ABSTRACT
Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh is a trenchant postcolonial mise-en-scene of the reformer's implication in the very oppression that she seeks to eradicate. Elephants, reminders of a golden Indian past, and of hydra-headed imperialism and nationalism in this allegorical tale, are thus contested metaphors to be appropriated by a linked chain of post-enlightenment reformers from British colonialists to nativist elite hybrid Aurora Zogoiby. From this counter-allegorical allegory in Rushdie's Moor's Last Sigh, this chapter reviews the work of James Cobb (1756-1818), an office-holder of the East India company, whose late eighteenth-century plays about crosscultural encounters anticipate Rushdie's examples of the imagination of coloniality5 at work on transnational fictions of reform. As to the first scenario of exploration and aggression, Cobb's age was one of rapid global changes triggered by commerce and global warfare. Human 'nature' is used to put cultures and women in their appropriate places within enlightenment hierarchies, to transform so-called cacophony into harmony.
