Fictionalizing History in Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence

Abstract

Salman Rushdie'sThe Enchantress ofFlorence(2008) is a novel which dissolves history as the matter of facts. By exposing how history hides its fiction and highlights its fact to meet their subjective goal, Rushdie aims at establishing fictitious matters to construct history. In the novelThe Enchantress of Florence,Rushdie has fictionalized the history of the hedonistic Mughal Capital, in which the brilliant Akbar the Great wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire, and the treachery of his sons, and the equally sensual Machiavelli takes a starring role as he learns, the hard way , about the true brutality of power. The study highlights a reconstructing of traditional history through Rushdie's art of writing back of the history of Mughal Empire in the mould of new historical scenario. Rushdie has written the history of the imperial power of Mughal Empire in fictional form highlighting the concept that all historical accounts are narratives. The way Rushdie reconstructs the official recorded history is that all historical analysis is unavoidably subjective inThe Enchantress of Florence. This is a qualitative research fully based on secondary resource i.e. several reviews in national dailies, reputed magazines, online exploration, libraries research, instruction of guides and recent research drafts carried out on this novelhave beenindispensable sources for the thesis, different interviews with the novelist by the different national & international newspapers which explores full-fledged outstanding in order toconclude thatRushdie’sversion of fiction is a twisted, a rewriting and redefined history.