one party dictating the terms of encounter. This question, whether hybridity leads to a creative and dynamic cultural flourishing or to the potentially stifling absorption of one culture by another, is indirectly raised in the final chapter of The Enchantress of Florence where Akbar is portrayed as having reached a “turning point” when he considers making the foreigner Niccolò Vespucci his honorary son:

To allow him into the family would be a sign that he was indeed pursuing Abul Fazl’s idea of becoming the World-King, that he could incorporate into his line – into himself – persons, places, narratives, possibilities from lands as yet unknown, lands which might, in their turn, also be subsumed. If one foreigner could become a Mughal then so, in time, could all foreigners. Additionally, it would be a further step in the creation of a culture of inclusion […]: his true vision come to life, in which all races, tribes, clans, faiths and nations would become part of the one grand Mughal synthesis, the one grand syncretisation of the earth. (317)

In the novel, Akbari synthesis is depicted not as the creatively chaotic Bombayesque hybridity that Rushdie celebrated in previous novels but as an ordered synthesis which is orchestrated by a few for the many to emulate. Despite its creativity and productivity this Akbari synthesis is not represented as a grass-roots phenomenon. In historiography, Akbari synthesis is considered less a megalomaniacal gesture than one of daring pragmatism and unprecedented inclusion in a realm made up of so many different cultural practices, religions, and languages. But in The Enchantress of Florence, the reader is encouraged to distrust too grand a hybrid venture as all-absorbing and stifling rather than as a process which gives a diversity of cultural practices a chance to thrive. The novel, after all, also shows the losers of Akbar’s politics of inclusion such as the Brahmin singers, Tana and Riri, who prefer death to performing in front of a Muslim ruler, a gesture which Akbar interprets as preferring “division to unity, their gods to ours, and hatred to love” (196).

The novel portrays Akbar as far too sceptical, self-critical, and disillusioned with religion to believe wholeheartedly in the divine image of himself which is created by his court historian Abul Fazl and which ultimately legitimizes Akbar’s synthesizing endeavours. In contrast to Abul Fazl’s view of Akbar as a divine ruler of all humanity, the novel depicts him from a very intimate perspective as a thoughtful, charismatic, and flawed figure with an unquenchable curiosity and little reverence for organized religion, and underlines the contradictory elements in his personality and philosophy. Rushdie’s Akbar is more complex and contradictory that the Akbar represented in nationalist historiography, but his portrayal of Akbar is nevertheless clearly aware of the Mughal ruler’s representation in nationalist discourse as paradigmatically Indian because of his far-reaching experiments with cultural hybridity. The Enchantress of Florence affirms this aspect of the nationalist narrative of Akbar to a great extent. Rushdie’s Akbar may not be simply celebrated in the novel but he is hardly criticized as such; like many who study this historical period Rushdie seems to have succumbed to the charm of this exceptional figure.

The centrality of Fatehpur Sikri in The Enchantress of Florence, despite the fact that the city mentioned in the title is Florence, can be explained by the centrality of Akbar whose creation Fatehpur Sikri was. Akbar is the most interesting and developed character in the novel, one of the main protagonists, and both the recipient of the stranger’s tale and its judge. Fatehpur Sikri is in many ways portrayed as an extension of the emperor Akbar in the novel, the mirror of his mood, character and world view. This representation is in line with historical accounts which claim that “Fatehpur Sikri is Akbar himself congealed into stone, strong, sharp, and vital. Daringly original. Open, eclectic, soaring, yet earthy. And full of surprises” (Eraly, 2000: 179). In historical accounts Akbar is associated with other places and cities as well, such as Agra and Lahore, but Rushdie’s focus on Fatehpur Sikri may be explained by the fact that Akbar’s 14 years in Fatehpur Sikri are considered “the most innovative years of his reign” (Beach, 1987: 24). Bruce B. Lawrence argues that for his “bold attempt at imposing communal harmony through royal fiat and obedience to the emperor”, Akbar “required both for its genesis and for its rapid implementation the geographic isolation and scenic awe that Fatehpur-Sikri provided” (Lawrence, 1987: 92). Akbar, and by extension his city, represent the Indian capacity for synthesis and hybridity in both Indian nationalist historiography and in the novel. However, in nationalist discourse, this talent for syncretism is considered something intrinsically Indian, whereas in the novel, the emphasis is on its universal relevance: “Sikri, shimmering in the heat like an opium vision. […] In this place he would conjure a new world, a world beyond religion, region, rank and tribe. […] his wizardry would magick all the land, and the future, and all eternity” (43).

Translating Mughal architecture into narrative form

The key characteristic of Mughal architecture during Akbar’s reign was a syncretism that resulted in an architectural style which successfully entered into a “highly creative dialogue with local building traditions” and as a result produced a city as “strikingly original” as Fatehpur Sikri (Koch, 1991: 135, 56). In fact, Ebba Koch’s account of Mughal architecture reads like an apt description of the practice of cultural hybridity that Rushdie represents in the novel:

Mughal architecture created a supremely confident style by synthesizing the most heterogeneous elements: Transoxanian, Timurid, Indian, Persian and European. The supraregional character of Mughal architecture sets it apart from the earlier Islamic architecture of the Indian subcontinent and gives it a universal appeal. At the same time, Mughal architecture was not strictly dogmatic, and remained flexible towards regional conditions and building traditions. (1991: 31)

The elements of Mughal architecture which exemplify traits of the form of hybridity that the novel promotes are its confidence in creating something new out of a variety of influences, its “universal appeal” and its flexibility and openness in responding to and learning from specific encounters such as that of Akbar with the stranger who claims to be his uncle. The architectural and aesthetic influences on Mughal architecture also have a narrative equivalent in the novel: the Transoxanian and Timurid elements are represented by the history of Akbar’s ancestors and Shaibani Khan; the Persian, Ottoman, and the European parts correspond to the terrain covered by Qara Köz and Argalia’s stories. This hybrid tale draws on an enormous variety of histories and narrative traditions and incorporates characters from other stories such as Umar the Ayyar from the Persian Hamza Nama or the names Angelica and Argalia from the Italian Orlando epics by Ariosto and Boiardo. However, despite the range of influences, the novel’s narrative style is not fragmented; the narrative structure, tone, and style integrate the various elements in a way that resembles the palace architecture of Fatehpur Sikri.

What characterizes the layout of areas and buildings at Fatehpur Sikri’s palace complex is their arrangement in a sequence of enclosed but connected spaces (Petruccioli, 1987a: 61). The palace’s “shared axes and linked courtyards” create a setting which allows movement “from one carefully ordered space to the next” (Lowry, 1987: 33). Individual enclosures often encompass a wide, open space, but a space that is nevertheless contained. In the novel, this spatial arrangement is mirrored in the way the narrative structure enables the orderly progression from one story to the next. Individual stories are given generous room to unfold, but they are also linked by the frame narrative. These narrative “enclosures” order the sequence of stories in a complex way, but this complexity does not feel confusing, since every episode is completed in its allocated and clearly demarcated space. For example, the episode of the memory palace opens up a space for the telling of Argalia’s story within the second, Florentine part of the story and within Machiavelli’s storyline; the slave Angélique, who is reduced to a receptacle of the memory palace, narrates Argalia’s story by systematically traversing the interconnected “story-rooms”, which fill the space where her sense of self had been (184). Thus, besides demonstrating what a precarious place this narrative space can be for women, the memory palace’s strand of stories constitutes a good example of the complex but clearly ordered narrative architecture of The Enchantress of Florence on the level of both form and content.

The hybrid tale is structured in such a way that the diverse elements keep their distinct character but the sum of all parts nevertheless constitutes a coherent whole, similar to the structure of Fatehpur Sikri’s palace which “has a phantasmagoric variety of spaces, but it still manages to maintain a unified appearance” (Petruccioli, 1987b: 57). In Akbari architecture this is partly achieved through the use of red sandstone as building material which mollifies “[s]tylistic clashes resulting from the amalgamation of such heterogeneous elements” (Koch, 1991: 43). In The Enchantress of Florence several stories are interwoven in the novel, mainly those of Niccolò Vespucci, Antonino Argalia, and Qara Köz, which are integrated with Akbar’s story, the functions of which are manifold: Akbar’s narrative is the frame story as well as a story that is both informed and influenced by the telling of Niccolò Vespucci’s tales. Akbar’s own story is not contained by Vespucci’s but determines it up to a point, makes it possible and invalidates its ending. Thus Akbar’s story is the unifying structure of the hybrid tale and Fatehpur Sikri becomes the site from where the Persian, Ottoman, and Florentine tales are judged. ⁵

Symmetry is another key characteristic of Mughal architecture. Significant buildings such as the House of Private Audience and structures like the pool Anup Talao in Fatehpur Sikri follow the perfect symmetry of the square with its connotations of balance and order. According to Attilio Petruccioli, Mughal sovereigns evinced a “passion for geometrical order” because they “believed that the geometrical harmony of their territory, towns, and architecture was the best testimony to their power”, since geometrical harmony symbolized the just order Mughal rule provided (Petruccioli, 1987b: 58, 50). This “passion for symmetry”, as represented in the city’s layout and the design of its individual structures, is translated into narrative form in a variety of ways in The Enchantress of Florence (Richards, 1987: 70). Rushdie’s use of language, for example, tries to capture and emulate this sense of harmony and proportion created by Mughal architecture. The novel’s tone is calm and measured and the rhythm evenly paced; the narrative voice does not seek to confuse but patiently explains and reveals all pieces of information necessary for understanding these wondrous and fantastical tales. The stories encompass an enormous amount of locations, characters, and historical detail but the narrative does not feel cramped or dense, very unlike previous novels where Bombayesque cacophony was replicated in the narrative style and “everybody talked at once” (Rushdie, 1995: 350). Even though Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Last Sigh are first person narratives, the novels are decidedly polyphonic and the narrator’s voice “has to shove its way through the throngs” (1995: 128). In contrast, The Enchantress of Florence’s third person narrative comprises many narrators who all sound very similar. Fatehpur Sikri’s symmetrical and well-ordered layout also translates into a narrative atmosphere in The Enchantress of Florence which is dissimilar to any of Rushdie’s previous novels; in particular in the parts set in Fatehpur Sikri the novel creates an atmosphere which is conducive to meditation and philosophical speculation.

Fatehpur Sikri is portrayed as a place that exceeds expectations and which enables encounters and experiences that take the characters by surprise. In his book Place and Space in Modern Fiction, Kort argues that there is an element of the unexpected in meaningful and positive place-attachments, an element that is like a “gift”:

Positive place-relations cannot wholly be accounted for in terms of expectation and planning. There is something gratuitous and surprising in positive place-relations. […] Positive place-relations hold gifts that we do not know we need and desire so much until we receive them. (Kort, 2004: 200-201)

The novel represents Fatehpur Sikri as a site where Akbar feels confident to be open to the voices of the marginalized and to listen to those who are not usually deemed worthy to be heard; he is willing to learn lessons in hybridity from foreigners, his enemies, his female relatives, and his imaginary lovers, by allowing himself to be curious about other ways of living. Following the lead of the defeated Rana of Cooch Naheen, Akbar decides to create the Tent of the New Worship: “In the heart of his victory city he would build a house of adoration, a place of disputation where everything could be said to everyone by everyone on any subject, including the non-existence of God and the abolition of kings” (36). As well as creating an arena where the most blasphemous and scandalous notions could be discussed, Akbar is also portrayed as being unable to silence his own seditious voice, which questions the legitimacy of his absolutism. His power as absolute monarch and his role in keeping order in his realm are hard to reconcile with his other ideas, namely that “discord, difference, disobedience, disagreement, irreverence, iconoclasm, impudence, even insolence might be the wellsprings of the good” (310). Fatehpur Sikri is represented as a space that allows Akbar to follow his flights of fancy and think the unthinkable.

The Enchantress of Florence creates an alternative positive and creative hybridity to the haphazard working of the Bombayesque hybridity of the crowd. Fatehpur Sikri is represented as an enabling space that allows cultural hybridity to thrive and which also values the disputatious and the dialogic. The novel demonstrates that orchestrated cultural synthesis can surpass what had existed before as part of different cultural traditions when a space is provided where cultures, ideas, and people can meet in a creative fashion. However, Fatehpur Sikri as an enabling hybrid space is juxtaposed with a decidedly more Bombayesque place, namely Renaissance Florence. This juxtaposition of Florence and Fatehpur Sikri in The Enchantress of Florence encourages an interrogation of the cities’ similarities and differences; at times, the cities appear to be mirror images of each other and at other times opposites.

From an historical perspective, the contrast between the two cities is certainly striking: Renaissance Florence was the mercantile capital of a small Italian province whereas Fatehpur Sikri was for 14 years the capital of the vast Mughal empire. The Enchantress of Florence also emphasizes the difference between the two cities. Life in Renaissance Florence is depicted as lived in public, in bustling piazzas and crowded streets in contrast to the quieter Fatehpur Sikri. This Florentine way of life exerts an irresistible fascination for Akbar:

Akbar was walking the streets of that other stone city in which nobody ever seemed to want to stay indoors. The life of Sikri took place behind drawn curtains and barred gates. The life of this alien city was lived under the cathedral dome of the sky. […] What did it mean to be a man so completely among men, and women too? (141).

Akbar, feeling “so strong a sense of kinship with the denizens of these braying lanes” (142), recognizes in Florentine openness and exhibitionism aspects conducive to the inquisitiveness of his own personality and he ponders questions of identity and intersubjectivity: “Did the crowd enhance one’s selfhood or erase it?” (141). Florentine life also inspires the other inhabitants of Fatehpur Sikri; the tales that Mogor dell’Amore circulates about exotic Florence intrigue the citizenry of Fatehpur Sikri who display a “growing interest in the drink-sodden daily life and sex-crazed nocturnal culture of faraway Florence” (200).

Ultimately, however, the novel suggests that Renaissance Florence and Fatehpur Sikri are more similar than they are different. Both cities are represented as enchanting, cosmopolitan places; both are described as beautiful, magnificent, and extraordinary but only Florence is described in gendered terms: “Imagine a pair of woman’s lips […] puckering for a kiss. That is the city of Florence, narrow at the edges, swelling at the centre, with the Arno flowing through between, parting the two lips […] The city is an enchantress” (141; emphasis in original). Both cities are depicted as renowned for their citizens’ love of festivities and spectacle.

In stressing the similarity between the two cities, the novel implicitly gestures at the trope of the mirror, one of the key spatial images of The Enchantress of Florence. This trope of the mirror also relates to Mughal architecture’s love of perfect, mirror-like symmetry and is another example of the way the text translates Mughal aesthetics into narrative form in order to explore the concept of hybridity. Mirrors function as a means of insight in the novel by showing the characters that they can learn much about themselves if they look at themselves through the eyes of others; they can thus notice how different but also how alike humans are. Both insights are crucial to a constructive hybrid encounter, because basic similarities enable a cultural encounter in the first place. Yet cultural distinctiveness, without which a concept such as cultural hybridity would be meaningless, is represented as paramount in providing the characters with a meaning-constituting context: “This was what was left of a human individual when you took away his home, his family, his friends, his city, his country, his world: a being without context [… facing] the profound absurdity of the human condition” (175). This is a lesson Nino Argalia learns while abandoned in the fog after a skirmish between Andrea Doria’s mercenary fleet and the Ottoman navy. And, despite his consequent successful hybrid transformation into a Janissary, he is represented as lacking a meaningful mooring until he falls in love with another uprooted character, Qara Köz, and returns with her to his home city, Florence.

The image of the mirror is also closely linked to the novel’s representation of women. Only female characters are paired up with characters who are mirror-like reflections of them: Qara Köz has her servant the Mirror, the Florentine prostitutes Scandal and La Matterassina have their equivalent in Mohini and Mattress in Fatehpur Sikri’s House of Skanda and the Queen Mother has an echoing servant, Bibi Fatima. Qara Köz is also perceived as a representation, and hence mirror, of Florence and inherited this position from Simonetta Vespucci, which is confirmed by the Medicis’ magic mirror; furthermore Qara Köz mirrors Jodha’s status as imaginary royal companion. Thus the novel’s women are inextricably linked with the mirror trope and its connection to Mughal architecture. Consequently, the female figures become fundamental to the novel’s architecture rather than being convincing characters in their own right. However, the novel’s women, in particular Qara Köz, also serve more constructive purposes in creating enabling spaces for themselves and each other.

Creating enabling spaces

In the third part of the novel, Qara Köz (as Angelica) manages to create an enabling and liberating space for herself in Florence comparable to Akbar’s creation of Fatehpur Sikri, albeit on a less spectacular scale. But the text frequently acknowledges the limitations which even a woman of her status and charms faces and therefore her feat of enchanting Florence is represented as the greater one: “against impossible odds in this alien world she would make her own kingdom” (257). The fact that Qara Köz traverses a great part of the globe from East to West is also portrayed as a remarkable achievement made possible by her ability to replace the protection of one man for that of another. That is why she comes across as manipulative and as a femme fatale for all men who fall for her. Despite her extraordinary skills as sorceress the novel emphasizes that her journey’s path is confined by the necessity of having opportunistically to swap one space protected by an infatuated male with another. Even after her demise, Akbar only hears her story through a male voice, that of her alleged son. However, her story is nevertheless one of repeated transgressions of all kinds of boundaries, made possible by her exceptional beauty and her powers of enchantment (and at the end she manages to reclaim her story and finishes it herself).

Qara Köz is represented as truly coming into her own once she expands the space of her enchantment from spellbinding men in her close vicinity to having an entire city fall under her spell. She is represented as both borrowing some of Florence’s enchanting qualities as well as newly defining the city’s self-image: “Within moments of her coming she had been taken to the city’s heart as its special face, its new symbol of itself, the incarnation in human form of that unsurpassable loveliness which the city itself possessed. The Dark Lady of Florence” (275). Miracles are attributed to her and she is worshipped like a saint: “Qara Köz unveiled […] had come into the fullness of her womanly powers and was exerting the full force of those capacities upon the city, misting the air with a benevolent haze which filled the thoughts of Florentines with images of parental, filial, carnal and divine love” (278). Her mission is one of cultural hybridity as stated by Argalia: “She comes here of her own free will, in the hope of forging a union between the great cultures of Europe and the East, knowing she has much to learn from us and believing, too, that she has much to teach” (276). This grand mission of hers differs radically from her previous feats, which aimed at her own survival and prospering. But we might ask to what extent she achieves cultural hybridity. She creates a space for herself rather than merging different cultural traditions. Nevertheless the love she inspires is represented as constituting the prerequisite for any kind of creative cultural encounter and the people of Florence perceive her coming amongst them as an attempt to reconcile “forces that might appear irreconcilable” and therefore as a “symbol of peace” (285-286).

The most visible and tangible effect of Qara Köz’s creation of a space of her own is her habit of flânerie. The novel emphasizes that her behaviour is radically new and daring, since she refuses to behave like a typical aristocratic lady of Florence, “apart from the common people” (277). She and her Mirror are represented as transgressing barriers of class and gender:

It was plain that both she and her Mirror were relishing their new unveiled existence. By day the princess went out to walk the thronging streets, going to market or simply seeing the sights […] deliberately making herself visible as no great lady of Florence had ever allowed herself to be. The Florentines loved her for it. (277)

This behaviour is not depicted as an adoption of Florentine mores, and neither is it a tradition she picked up on her travels. Historically, women’s relation to urban space is characterized by restrictions that limit unhindered movement, especially for upper-class women in Renaissance Italy and to an even greater extent at the Mughal court. ⁶ So what enables this daring behaviour on the part of Qara Köz and her maid is not so much a product of cultural hybridity as a product of their status as privileged outsiders. The novel emphasizes that Qara Köz enjoys an exceptional status in Florence as a beautiful, exotic foreigner, a princess under the protection of a mighty warrior; this exceptional status makes her transgressions possible because the surprising and unusual are already expected of her. Being uprooted frees her to invent new roles and new spaces for herself and other women who copy her behaviour.

However, as the novel suggests, the most promising places for the creation of something new are cosmopolitan spaces that are confident in their own cultural distinctiveness and curious about otherness. Florence is represented as an enabling space because of its willingness to be enchanted. The novel portrays Florence as a place that makes it possible for a woman like Qara Köz to reach her potential as the people’s enchantress, something she can at least partly transport to Fatehpur Sikri, which is similar to Florence in its confidence about its cultural distinctiveness and curious about the tales from the exotic West. When Sikri’s inhabitants tell their children “the stories of the hidden princess” and are “exhilarated at the possibility that she might actually be seen in public”, adopting her as the “people’s princess”, it is evidently testimony to her creative and enduring powers of enchantment (324). ⁷

The novel abounds with images of enchantment, and enchanters and enchantresses crowd its pages. The novel’s enchanters, witches, and sorcerers are the writer’s counterpart in the novel, since they also conjure things up out of thin air and can make them (almost) real; they are the writer’s mirror image in being able to re-create reality or our perception of reality: “The creation of a real life from a dream was a superhuman act, usurping the prerogative of the gods. In those days Sikri was swarming with poets and artists, those preening egotists who claimed for themselves the power of language and image to conjure beautiful somethings from empty nothings” (47). The novel may bathetically inflate the writer’s claim to creation through enchantment here but the text ultimately affirms literature’s creative role and links the writer’s powers of enchantment to that of the supreme enchanters in the text: Akbar, Qara Köz, and Niccolò Vespucci. Enchantment is represented as a means of enabling the creation of something new and is therefore connected to the concept of cultural hybridity. And The Enchantress of Florence, of course, deploys a narrative space whose model of hybridity is meant to enchant. Hybridity and enchantment enable each other; yet creating an enabling space through enchantment in a city susceptible to the allure of cultural hybridity such as Florence is nevertheless represented as a challenging and dangerous feat. Enchantment may transcend class and gender barriers in the city, but it also defines gender boundaries. The novel emphasizes the closeness of the image of the witch and the enchantress; after six years of Qara Köz’s enchantment, her powers are depicted as weakening and eventually, after the death of Duke Lorenzo de’ Medici, the people turn on her and call her “witch” (296). Thus enchantment is shown to have a darker side and its limits; its magic does not always work and can be particularly dangerous for women. Nor does Niccolò Vespucci’s enchantment through storytelling work in the end, since Akbar’s dismissal of the final instalment of his story, which was meant to prove his parentage and his status as Akbar’s relative, also sees him banished from court. Like Qara Köz, his powers of enchantment enable him temporarily to become part of his adopted city, but eventually he is forced to flee. Both expulsions signal the failure of the experiments with cultural hybridity.

Both cities finally reject those outsiders who had been supremely inspiring and enchanting, reforming the cities’ inherent tendency towards the inclusion of cultural otherness, which constitutes a vital part of the cities’ flourishing. Qara Köz in Florence transforms gendered behaviour and liberates women up to a point, while Niccolò Vespucci’s tale revives Fatehpur Sikri with Florentine élan and contributes crucially to Akbar’s philosophy of inclusion. When the enchanters are forced to escape, both cities are eventually punished in the same way by lack of water; in Florence the River Arno remains dry for over a year and in Fatehpur Sikri the lake’s water mysteriously recedes. Water is a prominent, multifunctional, and malleable image in The Enchantress of Florence, which, with its reflective surface, is also linked to the mirror imagery and the novel’s concern for symmetry. The drying up of life-giving water signals the decline of Florence and the end of Fatehpur Sikri’s status as the empire’s capital but it also stands symbolically for the withering of the cities’ cosmopolitanism. At the end, Akbar understands the nature of Niccolò Vespucci’s curse:

It was the future that had been cursed, not the present. […] But once he was gone, all he had thought, all he had worked to make, his philosophy and way of being, all that would evaporate like water. The future would not be what he hoped for, but a dry hostile antagonistic place where people would survive as best as they could and hate their neighbours and smash their places of worship. (347)

Historians still speculate as to why Akbar chose to “abandon [Fatehpur Sikri] so soon and so abruptly” (Richards, 1987: 66). In The Enchantress of Florence, Akbar’s ambitious policy of cultural synthesis is intimately connected to the city Fatehpur Sikri and when the city is doomed, the decline of Akbar’s vision is bound up with it. On the level of content, Akbar’s hybrid project is to some extent declared a failure in the novel, but on the level of form, this hybrid tale with its dazzling “Mughal” structure delivers a different verdict on the possibilities of hybridity; on this level hybridity is shown to be a force for abundant creativity and inspiration. Rushdie’s representation of Mughal hybridity does not constitute a revision or critique of Bombayesque hybridity but the exploration of a different form of cultural encounter, an encounter that is carefully nurtured and orchestrated from above. Despite the novel’s emphasis on the failings of Akbari hybridity and its élitist character, this deliberate, confident, and sophisticated experimentation with hybridity is something that the novel promotes as an ideal to hold on to, to cherish, and develop. What The Enchantress of Florence stresses is the excitement and pleasure one gets out of the encounter with the other and the rewards for being curious.