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Writing Back, Re-writing Britain: Farrukh Dhondy and Salman Rushdie

Ruvani Ranasinha

in South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation

The mass immigration of the 1950s and 1960s changed the dynamics of British culture and created new audiences. Later writers from South Asia were more confident in self-consciously writing against ... More

The mass immigration of the 1950s and 1960s changed the dynamics of British culture and created new audiences. Later writers from South Asia were more confident in self-consciously writing against the terms of dominant culture. Most prominent amongst these was Salman Rushdie, who contested stereotypical representations of India and of ethnic minorities in Britain in his fiction and criticism. This chapter considers Rushdie alongside the figure of Farrukh Dhondy, who began his career in Britain as a political activist. Their work is examined primarily in terms of the way they straddle the concerns of both first and second-generation writers. Rushdie's first three novels embody the movement from colonialism and anti-colonialism towards a project of re-writing multicultural Britain. Dhondy's early stories and plays form a transformative bridge between writing back and re-writing Britain in another way. They map out themes of generational conflict and class tensions within British Asian communities as well as the topical, vexed debates on the appropriate response to racism, particularly the role of violence in the anti-racist struggle.Less

Diaspora and Postcolonialism: Salman Rushdie and the Jews

Bryan Cheyette

in Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish and Postcolonial Writing and the Nightmare of History

This chapter examines the work of Salman Rushdie, and considers Rushdie’s identification with Roth as a Jewish writer under attack by his own community of readers. It is perhaps not a coincidence, in ... More

This chapter examines the work of Salman Rushdie, and considers Rushdie’s identification with Roth as a Jewish writer under attack by his own community of readers. It is perhaps not a coincidence, in this regard, that the earliest version of Midnight’s Children, as a “vulgar” satire of Indira Gandhi, was based loosely on Roth’s Our Gang (1971). These forms of imaginative crossovers (seeing similarities in dissimilars) can be traced back to Rushdie’s earliest fiction and essays, and forward to his later novels.Less

Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul

Sara Upstone

in British Asian Fiction: Twenty-first Century Voices

This chapter explores the transition between migrant and British-born/raised positioning through the figures of V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, arguing that the common reading of their liminal ... More

This chapter explores the transition between migrant and British-born/raised positioning through the figures of V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, arguing that the common reading of their liminal positioning can be reconsidered to emphasise the transition from migrant to British Asian consciousness. Are Naipul and Rushdie British authors, needing to be read within the context of an increasingly multicultural British literature? They are not alone in being based for the majority of their lives in Britain but being born elsewhere, and both reflect their status as postcolonial, rather than British Asian, authors, in their principal concern for the trauma of migration. While each authors' characters straddle alienation and confident belonging, the authorial voice in both cases is testament to the latter. In this respect, marginality is only employed strategically: what Graham Huggan refers to as both authors' ‘staged marginality’. Both Rushdie and Naipaul capture a Britishness being changed to accommodate its ethnic citizens.Less

Islam and Blasphemy on the International Stage, 1989–2011

Paul Marshall and Nina Shea

in Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide

Some of the larger and more famous recent attempts to export blasphemy restrictions from the Muslim world to the West have had such a complex and long lasting effect that they require particular ... More

Some of the larger and more famous recent attempts to export blasphemy restrictions from the Muslim world to the West have had such a complex and long lasting effect that they require particular examination. These are detailed in Chapter Ten and include the continuing affair of The Satanic Verses, renewed when author Salman Rushdie's was given a knighthood by the British government. The so-called “Danish Cartoons” crisis of 2005–2006 continues to reverberate when the images are republished or forbidden to be printed, as in 2009 when Yale University Press censored them and other images from a book detailing the cartoons crisis itself. Other examples include Newsweek's account of a Qur’an flushed down a toilet at Guantanamo, a report which was later disproved; Pope Benedict XVI's controversial speech at Regensburg; and Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders's provocative film, Fitna. These upheavals frequently involved political manipulation. For example, the Danish cartoons were first published in September 2005 and republished, even in Egypt, Morocco, and Indonesia, without any outcry. Only in January 2006, following a decision by the OIC in its Mecca meeting to make an issue of the caricatures, did riots, violence and boycotts erupt and some 200 people die.Less

Critical overview and conclusion

Andrew Teverson

in Salman Rushdie

Timothy Brennan, in his critical study Salman Rushdie and the Third World, identifies Rushdie as being a member of a distinctive and historically original group of writers that has come to prominence ... More

Timothy Brennan, in his critical study Salman Rushdie and the Third World, identifies Rushdie as being a member of a distinctive and historically original group of writers that has come to prominence in the period following the formal dissolution of the British Empire. These writers are described by Brennan as Third World cosmopolitans: migrant intellectuals who are identified with a Western metropolitan elite in terms of class, literary preferences and educational background, but who, by virtue of ethnicity, are also presented by the media and publishing industries as being ‘the interpreters and authentic public voices of the Third World’. Brennan's central thesis is that Rushdie's socio-cutural location compromises his viability as a political writer, a thesis which has provoked some of the most important critical responses to Rushdie's work. Few if any of these critical responses disagree with Brennan's broad location of Rushdie as a migrant, cosmopolitan intellectual. The source of disagreement, rather, concerns the degree to which Rushdie's political arguments are undermined by this location, and by the structures of thinking that his location tends to implicate him in.Less

Freedom of Speech

Anne Norton

in On the Muslim Question

This chapter examines how the Muslim question has been linked to the question of freedom of speech. A clash of civilizations that saw the West as the realm of enlightenment, and Muslims in the realm ... More

This chapter examines how the Muslim question has been linked to the question of freedom of speech. A clash of civilizations that saw the West as the realm of enlightenment, and Muslims in the realm of religion, custom, and tradition, has long been part of spectacles in the Western public sphere. Ayatollah Khomeini gave new life to these civilizational theatrics when he issued a fatwa calling for the assassination of Salman Rushdie, whose The Satanic Verses became the center of a controversy that cast freedom of speech as a Muslim question. However, the martyr to free speech was not Rushdie but Theo van Gogh, the murdered producer of the film Submission. The chapter shows how the dramas surrounding Rushdie, van Gogh, the Danish cartoons and the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo's copycat cartoon provocations mark Muslims as the enemies of free speech.Less

Anti-racism, liberalism and class in The Satanic Verses and the Rushdie affair

Ahmed Rehana

in Writing British Muslims: Religion, class and multiculturalism

This chapter provides a crucial context to the Britain-based controversy surrounding the publication of Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, establishing the importance of a dialectical ... More

This chapter provides a crucial context to the Britain-based controversy surrounding the publication of Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, establishing the importance of a dialectical understanding of race, class and religious affiliation and grounding the protests in their material conditions. It reads the novel alongside and against the dispute that it generated: an engagement with the social context illuminates the presence of ideological contradictions within the novel which in turn shed light on the complexities and contradictions of multicultural politics in 1980s Britain. Focusing primarily on Rushdie’s representations of the fictional area ‘Brickhall’ in London, the chapter argues that the oppositional anti-racism that underpins the representation of the largely Muslim community’s struggle against the racism of Thatcher’s Britain is in tension with the endorsement of secular individualism against religious communalism that pervades the novel. The chapter reveals the strategies by which the novel attempts to manage and resolve this tension which is embedded within it and which emerged in the form of protests and book-burnings soon after its publication.Less

The Rushdie Affair: Truth and Conduct

Paul Rabinow and Anthony Stavrianakis

in Designs on the Contemporary: Anthropological Tests

This chapter takes up Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and the aftermath of its publication - the “Rushdie Affair” –in terms of an anthropology of the contemporary. The chapter observes ... More

This chapter takes up Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and the aftermath of its publication - the “Rushdie Affair” –in terms of an anthropology of the contemporary. The chapter observes Rushdie’s working through of a series of indeterminations, about culture, truth and narrative mood, in the novel and in the increasingly discordant situation of the affair - at a second order of observation. This second order observation is of the experience and effects of the writing–as technē tou biou for Rushdie, how it circulates for others – those who denounced him as blasphemer - as well as for anthropologists. The chapter explores how anthropologists have attempted to render actual the Rushdie Affair – drawing on the judgments of Talal Asad, Jeanne Favret-Saada and others and provides a contemporary mood and form for observing the breakdowns in the affair and the failed attempts at repair and vindication.Less

Never in Doubt: Salman Rushdie's Deeper Challenge to Islam

in The Culture of Islam: Changing Aspects of Contemporary Muslim Life

Salman Rushdie will be forever remembered for the tribulations set in motion by his publication of The Satanic Verses. But if the questions of blasphemy and politics, of death threats and public ... More

Salman Rushdie will be forever remembered for the tribulations set in motion by his publication of The Satanic Verses. But if the questions of blasphemy and politics, of death threats and public book-burning can be set to the side and an effort made to return to the novel itself, some rather fundamental questions can be asked about the way in which the author has tried to cope with the question of doubt as it is posed to those who have crossed borders of nation, cultural context, and belief. Indeed, the issue of doubt can be seen to lie at the heart of his novel just as, in many respects, it lies at the heart of any cross-border experience. Rushdie's novel merges the implications of a Western literary form associated with the questioning of basic beliefs with the foundational claims of Islamic legitimacy, a tactic that seeks to force a conversation many are unwilling to entertain. The contrast between the role of doubt in the religious thought of the West and in the history of Islamic religious ideology could not be more striking.Less

To Understand Me, You’ll Have to Swallow a World: Margins, Multitudes, and the Nation in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Mrinalini Chakravorty

in In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary

This chapter considers the stereotypical representation of crowds and overpopulation in Salman Rushdie's narrative, Midnight's Children. The novel's overarching theme centers on the anxieties ... More

This chapter considers the stereotypical representation of crowds and overpopulation in Salman Rushdie's narrative, Midnight's Children. The novel's overarching theme centers on the anxieties regarding the future of the Indian subcontinent's newly formed postcolonies, which represent the political threshold of decolonization as a collective, polyphonic experience. Drawing on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's thesis that the “productive flesh of the multitude” has the “unruly” capacity to challenge the neoliberal world order, Rushdie's magical realism in the story reinvents the colonial stereotypes of “dirty” and “disorderly” mobs to reflect a new immanent potential for the children of Midnight. The multitude exists in Rushdie's fiction to reify stereotypical images of the subcontinent as teeming, chaotic, heteronormative, excessively consumptive, and fecund—a vision of a people aligned with the goals of a liberal state.Less

From science fiction to history: Grimus and Midnight's Children

Andrew Teverson

in Salman Rushdie

This chapter focuses on two novels: Grimus and Midnight's Children. Scenarios borrowed from science fiction fantasy appear in several of Rushdie's novels. The science fictional imagination is at its ... More

This chapter focuses on two novels: Grimus and Midnight's Children. Scenarios borrowed from science fiction fantasy appear in several of Rushdie's novels. The science fictional imagination is at its strongest, however, in Rushdie's first published fiction, Grimus. Because Rushdie sees science fiction not as an end in itself, however, but as a springboard for the exploration of philosophical and political concepts, the novel may be described as a specific form of science fiction – a ‘speculative fiction’ – in which the alien qualities of ‘new worlds’ are used as a means of investigating and destabilising settled certainties concerning our own world. In Midnight's Children, Rushdie's concern to fictionalise an experience of recent Indian history suggests that his novel might potentially be considered as a form of historical fiction. The novel is preoccupied at the level of ideas by history and historicity, by the ways in which history is recorded, by the techniques with which a period is conjured and contained (or not contained), and by the ways in which the individual ‘historiographer’ understands (or misunderstands) his relationship with his material.Less

Writing in English

Andrew Teverson

in Salman Rushdie

The fact that English education in India may be seen as a tool for the cultural domination of Indians, designed to cement and extend the dominion already effected through military and economic means, ... More

The fact that English education in India may be seen as a tool for the cultural domination of Indians, designed to cement and extend the dominion already effected through military and economic means, makes explicit a central problem confronting an anti-colonial and post-colonial writer such as Rushdie, whose literary language of choice is English. Briefly stated: by using English, Rushdie lays himself open to the charge that he is not only accepting the legacy of British imperial rule but legitimising the culturally imperialistic act which brought English into being as a sub-continental language. Some of Rushdie's more aggressive critics have made this argument against him with force.Less

The Satanic Verses and the State (I): Rushdie and the Camden Committee for Community Relations

Asha Rogers

in State Sponsored Literature: Britain and Cultural Diversity after 1945

This first of two chapters on The Satanic Verses discusses Salman Rushdie’s conflicted status as a critic of state racism and a feted literary celebrity that criticized multiculturalism. Beginning ... More

This first of two chapters on The Satanic Verses discusses Salman Rushdie’s conflicted status as a critic of state racism and a feted literary celebrity that criticized multiculturalism. Beginning with his quarrel with Stuart Hall over the political and aesthetic commitments of ‘black’ art in 1987, it then shifts to two key sources shaping Rushdie’s early polemical essays and the London sections of The Satanic Verses: racism as an intellectual problem rooted in white society as discussed in Ann Dummett’s A Portrait of English Racism (1973), and the migrant underclass Rushdie encountered through the grassroots Camden Committee for Community Relations. The chapter concludes by tracing the emerging tensions between Rushdie’s idea of an anti-racist critical practice and his evolving commitment to free literary expression.Less

Pessoptimistic fictions: Haroun and the Sea of Stories and The Moor's Last Sigh

Andrew Teverson

in Salman Rushdie

This chapter discusses the novels The Moor's Last Sigh and Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Rushdie's sixth novel, The Moor's Last Sigh, may be seen as the fictional embodiment of a darker, less ... More

This chapter discusses the novels The Moor's Last Sigh and Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Rushdie's sixth novel, The Moor's Last Sigh, may be seen as the fictional embodiment of a darker, less forgiving assessment of India's post-Independence political life. Here, much of the ebullience that characterised Midnight's Children has evaporated in the heat of communitarian violence and rampant political corruption, whilst the political resolution which the next generation was supposed to have embodied has been diverted into rapacious stock-market speculation and commodity fetishism. The narrative of Haroun and the Sea of Stories is similar to that of The Moor: the conflict between a pluralist and tolerant society and a monolithic and intolerant political order. In Haroun, the conflict appears in the guise of fantasy.Less

East-West Descent Narratives

Rachel Falconer

in Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives since 1945

This chapter discusses several East–West descent narratives. The first is Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, which represents the descent of a Western, imperial hero into a demonic ... More

This chapter discusses several East–West descent narratives. The first is Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, which represents the descent of a Western, imperial hero into a demonic Eastern/Southern underworld. The chapter then studies Salman Rushdie's The Jaguar Smile and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, the latter as a revision of the myth of Orpheus, and examines rich and positive representations of East–West relations and descent journeys from one region to another. It also contrasts the Bush administration's polarised worldview, where certain Eastern states have all been characterised as an ‘axis of evil’.Less

Contexts of Literary Production and Consumption

Ruvani Ranasinha

in South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain: Culture in Translation

This book traces a genealogy of the literary publication and reception of South Asian Anglophone writing in 20th-century Britain, through a comparison of the changing contexts of literary production ... More

This book traces a genealogy of the literary publication and reception of South Asian Anglophone writing in 20th-century Britain, through a comparison of the changing contexts of literary production and consumption for succeeding generations of selected writers of South Asian origin, who emigrated to, or were born in, Britain. Comparing two or more writers of a similar ‘generation’ in each chapter, this book begins just before World War II, a decade before the independence of the subcontinent. This moment was the prelude to the mass emigration that would configure constructions of South Asian identity in Britain. The writers discussed here include the early nationalist Indian writers, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao, alongside R. K. Narayan whose impact is compared to the contrasting receptions of Sri Lankan poet and publisher M. J. Tambimuttu, and of Bengali author Nirad Chaudhuri. Other writers discussed in the book include Kamala Markandaya and Ambalavener Sivanandan, Salman Rushdie and Farrukh Dhondy, and Hanif Kureishi and Meera Syal.Less

Political and intellectual contexts

Andrew Teverson

in Salman Rushdie

This chapter explores Rushdie's conception of the relationship between art and politics. It turns to three essays written by Rushdie in the early 1980s, at the juncture of his career when he was ... More

This chapter explores Rushdie's conception of the relationship between art and politics. It turns to three essays written by Rushdie in the early 1980s, at the juncture of his career when he was starting to define his public role as a novelist after the successes of Midnight's Children and Shame. These essays, which might, with a degree of critical licence, be seen to amount to a manifesto of his views on the political functions of art, are ‘Imaginary Homelands’ (1982), ‘Outside the Whale’ (1984) and ‘The Location of Brazil’ (1985). Arguably the most revealing of all these is ‘Outside the Whale’, written in partial response to George Orwell's 1940 essay, ‘Inside the Whale’, in which it is suggested that writers, rather than engaging directly in politics, should climb inside a metaphorical whale where, with ‘yards of blubber between [themselves] and reality’, they will be ‘able to keep up an attitude of the completest indifference’ to the world.Less

Rushdie and the Art of Modernism

Richard Begam

in Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism: Anglophone Literature, 1950 to the Present

This chapter positions The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995)—the first full-fledged novel Salman Rushdie wrote following the 1989 fatwa—in relation to criticisms of modernism advanced not only by Ayatollah ... More

This chapter positions The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995)—the first full-fledged novel Salman Rushdie wrote following the 1989 fatwa—in relation to criticisms of modernism advanced not only by Ayatollah Khomeini but also by scholars such as Fredric Jameson and Edward Said. It is significant that the novel’s subject is modernism itself, represented by Aurora Zogoiby, whose work synthesizes virtually every avant-garde movement, from fauvism, surrealism, and Dadaism to cubism, expressionism, and abstractionism. In offering a history of twentieth-century art, Rushdie explores how modernism can retain its aesthetic autonomy while giving voice to its social and political commitments. The chapter concludes by examining two aspects of the novel that are usually considered postmodern: the figure of the palimpsest and Moraes’s accelerated aging. The former is associated with James Joyce and T. S. Eliot’s mythic method, while the latter—with its sense of accelerated temporality—functions as a metaphor for modernism itself.Less