Global Migrancy and Diasporic Memory in the work of Salman Rushdie

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Global Migrancy and Diasporic Memory in the Work of Salman Rushdie

Global Migrancy and Diasporic Memory in the Work of Salman Rushdie Stephen J. Bell

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2020 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020944011 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii 1 Introduction1 2 Remembering the Past, Writing/Righting History

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3 The Politics of the Palimpsest

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4 Pitting Levity against Gravity

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5 Of Untranslated and Translated Men

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6 Conclusion157 Bibliography179 Index187 About the Author

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Acknowledgments

Those closest to me know what a labor of love this book has been. Because I first began developing ideas for the manuscript during the summer of 2008, my family must have believed at times that the conclusion of the journey would be endlessly deferred: my very own Scheherazadean Arabian Nights or Kathasaritsagara. I am deeply indebted to my beloved wife, Brianne, who extended patience and grace as I spent a series of summers away from home reading, researching, and writing. Vast appreciation goes to my parents as well for continually encouraging me, praying for me, and convincing me that the accomplishment of this dream was an attainable achievement. Both instilled a love of reading in me at an early age, and my mother, Barbara, is still one of my most valuable sounding boards whenever I want to substantively discuss literature and film. My father, Bruce, is my inspiration and role model, serving as the trail-blazing pioneer who earned his doctorate in business administration from Walden University. Finally, endless gratitude goes to lifelong friends Janet and Aaron Kurtz, who not only opened their home and their furnished basement to me at various points over the past number of years to think and write concertedly but also welcomed me in for the entirety of the summer of 2013 so I could write the first draft of the manuscript itself. Aaron’s wonderful meals and Janet’s willingness to listen to sections of chapters in progress made the entire process so much easier and provided just the accountability I needed to complete this massive undertaking. Special thanks goes to my dissertation director at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Lingyan Yang, whose tireless work on my behalf in coordinating defenses, carefully reading and commenting on my proposal and chapters, responding to countless emails, and affirming my scholarship on Rushdie encouraged me more than she’ll ever know.

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Acknowledgments

Finally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Salman Rushdie himself, whom I met in July 2009 at a conference with Keystone College in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and who told me that my dissertation topic on his work, which represents the foundation of this book as well, sounded promising and on target. Reading his exuberant Midnight’s Children for the first time in 2001 not only put a new favorite novel in my “Top Three” list but also encouraged my interest in other works of contemporary world fiction and defined the trajectory of my teaching career as a professor of world literature. Although Rushdie is often the strongest explicator of his own novels, making any critical writing seem rather redundant, I earnestly hope this book makes at least a small contribution to the growing field of Rushdie scholarship. One final note: this book was completed during the often bewildering days of quarantine in response to the global coronavirus pandemic. While working on my final chapter, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Benjamin Franklin’s own frustration over his disrupted composition of the Autobiography because of the urgent imperatives of the American Revolution: “The affairs of the Revolution occasion’d the interruption.” Or Kafka’s reputed dissatisfaction with the ending of his Metamorphosis, blaming its perceived artlessness on the fact that he had to often interrupt the flow of his concentration to go on business trips for the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute. As Paulina in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale humbly implores, what “I did not well I meant well.”

Chapter 1

Introduction

Salman Rushdie is widely considered one of the most significant and recognizable contemporary anglophone authors of the past thirty-five years. Even before the notorious fatwa issued by the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran thrust him into the global spotlight for his allegedly blasphemous literary treatment of the Prophet Muhammad in The Satanic Verses, he was internationally celebrated for his 1981 Booker-prize winning novel, Midnight’s Children, which many early reviewers recognized as a kind of postcolonial Tristram Shandy. So influential was Midnight’s Children that in 1993 it won the “Booker of Bookers” prize, celebrating the most important novel to win the award since its founding in 1969. His early fiction, in particular, including Midnight’s Children, Shame, and The Satanic Verses, has sold so many copies and been translated into such disparate numbers of languages that (justly or unjustly) his words and voice have re-articulated from an Indian perspective the history and the peoples of the entire subcontinent for those only acquainted with British versions of it. In fact, Graham Huggan maintains without hyperbole in his The Post-Colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins that Rushdie’s success and literary influence almost singlehandedly re-directed attention to other postcolonial authors from what was then termed the “Commonwealth” (such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Arundhati Roy, and Amitav Ghosh) who otherwise may have gone unnoticed.1 As Ishiguro writes of his 1982 novel, A Pale View of Hills, “I received a lot of attention, got lots of coverage, and did a lot of interviews [because] everyone was suddenly looking for other Rushdies.”2 Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay in 1947, two months before India won its independence from England. His parents, secular Muslims who felt that the “multiplicity of commingled faiths and cultures”3 found in Bombay would create a safer environment than Delhi once Partition occurred, moved 1

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from the northern capital to the more cosmopolitan city on the Arabian Sea, thus establishing before Rushdie’s birth the author’s intimate ties to his beloved “Gateway to India,/Star of the East/With her face to the West.”4 Although his formative years were spent in India, he moved to England in 1961, where he was sent by his parents to receive his formal education, first at Rugby School, then at King’s College, Cambridge; it was while reading history at King’s College that he first encountered the controversial episode from early Islamic history of the “satanic verses” in a special subject independent study as part of his history tripos. His parents’ relocation to Karachi, Pakistan, in 1964 allowed Rushdie to move briefly to Pakistan in 1968 after finishing his degree to work with the national television service; however, his distasteful experience of state censorship encouraged him to move back to England the same year, where his work as an advertising copywriter supported him until his writing career gained traction.5 Even though his first novel Grimus (1975) was a critical failure, his novels beginning with Midnight’s Children (1981) almost all have received favorable recognition and multiple awards. Shame (1983) won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre étranger and was even given a literary award in Iran upon its publication. Rushdie’s sympathetic position toward the dispossessed and politically disempowered earned him an invitation to visit Nicaragua in 1986 as a guest of the Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers, an experience which he records in his 1987 travelogue The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey. The Satanic Verses (1988), short-listed for the Booker Prize, won the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel the same year. Although the fatwa announced on Valentine’s Day 1989 forced Rushdie into hiding under the protection of the British Special Branch, he continued to write prolifically, publishing his children’s book written for his young son Zafar, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, in 1990 (winner of the Writer’s Guild Award). This was followed by his essay collection Imaginary Homelands (1991); a British Film Institute monograph on The Wizard of Oz (1992); the short story collection East, West (1994); and his first full-length novel to be published after The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), which went on to also win the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award. Although his later work published since his move to New York in 1999, including The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999), Fury (2001), Shalimar the Clown (2005), The Enchantress of Florence (2008), Luka and the Fire of Life (2010), Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015), and The Golden House (2017), has not met with the same level of critical acclaim as his early fiction, his second book of essays, Step across This Line (2002), as well as his memoir, Joseph Anton (2012), reveals him to still be one of the most politically engaged and culturally relevant of contemporary authors. He was officially knighted in 2007 for his services to the field of literature.

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This book examines Salman Rushdie’s major works for the ways that they incorporate postcolonial and postmodern theoretical approaches to celebrate the importance of memory and to advance the critical role of the past in defining identity for characters and nation-states, despite the frequent prerogative of migrants to translate themselves into new creations through a dismissal of the weight of the past. Yet it will lay particular emphasis on the moral significance that Rushdie places on engaged commitment to the world, especially the world of the subcontinent and his own past, to which he remains bound “if only by elastic bands.”6 If “exile is a dream of glorious return,” as one of his characters reflects in The Satanic Verses, few diasporic writers living today rival Rushdie for the singular inspiration he draws from memories of home and the past.7 Rushdie’s major works, as well as his two collections of critical essays and published memoir, will be considered here for the ways in which he utilizes memories of the past as the wellspring of the self, without whose grounding one suffers “disorientation: loss of the east.”8 Yet the historical experience of migrancy loosens those ties to place, language, and tradition, creating a potentially unmoored state at the frontier between cultures while opening up for Rushdie the possibility of what he terms “multiple rootedness.” These major works and criticism include his often-forgotten first work, Grimus (1975); his Booker-prize-winning novel about the birth of the modern nation of India, Midnight’s Children (1981); his companion novel on the troubled emergence of Pakistan, Shame (1983); and his most notorious work about the perils and benefits of migration, The Satanic Verses (1988). Rushdie’s post-fatwa works will also be considered to explore the way that his own enforced absence from India and the South Asian subcontinent has altered his attitude toward home and roots and how his vision regarding the foundational power of the past has remained the same. However, since individual chapters will be arranged thematically, and not devoted to chronologically examining each major work, this book will not primarily seek to chart a progression in Rushdie’s subject position from his pre-fatwa to post-fatwa fiction but rather to illuminate the various ways in which memory, of such crucial concern to the fields of postmodern and postcolonial theory, plays a critical role in identity formation for individuals and nation-states in a majority of his novels and criticism. Later works to receive substantial attention in this book include his first children’s novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990); his collection of short stories, East, West (1994); his final major novel to be predominantly set in India, The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995); his tribute to the boundary-transgressing power of rock and roll, The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999); his least wellreceived novel about turn-of-the-century life in Manhattan, Fury (2001); and his examination of the tragedy of Kashmir and the scourge of global

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terrorism, Shalimar the Clown (2005). Finally, Rushdie’s early collection of vigorous, theoretically rich essays, Imaginary Homelands (1991); his more recent compendium of essays and articles, Step across This Line (2003); and his chronicle of the “plague years” of the fatwa, Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012) will provide cogent self-analysis of his own work. Because a more recent work like Luka and the Fire of Life fails to offer the same substantial commentary on the trope of memory from within the parameters of postcolonial and postmodern discourse, it will not appear in this critical analysis. However, a concluding chapter will briefly consider the prolific recent stage of Rushdie’s writing career since he began serving as a writer in residence at Emory University and New York University and reflect on the ways in which the themes of centripetal migrancy continue to define his work. From his earliest works and essays, Rushdie has obsessively interrogated the uses, roles, and perils of memory. He recognizes that memories of the past humanize us. While never irrefutably true in recall, the intentional act of remembering, of attempting to recover the fleeting, transitory moments of the past in order to preserve them from the annihilation of time, can serve as an inherently moral activity. Rushdie thus invests his own writing with continual considerations of the power and urgency of historical memory in all its hybrid complexity. While his appropriation of dominant postmodern and postcolonial tropes of ambivalence, migrancy, fragmentation, and hybridity seems to pit him squarely against seemingly stable categories of land, home, and belonging, his own work negotiates the tension between a commitment to roots and a drive toward rootlessness, a longing for home over and against a fevered desire for “away.” His 1982 essay, “Imaginary Homelands,” traces the consistent fissures and instability in attitudes toward the past that will come to dominate his life work. After indicating that “writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back,” he immediately acknowledges that “our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.”9 In other words, the dislocatory, disruptive experience of migrancy itself forcefully drives home for Rushdie the often-exhilarating reality of the decentered subject—a composite being “contaminated” by too much history—which puts on and sloughs off various versions of the self as if they were no more than temporary masks. And yet, at virtually the same moment, he celebrates Saleem Sinai’s quest to secure meaning, however fragmented, individualized, and partial, for himself (and for India) by “chutnif[ying] history” and “pickling” time through looking backward in Midnight’s Children,10 and sympathizes with the anglophilic Saladin Chamcha in The Satanic Verses, disgusted by both his father’s

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nationalism and “increasingly impatient of that Bombay of dust, vulgarity, policemen in shorts, transvestites, movie fanzines, pavement sleepers,”11 when he doubles back to the lost walnut tree of his youth and the “magic lamp” of his childhood overlooking the Arabian Sea and embraces with Zeeny Vakil the city of Bombay once again. Even the global celebrities, Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama, from Rushdie’s later work, The Ground beneath Her Feet, who appear to be valorized for their rootless determination to refuse affiliations of all sorts, for “step[ping] out of the frame”12 and transgressing cultural, racial, and geographical frontiers of all sorts, are equally chastened by Rushdie for embracing a kind of blithe commitment to globalized popular culture detached from ties of local significance. “There is only one place for every human being and always one place that gives you the feeling of being at home,” Rushdie claims in a 1995 interview. “I was born in Bombay and even now going to Bombay is the only time when I have the feeling of coming home.”13 So vital is the idea of home and belonging to Rushdie that, notwithstanding the frequent charges of his critics that he represents no more than a disconnected cosmopolitan, I would categorize his position as one of “centripetal migrancy.” The word “centripetal” comes from the Latin, with centrum “center” and petere “to seek,” forming the idea of a constant quest for the center. Isaac Newton describes the mechanics of centripetal force in his Principia as “that by which bodies are drawn or impelled, or in any way tend, towards a point as to a centre.”14 Although Rushdie has regularly acknowledged the irretrievable loss of home in his position as a diasporic migrant, that “imaginary homeland” of the mind continues like a phantom limb to announce its presence repeatedly throughout his work. An exchange that takes place early in Shalimar the Clown clearly expresses the paradoxical position of the centripetal migrant, longing for home and open to the power of the past to shape character and identity, yet fully aware of the impossibility of returning to a mythic point of origin. Olga Simeonovna, the superintendent of an anonymous apartment complex in Los Angeles, laments with other Eastern European émigrés the loss of her past, stranded as they are in a kind of “shadowless lotus-land full of the obscenely young.”15 Olga reveals her liminal status to U.S. ambassador Max Ophuls, himself originally from Strasbourg, France, by stating, “I live today neither in this world nor the last, neither in America nor Astrakhan. [. . .] A woman like me, she lives someplace in between. Between the memories and the daily stuff. Between yesterday and tomorrow, in the country of lost happiness and peace, the place of mislaid calm.” Max’s response is telling: “I too am a national of that country, madam. [. . .] I too have lived long enough to acquire citizenship there.”16 Having emigrated from the past, centripetal migrants are consumed with an inconsolable ache to return, yet ideas of the homeland carve out a new citizenship for them—one bounded not by the anthems, flags, and often fierce

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territoriality of the nation-state but rather the power of personal memories to construct their identity. Salman Rushdie’s fiction and critical writing from early in his literary career have always been marked by a vociferous postcolonial critique of the abuses of colonialism and imperialist ideologies. While his early fiction examines the ways in which reckless British policies in India facilitated the tragedy of the Partition Riots or allowed for (as Rushdie believes) the hastily created “wrong miracle”17 of Pakistani nationhood, his essays from Imaginary Homelands and his novel The Satanic Verses decry the racist attitudes and legislative actions on the part of British leaders which he sees as the sad legacy of imperialist aggression. Indeed, American neo-imperialist cultural power is also critiqued in later works such as The Ground beneath Her Feet, Fury, and Shalimar the Clown. The primary political force of his early novels and essays resides in his desire to “write back” and contest past descriptions and understandings of the South Asian subcontinent and its inhabitants, an act which his vantage point as a centripetal migrant makes uniquely truthful. While British authors such as Kipling and Forster sought to capture the “real India” in their works, Rushdie reveals their narrative observations to be highly motivated attempts at privileging Eurocentric modes of understanding while ignoring or erasing the perspective of Indians themselves. Rushdie’s work therefore serves to recuperate the complexity of Indian experience by not just narrating the birth of the modern postcolonial nation in such works as Midnight’s Children and Shame but also marginalizing British characters and moving his South Asian characters from the periphery to the center of his narratives. Indeed, in his magisterial Satanic Verses, he renders England strange and exotic and rewrites its modern history almost exclusively from the perspective of its immigrants, who are shown to be mostly responsible for its dynamic and creative potential. Interestingly, however, Rushdie has always disavowed the label of the postmodern to describe his style of writing. While critics have often celebrated Rushdie’s open, plural texts which routinely serve to disrupt, challenge, and decenter received understandings of history and totalizing interpretations of truth, Rushdie asserted in a 1984 interview that “it’s not an ideology of fiction to which I subscribe. Because I do think books are about the world.”18 Here Rushdie appears to be renouncing a kind of Baudrillardian postmodern understanding of reality composed of various forms of simulacra disconnected from their original sources; such a notion would therefore reject the referentiality of a fictional text to history and the world itself,19 something Rushdie has strenuously resisted ever since his failed attempt at ahistorical fantasy writing in his first novel, Grimus (1975). Notwithstanding his objections, his writing does bear strong traces of other postmodern influences.

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Rushdie’s own reading of history in the 1960s at Cambridge encouraged him to recognize the ways that the discipline of history itself stands as a human construct providing only a partial record of events and that it must be situated in the field of what postmodern theorists would call historiography. According to Linda Hutcheon, “In arguing that history does not exist except as text, it does not stupidly and ‘gleefully’ deny that the past existed, but only that its accessibility to us now is entirely conditioned by textuality. We cannot know the past except through its texts.”20 Rushdie’s fiction accordingly may be defined as instances of “historiographic metafiction,”21 self-reflexive and theoretically self-aware novels and stories that serve to redescribe and renarrate the past from the avowedly limited perspective of the individual artist. By acknowledging and foregrounding the limitations of his own imaginative vision, Rushdie demonstrates his own “incredulity toward [such] metanarratives”22 as European colonialism and religious fundamentalism of all stripes, which have sought to consolidate and coherently structure ultimate meaning through exclusion of marginalized and ex-centric elements. Another strand of postmodern practice that Rushdie appropriates is the Barthesian notion of intertextuality. Roland Barthes writes in “The Death of the Author” that “a text is [. . .] a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”23 While Rushdie would contradict Barthes’ rejection of the primacy of the authorfigure to construct meanings in a text, he does affirm the many complex and multi-lingual streams of influence that combine in fresh and new ways in his novels. Rushdie’s acknowledgment of his indebtedness to such disparate literary forebears as Sterne, Tagore, Dickens, G. V. Desani, Kipling, Gogol, Cervantes, and Garcia Márquez testify to the powerful translinguistic and transcultural energies he believes are to be gained through textual crosspollination. Such a multicultural literary method also decenters the idea that the Western novel, and indeed historical truth itself, is entirely homogeneous and monolithic; through his dialogic introduction of seemingly incompatible “voices” in the same space, Rushdie refuses “to privilege one language above all others, one set of values above all others, one text above all others.”24 One of the clearest points of convergence between postcolonial and postmodern theory as concerns Rushdie’s work would be the decentering that he frequently reveals when East and West collide as a result of the historical impact of colonialism. Jacques Derrida’s assertion in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” that a “de-centering had come about at the moment when European culture—and in consequence, the history of metaphysics and of its concepts—had been dislocated, driven from its locus, and forced to stop considering itself as the culture of reference”25 speaks to the radical destabilization that Rushdie opens up for such

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colonial characters as the Anglican priest, Oliver D’Aeth, in The Moor’s Last Sigh. D’Aeth and his fellow British futilely seek to “construct a mirage of Englishness”26 by Anglicizing the landscape with traces of British influence and prestige. But unlike self-assured British protagonists from nineteenthcentury works of fiction who are successfully able to impose their dominant vision and ideology on top of the land and its inhabitants, Rushdie ensures that India to D’Aeth represents “uncertainty . . . deception and illusion”27 and that pure “Englishness” cannot ever be successfully replicated. As Homi Bhabha would argue, the attempt on the part of the English to inscribe their identity wholesale on an alien landscape serves to undermine their authority by revealing the ambivalence that always lay at the heart of the colonialist enterprise. The strongest connecting thread between Rushdie’s postmodern and postcolonial approach, however, undoubtedly lies in the ways that his postmodern acceptance and celebration of the plurality, discontinuity, and heterogeneity of the self fit naturally with his own experience of cultural hybridization as a postcolonial “Indo-Anglian” writer. Such an understanding is made possible by both his cosmopolitan upbringing in Bombay at the intersection of many cultures and languages and his direct, intimate knowledge of the bewildering displacements and multiplicity of new perspectives born out of the experience of migration. Questions of memory and the most truthful ways to define and understand the past dominate postmodern and postcolonial discourses. Since postmodern theory would often deny that we have access to stable “ground beneath our feet” when we seek to understand our own histories, preferring to employ instead the decentered, fragmented, and discontinuous style of pastiche, critics of the postmodern method affirm that it divorces one from an attitude of rigorous historical engagement. As Timothy Brennan notes in his essay “Shame’s Holy Book,” the postmodern exercise of parody, accumulation of media images and intertextual references from a variety of sources, and cynical quoting of popular culture serve to help us forget and foster a kind of historical amnesia.28 Postcolonial literatures at first blush would appear to be much more invested in the importance of the past in constructing identity. As Gayatri Spivak has noted, “The general mode for the postcolonial is citation, reinscription, rerouting of the historical.”29 Because Imperialist discourse sought to represent the native frontier as nothing more than a blank spot to be written upon with European names, categories, and ideas, many postcolonial authors and theorists have recognized the vital importance of recovering a distinct national and cultural heritage that was erased or otherwise covered over during the colonial moment. The revival of lost languages, values, and histories and the contestation of false descriptions imposed by European influence thus constitute an empowering political act and mode of rhetorical resistance. The

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distinction between the postcolonial and postmodern would appear to be so pronounced that M. D. Fletcher will argue that the difference between the postcolonial and the postmodern entails “the ‘recuperative’ as opposed to the simply deconstructive.”30 And yet postmodern practice can serve dramatically counter-hegemonic purposes that have a concrete effect on the praxis and politics of life. By continually interrogating and destabilizing notions of the “center” as nothing more than arbitrary constructions perpetuated by those in power, the “historiographic metafiction” that Rushdie writes also reinscribes and reroutes the past in fresh ways, which a deconstructive and postcolonial feminist critic such as Spivak clearly affirms. Indeed, the postmodernist’s assertion that perceptions of reality itself are relative and tenuous seems particularly well-suited to Rushdie’s historically situated examination of the manifold consequences of migration. Rushdie himself self-consciously acknowledges the relationship between postcolonial migrancy and postmodernism when he claims in a 1984 interview that “if you arrive in society as a migrant, your position is automatically a dislocated one, and so you have to work out a literary mode which can allow that kind of conflict of descriptions to take place in it. [. . .] I do feel that physical and geographical displacement makes you selfconscious about your position.”31 Despite his experience of fragmentation and dislocation, however, Rushdie’s status as a centripetal migrant ensures that he always labors to construct “ground beneath [his] feet” out of concrete memories of his past. Just as postmodern thought entails more than just a carefree disregard for history, postcolonial theory is also far from uniform in its attitude toward the past. While many early critics sought to effect decolonization of the native mind by recovering an essential, precolonial self untainted by a European influence, seeking to restore originary roots of language, culture, and history, authors such as Achebe, Walcott, and Rushdie recognize with theorists such as Said and Bhabha the extent to which a postcolonial nation’s language and history is always already inescapably hybrid. Unlike Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who rejects the English tongue because of its association with brute conquest and the culturo-ideological uses it had been put to in the past for the consolidation of power, Rushdie sees English as it has been “Indianized” and localized by the South Asian subcontinent to now be a legitimate vernacular language, capable of transformative and contestatory purposes. Rushdie’s works thus fuse postmodern and postcolonial considerations in order to both deconstruct and rehabilitate the past. While he undermines absolute and totalizing interpretations of history and the necessity of concrete “roots” imposed by both British and subcontinental authorities through his textual emphases on unreliability, fluidity, hybridity, and ambiguity of perspective, he also insists on and draws “strength and inspiration [from not

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only] the broad community of British Asians and the broader community of Indian Muslims” but also the many different literary and cultural parents that have shaped his art.32 Such a marriage between an awareness of the fragmentation of the past and the need to recuperate and preserve it finds a perfect metaphor in the process of “chutnification” that Rushdie describes in Midnight’s Children. While Saleem memorializes the past through pickling it and placing each episode in a separate jar for the sake of the future, the hybrid combination of disparate elements that such chutney preparation requires foregrounds the indeterminacy and potential unreliability of memory as well. As Todd Giles writes, “Pickling makes anew in much the way we remake reality every time we think and experience it.”33 Rushdie’s critics have typically been divided into two separate camps: those who celebrate the boundary-crossing potential of his fiction, which destabilizes tired, essentialist notions of the self and re-energizes world literature with his pyrotechnic, heavily allusive, and hybrid use of language; and those who claim that his insertion of intertextual references, his refusal of any one unitary national or ideological identity, and his unwillingness to pay more than token lip service to subaltern identities and marginalized groups mark him out as a privileged cosmopolitan intellectual whose work is politically disabling. Those in the former category, including such leading postcolonial, poststructuralist lights as Edward Said (Culture and Imperialism 1993), Gayatri Spivak (Outside in the Teaching Machine 1993), and Homi Bhabha (Nation and Narration 1990, The Location of Culture 1994), utilize discourse analysis and such poststructuralist emphases as hybridity, mimicry, and ambivalence to chart the ways that Rushdie’s work opens up new space for a vigorous mode of art that becomes political in the way it unsettles fixed notions of identity, rewrites both the center and the periphery from his position as a migrant, and challenges “official organs of power”34 in both the West and the East by re-describing reality in fresh new ways. Nicole Weickgennant Thiara, Jaina Sanga, Robert Bennett, Sabrina Hassumani, Mark Mossman, Paul Cantor, Bill Ashcroft, and Graham Huggan join their voices to those of Said, Bhabha, and Spivak by marking out the ways that Rushdie’s postcolonial approach and celebration of heterogeneity, migrancy, and liminality render him one of the most relevant and theoretically sophisticated novelists living today. Huggan, in particular, notes how Rushdie’s exotic and (to his critics) neo-Orientalist depictions of the South Asian subcontinent serve as instances of a “staged marginality” that selfconsciously overturns and subverts Western expectations and narrates India, Pakistan, and Kashmir from an “insider’s perspective.” On the other hand, there are critics such as Timothy Brennan, Aijaz Ahmad, Harveen Mann, and Shailja Sharma who contend that Rushdie’s class position renders any political critique he may intend toothless and ideologically vacuous. In other

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words, his dalliance with poststructuralist deconstructive practice potentially “muddies the waters” of a more responsible ideological affiliation with the oppressed and the voiceless. Inderpal Grewal further notes (which Spivak has also recognized in her Outside in the Teaching Machine) the difficulty Rushdie has in narrating women and in providing female characters full subjectivity and agency. As Spivak relates, “One of the most interesting features about much of Rushdie’s work is his anxiety to write woman into the narrative of history.”35 His high modernist style and postmodern inclusion of untranslated references to Joyce, Beckett, and Eliot (to name only a few) further ensure that his work will go unread by the very South Asian migrants in East London and native inhabitants of Kerala or Mumbai or Dacca for whom he purports to speak. Finally, his claim to “multiple roots” is read as an irresponsible sampling of different cultures, styles, and subjects that is only possible to someone of his educational background, class, “freak fair skin and . . . ‘English’ English accent,”36 something Rushdie has himself observed from a point early in his writing career. Of course, as a diasporic migrant, Rushdie is already self-aware of his own limitations and would never presume to speak for a homogenous “Third World” or claim that his voice represents all members of the South Asian subcontinent. Indeed, his plurality of perspective has always sought to contest what he terms the “bogy of Authenticity . . . the respectable child of old-fashioned exoticism”37 in favor of a strategic eclecticism whose discursive interrogation of totalizing representations of identity proves to be an effective form of resistance. A third strand of Rushdie criticism that has emerged in the last decade or so questions the author’s relevance and insight since the famous 1989 fatwa, which interrupted not only his writing career but threatened his life as well. As evidenced by his post-9/11 critiques of anti-Americanism and seemingly fervent support of President Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (Step across This Line 2003), as well as his fictional move away from the South Asian subcontinent in favor of England and America (The Ground beneath Her Feet, Fury, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, The Golden House, Quichotte), Anshuman Mondal and Stephen Morton question whether Rushdie has become too complicit in the forces of globalization and multinational capital and withdrawn himself too much from the political urgency of his earlier fiction and essays. As Morton relates, “His recent fiction and essays seem to suggest a resignation to, and even at times tacit approval for, America’s unilateralist foreign policy in the early twenty-first century, and in particular the Bush administration’s war on terrorism.”38 While such a critique does have some weight, even a cursory read of one of Rushdie’s more recent novels, Shalimar the Clown, reveals the ways that Rushdie sees U.S. foreign policy and its naked assertion of cultural and military power (allegorized by the self-interested character of

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counter-terrorism chief Max Ophuls) to be at least partly responsible for the scourge of global terrorism and the creation of militant extremists in the twenty-first century. While I certainly see and can appreciate all sides of the debate regarding Rushdie’s location, including both his noble efforts at reinscribing the centrality and importance of the exilic voice and his relative failure to fully accomplish such reinscription in ideologically satisfying ways, I would situate myself more squarely in the camp of criticism that sees Rushdie’s liminal position of centripetal migrancy as powerfully enabling. Even his more recent fiction opens up new space by emphasizing the “interdependent histories [and] overlapping domains”39 that exist in the admixture of the East and the West, past and present. Indeed, the fairly easy binary opposition of cosmopolitan “rootlessness” over and against national grounding is continually deconstructed by Rushdie. As Spivak indicates, “Writing as a migrant, Rushdie still militates against privileging the migrant or the exilic voice narrowly conceived. [. . .] Within this turned-away-ness, Rushdie plants the migrant’s other desire, the search for roots as far down as they’ll go.”40 Chapter 2 of this book recognizes the extent to which the past is contested terrain according to postcolonial and postmodern theorists such as Edward Said, Benedict Anderson, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Gayatri Spivak, Robert Young, and Linda Hutcheon. Rushdie’s fiction always explores the subtle operations of memory and preserves a balance between the moral prerogative to reclaim the past and an awareness of its provisional, fragmented quality. His embrace of postmodern historiography allows him to see the ways in which history itself never qualifies as an objective, disinterested act, but is always motivated by particular interests. Accordingly, chapter 2 first traces the ways in which Rushdie consistently exposes the textual and artificially constructed nature of history from his earliest novels and essays and dismantles Orientalist expectations of India and the South Asian subject both at home and abroad by rewriting and recalling their history from the perspective of the margins. This transformed perspective undermines the Western need of the subcontinent as a repository of exotic and spiritual differences. It also inverts past racialized portrayals of the East by depicting “whiteness” as a form of radical Otherness and exposes the extent to which Orientalist language is used to authorize a type of discursive violence against subcontinental subjects and diasporic migrants. Indeed, as Homi Bhabha points out, Rushdie’s fiction literally “redefine[s] the boundaries of the Western nation, so that the ‘foreignness of languages’ becomes the inescapable cultural condition for the enunciation of the mother-tongue.”41 The stuttering character Whiskey Sisodia famously articulates this notion in The Satanic Verses when he reveals that the “trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means.”42 Such a redefinition constitutes what Sara

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Suleri terms “secular blasphemy,” as it enacts a revolt against the firmly established perspectives of those in power. Chapter 2 concludes with Rushdie’s identification of instances of erasure and falsification of the past on the part of subcontinental leaders who have attempted to construct and fix their own unitary version of history for purposes of state control. Not only does he take to task the amnesiac propensity of the subcontinental subject, but he also identifies the problematic tendency of Indian and Pakistani authorities to regularly twist the truth to stoke the flames of nationalistic and sectarian pride. However, Rushdie continually advocates for the right of the individual postcolonial artist to challenge such official versions and to insist on the freedom of postmodern positions of indeterminacy, ambiguity, and undecideability in defining the past. As his narrators regularly intone, “It was so, it was not so.” Chapter 3 examines the ways in which Rushdie foregrounds the metaphor of the palimpsest in each of his works (but most forcefully in Shame and The Moor’s Last Sigh) as a postcolonial and postmodern model for memory and the reading of history, which if it (history) “creates complexities, let us not try to simplify them.”43 Rushdie’s entire writing career has sought to create a suitable metaphor in his fiction for the complexity and heterogeneity of the past that captures his own experience as a diasporic migrant “buffeted by too much history.”44 Rejecting both the nationalist’s desire to restore an authentic past, free of any trace of the colonizer’s language, history, or identity as well as the approach of a conservative, relatively deracinated South Asian writer like V. S. Naipaul, who seems to have internalized a repulsion for preWestern influences, Rushdie continually emphasizes the hybrid and permeable quality of the past and of postcolonial identity, which constitute a kind of parchment written upon by a multiplicity of sources, each one significant and valuable. The depth model of the palimpsest is closely allied with a spatial understanding of national and individual identity as composed of overlapping layers. Appropriately, Rushdie makes use of a palimpsestic understanding of reality to affirm the activity of boundary-crossing of all kinds, including the transgression of generic categories in his employment of magic realism and his insistence on surrealist alternate realities. He regularly celebrates the benefits of mélange over and against strict categorization, yet never endorses false, empty hybridity stripped of the weight of historicity. Rushdie’s rhetorical employment of the palimpsest particularly serves as an antidote to the narrow, exclusionary politics of the subcontinent, which seeks to erase the traces of marginalized, subaltern voices in favor of the monologic identity of groups in positions of dominance; the metaphor therefore serves as an effective tool in the arsenal of an artist to whom memory stands as such an urgent moral imperative.

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His adoption of the paradigm of the palimpsest, which affirms simultaneous and successive “inscription and reinscription [. . .] [thus] acknowledge[s] the extent to which cultures [are] not simply destroyed but rather layered on top of each other, giving rise to struggles that themselves only increase the imbrication of each with the other.”45 As Saleem Sinai affirms in Midnight’s Children, “I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-theworld affected was affected by mine.”46 Such an approach seeks to preserve all the traces of the past and advocates remembering the nations of Pakistan and India (in addition to migrant communities in England and America) as fully layered multiplicities rather than false and forced singularities. Chapter 4 examines Rushdie’s appropriation of Milan Kundera’s exilic conundrum that seeks to understand and integrate the contrasting experiences of lightness (migrancy and diaspora) and weight (home, belonging, and memory). The chapter attempts to argue that Rushdie, just like Kundera, critiques a disaffiliated “lightness of being” as irresponsible and careless since both authors seem to valorize the importance of committed memory and engagement with rooted, political realities. As the angel Damiel wistfully laments his abstract angelic state in Wim Wenders’ celebrated 1987 film Wings of Desire, “I don’t want to always hover above. I’d rather feel a weight within, casting off this boundless freedom and tying me to the earth.”47 While critics such as Ahmad and Brennan identify Rushdie with characters in his fiction (such as Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama in The Ground beneath Her Feet or Malik Solanka from Fury) who blithely reject “home, kinship, the whole enchilada”48 in favor of the jouissance of stepping across lines and ignoring boundaries, such critics don’t pay nearly enough attention to the concomitant nostalgia for the past (particularly for his polyphonous, teeming city of Bombay) equally inscribed in his work. Ahmad and Brennan interpret Rushdie as a rootless cosmopolitan, disconnected by his elite status from the material experiences of national belonging, political engagement, and serving as a self-appointed spokesperson for the subcontinent to the West by peddling the East’s exotic wares. Yet chapter 4 argues that Rushdie’s continued commitment to a forceful critique of political inequities through a policy of rhetorical “rowdyism,” as well as his subversive employment of Mikhail Bakhtin’s category of the carnivalesque, contradicts most of his critics’ claims regarding his disempowered subject position. In addition, Rushdie’s frequent fictional associations of flight from the past and from committed belonging with guilt and self-erasure indicate the importance he places as a centripetal migrant on the defining memories of home, belonging, and roots. The and final will critically assess the repeated dynamic in Rushdie’s fiction of the metaphor of translation. In his essay “Imaginary Homelands,”

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Rushdie notes that “the word ‘translation’ comes, etymologically, from the Latin for ‘bearing across.’ Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.”49 Noting that Rushdie combines the words “migration,” “metaphor,” and “translation” to each characterize the experience of being “borne across,” chapter 5 will illuminate the fact that all three terms involve a transformation/ transaction of identity rather than a simple substitution of a new reality for a former one. The chapter focuses primarily on the ways that Rushdie charts a course between an excess of memory (represented by the ghettoized mentality that refuses to be “translated” despite a historical and geographical experience of migration and dislocation) and a complete absence of memory, signified by anglophilic and Westernized migrants who wish to shed the skin of the past and must repeatedly warn themselves, as Saladin Chamcha does, to “look out for your shadow. That black fellow creeping up behind.”50 Such a racialized statement of self-loathing obviously has much to do with Frantz Fanon’s critique of the ways that the colonial encounter has scarred the black psyche and caused some migrants (like Chamcha) to internalize a sense of their own inferiority; Fanon’s theories are accordingly used in mapping out the ways that those particular characters in Rushdie’s oeuvre who wish to escape or flee the past by fully assimilating to the dominant culture do so at the cost of a pathological rupture to their identities. Yet in place of unhealthy fixation on, or flight from, memory, Rushdie continually upholds the model of the “translated” centripetal migrant. Through a deconstructive technique that emphasizes the fluid plurality of the self made possible by migration, Rushdie indicates that the hybrid Third Space which Bhabha theorizes, and which the centripetal migrant occupies, is productive of new insights precisely because it exists as a liminal zone between past and present. Each chapter of this book thus seeks to substantially advance the critical role that memories of the past play for Rushdie in establishing a coherent and engaged identity for migrants as they transform themselves into complex new creations while continually looking backward to their “imaginary homelands.”

NOTES 1. Graham Huggan, The Post-Colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (New York: Routledge, 2001), 74. 2. Andrew Teverson, Salman Rushdie: Contemporary World Writers (New York: Manchester University Press, 2007), 4.

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3. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism (1981–1991) (New York: Penguin, 1991), 16. 4. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Penguin, 1991), 102. 5. In his 2015 novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, Rushdie playfully sends up his own humble beginnings in advertising before he made it big as a literary artist. The story features an Indian graphic novelist named Jimmy Kapoor trying to get his superhero characters to enter “the divine pantheon” of the DC and Marvel universe even though “tax accountancy in Jimmy’s cousin’s practice on Roosevelt Avenue was beginning, at his low points, to feel like the young artist’s fate,” 66. 6. Salman Rushdie, Shame (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 23. 7. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (New York: Picador, 2000), 212. 8. Salman Rushdie, The Ground beneath Her Feet (Henry Holt and Company, 2000), 5. 9. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 10. 10. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 529. 11. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 37. 12. Rushdie, The Ground beneath Her Feet, 43. 13. Amrit Dhillon, “I am Pessimistic about the Changes Occurring in India,” India Today, September 30, 1995, 137. 14. Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (Chicago: Snowball Publishing, 2010), 10. 15. Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown (New York: Random House, 2006), 8. 16. Ibid., 9. 17. Rushdie, Shame, 93. 18. Kumkum Sangari, “Interview with Salman Rushdie,” The Book Review 8, no. 5 (April 1984), 250. 19. Teverson, Salman Rushdie, 64. 20. Linda Hutcheon and Joseph Natoli, A Postmodern Reader (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), 256. 21. Ibid., 245. 22. Jean-François Lyotard, “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,” in A Postmodern Reader, eds. Linda Hutcheon and Joseph Natoli (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 72. 23. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen no. 5+6, item 3: Three Essays. 24. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 420. 25. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in A Postmodern Reader, eds. Linda Hutcheon and Joseph Natoli (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), 227. 26. Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (New York: Vintage, 1997), 95. 27. Ibid. 28. Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 141–42. 29. Gayatri Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 244.

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30. M. D. Fletcher, Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1994), 7. 31. Sangari, “Interview with Salman Rushdie,” 250. 32. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 434–35. 33. Todd Giles, “Writing and Chutnification in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,” The Explicator 65, no. 3 (2007), 183. 34. Teverson, Salman Rushdie, 15. 35. Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 251. 36. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 18. 37. Ibid., 67. 38. Stephen Morton, Salman Rushdie: Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 117. 39. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 259. 40. Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 250. 41. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2009), 317. 42. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 353. 43. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 65. 44. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 36. 45. Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New York: Routledge, 1996), 173–74. 46. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 440. 47. Wings of Desire, DVD, directed by Wim Wenders (USA: Orion Pictures, 1987). 48. Rushdie, The Ground beneath Her Feet, 177. 49. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 17. 50. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 54.

Chapter 2

Remembering the Past, Writing/Righting History

In his celebrated essay, “Imaginary Homelands,” Salman Rushdie wistfully acknowledges the partial, fragmented perspective that migration to London has forced upon him as he tries to recover his beloved Bombay through writing. Yet “human beings,” he writes, expanding his meditation on the dislocatory, disruptive experience of exile to encompass the human condition itself, “do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions.”1 The difference for diasporic individuals is that they’re forced to come to terms with this basic human limitation far sooner than others. Despite a desperate desire to counteract feelings of “disorientation: loss of the East”2 through recourse to a stable, grounding vision of the past, Rushdie writes that “our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.”3 Although such visions of the past are bound to be incomplete and potentially even fictionalized, Rushdie recognizes the vital task of resurrecting the past in memory as an inherently moral act which both grounds individual and national identity in all its hybrid complexity, while revealing mistruths and false constructions perpetrated by both Western and subcontinental power structures. Memory thus plays a central role for Rushdie as a “centripetal migrant” in establishing him as a passionately engaged and worldly author. The committed exercise of memory regularly grounds his characters by establishing for them meaning, purpose, and identity, while frequent “forgettery”4 not only leads to a state of amoral oblivion and irresponsibility for individuals but also allows politicians and authority figures (both Western and subcontinental) to ideologically substitute their own versions of the past in order to consolidate 19

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power. Because memory is of such central concern to both postcolonial and postmodern theory, it’s no surprise that Rushdie repeatedly insists throughout his fiction and criticism on the need for sensitive migrant artists and intellectuals to attempt to truthfully recuperate the past by insisting on its fragmented, subjective quality. Rushdie’s work continually engages in thoroughgoing counter discourses, challenging false Orientalist constructions of the subcontinental subject by imaginatively redrawing, re-mapping, and reclaiming Indian and Pakistani history. However, even though he reveals the discursive violence wrought by racialized and overly simplistic Orientalist depictions of India and Pakistan and exposes false characterizations of migrant diasporic communities in England, Rushdie never falls into the trap of merely flipping the binary by exclusively remembering and idealizing eastern traditions, languages, and histories through a wholesale rejection of the impact of Western influences. His decision to write in a hybrid “Bombay English” demonstrates the extent to which Rushdie’s complex project of reclamation seeks to remember and enunciate all the linguistic traces that define both the Indian subcontinent and his own identity as a writer. Rushdie’s art also creates “counter memories” that serve to defy false constructions of the past by the leaders of post-independence India and Pakistan. By employing such an oppositional approach to official memory, Rushdie’s work represents a kind of insurgent critique against abuses of power perpetrated by the postcolonial nation-state. Rushdie’s recurrent moral commitment to contesting and opposing “official” versions of the truth by remembering the past differently thus constitutes the most significant ideological goal of his work. As such, he believes that “changes in our discourses concerning the world will produce changes in the material constitution of that world”5 and will establish a more accurate and honest record of the complexity of the past. THE OPERATIONS OF MEMORY Memory is perhaps Salman Rushdie’s flood subject, second only to migrancy, to which he devotes a significant amount of attention in his novels, stories, and critical essays. In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie’s Booker-prize-winning novel of memory, the narrator Saleem Sinai’s father, Ahmed, and his business associate Dr. Narlikar enact an ill-fated scheme to invest in concrete tetrapods, which will create more land for Bombay and allow for future construction contracts that will make them fabulously wealthy. This dream of land reclamation for Bombay is of course a central metaphor for not only Saleem’s narrative method—reconstructing the past through memory—but also Rushdie’s postcolonial and postmodern practice. As he writes in his

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recent memoir of the fatwa “plague years,” “[I] had been interested in reclamation ever since [I] wrote Midnight’s Children to reclaim [my] Indian heritage for [myself], and even before that, in fact, for was [I] not a Bombay boy, and was that megalopolis not itself a city built on land reclaimed from the sea?”6 Yet if postcolonial theorists and writers labor to write back against “cultural denigration, the conscious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality and culture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model,”7 through recovering and foregrounding native traditions, languages, and identities that had been overwritten in the colonial encounter, most postmodern practitioners would also assert, using metafictional devices that undermine absolute interpretations, that such histories are bound to be limited and partial. In concert with the metaphor of the tetrapod in Midnight’s Children, Rushdie also introduces the dominant image of the perforated sheet by which Saleem’s grandfather, Aadam Aziz, examines and courts his future wife, Naseem. In the novel’s opening chapter, Aadam, a Westernized Indian doctor, is called upon on his return to Kashmir to medically treat a wealthy landowner’s daughter, but the pull of conservative and traditional gender relations is so dominant that Dr. Aziz must diagnose his patient’s various maladies by viewing parts of her body through a sheet with an embroidered hole in the middle. According to Saleem, the spell of the perforated sheet not only influences his mother Amina to assiduously struggle to love her second husband, Ahmed, in component fragments but also “condemned me to see my own life—its meanings, its structures—in fragments also.”8 These two metaphors thus constitute one of the primary problematics of postcolonial historiography that Rushdie interrogates throughout his writings: how to truthfully resuscitate the multiplicity of distinctive traces of the past that construct identity for formerly colonized individuals and nationstates while acknowledging the inaccuracies, lacunae, and imperfections that are bound to dominate. The historian Virgil Jones in Rushdie’s first novel, Grimus, anticipating Saleem’s dilemma of recalling history only in part, muses “about the historian’s inability to stand apart and watch; it was erroneous, he would have said, to look upon oneself as an Olympian chronicler; one was a member of the parade. An historian is affected by the present events that eternally recreate the past.”9 Keith Wilson, noting the proliferation of errata and instances of unreliable narration in Midnight’s Children, claims that it is “a novel centrally concerned with the imperfections of any narrative act [. . .] and the impossibility of rendering a reality—however much concerned with public history—that is not petrified into false and subjective form at the point at which an artist attempts to render it.”10 Interestingly, Rushdie reconciles such apparently irreconcilable positions by insisting on the importance of error and

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unreliability in the practice of memory. As he relates, “Memory does that. Even when it’s faced with the facts, it still refuses to accept [them]. Given that [Midnight’s Children] is retrospectively told [. . .] it seemed to me that if you are going to make it accurate, it has to contain that kind of inaccuracy.”11 In other words, as postmodern historiography would paradoxically affirm, one of the key indications that a piece of history is legitimate (“accurate”) is the extent to which the recorder of such events self-consciously recognizes, in a show of epistemological humility, that his or her interpretation is subjective and interested. Such a method, of course, defies Imperialist presumptions of objectivity in defining the native territory and subject population that borrowed from the totalizing forms of knowledge made possible by the European Enlightenment. And yet, despite such provisional claims on the past, Rushdie demonstrates that the intentional exercise of memory is imperative in the construction of a unified, coherent identity and that to be “emptied of history” is the worst of fates. As Saleem points out, “Consciousness, the awareness of oneself as a homogenous entity in time, a blend of past and present, is the glue of personality, holding together our then and now.”12 Those characters who come permanently unstuck from their pasts are repeatedly cast as pitiable at best and monstrous at worst. Since Rushdie’s privileged field of study at Cambridge in the 1960s was history, his fiction is filled with negative instances of those who revolt against (or are stripped of) history and end up ontologically undefined. Saleem’s violent loss of memory when he’s brained by the silver and lapis lazuli family spittoon in Midnight’s Children makes possible a numb, emotionless existence in which his inability to even recall his own name excuses the many atrocities he commits during the War of Bangledeshi independence: “By abandoning consciousness, seceding from history, [he] was setting the worst of examples.”13 In Shame, Bilquìs Hyder’s loss of her clothing, her father, and eventually her country in the communalist firebomb that tears apart her father’s movie theater in Delhi causes her at first to disdain any re-visitation of the painful past although she spends the rest of her life compensating for its loss with a desire for an impossible permanence, fixity, and certainty whenever the hot Loo wind arrives. Rushdie’s narrator expresses Bilquis’ predicament by mournfully suggesting that “all migrants leave their past behind, although some try to pack it into bundles and boxes [. . .] because it is the fate of migrants to be stripped of history, to stand naked amidst the scorn of strangers upon whom they see the rich clothing, the brocades of continuity and the eyebrows of belonging.”14 In his later works, such as Fury, America represents the promised land of rootlessness and vacuous momentby-moment consumerist living for immigrants to her shores who receive a cleansing erasure of past identities and are able to “unself [. . .] the self”15

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through eliminating “the whole useless baggage of blood and tribe.” Malik Solanka, in flight from his memory of trying to kill his own child in a moment of insensate anger, prays for America to “give me a name . . . make of me a Buzz or Chip or Spike. Bathe me in amnesia and clothe me in your powerful unknowing. Enlist me in your J. Crew and hand me my mouse ears! No longer a historian but a man without histories let me be. [. . .] Fly me to the rim of space.”16 Of course, a postmodern author like Rushdie, who eschews absolute positions that provide explanations for human behavior which become too systematic and singular, also manages to insert into his work instances of characters that are undone by an excess of memory. For example, his description of the impact of the purgatorial, phantasmagoric Sundarbans on the three Pakistani soldiers, Ayooba, Shaheed, and Farooq, in which the ghosts of guilt that seek to avenge acts of rape and murder recently committed by the soldiers haunt them in the jungle, includes such language as the “double-edged luxury of nostalgia” and “regress[ion] towards infancy.” Initially, Rushdie makes clear that their retreat into warm memories of childhood, recalling such scenes as a mother presenting “the delicate rice-based sweets of her love,” serves to selfindulgently insulate them from the horror of their recent acts.17 Such empty nostalgia is also decried in The Moor’s Last Sigh when Abraham Zogoiby is told by Cohen, the old Jewish chandler, about the emotional response of Boabdil, the last ruler of Moorish Spain, after he was dispossessed and forced to abdicate the Alhambra. His mother, Ayxa, reputedly emasculates her own son in words of withering scorn: “Well may you weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man.”18 Since Moorish Spain before the Christian Reconquista is made by Rushdie in the novel to stand in for the fabulous, plural, hybrid dream of India before the rise of a narrowly defined Hindu nationalism in the 1980s, it seems clear that any prolonged lament for the death of Nehru’s secular, socialist, unifying vision is ineffectual because it paralyzes the mourner and allows him to ignore the extent to which his inaction makes him complicit in the tragedy: “We were both the bombers and the bombs. The explosions were our own evil—no need to look for foreign explanations. [. . .] We have chopped away our own legs, we engineered our own fall. And now can only weep, at the last, for what were too enfeebled, too corrupt, too little, too contemptible to defend.”19 A final instance of a character who remembers too much is the Indian General Kachhwaha in Shalimar the Clown. Unlike the Pakistani soldiers in Midnight’s Children who could temporarily retreat from the force of their wartime acts into muted nostalgia, Gen. Kachhwaha is grotesquely punished with the inability to forget anything, from the “accumulating detritus of quotidian memories”20 to the horrible atrocities he’s authorized

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in his name: “There was no peace, because the [1965 Indo-Pakistani] war raged on interminably in his memory, every moment of it replaying itself at every moment of the day.”21 Finally, toward the end of his life, he “felt the bloat of memory expanding his body, he was all swollen up, stuffed full of the babel of the unforgotten.”22 The soldier’s gift that had been used early in life as a professional resource for purposes of control and surveillance of “subversives” becomes an unmanageable curse as the flood of history overwhelms him.23 Although memory constitutes such a crucial human imperative and becomes even more freighted with significance for the migrant, who according to Rushdie faces the dislocating loss of three of the most significant classic definitions of the self—place, language, and community—there are those who would contest the legitimacy of the diasporic imagination to conjure up the past at all. Rushdie’s self-conscious narrator in his 1983 novel, Shame, for instance, who acknowledges that he has had to learn “Pakistan in slices,”24 senses that he holds no authority to presume to speak about the nation and its many faults because of his status as a cosmopolitan migrant. In a guilty interior dialogue, he imagines his accuser railing against him: “Outsider! Trespasser! You have no right to this subject! [. . .] Poacher! Pirate! We reject your authority. We know you, with your foreign language wrapped around you like a flag: speaking about us in your forked tongue, what can you tell but lies?”25 Rushdie himself questioned his credentials in “Imaginary Homelands” when he inquired whether those who have chosen to live and write outside of India are “just dilettantes in such affairs, because we are not involved in their day-to-day unfolding, because by speaking out we take no risks, because our personal safety is not threatened? What right do we have to speak at all?”26 Yet in the same essay, Rushdie suggests that the stereoscopic “double perspective” that migrant writers enjoy when they establish their liminal position as both insiders and outsiders to a particular society, “however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be [. . .] is not an infertile territory for a writer to occupy.”27 As Anurandha Dingwaney Needham has indicated, “The right of the expatriate to speak or write [is] precisely because s/he is stationed outside. In this formulation, distance can be made to work; it makes possible, creates the space for a mode of inquiry that is not trapped in dominant ideologies [. . .] by offering alternative histories.”28 Saleem’s description of the way a viewer’s relative proximity to a movie screen affects one’s vision underscores this central truth—the closer one gets to the screen, the more the picture becomes blurred and difficult to determine.29 Accuracy of perspective demands temporal and spatial distance, and only the migrant who has “stepped outside the frame” can remember truthfully and clearly enough.

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ORIENTALISM AND MEMORY One of the most significant obstacles to an honest assessment and reclamation of the past for postcolonial authors and nations has been the ideological power exerted by highly motivated Orientalist constructions of the East that continue to persist today in their neo-imperialist manifestations. According to Edward Said, by the end of World War I, Europe had colonized nearly 85 percent of the globe.30 And yet the demand for natural resources and the need to preserve a balance of power among other European nations by carving out spheres of influence through military and economic means was underwritten in the realm of culture by a systematic attempt in such fields as history, literature, and anthropology to “construe the colonized as a racially degenerate population in order to justify conquest and rule.”31 Mother India, Katherine Mayo’s inflammatory and racialized 1927 report on the essentialized habits of the Indian populace written to discourage their independence from Britain, stands as a preeminent example of such self-reinforcing Orientalist rhetoric: “Inertia, helplessness, lack of initiative and originality, lack of staying power and of sustained loyalties, sterility of enthusiasm, weakness of life-vigour itself—all are traits that truly characterize the Indian not only of to-day, but of long-past history.”32 Non-Western people groups and territories were thus projections by the West of an ideal Other to serve as a discursive foil to Europe. Whereas the industrialized West and its representatives are shown in works of European imperialist literatures to be embodiments of Enlightenment rationality and democracy, always serving as the standard-bearers of history, the “primitive East” is consistently represented as uncivilized, despotic, mystical, and unchanging. Borrowing from the theories of Antonio Gramsci, Edward Said argues that European superiority was thus reinforced culturally through systematic hegemonic domination at the level of ideas which masqueraded as objective, disinterested knowledge, and “precede[d] conquest by force.”33 As Said argues, “To have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. And authority here means for ‘us’ to deny autonomy to ‘it’—the Oriental country—since we know it and it exists, in a sense, as we know it.”34 Rushdie demonstrates his awareness of the lingering power of Orientalist belief structures when Aadam Aziz bridles against the admiration of his German anarchist friends in Heidelberg for Vasco da Gama and their assumption that “India—like radium—had been ‘discovered’ by the Europeans” so “that [Aadam] was somehow the invention of their ancestors.”35 “Exotic” non-Western peoples and histories were accordingly contained, controlled, and domesticated via the distorting lens that Said terms “Orientalism.” If the Western representation of the East in Orientalist rhetoric requires that territories such as India exist in a timeless present until the birth of historical

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awareness and civilization ostensibly inaugurated by British colonialism, Imperialist writing served to textualize colonial lands and discursively overwrite native histories, languages, and cultural customs. As a result, ancient Sanskrit histories such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, as well as the Hindu Puranas, were relegated to the realm of mere myth and placed under the sign of erasure and irrelevance by Anglicists. As Gauri Viswanathan relates in her Masks of Conquest, “The alignment of poetry with falsehood and prose with truth and accuracy successfully dismissed Oriental epic narratives as nothing more than illusion and error,” which made the introduction of more historically based English literature and knowledge to an educated class of Indians of paramount importance.36 Such Westernized Indians, who would willingly cut themselves off from their own traditions, have since been disparagingly termed “Macaulay’s Minutemen” by Indian subaltern historians after Macaulay’s (in)famous 1835 Minute on Indian Education: “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”37 A January 1844 report in the Madras Christian Instructor and Missionary Record conveys the attitude held by many British administrators regarding the relative worth of their own English literature compared to the morally suspect Indian imagination: “A literature so full of all qualities of loveliness and purity, such new regions of high thought and feeling [. . .] that to the [Indian] dwellers in past days it should have seemed rather the production of angels than men.”38 Viswanathan goes on to suggest that Macaulay’s encouragement of the creation of an elite comprador class of Indian intellectuals, trained to embrace Englishness and forget or otherwise minimize their own cultural heritage, would allow the British Raj to consolidate control more effectively.39 As Andrew Teverson relates, Rushdie’s decision to write in English not only marks him (in the eyes of his detractors) as a spiritual descendent of Macaulay’s children, gladly inheriting the colonial traditions and language of the oppressor, but also indicates to such critics that he is contemptuous of his own linguistic roots.40 WRITING IN ENGLISH Rushdie thus joins the ranks of many postcolonial writers who have struggled with the question of which language to employ to best represent and recall the “authentic” experience of their formerly colonized countrymen and women. Some, like Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, have rejected the English tongue because of its association with brute conquest and the culturo-ideological uses it had been put to in the past for the consolidation

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of power. As Bill Ashcroft and others put it, “One of the main features of imperial oppression is control over language. [. . .] Language becomes the medium through which a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated, and the medium through which conceptions of ‘truth’, ‘order’, and ‘reality’ become established.”41 The English language, it is argued, potentially estranges and alienates colonized subjects from their own history, culture, and local environment and wreaks a kind of violence on their identity. Seeing themselves mirrored in the words and authoritarian address of the dominant culture, they begin to internalize an image of self as inferior, abject, and barbaric, thereby becoming the very repository of false Orientalist representations that the West has sought to impose on its “Other.” Since Ngũgĩ believes that English has run its course and is irreparably tainted by its association with domination and hegemony, the best course of action for a Kenyan writer is to remember one’s “roots in the languages, cultures and history of the Kenyan peasant masses, the majority class in each of Kenya’s national communities.”42 Ngũgĩ’s project of reclaiming authentic Gikuyu culture through his adoption of a “pure” native tongue matches the desire on the part of many newly independent nations to recover their distinct cultural heritage through recourse to nativism and fierce nationalism. Edward Said allegorizes this rejection of English language and culture (through the familiar postcolonial reading of Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest) as one possible response open to the formerly colonized individual seeking to rid himself of the burden of the past: to choose “to be a Caliban who sheds his current servitude and physical disfigurements in the process of discovering his essential, pre-colonial self. This Caliban is behind the nativist and radical nationalisms that produced concepts of négritude, Islamic fundamentalism, Arabism, and the like.”43 Yet Rushdie, in a 1997 essay entitled, “Damme, This Is the Oriental Scene for You!,” which celebrated the fifty years of Indian writing in English since Independence, echoes an argument he made in an earlier influential essay, “Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist,” by stating that the reclamation of a distinct linguistic heritage in India requires that English be seen realistically as a viable Indian vernacular language. As he insists, the quixotic desire to erase the memory of the English language seems to rest on the false premise that English, having arrived from outside India, is and must necessarily remain an alien there. But my own mother-tongue, Urdu, the camp-argot of the country’s earlier Muslim conquerors, was also an immigrant language, forged out of a blend between the conquerors’ imported tongue and the local languages they encountered. However, it became a naturalized subcontinental language long ago; and by now that has happened to English, too.44

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A total abrogation of English on the premise that it’s irretrievably broken because of its historic use as a tool of epistemic and actual violence thus ignores the fact that all languages, even local ones, have been put to such purposes in the past. Indeed, in India today it’s the planned linguistic programs of such Hindu fundamentalists and staunch “culturalists” as the Shiv Sena in Bombay or the national Bharatiya Janata Party who would enforce Hindi on the entire population of India, thereby alienating many of India’s non-Hindi speakers, particularly in southern India. In this particular context, English is much less hegemonically threatening today as a language system, and its many vernacular versions often participate in critiquing such fundamentalist linguistic impositions from within the nation. Such essentialist “appeals to tradition, national or religious identity [and] patriotism”45 as a form of resistance, as attractive as they may be, also forget the extent to which language itself is always already inescapably hybrid and benefits greatly from the “transnational, cross-lingual process of pollination.”46 Robert Young argues that the Englishness of the past is often represented in terms of fixity, of certainty, centredness, homogeneity, as something unproblematically identical with itself. [. . .] [Yet] if we consider the English novel, we find that what is portrayed as characterizing English experience is rather often the opposite, a sense of fluidity and a painful sense of, or need of, otherness.47

Young acknowledges that Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of hybridization within language and novelistic discourse provides a particularly helpful way of understanding how authoritative power can be unsettled through a recognition of latent dialogism inhering in every utterance, making it “simultaneously the same but different.”48 According to Bakhtin, hybridization “is a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses.”49 Young points to the powerful “moment where, within a single discourse, one voice is able to unmask the other. This is the point where authoritative discourse is undone”50 and forced into awareness of the potentially destabilizing truth that each of us lives our lives in what Bakhtin would understand to be a veritable “ocean of heteroglossia.”51 Since postcolonial “literature is [. . .] always written out of the tension between the abrogation of the received English which speaks from the centre, and the act of appropriation which brings it under the influence of a vernacular tongue,”52 syncretic postcolonial theorists and writers like Rushdie who choose to work within the English tradition find ways to, as Audre Lorde puts it (although she would doubt its efficacy), “dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools.” The dominant language is thereby

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subverted and transformed from within through the use of indigenous expressions (“baap-re-baap!”), portmanteau phrases (“chutnification”), and untranslated words (“takallouf”) that often lie at the center of a particular discourse and by “expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents.”53 This strategy is expressly maintained by Rushdie in a 1982 interview as he uses a potent metaphor of reverse colonization to describe how he and other postcolonial writers have worked to reshape the English language: The English language is unique in its flexibility, in its subtleness. This language was created by this cold grey northern island, and yet somehow large enough and versatile enough to express the cultures and the thoughts and the dynamics of societies which have never come remotely close to that world, [. . .] the Caribbean writers, African writers, Indian writers, others who are writing in English. It’s like a reverse takeover of the Empire. It’s as though the people who were colonized are now doing the colonizing.54

Such a hopeful assessment of the ability of the English language to absorb innumerable linguistic strands without losing the particular cadence of local dialects underscores Rushdie’s energetic use of Bombay English, which “far from being the antithesis to the vernacular lives in memory of it.”55 THE POLITICAL VALUE OF REDESCRIPTION Rushdie’s reshaping of the English language through a recollection and deployment of multiple hybrid and heterogeneous linguistic influences serves a number of important political purposes. He has always held a high view of the power of language and fictional argument to transform the world. Coming of age as he did in the politically active 1970s, his writing (notwithstanding his failed 1975 fantasy novel, Grimus) has always borne the traces of a stubborn anti-authoritarianism and a committed effort to ferret out lies and to resist totalizing descriptions of the world created by those occupying the halls of power. Indeed, in one of his earliest essays, “Imaginary Homelands,” he indicates that “writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory. And the novel is one way of denying the official, politicians’ version of truth.”56 Such an insight demonstrates the extent to which Rushdie has been influenced by a Gramscian understanding of the impact of culture and ideology in defining power relationships. If subject people groups and nations have consented to (and continue to accept) their subordinate, colonized status most effectively and subtly through past Orientalist representations encoded in the literature

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and language of the West, it stands to reason that successful opposition to such ideological control may also be waged culturally. Of course, such resistance mounted in the sphere of culture and the field of novelistic discourse strikes some committed Marxists such as Aijaz Ahmad and playwright Howard Brenton, as well as certain members of the subaltern studies group, such as Ranajit Guha, as not going far enough. Rushdie articulates a policy of political non-affiliation in a 1990 interview when he relates, “Contrary to public opinion, which always put me down as a raving Lefty, I’m a very bad joiner. I’ve never in my life belonged to a political party. [. . .] I’ve always thought that what gave writers a role in these matters was that they couldn’t be slotted into a particular category.”57 Yet isn’t it imperative that a concerted collective activist culture be brought to bear on the inequities and asymmetrical power structures of the world, thus allowing for a fuller agency for dispossessed and impoverished individuals who have been excluded from the possibility of political praxis? Do the novels of (what Timothy Brennan would term) a “Third World Cosmopolitan” like Rushdie do enough in the aesthetic realm to mobilize and motivate a large enough readership to seek concrete, material change? Rushdie’s response would be that shifts in the way we see and understand the world constitute a critical first step in refashioning it materially along more equitable lines. As Andrew Teverson relates, “The novel [of memory] becomes political, in other words, not by engaging directly in political issues (necessarily) but by describing the world in a way that contests or resists the interpretations of it offered by the more official organs of power.”58 The most important goal of a politically minded novelist like Rushdie, then, is (notwithstanding the understandable limitations of individual vision) to contest such descriptions with his own memories which read history “against the grain” and inscribe an alternative vision of events, creating a kind of politically charged “counter-memory.” As Milan Kundera writes in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting concerning the plight of political dissidents who found themselves “air-brushed” out of photographs and history by Communist propagandists in Czechoslovakia, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”59 Rushdie incorporates Kundera’s thought into his essay, “Imaginary Homelands,” when he reminds us that “particularly at times when the State takes reality into its own hands, and sets about distorting it, altering the past to fit its present needs, then the making of the alternative realities of art, including the novel of memory, becomes politicized.”60 In other words, “a poet’s work,” as Gibreel Farishta’s dream-character Baal intones in The Satanic Verses, is defiantly “to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.”61 Such writing about the past obviously never qualifies as an objective, disinterested act but is always motivated by particular interests.

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SECULAR BLASPHEMY For all the furor generated by the infamous Satanic Verses controversy, in which Rushdie was taken to task by Muslim leaders around the world for the way in which he presumed to remember the birth of Islam as an event in history and to recall the prophet’s experience of revelation, as well as his subsequent actions, from the perspective of a secular unbeliever, the novel itself stands much more as an act of what Sara Suleri would term “secular blasphemy” against British power structures. According to Jaina Sanga, “Alternative postcolonial renditions [constitute] an instance of secular blasphemy. [. . .] This blasphemy is bound not in ideas of religion or God, but rather in historical and cultural re-representations that speak to and attempt to undermine certain colonial ideologies,”62 each of which clears space for a “revisionary cultural agenda.”63 For instance, during the “Raj Revival” of the 1980s in Britain and the concomitant enactment of the neo-imperialist, conservative ideologies of Margaret Thatcher’s administration following the Falkland Islands War, Rushdie writes that there was a political attempt to unify the nation jingoistically under “the fantasy that the British Empire represented something ‘noble’ or ‘great’ about Britain; that it was, in spite of all its flaws and meannesses and bigotries, fundamentally glamorous.”64 Taking to task the triumphalist language of Thatcher’s speech at Cheltenham to commemorate British victory over Argentina, Rushdie underscores in his 1982 essay, “The New Empire within Britain,” the way that such rhetoric served to divide the population and harden racial attitudes at a time of increasing anxiety over non-white immigration into England: If such a leader at such a time felt able to invoke the spirit of imperialism, it was because she knew how central that spirit is to the self-image of white Britons of all classes. I say white Britons because it’s clear that Mrs. Thatcher wasn’t addressing the two million or so blacks, who don’t feel quite like that about the Empire. So even her use of the word “we” was an act of racial exclusion, like her other well-known speech about the fear of being “swamped” by immigrants.65

Big-budget British films and television series cooperated in this “Empirerevivalism,” with productions such as Attenborough’s Gandhi, Lean’s A Passage to India, The Jewel in the Crown, and even Octopussy presenting fantasy portraits of the East for Western consumption. In an effort to recuperate the image of the British Empire, a number of falsehoods and revisionist distortions were perforce enacted that both absolved past sins by air-brushing them out and indulged in Golden Age nostalgia that allowed neo-imperialists to long for an era of faded national grandeur. Like the octogenarian Rosa

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Diamond in The Satanic Verses, who wraps herself in a multiplicity of different dream-memories of her past as a mode of comforting self-protection, Rushdie indicates that the British do “not know how to look [their] history in the eye.”66 In short, the realm of culture underwent a startling “revolt against history” which Rushdie has always been at pains to critique. His work thus systematically seeks to dismantle such false conceptions of the empire in a number of significant ways by engaging in a kind of secular blasphemy, which serves to expose the “flaws, meannesses and bigotries” upon which Imperialist ideology was and continues to be predicated. A RE-“ORIENTATION” OF PERSPECTIVE: HISTORY FROM THE MARGINS One of the first, and most significant, ways that Rushdie employs the trope of memory to abrogate the authority of British perspective is to (particularly in his early novels) rewrite Indian history from the perspective of the subcontinent. Correcting the false Orientalist conception that India, like other colonial territories, was a primitive, benighted land existing in a timeless present that needed to be rescued through the intervention of British language, culture, and religion, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children reaches backward in time to a prelapsarian world in which Aadam’s “fall” from grace in the Edenic Kashmir comes through the agency of European learning and secular practices acquired through his travel. Anticipating Benedict Anderson’s argument that nations are “imagined communities,” which spring to life through a consensual agreement of a shared identity linking many disparate individuals moving together through “homogenous, empty time,”67 Rushdie defines the new Indian nation as a willed invention on the part of the Indian people much more than a gift bestowed by beneficent British policy-making. In truth, the cynical rushed efforts to enact Partition on the part of such figures as Mountbatten and Radcliffe served to exploit communalist tensions between Hindus and Muslims and not only contributed to the violent massacres and displacements of the Partition Riots but in many ways led to the persistent antagonism between India and Pakistan to this day as well. Although Orientalism requires that all Oriental subjects be “passive, non-participating [. . .] above all, nonactive, non-autonomous, non-sovereign with regard to itself,”68 Rushdie demonstrates the way in which such subcontinental leaders as Nehru, Gandhi, and M. A. Jinnah actively fought for and won independence from the British. Anderson highlights the equivocal nature of such nation-formation when he claims that new states had to reconcile their relative newness (announced

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in Midnight’s Children by the words of Prime Minister Nehru from the Red Fort in Delhi) with a recuperation of a near-mythical past that was “long suppressed” in the colonial encounter. On the one hand, such nation-states experience “a profound feeling that a radical break with the past was occurring—a ‘blasting open of the continuum of history’.”69 Yet, on the other hand, Saleem also gives voice to the paradoxical situation experienced by citizens of the new India, who are encouraged to remember themselves and their timeless journey through the abysm of history at the very same moment that they proleptically anticipate the radically new national dispensation: “A nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary [and activated by] a phenomenal collective will.”70 Rushdie’s determination to expose the folly of those who would assert that modern, democratic India was birthed into existence exclusively through the legacy of British colonial practice and traditions is allegorized through William Methwold’s game in Midnight’s Children of encouraging the new Indian residents of his estate to preserve everything wholesale in their European-named villas after the transfer of power from England to India is enacted. Yet Methwold’s implicit desire—that these Parsi and Muslim families representing the elite strata of Indian cultural, legal, and economic society be exclusively defined as his own creation—is undercut in a number of ways. Not only does Amina resist what she feels are the “dislocating presence of strangers’ possessions,”71 but the subaltern entertainer, Wee Willie Winkie, also foregrounds the fictional quality of an exclusivist imposition of British identity on top of the natives’ own self-determined character: “Ladies, gentlemen, how can you feel comfortable here, in the middle of Mr. Methwold Sahib’s long past? I tell you: it must be strange; not real.”72 Finally, Saleem’s revelation that Methwold is a “baldie” whose charisma resided all along in an irresistibly parted hairpiece emblematizes the duplicitous and chimerical quality of British imperialist identity. The history of Bombay is likewise narrated in such terms, and unlike the belief of Methwold (metonymically standing in for other British sahibs of the high colonial era), who mistakenly embraces the notion that his East India Company ancestor had “dreamed [Bombay] into existence” in 1633, the city is shown to trace a complicated ancestry including early Koli fisherfolk, the etymological influence of the goddess Mumbadevi, the operations of the Portuguese (“Bom Bahia for its harbor”73), and the more recent constructions made to Bombay’s infrastructure after independence. Indeed, British claims to centrality are peremptorily brushed aside in Saleem’s summary of Bombay’s history up to the moment of his birth: “In August 1947, the British,

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having ended the dominion of fishing-nets, coconuts, rice and Mumbadevi, were about to depart themselves; no dominion is everlasting.”74 The Satanic Verses effects the same kind of re-fashioning of history, this time from the perspective of the margins (“the view from underneath”75), the concentrated migrant communities of Southall and Brick Lane who represent the far-flung imported empire of disempowered subject peoples from the Caribbean, Africa, and India. In a reversal of most standard discussions of “center” and “periphery,” Rushdie critically interrogates and destabilizes British identity through a penetration of the metropolitan center by nonEuropean people groups. As Jaina Sanga notes, “It’s almost as if Rushdie is redrawing an image of the British, only this time it is not from their own perspective; rather it is a representation that takes into account a view which has thus far remained on the margins. It is this representation that constitutes a form of secular blasphemy as it opens up a space for other histories.”76 Readers discover that Bombay at the beginning and end of the novel is characterized as a city which is relatively stable and comprehensible (realistic), while “Ellowen Deeowen” is depicted as a nightmarish, exotic dreamscape re-charted and mapped by Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, migrants to the metropolis. This critical maneuver on the part of an oppositional postcolonial writer like Rushdie is what Edward Said has termed “the voyage in” in his Culture and Imperialism as he “sets [himself] the revisionist, critical task of dealing frontally with the metropolitan culture, using the techniques, discourses, and weapons of scholarship and criticism once reserved exclusively for the European.”77 Indeed, the relative absence of most Anglo-Saxon characters in the novel essentially serves to re-define England itself as E. P. Thompson would term “the last colony of the British Empire”78 The effect is so unsettling that one puzzled early reviewer of the novel apparently remarked, “What is all this material about Muslims doing in this novel about London?”79 THE WISDOM OF THE EAST Another way that Rushdie utilizes memory to undermine British versions of the past lies in his subversion of the Orientalist myth of India and an essentialized East as repositories of ancient wisdom and mystical truths. One of the more common misconceptions found in the Orientalist repertory of images is the notion of the Orient as a land of marvels and mysteries which not only exists as a foil to a more modern, rational Europe and America but also serves to be plundered for its exotic imagery in order to spiritually rejuvenate a sterile, soulless West, as evidenced by the seminal influence of non-European cultures on the creations of European aesthetic modernism.80 Orientalists, by

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domesticating an image of the East, are able (according to Said) to control it and use it for their own purposes: “Something patently foreign and distant, acquires, for one reason or another, a status more rather than less familiar.”81 Coming to England in 1961, Rushdie discovered that there was a kind of version of India that was in everybody’s heads, which frankly I didn’t much recognize. Having come from a great big city, more or less in a very contemporary and cosmopolitan childhood that I’d had, to get here and discover that what India meant to people was, you know, sitar music and Yoga and lentils and Maharishi. And sort of mysticism and kind of ancient wisdom, and I thought what’s that? [. . .] Because it seemed to bear almost no relationship to the country I’d grown-up in. [. . .] [T]he India they were responding to didn’t exist.82

Failure on the part of England and the West to engage the historical and material realities of India in order to pursue its “love affair with Indian mysticism”83 is accordingly placed under the lens of critique throughout Rushdie’s work in several important ways. Mull Standish, for instance, Indian superstar musician Ormus Cama’s first record producer in The Ground beneath Her Feet, explicitly links the need for spiritual enlightenment and equilibrium that India offers him as an American caught up in the crass materialism of the music industry by using the language of economics and acquisition: India as raw material useful for the purposes of replenishing the spiritual storehouses of the West. “To provide the planet with good air to breathe,” Standish explains to a bemused Ormus, “we have been given the Amazon rain forest. To provide for the planet’s soul, there is India. One goes there as one goes to the bank, to refill the pocketbook of the psyche. Excuse the vulgar money-oriented metaphor.”84 Standish’s appropriation of what Rushdie would affirm to be an empty and decontextualized Indian spirituality is used to assuage the guilt and alienation he has endured because of the moral compromises required by the modern world which he himself has made. After Standish relates his “illuminating” recent visit to a child mahaguru in which he gratefully receives what Rushdie satirically reveals to be rather meaningless “magic eight ball” advice, the Indian narrator of the novel, Rai Merchant, incredulously reflects on the West’s need of an ideal Orient from which to draw inspiration: “Again the curious possessive fascination of the hedonistic West with the ascetic East. The arch-disciples of linearity, of the myth of progress want, from the Orient, only its fabled unchangingness, its myth of eternity.”85 Qara Köz, the worldly-wise Mughal princess in Rushdie’s Enchantress of Florence, echoes this sentiment when she dismissively scorns those Europeans who attribute the “Eastern wisdom” that she has transported with her to the good fortune

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which Renaissance-era Florence is suddenly enjoying: “There is no particular wisdom in the East. . . . All human beings are foolish to the same degree.”86 The premier exemplar of the “ascetic East” that Rushdie would argue the West has laid claim to and transmuted into a spiritual symbol, denuded of his historical context and complexity, has been Mahatma Gandhi. He has often been viewed by the West as synonymous with the Indian independence movement, which achieved success through political gradualism and nonviolent passive resistance and has been linked indiscriminately with the likes of Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet Rushdie in a 1983 essay on the wild success of Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi argues that the saintly portrait of the man which Ben Kingsley’s performance delivers is contradicted by the facts of history and instead merely “satisfies certain longings in the Western psyche”:87 the desire to encounter heroic Christ figures whose humility, simple lifestyle, and self-sacrifice lead to redemption for the many, the mistaken belief that revolutions achieve their intent most effectively through submission and nonviolence, and the aforementioned hunger on the part of Western audiences to see India as a useable source of spirituality and wisdom. In Shame, Rushdie had argued that “every story one chooses to tell is a kind of censorship, it prevents the telling of other tales.”88 The primary figures that Attenborough’s film chooses to either leave out or reinterpret are the guerrilla militant Subhas Bose and India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru—Bose is erased because his methods of violence in joining forces with the Japanese, although they were effective in weakening British resolve, didn’t fit into the film’s narrative of nonviolence, and Nehru was figured as Gandhi’s disciple instead of his equal because, according to Rushdie, his identity as an “urban sophisticate who wanted to industrialize India, to bring it into the modern age” jarred with the need on the part of Western audiences for Indian figures sufficiently exotic and otherworldly to whom they could condescend.89 Rushdie’s fiction seeks to amend the record in several ways regarding Gandhi’s relative place in the Indian independence movement. While Gandhi’s nationwide declaration of hartal or collective strike action before the 1919 Amritsar massacre receives attention in Midnight’s Children, as does his death, the narrative significantly jumps from 1919 to 1942, effectively eliding some of Gandhi’s most important anti-British activities.90 As Nicole Thiara notes, “Gandhi is not absent in Midnight’s Children, but Gandhian discourse is, which is a clear distancing device: the Gandhian idea of India, with his references to Hindu mythology and his emphasis on India’s peasants, is clearly not endorsed by Midnight’s Children, whose idea of the nation is relentlessly urban.”91 Indeed, Camoens da Gama, the fiercely secular nationalist father of Aurora Zogoiby in The Moor’s Last Sigh, fears the fusion of religious discourse with

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political empowerment that Gandhi seems to represent when the famous figure leads the predominantly Hindu crowds in a chanted dhun in honor of the god Ram. Such a fear proves to be founded toward the end of the novel when the Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party co-opts the deity as the Hindu god most in line with their absolutist claims. Like Camoens, Rushdie seems to indicate throughout his fiction that “he was for Nehru, not Gandhi—for business and technology and progress and modernity, for the city, and against all that sentimental clap-trap of spinning your own cotton and travelling thirdclass on the train.”92 WHITENESS AS OTHERNESS One outcome of Rushdie’s redrawing of Orientalist maps of reality from the perspective of the formerly colonized is that whiteness as a category of racial privilege is often rendered strange and “other” in his remembered version of events. At the beginning of Shame, for instance, Rushdie’s narrator, borrowing subtly from the language of science fiction, continually details how the “Angrez,” or British sahibs, resemble nothing so much as enervated, grayskinned aliens wilting in the harsh heat and sun and whose skin color, rather than a marker of prestige, identifies them as “curious grey beings from a wet northern world.”93 In a bizarre scene toward the beginning of Midnight’s Children, Amina Sinai, on her way to hear Ramram Seth’s prophecy regarding her unborn son, is solicited by what appears to be a white man begging but upon closer inspection reveals herself to be a white woman dressed as a man (a “Hijra,” or transvestite, according to Lifafa Das) who has reduced herself to beggary to atone for the guilt of her European husband’s complicity in a former act of racial violence. Within a span of a few moments then, power relations are dizzyingly destabilized for Amina (and the reader) along lines of class, race, and gender. A final instance in which whiteness is pathologized in Rushdie’s work is the metaphorical skin pigmentation disorder in Midnight’s Children afflicting the Rani of Cooch Naheen, as well as Ahmed Sinai and other rising businessmen in the new India, who were “going white in blotches.” Rushdie describes this condition as a “disease which leaked into history and erupted on an enormous scale after Independence”94 and which, far from signifying empowerment as such figures become “masters of their own destinies,” really turns them into “victim[s] of a widespread, though generally unremarked phenomenon” (emphasis mine).95 Although Ahmed prides himself in his new complexion and uses it to look down on his darker-skinned neighbors, it seems clear that Rushdie sees such an outcome as a racialized symptom of exploitive neocolonial business practices among certain members of the

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deracinated, Westernized elite. Rushdie’s critical memories of the heady early days of Indian independence thus not only problematize his detractors’ assertion that he himself is a fully “westoxicated” cosmopolitan, but also expose the ways that power was often consolidated ideologically by subcontinental leaders who sought to emulate their erstwhile Western masters. LANGUAGE AND VIOLENCE Rushdie’s writing also recalls how language has historically been used for purposes of racial denigration and demonstrates the ways in which power is consolidated and the nonwhite population policed in present-day England, as well as in pre-independence India. His time devoted to improving race relations in England during the 1980s with the Camden Committee for Community Relations revealed the ways in which racist and prejudicial attitudes and housing policies enacted against “visible but unseen” immigrant populations in overcrowded, unsanitary housing conditions perpetuated the sordid legacy of imperialism. From the anonymous Pakistani girl attacked and raped by a gang of white boys in a London underground station in Shame, to Uhuru Simba’s suspicious death in police custody that authorities weakly attribute to an accidental fall from his bunk in The Satanic Verses, to Gibreel’s refracted dream-London city of Jahilia in which the dominant members of the population disparage the early adherents of Islam as nothing more than a “revolution of water-carriers, immigrants and slaves,”96 his fiction is replete with reminders of how imperialism’s values persist in the present in the form of institutionalized racism.97 Although England longed to define its self-image as one of “fair play, tolerance, decency, and equality,” Rushdie indicates that “maybe that place never existed anyway, except in fairy-tales.”98 In The Satanic Verses, for instance, after Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta mysteriously survive the mid-air explosion of Bostan Flight 420, Saladin is immediately confronted with a “through the looking glass,” nightmare version of his beloved England that dramatically opposes the anglophilic fantasy he’d patiently constructed all his life. After being arrested and repeatedly abused by racist police officers who humiliate him and deride his Dionysian/demonic appearance of hooves and horns, he thinks to himself, “This isn’t England. [. . .] How could it be, after all; where in all that moderate and common-sensical land was there room for such a police van in whose interior such events as these might plausibly transpire?”99 Things grow stranger when he’s deposited in a kind of sanatorium for illegal immigrants who assume monstrous, fantastical shapes, including manticores and other hybrid beast-people, one of whom offers him an explanation of sorts for his

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recent metamorphosis: “They have the power to describe us. [. . .] That’s all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct.”100 Throughout the novel, therefore, it becomes clear that the primary responsibility for such grotesquerie lies in the Orientalist, racialized constructions of non-white inhabitants of England as irredeemably ex-centric and “Other” which are perpetuated by those in power. And one of Rushdie’s primary goals is to “write back” to those descriptions by reminding his readers that “of the black communities, over forty percent are not [even] immigrants, but black Britons, born and bred, speaking in the many voices and accents of Britain, and with no homeland but this one.”101 Very often such racist depictions can be turned on their head and recuperated by an author eager to explode unjust stereotypes by problematizing their usage. In the controversial Muhammad chapters of The Satanic Verses, the Muslim prophet is given the ugly name “Mahound,” which had been used by European authors since Dante to defame and demonize Muslims. Yet as the narrator explains his controversial choice, “to turn insults into strengths, whigs, tories, Blacks all chose to wear with pride the names they were given in scorn.”102 The racially downtrodden members of the Afro-Caribbean and South Asian communities of “Brickhall” in East London choose to perform the same ideological maneuver with Saladin’s devilish appearance when they begin to defiantly wear devil horns in public. As one character explains to Saladin, “People can really identify with you. It’s an image white society has rejected for so long that we can really take it, you know, occupy it, inhabit it, reclaim it and make it our own.”103 In his essay, “In Good Faith,” Rushdie explicitly ties this rhetorical gambit of redefinition to the prerogative of oppressed minorities to rewrite their own version of the world: “The very title, The Satanic Verses, is an aspect of this attempt at reclamation. You call us devils? It seems to ask. Very well, then, here is the devil’s version of the world, of ‘your’ world, the version written from the experience of those who have been demonized by virtue of their otherness.”104 The dominant discourse is also hijacked by Rushdie to demonstrate how ruthless power, rather than benevolent policy-making, lies at the heart of Imperialist ideology. In a brilliant moment of postmodern sampling, The Moor’s Last Sigh seamlessly lifts and inserts a significant and telling passage from Kipling’s powerful short story “On the City Wall” into the narrative without citing Rushdie’s source. As a result, a canonical piece of Imperialist fiction is utilized to deconstruct Kipling’s original intent regarding the need for Anglo-Indian administrators to contain the threat of communalist hostility through a policy of divide and rule, and the origins of violence are redirected squarely by Rushdie at the feet of the British Raj. In the original story, HinduMuslim rioting during the Muharram processions serves as justification for the need of beneficent Anglo-Indian rule and dramatizes the impossibility of

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self-rule for the natives. Kipling’s narrator, in the language of self-abasing martyrdom, intones “if an advance be made all credit is given to the native, while the Englishmen stand back and wipe their foreheads. If a failure occurs the Englishmen step forward and take the blame.”105 Such rhetoric in its original context is meant to reinforce Orientalist beliefs about the innate savagery of the Indian populace and to reassure the English-reading public that noble and knowledgeable Anglo-Indians will sacrifice themselves to ensure the smooth functioning of the body politic. Placed intertextually by Rushdie in the mouth of a recognizable, yet anonymous, Kipling-esque character, a “cream-suited, balding Englishman with thick, pebbly eye-glasses and a walrus moustache,”106 however, the same passage takes on sinister resonances. Giving the famous speech in his palace of juridical authority after an intrafamilial squabble leads to the arrest at gunpoint of two brothers, the sycophantic Aires and prideful proto-nationalist, Camoens, Rushdie’s shadow-Kipling not only exerts control through threats of violence and imprisonment but refuses to accept the blame for the family’s actions. As a result of such a parodic-travestying maneuver on the part of Rushdie, Kipling’s original authoritative address is unsettled and the scheming, cynical policy of Imperialist practice is once more laid bare. One final way that Rushdie demystifies the workings of hegemonic power occurs toward the end of The Satanic Verses, in which he remembers how seemingly innocent and objective uses of the media to record for history the initial violence of the Brixton and Southall riots of 1981 and 1985 actually reinforced racialized stereotypes and served the interests of the dominant culture. When the police raid the Club Hot Wax in order to root out unruly immigrant elements, Rushdie’s narrative voice switches and the scene is recreated through the personified lens of the television camera, which rather than serving a factual, reportorial function is selective and ideologically takes sides in the unfolding drama. As Harriet Murav relates, “To be the object of another’s gaze, to be defined [entirely] by another” stands as an act of violence to one’s identity.107 The story the news chooses to convey to the viewing public is heavily weighted in favor of the law, order, and decency that such named and trusted faces as Inspector Stephen Kinch of the Metropolitan Police represent: These kids don’t know how lucky they are, he suggests. They should consult their kith and kin. Africa, Asia, the Caribbean: now those are places with real problems. Those are places where people might have grievances worth respecting. Things aren’t so bad here, not by a long chalk; no slaughters here, no torture, no military coups. [. . .] Ours always was a peaceful land, he says. Our industrious island race.108

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The camera cannot ascertain motives for why “these people” have burned their own streets and fails to identify the insignificant faces of individual rioters, but in the aftermath of the raid the most reprehensible criminal identities are assumed and assigned (drug dealing, underage prostitution, delinquency) to characters that the reader alone has been privileged to know throughout the narrative. Rushdie therefore reveals that the full power of the police state is marshaled against its enemies in order to protect its righteous (read: white) citizens, while the media plays up events to keep the population in fear. Meanwhile, the lives on the ground of members of London’s “visible but unseen” immigrant population remain inaccessible “in places which the camera cannot see.”109 A NATION OF FORGETTERS Rushdie does not just seek to correct false representations and mistruths perpetuated by Western hegemonic power structures, however. He devotes equal space to exposing the corruption, injustice, and violence endemic to the postcolonial nation-state and which the leadership of India and Pakistan would prefer the world to forget. From small-time scam artist Piloo Doodhwala’s nonexistent goat (“ghoast”) operations, which siphon off enormous subsidies and tax breaks from the central government in The Ground beneath Her Feet, to Abraham Zogoiby’s vast network of narcotics smuggling and opportunistic nuclear arms-dealing, which allows him access to vast channels of multinational capital in The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie’s fiction is replete with the damaging actions of subcontinental politicians, businessmen, and cultural figures. Yet Rushdie’s satirical and deflationary rhetoric never quite gives any of these characters full due for the harm they’re exacting; in works such as Shame and The Moor’s Last Sigh, he often applies one of his favorite insights from Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” which argues that history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as a farce on the subcontinent: “Tragedy was not in our natures. A tragedy was taking place all right, a national tragedy on a grand scale, but those of us who played our parts were—let me put it bluntly—clowns.”110 Such an approach has not curried him much favor among such nationalist critics as Timothy Brennan or Aijaz Ahmad, who argue that his unflattering portraits of cruel, monstrous, and buffoonish South Asian despots feel like the “airing of dirty laundry,” and not only fail to create an empowering decolonizing discourse for the people of the subcontinent but also participate in reinforcing many of the very Orientalist stereotypes of the East he’s aimed to dispel. However, in a 1996 address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors entitled “Farming Ostriches,” Rushdie denies that the literary artist should

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in good conscience ever serve as the spokesperson for the state but that his or her primary responsibility is only to remember rightly and record history as truthfully as possible in his or her fiction. As he puts it, “Truth is all too often unpalatable, awkward, unorthodox. The armies of received ideas are marshaled against it. The legions of all those who stand to profit by useful untruths will march against it. Yet it must, if at all possible, be told.”111 Indeed, Edward Said denies that Rushdie’s oppositional rhetoric serves to discredit an empowering postcolonial self-presentation: “Rushdie’s novels are scathingly critical, not to say insurrectionary, about the present rulers of India and Pakistan, but one never gets the impression [. . .] that the critique is disengaged, or haughty, or disapproving of the entire postcolonial enterprise.”112 Two of the most significant offenses against the truth committed by South Asian leadership which Rushdie seeks to bring to light are the obfuscating rhetoric of state propaganda and the often-inhumane and antidemocratic acts of violent aggression enacted to root out political resistance. PROPAGANDA AND MISINFORMATION One of the more infuriating problems that Rushdie suggests has plagued India and Pakistan since their birth as new nations has been the tendency for politicians and news media outlets to engage in regular misinformation campaigns that encourage a “divorce between news and reality”113 and keep the population in the dark. In his children’s book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, for instance, Rushdie contrasts the fantastical, yet truthful stories that the storyteller Rashid Khalifa tells with the kinds of propagandistic “praising” tales that the smarmy politician Snooty Buttoo wishes Rashid would tell so that the “people will believe [Khalifa], and be happy, and vote for [Buttoo].”114 Such rifts between the truth and “official facts” often widen during times of regional conflict, when the shame of losing face by being dominated militarily necessitates inflation of statistics and reinforces an ill-founded patriotic spirit. During the 1965 Indo-Pak War, for instance, Saleem wryly points out that “in the first five days of the war Voice of Pakistan announced the destruction of more aircraft than India had ever possessed; in eight days, All-India Radio massacred the Pakistan Army down to, and considerably beyond, the last man.”115 Three years earlier, in 1962, the utter rout to which Chinese forces put the Indian army during the Sino-Indian conflict on the northeast border disillusions an Indian public whose former morale had been boosted by a “disease of optimism” with which they’d been infected by government and media sources. According to Rushdie, one of the only inoculations for such a disease is for conscientious artists to remember truthfully, which means exposing the invisible

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“black part” of history (using Indira’s parti-colored hair as an analogy for his historical method) and challenging the official narratives of nationalistic propaganda. He appropriates a gastronomic metaphor from Islamic dietary practice when he likens the nation to a family who seeks to keep secrets which the artist as rebellious son is bound to reveal, even if it transgresses “food” restrictions: “Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood [. . .] I arrive at the unspeakable part, and undaunted, press on.”116 In Rushdie’s own experience, although none of the subcontinent’s nations hold a premium on the practice of such propaganda, Pakistan’s policy of state censorship has always made it particularly difficult to determine the truth as a citizen of that country. As Saleem relates in Midnight’s Children, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence—that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disoriented, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.117

In other words, the alternative realities of art, which Rushdie associates with the openness and creatively noncoercive possibilities of a cosmopolitan city like Bombay, must always be pitted against the falsehood and lies of state propaganda which foreclose such possibilities and bind the population in ignorance. MEMORY’S RESISTANCE TO POLITICAL OPPRESSION In Midnight’s Children, Saleem early on provides his rationale for transcribing his memories because “today, perhaps, we are already forgetting, sinking willingly into the insidious clouds of amnesia; but I remember, and will set down.”118 As Ernest Renan writes in “What Is a Nation?”, historical amnesia is often required to consolidate the myth of national narratives: Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality. Indeed, historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin of all political formations. [. . .] Unity is always effected by means of brutality.119

Benedict Anderson exposes this predilection for the nationalist narrative project to elide, erase, and obscure inconvenient truths that would militate

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against a reassuring and stable cultural identity which can be valorized and celebrated. The brutalities cited by Renan are thus not simply literal acts of violence in a nation’s past that must be forgotten in order for that nation’s identity to be effectively consolidated but rather instances of ideological and linguistic violence manufactured by institutions and dominant political factions in order to effectively assert power and authority. In other words, for Pakistan to see itself as a unified nation-state, it must repress the memory of atrocities committed by Pakistani soldiers “which were not true, which were not possible” during the War for Bangladeshi independence of 1971, when professors and intellectuals were shot in the street and women were gang-raped in back alleys.120 And for India to see itself as a thriving, modern democracy, it must often fail to remember the excesses of the “Emergency” period from 1975 to 1977 or the livid violence of the Partition riots. After the manifold abuses of state power during India’s Emergency (including the arrest of dissidents, suspension of civil law, and enforced sterilization of the poor), there existed, according to Rushdie, a concerted effort on the part of Indira and Sanjay Gandhi to conceal the enormity of the truth, which would allow for a later rehabilitation of their public image and permit Indira to be reelected. Emma Tarlo describes this refusal to memorialize the event after Indira’s re-election in 1980: “As a moment of national shame, a blot on India’s democratic record, the Emergency has been built more as a moment for forgetting than as one for remembering.”121 Since, as Anderson has claimed, nationalism is a kind of narrative that privileges and prioritizes specific memories and moments over others, taking advantage of a society’s manifold self-protective amnesias,122 it stands to reason that skeptical counter-narratives are the most effective means of challenging such inaccuracies and falsehoods. One of the strongest instances of the exercise of a contestatory countermemory utilized to fight the oppression and corruption which subcontinental power structures seek to disavow occurs in Rushdie’s Shame. Iskander Harappa, a thinly veiled Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, deliberately buries his shameless history of debauchery and corruption in order to consolidate his authority as Pakistan’s prime minister. In an effort of willed self-creation as he achieves a rise to power, he silences critics who seek to remind the nation of his many abuses of authority, and after his execution at the hands of Pakistan’s new president, Raza Hyder (Zia ul-Haq), his daughter Arjumand (Benazir Bhutto), in an act of self-delusion, canonizes him by “transmut[ing] the preserved fragments of the past into the gold of myth.”123 The only person willing to challenge such a self-serving portrait of Iskander is his much-abused wife, Rani, who while under house arrest artfully weaves a series of 18 shawls, collectively titled “The Shamelessness of

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Iskander the Great,” and delivers them to Arjumand years later to confront her daughter with the truth of Iskander’s vile actions in order to reveal his true legacy. Embroidered on the shawls of memory, for which there was “not enough scarlet thread on earth to show the blood”:124 Iskander’s lechery, his active encouragement of election fraud and voter intimidation, the brutal crackdowns he had ordered on separatists in Baluchistan, and vast allegorical representations of Iskander murdering democracy while his generals stand by. In short, the shawls give the lie to Iskander’s glowing public image because they dare to articulate “unspeakable things which nobody wanted to hear.”125 Andrew Teverson suggests that Rani therefore becomes synonymous with the oppositional artist and Rushdie in particular because she denies and writes back against oppressive authority with her own memories that challenge official representations of the truth.126 Interestingly, this viewpoint seems to conflict with the arguments of Inderpal Grewal and Aijaz Ahmad who contend that Shame represents a fiction of despair because its portrait of an elite ruling class stifles all possibility of mobilizing dissent, particularly among women and the subaltern classes. Grewal takes her cue from Gayatri Spivak’s seminal argument, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in which Spivak grimly posits that marginalized subaltern subjectivity has been irretrievably silenced in the face of both epistemic colonial inscription and elite nationalist historiography. Similarly, Grewal contends that there is no possibility for Rushdie’s silenced female characters in Shame to mount a challenge to the patriarchal status quo in Pakistan because they are all re-inscribed as “passive and ineffectual or as mediators of male power.”127 Therefore, although Rushdie appears to sympathize with the plight of women for whom “repression is a seamless garment” that “crushes its women beneath the intolerable burdens of honour and propriety,”128 his claustrophobic narrative offers “a history of the unchanging subordinate position of Pakistani women, of women as more acted upon than acting [and] of the futility of opposition.”129 Ahmad likewise identifies Rushdie’s deep indebtedness to a kind of Foucauldian philosophy and narrative structure in Shame whereby all resistance is seen as futile in the face of such unmitigated mechanisms of power. As he puts it, What this [limited picture] excludes [. . .] is the dailiness of lives lived under oppression, and the human bonding—of resistance, of decency, of innumerable heroisms of both ordinary and extraordinary kinds—which makes it possible for large numbers of people to look each other in the eye, without guilt, with affection and solidarity and humour, and makes life, even under oppression, endurable and frequently joyous.130

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But Ahmad’s point that “women are not, in any fundamental sense, mere victims of history; much more centrally, women have survived against very heavy odds, and they have produced history” as well as his assertion that “they have retained with society and history a relation that is essentially imaginative, visionary, communal and regenerative”131 seems to disregard the fact that Rani Harappa, marginalized as she is within the text, also serves as the novel’s most important link to the past since she imaginatively “produce[s] history.” Her 18 shawls of defiant memory speak truth to power and form a regenerative bridge between the past and the future, thereby bearing a similar symbolic role to Saleem’s thirty jars of “chutnified” memories at the end of Midnight’s Children. Saleem’s pickles and Rani Harappa’s shawls, although their frequent accusations “may be too strong for some palates, [though] their smell may be overpowering, [and] tears may rise to the eyes” still both “possess the authentic taste of truth [and are] despite everything, acts of love” gifted to amnesiac nations.132 The mere fact that they exist serves as a hopeful sign of spectacular resistance. For Rushdie, the conflict between morality and irresponsibility finally comes down to a choice between memory and forgetting. Nowhere is the moral prerogative to resurrect and recover painful memory more evident than in Shalimar the Clown, set for much of its length in the disputed territory of Kashmir. As Rushdie narrates it, Kashmir before Partition existed as an idyllic paradise defined by Kashmiriyat (Kashmiri-ness), which was marked by the heterogeneous, polyglot, syncretic coexistence of Muslims and Hindus: “The words Hindu and Muslim had no place in their story. [. . .] In the valley these words were merely descriptions, not divisions. The frontiers between the words, their hard edges, had grown smudged and blurred.”133 However, the combined efforts of Muslim insurgents from Pakistan and the brutal crackdown of the Indian army serve to forever destroy the villagers’ sacred peace. When Hindu villages are razed by Muslim militants, the narrator pleads that “these names had to be remembered. Forgetting would be a crime against those who had suffered ‘wholehog’ burning of their neighborhoods, or seizure of their property, or death, preceded by such violences as could not be imagined or described.”134 And after the inhabitants of the predominantly Muslim village of Pachigam are violated, raped, and massacred by the occupying Indian army, the narrator hauntingly laments, “there are things that must be looked at indirectly because they would blind you if you looked them in the face, like the fire of the sun. [. . .] The village of Pachigam still existed on maps of Kashmir, but that day it ceased to exist anywhere else, except in memory.”135 Or as Saleem succinctly puts it, echoing the charge of Rushdie himself, “Morality, judgment, character . . . it all starts with memory.”136

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NOTES 1. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 12. 2. Rushdie, The Ground beneath Her Feet, 5. 3. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 10. 4. Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2012), 251. 5. Teverson, Salman Rushdie: Contemporary World Writers, 17. 6. Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 442. 7. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (New York: Routledge, 2002), 9. 8. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 119. 9. Salman Rushdie, Grimus (New York: Random House, 2006), 11–12. 10. Keith Wilson, “Midnight’s Children and Reader Responsibility,” in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. M. D. Fletcher (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1994), 62. 11. Malavika Rajbans Sanghvi, “You Fight to Like Where You Live,” Indian Express (Sunday Edition) Express Magazine, March 20, 1983. 12. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 404. 13. Ibid. 14. Rushdie, Shame, 64. 15. Salman Rushdie, Fury (New York: The Modern Library, 2002), 79. 16. Ibid., 51. 17. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 418. 18. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 80. 19. Ibid., 372–73. 20. Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown, 97. 21. Ibid., 129. 22. Ibid., 291. 23. A final recent example of a Rushdie character cursed with an incapacity for “forgettery,” like the Borgesian character, Ireneo Funes, is the high-functioning autistic son of Nero Golden, Petya, who is doomed not just to recall words and events but is overwhelmed by “smells and tastes and sounds and feelings also. And glances and shapes and the patterns of cars in the street and the relative movement of pedestrians and the silences between musical notes and the effects of dog whistles on dogs. All of them all the time running around [his] brain” (Salman Rushdie, The Golden House (New York: Random House, 2017), 200–201). 24. Rushdie, Shame, 70. 25. Ibid., 23. 26. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 14. 27. Ibid., 15. 28. Anurandha Dingwaney Needham, “The Politics of Post-Colonial Identity in Salman Rushdie,” in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. M. D. Fletcher (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1994), 152.

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29. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 189. 30. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 123. 31. Benita Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Routledge, 1995), 41. 32. Qtd. in Nicole Weickgennant Thiara, Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography: Writing the Nation into Being (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 134. 33. Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 1. 34. Said, Orientalism, 32. 35. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 6. 36. Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, 111. 37. Qtd. in Thiara, Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography, 163. 38. Qtd. in Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, 87. 39. Ibid., 91. 40. Teverson, Salman Rushdie, 32. 41. Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back, 7. 42. Ibid., 57. 43. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 214. 44. Salman Rushdie, Step across This Line: Collected Nonfiction (1992–2002) (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), 149. 45. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 327. 46. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 69. 47. Young, Colonial Desire, 2. 48. Ibid., 20. 49. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1988), 358. 50. Young, Colonial Desire, 22. 51. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 368. 52. Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back, 38. 53. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 294. 54. Rani Dube, “Salman Rushdie,” Debonair Reviews, February 1982. 55. Bhishnupriya Ghosh, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 130. 56. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 14. 57. Blake Morrison, “An Interview with Salman Rushdie,” Granta 31 (1990): 124. 58. Teverson, Salman Rushdie, 15. 59. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Penguin, 1986), 3. 60. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 14. 61. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 100. 62. Jaina Sanga, Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors: Migration, Translation, Hybridity, Blasphemy, and Globalization (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 108.

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63. Ibid., 117. 64. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 101. 65. Ibid., 131. 66. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 157. 67. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006), 33. 68. Said, Orientalism, 97. 69. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 193. 70. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 124. 71. Ibid., 111. 72. Ibid., 113. 73. Ibid., 102. 74. Ibid., 103. 75. Salman Rushdie, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (New York: Picador, 1997), 4. 76. Sanga, Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors, 122. 77. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 243. 78. Qtd. in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 130. 79. Qtd. in Colin MacCabe, “Salman Rushdie Talks to the London Consortium about The Satanic Verses,” Critical Quarterly 38, no. 2 (1996): 58. 80. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 242. 81. Said, Orientalism, 58. 82. Terry Gross, “Fresh Air: Salman Rushdie,” WHYY 91FM: WHYY, April 21, 1999. 83. Rushdie, The Ground beneath Her Feet, 228. 84. Ibid., 262. 85. Ibid., 266. 86. Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence (New York: Random House, 2009), 286. 87. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 102. 88. Rushdie, Shame, 73. 89. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 104. 90. Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World, 84. 91. Thiara, Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography, 26–27. 92. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 54. 93. Rushdie, Shame, 41. 94. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 45. 95. Ibid., 204. 96. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 103. 97. His biting criticism of anti-immigrant racial prejudice is not (in his more recent novels) confined to England. In 2015’s Two Years Eight Months and TwentyEight Nights, when the “strangenesses” begin that throw New York City into turmoil, public scapegoating which employs the racialized discourse of epidemiology commences that seeks to locate “identifiable persons, destabilizing persons, who were somehow responsible for the destabilized world.” Because one of the odd

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appearances is an orphaned baby who was found wrapped in an Indian flag in the office of the new mayor, “it might be necessary to look at the South Asian immigrant community to see if answers could be found. Maybe the disease—the strangeness was a social disease now, it seemed—had been brought to America by some of these persons, Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, just as the AIDS epidemic had originated somewhere in Central Africa and arrived in the United States in the early 1980s,” 85. 98. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 134. 99. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 163. 100. Ibid., 174. 101. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 132. 102. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 95. 103. Ibid., 296. 104. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 403. 105. Qtd. in Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 39. 106. Ibid., 38. 107. Harriet Murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 10. 108. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 470. 109. Ibid., 472. 110. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 352. 111. Rushdie, Step across This Line, 131. 112. Edward Said, “Irangate,” London Review of Books 9, no. 9 (1987): 10. 113. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 382. 114. Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (New York: Penguin, 1991), 47. 115. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 388. 116. Ibid., 62. 117. Ibid., 373. 118. Ibid., 36. 119. Qtd. in Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990), 11. 120. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 432. 121. Qtd. in Thiara, Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography, 51–52. 122. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 204. 123. Rushdie, Shame, 198. 124. Ibid., 214. 125. Ibid., 210. 126. Teverson, Salman Rushdie, 143. 127. Inderpal Grewal, “Salman Rushdie: Marginality, Women, and Shame,” in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives On the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. M. D. Fletcher (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1994), 129. 128. Rushdie, Shame, 189. 129. Grewal, “Marginality, Women, and Shame,” 143. 130. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 139.

Remembering the Past, Writing/Righting History

131. Ibid., 150. 132. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 531. 133. Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown, 57. 134. Ibid., 296. 135. Ibid., 309. 136. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 241.

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The Politics of the Palimpsest

“No one today is purely one thing,” Edward Said writes at the close of his Culture and Imperialism. “Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points. . . . It is more rewarding—and more difficult—to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally.”1 A significant number of postcolonial authors, in an effort to recover the traces of an “authentic past” that had been effaced and disrupted by colonization, have sought to restore a sense of national pride by remembering their precolonial heritage, while effectively “forgetting” the intervening years of hegemonic domination that had been imposed on them. A smaller number self-deracinate and internalize a sense of cultural inferiority while pursuing full Westernization, which they equate with modernity and progress. Yet Rushdie, embodying as he does the exilic energies of the South Asian diasporic migrant, chooses to “exist between the old and the new, between the old empire and the new state,” thus “articulat[ing] the tensions, irresolutions, and contradictions in the overlapping territories shown on the cultural map of imperialism.”2 As such, he recognizes in his fiction and essays the permeable and layered quality of identity for postcolonial individuals and nationstates, which constitute a kind of parchment written upon by a multiplicity of sources, each one significant and valuable. Rushdie frequently employs the trope of the palimpsest to complicate and challenge static, inauthentic memories of the past by proposing a fluid, layered, and complex overlapping of identity for individuals and nation-states. The fixity and stasis of remembered identity are accordingly shown from his distinct postmodern and postcolonial vantage point to be a consistently dangerous imposition on the past by both colonizers and mythologizing nationalists, while the freedom to recall the past as irreducibly hybrid and heterogeneous is consistently upheld in his work. 53

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Rushdie’s approach to identity as a kind of parchment written upon by an almost infinite number of sources demonstrates the vital role that memory plays for the postcolonial and postmodern artist in constructing reality for individuals and nation-states. In order to more truthfully recuperate the past, one must acknowledge not only the various layered inscriptions and re-inscriptions that have often been rubbed out by those in positions of dominance for purposes of ideological control but also the exhilarating freedom that comes from the traversal of cultural and linguistic boundaries. The palimpsest as a metaphor throughout Rushdie’s work thus works to continually destabilize forced and unnaturally rigid definitions of the Indian, Pakistani, and diasporic past and present by remembering each as the product of multiple cultural interpenetrations. POSTCOLONIALITY AND THE PALIMPSEST The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “palimpsest” as “a parchment or other writing-material which has been written on twice, the original writing having been erased or rubbed out to make space for the second.”3 Earlier cultures such as the Egyptians or Romans would transcribe words on sheets of papyrus, animal hide, or parchment and, when the time came to reuse the writing surface, would scrape off or wash inscriptions, thus writing over the original text. Yet while such a mechanical method appears to constitute what Iranian sociologist Ali Shariati terms a kind of “revolt against history”4 by discarding past traces and only preserving the etchings of the present, keen observers can still discern and recover the often heterogeneous “underwriting” emerging faintly beneath the surface patina. The palimpsest therefore exists as a kind of depth model for the understanding of history itself. Sigmund Freud also links the metaphor of the palimpsest to the operations of memory in his essay, “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’.” As he explains, the mystic writing pad is a kind of early Etch-a-Sketch device that can be inscribed and erased multiple times even though the writing surface bears the imprint of each successive inscription. Memory, like the writing pad, “provides not only a receptive surface that can be used over and over again, like a slate, but also permanent traces of what has been written.”5 In other words, memory preserves the past from the ruin of time but continues to make room for future inscriptions. Minoli Salgado writes that the metaphor of the mystic writing pad-as-palimpsest serves as a salutary schematic for history as understood by postcolonial writers such as Rushdie because it is a model that is inherently paradoxical, built on the contradiction of simultaneous erasure and retention, violation and restoration, and

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rests on a specific reading of the past [which exists as] the product of contestatory power relations. . . . A postcolonial text by its very definition looks back towards the violence of colonial inscription and the partial erasure of a precolonial past, as well as gesturing towards the more recent violence of nationalist reinscription and the erasure of the colonial past.6

The critical elaboration of those international writers and theorists who find it easiest to reckon with the historically composite and culturally blended nature of identity thus begins with what Gramsci sees as a kind of excavation, the “consciousness of what one really is . . . as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.”7 While the discourse of colonialism has hidden or sought to subjugate native traditions, cultures, and languages by superimposing a dominant layer on top of the precolonial identity, postcolonial critics and authors engineer a subversion of such cultural hegemony. Assuming authority over the palimpsest, they simultaneously deconstruct the dominant discourse and seek a recuperation of what had formerly been occluded. However, Salgado indicates that the model of the palimpsest is inherently paradoxical because no violation or erasure is ever total but only partial. Failure to recognize the durability of the complex and heterogeneous “underwriting” that lies beneath accumulated layers could lead some postcolonial writers and activists in a mood of insurgency to seek to recklessly rub out all “alien” layers in order to clear space and restore what Zeeny Vakil in The Satanic Verses terms “the confining myth of authenticity, that folkloristic straitjacket which she sought to replace by an ethic of historically validated eclecticism, for was not the entire culture based on the principle of borrowing whatever clothes seemed to fit, Aryan, Mughal, British, take-the-best-and-leave-the-rest?”8 This historical short-sightedness is the trap that nationalist-nativists fall into, according to Said, when their struggle for liberation at the level of cultural representations encourages them to correct imperialist distortions by first discarding any past oppressive, foreign elements, and then pinpointing and reclaiming a “pure” native past.9 Yet this ahistorical move only flips the binary through what Salgado calls the “violence of nationalist reinscription and the erasure of the colonial past” and often leads to a concomitant elimination of trace identities of minorities and excentric elements who fail to conform to the new model. The goal, according to such critics as Said and Homi Bhabha, should rather be to deconstruct, demystify, and override such narrow prescriptions by enjoining an ethic of overlapping hybrid influences and embracing the heteroglossic energies that motivate them.

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POSTMODERNISM AND THE PALIMPSEST The theories of Linda Hutcheon, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and even Derrida also sympathetically align themselves with the potent metaphor of the palimpsest in reading history, even if the image fails to be explicitly articulated in their writing. Just as Said advocates for the transgression of temporal and spatial boundary layers that go to construct an identity for postcolonial individuals and nation-states, so too postmodernism seeks to resist the universalizing and totalizing discourses of modernity by “decentering, challenging, and subverting the guiding ‘metanarratives’ of Western culture.”10 According to Lyotard, the two most significant metanarratives that have determined the course of Western understandings of history have been the Marxist affirmation of history as progressing toward social enlightenment and emancipation and the Hegelian discourse of knowledge progressing toward totalization. Each grand récit therefore periodized history chronologically and homogenously by privileging the later stages on the timeline. Read vertically, the present layers of historical enlightenment and liberation which receive the most attention are inscribed atop the benighted lower layers of the past, and consequently the palimpsestic quality of history is, if not altogether ignored, at least marginalized. A healthy postmodern “incredulity” toward such metanarratives recovers an awareness of the messy heterogeneity of the past and “refines our sensitivity to differences [while] reinforc[ing] our ability to tolerate the incommensurable.”11 Foucault’s skeptical and transgressive anti-humanism, which interrogates all foundational truths in favor of historical contingency, comes the closest to actually citing the palimpsest as an animating metaphor that frustrates a search for essential origins or grounds of identity (Ursprung) and which instead delights in tracing the ultimately indefinable heterogeneities and discontinuities that emerge through attention to genealogy instead. “Genealogy,” Foucault insists, “is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times.”12 In other words, genealogy contradicts the assumption that the historical method can ever capture the past as full presence, inviolable, stable, and complete. Its assessment and understanding of identity will only ever be partial and fragmented, emphasizing discontinuity and openness. Just as the character Virgil Jones in Rushdie’s Grimus announced the futility of objectively recreating any historical record in its totality, Foucault, borrowing from Nietzsche, endorses a postmodern historiography that similarly denies the possibility of such an Olympian perspective. “Historians,” Foucault writes, typically “take unusual pains to erase the elements in their work which reveal their grounding in a particular time and place, their preferences in a controversy—the unavoidable obstacles of

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their passion. Nietzsche’s version of historical sense is explicit in its perspective.”13 By honestly acknowledging one’s complicity and entanglement in the history that one narrates and refusing the false comfort of absolute certainty and complete, suprahistorical knowledge, one comes closer to conveying the contradictory, diverse, and rich strangeness of the past as it actually exists, pulsing with life and intensity. Derrida’s critical evaluation and eventual dismissal of the center in Western metaphysics also reinforces the relative merit of the palimpsest as a trope that disdains the foundationalist need for grounding or for closure of the multiplicity of traces and layers that construct historical identity. In his “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Derrida identifies the yearning for “full presence” as the goal of both traditional archaeology, which seeks ultimate origins, and eschatology, which looks for ultimate meaning and purpose when the story of history will be fulfilled. The center or “fundamental ground [of] immobility and a reassuring certitude”14 is displaced and wrenched from its position, however, largely due to the dislocations, ambiguities, and cultural confusions brought into being through the colonial encounter. As a result, the possibility opens up for creative individuals to move beyond the impossible desire to “decipher . . . a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay and from the order of the sign” and beyond the rigid and exclusivist approach that entails a “dream[ing] of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game.”15 Such a poststructuralist reading of identity dovetails interestingly with Rushdie’s assertion concerning the multi-layered, bottomless self, which, as Gramsci indicated, is composed of an “infinity of traces.”16 Revealing his awareness of the palimpsestic nature of the modern self, Rushdie relates, “We’re all divided selves. It is in the nature of modern life that the self is a very plural, fragmented bag of selves. It may be dramatized by the act of migration, by having the self placed in conflict, in the way it’s happened to me, but if it weren’t true of everybody, it wouldn’t be interesting to say.”17 An important consideration is that Rushdie refuses to hierarchize or privilege his various selves that would allow him to arrange them programmatically and linearly. As Sabrina Hassumani suggests, revealing one of Rushdie’s primary postmodern emphases, “Exclusively privileging the past, present or future leads to repression and suppression which results in violence.”18 The diasporic migrant thus remains a “fragmented bag of selves” composed of irreconcilable elements, and the frontier between the layers is always a permeable one. Of course, Hutcheon’s contention that the postmodern condition requires an “acceptance of a plurality of voices (none of them universal or even grounded in any foundational ‘truth’)”19 strikes some critics, including Frederic Jameson and Timothy Brennan, as insufficiently attentive to the

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importance of historical engagement and dismantles the very emphasis on historicity that the palimpsest model aims to create. Although Hutcheon’s own emphasis on postmodern historiography allows her to escape censure, less nuanced postmodernists have come under critique. As Brennan writes concerning Rushdie’s complicity in such practice, his work represents a transitional moment where “native” or local culture seems to be rendered meaningless by a communications network that effortlessly crosses borders and keeps an infinite stock of past artistic styles and local practices (in the form of old Hollywood movies, say, or of current documentaries of primitive societies) perpetually in the present, and available for use.20

Brennan’s assertion echoes one of the most damning critiques of postmodernism—that its playful, indiscriminate determination to assemble scraps and fragments of cultural forms into the flattening aesthetic of pastiche amounts to what Christopher Norris and Andrew Benjamin argue is a programmatic and “disabling historical amnesia . . . that simply plays along with the styles, fashions, and consumer demands of a thoroughly commodified culture.”21 Yet Rushdie, in response to, and even anticipation of such objections, self-consciously distances himself from such postmodern techniques whenever they threaten to cause characters to forget their ties to history and to embrace instead an empty cosmopolitanism that plunges them into a state of abstraction where palimpsestic layering ceases to function. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, for instance, his narrator Moraes Zogoiby enters a hell of “nonexistence” when he encounters the imaginary Spanish town of Benengeli, which welcomes rootless cosmopolitan travelers-qua-consumers. Its setting and Moraes’ uncomfortable response to such a nightmarish locale deserve quoting at length: This thoroughfare, which, as I would discover, was known by the locals as the Street of Parasites, was flanked by a large number of expensive boutiques—Gucci, Hermès, Aquascutum, Cardin, Paloma Picasso—and also by eating-places ranging from Scandinavian meatball-vendors to a Stars-andStripes-liveried Chicago Rib Shack. . . . I heard people speaking English, American, French, German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and what might have been either Dutch or Afrikaans. But these were not visitors; they carried no cameras, and behaved as people do on their own territory. This denatured part of Benengeli had become theirs.22

However, Moraes, himself the product of the union between several different Indian minority groups and religions, including Judaism and Catholicism (in a Joycean spirit, he refers to himself at one point as “a jewholic-anonymous, a

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cathjew nut”),23 holds the residents of this postmodern “EPCOT” village with their “alligator shoes and sports-shirts with crocodiles over their nipples”24 in nothing but pitying contempt: I surmised that I had arrived at a place to which people came to forget themselves—or, more accurately, to lose themselves in themselves, to live in a kind of dream of what they might have been, or preferred to be—or, having mislaid what once they were, to absent themselves quietly from what they had become. . . . What seemed like an enigma was in fact a void. These uprooted drifters had become, by their own choice, human automata. They could simulate human life, but were no longer able to live it.25

Moraes’ assessment, which appears to be Rushdie’s own as well, seems to suggest a distinct distaste for Baudrillard’s understanding of postmodernism in which “all confrontation, all binarism, dissolves within the monism of sign systems, of what he calls ‘simulacra’ that stand in the place of the ‘real’.”26 By spurning the various local rootings that establish their identity in the world and dwelling in an “amnesiac, democratic present, which thought of all yesterdays as garbage, to be disposed of as soon as possible,”27 the inhabitants of Benengeli instead embrace an empty form of multinational capitalism.28 Paul Cantor defines Benengeli as “a world of falsely universal brand names, epitomized by the fast-food chains that spring up everywhere and belong nowhere. This commercial cosmopolitanism denatures human beings; by ignoring all local customs, it dissolves their sense of cultural identity, which is always anchored in a larger sense of community.”29 In other words, by choosing to forget all ties to the past, and the responsibility they owe to history, such uprooted migrants have, in Rushdie’s estimation, collapsed the various layers of their identity into an endless surface and are only able to respond to the world in a spirit of “vacuous alienation and apathy.”30 SPATIAL LAYERING AND HYBRIDITY The notion of layering that defines the palimpsestic approach to language and identity is not, however, just a temporal depth model; as the previous example indicates, it works spatially as well as temporally to gesture toward the many cultural influences in the present moment that configure identity. While colonial and nativist inscriptions each sought to erase the past and ignore the palimpsestic “underwriting” (the first by dismissing native culture and traditions, the latter by often seeking to elide the years of imperial conquest), so too many inveterate cultural purists seek to police the boundaries and frontiers of national or religious identity and seal off potential “leaks” in order to

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avoid contamination or pollution by present foreign elements. Robert Young locates the European culturalist impulse to preserve and protect cultural and racial purity within the context of imperial expansion. Romantic nationalists such as Johann Gottfried von Herder expressed misgivings about the colonial enterprise not because of its brutalizing impact on non-white people groups but rather for the potential dilution of European identity and a destabilization of its mythical “virtues of homogeneity, uniformity and sameness”31 that would be sure to result from territorial enlargement. Yet, according to Young, such a self-protective desire ignores the fact that all cultures require the invigorating infusion of alterity and difference in order to thrive. As he relates, A conflictual tension exists at the heart of Herder’s argument: on the one hand, cultures develop organically into nations by virtue of their homogeneity, attachment to the soil, their traditions and single language, but on the other hand, the “golden chain of improvement that surroundest the earth” tells a different story, namely that the progress of culture works by a regenerative development between cultures, in which one nation educates another through mixing and migration.32

Rejecting the benefits of such admixture not only is culturally impoverishing but also denies (in yet another revolt against history) the impossibility of an absolutely pure culture free of foreign traces. Indeed, Matthew Arnold’s work, On the Study of Celtic Literature, reminds readers that English identity has always already been “contaminated” with Celtic, Norman, and German blood and is perpetually riven by its own difference.33 Nevertheless, Rushdie identifies lingering, yet powerful, traces of those ideologies which attempt to unify and consolidate a “stable” national identity in order to guard against the threats of miscegenation and métissage in the British immigration debates of the early 1980s. When Parliament passed the Nationality Act of 1981, depriving individuals of automatic natural citizenship by virtue of being born in England, Rushdie discerned that such legislation served to subtly discriminate against non-white inhabitants, since now a child was required to have at least one parent who was a settled British citizen to receive the “gift” of citizenship from the government.34 This policy thus effectively curbed the explosion of new citizens among the immigrant populations of England and revealed to Rushdie the dark strains of racist ideology that continued to fester: “British thought, British society, has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism. It’s still there, breeding lice and vermin, waiting for unscrupulous people to exploit it for their own ends.”35 Such a rigid and monodic approach to culture and race is always rejected by Rushdie, growing up as he did among the teeming and fluid religions, classes, ethnicities, and ideas that were each vying for his attention in a

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worldly city like Bombay and later experiencing the thrill of transgressing cultural and national boundaries as a diasporic migrant. As he places his own experience into The Ground beneath Her Feet, textualizing his hometown, Bombay has always been “a great city, a metropolis of many narratives that converged briefly and then separated for ever, discovering their different dooms in that crowd of stories through which all of us, following our own destinies, had to push and shove to find our own way through.”36 In his 2002 meditation on the opportunities and challenges of the modern age, “Step Across This Line,” he further reflects that because of international migration, “there has never been a period in the history of the world when its people were so jumbled up. We are so thoroughly shuffled together, clubs among diamonds, hearts among spades, jokers everywhere, that we’re just going to have to live with it.”37 Rushdie’s position moves beyond mere acceptance of such blending, however, and instead embraces the exhilarating desirability of cultural “shuffling.” Explicitly disavowing the fearful and self-protective attitude of Herder, who sought to deflect the dangers of hybridity and cultural miscegenation by preserving a myth of distinctive national and racial heritages, he has his character Neela Mahendra from the novel Fury wax rhapsodic about the aesthetic benefits of racial and cultural admixture which have been made possible by colonialism and post–World War II migration. Marveling at the impossibly good-looking Surinamese athletes on the Dutch national soccer team, Neela affirms that they are “the living proof of the value of mixing up the races. . . . Stir all the races together and you get the most beautiful people in the world.”38 Rather than bemoan the confusion and chaos that are sure to result when such rearrangement and recombination occur, Rushdie instead celebrates the permeability of identity as a necessary prerequisite for beauty and newness to enter the world, which results in “an increase in what it is possible for the voyager to be.”39 INFLUENCE Rushdie’s 1999 essay “Influence” proves to be an important manifesto of sorts that unifies many of his past arguments on the transcultural, translinguistic energies to which diasporic authors can lay claim. Giving an etymological reading of the word influence, he explains that “the word itself suggests something fluid, something ‘flowing in.’ This feels right, if only because I have always envisaged the world of the imagination not so much as a continent as an ocean.”40 He goes on to remind the reader that “books can grow as easily from spores borne on the air as from their makers’ particular roots.”41 As he had put forward in the 1982 essay, “Imaginary Homelands,” the virtue

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of cross-pollination is that a writer doesn’t have to be confined to his or her own racial, cultural, and linguistic heritage when writing. Rushdie’s own “polyglot family tree” includes Gogol, Cervantes, Sterne, Dickens, and Grass in addition to Tagore, G. V. Desani, and Garcia Márquez. Such a collision of seemingly irreconcilable voices all maintained in balance mirrors Rushdie’s own exuberant experience of the modern city, which Otto Cone from The Satanic Verses terms “the locus classicus of incompatible realities. Lives that have no business mingling with one another sit side by side on the omnibus.”42 Indeed, Rushdie’s readings of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens have convinced him that each are quintessentially Indian novelists whose portraits of frustrated “sharp-tongued women” [Austen] and proto-Surrealist scenarios made possible by modern city life [Dickens] he has liberally borrowed from in his own fiction.43 One of Rushdie’s most vigorous literary images that captures the endlessly proliferating and multi-layered “in-flowings” which inform not only the diasporic artist’s imagination, but also his understanding of the necessarily hybrid nature of identity, occurs in his first novel to be written after the 1989 fatwa—Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Borrowing his title from the seemingly bottomless eleventh-century Sanskrit compendium of oral folktales and legends, the Kathasaritsagara, or “Ocean of the Streams of Story,” Rushdie follows a hero, a precocious young man named Haroun, who travels to the Oz-like water world of Kahani (“Story”) to discover a cure for his father Rashid’s sudden inability to recount fantastic stories. Upon his arrival to Kahani, Haroun learns that the surface of the planet is dominated by multicolored strands, each representing a different tale. Rushdie reveals the complicated, braided quality of these various narratives as follows: As all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.44

Like some kind of infinite Borgesian universal library, the Ocean of the Streams of Story serves as an apt metaphor for Rushdie’s own narrative practice. Eschewing the culturalist mandate to confine oneself to a particular narrow, “pure” tradition, Rushdie throughout his career persistently ransacks in a free-ranging manner the archive of such pretexts as “European, Middle Eastern and Indian fairy tale, pop music lyrics, English children’s classics, Indian cinema, Persian poetry, political allegory and science fiction,” to

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identify just a few genres.45 Iff the Water Genie explains to Haroun the miraculous ability of the ocean’s Plentimaw Fishes, who are able to artistically ingest individual strands and relaunch them into the sea in new combinations: “Nothing comes from nothing. . . . [N]o story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old—it is the new combinations that make them new.”46 Of course, since Haroun was the first work to be published after the fatwa, much has been made by critics of the various allegorical intersections between the children’s novel and the manifold hostilities toward and misinterpretations wrought upon his controversial The Satanic Verses. He writes in his defense of The Satanic Verses, “In Good Faith,” that “those who oppose the novel most vociferously today are of the opinion that intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own. I am of the opposite opinion . . . Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world.”47 In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the archvillain Khattam-Shud, the Cultmaster of Bezaban (“Without-a-Tongue”) seeks to destroy the teeming multiplicity and variegated life of the Ocean of the Streams of Story by installing a massive plug that blocks the Wellspring of new stories at the bottom of the ocean. Khattam-Shud, clearly a stand-in for the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini himself, distrusts the lively debate and new perspectives opened up through the free exchange of ideas which are encoded in such stories, and seeks to foreclose narrative options by silencing the artist and limiting the number of influences that inform his work. Rushdie throughout his career has continually rejected such a monologic and stripped-down approach which emphasizes cultural purity and religious dogmatism via an exclusion of the reality of difference. In its place, he suggests that cultural identity is “not determined by one influence alone, but develops through a complex process of hybridisation and exchange; that communal segregation, cultural supremacism, walls of force, apartheids . . . are falsifications of the historically verifiable, mongrel nature of human community.”48 In Midnight’s Children, for instance, Saleem uses the metaphor of “leaking” and “swallowing” to indicate that the boundaries of the self and the nation are, and must always remain, porous and heterogeneous: “Things— even people—have a way of leaking into each other . . . like flavors when you cook,” he relates.49 Because each person is engendered by a multiplicity of influences, Saleem’s repeated refrain throughout the novel is that “to understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.”50 Indeed, the central conceit of Midnight’s Children—the fantastic chorus of voices held together in Saleem’s head—represents on one level the vibrant hope offered by a legitimately transcultural literature that harmoniously incorporates a plurality of different narrative threads without excluding any. Rushdie writes in his 1990 lecture, “Is Nothing Sacred?”, that “literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our heads, we can hear

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voices talking about everything in every possible way.”51 The primary conflict of ideas in Haroun and the Sea of Stories is waged between the Guppees (“Gossips”) and the Chups (“Quiet Fellows”); the Guppees seek to rescue the Ocean by insisting on the democratic need for openness, free exchange of ideas, and continual conversation, while the Chups live in perpetual fear of Khattam-Shud and reside in a land “of books that wear padlocks.”52 The reason why both Khattam-Shud and the Grand Ayatollah seek to deny the various “impure” influences of disparate cultural threads and perspectives, according to Rushdie, is a political desire for control over the narrative. “The world . . . is not for Fun. . . . The world is for Controlling,” Khattam-Shud maliciously warns Haroun toward the end of the novel. “[It is] there to be ruled. And inside every single story, inside every Stream in the Ocean, there lies a world, a story-world, that I cannot Rule at all.”53 This is precisely what Rushdie understands to be the core of the debate over The Satanic Verses: Who shall have control over the story? Who has, who should have, the power not only to tell the stories with which, and within which, we all lived, but also to say in what manner those stories may be told? . . . As a creative artist he knew that the only answer to the question was: Everyone and anyone has, or should have that power. . . . The argument was freedom. But in a closed society those who possessed political or ideological power invariably tried to shut down these debates. We will tell you the story, they said, and we will tell you what it means. We will tell you how the story is to be told and we forbid you to tell it in any other way54 (emphasis in original).

Ironically, the very language of “pollution” and “contamination” that cultural purists have used to intolerantly reject the multilayered superabundance and multiplicity of influences that the diasporic migrant writer rejoices in is turned on its head and employed by Rushdie in Haroun to describe the poisoning effects on the Ocean of the Streams of Story when such transcultural influences are blocked. And if walls are erected around narratives, confining them to purely one layer, Rushdie suggests that “literature becomes parochial and marginal” indeed.55 MAGIC REALISM AND THE TRANSGRESSION OF GENERIC BOUNDARIES The mimetic conventions which only permitted particular experiences to be narrated in nineteenth- and twentieth-century works of realistic literature posed a significant barrier that walled off the fantastic from the quotidian. Implicit rules stipulated that only the rational and the material existed;

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therefore, a narrative method which adhered as closely as possible to normative standards of behavior and interaction on the part of “real” characters became hegemonically dominant. As Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris explain, however, realism was never a simple, unproblematic reflection of “reality”; instead, Zamora and Faris expose the ways in which such an approach to narrating the world was ideologically constructed to serve dominant interests in the Western world. By excluding out of hand the possibility of the supernatural, the mythic, and the magical, works of Western realism trotted out versions of reality that masqueraded as normative, universal and objective while disguising their own interests in privileging the scientific and the rational.56 Rawdon Wilson, in his essay “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space: Magical Realism,” contends that Western realistic writing was often complicit with imperialist ideology in the nineteenth century as both sought to write over non-Western epistemologies and cognitive maps of the world and to construct such anti-rational modes of knowing as irredeemably ex-centric, foreign, and primitive. As he relates, in works of realistic fiction “the actual world’s diversity is canceled, cropped, or brushed out in order to create fictional worlds of great intensity, but narrow semiotic potential. . . . The possibilities of border-crossing or boundary-skipping between domains are blocked, methodically delimited.”57 Ironically, in their attempts to fashion an accurate portrait of “reality,” continental and British realistic authors (who were all too often unwilling to acknowledge the margins of experience or the possibility of multiple layered inscriptions which constitute daily life) ended up creating truly fantastic fictions that failed to comport with the totality of existence. Magical realism thus strives to subversively resist such false and univocal constructions by expanding the scope of experience to include scenarios and discourses that had been written over in the colonial encounter. Whereas realism regularly requires stable and fixed boundaries between the “real” and the supernatural, magic realism narrates life at the confluence of cultures and emphasizes the fluid interpenetration and hybrid commingling of the common and the mythic. It is resolutely nonhierarchical because it refuses to privilege one or the other modes of perception and instead preserves the palimpsestic quality of reality in suspension.58 In Midnight’s Children, for instance, when Amina Sinai goes to see Shri Ramram Seth in order to hear the prophecy regarding her son, she initially screams when she (and the reader) discerns that the seer is hovering crosslegged half a foot above the floor. Yet after a narrative interruption of two pages, Rushdie goes on to clarify that once Amina’s eyes have grown accustomed to the darkness, she recognizes that Ramram is actually seated on a shelf jutting out of the wall. While such an example seems to represent the

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priority of naturalistic interpretations of reality over the magical, since a plausible explanation is eventually given for Ramram’s levitation, no explanation is given for how he was able to foresee the linked destinies of Saleem and Shiva. As Rushdie argues, “The miraculous and the everyday coexist [in India]; gods are real and intervene in human affairs; miracles happen. So you have to develop a form which doesn’t prejudge whether your characters are right or wrong. You have to create a form in which the idea of the miraculous can coexist with observable, everyday reality.”59 Similarly, in the “Parting of the Arabian Sea” chapter of The Satanic Verses, the Westernized secularist, Mirza Saeed Akhtar, seemingly Rushdie’s mouthpiece throughout the episode for his scoffing disbelief in the possibilities of the miraculous, rejects out of hand the notion that the seer Ayesha is being guided by the archangel Gibreel; as a result, he constantly warns the credulous band of pilgrims that their act of faith in crossing the Arabian Sea on dry land will result in disaster. Yet when they enter the sea, Rushdie preserves the tension of each possible consequence in suspense, depending on the level of faith and perspective of the viewer.60 Muhammad Din (the Sarpanch, or headman, of Mirza Saeed’s village), as well as Osman the Hindu convert and Sri Srinivas the Hindu toymaker, each claim that the sea divided and that the pilgrims walked safely across, while Mirza Saeed continually claims to the authorities that all were drowned. As Stephen Slemon explains, magic realism always entails an imbrication, or overlapping, of at least two separate narrative possibilities as “opposing discursive systems [refuse] to subordinate or contain the other. This sustained opposition forestalls the possibility of interpretive closure.”61 By allowing for a plurality of alternative explanations for what transpired, Rushdie thus dramatically connects his thematic emphasis in the novel regarding the need for flexibility, compromise, and doubt to counter inhuman attitudes of absolutism, closure, and certitude with a magical realistic determination to allow space for layered and diverse modes of knowing. Rushdie therefore challenges the dominance of realistic conventions of writing, explaining that such techniques fail to adequately capture the chaotic and oftentimes contradictory experience of contemporary existence in a globalized culture: Reality changes. Reality is not fixed. The way in which we see and define reality now is different from the way it was defined in the 19th century or the 18th century or the 17th century. It shifts quite obviously because the world changes. And when it changes a novel has to try and change with it. . . . What García Márquez always said about magic realism was that it’s realism and not magic. It’s a way of noticing certain kinds of reality which the traditional naturalistic novel can’t notice because of its rules. . . . As the 20th century has altered

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reality, the traditional form of the novel has become less and less able to notice it. To notice the conflicts and the shifts . . . you have to break those rules. Because they seem to be rules for another time.62

Rushdie’s historicizing of narrative method and de-privileging of the centrality of Western modes of understanding suggest the ways in which traditional realistic narrative, while purporting to be able to take in the whole of reality as if through a microscope, actually is blinded by its own preconceptions concerning the nature of the world, which Rushdie affirms “is not very naturalistic these days. The world is operatic and surreal and grotesque. I think the quiet little novels which pretend that it isn’t are the fantasies. Those are the fabulist fictions.”63 SURREALISM AND ALTERNATE REALITIES Rushdie’s reference to the world being surreal reveals his indebtedness to the European cultural movement as articulated for him by Andre Breton and particularly the films of Luis Buñuel, who Rushdie claims was a more important influence on him than Joyce.64 If magical realism “is a mode suited to exploring—and transgressing—boundaries,”65 then surrealism’s particular emphasis on the endless traffic between the waking world and the one of dreams also finds specific resonance in Rushdie’s art. In a 1983 interview with Rani Dharker, he affirms his belief that “actuality is really very, very odd. Surrealism began, you know Andre Breton and all that, with the idea that if you were just to scratch at the surface of what seemed to be ordinary life you would find wonderful things bubbling away just underneath.”66 In fact, in Joseph Anton: A Memoir, he denies the existence of “ordinary life” at all. Claiming that “our ability to experience the world as extraordinary was dulled by habituation,” he asserts that “we grew used to the way things were, to the dailiness of life, and a sort of dust or film obscured our vision, and the true, miraculous nature of life on earth eluded us. It was the task of the artist to wipe away that blinding layer and renew our capacity for wonderment.”67 A singular instance in which Rushdie explicitly links surrealistic technique with the palimpsestic emphasis on mutually informing layers occurs with increasing regularity in his works of fiction as well as public addresses—the bizarre quality of private life simmering just beneath the surface of public life and behind closed doors. In a July 2009 keynote address to the Scranton Cultural Center, he announced that the “world seems to be getting increasingly more fictitious” and that there no longer exists any such thing as ordinary life. In its place, Rushdie suggests, there have erupted a number of “surrealist growths” pushing through the apparently banal surface.68 To those

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who object to his depictions of modern family life as too riotous and fantastic, he replies that they’re actually more truthful, and that the bourgeois façade of normality stands as the illusion. As he puts it in Joseph Anton: A Memoir, “The family was not the firm foundation upon which society rested, but stood at the dark chaotic heart of everything that ailed us. It was not normal, but surreal; not humdrum, but filled with event; not ordinary, but bizarre.”69 And in the baroque Moor’s Last Sigh, with its collection of crime lord fathers, feminist activist lawyer sisters, schizophrenic and sociopathic lovers, and incestuous mothers, Moraes Zogoiby, the still point of the turning world, confesses that “it is the idea of the norm that is bizarre, the notion that human beings have normal, everyday lives. . . . Go behind the door of any household . . . and you’ll find a macabre wonderland as untamed as our own.”70 His fiction is replete with characters who suffer identity confusion because of continual eruptions of the marvelous (and occasionally “not so wonderful”) world of the imagination into the sphere of the commonplace. Omar Khayyam Shakil’s (Shame) and Gibreel Farishta’s (The Satanic Verses) bouts of insomnia reveal that “people who sleep too little can find the boundaries between the waking and sleeping worlds get difficult to police. Things skip between the unguarded bollards, avoiding the customs post.”71 One of the central conceits in The Ground beneath Her Feet involves the existence of a parallel world or alternative dimension in which Jesse Presley lived, while his twin Elvis died; President Kennedy survived the assassination attempt in Dallas, only to be later killed by the same bullet that was fired at his brother, Robert; and famous literary characters such as Alexander Portnoy and Don Quixote become the authors and Roth and Cervantes the characters. Yet the Bombay-born musician, Ormus Cama, serves as a kind of bridge between worlds and his ability to see both dimensions with a “double vision” collapses the realms of the actual and the fanciful, revealing the “artificiality of such a separation.”72 However, Rushdie’s engagement of the science fiction trope of permeable alternate realities, layered atop and beside each other, serves as more than an opportunity for feats of fanciful legerdemain in the novel; it also subversively writes back against the notion of the non-Western world’s inferiority to the West and creates a politically charged version of events in which the East becomes the progenitor, rather than a mere echo of the West. In one of the more powerfully suggestive scenes in The Ground beneath Her Feet, Ormus claims to have heard and authored all the most influential music of the 1950s and 1960s, such as “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Blowing in the Wind,” before they were made famous by Elvis, the Beatles, or Bob Dylan. As Rushdie relates, “According to Ormus and Vina’s variant version of history, their alternative reality, we Bombayites can claim that it was in truth our music, born in Bombay, like Ormus and me, not ‘goods from

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foreign’ but made in India, and maybe it was the foreigners who stole it from us.”73 This transformation of a “belatedness into an earliness” on the part of Rushdie represents a clever postcolonial “turning of the tables” employed earlier by such authors as Jean Rhys, who “outflank[ed] her European predecessor,” Charlotte Brontë, in writing Wide Sargasso Sea as a prequel to Jane Eyre, or even Mark Twain, whose Connecticut Yankee teaches ancient Britain important political lessons, making “British culture . . . paradoxically derivative from America.”74 Such sleight of hand doesn’t serve to obstinately deny the historicity of the birth of rock n’ roll but rather offers what Wendy Faris describes as “an idiosyncratic recreation of historical events [that are] grounded firmly in historical realities—often alternate versions of officially sanctioned accounts.”75 By giving Bombay a central, rather than peripheral, role in the creation of rock music, Rushdie foregrounds the dense network of cultural boundary-crossings and intermingling that led to the formation of the art form in the first place. When Rushdie was growing up in the cosmopolitan city of Bombay in the 1950s, he states that “one of the things that really strikes me retrospectively is how this music, when it arrived halfway around the world, didn’t seem foreign to us. It didn’t seem like music from a long way away. It seemed to be our music too.”76 In other words, popular music cannot claim one particular nation for its origins or source of artistic energy; rather, its cultural location is complex and multivalent and always already contaminated by a multiplicity of enriching influences, none of which can assert preeminence over any other. PALIMPSEST AND TRAUMA It’s intriguing to chart how frequently the figure of the palimpsest emerges in Rushdie’s work during moments of individual and national trauma or crisis as a typically enabling form of recuperation performed by the postcolonial artist. If despotic regimes and overzealous individuals have sought to ruthlessly misread, pervert, or strip the past of its rich complexity of identity, Rushdie insists on the prerogative of the centripetal migrant to disclose such oversimplifying maneuvers and to reinscribe a more truthful, layered, approach. One of the most obvious examples of personal trauma in Rushdie’s own life was the disruptive experience of the fatwa. As Martin Amis famously said regarding the way that the writer’s reputation had been occluded and erased under the weight of his notorious celebrity, Rushdie had simply “vanished into the front page.”77 As a result, media representations of Rushdie transformed him from a witty, generous, and urbane writer into nothing more than a mirror of “the people who attacked [him]—their humorlessness, their bigotry, and so on. . . . [He] must be like that, too, if they’re so angry with [him].”78

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Moraes Zogoiby’s rueful meditation on the unjust accusations that landed him in the Dantean hell of Bombay Central jail on trumped-up charges in The Moor’s Last Sigh clearly reflects Rushdie’s bewilderment in the face of his own symbolic erasure: “Had my reading finger perhaps slipped from the sentence of my own story on to this other, outlandish, incomprehensible text that had been lying, by chance, just beneath? Yes: some slippage had plainly occurred.”79 The reductive rhetoric of the controversy, according to Rushdie, “flattened” him and turned him into a two-dimensional stereotype. He was either idealized into a placeholder for the power of free speech and artistic liberty by his supporters or demonized as an infidel, blasphemer, and race traitor by his detractors.80 In order to ensure his safety, he assumed the code name “Joseph Anton” (taking the first names of two of his favorite authors, Conrad and Chekhov) for his dealings with the British Special Branch, thus fictionalizing himself and submerging Rushdie under the protective layer of yet another alternate identity. The cumulative effect of all these accretions and false layers only increased his desire to recover, through a kind of strategic essentialism, what he believed to be his authentic self, “to be reborn as himself, into his own life.”81 Despite Rushdie’s recurrent critical emphasis on the radical heterogeneity of the self in which, as Gayatri Spivak argues, “no rigorous definition of anything is ultimately possible,” he would agree with Spivak that at times “definitions are necessary in order to keep us going, to allow us to take a stand. The only way that I can see myself making definitions is in a provisional and polemical one.”82 His personal experience of the fatwa as an engine of discontinuity thus overturned his traditionally positive appropriation of the palimpsest trope by exposing its limits and demonstrating how an insistence on the layered self can be disempowering when such levels are disingenuously foisted on one from without. Similarly, the traumatic effects of Indian Partition, in which historians estimate that up to a million people were killed and millions more displaced and relocated because of sectarian violence between Hindus and Muslims, repeatedly activate the metaphor of the palimpsest in Rushdie’s fiction. Following Partition, there was a concerted effort on both sides of the fault line to consolidate racial and cultural unity through a kind of exclusionary form of nationalistic identity politics and to obscure the always already-contaminated, hybrid quality of both India and Pakistan. The unified self-perception of the Pakistani-ruling elite stands as the most obvious example of such a reductive approach in Rushdie’s fiction. Although his narrator explains in Shame that Pakistan (the “Land of the Pure”) was an idea hatched by Muslim intellectuals in England and “translated” back to the geographical location of the subcontinent, an “imagined community” that everyone agreed to dream, official doctrine denied the obvious fact that the new nation was a palimpsest imposed on history and chose to forget its

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Indian past: “A palimpsest obscures what lies beneath. To build Pakistan it was necessary to cover up Indian history, to deny that Indian centuries lay just beneath the surface of Pakistani Standard Time. The past was rewritten.”83 Yet by exclusively privileging the uppermost layer of the present and ignoring the heterogeneous “underwriting” beneath, the crucially significant, fuller definition of a palimpsest as “simultaneous erasure and retention, violation and restoration”84 is lost, and the multivalent quality of national identity is damaged through a limiting emphasis on erasure and violation of the past. In a chapter entitled “The Duellists,” Rushdie writes back in Shame to this corrupted understanding of the palimpsest by claiming that “it is possible to see the subsequent history of Pakistan as a duel between two layers of time, the obscured world forcing its way through what-had-been-imposed.”85 One would think that India would seem to come off better in Rushdie’s work, as cosmopolitan cities like Bombay more readily embrace an “ethic of impurity” that acknowledges the empowering, hybrid quality of the past. However, India also comes under fire both implicitly and explicitly for the ways in which Nehru’s rhetoric of secular inclusivity subtly privileged a majoritarian perspective and facilitated the rise of Hindu nationalism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Nehru’s 1946 prison text, The Discovery of India, a work of nationalist historiography and cultural history that argued for the necessity of Indian independence and which proclaimed the essential oneness of the Indian people, served to promote the slogan of “unity in diversity.” At a key moment in the text, Nehru articulates that India “was like some ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously.”86 Such a pronouncement not only seems to insist on a distinctive and unified Indian identity, both ancient and new, with its own right to exist, but also appears to value each religious, cultural, and racial community that finds its place in the “noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell.”87 The palimpsestic reference thus serves as a way of writing back to the violence of colonial inscription by permitting “the soul of a nation, long suppressed, [to find] utterance.”88 Yet it also seeks to anticipate and forestall the future possibility of wide-scale violence that erupted at Partition by insisting on the benefits that come from mutual interpenetration, diversity, and tolerance among Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis, and Christians. As Nicole Thiara argues, “The idea of an inclusive, Indian nation based on tolerance and cultural synthesis” enunciated by the secular nationalist elite was historically driven by the desire to counteract communalist tensions building in the lead-up to Partition.89 However, Nehru’s secular socialist discourse of tolerance, according to Stephen Morton, concealed “a structure of intolerance towards populations

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deemed to be minorities from the foundation of the Indian nation state.”90 In other words, the very definition of tolerance suggests an imbalance of power whereby a majority population (Hindu) chooses to grudgingly accept a minority position with which it disapproves (Muslim, Sikh, Parsi, etc.). Such a seemingly liberal policy thus conceals the asymmetrical power relations subtly encoded within the Indian body politic since the unspoken assumption is that the dominant group must tolerate the weaker. The violent experience of Partition clarified this unbalanced position by revealing that the apparently universalist notion of secularism underpinning India’s constitution was based on a tacit assumption that the majority Hindu population were natural citizens of India, whereas the minority Muslim population had to demonstrate their loyalty to the Indian nation. As a result, it was the Muslim population who were marked as a minority group that should be tolerated in Nehru’s secular nationalist discourse.91

Such a position unwittingly opened the door to the culturally chauvinistic attitudes of the Shiv Sena and Hindu fundamentalists who sought to violently rub out “alien traces” of “foreign” minority identities in order to embrace a culturally homogenous ideology of Hindutva, an exclusionary form of Hindu nationalism. Nicole Thiara notes that in 1983, Hindu nationalists appropriated the image of “Mother India” (Bharat Mata) as predominantly Hindu by erecting a temple to Bharat Mata which sought to narrate Indian national history, but the temple only included Hindu gods and goddesses, while exclusively memorializing Hindu heroes who sacrificed themselves for the nation.92 Unlike Rushdie’s indictment of Pakistan’s determination to overwrite centuries of Indian history by selectively focusing on the uppermost layers of inscription, he decries in a later work, The Moor’s Last Sigh, the desire on the part of petty demagogues like Raman “Mainduck” Fielding to rhetorically erase what Mainduck believes to be illegitimate layers of “invader-history” in order to excavate a mythic and originary Hindu nation that never existed in the first place. Just as the traumatic rupture of Partition calls forth the metaphor of the palimpsest in Rushdie’s fiction, so too does the violent communalist rioting that led to the deaths of over 2,000 Hindus and Muslims in 1992 following the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodha, Uttar Pradesh in The Moor’s Last Sigh. Abuses and misappropriations of palimpsestic layering are regularly perpetrated in the novel by the forces of singularity and religious and cultural monologism. Although the Babri Masjid had been erected in the early sixteenth century by the Mughal emperor, Babur, the building became a site of controversy when Hindu extremists alleged that the mosque had been

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built over the sacred birthplace of the god Ram, which had formerly housed a Hindu temple, and must therefore be destroyed. Thomas Blom Hansen, seeking to determine a cause for the after-shocks of the violence in such a seemingly “civilized” metropolitan city as Bombay, confesses that “it was as if a whole layer of moderation, civility, and cautious public speech had been removed and instead ethno-religious hatred had emerged in a rather naked form.”93 What’s so chilling about such violence is that it seems to mark the fault line between two completely incompatible worlds in which the darkness of the one pierces the surface calm of the other. As Suzie Mackenzie notes in an essay/interview with Rushdie from The Guardian, “This is life, he says, this is reality. Layer on parallel layer. Growing up in India, walking down a street in Old Delhi where one day you will see people happy, joking, playing cards, and the next day they will be killing each other. Neighbours murdering lifelong neighbors.”94 In the lead-up to the mosque’s demolition, the national Bharatiya Janata Party and its Shiv Sena faction in Mumbai had each increasingly tried to articulate the myth of a homogenous India free of any “inauthentic” traces of Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis, Jews, or Christians, to say nothing of the colonialist influence of the British. As Raman Fielding hyperbolically boasts at one point in The Moor’s Last Sigh, “One day the city—my beautiful goddess-named Mumbai, not this dirty Anglo-style Bombay—will be on fire with our notions . . . Hindu-stan: the country of Hindus! . . . Now our freedom, our beloved nation, is buried beneath the things the invaders have built. This true nation is what we must reclaim from beneath the layers of alien empires.”95 Just as Rushdie’s version of Pakistan opts for a stripped-down, monolithic unity and purity of identity in Shame that conveniently forgets those buried “Indian centuries,” so too does Fielding’s exclusivist vision of a Hindu India immorally conceive of the modern nation as a palimpsest that must be stripped of its “illegitimate” patina of non-Hindu sources in order to return to an imaginary precolonial and pre-Mughal past.96 Yet Rushdie continually decries such dishonest flights from historical truth and advocates remembering the nations of Pakistan and India as fully layered multiplicities rather than false and forced singularities. DANPIERRE AND ROBESTON Toward the end of Shame, new President Raza Hyder, after having his onetime friend and erstwhile playboy, Prime Minister Iskander Harappa, assassinated, forcibly institutes an Islamicization program that seeks to create a politicized Islamic state within Pakistan through the practice of systematic censorship and repression. By tuning his inner ear to the theological speeches

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of the dead divine, Maulana Dawood, Hyder begins a theocratic crackdown that prohibits the sale of alcohol, replaces television broadcasts with nothing but the theological lectures of mullahs, and requires all citizens to stop and pray on the prophet’s birthday when the muezzins announce the event from all the mosques in the country. In addition, dissent becomes criminalized, since it’s now seen as a mode of profane resistance against sacred laws; the Islamic Socialism advocated by the dissenting body of the Popular Front is viewed as blasphemous and incompatible with God’s laws; and, perhaps most tellingly of all, women are forced to wear the veil, while men are given free rein to physically abuse women who fail to adhere to such draconian measures. Such practices clearly confirm the narrator’s earlier comment that “repression is a seamless garment; a society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, which crushes its women beneath the intolerable burdens of honour and propriety, breeds repression of other kinds as well.”97 Of course, this is the very picture of Pakistan that critics such as Sara Suleri, Aijaz Ahmad, and Inderpal Grewal have opposed because it seems to allow no space for female characters to resist or challenge such repression and potentially caters to a representation of the country as monolithically dogmatic and backward, thus perpetuating Western Orientalist stereotypes. However, Rushdie’s narrative directly counters such notions by arguing that the authoritarian politicization of Islam has been forced upon the unwilling people of Pakistan by a ruling elite whose motto of “Stability, in the name of God”98 is used in strategic and opportunistic ways to consolidate power. As the narrator reflects, “So-called Islamic ‘fundamentalism’ does not spring, in Pakistan, from the people. It is imposed on them from above. Autocratic regimes find it useful to espouse the rhetoric of faith” to enforce obedience.99 Yet this attempt to forcibly suppress and eliminate the secular in the name, and underneath the sign, of the religious is actually de-stabilized in a number of key ways throughout the text. For one thing, the foundations of the state of Pakistan were never intended to be purely theocratic as they were for the countries of Iran and Israel, according to the narrator. Despite the minority interest of such extremists as the Jamaat-i-Islami and Jamat-ulUlema-i-Islam parties,100 for founding leader M. A. Jinnah, “Islam and the Muslim State were . . . political and cultural ideas; the theology was not the point.”101 Rushdie goes one step further, however, by suggesting that Maulana Dawood’s belief that Islamabad is actually Mecca and that its holy places are being drowned in excrement actively motivates Hyder’s plan to “cleanse the sacred places.” Yet Dawood’s palimpsestic vision of Islamabad-as-Mecca is clearly a false interpretation born out of the religious man’s senility, as Pakistan was never the “holy heart of the faith.”102 The strict and exclusively religious interpretation of Pakistani identity thus constitutes yet another false

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layering that seeks to rewrite the past to serve the purposes of the present theologically absolutist regime. One of the most significant ways that Rushdie undermines the rigid and exclusivist reading of the Pakistani body politic in Shame is through a replacement of the unitary ideology of the theocrats that seeks to restrict identity to the imposed “uppermost” layer with a thoroughly deconstructed understanding of the self. By breaking down the false binaries that preserve the dominant position given to religion, Rushdie introduces a fuller and more complex palimpsestic interpretation of the people that refuses to privilege the sacred or the profane, the strictly moral or the playful. In a vertiginously layered section of the narrative that transgresses temporal and cultural boundaries, Rushdie’s narrator reminisces about once seeing in London Georg Büchner’s play, “Danton’s Death,” set during the French Revolution. Interestingly, this dramatic exploration of the various tensions and conflicts which drove the Reign of Terror serves to stimulate reflections on Pakistani politics as the narrator “translates” the characters of Danton and Robespierre into the South Asian leaders, Iskander Harappa and Raza Hyder. In the play, Danton (and by extension, Harappa) lives for hedonism and the pleasure principle, enjoying wine, nice clothing, and women, while Robespierre (Hyder) stands for puritanical virtue. The play seems to ideologically ally the “people” with Robespierre since Danton remarks that “Robespierre and the people are virtuous . . . distrust[ing] fun. This opposition—the epicure against the puritan—is, the play tells us, the true dialectic of history.”103 Yet such a stark arrangement of the battle lines between the sacred and the profane fails to reveal why Danton is cheered in court and becomes a hero; it also fails to comport with the veins of resistance Rushdie sees in play in Pakistani public life which challenge the absolutist imposition of a politicized and repressive form of Islam. The seemingly “marginal” female characters in the novel who suffered as the primary victims of such repression, for instance, “marched in from the peripheries of the story to demand inclusion of their own tragedies, histories and comedies” and became correspondingly central.104 Beyond this recognition, however, Rushdie adds one more: “The people are not only like Robespierre. They, we, are Danton, too. We are Robeston and Danpierre. The inconsistency doesn’t matter; I myself manage to hold large numbers of wholly irreconcilable views simultaneously, without the least difficulty.”105 This insistence on the irretrievably hybrid and heterogeneous quality of the self constitutes one of the most effective challenges to the privileging of the sacred over the profane, for it humanizes the Pakistani subject by reminding the reader of the tangled skein of various impulses, desires, and inscriptions that construct his or her identity.

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THE BROKEN PROMISE OF INDIA In a 1990 interview with Una Chaudhuri, Rushdie urgently reminds that “the tradition of India is a mixed tradition, and [it’s wrong to] try and create a kind of pure Indian tradition—which in fact is a pure Hindu tradition—and to say that that is Indian culture and everything else is kind of alien graft. It seems to me to be . . . quite dangerous rubbish at a time when communal discords, which have never been far away, seem to be starting up again.”106 Five years later, when The Moor’s Last Sigh was published, it seemed as if the “sperectomy” to which Saleem was subjected at the end of Midnight’s Children during the Emergency, draining him of hope because of the broken promises of Indian independence, had only been the first act. The Nehruvian idea of India, the “noble mansion . . . where all her children may dwell,” was fading, replaced with a much darker “god-and-mammon India”107 in which corruption and sectarian fundamentalism threatened to tear India apart. While the rise of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party sought to transform India into a unitary Hindu state, with a platform of anti-Sikh and anti-Muslim prejudice, the spread of multinational corporate influence and consequent corruption created a widening gap between the rich and the poor and threatened to decimate Nehru’s secular socialist vision for the state. The dream of India which is later betrayed by the forces of greed and communalist violence is whispered by Moraes Zogoiby’s grandfather, Camoens, to his wife, Belle, on her deathbed in 1937, ten years before India wins its independence from Britain: The dawning of a new world, Belle, a free country, Belle, above religion because secular, above class because socialist, above caste because enlightened, above hatred because loving, above vengeance because forgiving, above tribe because unifying, above language because many-tongued, above colour because multi-coloured, above poverty because victorious over it, above ignorance because literate, above stupidity because brilliant, freedom, Belle, the freedom express, soon soon we will stand upon that platform and cheer the coming of the train108 (emphasis in original)

Yet, according to Rushdie, the train never reaches the station because just as Saleem recognizes that the ultimate meaning of the midnight’s children lies in the fact that they were “broken promises; made to be broken,”109 so too is the ideal vision of a plural, hybrid, and harmonious India shattered by religious fanaticism, intolerance, and corruption.

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OVER WORLD AND UNDER WORLD Although the metaphor of the palimpsest is predominantly used throughout The Moor’s Last Sigh to serve as an antidote to the stain of sectarian and communalist violence by emphasizing the virtues of multiculturalism and diversity, one of its first uses in the novel is to demonstrate the exercise of corruption and exploitation of the “invisible” poor lying underneath the surface of commercial respectability for many of Bombay’s corporate leaders. Moraes’ father, Abraham, although he assumes the persona of a sheepish and doddering husband who always accedes to his wife’s demands, “had deliberately painted the dullest possible picture of himself . . . over the thrilling but unacceptable reality”110 that he’s secretly made his millions by rising to power as a corrupt crime lord engaged in graft, narcotics smuggling, and the theft of poor temple girls around the country to feed a number of illicit prostitution rings. His adoption of a new name—Mr. Siodi (C.O.D.)—after his corporate takeover through blackmail of the Parsi House of Cashondeliveri further indicates the extent to which he is willing “to paint a new layer over his own past.”111 Yet his son allegorizes and expands this understanding of his father to an interpretation of the city of Bombay itself: The city itself, perhaps the whole country, was a palimpsest, Under World beneath Over World, black market beneath white; when the whole of life was like this, when an invisible reality moved phantomwise beneath a visible fiction, subverting all its meanings, how then could Abraham’s career have been any different? How could any of us have escaped that deadly layering? How, trapped as we were in the hundred percent fakery of the real . . . could we have penetrated to the full, sensual truth . . . below? How could we have lived authentic lives?112

Although India is now the fastest growing free-market democracy in the world, the disparity between wealth and crushing poverty, “the gulf between the feast of the haves and the famine of the have-nots,” particularly in urban areas like Bombay, is growing.113 Notwithstanding the rapid growth of entrepreneurial businesses and information technology centers in burgeoning cities like Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India, it’s clear that the accumulation of capital has often been built on the backs of a growing subaltern class from the “Underworld” of the provinces who do not share in the distribution of such wealth. Aravind Adiga’s 2008 Booker-prize winning novel, White Tiger, for instance, viscerally bears this out by providing the “view from underneath” of

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a chauffeur, Balram Halwai, from “The Darkness” (one of the many anonymous villages in central India); throughout the novel, this driver for the rich exposes the latent violence perpetrated by those in power—police officers, politicians, and entrepreneurs. Although Balram, as a kind of Indian Bigger Thomas, murders his employer to escape what he terms the “Rooster Coop” of servitude and dumb complacency, he makes it clear that it’s the wealthy who are the true murderers of the poor and dispossessed: “Isn’t it likely that everyone who counts in this world, including our prime minister . . . has killed someone or other on their way to the top? Kill enough people and they will put up bronze statues to you near Parliament House in Delhi.”114 Rushdie likewise emphasizes throughout The Moor’s Last Sigh how the “Overworld” of privilege and wealth heartlessly writes over the histories and “invisible realities” of millions of poor laborers who are most responsible for transforming Bombay into the cosmopolitan city it has become. When Abraham colludes with Kéké Kolatkar, head of the Bombay Municipal Corporation, to pursue money laundering and bribery in order to take part in the same Bombay land reclamation project in which Dr. Narlikar and Ahmed Sinai had also invested in Midnight’s Children, Kolatkar counsels employment of the “non-existent” labor force of poor migrants to construct their illegal buildings since the city itself would take no responsibility for them. As Kolatkar deviously suggests, “Suppose these invisible buildings could be built by an invisible work-force? Would that not be the most elegant and economic of results?” Yet Moraes sympathetically acknowledges that Abraham and Kolatkar’s refusal to take responsibility for health care costs or worker’s compensation for these officially “invisible persons” represents the worst kind of exploitation: “It cannot be denied that for the million or more ghosts who had just been created by law, life got harder.”115 PALIMPSTINE Rushdie most forcefully employs the trope of the palimpsest throughout The Moor’s Last Sigh, however, as a recurrent aesthetic metaphor to neutralize the rising tide of narrow identitarian politics plaguing Indian civil society. In particular, he uses the artist Aurora Zogoiby’s layered paintings to express an alternative to the rigid vision of India posed by Raman Fielding and his Mumbai Axis band of zealots who wish to stamp out “foreign” (non-Hindu) elements throughout the novel. Influenced by her father’s open, nonsectarian dream of India, Aurora seeks an appropriate historico-cultural setting which she can ideologically superimpose atop the subcontinent and finds her golden age in Moorish Spain before the Christian Reconquista under Ferdinand and Isabella. Her series of masterpieces depict an ideal world which she terms

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“Mooristan” or “Palimpstine” in which Jews, Christians, Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains dwell in joyful harmony under the leadership of Boabdil/Moraes, the last Moorish leader of Granada. Her not-quite-Alhambra and rereading of Indian history through the past layers of Arab Spain is meant to celebrate a historical moment when diversity was privileged and when religious and racial co-existence stimulated an era of unprecedented cultural achievements. As Paul Cantor reminds, Andalusian Spain for the eight centuries before the Reconquest held in fruitful tension a number of disparate communities without excluding the insights of any one particular group. The works of the Arab philosopher, Averroës (Ibn Rushd, from whom Rushdie’s father derived his own self-chosen surname), and the Jewish philosopher Maimonides found themselves on equal footing as the cultural ideas of each group cross-pollinated and informed one another. The culture saw massive advances in the areas of architecture, astronomy, medicine, mathematics, music, literature, and philosophy which exceeded the knowledge of Christian Europe at the time.116 According to Rushdie, this composite, syncretic culture was systematically destroyed by the Catholic kings as they instituted a policy whereby Jews and Muslims could only remain if they were to convert. As a result, the fall of Granada led not only to a consolidation of Christian cultural and religious influence for the Iberian peninsula but also to the dissolution of the principle of growth-by-fusion as the former policy of “historically validated eclecticism”117 died with the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain. Rushdie articulates the clear analogical link between Moorish Spain and India at its inception: It seemed to me that the world I come from, India, the world this book comes out of, is also a composite culture. It’s also a place where there’s a Hindu majority, but there are many different cultures—Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, et cetera—forming this kind of mélange, this kind of composite entity, which is the world I grew up in and which I find very rich and pleasurable, and which I enjoy. There is a kind of threat to that composite culture now coming from a new kind of fundamentalism, which is basically Hindu fundamentalism, the fundamentalism of the majority.118

Aurora’s version of Mooristan/Palimpstine as a hybrid and palimpsestic counter-discourse thus radically challenges Mainduck Fielding’s fundamentalist understanding of India by representing India as fundamentally pluralistic and multiform. As Cantor writes, “New cultural forces do not displace or erase prior ones, but simply write over them, giving culture the layered character Rushdie finds so interesting.”119 Beyond simply remembering India as a layered cultural reality rather than a monolithic and exclusivist one, however, Aurora focuses on the liminal

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space of the water’s edge in her paintings to indicate the porous and permeable nature of Indian cultural identity. Rather than merely allowing for the harmonious co-existence of separate communities, her visual arguments suggest the extent to which the blurring of boundaries and frontiers represents the greatest possible benefit for a pluralistic nation like India. Palimpstine, in her idiosyncratic diction, is a “place where worlds collide, flow in and out of one another, and washofy away. . . . One universe, one dimension, one country, one dream, bumpo’ing into one another, or being under, or on top of.”120 Moraes remembers that “her vision, which in fact was a vision of weaving, or more accurately interweaving [included a series of] polemical pictures; in a way they were an attempt to create a romantic myth of the plural, hybrid nation; she was using Arab Spain to re-imagine India.”121 Moraes’ language of weaving and interweaving, of course, connects back to Rushdie’s essay on “Influence,” as well as to his image of the story sea from Haroun and the Sea of Stories; that language also signifies Rushdie’s preoccupation with the value of cultural interpenetration which he constantly upholds and whose frontiercrossing “in-flowings” he identifies as “that most profound of our needs.”122 MIGRANCY AND THE POLITICS OF THE PALIMPSEST In Shame, the migrant narrator’s frequent essayistic insertions of his own experience of Pakistan from the vantage point of an outsider, “forced to reflect that world in fragments of broken mirrors,”123 represent a final, politically enabling use to which Rushdie puts the metaphor of the palimpsest. For migrants are themselves particularly self-aware of their own palimpsestic identity as plural and layered individuals, whose various dislocations and ambiguities serve to root them in a multiplicity of memories, dreams, and provisional sitings. As Jaina Sanga notes, “The migrant’s identity is articulated through the constant process of obscuring what lies beneath and imposing layer upon layer of an alternate consciousness. In this sense, the condition of being an immigrant, whose history happened elsewhere, assumes at the very moment of dislocation, the imposition of another, or additional identity.”124 In a 1984 essay on German author, Günter Grass, Rushdie describes the “triple disruption of reality” faced by migrants: “That reality is an artefact, that it does not exist until it is made, and that, like any other artefact, it can be made well or badly, and that it can also, of course, be unmade.” He goes on to add that every migrant “distrusts all those who claim to possess absolute forms of knowledge; he suspects all total explanations, all systems of thought which purport to be complete.”125 Rushdie’s own negative, avowedly individual, experience with Pakistan revealed to him a state which frequently took “reality into its own hands, and

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[set] about distorting it, altering the past to fit its present needs.”126 Its regular suppression and censorship of alternate viewpoints prevented members of Pakistani political society from voicing alternative ideas, thus denying them access to the palimpsestic reality of their own national experiences. Rushdie therefore suggests that, just as the migrant is able to sit far enough back from the “movie screen” to engage in a more truthful perspective, thereby remembering more accurately, so too is he able to more effectively trace the Gramscian infinity of layers. Shame’s narrator states upfront that “the country in this story is not Pakistan, or not quite. There are two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space, or almost the same space. My story, my fictional country exist, like myself, at a slight angle to reality. I have found this off-centring to be necessary.”127 Rushdie’s Pakistan (or “Peccavistan,” in a punning reminder of Sir Charles James Napier’s reputed one-word dispatch after capturing the Sind in 1843) is a fiction, or lie, that tells the truth “at a time in which the people who claimed to be telling the truth were making things up.”128 His alternate version of the truth made “at a slight angle to reality,” even though the novel failed to fully avoid the official censors and was initially banned by Zia ul-Haq, still managed to find its way into Pakistan through alternate channels and was ironically even awarded a literary prize in Iran.129 One of the most important insights Shame’s narrator proffers from his long geographical perspective is the fact that in the eastern world, shame and honor represent the fundamental axis on which behavior is judged, while in the Western world, sin and redemption mark the two most important polarities.130 The roots of violence and the practice of honor killings in Pakistan thus revolve around the axis of shame and shamelessness. Most significant, however, is that Rushdie’s understanding of this dynamic, which he portrays in the victimized, monstrous body of Sufiya Zinobia, was first acquired overseas in the East End of London, as his narrator relates a series of memories about the mistreatment of South Asian immigrant women. From a Pakistani migrant father who kills his own Westernized daughter because he believes she’s been sleeping with a white boy to an anonymous “Asian” girl beaten up by a group of white boys at night in a London underground who fails to make an official complaint because of the shame she feels, each story has migrated east, been translated, and then been superimposed on to Sufiya Zinobia’s story, enabling Rushdie to better understand her experience. The indigenous inhabitants of the country invariably revile and distrust the identity of the immigrants displaced by Partition, or mohajirs, whose inescapably foreign and imported credentials necessarily pollute the essential “purity” of the nation. Stephen Morton, however, claims that a “mohajir [originally] refer[red] to one who has performed the act of hijrat, a word that also comes from Arabic and which connotes separation, migration, flight,

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specifically the flight of the Prophet Mohammad from Mecca to Medina.”131 The word thus holds an exalted, rather than a damaged, pedigree. Rushdie finally reminds the reader that Pakistan itself had originated in the minds of a group of mohajirs living abroad in England: “So it was a word born in exile which then went East, was borne-across or trans-lated, and imposed itself on history; a returning migrant, settling down on partitioned land, forming a palimpsest on the past.”132 As a result, the experience of migrancy, and the prerogative of the migrant to remember rightly, becomes not peripheral but central to Pakistani understandings of its own cultural and religious history. NOTES 1. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 336. 2. Ibid., 332. 3. “Palimpsest,” The Oxford English Dictionary, accessed August 31, 2019. 4. Qtd. in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 383. 5. Sigmund Freud, “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’,” in Collected Papers: Vol. V (Miscellaneous Papers, 1888–1938), ed. J. Stachey (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 178. 6. Minoli Salgado, “The Politics of the Palimpsest in The Moor’s Last Sigh,” in The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie, ed. Abdulzarak Gurnah (New York: Cambridge University Press), 158. 7. Qtd. in Said, Orientalism, 25. 8. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 52. 9. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 275. 10. Hutcheon and Natoli, A Postmodern Reader, xiii. 11. Lyotard, “The Postmodern Condition,” 73. 12. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Countermemory, Practice, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139. 13. Ibid., 156–57. 14. Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” 224. 15. Ibid., 240. 16. Qtd. in Said, Orientalism, 25. 17. Eleanor Wachtel, “Salman Rushdie,” Writers and Company, 1993, 156. 18. Sabrina Hassumani, Salman Rushdie: A Postmodern Reading of His Major Works (Teaneck, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 26. 19. Hutcheon and Natoli, A Postmodern Reader, x. 20. Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World, 140. 21. Qtd. in Hutcheon and Natoli, A Postmodern Reader, 301. 22. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 390. 23. Ibid., 104. 24. Ibid., 390.

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25. Ibid., 402–3. 26. Hutcheon and Natoli, A Postmodern Reader, 305. 27. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 326. 28. In his much more recent novel, The Golden House, Rushdie turns the tables, now cynically skewering the vacuity of a certain kind of populist protest culture by having one of the Golden sons, the artist Apu, satirically draw members of an “Occupy Wall Street”-type rally with whom he comes in contact. Instead of engaging in acts of solidarity aimed at stimulating true societal change, these protestors bear signs and placards with trite quotes from Internet memes and seem to represent a sort of empty liberal “slacktivism,” which can only mouth slogans that it once read somewhere on social media. The novel’s narrator observes a “thinker [who] wore an Anonymous mask, the mustachioed smiling white-faced Guy Fawkes popularized by the Wachowskis in V for Vendetta, but when [he] asked him about the man whose face he was wearing he admitted he had never heard of the Gunpowder Plot and did not remember, remember the fifth of November. Such was this would-be revolution,” 140. 29. Paul Cantor, “Tales of the Alhambra: Rushdie’s Use of Spanish History in The Moor’s Last Sigh,” Studies in the Novel 29, no. 3 (1997): 334. 30. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 403. 31. Young, Colonial Desire, 39. 32. Ibid., 41. 33. Ibid., 82. 34. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 136. 35. Ibid., 131. 36. Rushdie, The Ground beneath Her Feet, 52. 37. Rushdie, Step across This Line, 356. 38. Rushdie, Fury, 63. 39. Rushdie, Step across This Line, 351. 40. Ibid., 62. 41. Ibid., 63. 42. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 325. 43. Rushdie, Step across This Line, 64–65. 44. Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 72. 45. Teverson, Salman Rushdie, 168. 46. Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 86. 47. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 394. 48. Teverson, Salman Rushdie, 169. 49. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 37. 50. Ibid., 121. 51. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 429. 52. Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 102. 53. Ibid., 161. 54. Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 360. 55. Rushdie, Step across This Line, 68. 56. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris, eds., Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 3.

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57. Rawdon Wilson, “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space: Magical Realism,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 226. 58. Interestingly, however, in a recent interview with Porochista Khakpour on the publication of his 2017 novel, The Golden House, Rushdie, just as he did with the term “postmodernist,” modestly disavows the label “magical realist” to describe his fiction: “I’ve always slightly resisted the kind of magical realist tag because I believe that belongs properly to that group of South American writers, and it should be kept for them,” 59. 59. Wachtel, “Salman Rushdie,” 146. 60. Rushdie often describes the way that his worldview and art have been shaped by the key tenets of literary modernism. In scenes like this one, readers clearly see the influence of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, who argued that each individual consciousness in many ways establishes reality. In other words, one’s interested, motivated perspective determines what has happened more accurately and truthfully than an objective event to whose universal, common-sense meaning and interpretation all have equal access. 61. Stephen Slemon, “Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 410. 62. Rani Dharker, “An Interview with Salman Rushdie,” New Quest 42 (1983): 352. 63. Wachtel, “Salman Rushdie,” 149. 64. Sara Rance, “Things Fall Apart, The Centre Holds,” The Observer, May 3, 1992, 54. 65. Zamora and Faris, Magical Realism, 5. 66. Dharker, “An Interview with Salman Rushdie,” 355. 67. Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 103–4. 68. Salman Rushdie, “An Evening with Salman Rushdie” (keynote address, Scranton Cultural Center at the Masonic Temple, Scranton, PA, July 17, 2009). 69. Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 104. 70. Rushdie, Moor’s Last Sigh, 206. 71. Rushdie, Shame, 137. 72. Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 388. 73. Ibid., 96. 74. Paul Cantor, “Yankee Go Home: Twain’s Postcolonial Romance,” in Democracy’s Literature: Politics and Fiction in America, eds. Patrick J. Deneen and Joseph Romance (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 33, 37. 75. Wendy Faris, “Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy Faris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 169–70. 76. Gross, “Fresh Air.” 77. Martin Amis, “Rendezvous with Rushdie,” Vanity Fair, December 1990. 78. Charlie Rose, “The Moor’s Last Sigh,” The Charlie Rose Show, January 18, 1996.

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79. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 285. 80. A recent thought experiment posted on the Facebook page, “Dysthymia on a Dime,” contributes another layer to the fraught, problematic nature of our identities when we are remembered by others who have fixed us in a particular instance of time. As the author of the anonymous post casually speculates, do you ever wonder “about how old versions of you still exist to people out there[?] [P]eople you haven’t talked to in years remember who you used to be and nothing about who you are now, and they’re out there with memories of a version of you that kinda sucks.” Informality aside, this is precisely the agonizing dilemma endured by Rushdie as well, who was being defined (and remembered) in incomplete ways that disregarded the complexity of his identity. 81. Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 416. 82. Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds (New York: Routledge, 1987), 77. 83. Rushdie, Shame, 91. 84. Salgado, “The Politics of the Palimpsest,” 158. 85. Rushdie, Shame, 91–92. 86. Qtd. in Thiara, Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography, 180. 87. Jawaharlal Nehru, “Tryst with Destiny,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Norton Topics Online, accessed August 31, 2019. 88. Ibid. 89. Thiara, Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography, 158. 90. Morton, Salman Rushdie, 98. 91. Ibid., 99. 92. Thiara, Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography, 151. 93. Thomas Blom Hansen, “Reflections on Salman Rushdie’s Bombay,” in Midnight’s Diaspora: Critical Encounters with Salman Rushdie, eds. Daniel Herwitz and Ashutosh Varshney (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 97. 94. Suzie Mackenzie, “The Man Who Made the Booker,” The Guardian, November 4, 1995, A12. 95. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 293–95. 96. Of course, an alternate approach to this line of thinking is the lure of nostalgia that would romantically paper over the rampant corruption and sectarianism found in modern Mumbai, substituting a fictionalized dream Bombay in its place. As one Muslim gangster growls to his money launderer, the real estate baron Golden Nero in The Golden House, “That city of dreams is long gone. . . . You yourself have built over and around it and crushed the old under the new. In Bombay of your dreams everything was love and peace and secular thinking and no communalism, HinduMuslim bhai bhai, all men were brothers isn’t it? Such bullshit, you’re a man of the world, you should know better. . . . Just a question of what’s on the surface and how far beneath is the hate,” 332. 97. Rushdie, Shame, 189. 98. Ibid., 276. 99. Ibid., 278. 100. Morton, Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity, 58. 101. Rushdie, Shame, 277.

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102. Ibid., 273. 103. Ibid., 265. 104. Ibid., 189. 105. Ibid., 267. 106. Una Chaudhuri, “Imaginative Maps: Excerpts from a Conversation with Salman Rushdie,” Turnstile 2, no. 1 (1990): 38. 107. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 351. 108. Ibid., 51. 109. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 505. 110. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 180. 111. Ibid., 241. 112. Ibid., 184–85. 113. Rushdie, Step across This Line, 196. 114. Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (New York: Free Press, 2008), 273. 115. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 186. 116. Cantor, “Tales of the Alhambra,” 325. 117. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 52. 118. Rose, “The Moor’s Last Sigh.” 119. Cantor, “Tales of the Alhambra,” 333. 120. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 226. 121. Ibid., 227. 122. Ibid., 433. 123. Rushdie, Shame, 71. 124. Sanga, Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors, 33. 125. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 280. 126. Ibid., 14. 127. Rushdie, Shame, 24. 128. Günter Grass, “Fictions Are Lies That Tell the Truth: Salman Rushdie and Günter Grass in Conversation,” The Listener, June 27, 1985, 14. 129. Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 61. 130. Salman Rushdie, “Conversations on Moral Courage,” interview by Irshan Manji, 92nd Street Y, January 18, 2009. 131. Morton, Fictions of Postcolonial Modernity, 53. 132. Rushdie, Shame, 91.

Chapter 4

Pitting Levity against Gravity

In a February 1999 column that served as a meditation on the ten-year anniversary of the fatwa, Rushdie affirms what he considers to have been a major shift in his literary and cultural location: “There was always a tug-of-war in me between ‘there’ and ‘here,’ the pull of roots and of the road. In that struggle of insiders and outsiders, I used to feel simultaneously on both sides.” However, because the fatwa effectively banished him from his home country, disconnecting him from India more profoundly than his voluntary migrations to London and America did, he has now “come down on the side of those who by preference, nature, or circumstance simply do not belong. This unbelonging—I think of it as disorientation, loss of the East—is my artistic country now.”1 Yet even before the fatwa was announced, many critics chastened him for his carefree embrace of the rootless joys of a privileged cosmopolitan migrancy, which rejected the confining “shackles” of culture, past, and home. Such a position (or, rather, refusal of a position) seems to represent a kind of irresponsible flight from commitment and engagement with the world by instead articulating an ethic of non-attachment that seeks to ignore the gravitational memory of roots and national belonging. However, Rushdie’s own work consistently traces a more complicated attitude toward the role of roots in defining one’s identity as his position of centripetal migrancy anchors him to the subcontinental past despite his repeated fictional leave-taking. If memory represents a kind of weight, anchoring the self to the past through images of home, roots, and country, the experience of migrancy and diaspora often results in the sundering of such ties, permitting the individual to renounce significant worldly commitments and to become disconnected from material, political realities.2 In Milan Kundera’s formulation, “lightness” thus serves as a potent metaphor for the disengaged, memory-less migrant so besotted with his or her cosmopolitan, disconnected status that he 87

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or she seeks to escape not only the limits of the nation-state but the burden of the past as well. Although Marxist critics such as Ahmad and Brennan understand Rushdie to be precisely this sort of rootless, irresponsible individual, who prefers a frivolous postmodern sampling of cultures in order to escape from the commitment owed to his past, they seem to miss the political gravity and continual engagement with memories of the subcontinent inscribed within his whimsical, carnivalesque literary technique. In particular, his persistent policy of rhetorical “rowdyism” and determination to argue against unjust, false memories and cultural productions enacted by Western and subcontinental authorities represent a thoroughgoing commitment to recuperate the past and remember it rightly rather than quietistically submit to a passive, amnesiac state. In nearly all of his works, Rushdie emphasizes the defining importance of memory by linking characters’ frequent experiences of guilt as a result of ontological self-cancellation with flight from the past and careless disaffiliation. He thus insists on the need for migrants to weight themselves by cultivating gravitational ties which privilege committed memories of home and belonging. LIGHTNESS AND WEIGHT Toward the beginning of Shame, the narrator speculates why the mohajirs, or displaced political refugees from India to Pakistan, are so reviled by the indigenous inhabitants of the land: I have a theory that the resentments we mohajirs engender have something to do with our conquest of the force of gravity. We have performed the act of which all men anciently dream, the thing for which they envy the birds; that is to say, we have flown. I am comparing gravity with belonging. [. . .] [T]o explain why we become attached to our birthplaces we pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. [. . .] Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places. [. . .] To fly and to flee: both are ways of seeking freedom.3

Such individuals are thus seen by the forces of tribalism, which seek to preserve the importance of culture, heritage, and belonging, as performing a deeply unnatural act that is simultaneously begrudged and desired—they have come “unstuck” from the past and from history in their migratory flight. Yet Rushdie’s collapse of the terms “to fly” and “to flee” into an identical experience of liberation seems to universalize migrancy as a metaphor, and potentially fails to distinguish between an indulgent spirit of vagrancy and an enforced exile due to economic need or political exigency. It elides what

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Revathi Krishnaswamy describes as the “diverse modalities of postcolonial diaspora, such as migrant intellectuals, migrant labour, economic refugees, political exiles, and self-exiles.”4 As Raymond Williams cautions, “We need to make a distinction between exile and vagrancy: there is usually a principle in exile, there is always only relaxation in vagrancy.”5 Milan Kundera, the Franco-Czech émigré novelist and contemporary of Rushdie, offers some helpful critical categories for better appreciating Shame’s interanimating, potentially controversial, metaphors of gravity and flight in his most recognized work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The novel was published in 1984, one year after Shame was released, and each work shares a similar interest in defining the complexities of the exilic condition. The novel’s central couple is a philandering surgeon, Tomas, and his younger lover, the self-conscious Tereza, who live in Prague at the moment of the 1968 Russian invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia. Although Tomas lives by a code of erotic friendship, disdaining ties or commitments of any kind which might hinder his sexual appetites, Tereza craves strong relational bonds that will anchor her identity and give her meaning. Soon after they emigrate to Switzerland to escape Russian oppression, Tereza, unable to withstand his light-hearted and casual approach to love any longer, returns to Prague to live. Although he spends his first weekend in a heady state, intoxicated with the “sweet lightness of being” that claims him when he realizes he’s no longer attached to Tereza, he soon makes the determination to return to Prague, forfeiting his passport, his freedom, and eventually his prestigious position as a surgeon out of a spirit of weighty compassion for both Tereza and his country of origin. At the beginning of the novel, Kundera suggests that “the lightness/ weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all.”6 While Parmenides in the sixth century BC had, in keeping with the long history of Western metaphysics, divided the world according to binaries, privileging such categories as “light,” “warmth,” and “being” while negatively esteeming their opposites, Kundera challenges Parmenides’ assessment of the lightness/ weight opposition, for while heaviness implies a burden and is consequently rejected by Parmenides, “the heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.”7 Clearly here the terms take on moral weight and suggest the importance of commitments, both political and individual. Tomas’ decision to suffer with Tereza and his fellow citizens of occupied Czechoslovakia gives him a grounding and a verifiable cultural location despite the fact that he must now labor as an anonymous window-washer at the demand of the state.

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As Beethoven’s repeated refrain from the text, Es muss sein! (It must be!), suggests, “Necessity, weight, and value are [. . .] inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.”8 Tomas’ former lover, the artist Sabina, however, adopts a different approach to understanding the relative value of home, belonging, and commitment. Her decision to leave Czechoslovakia and live permanently in Switzerland is matched by her desire to privilege the virtues of lightness by breaking all ties with the past and eventually betraying all lovers. Yet even though Kundera acknowledges that her “drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being,”9 it’s simply in her nature to choose perpetual movement and migration “because were she to die [in a particular place] they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.”10 Thus, Kundera allegorizes the metaphors of gravity and flight and situates his examination of their relative merit not only within the intimate human drama of relationships but also within the larger scope of migration, exile, and the conflicted longing for/avoidance of roots and home. While attachment gives us meaning, it can unbearably limit movement and freedom, yet the uprooted self faces the possibility of a life of insignificant and meaningless movement. COSMOPOLITAN MIGRANCY AND NON-ATTACHMENT Such detachment from the past and uncommitted postmodern rootlessness have often been laid at the feet of Rushdie by his critics. Timothy Brennan, in his 1989 study, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation, was one of the first to offer a wide-ranging critique of Rushdie’s problematic cultural and political position by defining him as representative of a privileged class of writers emerging in the wake of decolonization that he terms “Third World Cosmopolitans” or “Cosmopolitan migrant intellectuals.” According to Brennan, these writers align themselves with an elitist, Western perspective in terms of education and choice of literary models even though their “exotic” subject matter often marks them as distinct from the Western center. The “token” diversity they represent is correspondingly absorbed by the Western educational establishment and influential publishing houses as these migrant authors are paraded as spokespersons of a genuine and undifferentiated “Third World” whose fiction is addressed to Western audiences rather than non-Western ones. As Brennan indicates, cosmopolitan intellectuals are selected by Western reviewers “as the interpreters and authentic public voices of the Third World. [. . .] Alien to the public that read them because they were black, spoke with

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accents or were not citizens, they were also like that public in tastes, training, repertoire of anecdotes, current habitation.”11 In addition, these international authors eschew the value of national belonging and roots and instead become advocates for “a kind of permanent immigration. [. . .] They hover between borders, the products of that peculiar ‘weightlessness’ that Salman Rushdie saw in his and others’ ‘migrant’ consciousness.”12 Brennan’s language of “hovering” and “weightlessness” thus identifies Rushdie (whose narrator in Shame claims that he has “floated upwards from history”13) with Kundera’s Sabina, for whom perpetual lightness and flight become an ontological imperative. Brennan’s polemical attack on what Aijaz Ahmad calls the “exorbitant celebration”14 of authors such as Rushdie centers on the ways that he sees these Third-World Cosmopolitans embracing a postmodern sensibility of vagrancy while rejecting the filiative bonds of roots, culture, and the past. Said, in his The World, The Text, and the Critic, had diagnosed the migrant condition as a shift from filiation to affiliation, a “movement away from the natural bonds of home to those [willed] associative connections made in the modern world” that he terms “transpersonal forms.”15 Homi Bhabha likewise suggests that the history of the diasporic movement and the cultural disruptions wrought by the ambivalence of the imperial encounter have created a situation of “unhomeliness” that emerges at the margins and borders of postcolonial experience. Such a dislocatory condition ensures that where the transmission of ‘national’ traditions was once the major theme of a world literature, perhaps we can now suggest that transnational histories of migrants, the colonized, or political refugees—these border and frontier conditions—may be the terrains of World Literature. The center of such a study would neither be the “sovereignty” of national cultures, nor the ‘universalism’ of human culture, but a focus on those “freak displacements” [. . .] that have been caused within cultural lives of postcolonial societies.16

The affiliative category of the transnational/transpersonal thus replaces the filiative national/familial in critical emphasis. Yet Bhabha’s (and by extension, Rushdie’s) seeming celebration of the productive effects of unhomeliness made possible by the interstitial experience of migrancy is condemned by Brennan and Ahmad for a number of key reasons. TRANSLATING FOR THE METROPOLITAN READING PUBLIC The most significant problem these critics have with writers such as Rushdie is the extent to which their work is compromised by their privileged Western

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sociocultural position and vantage point, which allows them to forget their roots and their obligations to the past. Although Rushdie believes that his Midnight’s Children was revolutionary because it was “about an experience of India that was not the British experience of India [. . .] an Indian experience of India written in a kind of Indianized English,”17 Brennan questions whether his “Westoxicated” perspective is sufficiently representative of South Asian subaltern identities and populist sentiment since his vision is relentlessly urban and upper middle class. Aparna Mahanta echoes Brennan’s charge by scathingly asserting that “Rushdie’s novels are for and about a tiny stratum of India’s [. . .] elite, inheritors of the British mantle, the deracinated, speaking English, thinking English, dreaming English [. . .] with no traditions except those sneeringly thrown at them by the departing Sahibs [. . .] they are cut off from their roots [. . .] exotics with aerial roots.”18 Padma in Midnight’s Children, for instance, functions only as Saleem’s interlocutor and her lowerclass, “plebeian” credentials serve as a comforting, often comic, balance to Saleem’s more solidly middle-class narrative position. Shame, as previously indicated, is a narrowly defined portrait of a ruling class whose closed circle of oppression predominantly excludes pockets of resistance enacted by everyday citizens. Even the migrant community in The Satanic Verses’ Brickhall (a fusion of Brick Lane, Southall, and Brixton) is predominantly composed of middleclass South Asian men, while poorer members of the Caribbean and African diaspora are either cartoonishly sketched or simply absent, as is the case with Uhuru Simba, who Gillian Gane sees as nothing more than “a token, a martyr, a deferred presence, a floating signifier.”19 Similarly, the faceless invisibility of the “temporary” residents of the Shandaar café indicate either that Rushdie, like Spivak, doubts the possibility of retrieving a viable subaltern subjectivity or more problematically, that he’s unwilling to make the attempt.20 To be fair, however, Rushdie never presumes to speak for a unified subcontinental identity but self-consciously acknowledges his partial vision in viewing Pakistan “in slices” in Shame and foregrounds the gaps and errata in Saleem’s vision of history in a work like Midnight’s Children. To those Western readers believing that the novel has authoritatively managed to squeeze the entirety of India into its 533 pages, Rushdie reminds them that “[Midnight’s Children] is not the Ten Commandments. It is not everything you have always wanted to know about India,” but only one provisional version of events.21 Yet Rushdie not only performs what Saskia Sassen has termed a “narrative of eviction” by privileging a particular kind of “worldly” experience performed by an educated class of migrants while ignoring the voices of the non-elite.22 He also ensures that his fiction will be addressed primarily to a metropolitan audience who are able to pleasurably recognize the gratuitous intertextual references to canonical Eurocentric and American traditions,

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theories, and literary figures while leaving the average subcontinental immigrant reader bewildered. For instance, on the opening page of The Satanic Verses, the attentive metropolitan reader with interest in Western classic rock will “hear” in Gibreel’s song as he plummets from the sky—“I tell you, you must die, I tell you, I tell you”23—the chorus of The Doors’ “Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar).” In The Ground beneath Her Feet, Ormus Cama’s blind recorder producer, Yul Singh, claims to have been given a loan from his optician, Tommy J. Eckleburg—a playful reference to Fitzgerald’s haunting billboard eyes in Gatsby’s “Valley of the Ashes.” As Harveen Mann points out, however, Rushdie often takes great pains to translate such Hindi and Urdu words as sharam, sanyasi, or funtoosh so that their meaning is clear to Western readers, while failing to “provide parallel translations for his [. . .] subcontinental audience of even such erudite—and hence generally inaccessible—Western cultural ‘signs’ as Nietzsche, Blake, Joyce, and T. S. Eliot, and such culturally-coded references as Alice in Wonderland, Red Riding Hood, Snow White, and Punch and Judy.”24 As a result, his practice of translation is unidirectional and weighted more heavily in the direction of a Western readership. Indeed, Brennan argues that even Rushdie’s decision to write novels rather than adopting the mode of poetry, testimonials, songs, and plays which are the dominant modes of the “Third World” is an indication that his writing first and foremost seeks to meet “the selective criteria” and “demands of Western tastes.”25 In this light, Vasco Miranda’s drunken words to Aurora and Abraham’s partygoers on the eve of Indian independence in The Moor’s Last Sigh sound very like a stinging self-indictment of Rushdie’s own privileged diasporic position: “Bunch of English-medium misfits, the lot of you. [. . .] You don’t belong here. Country’s as alien to you as if you were what’s-the-word lunatics. Moon-men. You read the wrong books, get on the wrong side in every argument, think the wrong thoughts. Even your bleddy dreams grow from foreign roots.”26 COMMODIFIED EXOTICISM A related argument that Brennan and Ahmad make decries the ways that Rushdie remembers and presents the East to the West as a commodified series of fantastical, exotic landscapes and encounters. As Aparna Mahanta charges, “In the lack-lustre world of postwar British fiction, Salman Rushdie’s exotic fantasies have made a deep impact” not because “exotic fantasia is alien to the tradition of British fiction” but “because it has a very respectable lineage going back to Swift and Sterne and coming down to Waugh and Greene.”27 Just as the colonies provided not only material resources for metropolitan centers but also imaginative ones for modernist artists like Conrad and

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Forster, so too does a work like Shame rehearse “the warped vision of the European explorer by viewing the land as a spectacle, a fund of imagery,” while Rushdie assumes the position of “an adventurer stationed in London selling Oriental wares to a public whose tastes he knows from several decades of travel.”28 Ahmad connects the free-ranging rootlessness of Rushdie’s migrant imagination with his privileged ability to accumulate and absorb a plurality of influences while refusing a grounding of cultural and material specificity: One did not have to belong, one could simply float, effortlessly, through a supermarket of packaged and commodified cultures, ready to be consumed. [. . .] The chief characteristic of the metropolitan supermarket was that entirely diverse products [. . .] could now be purchased under one roof, while also drawing upon the resources of different countries (Indian textiles alongside Manchester woolens; Persian carpets alongside French hosiery).29

Ahmad’s metaphor of the supermarket to describe Rushdie’s postmodern narrative method reminds one of Lifafa Das and his “Dilli dekho” peepshow act in Midnight’s Children, seeking to cram more and more postcards from his travels into his box to “encapsulate the whole of reality”30 for his audience or Gibreel’s lusty rendition of “Mera Joota Hai Japaani” from the film, Shree 420, as he tumbles from the sky at the beginning of The Satanic Verses: “O, my shoes are Japanese. [. . .] These trousers English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat; my heart’s Indian for all that.”31 Indeed, Srinivas Aravamudan notes that Gibreel’s choice of song reflects what Saladin later describes as the encroaching “Coca-Colonization of the planet”:32 “An ideologically sensitive reader might interpret the song as expressing a ‘late capitalist’ conjuncture, in which worldwide contradictions between aggressive nationalism (‘my heart’s Indian for all that’) and the unified global market [. . .] render an individual’s clothing into multi-ethnic postmodern pastiche.”33 Yet two of Rushdie’s strengths are the way in which he cleverly calls attention to the Western market’s need for signs of fetishized cultural difference and his self-conscious recognition of his complicity in the circulation of global capital. Graham Huggan complicates Ahmad’s thesis by describing Rushdie’s strategy as a sort of “strategic exoticism,” which undermines readerly expectations through deployment of an exoticist repertoire of images in order to reveal asymmetries of power brought about by both imperialism and globalization. Huggan defines Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children as a type of Orientalist merchant, cannily inviting the reader to sample his own, and India’s exotic wares. Snake-charmers, genies, fakirs; elegant saris and crude

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spittoons—most of the familiar semiotic markers of Orientalism are on display. By emphasizing the status of these items as commodities, Saleem/Rushdie ironically constructs the metropolitan reader as a voyeuristic consumer. Rushdie’s parody of the reader-as-consumer is reinforced by gastronomic metaphors: people, places and events—the country itself—become an edible; Indian history is ‘chutnified’ and preserved for future use.34

However, Rushdie’s very freedom to critique and subvert exoticized images of India in such a widely read text is made possible through a prize like the Booker, which Huggan argues (via Jameson’s notion of the West’s frequent “strategies of containment”) “might work to contain cultural (self-)critique by endorsing the commodification of a glamorized cultural difference” through a kind of “sponsored multiculturalism.”35 Although his oppositional discourse threatens to be blunted by such mechanisms, it’s clear to Rushdie himself that his controversial ability to shuttle between countries by “floating upwards from history” provides him (as an “insider-outsider”) with the privileged insight that “other perspectives existed. [He] had seen the view from elsewhere.”36 In a more recent work such as Fury, his central character, Malik Solanka, a double immigrant from India and England now living in America, reflects on the stunning material prosperity and global influence simultaneously desired and spurned by the guilty migrant newly arrived at the heart of the latest empire: “Yes, it had seduced him, America; yes, its brilliance aroused him, and its vast potency too, and he was compromised by this seduction. [. . .] Everyone was an American now, or at least Americanized: Indians, Iranians, Uzbeks, Japanese. [. . .] Even anti-Americanism was Americanism in disguise, conceding as it did, that America was the only game in town.”37 Such frequent moments of insight in Rushdie’s fiction therefore undercut and expose the power of the global market to assimilate all signs of difference through a homogenizing and omnivorous process of absorption. His very awareness of such aesthetics of decontextualization, contradictory though it may be, thus serves as a form of rhetorical resistance to it. NATIONAL UNBELONGING Ahmad and Brennan reserve their most strident critique, however, for Rushdie’s allegedly depoliticized aesthetic that borrows from the codes of post-structuralist discourse and for his corresponding rejection of the grounding memory of the nation, which (according to Ahmad) Rushdie sees as nothing more than a “mere [myth] of origin and as [an] essentialist, coercive totalization.”38 Not only are nation and nationalism outdated artifacts from

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an earlier era to a cosmopolitan writer like Rushdie, but their recuperation and revival in the hands of subcontinental leaders lead to the worst kinds of provincialism and cultural chauvinism that often end up promoting violence and repression. The metaphor of Mother India, for instance, is perverted in Midnight’s Children by Indira Gandhi with her “India is Indira and Indira is India” campaign slogan by fusing the leader with the state, so that dissent becomes traitorous and unpatriotic. The myth of Mother India (Bharat Mata) is also misappropriated by Hindu nationalists in The Moor’s Last Sigh, whose homogeneous understanding of the nation-state legitimates acts of passionate violence against those “foreign elements” deemed to have violated her sanctity.39 Rushdie accordingly indicated in a 1983 discussion of Midnight’s Children and Shame that “I don’t define myself by nationality—my passport doesn’t tell me who I am. I define myself by friends, political affinity, groupings that I feel at home in . . . and of course, writing. I enjoy having access to three different countries, and I don’t see that I need to choose.”40 The limits and boundaries that a particular nation prescribes, both geographically and imaginatively, create too narrow a provenance of activity and thought and therefore must be strenuously resisted and transgressed by the artist. His alter-ego, the satirist Baal in The Satanic Verses, had recognized this truth when the Grandee of Jahilia, Abu Simbel, tries to commission him to sabotage Mahound’s nascent religious movement by writing a series of defamatory verses about the group. He initially bridles against the offer, claiming that “It isn’t right for the artist to become the servant of the state.”41 In a brief, yet forceful, 1997 address entitled “Notes on Writing and the Nation,” Rushdie outlines what he believes to be the primary incompatibilities defining the relationship between the nation, which “requires anthems, flags” and the poet, who “offers discord. Rags.”42 First, the nation often tries to enforce its will on the writer by either reverently elevating the artist to the position of national voice or restricting his or her subjectivity: “The nation either co-opts its greatest writers (Shakespeare, Goethe, Camoens, Tagore), or seeks to destroy them (Ovid’s exile, Soyinka’s exile). Both fates are problematic.”43 Second, Rushdie believes that nationalism exacerbates the growing epidemic of sectarianism and encourages a defensive, closed-off posture, thereby denying the fact that “in our deepest natures, we are frontier-crossing beings.”44 As he warns, “In a time of ever more narrowly defined nationalisms, of walled-in tribalisms, writers will be found uttering the war cries of their tribes. Nationalism is that ‘revolt against history’ which seeks to close what cannot any longer be closed. To fence in what should be frontierless. [. . .] Writers who serve frontiers have become border guards.”45 In place of the nation as a foundational presence, Rushdie advocates that the postcolonial migrant artist instead root himself or herself in the

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imagination and embrace the dizzying experience of displacement as it leads to a kind of “multiple rootedness.” His 1985 reading of Terry Gilliam’s dystopian fantasy film, Brazil, explores the ways that dreams and the imagination manage to circumvent the totalitarian strictures of the state and oppose the dark reality that the nation articulates. Rushdie notes the predominant image of flight that Gilliam employs, with Sam (Jonathan Pryce) assuming the form of an unencumbered angel in his dreams and the anti-government insurgent Mr. Tuttle (Robert DeNiro) anarchically avoiding the reach of the authorities by swinging effortlessly through the urban jungle of wires and cables. “In Brazil,” Rushdie writes, “flight represents the imagining spirit” and “the world of the imagination is a place into which the long arm of the law is unable to reach. This idea—the opposition of art to politics—is of great importance, because it reminds us that we are not helpless, that to dream is to have power.”46 Rushdie goes on to note that Terry Gilliam’s own position as a migrant from England to America not only allows him to be “free[d] of the shackles of nationalism” but also permits him to espouse the particular liberation that comes when one “root[s] [oneself] in ideas rather than places, in memories as much as in material things.”47 Contradicting Ahmad’s contention that he is a rootless and disconnected cosmopolitan, therefore, Rushdie would assert that he’s “multiply rooted” and that his identity is overdetermined through a plurality of causal influences. As he conveys in a 1983 piece for the New York Times Book Review, “I don’t think that migration, the process of being uprooted, necessarily leads to rootlessness. What it can lead to is a kind of multiple rooting. It’s not the traditional identity crisis of not knowing where you come from. The problem is that you come from too many places. The problems are of excess rather than of absence.”48 In this regard, he’s like Saleem, with his endlessly proliferating cast of fathers. Not only has Saleem been raised by Ahmed, but because he was switched at birth with Shiva, his true father should have been the street performer, Wee Willie Winkie. Since Winkie was cuckolded by Methwold, however, Saleem is the departing colonial’s biological son. Yet he is also informally adopted by (or selects for himself) a series of other fathers as well—his boisterous Uncle Hanif, the failed film producer, his other uncle General Zulfikar, an ambitious Pakistani military officer, the Communist street performer Picture Singh, and even the German recluse Dr. Schaapsteker, whose antidote of krait poison cures his typhus as a baby and saves his life. Rushdie’s inheritance, similar to Saleem, includes the power of fashioning his own literary and cultural patrimony, and each new strand increases the sum total of what it’s possible for him to say and think. Yet the trope of multiple-rootedness for Ahmad and Brennan still represents a form of disempowering weightlessness or flight removed from the praxis of an activist community. Ahmad soberly suggests that “the pain of

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any ethical life is that all fundamental bondings, affiliations, stable political positions, require that one ceases to desire, voraciously, everything that is available in this world.”49 He therefore views Rushdie’s magpie approach to roots and identity as yet another manifestation of the postmodern supermarket, trying on and consuming whatever influence one encounters. To claim that one’s “home is everywhere” is another way of saying that it’s nowhere. This “excess of belonging”50 flattens influences by refusing to prioritize their relative importance and discourages the gravitational pull of bonds of national identity, which are forged in “communal assent” and “collective truth.”51 How can an author’s work be politically transformative if he or she has effectively discarded the memory of home and belonging, thus disconnecting the self from some of the most significant filiative commitments? “ROWDYISM” VERSUS QUIETISM The irony is that Rushdie has always been one of the most politically engaged of contemporary novelists, confronting the injustices and corruptions of the present, as well as the past, with great wit and energy. Coming of age as he did in the 1960s and involved as he was in the counter-cultural protests of the era, his motto has always been to “dispense with safety nets. . . . Be bloodyminded. Argue with the world.”52 However, since he denies the obligation of the artist to handcuff him or herself to any one particular ideology or political agenda, the primary political aim of his fiction lies in his post-structuralist belief that “changes in our discourses concerning the world will produce changes in the material constitution of that world.”53 The inescapability of the political has been one of the repeated refrains in his fiction and public addresses. In order to illustrate the fact that the gap between the public and private spheres has increasingly shrunk, he often recounts an insight about the early nineteenth-century works of Jane Austen: She was able to spend her entire career fully exploring the lives of her characters while making almost no reference to the Napoleonic Wars. When soldiers arrived in Jane Austen’s novels, they looked nice in uniform, and people wanted to dance with them at parties. They very rarely came back bloodied. The uniforms were always in great shape. Why were they in great shape? Because in that period Jane Austen was able to fully explore and explain the lives of her people without reference to the public dimension. The public dimension was far away from the lives of the people.54

Anees Noman, the Kashmiri brother of Shalimar turned bomb-maker in Rushdie’s 2005 Shalimar the Clown affirms this truth by utilizing the imagery

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of the militarized Line of Control separating Indian from Pakistani territory in war-torn Kashmir to explain his own entry into the public sphere of terrorism/ freedom fighting: “The boundary, the cease-fire line, between private life and the public arena no longer exist[s]. ‘Everything is politics now,’ he said. ‘The old comfortable days are gone’.”55 Frederic Jameson hypothesizes in his “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” that this erasure of the gap between public and private has been particularly prevalent in what he describes as “third world texts,” which of necessity take the form of consciously constructed national allegories. Western audiences, he suggests, “have been trained in a deep cultural conviction that the lived experience of our private existences is somehow incommensurable with the abstractions of economic science and political dynamics.” Yet “third world texts,” whose authors have been defined in many ways by the experience of colonialism, present the reality that “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.”56 In order to underscore the exhilarating, yet overly accelerated growth of Bombay in the decades following independence, for instance, Rushdie curses Moraes Zogoiby to develop and age twice as fast as he should: “Like the city itself, Bombay of my joys and sorrows, I mushroomed into a huge urbane sprawl of a fellow, I expanded without time for proper planning, without any pauses to learn from my experiences or my mistakes or my contemporaries, without time for reflection. How then could I have turned out to be anything but a mess?”57 Although Ahmad takes issue with Jameson’s reductive thesis for what he believes is a kind of theoretical orientalism, constructing the first and second worlds of capitalism and socialism as active agents of history and defining the third world as those to whom history happens,58 Rushdie’s presentation of characters such as Saleem Sinai and Moraes Zogoiby who are symbolically handcuffed to the public destinies of their nations certainly seems to illustrate Jameson’s point. The collapse of the public and private not only has made it irresponsible and escapist for artists to continue to avert their eyes in cases of great historical moment, but Rushdie would also contend that the shaping forces of public events have given the lie to Heraclitus’ famous statement, “Character is destiny.” In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works of realistic fiction, the way the characters lived dictated how their stories would conclude. But the enormously greater impact of history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries interrupts this formula so that our personalities don’t have the same shaping impact on our fates (a frequently repeated example Rushdie gives would be the planes hijacked by Muslim extremists on 9/11). As Alicja Cone tells her daughter Allie in The Satanic Verses, “character isn’t destiny any more. Economics is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What

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does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life?”59 One might be tempted to add, what does a fatwa care how you lived your life? However, while such an insight would produce in some a form of fatalistic resignation or disengagement from the world, these violent incursions of the public into the private have only increased Rushdie’s desire to write back and challenge such phenomena as the rise of global terrorism, the spread of religious fundamentalisms, systematic gender discrimination in India that authorizes the abortion of female fetuses, the vapidity of reality television, the widening effects of the opioid epidemic in America, the era of “alternative facts” under the Trump administration, and increasing anti-science attitudes that encourage the benighted to turn a blind eye to the problem of climate change. Indeed, Bishnupriya Ghosh would interrupt Brennan and Ahmad’s understanding of Rushdie as a cosmopolitan migrant and label him instead as a “cosmopolitical,” insisting that his emphasis on “historical contingency and performance over any reified production of the local” requires something in return from readers, whose own understanding of the South Asian subcontinent and of the situation of diasporic migrants in particular is consistently challenged.60 Nowhere is Rushdie’s “argumentative, bloody-minded” approach to the importance of involvement and to binding oneself tenaciously to truthful recollections of the past more evident than in a 1984 piece entitled “Outside the Whale,” whose immediate context is a response to what he terms “Raj revisionism” and neo-imperialist posturing in the aftermath of Britain’s victory over Argentina in the Falkland Islands war. This passionate commitment to political engagement often requires a writer such as Rushdie to create noisy “counter-memories” that raucously announce their presence. As explained in chapter 2, the startling number of British cultural productions that traded in Orientalist representations of the East and which sought to recuperate a positive vision of empire was directly tied to the rise of self-congratulatory, conservative attitudes expressed by the British public following the two-month-long conflict. Rushdie historicizes this moment by indicating the link between the country’s yearning for lost greatness and Thatcher’s troubling desire for a return to Victorian virtues. As he relates, “Works of art, even works of entertainment, do not come into being in a social and political vacuum. . . . The way they operate in a society cannot be separated from politics, from history. For every text, a context.”61 When the country wraps itself in the false comfort of a revisionist nostalgia, how may the committed artist best respond? His answer begins with a summary of a rather fatalistic 1940 essay by George Orwell entitled “Inside the Whale,” in which Orwell praises the merits of Henry Miller, whose fiction is passively resigned to the world as it is and ignores the need to enter the painful arena of political affairs. Orwell uses the metaphor of Jonah in the whale’s belly to approvingly indicate the extent

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to which Miller has retreated from the world, accepting it and insulating himself from its dangers. As Orwell writes, “Seemingly there is nothing left but quietism—robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it. Get inside the whale—or rather, admit you are inside the whale (for you are, of course). Give yourself over to the world-process . . . simply accept it, endure it, record it.”62 Rushdie here acknowledges that it may be that a quarrelsome and engaged author such as Orwell was simply too exhausted and overwhelmed by the atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust to countenance more conflict and argumentation. The defeatism and despair of Nineteen Eight-Four, coupled with the resigned tone of “Inside the Whale,” indicates to Rushdie that this voice is the one of “a man who has given up the struggle.”63 Yet Rushdie argues in “Outside the Whale” that not only does such artistic acquiescence to things as they are serve as a tacit assent to the status quo, it actively emboldens politicians who wish to remake the world in their own image: “The quietist option, the exhortation to submit to events, is an intrinsically conservative one. When intellectuals and artists withdraw from the fray, politicians feel safer.”64 Earlier in the essay, Rushdie had invoked the immortal ending of Voltaire’s Candide, in which the eponymous hero, after suffering the slings and arrows of the world’s ignorance, irrationality, and malice, silences his philosopher-mentor Pangloss by urging the policy of “cultiver notre jardin” (“we must cultivate our own garden”). While many readers have taken this final line metaphorically to mean that Voltaire intends for us to be active in the world, seeking to do our small part in making it more enlightened and equitable for all, Rushdie clearly interprets its ironic message literally and pessimistically: after so much suffering, the best you can do is focus on your own quiet plot of land or writing. Ignore the world and don’t intervene in political affairs. However, Rushdie ardently advocates the alternative approach, one that affirms the importance of a weighty and passionate engagement with the world rather than an irresponsible and escapist flight from it: The truth is that there is no whale. We live in a world without hiding places. [. . .] Either we agree to delude ourselves, to lose ourselves in the fantasy of the great fish, for which a second metaphor is that of Pangloss’s garden; or we can do what all human beings do instinctively when they realize that the womb has been lost for ever—that is, we can make the very devil of a racket. [. . .] So, in place of Jonah’s womb, I am recommending the ancient tradition of making as big a fuss, as noisy a complaint about the world as is humanly possible. Where Orwell wished quietism, let there be rowdyism; in place of the whale, the protesting wail.65

Rushdie’s contention is that committed artists have the obligation to enter into the crowded bazaar of public opinion and speak up for truth, offering

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markedly different pictures of the world than politicians and authority figures create. “I’ve been reading a book about anger,” Rai Merchant relates in The Ground beneath Her Feet, in words that reflect Rushdie’s own belief in the politically empowering expression of an artist’s vocal, righteous indignation. “It says that anger is evidence of our idealism. Something has gone wrong, but we ‘know’, in our rage, that things could be different. It shouldn’t be this way.”66 The call to rowdyism also reminds one of the character of Jumpy Joshi, the one-time 1960s radical from The Satanic Verses, raucously jumping on the hood of Prime Minister Wilson’s limo during a protest of the Labour Government’s support of U.S. interests in Vietnam. Before the fatwa, of course, Rushdie’s quarrel with the world, his “rowdyism,” found targets with everything from U.S. policy toward Nicaragua in its aid to the Contras (“I was myself the child of a successful revolt against a great power [. . .] [with] some awareness of the view from underneath, and of what it felt to be [. . .] on the bottom, looking up at the descending heel”)67 to his memories of institutionalized racism evidenced by unsafe living conditions endured by South Asian migrants in low-income housing projects in London. Yet just as Voltaire’s persecution at the hands of Church and State encouraged him to advise fellow writers to live close to a border to retreat to safety from time to time, so the experience of the fatwa seemed to have pushed Rushdie into a brief interregnum in which the pleasures of retreat from public affairs appeared tempting. He relates to an interviewer four years after the fatwa was announced that “the ideas that present themselves as things I want to write about are much less public, much less politically generated than they used to be. I have now had enough politics to last a lifetime.”68 Some critics have noted that his tacit support of the Bush administration’s missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, his attack on anti-Americanism as a form of envy and self-loathing on the part of its critics, and his potential endorsement of globalization as a way to disseminate Western values of freedom (“American culture isn’t the enemy. Globalization itself isn’t the problem”69) have now defined him as the very apostle of the status quo he had sought to resist earlier in his career. Yet in response to those who would affirm that his postmodern literary preferences have made him too ideologically slippery with no fundamental truth to appeal to, it seems as if the disruptive event of the fatwa brought even greater moral clarity than before and confirmed the photographer Henri Hulot’s words in The Ground beneath Her Feet: “When you know what you’re against you have taken the first step to discovering what you’re for.”70 Not only has his experience led him to privilege the absolute freedom of the imagination more than ever, serving as the president of PEN from 2004 to 2006, but he savagely critiques those who would permit abuses of human rights in the name of a deformed cultural relativism:

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Cultural relativism is the death of ethical thought, supporting the right of tyrannical priests to tyrannize, of despotic parents to mutilate their daughters, of bigoted individuals to hate homosexuals and Jews, because it is part of their “culture” to do so. Bigotry, prejudice and violence or the threat of violence are not human “values.” They are proof of the absence of such values. They are not the manifestations of a person’s “culture.” They are indications of a person’s lack of culture.71

Although the list of abuses appears to target particular crimes in the nonWestern and Muslim worlds, such narrow-mindedness is of course universal, and he places himself “outside the whale” once again in his 2005 Shalimar the Clown, which argues (in an apparent volte-face from his position immediately after 9/11) that careless and indiscriminate applications of American power may have contributed to the rise of justifiable anti-American sentiment in the non-Western world. In Shalimar, the American ambassador to India, Max Ophuls, whose Jewish parents were taken by the Nazis and who fought during the war alongside the underground resistance, years later finds himself in a position of overwhelming power and influence, permitting him the luxury of forgetting his former state of victimhood. When the beautiful Kashmiri Boonyi Noman dances for him one evening, his lust-filled imagination superimposes a scene from the past onto the present, seeing in her one of the many anonymous showgirls who performed before a group of Nazis who had ultimate power over them. Guilty over the way the roles have reversed, he thinks “I’m not a Nazi. [. . .] I’m the American ambassador, the guy in the white hat. I’m for God’s sake one of the Jews who lived.”72 Yet his desire for her, even though she’s married to Shalimar, conquers his moral reserve, and he turns her into a kept woman, giving her the opportunity to further her dancing career and providing her with a safe place to live so long as she satisfies his physical desires. When Boonyi realizes the extent to which she’s being exploited by the ambassador, however, she begins speaking in coded language about Kashmir and inscribes an alternative struggle for the disputed territory than the one being waged between India and Pakistan: “She decided that the term ‘Indian armed forces’ would secretly refer to the ambassador himself, [and] she would use the Indian presence in the valley as a surrogate for the American occupation of her body.”73 This allegorical mapping of the female body finds resonance with Anne McClintock’s reading of the gendered treasure map in Haggard’s Imperialist work of fiction, King Solomon’s Mines. As she argues, citing Said, “Orientalism [often] takes perverse shape as a ‘male power-fantasy’ that sexualizes a feminized Orient for Western power and possession. [. . .] The feminizing of the land [. . .] operated as a metaphor for relations that were very often not about sexuality at all, or were only indirectly sexual.”74

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Boonyi thus rhetorically displaces the site of oppression from Kashmir onto herself; the oppressors are no longer subcontinental foes, but the much more significant influence of neo-imperialist American foreign policy in the region, thereby confirming Max Ophuls’ own words in an earlier work he had penned: “The nature of overwhelming might [. . .] is such that the powerful man does not need to allude to his power. The fact of it is present in everyone’s consciousness. Thus power does its work by stealth, and the powerful can subsequently deny that their strength was ever used at all.”75 After a pregnant Boonyi has been cast off by Max, who is now repelled by her bloated appearance even though his money has purchased the food and illicit drugs she has consumed, Rushdie explicitly allegorizes her treatment at his hands as an instance of U.S. abuse of power in South Asia: “Look at me, she was saying. I am your handiwork made flesh. You took beauty and created hideousness, and out of this monstrosity your child will be born. Look at me. I am the meaning of your deeds. [. . .] This is not me. This is not me. This is you.”76 Yet Boonyi’s excoriating words are superseded by the deeds of her estranged husband, Shalimar, who resolves to hunt down and assassinate the ambassador for the stain on his honor that Max’s acts have brought. His shame at the hands of a foreign power transforms him into an international terrorist and trained assassin. Since Max goes on to become a significant U.S. counterterrorism chief whose secretive practices lead to greater security for America at the cost of rising resentment in the Muslim world, his murder by Shalimar appears to hint at the idea that America’s past activities have been partially complicit in the formation of Al-Qaida and other global terror networks. CARNIVALESQUE LEVITY AND SUBVERSION Although it may be conceded that the subject matter of Rushdie’s critical essays and novels consistently privileges an emancipatory and engaged political rhetoric whose weighty ideas passionately and transformatively engage the past, his postmodern writing style causes some critics to condemn him for excessive levity which belies the gravity of his remembered versions of the Indian subcontinent, Britain, and America. However, many Rushdie scholars, including Philip Engblom, Robert Bennett, Stephen Morton, and Andrew Teverson, have noted fruitful points of connection between Rushdie and the work of Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Not only do Bakhtin’s studies on dialogism, heteroglossia, and polyphony in narrative discourse align with a postmodern interpretation of Rushdie’s novels, but his emphasis on the subversive potential of the category of the carnivalesque effectively elides the categories of levity and gravity so that acerbic wit takes on a kind

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of weight. One of the regrettable consequences of the fatwa was the way in which it transformed Rushdie’s reputation as a fundamentally comic writer into one suspected of unrelieved gloominess and monolithic dogmatism by a public blinded by the controversy. “Rushdie’s fiction,” Teverson writes, “it is sometimes felt by those approaching it for the first time, is going to be ‘heavy’, obsessed with theological detail and hampered by political argumentativeness.” Yet those misconceptions are continually subverted when readers explore the novels themselves and discover that he is “capable of approaching political and religious issues with levity, irreverence and humour.”77 The truth is that Rushdie is a playfully witty writer in the tradition of Ovid, Swift, and Voltaire whose satirical insights serve the serious purpose of challenging injustice and speaking truth to power. Rushdie’s emphasis on hyperbolically grotesque scenarios and characters, repeated collisions between such categories as the sacred and the profane, comic and tragic, real and surreal, and determination to hold an exaggerated mirror up to the absurdities of society owes much to Bakhtin’s characterization of the carnivalesque. Rushdie’s novel Fury even opens with a riot of scenes from a carnival parade in downtown Manhattan in which the seemingly joyful coexistence in the same space of “slim-hipped gay-pride prancers,” “a big-assed Puerto Rican girl wearing her national flag as a bra” and the calypso stylings of “the true satirical music of the Jamaican troubadourpolemicists” inspire frustrated reflections from the narrator on the way that genuine difference has been consumed in the American melting pot.78 Unlike this Mardi Gras-like scene, which mostly exists as detached and irreverent spectacle, Bakhtin indicates in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics that the medieval practice of carnival was always essentially performative and politically engaged. According to Bakhtin, times of carnival typically preceded or followed sacred events on the liturgical calendar and thus served as an officially sanctioned safety valve that allowed people to engage in ambivalent laughter and mockery of those in authority. During the Festival of Fools, for instance, high-ranking church officials would often cast aside the vestments of authority and join the laypeople in daily activities, while children would frequently assume the role of priest or bishop.79 Craig Brandist explains that for Bakhtin “the activities of the carnival square [would include] collective ridicule of officialdom, inversion of hierarchy, violations of decorum and proportion, celebration of bodily excess, [all of which serve to] embody [. . .] an implicit popular conception of the world. [. . .] The carnivalesque [therefore] becomes a set of image-borne strategies for destabilizing the official worldview.”80 In addition, the temporary exchange of roles during times of carnival reinforced the human idea that the Apollonian virtues of order, light, and obedience to authority needed to be counter-balanced with Dionysian periods of excess, ribaldry, and misrule.

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The laughter aroused by the carnivalesque reminds us that “things are looser than they seemed, we have greater latitude in living with them, their gravity does not oppress us.”81 Those societies which seek to stifle or suppress the carnivalistic impulse among their citizenry in favor of a single, ideologically pure perspective end up becoming repressive and violent. Baal the satirist recognizes this truth in The Satanic Verses before he is to be executed by Mahound for the offense of blasphemy: “Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can’t forgive.” To which Mahound responds, “Writers and whores. I see no difference here.”82 Because each group engages in the forbidden transgression of boundaries, they are silenced by the authoritarian worldview of the new religion. One of the clearest examples of the carnivalesque occurs in the “City Visible but Unseen” chapter of The Satanic Verses as Rushdie narrates the subversive activities in the Club Hot Wax, run by the West Indian migrant, Pinkwalla. Mistreated and abused by the impact of Thatcherite conservatism’s institutionalized racism and not considered “true” citizens of the commonwealth unless they fully assimilate and lose all markers of “foreignness,” members of the South Asian, Caribbean, and African communities of Brickhall articulate an elaborate counter-discourse in the darkness of the dance club. Outside the juridical range of the metropolitan police, Pinkwalla leads them in a nightly ritual in which these migrants are able to temporarily reverse the flow of power and enact a kind of symbolic revenge against their oppressors. Mingling with the dancers on the floor are a series of life-like waxworks representing marginalized and excluded members of history—all migrants—whose forgotten status as colonized slaves and subalterns has been recuperated by Pinkwalla and made central: “The migrants of the past, as much the living dancers’ ancestors as their own flesh and blood, gyrate stilly while Pinkwalla rants toast raps up on the stage, Now-m​i-fee​l-ind​ignat​ionw​hen-d​em-ta​lk-im​migra​tion-​when-​dem-m​ake-i​nsinu​ation​-we-n​o-par​t-a-d​enat ​ i on-a ​ n -mi- ​ m ake- ​ p rocl ​ a mati ​ o n-a- ​ d e-tr ​ u e-si ​ t uati ​ o n-ho ​ w -we- ​ m ake​contr​ibuti​on-si​nce-d​e-Rom​e-Occ​upati​on.”83 Toward the margins of this alternative Madame Tussauds, however, stand wax villains of racists such as Enoch Powell and former British administrator in Jamaica, Edward Long, and even a wax effigy of Margaret Thatcher (“Maggie Torture”) herself; one of these figures is melted each night, to the ecstatic joy and laughter of the club members. Not only is the ceremony itself therefore an enactment of the carnivalesque with its reversal of roles, the symbolic undermining of authority, and celebratory destabilization of boundaries, but it metonymically stands in for the spirit of the novel itself, which Rushdie affirms is a “devil’s version of the world [. . .] written from the experience of those who have been demonized by virtue of their otherness.”84 An absolutist, totalizing view of the world is thereby rejected by Rushdie in

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favor of the marginal and the polyphonic. As Philip Engblom submits, “In the carnivalesque world of Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, it is riotous plurality (not order), variety and difference (not clarity) that are valued and celebrated.”85 FLIGHT AND GUILT Ahmad’s conviction that Rushdie’s dislocated position as a rootless cosmopolitan migrant is unproblematically embraced for the productive, enabling perspectives that emerge is therefore simply contradicted by the facts of Rushdie’s stories and nonfictional offerings. A brief survey of excerpts from his work demonstrates how the pain and loss engendered by flight from home, belonging, and memory is consistently registered. From early in his career he writes, “The Indian writer, looking back at India, does so through guilt-tinted spectacles. [. . .] I am speaking now of those of us who emigrated . . . and I suspect that there are times when the move seems wrong to us all. [. . .] We are Hindus who have crossed the black water; we are Muslims who eat pork.”86 From a 1986 interview he claims that “three of the most important things in [the 19th century] definition of the self are the idea of roots, of belonging to a particular place, of the self as defined in a place in a landscape. [. . .] What happens in migration classically is that you lose all three—you no longer belong to a place; you no longer belong to a language; you no longer belong to any kind of broad community.”87 After the fatwa made impossible his return to India, he laments to Charlie Rose in a discussion of The Moor’s Last Sigh that “I find myself in the odd position of an exile, which I never expected to be [. . .] and it seems to me as if that condition of exile gave the book an extra emotional gear because I really needed India [. . .] badly. I felt the loss of it very keenly. I missed it. I missed my friends, and I missed the place, and this was the only way I could go there.”88 Moraes Zogoiby’s rootless state when he arrives in Spain from Bombay leads to the following dark self-assessment, which seemingly echoes Rushdie’s own feelings at the time: “I was a nobody from nowhere, like no-one, belonging to nothing. [. . .] All my ties had loosened. I had reached an anti-Jerusalem: not a home, but an away.”89 Apu Golden voices a similar lament after having fled Mumbai with his father and two brothers following the November 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. Reflecting guiltily on his own present dilettantish pursuit of art, women, and excessive drinking in New York City which his life of wealth and privilege has permitted him, he notes that “it’s like [past lovers and friends in Mumbai] are just getting on with their lives but I am excluded from those lives, because I have excluded myself, and there is a deep feeling of having done something wrong.”

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Determined to return “home” to India to atone for his crime of leaving, Apu asserts, “There is a right way and a wrong way to do these things and I, we, all of us, we just ripped ourselves away, just tore off the corner of the page where we were standing, and that was a kind of violence. It’s necessary to put the past at rest.”90 Indeed, the painful experience of migration is rendered most viscerally in the opening pages of The Satanic Verses as a kind of death with the violent explosion of Boston Flight AI-420 over England, in whose aftermath Rushdie catalogs a mournful inventory of loss: “mingling with the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home”91 (emphasis in original). Although the repeated refrain in the novel is that to be born again, first you must die, which would indicate that the experience of migration brings with it a desired new birth, from the critical language found in the list above it seems as if the mid-air destruction of the plane was in many ways a self-inflicted form of poetic justice—that daring to recreate the self by disconnecting from the past has earned these travelers terrible retribution at the hands of fate. Gayatri Spivak, acknowledging the extent to which The Satanic Verses is a work profoundly bound up in the experience of migrancy, insightfully points out that Islamic India falls under this theme as well. “For Islam as such has its head turned away from the subcontinent, across the Arabian Sea, perpetually emigrant toward Mecca. Within this turned-away-ness, Rushdie plants the migrant’s other desire, the search for roots as far down as they’ll go. The name of this radical rootedness is, most often, religion.”92 Faith therefore exists in the irresolvable middle ground between roots and flight, between India and the Saudi peninsula, which makes doubt faith’s shadow twin. As Rushdie writes, “Question: What is the opposite of faith? Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief. Doubt.”93 Gibreel Farishta’s blasphemous consumption of pork and renunciation of his Muslim faith when he realizes that Allah did not save him during his illness plunges him into a kind of transit zone, where he is unable to believe or fully disbelieve. Rushdie’s metaphorical identification of guilt-ridden migrants as “Muslims who eat pork” thus fuses the acts of migration and blasphemy so they become essentially one and the same transgression. Yet this revolutionary dismissal and flight from his religious identity do not prove liberating to Gibreel. Instead, he first develops insomnia because the nightmarish quality of his dreams (which constitute the controversial “Mahound” chapters in the novel) prove too difficult to face. Rushdie writes in his defense of the novel, “In Good Faith,” that

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the first thing to be said about these dreams is that they are agonizingly painful to the dreamer. They are a “nocturnal retribution, a punishment” for his loss of faith. This man, desperate to regain belief, is haunted, possessed, by visions of doubt, visions of skepticism and questions and faith-shaking allegations that grow more and more extreme as they go on. [. . .] The first purpose of these sequences is not to vilify or “disprove” Islam, but to portray a soul in crisis, to show how the loss of God can destroy a man’s life.94

In order to compensate for his rejection of faith to which he is unable to return, and in an attempt to stabilize the awful uncertainty born out of his unconscious visions of the imperfections and inaccuracies present at the historical founding of the Islamic faith, he becomes monomaniacal in his quest to purify London and “tropicalize” it.95 If his dream of Jahilia is one in which the empire of sand and doubt denies fixity and truth, he will seek to heal his divided self by striving to impose order on the city to which he’s migrated: “No more of these England-induced ambiguities, these Biblical-Satanic confusions,” he cries out in his persona as the Archangel Gabriel. “Clarity, clarity, at all costs clarity! [. . .] O most slippery, most devilish of cities!—In which such stark, imperative oppositions were drowned beneath an endless drizzle of greys.”96 Yet his inability to come to terms with the Jahilia within, born out of his flight from religious belonging, exacerbates his condition of radical ontological self-exile, which Rushdie dramatizes in Gibreel’s selfdestructive paranoid schizophrenic episodes. The rift in Saladin Chamcha’s life is cultural rather than religious. Torn between Bombay and London, East and West, throughout most of the novel, he tries desperately to suppress the influence of his roots while attempting to out-English the English. Rather than understanding India as “Bharat Mata” (Mother India) in The Satanic Verses, Rushdie aligns the nation with the father, as Saladin’s father, Changez Chamchawalla, is a leading figure in the Indian nationalist movement. Saladin’s rebellion against his father thus initially takes on the familiar allegorical cast of the disaffiliated postcolonial figure refusing nationalist identification because it is too narrow, restricting, and potentially shaming. As Frantz Fanon notes, psychologizing the experience of the deracinated former colonial who feels he needs to choose between his native culture and European society, “the individual who climbs up into white, civilized society tends to reject his black, uncivilized family at the level of the imagination.” Filial bonds therefore are repressed and symbolically erased “since the family structure is relegated to the id.”97 Saladin’s oedipal longing to escape the embrace of the father/nation, “to place oceans between the great man and himself,” like Spivak’s conceptualization of Indian Islam, involves a “turned-away-ness” from the subcontinent and a disavowal of all things Indian even before he leaves India for England:

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“He was fed up of textile factories and local trains and all the confusion and super-abundance of the place. [. . .] His favourite playground rhymes were those that yearned for foreign cities.”98 When his father rooted for the national cricket team, Saladin cheered for an English victory. When Changez attempts to celebrate an authentic Indian artistic tradition by showing an adult Saladin his sixteenth-century collection of Hamza-nama cloths depicting scenes from early Muslim history, Saladin obstinately insists on the superiority of British cultural productions like the Aliens Show, for which he serves as a primary voice-over actor. Rushdie forges the link between Gibreel’s and Saladin’s renunciations of identity through the shared language of religion so that each character’s act amounts to a kind of blasphemy: Saladin had once “worshipped [Changez], he was a great father until you started growing a mind of your own, and then to argue with him was called a betrayal of his love, but never mind that now, I accuse him of becoming my supreme being, so that what happened was like a loss of faith”99 (emphasis in original). Just as Gibreel suffers from a number of psychopathologies as a result of his rejection of God, so too does Saladin endure a number of “cracks and absences” because of his revolt against father and roots. Since his newly adopted anglophilic identity is nothing more than a provisional mask or disguise, he increasingly experiences (to his great chagrin) the return of traces of his past which he had unsuccessfully sought to repress. Rushdie writes that on his initial arrival to England he “had constructed [his] face with care—it had taken him several years to get it just right. [. . .] Furthermore, he had shaped himself a voice to go with the face.”100 Yet on a plane back to Bombay to reunite with his father, his unconscious accuses him in several ways. He endures a disturbing dream in which a stranger with fragile glass skin [a symbolic version of himself] asks him to help him remove “the prison of his skin,”101 but the impossibility of the attempt is registered when the cracked surface refuses to peel away cleanly. This violent image is repeated in The Moor’s Last Sigh, when Moraes’ aunt, Carmen da Gama, the Anglican priest Oliver D’Aeth, and even Moraes himself dream of having their skin flayed from them; in each case the act is linked to a futile yearning to escape the burden of the past. As Moraes explains, “So, in writing this, I must peel off history, the prison of the past [. . .] [however,] in the waking world a man’s not as easy to flay as a banana, no matter how ripe he be. And [my parents] will take some shaking off.”102 Immediately after waking from his own dream, Saladin’s voice embarrassingly betrays him as well, “slip[ping] like a false moustache”103 into the distinct cadences and rhythms of Bombay English before he can consciously craft his response to an airline attendant. More than anything, however, Saladin’s refusal of roots puts him in the pitiable position of belonging properly nowhere. Rejected by his dream-England,

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which either requires that he and fellow voice-over actor Mimi Mamoulian “remain invisible, shedding bodies to put on voices”104 or physically attacks him for the color of his skin which marks him as a permanent immigrant, he can’t take comfort in his home city of Bombay any longer either. As he confesses to Zeeny, who seeks to reclaim him for India, “I don’t like people dropping in to see me without warning, I have forgotten the rules of seventiles and kabaddi, I can’t recite my prayers, I don’t know what should happen at a nikah ceremony, and in this city where I grew up I get lost if I’m on my own. This isn’t home. It makes me giddy because it feels like home and is not.”105 Although Saladin is afflicted with the very “unhomeliness” that Bhabha theorizes, his condition is not unproblematically rich and productive, but marked by the “unbearable lightness of being.” Rushdie therefore links Saladin’s predicament with Satan’s, which he makes explicit in his epigraph to the novel, which features a passage from Daniel Defoe’s The History of the Devil: “Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste or air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is . . . without any fixed place, or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon.” Satan is thus the originary migrant, denied fixity and doomed to what Srinivas Aravamudan in his Derridean analysis describes as an eternal, nomadic “destinerrance.”106 The guilt engendered from choosing to be a “creature of air, [His] roots in dreams And clouds”107 could on one reading be at least partially responsible for his devilish transformation when he returns to England. Just as Rushdie seems to indicate that the “broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues” led on one level to the demise of those migrants who dared to “[cross] the black water,” so too has Saladin’s dependency complex toward British culture and disaffiliation from India purgatorially turned him into the very icon of otherness—“that black fellow creeping up behind”108—he has resisted all his life. A tragic scenario played out in Shalimar the Clown serves as a final, powerful instance of the complex dynamic between flight and guilt while demonstrating the negative intergenerational impact such an escape from memory and identity can create. India Ophuls, the 24-year old daughter of U.S. ambassador, Max Ophuls, is unknowingly haunted by the absence of her Kashmiri mother, Boonyi, whose identity her father refuses to divulge out of shame. As Rushdie indicates, her mother “was lost to her, like paradise, like Kashmir, in a time before memory.”109 Like Saladin, her Kashmiri mother’s dialectical rhythms bubble unbidden out of her at night while she sleeps, but during her waking hours, she rejects the “subcontinental” burden of her name, cultivating a carefully constructed American persona: “She didn’t want to be vast or subcontinental or excessive or vulgar or explosive or crowded or ancient or

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noisy or mystical or in any way Third World.”110 Yet Rushdie demonstrates the extent of India’s ontological confusion when he relates that her determination to not dwell on the past and instead to live in a perpetual present is complicated by her aching desire to know her mother and have her father resurrect her memory. Just as Saladin’s rejection of the father is bound up in his refusal of the nation, here too, the nodes of parent, nation, and roots are brought together in a familiar arrangement, and India’s disconnection from the weight of the past has left her undefined. “And just as one extreme may at any moment turn into its opposite,” Kundera writes, “so this perfect buoyancy has become a terrifying burden of buoyancy”111 (emphasis in original). Later in the novel, the reader learns that India’s separation from her mother has been facilitated by an earlier act of abandonment on the part of Boonyi. Sensing the impossibility of returning in shame to her home village with the infant daughter she conceived with the U.S. ambassador, Boonyi agrees to give her child to Max’s aggrieved wife, who can’t have children of her own. As the plane crosses the Himalayas, flying her back home without her daughter, Rushdie poignantly captures Boonyi’s experience of loss through the by-now-familiar metaphor of gravity: “The weight of her missing child, the cradled void, was too much to bear. Yet it had to be borne.”112 When the plane encounters turbulence, causing it to drop several thousands of feet before leveling out, Boonyi fantastically attributes it to the heaviness of the absent girl, which actively resists her flight from both motherly responsibility and the burden of her decision. In order to permit the plane to outstrip the gravitational pull of belonging and filiation, Boonyi finally “summoned all her remaining will and let the phantom baby go. There was no baby, she told herself. She had no baby daughter. She was returning home to her husband and there was no leaden void being carried in her cradling arms. She felt the weight in her lap lessen, felt the aircraft rise. She threw away her lost baby and forced the plane up and over.”113 Yet when India’s adopted mother finally reveals her true identity to her, disclosing an old photograph of Boonyi and revealing that India’s birth name was Kashmira Noman, the same metaphor of gravity re-appears to indicate the healing re-integration with the past India/Kashmira is about to forge as she makes plans to travel to Kashmir: “She felt as if the weight of her body had suddenly doubled, as if she had suddenly become the woman in the photograph. [. . .] The weight of [her name initially] was too much for her to bear.”114 Repression of the past and of the importance of roots thus represents a kind of antigravity, while recovery of the past tethers one to the earth. Just as Saleem learned in his abstracted, weightless state in Parvati’s basket of invisibility when he couldn’t remember his name and Salahuddin Chamchawalla discovered when he cut himself off from his past in going by the anglicized “Saladin Chamcha,” so too does India/Kashmira determine

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that “a name means continuity with the past and people without a past are people without a name.”115 AMERICA AND ERASURE America in Rushdie’s fiction often serves as a metaphorical placeholder for discontinuity with the past and a willed forgetting on the part of its inhabitants, particularly for the migrants who have sought refuge on her shores. Ever since 1999, when Rushdie fulfilled a life-long dream by moving to New York, his fictions have increasingly been set in what Rai Merchant refers to as “America, the open-sesame. America, which got rid of the British long before we did. [. . .] My dream-ocean led to America, my private, unfound land.”116 While the British public began to grow both restive and complacent during the fatwa, either accusing Rushdie of being ungrateful for the Special Branch’s protection or forgetting that his was a cause which needed continual championing, he felt anonymous to the American public and consequently safe. In November of 1993, he met with President Clinton, who offered the full support of the American government, a full four and a half years before Prime Minister Blair agreed to meet with Rushdie. While he was composing The Ground beneath Her Feet at a rented home on Long Island in the late 1990s, he accordingly determined that he “could recapture his freedom in America before the British agreed it was time to give it back to him.”117 Given such a glowing constellation of associations which America represented to him in his time of need—liberation, blessed anonymity, welcome, support—it’s remarkable that Rushdie’s fiction often paints a darker image of the country, one that is more often than not connected with the negative values of weightlessness, disconnection, amnesia, and autonomous self-creation in his ethical universe. Malik Solanka reflects in Fury that America represents “the land of self-creation [. . .] the country whose paradigmatic modern fiction was the story of a man who remade himself—his past, his present, his shirts, even his name” and intends to assume a Gatsby-esque pose in America as well, embarking on “the complete erasure, or ‘master deletion,’ of the old program. [. . .] Nothing less than the unselfing of the self would do.”118 Solanka’s determination to fly from his old life and his critical connections with wife, child, and home is initially imbued with religious resonances, as he recalls how a neighbor in Bombay, Mr. Venkat, a formerly successful banker, had chosen to renounce his life of privilege by forsaking his family forever and becoming a sanyasi, or religious mendicant. Yet Rushdie undercuts any positive associations such flight might evoke by revealing Solanka’s motives to be ones of self-cancellation rather than self-enlargement. As his wife reminds him on the phone, he has forgotten her

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and their child by abandoning them in England. In addition, Solanka suffers a number of blackouts during times of emotional stress that allow him to escape the moral responsibility for his possible acts. Finally, Rushdie reveals a painful childhood memory of molestation at the hands of a family member in Bombay that explains why Solanka seeks control over his life now by falling into a pattern of repeated repression and escape from painful circumstances. Although he presents to his neighbors in Manhattan a superficial portrait of civility and grandeur, the 55-year-old gentleman and former Cambridge philosophy professor hides an uglier reality of psychic disintegration and a history of severing ties with those closest to him. Solanka’s palimpsestic identity is only matched by America’s own self-presentation during a time of such promiscuous wealth: “Behind the façade of this age of gold, this time of plenty, the contradictions and impoverishment of the Western human individual, or let’s say the human self in America, were deepening and widening.”119 The desire to re-invent oneself in America is explicitly critiqued in several of Rushdie’s other works as well. One of his characters in Shalimar the Clown expatiates in his memoir on “the reinvention of the self, that classic American theme. [. . .] That the self can so readily be remade is a dangerous, narcotic discovery. Once you’ve started using that drug, it isn’t easy to stop.”120 The reason why chameleonic self-invention becomes such an addictive experience is that it takes the postmodern insistence on the plurality of the decentered self, composed of a number of potentially contradictory subject positions, and often refuses to countenance the importance of materially grounded ethical engagements by rejecting the importance of the past. Uma Sarasvati in The Moor’s Last Sigh, for instance, embraces a “highly inventive commitment to the infinite malleability of the real” and a “[post]modernistically provisional sense of truth,” which leads her to destroy her closest human relationships.121 Similarly, Vasco Miranda in the same novel, “in the pursuit of his chosen future [. . .] had shed all affiliations of blood and place, a decision which implied a certain ruthlessness, and hinted, too, at instability. He was his own invention, and it should have occurred to [us] that the invention might not work.”122 Making oneself anew, the narrator of The Satanic Verses reminds at the beginning of the novel, is one of the central tasks of the migrant; yet it is also to take on a god-like prerogative. If the act is entered upon too lightly, the self might cease to add up to a coherent meaning. The Ground beneath Her Feet seems to be Rushdie’s most sustained argument in favor of “the unbearable lightness of being” and the joys of “step[ping] out of the frame”123 into a rootless existence, but here too the importance of roots and belonging is continually inscribed as Rushdie shows the consequences of endless flight. Unlike Saleem Sinai, for whom the recovery of Bombay in memory was such an urgent imperative, Rai Merchant blithely announces that “I’m not over-attached to history, or

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Bombay. Me, I’m the under-attached type.”124 Yet Rushdie states in a 1999 interview that the novel is “about people who leave, and for whom the dream is not of Home but of Away. But I thought if I am going to do that, I have to show the depth and the importance and the value of what’s being left.”125 Fittingly, Rai Merchant’s elegy to Bombay when the time comes for him to actually leave is gut-wrenching in its articulation of the emotional cost of migration. The international musicians Vina Apsara and Ormus Cama, as well as the narrator Rai Merchant, form a triangle of disaffiliation throughout the novel. “We three kings of Disorient were,” Rai states, indicating the ways in which each character has experienced the liberating, yet confusing, “loss of the East”126 in their movement away from India. Rejecting their culture’s insistence on the importance of stability, rootedness, and loyalty to the nation, they continually slip across borders in the same way that their beloved music disregards national and generic frontiers of all sorts as well. Rushdie writes that “in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semi-detached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race. [. . .] There may even be millions, billions of such souls, as many nonbelongers as belongers.”127 While the conservative forces of caste, tribe, and family seek to fix them in place, Vina, Ormus, and Rai prefer the freedom of rootlessness, and despite the frequent “feeling of being lost, [. . .] the wild panic of losing [their] moorings, the vertiginous terror of the horizon spinning round and round like the edge of a coin tossed in the air,”128 continue to choose Away over Home. Just as in Fury, America in The Ground beneath Her Feet represents a kind of anti-Jerusalem of potential unbelonging. In a breathless monologue urging Ormus to transform himself through migration, Vina waxes rhapsodic about the benefits of living in America, which center on the peculiar weightlessness of American existence. Far more than a nation, America to Vina is an idea and a state of mind that resist the importance of everything that India and even England hold dear. In fact, she announces that Ormus has always been an American without even knowing it because of his detached spirit. Unlike other countries, which require a lengthy process of adjustment before one can self-identify as a citizen, “You get to be an American just by wanting, and by becoming an American you add to the kinds of American it’s possible to be.”129 While she describes England as an antiquated museum of dusty relics from the past, America is continually re-inventing itself in a kind of perpetual present. The magical quality of American life, in which identity can be spoken into existence and history ceases to matter, is predicated on “not belonging, that’s an old American tradition, see?, that’s the American way.”130 Yet while Vina’s words successfully captivate Ormus, it’s clear that Rushdie is

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suggesting the dangers of an American (anti)tradition whereby the force of personality is built on nothing but air and illusions. Vina’s multiply transplanted history (born in Chester, Virginia, abandoned by her birth father and her mother, who commits suicide, transferred to Western New York to live with abusive distant relatives, then shipped to India to be cared for by her father’s rich relations) engenders a radical destabilization of self and a fundamental insecurity. Each new name she assumes—Nissy Poe, Diana Egiptus, and Vina Apsara—inscribes a separate, fractured identity. Although she hides behind the bravado of her bold rhetoric about America which authorizes her series of personas and encourages a practice of continual flight, Rushdie reveals that her uprootings had made her “literally selfless, her personality smashed. [. . .] Her name, her mother and family, her sense of place and home and safety and belonging and being loved [. . .] all these things had been pulled out from under her, like a rug. She was floating in a void, denatured, dehistoried.”131 Ormus too suffers from an ontological absence of definition from choosing to live an unmoored existence: “The idea of family, of community, is almost dead in him. [. . .] He has come loose, like an astronaut floating away from a space capsule. [. . .] He could easily amount to nothing. He might fail to add up to a person.”132 But the weightlessness of Vina and Ormus, pitiably disconnected from the past and from engaged commitments, and symbolized by the amnesiac quality of American existence, is counter-balanced by Rai Merchant’s strong statement at the beginning of the novel, urging the importance of gravitational ties of belonging which manifest themselves in concrete memories, connection to the past, and national roots: “But love is what we want, not freedom. Who then is the unluckier man? The beloved, who is given his heart’s desire and must for ever after fear its loss, or the free man, with his unlooked-for liberty, naked and alone between the captive armies of the earth?”133 The scope of the novel seems to suggest the latter is the less fortunate of the two. CENTRIPETAL MIGRANCY AND THE LONGING FOR HOME In Rushdie’s provocative counter reading of the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz, he not only claims that the moral—“there’s no place like home”—is all wrong but that the movie itself is actually a testament to the virtues and thrilling possibilities of migrancy. He identifies the emotional high point of the film to be Dorothy’s wistful singing of “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” which inspired him as a young boy living in Bombay to yearn for the otherness of “Elsewhere”:

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What she expresses here, what she embodies with the purity of an archetype, is the human dream of leaving, a dream at least as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots. At the heart of The Wizard of Oz is a great tension between these two dreams . . . “Over the Rainbow” is, or ought to be, the anthem of all the world’s migrants, all those who go in search of the place where “the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” It is a celebration of Escape, a grand paean to the Uprooted Self, a hymn—the hymn—to Elsewhere.134

Such an insight demonstrates why Rushdie feels the ending to be so misplaced and ineffective, because after all the color and self-knowledge and maturation that Dorothy has experienced after “stepping across the line” of her colorless existence in Kansas into Oz, it’s a stretch to imagine that she’d gladly exchange such a new life for the drab limitations of home. As he puts it, the “true” lesson of the film is “not that ‘there’s no place like home,’ but rather that there is no longer any such place as home: except, of course, for the home we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz: which is anywhere, and everywhere, except the place from which we began.”135 Despite such an affirmation of the desirability of Away, however, the corpus of Rushdie’s work suggests a quite different interpretation of the importance of home, past, and belonging. Jaina Sanga argues that “Rushdie cannot disavow himself from a sense of origins, and his personal influences in the stories seem to confirm Stuart Hall’s claim that all notions of identity, howsoever fractured and displaced, have a real set of histories that are anchored within real conditions.”136 As if in confirmation of this view, Rushdie explains to Jack Livings that the only time he ever wept while writing was when he narrated the death of pandit Pyarelal Kaul as the pandit conjured up emotionally rich images of a pre-fallen Kashmir, Rushdie’s own remembered mythic site of origin.137 Although Rushdie writes in his early novel Shame that “this will be a novel of leavetaking, my last words on the East from which, many years ago, I began to come loose,” nearly every subsequent novel includes an emotional scene of leave-taking that proves the impossibility of completely separating his imagination from the subcontinent or ever articulating a final word. “I do not always believe myself when I say this,” he continues, “It is a part of the world to which, whether I like it or not, I am still joined, if only by elastic bands.”138 His position as a centripetal migrant thus demands that the pull of memories of the subcontinent roots him inescapably in India, particularly his beloved Bombay, which he carries with him wherever he goes. As he movingly relates in an essay on fellow migrant Günter Grass, “Writing [about the past] is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things—childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves—that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers.”139

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NOTES 1. Salman Rushdie, Step across This Line: Collected Nonfiction (1992–2002) (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), 266. 2. One of the purest expressions of the admonitory voice of caution to wouldbe migrants is found in Rushdie’s 2008 novel, The Enchantress of Florence, as emperor Akbar’s dream-wife, Jodha, dismissively asserts that “travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd,” 48. 3. Rushdie, Shame, 90. 4. Qtd. in Hassumani, Salman Rushdie, 130. 5. Qtd. in Ahmad, In Theory, 157. 6. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999), 6. 7. Ibid., 5. 8. Ibid., 33. 9. Ibid., 122. 10. Ibid., 125. 11. Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), viii–ix. 12. Ibid., 33. 13. Rushdie, Shame, 91. 14. Ahmad, In Theory, 69. 15. Qtd. in Amina Yaquin, “Family and Gender in Rushdie’s Writing,” in The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie, ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 62. 16. Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” Social Text 31/32 (1992), 146. 17. Salman Rushdie, “Face to Face: Salman Rushdie and Jeremy Isaacs,” interview by Jeremy Isaacs, BBC 2, 1994. 18. Qtd. in Thiara, Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography, 171. 19. Gillian Gane, “Migrancy, the Cosmopolitan Intellectual, and the Global City in The Satanic Verses,” Modern Fiction Studies 48, no. 1 (2002): 41. 20. Ibid., 40. 21. Sanghvi, “You Fight to Like Where You Live.” 22. Qtd. in Gane, “Migrancy, the Cosmopolitan Intellectual, and the Global City,” 39. 23. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 1. 24. Harveen Mann, “‘Being Borne Across’: Translation and Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 37, no. 2 (1995): 290. 25. Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World, 36. 26. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 166. 27. Qtd. in Teverson, Salman Rushdie, 6. 28. Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World, 86.

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29. Ahmad, In Theory, 128. 30. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 82. 31. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 5. 32. Ibid., 420. 33. Srinivas Aravamudan, “Being God’s Postman is no Fun, Yaar: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses,” in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. M. D. Fletcher (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1994), 190. 34. Huggan, The Post-Colonial Exotic, 72. 35. Ibid., 110, 117. 36. Rushdie, The Jaguar Smile, 137. 37. Rushdie, Fury, 87–88. 38. Ahmad, In Theory, 12. 39. Thiara, Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography, 154. 40. John Haffenden, “Salman Rushdie,” in Novelists in Interview, ed. John Haffenden (London: Methuen, 1985), 261. 41. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 100. 42. Rushdie, Step across this Line, 59. 43. Ibid., 59. 44. Ibid., 350. 45. Ibid., 61. 46. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 122. 47. Ibid., 124. 48. Michael T. Kaufman, “Author from 3 Countries,” The New York Times Book Review, November 13, 1990, 23. 49. Ahmad, In Theory, 219. 50. Ibid., 129. 51. Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World, 23. 52. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 277. 53. Teverson, Salman Rushdie, 17. 54. Qtd. in Thomas Blom Hansen, “Reflections on Salman Rushdie’s Bombay,” in Midnight’s Diaspora: Critical Encounters with Salman Rushdie, eds. Daniel Herwitz and Ashutosh Varshney (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 19. 55. Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown, 220. 56. Frederic Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 69. 57. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 161–62. 58. Ahmad, In Theory, 100. 59. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 447. 60. Ghosh, When Borne Across, 82. 61. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 92. 62. Qtd. in Imaginary Homelands, 95. 63. Ibid., 96. 64. Ibid., 97. 65. Ibid., 99. 66. Rushdie, The Ground beneath Her Feet, 344.

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67. Rushdie, Jaguar Smile, 4. 68. John Banville, “An Interview with Salman Rushdie,” The New York Review of Books, March 4, 1993, 36. 69. Rushdie, Step across This Line, 269. 70. Rushdie, The Ground beneath Her Feet, 223. 71. Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 187. 72. Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown, 205. 73. Ibid., 197. 74. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 14. 75. Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown, 179. 76. Ibid., 205. 77. Teverson, Salman Rushdie, 5. 78. Rushdie, Fury, 7. 79. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 129–30. 80. Craig Brandist, “The Bakhtin Circle,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed August 23, 2019. 81. Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 61. 82. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 405. 83. Ibid., 301. 84. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 403. 85. Philip Engblom, “A Multitude of Voices: Carnivalization and Dialogicality in the Novels of Salman Rushdie,” in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. M. D. Fletcher (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1994), 303. 86. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 15. 87. Sedge Thomson, “Interview with Salman Rushdie at San Francisco State University, The Poetry Center,” KQED: San Francisco State University, March 26, 1987. 88. Rose, “The Moor’s Last Sigh.” 89. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 391. 90. Rushdie, The Golden House, 231. 91. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 5. 92. Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 250–51. 93. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 94. 94. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 398–99. 95. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 365. 96. Ibid., 364. 97. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 128. 98. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 37. 99. Ibid., 41. 100. Ibid., 33. 101. Ibid., 34. 102. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 136–37.

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103. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 53. 104. Ibid., 61. 105. Ibid., 59. 106. Aravamudan, “Being God’s Postman Is No Fun, Yaar,” 202. 107. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 13. 108. Ibid., 54. 109. Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown, 4. 110. Ibid., 5–6. 111. Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 188. 112. Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown, 217. 113. Ibid., 218. 114. Ibid., 354. 115. Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 157. 116. Rushdie, The Ground beneath Her Feet, 59. 117. Rushdie, Joseph Anton, 557. 118. Rushdie, Fury, 79. 119. Ibid., 86. 120. Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown, 162. 121. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 272. 122. Ibid., 157. 123. Rushdie, The Ground beneath Her Feet, 43. 124. Ibid., 78. 125. Nirmala Lakshman, “A Columbus of the Near-at-Hand,” The Hindu, April 25, 1999. 126. Rushdie, The Ground beneath Her Feet, 177. 127. Ibid., 72–73. 128. Ibid., 177. 129. Ibid., 331. 130. Ibid. 131. Ibid., 121. 132. Ibid., 147. 133. Ibid., 53. 134. Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz: BFI Film Classics (London: British Film Institute, 2006), 23. 135. Ibid., 57. 136. Sanga, Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors, 21. 137. Jack Livings, “Salman Rushdie, The Art of Fiction No. 186,” The Paris Review 174 (2005). 138. Rushdie, Shame, 23. 139. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 277.

Chapter 5

Of Untranslated and Translated Men

Rushdie has frequently affirmed that the migrant is the archetypal representative of our era, crossing frontiers and experiencing cultural transplantations at a rapidly accelerating rate. Although the modalities of such migration differ markedly, from émigrés and expatriates to refugees and exiles, each must come to terms with how best to establish “the ground beneath their feet” once they’ve been cut loose from origins and translated culturally, linguistically, and temporally. Some choose to cling to an essentialized illusion of purity and continuity with the past by remaining resolutely closed off to the “taint of Abroad,”1 while others seek a total rupture with the past in their pursuit of assimilation with the host culture. Yet Rushdie, as a centripetal migrant, charts a course between an excess of memory and a complete disavowal of memory by continuing to uphold the model of the fully “translated” migrant, open to the metamorphic power of dislocation to create a liminal space for “multiple rootedness,” which allows for new ways of perceiving, understanding, and transforming the world. Rushdie’s work repeatedly interrogates two unhealthy attitudes adhered to by diasporic migrants. One group seeks to problematically live exclusively in the past, clinging to memories, traditions, and native values so fiercely in an attempt to cope with and to neutralize the dizzying complexities of displacement that they become frozen in time and fail to experience growth. The other set fully embraces the benefits of migration and the joys of assimilation to the dominant culture but often at the cost of the loss of their own pasts. It’s as if each group has refused to acknowledge the palimpsestic and permeable layering of identity that allows for movement, development, and progress in a postcolonial, postmodern world. While the unassimilated, ghettoized migrant unduly privileges the “weightiness” of his or her memories and abjures the “lightness” of new experiences in order to remain continuous with the past, 123

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the Westernized anglophiles and deracinated migrants of Rushdie’s work merely flip the binary and embrace rootlessness as they discard the traces of their former identities. However, Rushdie’s metaphor of translation as a transactional and transformative process demonstrates the limitations of each position and deconstructs the forced and unnatural understandings of the past to which both “untranslated” separatists and “falsely translated” assimilationists adhere. The truly translated centripetal migrant is transformed by his or her existence at the liminal boundary zone between past and present, home and away, and is thus continually shuttling back and forth between each set of realities. Such an identity recognizes the importance of new perspectives that invariably emerge through the metamorphic energies of migration while acknowledging the stability, meaning, and purpose provided by memories of home and the past. TRANSLATION In two early essays, Rushdie performs an act of philological interpretation by explaining the common history of the words “metaphor,” “migration,” and “translation.” “Migration,” he writes in a piece on Günter Grass, “offers us one of the richest metaphors of our age. The very word metaphor, with its roots in the Greek words for bearing across, describes a sort of migration, the migration of ideas into images. Migrants—borne-across humans—are metaphorical beings in their very essence.”2 Two years earlier, he indicated in “Imaginary Homelands” that “the word ‘translation’ comes, etymologically, from the Latin for ‘bearing across.’ Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.”3 By textualizing the experience of migration through the words “metaphor” and “translation,” Rushdie emphasizes a critical insight concerning the dynamic of transculturation. Since metaphors in figurative language exist to articulate that one thing simultaneously is another, they suggest a kind of transaction (rather than substitution) of meaning in which each word interpenetrates the other, thus permitting a clearer understanding of both. As Roger Lundin points out, this exchange of qualities allows a metaphor to make “a foreign reality [. . .] something we can grasp through a familiar association [. . .] and in the process we see the strange made familiar and the familiar made eerily strange.”4 The connections forged between the “foreign” and the “familiar” demonstrate that the metaphor presupposes a transformation of identity rather than its effacement, leading to what French philosopher

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Paul Ricoeur understands as “the projection of new ways of describing the world.”5 Migrants themselves, therefore, borne across and translated into a new culture, facing demands and realities that often disruptively compete with their past identities, don’t necessarily have to discard the roots of the self through an erasure of memory since Rushdie’s paradigm of translation as a kind of transactional process promises both transformation and preservation of meaning. Yet for newness to enter the world, one must be open to the metamorphic potential of the metaphoric experience that allows one to imagine the world differently through “travelled eyes.”6 Translation thus rejects both rootlessness and excessive attachment to roots and embraces instead an ethic of engaged motility that shuttles between each state. An important exchange in Rushdie’s fiction in which the central problematic of cultural translation is interrogated takes place in The Satanic Verses. Horrified and perplexed by his transformation into a demonic goat-man, Saladin Chamcha is brought to the Shandaar Café and rooming house and presented to its proprietor, the self-taught classical scholar, Muhammad Sufyan. Using the ancient authors Lucretius and Ovid, Sufyan attempts to interpret Saladin’s situation and understand whether his old self has been destroyed and an entirely new self has replaced it or whether Saladin has retained an essential continuity of identity despite his displacement and dislocation. Lucretius’ argument in De Rerum Natura warns, according to the garrulous Sufyan, that “‘whatever by its changing goes out of its frontiers,’—that is, bursts its banks,—or, maybe, breaks out of its limitations,—so to speak, disregards its own rules, but that is too free, I am thinking . . . ‘that thing,’ at any rate, Lucretius holds, ‘by doing so brings immediate death to its old self.’”7 Sufyan’s several digressive glosses of Lucretius, while not discounting the fact that Saladin’s “psychological breakdown, loss of sense of self, inability to cope”8 are a result of his victimization at the hands of the British authorities, also hint at the possibility that it was Saladin’s own determination to “step across the line” of his Indian heritage and embrace English culture that led to his punishment. As Saladin reflects, “A being going through life can become so other to himself as to be another, discrete, severed from history.”9 Yet Ovid affirms that identity is like wax, which bears the temporary imprint of shaping forces, yet maintains an essential continuity of self despite any superficial mutability: “You hear, good sir? Our spirits! Our immortal essences!—‘Are still the same forever, but adopt in their migrations evervarying forms.’”10 Gibreel, the Indian movie star whose pursuit of Alleluia Cone has brought him half-way around the world, seems to fit the Ovidian model of translation since despite his migration, relocation, and “angeling,” his “heart’s Indian for all that.”11 However, Rushdie’s postmodern stance deconstructs the either/or options articulated by Sufyan and instead offers

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the possibility of embracing both. As Teverson indicates, “The self changes and it remains the same, or, rather, elements of it change, and elements of it are transformed; some aspects of identity are translated, and some remain untranslatable, and the trick, for the successful migrant, is to find a way of holding such an alarming, unsteady, multiple and irreconcilable sense of the selfhood together.”12 Gibreel’s inability to reconcile the split nature of his new identity, dramatized by his paranoid schizophrenic condition and eventual suicide, demonstrates the extent to which he refuses translation, despite his powerlessness to ultimately do so. Saladin, however, survives by finally choosing to inhabit the shifting border zones that mark the contours of his new self. Intertextually inserting his characters’ stories into the “very modern parable” of Moby Dick, Rushdie sees Gibreel as an Ahab-like character, whose monomaniacal purity of obsession causes his demise, while Saladin plays the role of Ishmael, “a man without strong feeling or affiliations,” who endures. “The self-interested modern man is the sole survivor,” he writes.13 Flexibility and accommodation in allowing oneself to be translated between cultures thus serve for Rushdie as indispensable virtues in negotiating the pressures and bewildering dislocations of migration. UNTRANSLATION AND CONTINUITY WITH THE PAST Toward the end of The Satanic Verses, Rushdie arrives at the heart of the antagonism between Saladin and Gibreel that impels the former to want to destroy the latter. Not only is Gibreel more than partly responsible for Saladin’s alienated position in the city (since he failed to speak up for him to the authorities after their arrival on the beach at Rosa Diamond’s), but Gibreel’s celebrated welcome to London is rebuffed by “London’s conqueror, [who] can see no value in the world now falling at his feet! [Gibreel] [. . .] for whom all things English are worthy of derision instead of praise.”14 This renunciation of everything for which Saladin has struggled his entire life constitutes an unforgiveable insult since Saladin had perpetually sought “to be transformed into the foreignness he admires,” while Gibreel “prefer[s], contemptuously, to transform” the unsatisfactory details of British cultural life so that they more accurately reflect the moral clarity of his own version of India.15 In other words, he seeks to translate England by Indianizing or “tropicalizing” it yet resists a corresponding translation of the self. The conflict between the two therefore thematizes two of the dominant options available to migrants in a foreign land. Those migrants who are seen by themselves and others as good or “true” have remained faithful to the memory of the past by successfully blocking out foreign influences and

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establishing carefully monitored boundaries between past and present, home and away. Edward Said presents an allegory of this postcolonial conundrum by distinguishing between Ariel, who internalizes a desire to become “a willing servant of Prospero [. . .] [doing] what he is told obligingly, and, when he gains his freedom, [returning] to his native element, a sort of bourgeois native untroubled by his collaboration,” and Caliban, “who sheds his current servitude and physical disfigurements in the process of discovering his essential, pre-colonial self.”16 If Saladin-as-Ariel is compromised by his ingratiating attitude toward the dominant culture, Gibreel-as-Caliban’s decision to “remain, to a large degree, continuous—that is, joined to and arising from his past”17 is therefore “to be considered ‘good’ by virtue of wishing to remain, for all his vicissitudes, at bottom an untranslated man.”18 The Satanic Verses, as Rushdie’s most sustained investigation of the psychological and sociological effects of migrancy on the self, accordingly contains a number of examples of diasporic individuals who labor for a number of reasons to remain continuous with the past through a strict ghettoization of identity. These characters seek to enact a kind of “cultural essentialism [. . .] [that] attempts to recover the original myths of national belonging.”19 Although they are cultural nomads in the terms Young and Said lay out, their unassimilated status rejects the nomadic practice that Said encourages, “whose power [. . .] is not aggressive but transgressive.”20 According to Young, nomadism implies perpetual movement across frontiers and boundaries, which allows the migrant to evade the fixity of assigned identities created by hegemonic power centers through an assertion of multiple, plural subject positions. Young therefore argues that nomadism as a model represents a “form of palimpsestual inscription and reinscription, a historical paradigm that will acknowledge the extent to which cultures were not simply destroyed but rather layered on top of each other, giving rise to struggles that only increased the imbrication of each with the other and their translation into increasingly uncertain patchwork identities.”21 Yet “untranslated” migrants in The Satanic Verses like Hind and the exiled Imam obdurately renounce the nomadic practice of heterogeneous and overlapping hybridity in order to remain faithful to a purified memory of home. LOST IN TRANSLATION Muhammad Sufyan’s long-suffering wife, Hind, “pluck[ed] [. . .] out of [her] life” in Dhaka because of her husband’s illicit Communist leanings and deposited in “Babylondon,” serves as one of several migrants whose lives Rushdie is interested in investigating when they are “ripped from one world and land in another.” As he relates, “Whether by accident or by design

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or by war or exile or through a random act of God, [such people are] suddenly unhoused, without the protection of comfortably known surroundings and people [. . .] [and] no longer have any socializing, normalizing comfort around [them].”22 Her familiar city of Dhaka, recognizable cultural and religious customs, and language have all been removed from her. Because of her husband’s inability to find steady work, she has now taken on the role of the primary breadwinner, cooking her specialties in the Shandaar Café while watching the educated Sufyan greet the customers. Furthermore, she suffers from the easy acculturation of her daughters to London life as they are untroubled by the new customs, wear their hair short, speak in English rather than their native tongue, and are too familiar with boys in public. Hind thus becomes a fictional near-relative of the anonymous Pakistani parents of Anahita Muhammad in Shame. Anahita (“Anna”) speaks in an East London accent, wears the latest style of jeans, and goes out dancing in clubs at night. Although Anahita is murdered by her father in an honor killing, the motive driving his behavior—desire to preserve her honor which he fears has been threatened by the impurities of the host culture—is shared by Hind. Perhaps most unsettling of all for Hind, however, is the frequent mistreatment faced by South Asian immigrants at the hands of a dominant racist culture: They had come into a demon city in which anything could happen, your windows shattered in the middle of the night without any cause, you were knocked over in the street by invisible hands, in the shops you heard such abuse you felt like your ears would drop off but when you turned in the direction of the words you saw only empty air and smiling faces, and every day you heard about this boy, that girl, beaten up by ghosts.—Yes, a land of phantom imps, how to explain; best thing was to stay home, not go out for so much as to post a letter, stay in, lock the door, say your prayers, and the goblins would (maybe) stay away.23

Hind’s out-of-placeness in England, coupled with her growing paranoia and xenophobia, leads her to a defensive, despairing posture in which she refuses any accommodations with the dominant culture. Drawing in her borders, she remains indoors, sending others to the market for food ingredients. She also only watches Bengali and Hindi movies and reads exclusively Indian film magazines so “she could stay in touch with events in the ‘real world.’”24 By nostalgically redrawing the borders of the Bangladeshi nation imaginatively from within the nation to which she’s been transplanted, she attempts to retain the “essential” indigenous purity of her home culture.25 Yet in Hind’s attempts to create a pure, untranslated existence for herself, she forgets the extent, as Ernest Gellner argues, that “nationalism is not what

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it seems, and above all not what it seems to itself. [. . .] The cultural shreds and patches used by nationalism are often arbitrary historical inventions. Any old shred would have served as well.”26 Bhabha explicates Gellner by stating that the “historical necessity of the idea of the nation conflicts with the contingent and arbitrary signs and symbols that signify the affective life of the national culture.”27 Hind’s need to insulate herself from the contaminating effects of British public life requires that she forget the extent to which the “contingent and arbitrary signs” of subcontinental culture—its films and its food—are always already marked by signs of hybridity and difference. Rushdie remembers that one of the joys of growing up in a cosmopolitan city like Bombay was his direct exposure to the classic films of such directors as Buñuel, Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa, and Godard, in addition to the Indian voices of Satyajit Ray and Raj Kapoor. Just as the history of rock and roll traced a series of cultural borrowings and overlapping domains, so did the films of international cinema which informed Rushdie’s vision cross-pollinate one another. Kurosawa acknowledged his indebtedness to Ray’s Apu Trilogy.28 Bollywood movies are constantly remaking such films as Love Story and The Magnificent Seven, yet some of these same movies are conscripted and re-translated back into Hollywood outputs. The Satanic Verses’ S. S. “Whiskey” Sisodia, based on Indian-born film producer Ismail Merchant (co-founder with James Ivory of Merchant Ivory Productions), boasts such an international reputation, off-handedly remarking on his past work with James Mason, “Vanessa [Redgrave], Amitabh, Dustin [Hoffman], Sridevi, [and] Christopher Reeve.”29 Indeed, his plan for Gibreel to star in a series of “theologicals” depicting the fantastical scenarios in the life of the Archangel Gabriel from Gibreel’s dreams will be financed by his London studios, with the films shot on three separate continents, all enjoying a massive publicity campaign that seeks to take London by storm. This is the film project that Hind reads about in the “imported Indian fanzine Ciné-Blitz,”30 which gives her the rapturous news that Gibreel did not die in the plane crash at the beginning of the novel. Her desire to read only Indian news and to exclusively watch Indian films has thus inadvertently opened her up to the world at large, which she believed she could keep safely at bay. As Robert Young reminds, “A culture never repeats itself perfectly away from home. Any exported culture will in some way run amok, go phut or threaten to turn into mumbo-jumbo as it dissolves into the heterogeneity of the elsewhere.”31 In the area of food preparation, too, her meals are not as authentic and “pure” as she’d like to believe. Before her husband’s secularism and broadminded political sensibilities began to drive a wedge between them, Rushdie indicates that

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she had admired his pluralistic openness of mind, and struggled, in her kitchen, towards a parallel eclecticism, learning to cook the dosas and uttapams of South India as well as the soft meatballs of Kashmir. Gradually her espousal of the cause of gastronomic pluralism grew into a grand passion, and while secularist Sufyan swallowed the multiple cultures of the subcontinent—“and let us not pretend that Western culture is not present; after these centuries, how could it not also be part of our heritage?”—his wife cooked, and ate in increasing quantities, its food.32

Paul Cantor rightly points out that this passage seemingly parodies the importance of responsible multiculturalism, as Hind’s cuisine preparation is predicated on her husband’s Westernized secular approach: “If he were a believing Muslim, she could not cook him pork, and if he were a practicing Hindu, she would not be serving him beef. [. . .] [T]his example of cultural hybridity works only by ignoring the serious dietary commitments religions often demand from their followers.”33 Yet such insight only furthers the self-deception and potential bad faith practiced by Hind, as her Indian food borrows from a multiplicity of cultural sources so that the possibility of a pure and unadulterated subcontinental cuisine becomes impossible. And, of course, not only does she prepare the food, but she consumes it as well, thus allowing even “Western culture” to traverse her own personal borders. As Rushdie writes, concluding the passage, “food passes across any boundary you care to mention.”34 STOP ALL THE CLOCKS The fictional Imam, a thinly veiled reference to the Grand Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, likewise resists translation, preferring to remain continuous with his past and imaginatively demarcating clear, immutable binaries between England (away) and Desh (home). Exiled (and translated) to Kensington in the novel rather than Paris for his opposition to the Westernized Shah, the Imam’s opposition to England is more religious than cultural. His desperate desire to cling to his Islamic faith represents, according to Spivak, “the cry of the oppressed heart living in ghettos in a land of false dreams”35 and constructs a reassuringly stable form of Islam to serve as “the regulation of diaspora/migrancy.”36 Although Rushdie doesn’t explicitly reference the cause of the historical Khomeini’s exile—his vocal resistance to the modernizing proposals of Reza Shah Pahlavi’s “White Revolution,” which he felt to be anti-clerical and opposed to the devout tenets of the Shia faith—he registers the conflict between religion and secularism through the Imam’s opposition to the figure of the Empress Ayesha, who is finally overthrown in a refracted

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dream version of the Iranian Revolution. The Imam’s unwillingness to compromise with the cultural codes of British life therefore serves as a displaced war by proxy against the Westernized Shah/Ayesha. Just like Hind, the Imam’s preferred method of remaining untranslated is to adopt a ghetto mentality that rejects the uncompromising limitations of his physical space. He keeps the thick curtains in his apartment shut “because otherwise the evil thing might creep into the apartment: foreignness, Abroad, the alien nation.”37 Although his religious convictions make him an iconoclast, he permits the interior of his apartment to be appointed with a few select images: postcards of his homeland, Desh, depicting its topography, religious architecture, and communal life. He keeps the central heating on at all hours to artificially manufacture the climate of Desh and to counter “the moral fuzziness of English,” which, according to Gibreel, “was meteorologically induced.”38 Finally, the Imam chooses to drink nothing but water, whose purity and cleansing quality counters the inebriating and adulterating effects of the wine that Ayesha chooses to drink. As the Imam reflects, “In exile all attempts to put down roots look like treason: they are admissions of defeat.”39 Rushdie makes clear that the overwhelming motivation behind the Imam’s ascetic lifestyle in exile is theological in nature as he renounces the lure of the secular and seeks to become impervious to it. He resolutely fixes his gaze on his entourage of bodyguards whenever he (infrequently) steps outside so that no element or particle of this hated city,—this sink of iniquities which humiliates him by giving him sanctuary, so that he must be beholden to it in spite of the lustfulness, greed and vanity of its ways,—can lodge itself, like a dust-speck, in his eyes. When he leaves this loathed exile to return in triumph to that other city beneath the postcard-mountain, it will be a point of pride to be able to say that he remained in complete ignorance of the Sodom in which he had been obliged to wait; ignorant, and therefore unsullied, unaltered, pure.40

Unlike the resistance to British hegemony over South Asian migrants undertaken by the rebellious youth of Brickhall, who subvert the demonization of their identity by appropriating the signs of their own marginalization through commercial fad (i.e., adopting cheap devil horns), the Imam rejects all codes of the dominant culture and controversially stages his opposition as a revolution against the modern condition itself through his violent desire to turn back the clock. Such a maneuver fuses the ideological renunciation of the secular (in favor of a religious “myth of origins”) with a “dream of glorious return”41 to an individual lost past for which so many migrants yearn. In establishing clear-cut binary divisions between home and away, the essentializing imagination of the Imam reconstructs the spatial and geographical conflict as one marked by an equivalent tension between temporal modes.

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If England (and the secular) represents the energies of modernity, progress, and history, then the Imam’s dream version of Desh signifies the “eternal” and timeless Truth of Islam to which he wishes to return. As Harveen Mann suggests, “The Quran may itself be considered a type of ‘transcendental signified,’ a text outside of language [and history], with only one unequivocal, transparent meaning, uncontaminated by the distorting vehicle of representation.”42 In the Imam’s version of Islam as a closed system which denies the reality of hybridity and transformation, history itself becomes another word for blasphemy and apostasy: “We will make a revolution,” the Imam proclaims [. . .] “that is a revolt not only against a tyrant, but against history.” For there is an enemy beyond Ayesha, and it is History herself. History is the blood-wine that must no longer be drunk. History the intoxicant, the creation and possession of the Devil, of the great Shaitan, the greatest of the lies—progress, science, rights—against which the Imam has set his face. History is a deviation from the Path, knowledge is a delusion, because the sum of knowledge was complete on the day Al-Lah finished his revelation to Mahound. “We will unmake the veil of history.”43

Of course, such a stark rhetorical division between history and religion, progress and an atavistic primitivism, threatens to reinscribe the very Orientalist modes of defining the East that Rushdie has spent a career contesting. As Spivak notes, it encourages an essentialist reading of The Satanic Verses that privileges the very terms (singularity, purity, clarity of intent, and meaning) that the text itself seeks to deconstruct. The reader seems to be presented with only two options, which mirror the enforced dualism of The Satanic Verses controversy itself: either the orthodoxy of “secular” Enlightenment rational abstractions (progressive liberalism) or the unswerving adherence to religion (regressive fundamentalism), embodied by the Imam.44 Yet even though the Imam refuses to translate himself, preferring the rigid “Untime”45 of a world filled with smashed clocks, the text translates him for the reader, demonstrating that the walls he seeks to erect to preserve his identity are more permeable than he had hoped. As Rushdie writes of Gibreel later in the narrative, “Such distinctions, resting as they must on an idea of the self as being (ideally) homogeneous, non-hybrid, ‘pure,’—an utterly fantastic notion!—cannot, must not, suffice.”46 The very act of migration automatically displaces individuals, placing in bold relief what the Iranian intellectual, Ali Shariati, sees as central to the human condition itself: “Man is a ‘choice,’ a struggle, a constant becoming. He is an infinite migration, a migration within himself. [. . .] He is a migrant within his own soul.”47 Migration therefore may be redefined as the particular ontological state of

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postcolonial modernity—a way of inhabiting the “unhomely” space between the nostalgically imagined homeland and the uncomfortable location of the foreign culture.48 The first way in which the Imam’s “untranslated” state is compromised is found in the seemingly insignificant detail Rushdie inserts that the water he drinks is regularly purified through an “American filtration machine.”49 Just as Hind ingests food “tainted” with Western influence, modernity passes into the Imam through the water he drinks. In addition, his need to retain traces of his homeland causes him to contradict his former stand as an “enemy of images” as he not only displays postcards of Desh but also the “more potent icon” of his enemy Ayesha in the inner sanctum of his bedroom.50 The reverence due the invisible is therefore displaced onto forbidden images in the “surrogate homeland” of exile.51 Furthermore, in Gibreel’s phantasmagoric dream of transporting the Imam back to Desh (which is also a “slippery” idea of Jerusalem) to superintend the Islamic revolution, the Imam is translated into a demonic figure with red eyes and claw-like legs covered in hair, inspiring the citizens of Iran to martyr themselves for his cause. This revelation of the “hell within” the sacred person of the Imam not only echoes the deconstructive “angelicdevilish fall”52 in which the “pure” Gibreel and “compromised” Saladin exchange roles throughout the novel but also reflects Rekha Merchant’s Blakean contention that “this notion of separation of functions, light versus dark, evil versus good, may be straightforward enough in Islam [. . .] but go back a bit and you see that it’s a pretty recent fabrication.”53 Rekha’s demystifying take on the origins of evil performs an act of skeptical Higher Criticism on such scriptural texts as Amos, Deutero-Isaiah, and the Book of Chronicles and argues that the satanic role of the adversary was originally located within the Godhead himself. The “pure” Imam’s blasphemous rhetorical alignment with the satanic in the text is made possible through the very ambivalence opened up by his migrancy and exile. Commenting on the Defoe epigraph for the novel, Srinivas Aravamudan indicates that “the slipperiness of the devil is that of the signifier itself; it is the very indeterminacy of the devil’s actions that make him truly diabolical. The destinerrance of his vagrancy, his lack of address which summarizes his delinquency, the nomadic refusal to recognize the law of settlement, is an eternal escape from the transcendental signified—God.”54 In other words, the very timelessness and eternity which the Imam wishes to pit against the secular forces of history and progress paradoxically ensure his satanic destinerrance since arrival in Desh/Iran/Jerusalem would presuppose a prior entry into history. Therefore, the Imam’s apartment is described as a “waiting-room or transit lounge”55 and his refusal of clocks and history creates a condition of suspended animation whose embrace of the timelessness

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of an “untranslated eternity” marks out a permanent exile which signifies “an eternal escape from the transcendental signified—God.” FALSE TRANSLATION AND MIMICRY Rushdie has repeatedly examined in his critical essays the ways that he himself has personally reckoned with the complicated experiences of translation faced by his characters: The crossing of borders, of language, geography, and culture [. . .] the lowering of the intolerable frontiers created by the world’s many different kinds of Thought Policemen: these matters have been at the heart of the literary project that was given to me by the circumstances of my life. [. . .] Born into one language, Urdu, I’ve made my life and work in another. Anyone who has crossed a language frontier will readily understand that such a journey involves a form of shape-shifting or self-translation.56

Such self-translation always entails a recognition that unitary interpretations of the past and the self are too limiting and that one must take on the perspective of others by crossing cultural and linguistic borders in order to experience the world more fully. Yet Rushdie is consistently critical of those subcontinental characters who wish to erase their past identities wholesale in an effort to become fully British or American, a point which critics of Rushdie’s own cosmopolitan, Westernized position fail to fully appreciate. Anglophilic figures such as Epifania da Gama, Sir Darius Xerxes Cama, and Saladin Chamcha, as well as a global celebrity like Ormus Cama, seek to immerse themselves fully within the dominant culture at the cost of blocking out their culturally specific Indian identities for a number of reasons. Their mimicry is not the disruptive, adversarial “sly civility”57 that Bhabha identifies but rather results in the creation of disempowered “mimic men” who “become what [they] see of [themselves] in the eyes of others.”58 As Sabrina Hassumani writes concerning Chamcha’s predicament, “What [he] fails to grasp [. . .] is that the British identity he has forged is equally as one-sided and repressive as the Changez-enforced identity he sought to escape years ago.”59 Consequently, these literal and symbolic moves outside the given culture lead not to enlargement but a diminution of the self. Since the dynamic of both metaphor and migration requires a transaction of meaning rather than a substitution, such attitudes are not truly acts of translation but another form of rigid monoculturalism that ignores the metaphoric process of transformative migration.

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Gauri Viswanathan’s study of the ideological purposes to which English literature was put in the colonies, particularly in India, illustrates the way that a particular class of Indians consented to their own cultural domination because of the power and prestige that Anglicization conferred upon them. She points out that Macaulay’s Minute of 1835 made use of the Filtration Theory, which was “predicated on the notion that cultural values percolate downward from a position of power” and operated “by enlisting the cooperation of intermediate classes representing the native elite.”60 Even though these “Macaulay’s Minutemen” were to serve as mediators between the Indian populace and the administrative mechanisms of empire, their recognition of the ostensibly unidirectional nature of cultural influence caused them to aspire to an imitation of Englishness that often disavowed their Indian origins in language, culture, and community. Just as “the Englishman actively participating in the cruder realities of conquest, commercial aggrandizement, and disciplinary management of natives blends into the rarefied, more exalted image of the Englishman as producer of [. . .] knowledge” through the guise of English literary and cultural transmission, so too does the anglophilic Indian “function as a [kind of] surrogate Englishman in his highest and most perfect state.”61 Yet the consequence of such mimicry on the part of the Indian subject often led to what Albert Memmi terms “petrification” in his 1965 work, The Colonizer and the Colonized: “The colonized draws less and less from his own past, relegates his folk heroes and popular leaders to a secondary status, and seems ‘condemned to lose his memory.’ [. . .] The first ambition of the colonized is to become equal to [the colonizer] and to resemble him to the point of disappearing in him.”62 Such mimicry, far from being an uncomplicated form of empowerment, thus actually hides a radical insecurity; because Englishness has been constructed as the position of power, privilege, and mastery, such natives attempt a “hallucinatory whitening”63 through a process of cultural deracination, which allows them to mask their deep inferiority complex. Jameson, citing Gramsci, notes that this complex is driven by a condition of subalternity, “namely the feelings of mental inferiority and habits of subservience and obedience which necessarily and structurally develop in situations of domination—most dramatically in the experience of colonized peoples.”64 Fanon describes the ways in which colonized individuals learn to internalize a sense of racial self-loathing that leads them to aspire to whiteness in his work, Black Skin, White Masks. “All colonized people,” he writes, “in other words, people in whom an inferiority complex has taken root, whose local cultural originality has been committed to the grave—position themselves in relation to the civilizing language: i.e., the metropolitan culture. The more the colonized has assimilated the cultural values of the metropolis, the more he

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will have escaped the bush. The more he rejects his blackness and the bush, the whiter he will become.”65 Correspondingly, those individuals who travel from the “periphery” to the center of the empire, the metropolitan city, are valorized by their home culture. The more they can demonstrate their own marks of civilization by acquiring the sophisticated accents of the dominant language, receiving an elite Western education, earning bureaucratic positions of influence, and potentially winning the romantic attentions of white men or women, the greater will be their chances of being accepted by the white world. “So I will try quite simply to make myself white,” Fanon writes, “in other words, I will force the white man to acknowledge my humanity.”66 Yet the dependency complex which Fanon identifies is not so easily done away with by attempted deracination because such an individual is “overdetermined from the outside. [He is] a slave not to the ‘idea’ others have of [him], but to [his] appearance.” Objectified and stripped of his subjectivity because of the color barrier, “the white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting [him]. [He is] fixed.”67 As he argues, the black man always represents a sign of difference constructed by white people so that from a very early age, cultural images of blackness as demonic, bestial, and savage or shameful, base, and dark force nonwhite children to identify with white heroes and repress a guilty sense of their own low self-worth. In a final futile attempt to disavow his own race, the alienated non-European turns against other non-whites in order to prove his affiliative loyalty to white culture. Fanon, citing Sartre, demonstrates how persecuted Jews, in an attempt to avoid the consequences of anti-Semitism, often sought to hide the markers of their Jewish heritage, thus validating racist ideologies that would define them as less than human. By internalizing the binary logic of Jewishness as evil and Aryanism as good, however, they inadvertently reinscribed the oppressive doctrine and became functioning anti-Semites themselves. Fanon identifies the same pathology among formerly colonized non-Europeans as well but argues that while many Jews can “pass” as nonJews, the skin color of the black man makes such hiding an impossibility. EMPIRE’S CHILDREN Rushdie regularly includes in his novels a class of individuals so colonized in its outlook that it either can’t see beyond the colonial moment or longs to return to British rule once independence has arrived. Such an attitude becomes another kind of orthodoxy that prevents the intermingling of ideas, cultures, and perspectives and encourages the forced compartmentalization of identity as these individuals seek to be absorbed from the periphery into the center. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Epifania da Gama and her son Aires,

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for instance, oppose the nascent nationalism of husband Francisco and another son, Camoens. Similar to the Imam and Hind in The Satanic Verses, Epifania sees British India as a closed system which requires that the messy, noisy reality of her native India be walled off to ensure stability and peace. Accordingly, 13-year-old Aurora’s decision to each night secretly open up all the windows of their Cabral Island home in southern India is met with violent resistance from Epifania because of the plague of mosquito bites she suffers as a result. Yet not only bugs are admitted entry with Aurora’s act. Rushdie writes that “the opening of the shutters let in everything else [. . .] the heavy rolling sound . . . of the incoming tides of history.”68 Aurora’s physical performance of opening windows is metaphorically matched by the masterful mural she paints over every square inch of her childhood bedroom, which joyfully lets in the teeming, heterogeneous, and hybrid experience of Indian history and present existence. Her aesthetic decision serves a decolonizing turn as she defiantly “put[s] [Indian] history on the walls,”69 from King Gondophares and Emperor Asoka to the more modern imprisonments of Indian Congress and Muslim League leaders, thereby making the invisible visible. Aurora’s artwork thus dissolves the boundary between outside and inside as she brings history within the walls of the home and seeks to clear a space for rethinking the past and formulating possibilities for the future. However, just like the Imam who exists in a state of suspended animation in his Kensington apartment, refusing to accept the demands of history, Epifania wishes to endlessly defer the moment of Indian independence when her dream of India will inevitably come crashing down. Epifania has so internalized the matter-of-fact legitimacy of British hegemony and the need for its beneficent rule that she has developed the very dependency complex that Fanon diagnoses. Epifania’s anglophilic position grants the British god-like power so that any political dissent or dispute becomes not only a potential act of rebellion but a form of cosmic treason as well. “What are we but Empire’s children?” Epifania asks, revealing her inability to imagine an identity separate from the paternal influence of the British.70 Posing her statement as a question reveals the radical ontological uncertainty of her position, foreclosing the existence of assertive alternatives of a unified national identity. She goes on to chasten her nationalist husband by claiming that “British have given us everything, isn’t it?—Civilisation, law, order, too much. Even your spices that stink up the house they buy out of their generosity, putting clothes on backs and food on children’s plates. Then why speakofy such treason and filthy up my children’s ears with whatall Godless bunk?”71 Not only does Epifania transform British commercial self-interest into acts of selfless magnanimity, which in reality are nothing more than “a mask for economic exploitation [. . .] successfully camouflaging

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the material activities of the colonizer,”72 but she interprets the relationship between England and India as one tolerated between a divine creator and a compliant creation. Since British rule is understood as part of the natural order of reality for Epifania, questioning British policy and challenging the status quo become tantamount to godlessness rather than mere sedition. Epifania and Aires mark out the terms of Fanon’s self-denigrating dependency and inferiority complexes by asserting their desire for British influence while acknowledging the impossibility of ever fully assimilating. Aires, for instance, responds to the shaming treatment at the hands of the Kipling-esque British resident with fawning gratitude and then respectful silence, after he’s slapped across the face for voicing his appreciation. He sends a series of letters to local newspapers after his imprisonment arguing that this misguided policy of ejection of our rulers [. . .] suppose it succeeds; then what will become? Where in this India are the democratic institutions to replace the British Hand, which is, I can personally avow, benevolent even when it chastises us for our infantile misdeeds. [. . .] Common man in India has always bowed his knee to the counsels of his betters—of persons of education and breeding!73

Although Aires and Epifania’s mixed-race heritage which they trace back to Vasco da Gama would permit them to the dream of aspiring to “whiteness,” their willingness to accept the subservient status given them as colonized subjects makes such a movement unimaginable. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argues regarding such a colonized mindset, the years of devaluing their own native history, language, and culture result in a kind of spiritual subjugation so that imperialism’s “most important area of domination [was] the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world.”74 SCANDAL’S EMBRACE Sir Darius Xerxes Cama in The Ground beneath Her Feet, unlike Epifania or Aires, harbors actual hopes of taking on a “hallucinatory whitening” because of his proud Parsi heritage and access to British education, but he is undone by the shameful disclosure of his fraudulent baronetcy, which signifies the incommensurability of his Indian identity with pure Britishness. Thomas Blom Hansen notes how those in the anglicized Parsi community, particularly in the Westernized city of Bombay, saw themselves as the cultural group most closely affiliated with the British because of their command of the modern codes of business and law and their unwavering loyalty to the empire.75

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The Indian barrister Sir Darius, believing Bombay to be a “great metropolitan creation of the British,” insists that “he, too, was a great metropolitan creation of the British, and proud of it. ‘When you write this city’s history [. . .] you might just find it’s my biography you’ve penned’.”76 His anglophilic dream of England to which he aspires is a “pure, white Palladian mansion set upon a hill,”77 a country estate house which represents his greatest desire, “a place in England, perhaps even in Englishness.”78 So closely does he align himself as a Parsi with British cultural identity that he looks down on those “common” Indians who reflect poorly on the subcontinent, as he does with the raucous crowds who attend the annual cricket matches between the Bombay religious communities: “The country’s imperial overlords, observing the bawdiness of the populace, could only feel disappointed at the continuing backwardness of those over whom they had ruled so wisely for so long. Sir Darius Xerxes Cama [. . .] wanted to cry aloud, ‘Brace up! Do yourselves justice! The British are watching!”79 Such anxiety over appearances clearly suggests his fear that he will be associated with such shameful behavior and causes him to suppress his Indian heritage and criticize the subcontinent for its “stasis.”80 When his fellow Parsi, Homi Catrack, urges him to consider embracing the nationalist movement because of the inevitability of independence, Sir Darius regards “him as something of a race traitor (for were not the Parsis’ interests inseparable from those of the British, whose presence they had so vigorously supported, whose culture they had so successfully integrated with their own?).”81 Since Sir Darius unites the fate of the British with that of the Parsi community, the fading of British imperial presence is sympathetically matched with a corresponding decline in Sir Darius’s prestige as well. “Anglophilia,” Rushdie writes, “for so long the basis of these people’s ascendancy, would henceforth be like the mark of Cain. It would be the dark star hanging over their interminable but also irreversible decline.”82 Although Sir Darius begins to drink excessively, causing him to make a fool of himself at his Masonic Lodge in vulgar displays of dancing muscle shows, he displaces his unease over his chosen cultural affiliations and his self-contempt onto his sons by regularly haranguing them for their feebleness and decadence. Sir Darius’s darkest secret, whose revelation leads to his public snubbing by fellow mason William Methwold, is that he had never passed the bar during his years of education at Middle Temple, making his legal status a forgery and his knighthood illegitimate. His eventual travel to the heart of Englishness therefore leads not to his triumphant identification with British culture but his rejection from it. England marks the scene of his permanent difference so that the shameful treatment he endures from the skeptical immigration officials (who know nothing of his false credentials) blends seamlessly with the rebuff he receives from his former friend Methwold (who does know).

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However, Rushdie intimates that the scandal of his inauthentic identity, activated by his misguided belief that he can mimetically reflect pure Englishness, has its deepest guilt origins in Sir Darius’ anglophilia itself. Buried in his dreams of the white country estate exists the figure of a blindfolded nude white woman, a personification of scandal itself, to whose arms he rushes even as he realizes her embrace will destroy him. On one level, of course, this woman signifies the repressed memory of his forged identity, yet, on a perhaps deeper level, she represents his illicit desire to distance himself from his Indian past while pursuing anglophilic pretensions that Rushdie had already affirmed were increasingly viewed as the “mark of Cain.” Therefore, not only does the disclosure of his secret lead him to return home to Bombay in disgrace, “shut[ting] himself up in his library with his bottle, and wait[ing] for the end,”83 but the “violent disassociation of [his] sensibility [. . .] from his natural and social environment”84 through his slavish desire to imitate authentic Englishness results in his pitiable position as a man without a country, and he becomes yet another instance of failed translation. GLOBALIZATION AND DERACINATION Ormus Cama, Sir Darius’s son, isn’t tempted by anglophilia but rather the lure of international fame, which sparks a similar desire to suppress his rooted identity through another form of false translation. Driven by the need to escape the strictures of his family life in Bombay, as well as the “confining myth of [Indian] authenticity, that folkloristic straitjacket”85 to which his American record producer, Mull Standish, initially wants to put him, Ormus longs to be recognized exclusively for his music. “Soon it begins to feel like a long time ago that he was Indian, with family ties, with roots,” Rushdie indicates after he’d been abroad for a number of years. “In the white heat of the present tense these things have shriveled and died. Race itself seems less of a fixed point than before. He finds that to these new eyes he looks indeterminate. He has already passed for Jewish,” as well as Italian, Spanish, Latin American, and Greek.86 Mull Standish encourages him to take a stage name, insinuating that deracination is often the key to commercial success and global acceptance, and provides him with a litany of “ethnic” names who were willing to self-transform by stripping themselves of past monikers: Issur Danielovitch (Kirk Douglas), Bernie Schwartz (Tony Curtis), and Greta Gustafsson (Greta Garbo). Shaul Bassi identifies Freddie Mercury (Farrokh Bulsara) of Queen as a possible source for Rushdie’s portrayal of Ormus. Mercury, like Ormus, grew up in a Parsi family in Zanzibar and yet was similarly “deficient in visible ethnic markers.”87 By playing down their rooted heritage, each was

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able to cross international frontiers and become globally successful instead of just locally so in a particular regional niche. Standish’s false biography of Ormus, which he submits to the press, accordingly fabricates a “melting-pot, patchwork-quilt, rainbow-coalition tale of mixed genes” that will enhance Ormus’s mystique.88 Yet by engaging in a forced and commercialized substitution of identity instead of a true metaphorical translation of the self, Ormus is attacked by his critics for denying his origins and becomes his father’s son after all, despite his repeated efforts at escaping the narrow ambit of his childhood in Bombay. His purposeful deracination constitutes a kind of “cultural heresy”89 as he becomes one of those “individuals without an anchorage, without borders, colorless, stateless, rootless, [an anonymous member of] a body of angels.”90 DECONSTRUCTION IN THE CITY, DESERT, AND OCEAN Although Ormus, like Saladin Chamcha, is a “creature of selected discontinuities”91 because of his migrant position, his deracinated stance, which forbids him from incorporating India into his experience, ensures that he will never be successfully translated. His “melting-pot, patchwork-quilt, rainbowcoalition” identity encourages his absorption into the dominant codes of global mass culture, which conceals the fact that such musical forms in the late twentieth century are “an [overwhelmingly] American-led phenomenon, made possible by the massive concentration of wealth, power and technological means in the West.”92 As a result, he ironically becomes just as culturally segregationist and homogeneous as the Imam and Hind or Epifania and his father, Sir Darius. In order to become a fully translated man or woman, Rushdie suggests one must embrace the ambivalent and seemingly paradoxical energies of centripetal migrancy, blurring the boundaries between self and other, home and away, past and present, while maintaining the historical grounding of each. One of the most important ways that Rushdie contests the forced monologism of cultural assimilationists and untranslated segregationists is to consistently deconstruct exclusive “either/or” cultural positions which he sees as both arbitrary and potentially violent. In a 1999 column on globalization, he questions, [D]o cultures actually exist as separate, pure, defensible entities? Is not mélange, adulteration, impurity, pick ’n’ mix at the heart of the modern, and hasn’t it been that way for most of all this all-shook-up century? Doesn’t the idea of pure cultures, in urgent need of being kept free from alien contamination,

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lead us inexorably toward apartheid, toward ethnic cleansing, toward the gas chamber?93

Such violence exists, Rushdie argues, first in the form of discursive constructions that establish a stark dividing line between “purity” and “impurity,” which are then translated into the world of unequal material relations. These false binaries not only are responsible for the racist attitudes that regard every nonwhite citizen as a perpetual immigrant in Thatcherite England but also foster rigid Islamist positions in Pakistan and encourage the exclusivist politics of Hindutva in India. This myth of purity and authenticity leads not only to an exaggeration of difference between cultures (which leads to provincialism and chauvinism) but, more importantly, to a suppression of difference within cultures, as well as individuals (which results in an illusion of monolithic unity). The experience of migrancy for Rushdie puts identity itself in play and underscores its provisional nature. As he claims in a 1988 interview, “The sense of a homogeneous, self-contained character is something I can’t accept any more. The way I look at a person now is composed of all sorts of irreconcilable elements.”94 This insight informs his understanding not only of the multiplicity of individual identity but also the ambiguous and ambivalent quality of modern life. In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, for instance, he seems at first to be establishing (as argued in chapter 3) a clear-cut allegorical division between the forces of “good” (the free speech-advocating Guppees living in perpetual light) and “evil” (the silent and oppressed Chupwalas dwelling in endless darkness). Yet if the Guppees are meant to serve as stand-ins for Western-minded supporters of dialogue and liberal exchange and the Chupwalas the “backward” Muslim nations that supported the fatwa, it only reinforces the unproblematically stark binary opposition between the West and the East: When the West engages in this line of thinking [. . .] it is guilty of the same offense that it claims Khomeini to be: otherization. Just as on a religious level, Khomeini’s belief in the purity of the Quran encourages him to otherize Rushdie as an Evil Enemy, the West’s Enlightenment narrative leads it to a monolithic interpretation of “Islam” according to which all Muslims are backward, ignorant terrorists.95

In order to destabilize such one-sided essentialized categories, however, Rushdie demonstrates within the text itself the flaws in the Guppees’ voluble approach and the beauties inherent in the Chupwalas’ silence. The reader, for instance, learns that the Guppees are the ones who have established the light/ dark divide by having their scientists construct a “Wall of Force” between the

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two lands, separated only by a Twilight Strip. The youth of the land of Gup, restless with the enforced sunlight and chatter, often rebelliously travel to the dangerous zone between lands because, according to Iff the Water Genie, “living in the sunlight all the time, they wish to see the stars, the Earth, the Other Moon shining in the sky. [. . .] Dark, my sirs, has its fascinations: mystery, strangeness, romance.”96 Hassumani also indicates that the Guppees’ categorization of stories into “new” and “old,” privileging the thrills of the former, has empowered Khattam-Shud to poison the old stories without their noticing: “By focusing exclusively on newness and novelty, the Guppees have foregrounded the present moment to the exclusion of the past, or their ‘roots’,”97 and thus become complicit in the pollution of the Ocean of the Streams of Story. Mudra, the great Shadow Warrior of the silent Chupwala forces, although he terrifies Haroun and the Guppee armada when they first encounter his mute, seemingly threatening presence, is actually communicating with them in gestures using the ancient Indian classical religious dance form of Abhinaya. According to Rushdie, “The dance of the Shadow Warrior showed [Haroun] that silence had its own grace and beauty (just as speech could be graceless and ugly); and that Action could be as noble as Words; and that creatures of darkness could be as lovely as the children of the light.”98 Since the novel ends with the dismantling of the Wall of Force between the two lands and the friendly openness of a conciliatory dialogue between the Gups and the Chups, Rushdie seems to be suggesting that speech and silence, the West and the East, liberalism and fundamentalism require one another and that representatives of each grouping need to recognize the relative limits of their own position. Indeed, Sara Suleri goes so far as to argue that The Satanic Verses, Haroun’s implied intertext, is a “deeply Islamic book” since his blasphemous, yet passionate, interest in depicting the birth of Islam and the dynamics of religious revelation “epitomizes the profound cultural fidelity represented by specific acts of religious betrayal.”99 Rushdie’s position as a translated centripetal migrant thus permits his fiction to deconstruct the hostile binaries that define the controversy as he places both the religious and the secular under erasure and urges gestures of reconciliation. The locales in The Satanic Verses where Rushdie most intentionally sites the fissures and incommensurable seams where identity is relentlessly deconstructed are the dream-desert of Jahilia and the nightmare-city of Ellowen Deeowen, which Rushdie indicates are refracted versions of the same space. The caravan routes which intersect in seventh-century Jahilia (Mecca) and the zebra crossings and tube stations of modern London each represent a location in which “incompatible realities [. . .] all jostl[e] for space. [. . .] The point I was trying to make,” Rushdie affirms, “is that the city is not solid: it is essentially unstable. So the three cities in the book—London, Bombay,

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Jahilia—are really the same place. These instabilities exist in all three.”100 Not surprisingly, each site is dominated by migrants, who “impose their needs on their new earth, bringing their own coherence to the new-found land, imagining it afresh.”101 Jahilia’s composition of sand is thematically linked with the experience of migrancy as Rushdie writes that the provisional city is made up of “the very stuff of inconstancy,—the quintessence of unsettlement, shifting, treachery, lack-of-form. [. . .] These people are a mere three or four generations removed from their nomadic past, when they were as rootless as the dunes, or rather rooted in the knowledge that the journeying itself was home.”102 Jahilia’s metamorphic instability not only underscores the fluid, hybrid space but also metonymically represents the need (and the unique ability) for translated migrants to maintain in balance the various components of their own identities. Jahilia becomes the ideological battleground that pits Mahound’s monotheistic “one one one, his terrifying singularity”103 with the Grandee Abu Simbel’s compromised embrace of plurality and multiplicity. While it certainly appears as if Rushdie privileges Abu Simbel’s open and tolerant approach over Mahound’s certainty and dogmatic refusal to compromise, he deconstructs this position within the text in a number of key ways and reveals Mahound to perhaps be the true inheritor of the translated setting of Jahilia. If Jahilia’s shifting surfaces are the proper milieu of migrants, then Mahound’s “revolution of water-carriers, immigrants and slaves”104 would seem to be the ones most able to acclimate to its demands, not the city’s elite, led by Abu Simbel, who have sought to impossibly root themselves at the crossroads of caravan routes and opportunistically profit from the temple worship of religious pilgrims. In addition, since Jahilia is a stand-in for Mecca, its definition as a place of “unsettlement” and nomadic flight reminds the reader of how the Prophet and his earliest followers were mohajirs who only fully discovered their identity in flight to Medina. Finally, the central question asked of both Mahound and Gibreel in the novel is never explicitly answered but seems to leave room for valorization of both alternatives under different circumstances: Any new idea [. . .] is asked [. . .] WHAT KIND OF IDEA ARE YOU? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze?—The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world105 (emphasis in original)

Abu Simbel, the pluralist-secularist, clearly embodies the former idea, yet he is “smashed to bits” by the force of the new religion. Mahound, becoming

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the latter idea, brings newness into the world through the force of his will and imagination. Yet Gibreel, a seeming echo of Mahound, is annihilated by his unwillingness to “sway with the breeze,” while Saladin’s accommodation of his past and present ensures his survival. What seems to be a clear-cut contrast between religious monotheists and secular pluralists therefore is better understood as a struggle between translation and untranslation, with the translated centripetal migrant, flexibly incorporating past and present, successfully negotiating his identity in the Jahilian spaces between and within the self. Modern cities are also fluid zones, which according to Rushdie are “invented spaces, artificial spaces. [. . .] The shape of a city constantly changes, but at any given moment it looks absolutely solid and permanent, so it’s a kind of fiction.”106 Such an insight into the metamorphic properties of the city not only undermines a racist ideology of eternal constancy and stability that seeks to limit the influx and cultural influence of immigrants from other lands but also exposes the ideological dynamic of a city’s make-up. Just as the postmodern emphasis on historiography reveals the arbitrary constructions of memory, the invocation of the fictional nature of urban space begs the question of who has control over the story. The official narrative demands a unitary, centralizing definition of the metropolitan center, built and sustained by the efforts of a body of racially homogeneous citizens, conveniently ignoring the contributions of its immigrants. Yet Rushdie is continually dismantling such totalizing falsifications throughout his fiction. He would echo Bhabha in affirming a particular ambivalence that haunts the idea of the nation, the language of those who write it and the lives of those who live it. It is an ambivalence that emerges from a growing awareness that, despite the certainty with which historians speak of the “origins” of nation as a sign of the “modernity” of society, the cultural temporality of the nation inscribes a much more transitional social reality.107

The voices he is interested in narrating are therefore the urban migrants who “impose their needs on their new earth, bringing their own coherence to the new-found land, imagining it afresh.”108 From the mohajirs of Shame to the Ashkenazi Jew from Strasbourg, Max Ophuls, in Shalimar the Clown, migrants have been the true architects of the modern world. Indeed, The Satanic Verses discloses that England itself is an invention of migrants since one of the earliest historical figures to be referenced in the novel is William the Conqueror. Although 1066 and the Battle of Hastings has been presented as central to every schoolboy’s understanding of British history, the text reminds the reader that William was a Norman migrant to English shores and that England was once a backwater territory. Paul Brians demonstrates how Rushdie exoticizes England by filtering its customs (spiky

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kipper fishes, toilet hygiene, hot water bottles in bed) through the perspective of its migrants, thus rejecting the dominant culture’s claims to centrality and exposing its difference from itself.109 It’s as if Rushdie aims to appropriate and transform Marlow’s famous statement about London in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—“this also [. . .] has been one of the dark places of the earth”110—and demonstrate London’s continuing backward, incomprehensible, and occasionally savage ways. Just as Mahound is able to transform Jahilia through both his movement outward and his firm centripetal convictions that hold fast to the importance of the past, tradition, and religious belonging, so too are those translated migrants in The Satanic Verses able to transform the city around them. Gibreel’s hallucinatory journey through the city streets of London, for instance, shows him the enduring architectural legacy of William of Orange, whose vision for London borrowed from images of his own past: “Here [. . .] is where the Dutch king decided to live when he came over three centuries ago. In those days this was out of town, a village, set in green English fields. But when the King arrived to set up house, London squares sprang up amid the fields, red-brick buildings with Dutch crenellations rising against the sky, so that his courtiers might have places in which to reside.”111 Such a transformed space is not purely Dutch or exclusively English but something new entirely. Ultimately, Rushdie shows that it is those migrants from the African, Caribbean, and South Asian diasporas that are most open to the transformative processes of translation who represent the greatest hope for newness entering England. In a stirring speech given to an assembly of politically mobilized members of the aggrieved immigrant community of Brickhall, Antoinette Roberts, the elderly mother of the unjustly accused Uhuru Simba, gives a forceful call to action: Make no mistake [. . .] we are here to change things. I concede at once that we shall ourselves be changed; African, Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Cypriot, Chinese, we are other than what we would have been if we had not crossed the oceans, if our mothers and fathers had not crossed the skies in search of work and dignity and a better life for their children. We have been made again: but I say that we shall also be the ones to remake this society, to shape it from the bottom to the top. We shall be the hewers of the dead wood and the gardeners of the new. It is our turn now.112

Antoinette’s naming of particular national identities recuperates and preserves the traces of the past, even as she acknowledges the metaphoric transaction of meaning that inevitably results during the act of migration. She therefore fuses in her speech the two different opposing strands of postcolonial

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discourse that Radha Radhakrishnan terms the post/trans and the re: those discourses that “foreground mobility, migrancy, and deracination and [are] associated with the valorization of the hybrid” (post/trans) and those that are predicated on “discourses of origins, authenticity, [and] indigeneity.”113 Further, Antoinette’s revelation that these migrants are “other than what [they] would have been” if they had not been translated by the city, far from disempowering them or stripping them of their agency, demonstrates how personal metamorphosis and the openness to a fully contrapuntal understanding of the self are central to the transformation of social space. As Bhabha writes, “It is to the city that the migrants, the minorities, the diasporic come to change the history of the nation [. . .] it is the city which provides the space in which emergent identifications and new social movements of the people are played out.”114 THE HYBRID “THIRD SPACE” Rushdie expresses the paradoxical cultural situation of the translated migrant in his 1982 essay, “Imaginary Homelands,” by arguing that “our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.”115 While the diasporic self often feels fragmented and disconnected as a result of its translation, it simultaneously experiences the vertiginous thrill of overabundance and an excess of roots. Mark Mossman, with nods to Bhabha and Spivak, identifies this liminal border zone of “in-between-ness” as characteristic of Rushdie’s cultural position, which informs each of his fictions: “There are always social spaces or locations for an individual to exist in which the individual can operate, and can also understand and be deeply critical of every side of the culture as a whole: it is the ability to play both sides [. . .] the ultimate ability to perceive the schema of the cultural system in action.”116 Bhabha argues that the interventionary production and habitation of a liminal “Third Space” between home and away, past and present, self and other, which is so characteristic of diasporic migrants, challenges unitary and homogeneous understandings of national and cultural identity, which would seek to impose a violent and unrealistic coherence: It is only when we understand that all cultural statements and systems are constructed in this contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation, that we begin to understand why hierarchical claims to the inherent originality or “purity” of cultures are untenable. [. . .] It is that Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity.117

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Bhabha’s idealization of an interstitial hybridity that resists the monologic purity of both subcontinental fundamentalism and Western cultural chauvinism privileges the kinds of translations of the self that are effected on the margins of experience. “It is in the emergence of the interstices—the overlap and displacement of domains of difference—that the intersubjective and collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural value are negotiated,” Bhabha argues. “How are subjects formed ‘in-between’, or in excess of, the sum of the ‘parts’ of difference?”118 Bhabha demonstrates how destabilization and ambivalence create such a Third Space in the colonial setting, for instance, through the dynamic of mimicry. In his “Signs Taken for Wonders,” he explains how the radically new environment for British missionaries worked to de-naturalize all signs, leading to a kind of “tropicalization” of Christianity and the creation of hybrid new forms of religion and language. The intentionality of the colonial address is interrupted and displaced by the way in which the Christian narrative is received by the natives. In attempting to repeat the English culture in a different culture, Englishness is rendered different from what it was, thereby undermining its authority and presence. According to Bhabha, mimicry is effected “as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” when it “continually produce[s] its slippage, its excess, its difference.”119 Rushdie definitively makes use of Bhabha’s category of colonial mimicry in describing the celebration of Christmas in India in The Moor’s Last Sigh. Although Christmas festivities have flourished as a predominantly European tradition (Rushdie often discusses the impact Dickens had on cementing the cultural iconography of Christmas for England and America), its celebration in India has been translated into a warmer climate and rendered the same, yet different: Christmas, that Northern invention, that tale of snow and stockings, of merry fires and reindeer, Latin carols and O Tannenbaum, of evergreen trees and Santa Klaas with his little piccaninny “helpers,” is restored by tropical heat to something like its origins, for whatever else the Infant Jesus may or may not have been, he was a hot-weather babe; however poor his manger, it wasn’t cold; and if Wise Men came, following [. . .] yonder star, they came, let’s not forget it, from the East. [. . .] There are many Christianities here in Cochin, Catholic and Syriac Orthodox and Nestorian. [. . .] There are no trees here; instead there is a crib. Joseph could be a carpenter from Ernakulum and Mary a woman from the tea-fields, and the cattle are water-buffalo, and the skin of the Holy Family (gasp!) is rather dark.120

This passage performs significant work on a number of important levels. First, Rushdie’s reference to Christmas as an “invention” reveals its arbitrary

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constructedness and puts the meaning of the holiday itself in play. Second, the Indian celebration of Christmas enacts a kind of destabilizing mimicry whereby the familiar holiday becomes different and even unsettling (“gasp!”) to those colonial administrators accustomed to celebrating it back in England. Its celebration in this translated setting of dark-skinned natives, waterbuffaloes, and absence of evergreen trees brings into being a hybrid middle ground that “rearticulates presence in terms of its ‘otherness,’ that which it disavows.”121 Third, Rushdie’s reference to the practice of Christmas in many different forms reveals the multiplicity of Christian denominations in southern India, which undermines the unitary Anglican understanding of the faith. And, finally, the culturally hybrid, transformed celebration of the holiday “is restored by tropical heat to something like its origins,” thus once again performing one of Rushdie’s favorite subversive postcolonial maneuvers by turning a “belatedness into an earliness.”122 Christmas itself becomes an instance of a fully translated migrant idea whose decentered transformation discloses important new truths. THE LIMINAL SPACE OF THE COMMA In Rushdie’s short story “The Courter,” from his 1994 collection of stories, East, West, his adolescent narrator living in London in the 1960s recalls an image of wild horses being tamed by Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable in the 1961 film The Misfits. Unlike his ayah, Mary, whose homesickness drives her back to India, the narrator finds his liminal position in England productive of identity, even as he acknowledges the bittersweet nature of his “exile from the beloved country of [his] birth”:123 “I, too, have ropes around my neck [. . .] pulling me this way and that, East and West, the nooses tightening, commanding, choose, choose. [. . .] Ropes, I do not choose between you. Lassoes, lariats, I choose neither of you, and both. Do you hear? I refuse to choose.”124 By situating himself within the interstitial and liminal “third space” that Homi Bhabha recommends, he finds himself free to “live within the experience of [. . .] multiple identit[ies] without striving to reduce that multiplicity to artificial certainties.”125 Rushdie acknowledges the power of this final image from “The Courter” and explains how, as a centripetal migrant, he too refuses to choose between home and away, East and West: “I said to people when I started thinking of calling the stories East, West that the most important part of the title was the comma. Because it seems to me that I am that comma—or at least that I live in the comma.”126 Perhaps no other character in Rushdie’s fiction is more poignantly or powerfully representative of the interstitially placed, translated “comma” than Saladin Chamcha from The Satanic Verses. At the beginning of the narrative,

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however, he looks very like one of Fanon’s woefully deracinated “mimic men,” in thrall to a homogeneous British cultural identity. His abbreviated surname, Chamcha, signifies in Urdu and Hindi “spoon,” which idiomatically makes him a fawning Indian servant of British interests. As Rushdie explains in a 1982 editorial, “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance,” “colloquially, a chamcha is a person who sucks up to powerful people, a yes-man, a sycophant. The British Empire would not have lasted a week without such collaborators among its colonized peoples. You could say the Raj grew fat by being spoon-fed.”127 He longs for the kind of “hallucinatory whitening” that Fanon describes by Anglicizing his name from Salahuddin to Saladin, receiving an education in England, marrying a white woman, Pamela Lovelace, and finding work as a voiceover artist in London, thereby becoming a “goodandproper Englishman.” His desire to assimilate with the dominant culture is most vividly depicted by Rushdie in a dream in which Saladin is making love to the Queen, the symbolic representation of England itself. Any racialized abuse he suffers early in his life “only increased his determination [. . .] to find masks that these fellows would recognize, paleface masks, clown-masks, until he fooled them into thinking he was okay, he was people-like-us.”128 Saladin’s slavish pursuit of Englishness is initially predicated on a total disavowal of Indianness, as argued in chapter 4. Internalizing the racist English picture of Indian identity, he likens India, “her forgotten immensity, her sheer presence, the old despised disorder,”129 to a disease like typhoid from which he seeks to recover through the immunizing effects of an English posture. The radical, anti-colonial discourse of his Indian friends, Zeeny Vakil, George Miranda, and Bhupen Gandhi strike him as unfamiliar and dangerous. Yet his treatment at the hands of British immigration officials, his summary firing from The Aliens Show by its monstrously racist producer Hal Valance (who argues disingenuously that audience surveys are now rejecting “ethnic” programming with actors of the “tinted persuasion”130), and his transformation into the satanic image of otherness that English culture has constructed create what Bhabha would describe as a “split” in Saladin’s identity. “I am the incarnation of evil,” the alienated Saladin muses in the Shandaar rooming house, “I am the embodiment of wrong, of what-we-hate, of sin.”131 His desire to be English is rendered impossible by the incontrovertible fact of the color of his skin, yet his corresponding rejection of his Indian past places him in an ontologically rootless no-man’s land like Omar Khayyam Shakil faces in Shame, as Shakil is continually plagued with vertigo as a physiological marker of his “sense of being a creature of the edge: a peripheral man.”132 Yet Saladin’s dispossession from the paradisiacal dream of England to which he has always aspired and simultaneous arrival in the “zone of occult instability where the people dwell”133 creates a hybrid, productive space for him at the moment of rupture that allows for his transformation into a

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translated man. As Said writes, such individuals “exist between the old and the new, between the old empire, and the new state, [and] their condition articulates the tensions, irresolutions, and contradictions in the overlapping territories” in which they find themselves.134 He ultimately survives by embracing the change and metamorphosis wrought by migration and recognizing the extent to which he is a text palimpsestically written on by a multiplicity of sources, including his Indian origins. “Try and make an adult acquaintance with this place, this time,” Zeeny Vakil urges Saladin after he returns to Bombay to be with his father before Changez dies. “Try and embrace this city, as it is, not some childhood memory that makes you both nostalgic and sick. Draw it close. The actually existing place. Make its faults your own. Become its creature; belong.”135 Although Rushdie has argued that Saladin “makes himself whole by returning to his roots,”136 it’s clear that he’s become a new creation through being “borne across” and that the Arabian Sea on which he looks out with Zeeny through the “window of his childhood”137 is the same but different. In a moving scene toward the end of his time in England, Saladin views a program on television called Gardeners’ World that demonstrates a technique called the “chimeran graft,” which creates a hybrid growth out of two different trees. “If such a tree were possible,” Saladin reflects, “then so was he; he, too, could cohere, send down roots, survive.”138 “The only people who see the whole picture,” a character from The Ground beneath Her Feet recognizes, “are the ones who step out of the frame.”139 Having stepped outside that frame and accumulated multiple roots, centripetal migrants like Rushdie are able to increase the sum total of what it is possible to say or think. Yet his position as a translated man ensures that his movement outside the frame is accompanied by continual imaginative voyages back inside that frame, deriving stability, meaning, and purpose from memories of home and the past. Rushdie often likes to end his many lectures and public addresses by citing an image of a barking dog from Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December, who’s imagined by one character in the novel to be barking, “For God’s sake, open the universe a little more.”140 Such an enlargement of perspective is precisely what a translated man like Rushdie believes will result when one opens oneself to the creative energies and possibilities of centripetal migrancy.

NOTES 1. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 31. 2. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 278. 3. Ibid., 17.

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4. Roger Lundin and Susan Gallagher, Literature through the Eyes of Faith (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1989), 26. 5. Qtd. in Lundin and Gallagher, Literature through the Eyes of Faith, 27. 6. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 5. 7. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 285. 8. Ibid., 261. 9. Ibid., 297. 10. Ibid., 285. 11. Ibid., 5. 12. Teverson, Salman Rushdie: Contemporary World Writers, 151. 13. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 423. 14. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 440. 15. Ibid., 441. 16. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 214. 17. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 441. 18. Ibid., 442. 19. Sanga, Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors, 78. 20. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 332. 21. Young, Colonial Desire, 173–74. 22. Michael Silverblatt, “Bookwork with Michael Silverblatt, Guest: Salman Rushdie,” KCRW-FM: Santa Monica College, March 2, 1996. 23. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 258. 24. Ibid., 259. 25. Interestingly, in his 2008 novel The Enchantress of Florence, Rushdie flips the script and has the Mughal emperor Akbar anxiously reflect on the potential for contamination embodied in the foreign figure of the Florentine, Niccolò Vespucci, a migrant newly arrived in his kingdom: “Was foreignness itself a thing to be embraced as a revitalizing force bestowing bounty and success upon its adherents, or did it adulterate something essential in the individual and the society as a whole?” 319. Whereas Hind and (as we shall soon see) the Imam guard themselves against the incipient corruption of the Western host nation in which they’ve been temporarily placed, Akbar seeks vainly to insulate himself from the migrant ideas of Europe that have traveled east during the sixteenth century. 26. Qtd. in Bhabha, Nation and Narration, 294. 27. Bhabha, Nation and Narration, 293. 28. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 107. 29. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 352. 30. Ibid., 279. 31. Young, Colonial Desire, 174. 32. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 254. 33. Cantor, “Tales of the Alhambra,” 335. 34. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 254. 35. Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 265. 36. Ibid., 262. 37. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 212.

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38. Ibid., 365. 39. Ibid., 215. 40. Ibid., 213. 41. Ibid., 212. 42. Mann, “‘Being Borne Across,’” 293. 43. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 217. 44. Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 261. 45. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 222. 46. Ibid., 442. 47. Qtd. in Said, Culture and Imperialism, 334. 48. Morton, Salman Rushdie, 69. 49. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 215. 50. Ibid., 212. 51. Ibid., 214. 52. Ibid., 5. 53. Ibid., 334. 54. Aravamudan, “Being God’s Postman Is No Fun, Yaar,” 202. 55. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 214. 56. Rushdie, Step across This Line, 373–74. 57. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 132. 58. V. S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (London: Penguin, 1969), 20. 59. Hassumani, Salman Rushdie, 80. 60. Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, 34. 61. Ibid., 20. 62. Qtd. in Hassumani, Salman Rushdie: A Postmodern Reading, 77–78. 63. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 80. 64. Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” 76. 65. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 2–3. 66. Ibid., 78. 67. Ibid., 95. 68. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 9. 69. Ibid., 59. 70. Ibid., 18. 71. Ibid. 72. Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, 20. 73. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 50. 74. Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya, 1987), 16. 75. Hansen, “Reflections on Salman Rushdie’s Bombay,” 95. 76. Rushdie, The Ground beneath Her Feet, 31. 77. Ibid., 86. 78. Ibid., 330. 79. Ibid., 28. 80. Ibid., 151. 81. Ibid., 49.

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82. Ibid. 83. Ibid., 154. 84. Wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind, 17. 85. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 52. 86. Rushdie, The Ground beneath Her Feet, 290–91. 87. Shaul Bassi, “Orpheus’s Other Voyage: Myth, Music and Globalization,” in The Great Work of Making Real: Salman Rushdie’s The Ground beneath Her Feet, eds. Elsa Linguanti and Viktoria Tchernichova (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2003), 113. 88. Rushdie, The Ground beneath Her Feet, 292. 89. Sara Suleri, “Contraband Histories: Salman Rushdie and the Embodiment of Blasphemy,” in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. M. D. Fletcher (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1994), 224. 90. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 155. 91. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 441. 92. Teverson, Salman Rushdie, 180. 93. Rushdie, Step across This Line, 268. 94. Sean French, “Falling towards England,” The Observer, September 25, 1988, 43. 95. Hassumani, Salman Rushdie: A Postmodern Reading, 98. 96. Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 103. 97. Hassumani, Salman Rushdie: A Postmodern Reading, 102. 98. Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 125. 99. Suleri, “Contraband Histories,” 222. 100. John Mitchinson, “Between God and the Devil,” Waterstone’s Booksellers (Autumn/Winter 1988): 72. 101. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 473. 102. Ibid., 96. 103. Ibid., 104. 104. Ibid., 103. 105. Ibid., 346. 106. John Clement Ball, “An Interview with Salman Rushdie,” The Toronto South Asian Review 10, no. 1 (Summer 1991): 33. 107. Bhabha, Nation and Narration, 1. 108. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 473. 109. Paul Brians, “The Unity of the Satanic Verses,” Notes on Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses, accessed August 23, 2019. 110. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Dover, 1990), 3. 111. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 473. 112. Ibid., 428–29. 113. Qtd. in Gane, “Migrancy, the Cosmopolitan Intellectual, and the Global City in The Satanic Verses,” 28. 114. Bhabha, Nation and Narration, 319–20. 115. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 15.

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116. Mark Mossman, “Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: National Narrative as a Liminal Voice,” The Midwest Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1999): 74. 117. Homi Bhabha, “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences,” in The PostColonial Studies Reader, eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Routledge, 2002), 208. 118. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 2. 119. Ibid., 122. 120. Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 62. 121. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 130. 122. Cantor, “Yankee Go Home,” 33. 123. Salman Rushdie, East, West (New York: Vintage, 1996), 178. 124. Ibid., 211. 125. Teverson, Salman Rushdie, 148. 126. “Homeless Is Where the Art Is,” The Bookseller, July 15, 1994. 127. Qtd. in Aravamudan, “Being God’s Postman Is No Fun, Yaar,” 200. 128. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 44. 129. Ibid., 55. 130. Ibid., 276. 131. Ibid., 265. 132. Rushdie, Shame, 18. 133. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 163. 134. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 332. 135. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 555. 136. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 398. 137. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 561. 138. Ibid., 420. 139. Rushdie, The Ground beneath Her Feet, 43. 140. Qtd. in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 21.

Chapter 6

Conclusion

In Barry Levinson’s masterfully understated 1990 film, Avalon, he semiautobiographically charts the history of assimilation for the Krichinskys, a family of Eastern European immigrants to Baltimore. Evoking allusions to the famous scene of Benjamin Franklin’s arrival in Philadelphia from his Autobiography, Levinson repeatedly and nostalgically returns to the patriarch of the family’s (Sam Krichinsky) disembarkation from the boat and idealized memories of his earliest moments in America. “I came to America in 1914— by way of Philadelphia,” Sam relates in voiceover flashback on a number of occasions in concert with slow-motion scenes of fireworks going off overhead in honor of the 4th of July. “That’s where I got off the boat. And then I came to Baltimore. It was the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen in your life. There were lights everywhere! What lights they had! It was a celebration of lights! I thought they were for me, Sam, who was in America.”1 The Krichinskys’ early experience in America represents a veritable endorsement of the possibilities of the American Dream, with Sam and his three brothers going into the wallpaper-hanging business together, playing rhapsodically beautiful violin music at public functions on the weekend, and sharing annual Thanksgiving meals around the table together in one of the row houses that is adjacent to homes occupied by every other member of the extended family. However, this idyll begins to crumble through a combination of factors: the younger generation’s opportunistic desire for quick wealth and too-easy assimilation to American cultural norms of radical individualism; the older generation’s inflexibility and stubborn refusal to compromise with old traditions; the fracturing of the extended family as the younger generation seeks to pursue better opportunities in the suburbs; and especially the pernicious influence of television, which eliminates the desire or need to share family stories around the table together. Midway through the film, Sam Krichinsky mutters 157

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plaintively as he stares at the vacant, unfurnished rooms of the Baltimore rowhouse he will soon abandon when he and his wife join his son’s family in their new home in the suburbs, “We’re getting further and further away from Avalon.” Sam’s invocation of the name Avalon, of course, signifies not just the physical location that they have called home for so many years but also a mythic and ideal place of origin that represents the center of their identity and a site of security, stability, and meaning in the midst of the bewildering experience of migration, assimilation, and translation. And yet, despite the nourishing role that memories of the past serve for Levinson, he demonstrates at certain points, just as Rushdie does, the shifting and potentially unreliable nature of those memories. Since Avalon is the mythical, legendary island where King Arthur’s body was sent after he died, are the older members of the Krichinsky family possibly longing for a kind of “Golden Age” past that never truly existed, a sort of immigrant version of an ideal Camelot, in order to stem the inevitable tide of change and progress? Certainly there is a plurality of critical voices who have accused Rushdie in his most recent works (The Enchantress of Florence, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, The Golden House) of having completely abandoned the imaginative vision that inspired his greatest fiction, which had been continually fed by loving memories and richly drawn portrayals of the South Asian subcontinent. His embrace of a kind of “perpetual migrancy” has (to these critics) thus finally severed for good the bands that tied him to his past as he has “moved further and further away from Avalon,” rendering his new fiction anemic, trite, and tiresome. The question then is not just whether a certain continuity of intention and durability of concerns animate Rushdie’s work, but whether his latest fiction has only confirmed suspicions long held by some of his fiercest critics—that his privileged “westoxicated” perspective has intensified since his move to the United States in 1999. Although he may continue to wax eloquent about such urgent and timely concerns afflicting the modern world as religious extremism, climate change, the vacuity of certain kinds of political correctness, the lamentable fate of refugees, and heavy-handed approaches to identity politics, has his writerly voice become predictable? Has he forgotten his roots as he too has moved “further and further away from Avalon”? A cursory glance at some reviews of Rushdie’s work since the publication of his 2012 memoir, Joseph Anton, superficially seems to bear out this overall critical trend toward Rushdie’s recent work as being slight and inconsequential. Zoë Heller, with The New York Review of Books, savages the author by claiming, “The world is as large and as wide as it ever was; it’s just Rushdie who got small.”2 David Gates accuses Rushdie’s 2008 Enchantress of Florence of self-congratulatory, purple prose (“so pleased with itself and so besotted with the sound of its own voice”), an

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unnecessarily byzantine plotline, and anachronistic messaging: “Rushdie has made [Emperor] Akbar recite the Dissenter’s Creed” of his own twenty-first-century anti-authoritarian worldview.3 Leo Robson of the New Statesman takes issue with Rushdie’s stylistic approach to his 2017 The Golden House. Because of Rushdie’s desire to be relevant and au courant, Robson asserts that the author has essentially “mailed the novel in”: “Rushdie’s belief in the written record or catalogue is palpable, glaring at the reader from every headline-crowded, ephemera-laden page. [. . .] [H]ere we have Salman Rushdie—who, as the author of Midnight’s Children as much as The Satanic Verses, embodies the novel’s powers of resistance—offering a book that seems little more than an exercise in googling, an attempt to sell the listicle as literature.”4 Hassan Mahamdallie from The Independent strikes closest to the critiques levied against Rushdie referenced in chapter 4 of this book with his negative review of the 2015 Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. Sounding very similar to Ahmad or Brennan, Mahamdallie argues that Rushdie’s negative experience of the fatwa had so hardened his attitudes toward organized religion and the “unenlightened” world of the non-West that he seems to have succumbed to the very oppositional “black and white” worldview that he’s claimed to resist his entire writing life: Overall, the novel makes for a rather disquieting read and the feeling of having glimpsed someone’s personal revenge fantasy. The good guys are made from bits of Rushdie’s self-image, his post-fatwa persecution and his well-known views on the nature of religion, Islamist terrorism, secularism, freedom of speech and so on. The bad guys are ugly photo-fits for Bin Laden, Isis, barbarism, obscurantism, irrationality, bearded stupid preachers, misogynist inadequates and all those who have it coming to them.5

This is perhaps the most damning critique of Rushdie’s more recent work because it seems to suggest that in order to achieve a voice of moral clarity, Rushdie has instead indulged in an attitude of smug moral superiority that elevates Western forms of Enlightenment rationality over a stereotypical portrait of monolithic fundamentalism that more often than not finds its origins in the East. Gone apparently are the complexities, nuances, and ambiguities that had marked his more forceful early fiction. A recent 2016 interview with one of Rushdie’s most vociferous antagonists, Timothy Brennan, offers a useful framework for considering the relative merits of Rushdie’s most recent work and for determining whether he has moved too far imaginatively from his own past as a “third-world cosmopolitan migrant” transnational author to have anything of value to say about the Indian nation-state. Discarding the empowering richness of his roots and his

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own cultural origins, has Rushdie suffered a total “mitigation of belonging in quest of a globalized migrancy”?6 Brennan begins with the by-now-familiar broadside that Rushdie has never been a true or sympathetic spokesperson for South Asian experience and identity. His disaffiliation made possible by multiple acts of migration (between India and Pakistan before adulthood, then to England, and finally to America) as a result of his privileged class position essentially renders his voice obsolete and irrelevant, since his experience is far removed from that of the average subcontinental reader. Rushdie’s affection for India and regular invocation of its nourishing effect on his imagination are not indications that the author is a validly representative “third-world cosmopolitan” migrant who should be acknowledged as a credible mouthpiece for customary South Asian experience. While Brennan believes this assessment of Rushdie’s merit has always been in play, he feels that the author’s recent novels underscore his point even more fully as Rushdie’s time abroad has fully sundered his ties to the past: A progressive critic of empire (at the time), with an appreciable knowledge of Indian history and culture, Rushdie seemed in those years to many, to embody a more populist élan, a more balanced and penetrating historical claim, than was really the case. Appropriating [broadly recognized moments in Indian history] by direct mention in his first major book, Rushdie could easily be taken to summarize, and bring to completion, the lot, whereas he was out of touch with those who made this history, and at a great distance—and at times even contemptuous—of their contemporary counterparts.7

Indeed, one of Brennan’s central complaints about The Enchantress of Florence is that Rushdie has become so out of touch with the organic history of India and “with those who made this history” that he resorts to a kind of Googled or Wikipedia-researched version of Mughal India at the height of the European Renaissance that any author could accomplish: “The cast of characters are drawn compulsively from the annals of the well-known and iconic, rather than the mundane, the real, and the actual. If we have Florence, then of course we must have Vespucci, Medici, Machiavelli, and Uccello; if we have India, we must have Akbar. This is a historical painting by numbers, and its requirements are fatiguing and predictable.”8 A second indictment Brennan levies is one directed more toward Rushdie’s postcolonial apologists than toward Rushdie himself. Employing such vocabulary as hybridity, mimicry, or sly civility to define his South Asian characters’ acts of subtle resistance to the hegemonic influence of a white English- or American-dominant culture permits the South Asian diasporic subject to fraudulently appropriate specific African-American and

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Afro-British histories of particular resistance and to superimpose those same experiences onto their own. The use of such terms and vocabulary “allow[s] those who are thoroughly acculturated, freely accepted by the mainstream, and thriving in elite institutions to still retain the status, in their own minds, of victims of colonialism. Indeed, their cultural capital comes from this association, and so must at all costs be retained, even when it is very far from a social or political reality in their professional or personal lives.”9 As such, authors like Rushdie can have it both ways, enjoying a kind of marginalized status when they’ve long since been absorbed into the center and given canonical status. Finally, Brennan acknowledges Rushdie’s efforts to retain an emphasis on cultural specificity through an admission of the reality of multiple-rootedness for diasporic migrants and applauds him for understanding translation as a concrete cultural phenomenon experienced by actual migrants rather than merely an abstract linguistic dynamic favored by most post-structuralists. However, he reserves his most strident criticism for the ways in which he sees Rushdie essentially “carrying water” for Western power structures and not offering the same intensity of resistance to systems of injustice as he had done in his earlier novels. As he sees it, the ubiquity of Rushdie’s dominant metaphor of migrancy in his fiction caters to the emergent discourses of “globalization”—that is, the notion that the cosmopolitan was now vernacular and general, that we live in a “world” culture with local distinctions, but without fundamental divisions, having now outgrown national filiations. [. . .] In the very age in which the upper echelons of government and business in the West wanted to promote a cosmopolitan view of oneworld culture in order to facilitate the free movement of capital abroad following the fall of the Berlin Wall, and to do so without the bothersome resistance of movements of national liberation and sovereignty. . . . [Rushdie] offered them a theory of “migrancy”—ostensibly progressive, since it included everyone in a universal condition, but practically speaking, a cost-free kind of protest.10

Stripped of those “local distinctions” and “national filiations,” while disregarding the importance of “resistance . . . movements of national liberation and sovereignty,” Rushdie (according to Brennan) is stuck writing the same novel over and over again with no freshness or novelty to his voice. Yet one could also make the argument that critics like Brennan are engaged in relitigating the same disputes in their distaste for Rushdie and are “stuck writing the same critiques over and over again,” while failing to pay attention to new ways in which Rushdie plays with fiction to produce new insights. Indeed, if Rushdie’s position of centripetal migrancy truly does activate most of his imaginative work, it would stand to reason that memories of his

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“imaginary homeland” would persist as enduring textual signposts, as would his frequent admonitions of the perils of disregarding the complex historical anchors of the self, particularly for migrants. To every reviewer who imagines Rushdie, like Shakespeare, mournfully castigating himself in moments of brutal self-honesty, “Why write I still all one, ever the same, / And keep invention in a noted weed, / That every word doth almost tell my name / Showing their birth, and where they did proceed,” there is a sparkling passage from one of his newer works that proudly announces, “O know, sweet [Bombay], I always write of you, / And you and love are still my argument.”11 A brief examination of three of his most recent novels will serve as a coda to this book, revealing the fresh ways in which he inflects the interlinking experiences of memory, migrancy, and the transnational. THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE Picking up in some ways where he left off with his idealization of the syncretic and tolerant culture of Moorish Spain in The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie identifies another Golden Age of sorts in the sixteenth-century court of the famed Mughal emperor Akbar the Great in his 2008 The Enchantress of Florence. Just as the Spanish Moors valued the fruitful synthesis of ideas that flowered in the soil of multiculturalism and the creative dialogue fostered between different religions and cultures, Akbar encourages the stimulating exchange of ideas by erecting a “Tent of the New Worship” that permits invigorating free discourse and argument, even ideas that could potentially undermine his own ruling status. Ahead of his time, Akbar (as Rushdie has characterized him) “longed for a different world, a world in which he could find exactly that man who was his equal, whom he could meet as his brother, with whom he could speak freely, teaching and learning, giving and receiving pleasure, a world in which he could forsake the gloating satisfactions of conquest for the gentler yet more taxing joys of discourse.”12 Akbar’s wish is granted when a mysterious stranger from the West, who dubs himself Mogor dell’ Amore, arrives at court with a strange tale that reveals the intimate bonds that tie them together (the European traveler’s real name, held in abeyance until the end of the novel, is Niccoló Antonino Vespucci, the son of the Florentine Ago Vespucci and the handmaiden of Qara Köz, sister to the first Mughal emperor of India). Toward the end of the novel, Akbar seeks to actualize his dream of fusion between the East and the West through the harmonization of opposites by adopting Vespucci and naming him his honorary son. In so doing, he will proudly proclaim to the world that foreignness and otherness do not “adulterate something essential in the individual and the society as a whole”13 but rather lead to an enlargement of

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self and nation, an increase in the sum total of what it is possible for him to say and think: To allow [Vespucci] into the family would be a sign that he [. . .] could incorporate into his line—into himself—persons, places, narratives, possibilities from lands as yet unknown, lands which might, in their turn, also be subsumed. If one foreigner could become a Mughal then so, in time, could all foreigners. Additionally, it would be a further step in the creation of a culture of inclusion [. . .] his true vision come to life, in which all races, tribes, clans, faiths, and nations would become part of the one grand Mughal synthesis, the one grand syncretization of the earth, its sciences, its arts, its loves, its differences, its problems, its vanities, its philosophies, its sports, its whims.14

One of the unique central tropes in the novel is that the East is, and has always been, a mirror of the West, and vice versa. “We are their dream,” Akbar’s imagined wife, Jodha tells him, “and they [Europe] are ours.”15 The more Akbar learns of Florence, the more he feels a sense of kinship with its culture and inhabitants and recognizes as his own the fundamental principles of the European Renaissance. Qara Köz, a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, is likewise embraced by many as the true “face” of Florence soon after her arrival: “She had been taken to the city’s heart as its special face, its new symbol of itself, the incarnation in human form of that unsurpassable loveliness which the city itself possessed.”16 Indeed, her impact on the moral life of the city is so profound that the pope even muses publicly whether the pagan Qara Köz will in time be canonized as a saint of the Catholic Church. Rushdie thus indicates the ways in which the explosion of travel and cultural exchange inaugurated by the Renaissance creates the conditions for the “renewal, regeneration, rebirth”17 often associated with the time period. Just as Rushdie suggested the profound impact of India and the East on the origins of rock and roll in The Ground beneath Her Feet, he here shows how even a seminal Renaissance text like The Prince was birthed out of an exchange of ideas between the character Machiavelli and his friend Argalia, the “Florentine Ottoman,” who recounts his moral education in the world of the East as a janissary. Yet this indication of the productive qualities of migration, translation, and transculturation also points forward toward Bill Ashcroft’s understanding of the “transnation,” a category that goes beyond the transformational impact of movement between nations and focuses instead on the multiple migrations and plural subject positions that continually proliferate within the nation-state itself: “The nation-state exists by suppressing the proliferation of subject positions within its borders but [. . .] culture still escapes the bounded nation state society, exceeding the boundaries of the nation state and operating beyond its political strictures through the medium

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of the local. This excess is the transnation.”18 After all, the migrations and movements outward from the self for Akbar transpire imaginatively before he’s ever left the confines of his kingdom of Fatehpur Sikri or encountered Vespucci. His discontent with his narrow place in the world, including the religious faith he was born into and his desire for otherness, leads him to construct himself as a plurality of selves, continually seeking to migrate outward, while paradoxically retaining the prerogative of singularity. As he reflects, “Perhaps this idea of self-as-community was what it meant to be a being in the world, any being; such a being being, after all, inevitably a being among other beings, a part of the beingness of all things.”19 However, despite the ways in which Rushdie appears to uncritically endorse Akbar’s proto-modern embrace of the transnational experience, “whereby identities at the time of global exchange are no longer recognized according to their roots, but according to their routes,”20 he also darkly hints at the dangers of disconnecting oneself entirely from all ties to the past and one’s roots, making his valorization of migration and travel more equivocal and complex. For instance, Akbar’s aunt, Gulbadan Begum, although she shows a streak of independent thought and willful self-determination by ironically rejecting key aspects of her faith after participating in the hajj to Mecca, becomes a kind of precursor to Gibreel Farishta through her new life of chronic uncertainty and doubt upon her return home. Argalia, when he leaves family, home, and history both to make his fortune and to forge his identity anew, joins the forces of the Italian condottiero and pirate Andrea Doria and experiences a terrifying moment of self-awareness when he is lost in the fog and abandoned by the crew: “[H]e was left without defenses or recourse, a lonely human soul drifting vaguely into the white. This was what was left of a human individual when you took away his home, his family, his friends, his city, his country, his world: a being without context, whose past had faded, whose future was bleak, an entity stripped of name, of meaning.”21 This choice to “come unstuck” from roots, family, and the weight of the past always comes at great cost for Rushdie’s characters. Although he regularly criticizes the narrow cultural insularism that condemns and seeks to erase the impact of migrant figures like Qara Köz for “preferr[ing] life among foreigners to an honored place in her own home”22 and seeking to create herself anew, he also acknowledges the deep need to establish roots and not perpetually exist as a rolling stone. For every act of flight, there persists a concomitant yearning to belong and to ground oneself, if only in an “imaginary homeland.” Utilizing the by-now-familiar trope of flight to characterize Qara Köz’s rootless migrant existence, Rushdie indicates that the great enchantress was pitiably “without family, without clan, without any of the consolations of remaining within one’s allotted frontiers, inside her mother tongue and in her brother’s care. It was as if she were flying above the ground, willing herself to

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fly, while fearing that at any moment the spell might be broken and she would plummet to her death.”23 Fittingly, the novel ends with her having returned from her peregrinations outward to Europe and ultimately the “New World” of America back to her point of origin, if only in the imagination of her descendant, Emperor Akbar. As Rushdie movingly relates, “The blood ties could not be broken. She had made herself anew but what she had been, she would remain, and her heritage would be hers and her children’s to reclaim.”24 TWO YEARS EIGHT MONTHS AND TWENTY-EIGHT NIGHTS The lamentable loss of personal history and disconnection from one’s past and roots also plays a central role in Rushdie’s fantastical 2015 novel Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. A New York City gardener named Geronimo Manezes, born “Raphael Hieronymous Manezes” in Bombay, discovers after a Hurricane Sandy-like event that ushers in a time known as the “strangenesses” (which lasts for precisely 1001 nights) that the barrier between the real world and Peristan (Fairyland) has dissolved and that an “inexplicable, personal gravitational lessening”25 causes him to float above the earth. From the beginning of his new condition, Rushdie indicates that his new situation represents a kind of poetic punishment on the part of the universe in response to his efforts to remove himself from his own painful past: “He had discarded possessions, shedding burdens, keeping nothing but what was essential, lightening his load. It did not occur to him that this process of divesting himself of the physical aspects of his past, of letting go, might be related to his condition. Now, as he rose, he began to clutch at scraps of memory, as though their cumulative weight might bring him back to earth.”26 Rushdie explicitly links Geronimo’s plight with the rootless, undefined experience of disorientation plaguing so many migrants. Seemingly having lost his childhood in India because of his poor memory, Geronimo exists in a kind of endless waiting room of the present, joylessly going through the motions of life and the mechanical act of gardening but suffering from an “ontological insecurity. [. . .] Sometimes he filled up with a kind of rage, the fury of the uprooted, the un-tribed.”27 Rushdie later fittingly describes his detached condition as “the bone-weariness of the rootless.”28 Like Saladin Chamcha before him, Geronimo experiences a deep feeling of disconnection and alienation, “the sensation of not belonging anymore to a part of oneself,”29 when he visits his father in Bombay (now Mumbai). Indeed, Mumbai has also lost its memory of itself, embracing communalism and Hindu nationalist ideology and no longer exhibiting the pluralist, exorbitant, multiform identity of the former city. This historical amnesia metaphorically

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leads to Geronimo’s predicament: “History had slipped away from him, and in his own eyes as well as others’ he was becoming, he had become, nothing more or less than the man who was three and a half inches off the ground.”30 Geronimo finally begins to achieve wholeness and integration when his magical ancestor, the jinnia princess Dunia, whisks him away to Peristan after having listened to his deepest unspoken desires for belonging and reconnection and shows him again his own past in Bombay in Technicolor vividness: He was in the grip of everything sad that ever happened to him, he wished he had never become detached from the place he was born, wished his feet had remained planted on that beloved ground, wished he could have been happy all his life in those childhood streets, and grown into an old man there and known every paving stone, every betel-nut vendor’s story. [. . .] He wished he could have roots spreading under every inch of his lost soil, his beloved lost home, that he could have been a part of something, that he could have been himself, walking down the road not taken, living a life in context and not the migrant’s hollow journey that had been his fate.31

Yet while Geronimo’s engagement and confrontation with his own past begin the process of rejoining him with the earth, even empowering him to magically rescue others afflicted with the “separation plague” of abstraction that begins to lift them off the ground as well, he balances his awareness of the migrant’s need for belonging, meaning, and home with a concomitant recognition that a disproportionate indulgence of comforting nostalgia could equally disconnect him from the complexity of his present self, for the separation plague is counterpoised in the novel with a “crushing plague,” a sickness that neatly aligns itself with those who are too attached to their native culture, roots, language, religion, and homeland. As Rushdie writes, the world was suffering from “the dual curses of the rising and the crushing, of frightening and potentially fatal detachment from, or oppressively excessive attachment to, our enigmatic earth.”32 How does one most effectively reconcile the multiple selves engendered by history? At its heart, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights centers on the debate between two dead philosophers, the twelfth-century Islamic rationalist philosopher, Ibn Rushd, and the eleventh-century Persian philosopher Ghazali, who privileges divine causation over all forms of rational inquiry. Each philosopher is responsible for unleashing supernatural beings into the world during the time of the “strangenesses”: the good jinn who promote rationality and the dark jinn (or Grand Ifrits) representing the forces of religion and unreason, who wage a proxy war either against or for mankind in the name of each philosopher. Thematically, this seems to be Rushdie’s way of staging a kind of cultural psychomachia that pits the positive forces of

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atheistic Western Enlightenment epistemology against the benighted, backward energies of faith and superstition. The greatest and most powerful of the Ifrits, Zumurrud, even makes Afghanistan his home base with the Taliban, who are perfectly suited to his Ghazali-driven crusade, as they live for banning and forbidding everything. Late in the novel, Zumurrud eventually takes up religion himself as a means of “instituting a reign of terror on earth,”33 a global jinn sultanate that becomes a kind of fairy equivalent of the ISIS caliphate, as Zumurrud promotes decapitations, crucifixions, and stoning of the unfaithful. Ghazali’s mission is thus to use the Ifrits to instill the unthinking, atavistic fear of God in humanity, which he believes will finally defeat his antagonist Ibn Rushd by moving people once and for all from reason to faith. Like Raza Hyder and the Imam from The Satanic Verses, for Ghazali “life on earth is just an anteroom, or a doorway. Eternity is the real world.”34 Rushdie seemingly puts his thumb on the scale in depicting the ramifications of this worldwide conflict by unequivocally valorizing those characters, like the “skeptical and godless”35 Geronimo, who demonstrate “[a]ggressive hostility to all forms of religious belief.”36 Whether because he sees our contemporary moment as one marked by inarticulate rage, incoherence, and irrationality or because his position on religion has hardened since the years of the fatwa and his witness to the damaging effects of religious extremism and communalism on the Indian subcontinent, Rushdie seems to see religion not as a grounding or humanizing activity, but rather as an impediment to human flourishing: “[T]he irrational in man [. . .] had to be defeated, so that an age of reason could begin.”37 This seems to echo the pronouncement of Wole Soyinka, who in a 2007 lecture as part of the Claremont Graduate University’s Institute for Signifying Scriptures predicted that religion would be the singular issue dominating the twenty-first century, as race was for the twentieth century. Yet although Soyinka decries the abuses of many forms of religious fundamentalism and extremism seen throughout the world today (“There is no reason at all why a religion cannot just expose and disseminate its own believed virtues and not at the expense of denigrating the belief systems of others”38), he also acknowledges the benefits of a winsome and engaged religious practice that endorses magnanimity, generosity, and tolerance. But for Rushdie, the desired end state appears to be a wholesale elimination of religion and faith so that a new era of rational harmony can begin. The collective narrators of the novel who live one thousand years in the future and look back on our present era argue that “the use of religion as a justification for repression, horror, tyranny, and even barbarism, a phenomenon which undoubtedly predated the War of the Worlds but was certainly a significant aspect of that conflict, led in the end to the terminal disillusion of the human race with the idea of faith.”39 Such sweeping, absolute statements

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have led some critics, such as Adam Perchard, to claim that “Rushdie comes to view the Enlightenment as the key point of historical and ideological divergence between cultural hemispheres, and uses a narrow interpretation of Enlightenment philosophies as a means of equating the West with freedom of speech, secularism, progress, reason, and literariness, and the Islamic East with despotism, fanaticism, stasis, and silence.”40 Seemingly absent is the nuance that marked an earlier work like The Satanic Verses, where faith and doubt could uneasily coexist and an episode like the “Parting of the Arabian Sea” could equally privilege the miracle or the disaster, depending on one’s perspective. Utilizing the language of Spivak, there appears in this novel to be only a “turned-away-ness” and not “the migrant’s other desire, the search for [religious] roots as far down as they’ll go.”41 Or are things as clear-cut as that? Rushdie offers a clue to his intent in three separate interviews in the wake of the novel’s publication. In a 2015 interview with India Today, he claims that “there is not a simple opposition between reason and unreason. Unreason, after all, includes fancy, dream, and so on, which can enrich our lives.”42 In a conversation with Brian Bethune, although Rushdie considers religion and faith to be aligned with the irrational aspects of the human condition, he also admits that unreason’s features include “imagination, dreams and much else that makes life joyful. My books are full of the fantastic. I would have some difficulty with which side would have my vote. Do I contradict myself, as Whitman said? Very well, then, I contradict myself.”43 Finally, in a 2017 interview with Lisa Page, he expands upon the importance of the famous Goya etching, “El Sueño de la Razón Produce Monstruos,” to the message of his book: Goya says something a bit more complicated. What he says is, “Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters.” So he’s saying something more complex than, you know, fantasy: bad. Reason: good. It’s more of a yin and yang argument. You need a bit of both. So I had the idea in that beginning in which a creature of fantasy unites with a creature of reason. And through that union (of the jinn and Ibn Rushd), they produce these beings and that’s the best way to be, the book argues.44

One of the consequences of the total defeat of the Grand Ifrits is that the inhabitants of the new world that has been created, stripped of all traces of fantasy, unreason, and religion, can no longer dream. This rational utopia has thus come at a horrible cost. Contrary to the end of Haroun, when the Twilight Strip dividing the Guppees and the Chupwalas is broken down to permit exchange between cultures, this novel concludes with the threshold between Peristan and our world being permanently sealed in order to ensure that unreason never again gains a foothold:

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This is the price we pay for peace, prosperity, understanding, wisdom, goodness, and truth: that the wildness in us, which sleep unleashed, has been tamed, and the darkness in us, which drove the theater of the night, is soothed. [. . .] Mostly we are glad. Our lives are good. But sometimes we wish for the dreams to return. Sometimes, for we have not wholly rid ourselves of perversity, we long for nightmares.45

This rather equivocal conclusion was forecasted earlier in the novel in the message of an apocryphal story that a fellow tenant in Geronimo’s apartment, the artist Blue Yasmeen, tells on one occasion about the Unyaza people. This tribal culture, thoroughly irreligious because dependence on fanciful gods would eliminate the critical importance of hardy self-reliance, nevertheless must contend with a pernicious “story parasite [that] entered human babies through the ear within hours of their birth, and caused the growing children to demand much that was harmful to them: fairy tales, pipe dreams, chimeras, delusions, lies.”46 As a result, the Unyaza insert mud into the babies’ ears to prevent such an invasive possibility. Yet the cure becomes worse than the disease, as a world stripped of imagination, illusion, and story becomes for these children a hopeless and despairing one; the culture eventually commits mass suicide. The difficulty for Rushdie is thus that religion is also a type of meaning-generating story at war with more rational Enlightenment narratives. How does one neutralize the adverse effects of these often repressive belief systems in a democratic, pluralistic society while still giving those whom you oppose the freedom to tell their own stories? One of the key morals of the sad tale of the Unyaza and of the novel therefore is that too much “reality,” and a determined removal of oneself from the nourishing roots of one’s culture or one’s faith, often leads (as it also did for Gibreel in The Satanic Verses) to hopelessness, pessimism, and meaninglessness. The loss of the magic that animates the grand stories which seek to explain our lives also potentially leads to the removal of meaning for such experiences as “emotion, love, friendship, loyalty, fellowship or trust.”47 And in such a world, we may as well all be disconnected, floating three and a half inches off the ground. THE GOLDEN HOUSE Whereas Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights fantastically presents the rift created in reality during the period of the “strangenesses,” Rushdie’s most recent novel, The Golden House, set during the eight years of the Obama administration, although it features very few instances of his trademark magic realism, similarly explores the rupture in American life that seems to have taken place in our present moment. As such, it has become

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what Nathaniel Rich describes as “the first novel of the Trumpian era.”48 The Golden House is very much a product of, and response to, the “post-truth” world we currently inhabit, a diagnosis of our particular season of national discontent. Hyper-political polarization and the increasing influence of social media have led to the creation of “two bubbles,” one dominated by the liberal, rarified elites, denizens of urban metropolitan centers, and the other inhabited by increasingly fed-up red-state conservatives and populists, who embrace as their champion an agent of chaos—the outlandish former real estate magnate turned presidential candidate Gary Gwynplaine, who goes by “The Joker.” As the narrator laments, “In our age of bitterly contested realities it is not easy to agree upon what is actually happening or has happened, or what is the case, let alone upon the moral or meaning of this or any other tale.”49 Yet despite “the liberal bubble’s” self-protective commitment to status and the comforting privilege of its own education and wealth, it’s clear that Rushdie endorses its picture of reality as more credible than the one propagated by the Joker, “this cartoon character who had crossed the line between the page and the stage—a sort of illegal immigrant,”50 and his acolytes, who gleefully inhabit a “kind of radical untruth”51: Now the only person you think is lying to you is the expert who actually knows something. He’s the one not to believe because he’s the elite and the elites are against the people, they will do the people down. To know the truth is to be elite. If you say you saw God’s face in a watermelon, more people will believe you than if you find the Missing Link, because if you’re a scientist then you’re elite. Reality TV is fake but it’s not elite so you buy it. The news: that’s elite.52

It seems as if this epistemic crisis which Rushdie sees gripping America today dictated the manner in which he chose to compose his novel: a style he refers to as “operatic realism”: “The thing about realism in its great heyday is that it depended on there being an agreement between writer and reader about the nature of reality. [. . .] When you have that agreement, then you can build a realist novel on that. But we now live in a time when that consensus has very much broken down. We don’t have an agreement about the nature of reality. I mean, reality is now an argument.”53 Even though this sounds very much like the claims Rushdie made in the early 1980s to advocate for the magical realist mode required to counter the dry nineteenth century conventions of literary realism, which incompletely depicted the world, it’s as if the early twenty-first-century moment, which has embraced such brazenly false portraits of reality, calls for a more grounded literary approach from him. Contrary to Trump’s by now ubiquitous campaign promise to “Make America Great Again” through resurrecting an earlier portrait of what America used to look like, Rushdie counters by claiming that “Donald Trump

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is what happens when you forget what America is.”54 As such, it’s fitting that the plot of the novel centers on an Indian family who has come to America, specifically Greenwich Village, to forget itself and its own painful past history. Nero Golden, the patriarch of the family, encourages each of his three sons to give themselves new names and re-invent themselves from the ground up, shedding their former identities like snakeskins. Nero, like Malik Solanka in Fury, is a firm believer in the American capacity (and even urgent need) to create for oneself anew an illusory version of the self through a sheer act of will: They would wipe the slate clean, take on new identities, cross the world and be other than what they were. They would escape from the historical into the personal, and in the New World the personal would be all they sought and all they expected, to be detached and individual and alone, each of them to make his own agreement with the everyday, outside history, outside time. [. . .] It did not occur to any of them that their decision was born of a colossal sense of entitlement, this notion that they could just step away from yesterday and start tomorrow as if it wasn’t a part of the same week, to move beyond memory and roots and language and race into the land of the self-made self, which is another way of saying, America.55

As it was for Ormus Cama in The Ground beneath Her Feet, their ambiguous racial heritage makes it difficult to discern their true country of origin, which suits Nero just fine, who wishes for his past to remain a mystery and his true identity anonymous. It’s not until the end of the novel that the reader discovers the Goldens’ backstory: they were forced to flee India after the Mumbai bombings and terror attacks on the Taj Hotel in November 2008. Having involved himself with various mafiosos and made his fortune early in life through extortion, racketeering, blackmail, and bribery, Nero is brought back into action one last time by a leader of the criminal underground who asks him to pay off members of the Indian Coast Guard, which allows armed militants from Pakistan to stage their assault on various cultural sites in Mumbai. As an argument between Nero and his wife immediately before the attacks sent her to meet a friend at the Taj Hotel, she is killed, and Nero is forever haunted by guilt as he intuits that his own criminal past sent her to her death. Indeed, allegorically it’s possible that the absent mother is made to stand for Mother India herself, as the narrator of the novel relates that “it was her absence, her tragedy, that made sense of her family’s presence among us. She was the meaning of this tale.”56 Just as the migrants who are killed midflight at the beginning of The Satanic Verses seem to have, in one interpretation, earned their fate by guiltily severing themselves from their pasts, so too does the tragedy of the Golden house

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appear to be connected with the very act of migration to America itself, or at least the kind of flight that seeks to eliminate all ties to one’s former life. As the narrator René says to his girlfriend Suchitra about the Goldens, “The idea of a man who erases all his reference points, who wants to be connected to nothing in his history. [. . .] Can such a person even be said to be a man? This free-floating entity without any anchor or ties?”57 Suchitra goes one step further and questions whether such a determined erasure of name, origin, culture, and history signifies that the guilty party isn’t even truly alive anymore. “He was, they all were, in the grip of a huge fantasy,” Rushdie relates: “The idea that men would not be judged by who they once were and what they had once done, if they only decided to be different. They wanted to step away from the responsibilities of history and be free. But history is the court before which all men, even emperors and princes, finally must stand.”58 This dogged escape from the past isn’t without dire consequences for the rest of Nero’s family either. His first son, Petya, a high functioning autistic, becomes an alcoholic and struggles with agoraphobia as if his move across the ocean has stymied his capacity for any further movement. The guilt attached to ignoring the weighty truth of his father’s criminal activities leads Nero’s second son, Apu, to engage in a number of unhealthy behaviors, such as illicit drug use and serial affairs, in order to anesthetize the pain of his loss. He confesses to René that he senses a connection between his growing macular degeneration, which he claims allows him to stereoscopically see the buried, invisible world of the haunted past with his left eye and the prosaic world of the present with his right, and the terrible burden of having cut himself off from his past in India: It’s like [the ghosts] are just getting on with their lives but I am excluded from those lives, because I have excluded myself, and there is a deep feeling of having done something wrong. All of them are from back home, you understand? [. . .] There is a right way and a wrong way to do these things and I, we, all of us, we just ripped ourselves away, just tore off the corner of the page where we were standing, and that was a kind of violence. It’s necessary to put the past at rest. I have the strong sense right now of not being able to see my way forward. It feels like there isn’t a way forward. Or that for there to be a way forward, first there must be a journey backwards.59

Yet that “journey backwards” leads to nothing but disaster, as Apu and his girlfriend, the Somali artist Ubah Tuur, are killed by former associates of Apu’s father when they return to Mumbai for a visit. Perhaps the most pitiable fate is reserved for the youngest son Dionysus, who goes by D., and who struggles throughout the novel with his gender identity. Somewhat controversially, Rushdie makes use on several

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occasions of the language of migration to examine D. Golden’s persistent gender confusion and ambiguous sense of personal selfhood. For instance, D’s girlfriend Riya reminds him that “few hijras [transvestites from India] settle in their places of origin. Family rejection and disapproval probably account for the uprooting. Having re-created themselves as beings whom their original families often reject, hijras usually take those new identities to new places.”60 In a conversation with Riya and his lesbian friend, the singer Ivy Manuel, about opening himself up to a variety of gender choices and options, he’s issued a linguistic mandate when Ivy urges him to define himself, instead of having his gender identity dictated by his biological sex, his site of origin: “The first and most important word is ‘transition’ [. . .] in the present case, the process by which a person permanently adopts the outward or physical characteristics of the gender with which they identify, as opposed to those of the gender they were assigned at birth. [. . .] [Gender] transition is like translation. You’re moving across from one language to another.”61 Yet D. balks at this explanation, contradicting Ivy’s ideological certainties: “Didn’t the argument used to be the other way around? Being gay wasn’t a choice, it was a biological necessity? So now we’re saying it’s a choice after all?”62 René imagines a series of counseling sessions where the therapist tries to pin D. down and confine him to a particular gender category, but D refuses, dismayed by the increasingly narrow, specific, rigid options available. D’s frustration seems to stem from a desire to avoid a very modern American urge toward radical individualism and sovereign, autonomous self-creation at all costs. Riya works at an institution known as the Museum of Identity (and it’s no accident that the Museum of Identity’s acronym is MoI—“me”). Rushdie claims in a recent interview that “I think we are just living in a moment when we are being asked to narrow ourselves—you know, when we are asked to frame ourselves more and more narrowly. That’s true of political identity, gender identity, cultural identity. The Museum of Identity in the novel is obviously made up, but I’m amazed that it doesn’t exist.”63 In response to the therapist’s push to have D freely choose his/her gender identity instead of having it foisted upon him/her, D snarls, What if I can’t see how these choices you are proposing, these multiple-possibility gender nuances, are not part of that same reactionary ideology. [. . .] What if I propose that my identity is just difficult, and painful, and confusing, and I don’t know how to choose or what to choose or even if choosing is what has to happen, what if I just need to stagger blindly toward finding out what I am and not who I choose to be. What if I believe there is an I am and I need to find that. What if this is about discovery, not choice, about finding out who I’ve always been, not about picking a flavor from the gender ice-cream display?64

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D’s words are strong medicine, and Rushdie certainly could meet with charges of insensitivity, an improper understanding of the life-giving importance of choice to those who have had their gender oppressively defined for them their entire lives, or even accusations of transphobia. The fact that D. ultimately commits suicide also suggests an impossibility of imagining an end for someone like her that doesn’t end in tragedy. However, it’s clear that D’s disillusion with categorically confining identitarian gender definitions is of a piece with Rushdie’s preoccupations throughout his writing career. After D’s suicide, Riya’s own frustration with the coercive influence of rigid enforcement of identity politics leads to her planned resignation from the Museum of Identity. As she reflects, “To be plural, to be multiform is a singular thing, rich, unusual, and myself. To be forced into narrow definitions is a falsehood. To be told, if you are not one thing then you are nothing, is to be told a lie. The Museum of Identity is too engaged with that lie.”65 Once again, we find ourselves back to the “the confining myth of authenticity, that folkloristic straitjacket” that so frustrated Zeeny Vakil in The Satanic Verses. Riya’s claim is that modern identity politics, just like the rigidly imposed definitions of cultural and national identity expected of migrants, are too certain, unambiguous, and demanding. “The truth,” Riya proposes instead, “is that our identities are unclear to us and maybe it’s better that they remain that way, that the self goes on being a jumble and a mess, contradictory and irreconcilable. [. . .] Flexibility should be all right. Love should dominate, not dogmas of the self.”66 In twenty-first-century America, where it seems as if everyone is taking sides and planting flags, staking out ever narrower claims to his or her version of the truth, such uncertainty and cautious humility might represent the best way forward. This book has sought to focus on the crucial role that memory plays in defining identity for individuals and nation-states in Rushdie’s fiction and critical essays. As a postcolonial and postmodern artist, Rushdie’s emphasis on the plurality, heterogeneity, and hybridity of the self allows him to appreciate the manifold traces and layers that go to compose identity, yet his approach to memory consistently balances fragmentation and ambiguity with preservation and rehabilitation. Although Rushdie is critically aware that the past exists only in provisional, uncertain versions, those life-giving memories of his “imaginary homeland” continually provide artistic sustenance and political weightiness to his work. By striking such a balance, Rushdie not only thwarts the Orientalist desire to devalue or even erase important cultural and national memories for postcolonial nation-states and their inhabitants but also frustrates the heavy-handed and retrograde “primordialist bug” that Arjun Appadurai argues has infected many non-Western nations who have sought to reject the realities of diaspora through clinging violently to “blood, language, religion, and memory.”67

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John Donne’s famous seventeenth-century poem “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” closes with a metaphor that clearly defines Rushdie’s position as a centripetal migrant and underscores the importance Rushdie places on memories of the past. Comforting his beloved in the wake of his impending departure, Donne likens their strong connection and interdependent relationship to the workings of a mathematical compass. Although one point of the compass “far doth roam” in its journeys, the other “fix’d foot” remains in place (“in the centre”) as the circle is being inscribed. Donne movingly relates to his beloved that “Thy firmness makes my circle just, / And makes me end where I begun.”68 Similarly, memories of the subcontinent and India, and Bombay in particular, represent the fixed point of reference for all Rushdie’s peregrinations and wanderings and ensure that he will never leave for good. While he often valorizes the experience of migrancy as a mode of opening up new ways of seeing the world, he just as concretely attaches such a migrant position to centripetal movements via memory directed toward the “centers” of land, belonging, and home—identities to which he remains permanently bound. NOTES 1. Avalon, directed by Barry Levinson (1990; Minneapolis: Columbia Tri-Star, 2001), DVD. 2. Zoë Heller, “The Salman Rushdie Case,” The New York Review of Books, December 20, 2012. 3. David Gates, “A World of Marvels,” The New York Times, June 8, 2008. 4. Leo Robson, “The Golden House Is Salman Rushdie’s Not-So-Great American Novel,” The New Statesman, September 10, 2017. 5. Hassan Mahamdallie, “The Novelist Tackles Islamic Fundamentalism—with Mixed Results,” The Independent, September 5, 2015. 6. Qtd. in Tapan Ghosh, Mapping Out the Rushdie Republic: Some Recent Surveys (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), lv. 7. Ibid., xlv. 8. Ibid., lxvi. 9. Ibid., xlvii. 10. Ibid., xlviii. 11. William Shakespeare, “Why Is My Verse so Barren of New Pride? (Sonnet 76),” Poetry Foundation. 12. Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence, 35–36. 13. Ibid., 319. 14. Ibid., 317. 15. Ibid., 48. 16. Ibid., 275. 17. Ibid., 148.

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18. Bill Ashcroft, “Writing beyond Borders: Salman Rushdie and the Nation,” in Mapping Out the Rushdie Republic: Some Recent Surveys (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 3. 19. Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence, 31. 20. Pier Paolo Piciucco, “A Snapshot of Globalization: A Reading of The Enchantress of Florence,” in Mapping out the Rushdie Republic: Some Recent Surveys (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 251. 21. Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence, 173. 22. Ibid., 108. 23. Ibid., 255. 24. Ibid., 256. 25. Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (New York: Random House, 2015), 24. 26. Ibid., 102. 27. Ibid., 46–47. 28. Ibid., 250. 29. Ibid., 33. 30. Ibid., 106. 31. Ibid., 172. 32. Ibid., 282. 33. Ibid., 230. 34. Ibid., 58. 35. Ibid., 153. 36. Ibid., 82. 37. Ibid., 274. 38. K. Connie Kang, “Nobel Winner Assails Religious Intolerance,” Los Angeles Times, January 27, 2007. 39. Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, 269. 40. Adam Perchard, “The Garden of Reason: Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights,” in Mapping out the Rushdie Republic: Some Recent Surveys (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 304. 41. Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 250–51. 42. Kaveree Bamzai, “Interview with Salman Rushdie,” India Today, September 14, 2015. 43. Brian Bethune, ““Genies and Days of Strangenesses: Salman Rushdie’s New Novel is a Rollicking, Funny and (Sort of) Optimistic Fantasy,” Maclean’s, September 21, 2015. 44. Lisa Page, “An Interview with Salman Rushdie,” The Writer’s Chronicle 49, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 18. 45. Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, 286. 46. Ibid., 113. 47. Ibid., 114. 48. Nathaniel Rich, “The Golden House by Salman Rushdie: The First Novel of the Donald Trump Era,” Financial Review, October 24, 2017. 49. Rushdie, The Golden House, 40–41.

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50. Ibid., 250. 51. Ibid., 284. 52. Ibid., 222. 53. Porochista Khakpour, “Epic,” Poets & Writers 45, no. 5 (September/October 2017): 59. 54. Page, “An Interview with Salman Rushdie,” 24. 55. Rushdie, The Golden House, 20. 56. Ibid., 21. 57. Ibid., 187. 58. Ibid., 53. 59. Ibid., 231. 60. Ibid., 108. 61. Ibid., 115–16. 62. Ibid., 116. 63. Khakpour, “Epic,” 62. 64. Rushdie, The Golden House, 258–59. 65. Ibid., 297. 66. Ibid. 67. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 143. 68. John Donne, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” Poetry Foundation.

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Index

Ahmad, Aijaz, 10, 14, 30, 41, 45–46, 74, 88, 91, 93–95, 97, 99, 159 Anderson, Benedict, 12; “Imagined Communities,” 32–33; Nationalism and memory, 43–44 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 94, 111, 133–34 Ashcroft, Bill, 10, 21, 27, 28, 163–64 Avalon, 157–58 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 28; hybridization, 28; carnivalesque, 104–6 Baudrillard, Jean, 6, 59 Bhabha, Homi, 8, 9, 10, 15, 55, 111, 149, 150; “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences,” 147; The Location of Culture, 12, 134, 148– 49; Nation and Narration, 129, 145, 147; “The World and the Home,” 91 Brennan, Timothy, 8, 10, 14, 30, 41, 57– 58, 88, 90–93, 95, 97, 100, 159–61 Cantor, Paul, 10, 59, 69, 79, 130, 149 Derrida, Jacques, 7, 56, 57 Donne, John, 175 Fanon, Frantz, 15, 137, 138, 150; Black Skin, White Masks, 109, 135–36; The Wretched of the Earth, 141

Faris, Wendy, 65, 67, 69 Fatwa, 1–4, 11, 21, 62, 63, 69, 70, 87, 100, 102, 105, 107, 113, 142, 159, 167 Foucault, Michel, 45, 56 Freud, Sigmund, 54 Gandhi, Indira, 43, 44, 96; “Emergency,” 44, 76 Gandhi, Mahatma, 32, 36–37 Gramsci, Antonio, 25, 29, 55, 57, 81, 135 Grewal, Inderpal, 11, 45, 74 Hansen, Thomas Blom, 73, 138 Hassumani, Sabrina, 10, 57, 134, 142, 143 Huggan, Graham, 1, 10; strategic exoticism, 94–95 Hutcheon, Linda, 7, 12, 56, 57 Jameson, Frederic, 57, 95, 99, 135 Jinnah, M.A., 32, 74 Khomeini, Grand Ayatollah, 1, 63, 130, 142 Kundera, Milan, 14, 30, 87, 89–90, 91, 112; The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 30; The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 89–90 187

188

Index

Lundin, Roger, 124 Lyotard, Jean-François, 56 “Macaulay’s Minutemen,” 26, 135 Mahanta, Aparna, 92, 93 Mann, Harveen, 10, 93, 132 McClintock, Anne, 103 Mohajirs, 81–82, 88, 144, 145 Morton, Stephen, 11, 71–72, 81–82, 104, 133 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 23, 32–33, 36–37, 71–72, 76 Newton, Isaac, 5 Partition, 1, 6, 32, 44, 46, 70–72, 81 Renan, Ernest, 43–44 Rushdie, Salman: “April 1999: Rock Music,” 102; “Attenborough’s Gandhi,” 36; “Commonwealth Literature does not Exist,” 13, 28; “Damme, This is the Oriental Scene for you!,” 27; “A Dream of Glorious Return,” 77; East, West, 2, 3; “The Courter,” 149; The Enchantress of Florence, 2, 35–36, 118n2, 152n25, 158, 160, 162–65; “Farming Ostriches,” 42; “February 1999: Ten Years of the Fatwa,” 87; Fury, 2, 3, 6, 11, 14, 22–23, 61, 95, 105, 113– 14, 115, 171; The Golden House, 2, 11, 47n23, 83n28, 85n96, 158, 159, 169–74; Grimus, 2, 3, 6, 21, 29, 56; The Ground beneath Her Feet, 2, 3, 5, 6, 11, 14, 19, 35, 41, 61, 68–69, 93, 102, 113, 114–16, 138–41, 151, 163, 171; “Günter Grass,” 80, 98, 117, 124; Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 2, 3, 42, 62–64, 80, 142–43, 168; Imaginary Homelands, 1, 2, 6; “Imaginary Homelands,” 4, 11, 14–15, 19, 24, 29, 30, 61, 107, 124, 147, 151; “Influence,” 61–62; “In

God We Trust,” 54; “Is Nothing Sacred?,” 7, 63, 126; The Jaguar Smile, 2, 34, 95, 102; Joseph Anton, 2, 4, 21, 64, 67, 68, 70, 103, 113, 158; “The Location of Brazil,” 97; “March 1999: Globalization,” 141–42; Midnight’s Children, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 13, 14, 20–21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 32–34, 36, 37–38, 42, 43, 44, 46, 63, 65–66, 76, 78, 92, 94–95, 96, 123, 125; The Moor’s Last Sigh, 2, 3, 8, 13, 23, 36–37, 39–40, 41, 58–59, 68, 70, 72–73, 76–80, 93, 96, 99, 107, 110, 114, 136–38, 148–49, 162; “The New Empire within Britain,” 31, 34, 38, 39, 60; “Notes on Writing and the Nation,” 96; “One Thousand Days in a Balloon,” 9–10; “Outside the Whale,” 31, 100–101; 124, 147; The Satanic Verses, 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 12, 15, 30, 31, 32, 34, 38–39, 40–41, 55, 62, 63, 64, 66, 68, 79, 92, 93, 94, 96, 99–100, 102, 106–7, 108–11, 114, 125–34, 137, 140, 141, 143–47, 149–51, 167, 168, 169, 171, 174; Shalimar the Clown, 2, 4, 5, 6, 11, 23–24, 46, 98–99, 103–4, 111–13, 114, 145; Shame, 1, 2, 3, 6, 13, 22, 24, 36, 37, 38, 41, 44–46, 68, 70–71, 73–75, 80–82, 88–89, 91, 92, 94, 96, 117, 128, 145, 150; Step across This Line, 2, 4, 11; “Step across this Line,” 61, 96, 134; Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, 2, 11, 16n5, 49n97, 158, 159, 165–69; The Wizard of Oz: BFI Film Classics, 2, 116–17 Said, Edward, 9, 12, 56; Culture and Imperialism, 10, 27, 34, 53, 55, 127, 151; “Irangate,” 42; Orientalism, 25, 35; “The World, the Text, and the Critic,” 91 Sanga, Jaina, 10, 31, 34, 80, 117, 127

Index

189

Shakespeare, William, 96, 162 Spivak, Gayatri: “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 45, 92; In Other Worlds, 70; Outside in the Teaching Machine, 8, 10–12, 108, 130, 132, 168 Suleri, Sara, 74, 141, 143; “Secular blasphemy,” 13, 31

Thiara, Nicole Weickgennant, 10, 36, 71, 72, 96

Teverson, Andrew, 6, 10, 26, 30, 45, 62, 63, 98, 104, 105, 126, 141, 149 Thatcher, Margaret, 31, 100, 106, 142

Young, Robert, 12, 14, 28, 60, 129

Viswanathan, Gauri, 26, 135, 137 Wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ, 9, 12, 26–27, 138 Wings of Desire, 14

Zamora, Lois, 65, 67

About the Author

Stephen Bell is a professor of English at Liberty University, where he has been teaching since 2007. He earned his bachelor’s degree in English from Wheaton College, his master’s degree in English from the University of Virginia, and his PhD in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. His research and teaching interests include world literature, theory (particularly postcolonial and postmodern), and classics of the Western canon. His dissertation, a study of the ways that memory and identity intersect in the works of Salman Rushdie, won the 2014 Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

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