SOURCE: "Salaam Bombay!," in New Republic, Vol. 214, No. 12, March 18, 1996, pp. 38-41.

In the following review, Wood offers a mixed assessment of The Moor's Last Sigh.

In 1835, Macaulay threw out one of those phrasal boomerangs that returns not to arm but to maim its sender: "A single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India." In this century, Macaulay has been paid back by Indian literature for that untruth: he has been pelted with masterpieces. The two most significant novelists working in England—V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie—are Indian in origin. Both have made comic war on English condescension, and both have made peace with their now enriched victim. Rushdie in particular has seemed to want to tip a shelf of European books into his novels in reply to Macaulay, to want to make his books costive and prodigal and bursting...