So I made a mental note of renting the film whenever it became available. I knew of the Jodha-Akbar film through my son’s obsession with Mumbai cinema, and then an acquaintance raved about it after watching it on the big screen. But to get to the meat of the subject: the Jodha-Akbar chemistry - the real or not so real, the allegorical or simply metaphorical nature of the relationship-and this is where the Mumbai film joins the discourse. Could a King be separate from his subjects and from his mirror image? That is the idea behind this story. The royal ‘We’ represents a King and his subjects as one. He wants to relate to her in a manner that was truly ‘himself’ that is an ‘I’ not a ‘We’. “Shelter of the World” is a tale of Akbar’s enthrallment with an imagined wife, a Jodha of fantasy, a mirror image he had created. I was annoyed by the pulling together of the apocryphal, the reworking of old ideas - even epithets - and, frankly speaking, the unabashed cashing in of ‘cultural knowledge’ which is Rushdie’s forte. To be as brief as possible, ‘disgruntled’ was how I felt when it was over. I saved the story for my in between read time, but I must admit that I was tempted to read it all at once. In any case, Rushdie’s "short fiction" caught my eye as soon as I fished the New Yorker from my mailbox. At this point, I must confess that I am one of them.
It is an esoteric community of South Asian literature fans who communicate with one another through the reified channels of mailing lists, blogs and discussion-boards in the worldwide web. Yet the improbable common audience does exist. While the average Mumbai cinema aficionado is highly unlikely to have even heard of Rushdie despite his Satanic Verses disrepute, it is equally unlikely for the average New Yorker reader to have an appetite for Indian cinema, the popularity of Indian cuisine notwithstanding. It is rare for a subject of Mumbai cinema and a magical realist writer’s imagination, to coincide, but such an astonishing simultaneity has actually come to pass: Salman Rushdie’s short fiction, " The Shelter of The World,” ( New Yorker, Feb 25 2008) and Ashutosh Gowarikar’s film Jodha-Akbar (released February, 2008) came out around the same time.
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