Salman Rushdie

[Gopa B. Caesar]

1947: Born in Bombay, India, to Muslim parents,
1961: Educated in Bombay before being sent to Rugby School, Warwickshire.
1961-65; King's College, Cambridge University, where he took a BA (Honours) degree in History. He has lived in England since 1961,
1970-81: freelance advertising copywriter, London,
1989 : Forced into hiding afater the Ayatolla Khomeni passed the death sentence on Rushdie for blasphemy against the Qu’ran in The Satanic Verses.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Works by Rushdie

-Rushdie's novels are characterized by an epic sweep of narration, with hilarious and often ribald humour
-Rushdie combines realism and fantasy like Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges,
-He roundly satirizes the politics and society of the country in which each novel is set.
-He identifies the theme of emigration and the migrant self as his favorite leitmotif
Novels:
Grimus (1975),
Midnight's Children (1981),
Shame (1983),
The Satanic Verses (1988)
The Moor’s Last Sigh
The Ground Beneath her Feet
Fury
Shalimar the Clown (2006)

Non-fiction:

The Jaguar Smile
Imaginary Homelands
Step across this Line,
The Vintage Book of Indian Writing

[Gopa B. Caesar]

General Theme

The central issue in all his novels is the dichotomy of good and evil in one-self and the world. In each novel Rushdie uses the same pattern --- he explores the philosophical significance of ideals and concepts through several pairs of characters who are so intimately connected that they literally or figuratively fuse, and when they separate each takes on a part of the identity of the other.
The element of good surviving over evil is so strong that one might well call Rushdie a romantic who uses the medium of satire.
in Rushdie's first novel, Grimus, Flapping Eagle the Amerindian protagonist and Grimus the satanic antagonist literally fuse and then break away.
The twin characters in Midnight's Children, Saleem Sinai and Shiva, are born in adjoining hospital rooms on the stroke of midnight at the moment of India's independence on 14-15 August 1947.
The twin characters in Shame, Hyder Raza(i.e. President Zia-ul-Haq) and Iskander Harappa (i.e. Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto) rise to power with dire consequences.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Booker of all Bookers

Midnight's Children is an allegory of India's history during the first three-quarters of the 20th century (ranging in time from World war 1 to 1977) told from the point of view of Saleem Sinai, one of 1,001 magic children born between midnight and 1:00 A.M. on 15 August 1947, when India received its independence from Britain.
The prematurely aged, impotent Sinai, dying in a pickle factory near Bombay, tells his tragic story with such comic élan and mythic exuberance that the reader can only react with amusement and laughter.
On the quarter-century anniversary of the Booker Prize in 1993, Midnight's Children was named the "Booker of Bookers," the best among all Booker winners.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Magic Realism

Captures the artists’ and the authors’ efforts to portray the strange, the uncanny, the eerie, and the dreamlike—but not the fantastic—aspects of everyday reality’
Seymore Mentom Magic Realism Rediscovered (1983)

   Sudden incursion of fantastical or magical elements in an otherwise realistic setting or plot

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Historigraphic Metafiction

Metafiction: ‘a language about language’ ►human communication ►dogs cannot bark about barking
Includes self referential element that challenges convention of realistic novels►mimetic & diegetic
Self-conscious problematization of the making of history and fiction ►postmodern
A productive intertextuality that neither simply repudiates the past nor reproduces it as nostalgia

[Gopa B. Caesar]

MEMORY

History: Memory:: Public culture: Individual Memory
‘memory is not a calendar memory; our experience of time does not keep company with the rhythms of month and year alone; it is aggravated by the void, the final sentence of the plantation’- Gissant
To counter the erasures of History, it is necessary to unravel other submerged histories through an imaginative, if not literal, effort of memory.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Exposing the ‘Myth of the Nation’

Midnight's Children inaugurated what seemed like an endless stream of "nationsroman" (novels of the nation) in the 1980s.
Ex.   Allan Sealy's Parsi version, The Trotter-Nama (1988), Ghosh's The Shadow Lines, and Tharoor's The Great Indian Novel.
Un-nationalistic: The modern nation state from philosophical, political, and historical to satirical, parodic, and mocking grounds.
more elegiac than celebratory of the nation.
The 1980s has taken place at a time when the future of the Indian nation-state is being questioned, when Rushdie's enigmatic ending in Midnight's Children of a "broken creature spilling pieces of itself into the street" is echoed in communal unrest and separatist violence.
a curious obsession to mythologize the nation not at its moment of birth when it was the glorious victor of a liberation struggle, but in its unglamorous middle age, riddled by the maladies of modernity and despair, which the novels proceed to catalogue in painstaking detail.
In many ways, Rushdie severed the critical and stifling affiliation between British English and the subcontinent, bringing a historical distance from which to observe and analyze the condition of being once-colonial subjects.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

‘Minority Literature’

After Deleuze and Guattari (1986): a literature constructed by a social or political minority through which it exerts a critical, political force on "great" (or established) literature.
Minority literature is an outcome of critique and conscience, and it functions on numerous registers to expose, revise, or otherwise resist the triumphalist narratives of groups in power.
Alternatives to ‘grand narratives’.
The proliferation of the "nationsroman" critiques the Enlightenment myth of nationalism within the discourse of the novel.
The ‘nationromans’ is characterised by its unabashed ambition, as well as the seriousness with which it is taken within public culture in India.
   effective critique needs both a voice and an audience.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed their thesis on minority literature after Franz Kafka►Saladin Chamcha turns into a Goat in England

[Gopa B. Caesar]

POSTMODERNISM

Indeterminacy: ambiguities, ruptures, displacements that affect knowledge (episteme)
Fragmentation: ‘Let us wage war on totality; let us be witness of the unpresentable’ –Lyotard
Decanonization: decentring all forms of authority
Self-less-ness
The Unpresentable
Irony
Hybridization: mutant replication of genres (parody, pastiche)
Carnivalization (feast of changes—becoming), polyphonic, heteroglossic
Performance/Participation
Reconstruction
Immanence

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Shame begins and ends in a fantastic house in the town of Q., located on the arid, isolated border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Nicknamed Nishapur, home of the great Persian poet Omar Khayyam, it is inhabited by three sisters who for twelve years raise a son, named for the poet. They rear him in strict isolation from the world, instilling in his brilliant mind a strange feeling of being peripheral and inverted. In exchange for being allowed to attend school, Omar is ordered never to feel shame (sharam in Arabic). He goes away to medical school and a brilliant career as an immunologist and shame does indeed appear to have no part in his voyeuristic, misogynistic character.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Omar befriends and debauches with a rich playboy, Iskander ("Isky") Harappa, who marries Rani Humayun, who immediately sees Omar as a threat. Isky and Rani have one daughter, Arjumand, nicknamed the "Virgin Ironpants," for her determination to overcome her gender sexually and professionally. On his 40th birthday, Isky hears the call of History and abandons his debauchery to enter politics. For years, he has been the rival of Raza Hyder, a military hero who calls himself "Old Razor Guts." Raza has married Bilquìs Kemal, a woman whose mind is shaken by the suicide of her idealistic father. After a wrenching stillbirth, they bear two daughters, Sufiya Zinobia (nicknamed "Shame") and Naveed (nicknamed "Good News").

[Gopa B. Caesar]

The elder, left mentally retarded by a fever as an infant, takes within herself all the unfelt shame of the world, which eventually becomes incarnate as a Beast. The Beast makes her behead a flock of turkeys and she falls ill with the plague of shame. Omar treats her immunological disorder and falls in love with her. At her sister's wedding, the Beast again makes her lash out and she bites the groom in the neck. Omar marries her quietly, nonetheless, but he is forbidden to have sexual relations with her. Despite her mental limitations, Sufiya Zinobia knows husbands are for giving women babies and when her Omar impregnates her ayah Shahbanou,, the Beast again takes over and four young men are forced to make love with Sufiya Zinobia and have their heads torn off.

[Gopa B. Caesar]

Omar and Raza Hyder realize the truth and drug and imprison Sufiya Zinobia, unable to kill her. Raza Hyder, who was placed in charge of the army by Prime Minister Iskander Harappa, has overthrown him, instituted Islamic law and allowed Isky to be tried, brutally imprisoned and executed. Raza is himself overthrown by a military coup and flees with Bilquìs and Omar, to supposed safety in fortress-like Nishapur, disguised shamefully in women's burqas. There, Omar's three mothers rejoice to find Raza, the murderer of their second son Babar, in their hands. After the visitors endure the wild ravings of malaria, the three sisters dispatch Raza Hyder with great gore in the dumbwaiter they had specially customized to serve as their means of limited communications with the outside world. The Beast that has taken over Sufiya Zinobia hunts Omar in the bed where his grandfather died and after a last eye-to-eye confrontation, beheads him. The shell of Sufiya Zinobia is cast off, set free and the spouse-protagonists are consumed in a great fire.

[Tamanna Islam]

tangled! :/