A Feminist Study of Salman Rushdie's Enchantress of Florence

In The Enchantress of Florence (2008), the story begins with the Mughal past of India, during the reign of Akbar when a traveller comes to the king's court and wants to share a secret with the king. The traveller's own history is episodic spanning many delocirs into exotic lands and regimes and his secret even more complicated. It is about a woman endowed with magical powers that holds men captive, ensnares them and so captivates their imaginary that they become her willing slaves. Thus the main theme of the novel revolves around sex and eroticism. The traveller to the Emperor Akbar's court claims to be his long lost relative who was the son of Qara Koz, the exiled sister of Babur. Akbar's grandfather. She had married an Italian from Florence. This is because of the intent of the author to link the East with the West. One of the characters in the novel states this thematic thrust very clearly when he says. "The curse of the human race is not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike." Basically, the novel celebrates a kind of a vanished world that never was inter-relating the real with the unreal.