Salman Rushdie

Personal life

Ahmad Salman Rushdie, born 19 June 1947 in Bombay, India, is an Indo-British novelist and essayist. He was sent to study in England when he was fourteen. Since that time, he has spent most of his life studying and working in England. In numerous essays and interviews, Rushdie describes himself as a migrant writer and much of the “difficulty” of his work emerges from this migrant status. Rushdie was educated in India and in England. After he had studied history, he was an advertising copywriter. As he points out, the influence of Islam has been powerful, though he does not consider himself religious: “The fact that I would not call myself a religious person, doesn’t mean that I can reject the importance of Islam in my life. If you are trying to write about that world, you cannot make a simple rejection of religion. You have to deal with it because it’s the centre of the culture.” (Smale, 31).

Literary work

Salman Rushdie published his first novel Grimus 1975. Though it was unsuccessful, he won around 30 prizes and titles with his work in Sweden, Italy, USA, Austria, India, and Great Britain. With his second novel Midnight's Children (1981), he won the Booker Prize in 1984 and the Booker of Bookers in 1993. In 1983, his third novel “Shame” had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and with The Satanic Verses (1988), he won the Whitbread Prize in 1988. Besides his many novels (his last one The Golden House in 2017), he also published two children’s books: Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and Luka and the Fire of Life (2010). His main works deal with religious and intercultural topics, and his best works are always politically controversial. They deal with contemporary and historical India and Pakistan, and with Western cities with large populations drawn from parts of the world which emerged from Western imperial conquest, what makes Rushdie not only a postmodernist, but also a postcolonialist. Although most critics accept that Salman Rushdie is a postmodern writer, it is hard to find a category for the complexity of design in the novels. His works, especially his novels, are a playful acknowledgement of the power of popular culture to engage and move the people. His works help us understand the major cultural shifts of the last 50 years. Rushdie raises uncomfortable issues about identity in a fast-changing world without steady values. That is why he got into big trouble in the late 1980's when he had offended many Indians and Pakistani due to the politically controversial topics in Midnight's Children, Shame (1983), and The Satanic Verses. Rushdie’s media status and literary success were not universally celebrated: In numerous articles and interviews, Rushdie engaged with political and social issues ranging from the politics of Indian partition to Thatcherism and racial oppression in Britain. The cynicism surrounding Rushdie is clearly evident in some of the reviews of the satanic verses.

The Satanic Verses

Salman Rushdie in Big Trouble

Rushdie was perceived to be directly attacking the foundations of a world religion in The Satanic Verses. With this novel, Salman Rushdie is said to offend Muslims (and Christians), who called the book blasphemous and arranged book burning events. Furthermore, Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran at that time, proclaimed a fatwā condoning and actively approving of a possible execution of the author on 14 February 1989. Nevertheless, “95% of what has been written about the book in India has been by those who have not read it” (Smale, David 28). Though protesters against the novel received no satisfaction from British law, the Satanic Verses was banned in India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa. The immediate response of the British media to this was somewhat muted, though Thatcher is part of the book's satire (Ball, 116). When the novel was banned in India in October 1988, for example, the Times dedicated just five lines, and the Guardian a mere four lines, to reporting the event. Furthermore, before the publication of the Satanic Verses, Rushdie had been at the forefront of anti-racist debates in Britain. He frequently made use of his high media profile to support the cause of ethnic minorities by attacking the policies of the then-Conservative government.

The Content

Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta provide the most direct image in Rushdie’s fiction of the post-colonial subject in collision with this world (Cundy, 66). Saladin has fulfilled his desire to leave India, to make the journey from Indianness to Englishness (correlation to Rushdie). He consolidates the diffuse elements of his identity by the end of the text so that he perfectly managed the migration act. The Satanic Verses deal with the postcolonial topics of Indian identity, cultural hybridity, exploitation, reincarnation, mental illness, faith and doubts, and racism. It clearly reveals that multiple and frequently divergent discourses have emerged out of the postcolonial diaspora. In this way, the novel illustrates the migrant’s problems of self-contextualisation (of being both located and dislocated) (Cundy, 66). It is as much about changing identities as loss of religious faith; many of its devices – such as the use of the same names by more than one character – add emphasis to this central preoccupation. The migrant’s dilemma (to change, risking loss of faith and identity, or to try to hold on to a consistent idea of selfhood) lies at the novel’s heart, and provides its unexpected denouement. It is written out of the very experience of uprootedness, disjunction, and metamorphosis that characterises the migrant condition, and that condition can itself serve as a metaphor for humanity at large (Erickson, 133). In relation to Rushdie’s special style of writing, one of the most important features of Rushdie’s texts is that, even within the course of such a diatribe, he is playing with words and with the structure of sentences. Both the Satanic Verses and Midnight’s Children were attacked for their structural looseness, but nevertheless, Rushdie speaks of the process of hybridisation which is the novel’s most crucial dynamic. It is a dynamic created from the dialogism of multiple textual voices – dissenting, lying, and asserting identity against a tide of demonisation. The text’s disruptive narratives and dream sequences are indicative of and can be interpreted as the empire messing with identity.

Rushdie and Postcolonialism

Salman Rushdie admires himself as a secular, postmodern, postcolonial, Third-world cosmopolitan migrant. Therefore, he addresses in his writing the postcolonial migratory movement after the decolonization 1947 when India became independent. This movement was so massive that nowadays, postcolonial migrants make up 7 to 8 per cent of the total British population. Though postcolonial immigrants were often assisted by metropolitan government, the Indian migrants struggled with racism, with the cultural and religious differences and transnationalism. These problems of the immigrants are well known by Rushdie himself and therefore in his novels. “Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.” He locates himself in a space somewhere outside or apart from that of dominant religious, political, and social structures of Islamic and European countries (Erickson, 129). Through his writing, Rushdie is seen to explore his own migrant status. (Smale, 89). His texts deal with the immigrant experience in Britain that captures the immigrants’ deam-like disorientation and their process of “union-by-hybridization. Rushdie’s use of the genre of magical realism creates the turn from history into amnesia and the blurring boundaries of fact and fiction, of location and dislocation, past and present, memory and history to show that reality is often imagined and imagination often becomes reality (Erickson, 131). The blurring boundaries and the impurity in the novels are accompanied by the novel’s self-continuous use of pastiche and non-linear writing. The pastiche is the juxtaposition and overlapping over realist, magical realist and modernist modes, the parodic rewriting of historical and religious narratives. “Pastiche and formal ambivalence are the very conditions that enable the literary texts to enter the public sphere as political act” (Aamir, 53). As a postmodern author, Rushdie uses satire to relate to the concrete history of colonization (Ball, 10). “Satirists discover in the past an image of pristine integrity, in relation to which their contemporary situation signifies a falling off into ambiguity and doubleness” (Ball, 9). Satire here reveals the desire to return to an original pre-colonial relationship with the sense of a community that gave you birth (Ball, 10). Furthermore, all satire is at least in part an attack on imperialism and focuses on contemporary, post-independence neo-colonialism (Ball, 10). These intricate relations of affiliation and potential compromise are explored in “Midnight’s children through the figure of the Chamcha. Meaning “spoons”, Chamcha point to intimacy and, indeed, complicity between the authority of colonialism and its colonial subjects. These are, moreover, relations that continue into the postcolonial context through “the rise of the domestic collaborators, the corrupt neo-colonial elite.” The casual invention of parallel worlds in space and time and the debt to Bollywood film techniques indicate the postmodern character. Also Margaret Thatcher was a target of Rushdie’s satire. AS the leader of the Conservative party, she tightened control over immigration by passing the British Nationality Act in 1981. Citizens of Britain’s dependent countries or former colonies could no longer take citizenship for granted. In 1988, Thatcher also passed the Immigration Act.

Bibliography

Ball, John Clement. Satire and the Postcolonial Novel: V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie. New York and London: Routledge, 2003.

Blake, Andrew. Salman Rushdie: A Beginner’s Guide. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2001.

Cundy, Catherine. Salman Rushdie. Manchester: MUP, 1996.

Erickson, John. Islam and Postcolonial Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Grant, Damian. Salman Rushdie. Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers, 1999.

Mufti, Aamir R. Enlightment in the colony. The Jewish question and the crisis of postcolonial culture. Oxfordshire: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Smale, David. Salman Rushdie. Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.