ABSTRACT
There is an intriguing relationship between Salman Rushdie's novel The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) 1 and a BBC documentary film, The Lost Portrait (1995). 2 The film mingles the narrative of Rushdie's novel and his commentary on the book with his mediated journey to India in search for a lost portrait of his mother. This is a portrait that was allegedly painted before Rushdie's birth by an Indian painter, and subsequently re-used as a canvas for another painting by another emerging artist. Furthermore, the film documents the painting of Rushdie's own portrait by yet another Indian artist. All in all, the film captures the metaphorical literary quality of layered narrative in very concrete terms. In my essay, I discuss both the metaphorical visual elements in the novel, and the film's narration in Rushdie's search for the lost portrait. These overlap and contradict each other, yet they both evolve around the possibility and necessity of palimpsest reality. I will discuss what the literary, artistic, and philosophical corollaries of such an approach might be, and how this appears in Rushdie's work in more general terms.
