Faculty of Humanities and Social Science > English

Salman Rushdie

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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

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