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Chapter-II

Hybridity and Postcolonialism

Rushdie as a magic realist writer incorporates many techniques that have

been linked to postcolonialism with hybridity being a primary feature. The word

“hybridity” means an offspring of two different ideas that have been mixed up such

as plants or animals, urban or rural, mixed racial or cultural origin and Western or

Eastern. In the same way “Post” means aftermath of something and “Colonial”

means countries that are colonies; therefore “Postcolonial” means the country

which eased the colonial rule and became independents such as India and Pakistan.

Rushdie as a postcolonial writer rejects the British colonial portrayal of India and

builds a new world through his novels. He pictures the Indian citizens and its

history to provide the true images of India. Instead of providing the idea of magic

and reality separately, he fuses them through a new technique called magic

realism.

Magic realism is fully prompted in Rushdie’s oeuvre. The technique of

magic realism used by him provided a conflict among the critics. It is a means for

political promise in a literary text; the invocation of magic is associated with

traditional mythical writing. Therefore, magic and realistic writing co-exist

simultaneously and function as a metaphor for the idea of multiplicity of truth and

history. And according to Rushdie the postcolonial writers write about their

experience of displacement, which resulted in the incomplete vision of reality.

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Stephen Selmon has contributed greatly to the association of magic realism and

postcolonialism. In “Magic Realism as a Postcolonial Discourse” Stephen stresses

the function of magic realism as the weapon of the “Silenced, marginalized,

dispossessed voices” in their battle against “inherited notions of imperial history”

(59-60).

Rushdie’s novel celebrates hybridity, impurity and intermingling of fact

that becomes an alteration for the new and unexpected combination of politics,

cultures, ideas, movies and songs. Hybridity reflects a conscious discontinuity that

comes from immigration and displacement of writer experience. Hybridity is

associated with the appearance of postcolonial discussion and its review of cultural

imperialism. It is a theory that studies the mixture of identity and culture. The

principal theorists of hybridity are Homi. K. Bhabha, Nestor Garicia Canclini,

Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, and Paul Gilroy.

Homi K. Bhabha, a Professor of English, American Literature and

Language, Harvard University, Cambridge, has coined a key concept of hybridity.

He says hybridity is the appearance of new cultural forms of multiculturalism.

Seeing colonialism as something locked in the past, Bhabha shows how its

histories and cultures constantly intrude on the present, demanding that we

transform our understanding of cross-cultural relations. Homi Bhabha in his book,

The Location of Culture states:

If the jargon of our time post modernity, post coloniality, post feminism

has any meaning at all, it does not lie in the popular use ‘of the post’ to

indicate sequentiality - after -feminism; or polarity anti-modernism. (6)

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Instead, he argues these terms have “only embody its restless and revisionary

energy if they transform the present into an expanded and ex-centric site of

experience and empowerment” (6).

This chapter explores the way in which Salman Rushdie says about

hybridity in his novels. His works show his strong belief in magic realism where

the theme is mixed with many cultures and does not limit to any particular cultures

or society. The various cultural identities in his novels are postcolonial history,

national narratives, individual migrant identity and the English language.

Rushdie who has immigrated to the West has discovered a new way of

looking forward rather than behind. In the past people who immigrated to the West

were considered to an exile or diasporic writers. They write about their personal

and Indian experience in their work. It may be cheerful or sad, but most of the

works discuss the physical pain and mental agony. But Rushdie’s presentation is

vice versa. Marangoly George in “At a Slight Angle to Reality: Reading Indian

Diaspora Literature" says:

At the centre of Indian diasporic literature - is the haunting presence

of India - and the anguish of personal loss it represents. It is precisely

this shared experience of absence that…unites the literature of the

Indian diasporal. (183)

Rushdie’s works do not portray the physical pain or mental agony; it embraces the

globalization with peace and harmony. As a migrant he is free to create his own

cultural identities based on his own experience at home.

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Like Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee, Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri, Rohinton

Mistry, and Kiran Desai are living and writing about the West. They not only write

about the pains for the loss of India as an immigrant, but also openly welcome their

connections for both the East and West. Their writing portrays the immigrant

society their mixing of cultures, race and languages in both the countries. Rushdie

as an enthusiastic and optimistic portrayer of such themes of hybridity discusses

the potential beauty of the immigrant condition. By stepping away from the past

diasporic writers he looks to the future, where he can live, imagine and create his

work according to his wish. Rushdie writes about the western culture and their

identity as influenced immigrant to England. He thereby uses specific postcolonial

literary techniques such as fragmentation, plurality and language in his works.

As an Indian emigrant living in England and writing in English, Rushdie is

able to view and write about India with objectivity, yet distance from India causes

some break up of memory and thereby results in the unreliable narrative

techniques. Therefore, Rushdie’s position as an emigrant postcolonial writer

functions as a double-edged sword; he is praised for his objectivity at the same

time criticized for his inauthentic representations of modern India. The desire to

regain India’s beauty and harmony of the past influenced him to write Midnight’s

Children. Rushdie realized the importance of India to restore its past identity.

Midnight’s Children is his first literary attempt to recapture Bombay, India. The

novel explores the ways in which history have been told through the retelling of

Saleem’s individual experience.

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Saleem in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children remains the central figure among

the postcolonial literature. Saleem Sinai the protagonist and narrator explains his

family history to the reader and Padma his listener. While narrating his grandfather

and grandmother’s personal history, he intertwines Indian history with his family

history. India’s setting and its history becomes the major theme of his narration.

Midnight’s Children is all about the struggle for independence and the partition of

India. It focuses on the post-independent India with its socio-political disturbance,

religious injustice or hatred, violence and finally the immoderation of Indira

Gandhi’s Emergency Rule. Syed Amanuddin in “The Novels of Salman Rushdie:

Reality as Fantasy” says “Midnight’s Children mythologizes the very

consciousness of independent India with its memories of the past, dreams of the

future and harsh realities of the present” (42).

Midnight’s Children as a postcolonial text begins from the novel’s ability

to intertwine the three major themes. First, the creation and telling of history, then

the creation and telling of individual’s identities and finally the creation and telling

of fairy tales. These three connected themes look at the problems of

postcolonialism and its difficulties in assigning one’s personal or national origin,

personal or national history and personal or national authentic identity. The novel

expresses these themes of creation and telling of history through connected and

dependent forms of hybridity.

Saleem’s life becomes inextricably linked with the political, national and

religious events of India. All the children born in and around India’s independence

had a special gift, in the same way Saleem had a special gift of telepathy. He was
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able to telepathically communicate with other gifted children. He acts as a

telepathic medium, bringing hundreds of physically different children into contact

and he attempts to discover the meaning of their gifts. He finds out that those

children who are born closest to the stroke of midnight possess more powerful gifts

than the others. Shiva of the Knees, Saleem’s evil opponent and Parvati, called

Parvati-the-witch, are the two children with notable gifts and played the major

character in Saleem’s narration. There was thousand and one midnight’s children

born between 12 to 1 a.m. in the night of August 14-15, 1947, the hour of the

nascence of free India and Saleem is one among them born at 12. Out of such 1001

children 420 were dead and 581 lived till 1957. Among the 581, 261 were boys

and 315 were girls:

By 1957, the surviving five hundred and eighty-one children were all

nearing their tenth birthdays. (272)

... Altogether brighter reality of the five hundred and eighty-one.

(Two hundred and sixty – six of us were boys: and we were

outnumbered by our female counterparts – three hundred and fifteen

of them, including Parvati. Parvati- the-witch. (274)

Saleem explains his role as a creator of the new India and it is possible for him by

his childhood omniscience and telepathy:

[T]he feeling had come upon me that I was somehow creating a

world; that the thoughts I jumped inside were mine, that the bodies I

occupied acted at my command; which is to say, I had entered into

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the illusion of the artist, and thought of the multitudinous realities of

the land as the raw unshaped material of my gift. (207)

Thereby he creates an illusionary world, where he is the creator and forms the

Midnight Children’s Conference. There are meets, discussions and quarrels among

the children in the mind of Saleem. These children are a sort of multi-headed

monster, speaking infinite languages. It is spirit of multiplicity of looking at things

from one thousand and one ways, which becomes good example of hybridity.

Accepting the view as a creator in his mind, Saleem remembers the

congratulatory letter written by Nehru to him at his birth:

Dear Baby Saleem, My belated congratulations on the happy accident

of your moment of birth! You are the newest bearer of that ancient

face of India which is also eternally young. We shall be watching

over your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the

mirror of our own. (167)

Saleem as the creator of new India explains the difficulty of narrating his life story

because there are multitudes of different lives within him, as he is thinking for

thousand and one children. Like India, he must bring together this multiple

identities in order to define himself. He says:

There are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of

intertwined lives events miracles places rumors…I have been the

swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to
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swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and

shoving inside me. (4)

The alternative illusionary world of Saleem's life flourishes between the

political and economic growth of India. The thousand and one midnight’s children

are not only the product of his illusion, but they represent the events of India’s

future history. The children of midnight are the heirs of darkness welcoming the

new beginning. The number of children is the future plan of India. The imaginary

world created by Saleem welcomes the new beginning that mixes with East and

West, celebrating the multiple hybridity.

Rushdie’s relationship with India and the nature of his connection to

Bombay starts from his birth. His birth coincides with the independence of India.

After nearly one hundred years of colonial rule, the British occupation of the South

Asian subcontinent was nearing its end. Exactly three months after his birth,

Pakistan and India achieved their long awaited independence at the stroke of

midnight on August 14 and 15, 1947 respectively; the power was transferred from

Great Britain to the governments of each country. Exactly at 12 a.m. on 15th of

August Jawaharlal Nehru announced to the public and the Constituent Assembly:

‘... Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny; and now the tome

comes when we shall redeem our pledge – not wholly or in measure,

but very substantially’ ... ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, when

the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom’ ... ‘A moment

comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the

old to the new, when an age ends and when the soul of a nation, long
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suppressed, finds utterance’... ‘We end today a period of ill –

fortune.’ (154-55)

Like Rushdie, his protagonist Saleem Sinai is also born on the eve of independence

and the events of his life are closely connected to the events in the development of

both India and Pakistan. Saleem becomes the notice of the whole country,

experiencing the life and time of the multitudes, thereby becoming the symbol of

Independent India.

Rushdie has a strong desire to restore his past identity, he uses magic

realism for describing the important events that had happened in history. Saleem’s

narrative gives all details about himself and his family members, especially the

experiences of his grandfather provide a unique perspective to view the events

during the period of India’s independence. Saleem’s life is a microcosm of post-

Independent India. His attempt to reunite his various multiple identities reflects

India’s struggle to reunite its multiplicity after colonial rule. Saleem reflects on the

significance of India’s independence and recognize that postcolonial India is a

unified nation that didn’t exist before. In the narrative build-up Saleem refers the

aftermath of India’s independence:

a nation which had previously never existed [that] 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; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist

except by the efforts of a phenomenal will—except in a dream we all

agreed to dream. (124)

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Saleem’s story is half real, half dreamy and turns out to be the story of

India with its painful moments due to colonization. The self - refluxing attitude of

Saleem is clear from the beginning. He reflects with an element of nostalgic

memories that is magical. He feels the inter-relation of his life with the history of

modern India. He gets numerous historical events and dates mixed up in his

narration to make him the centre of India’s history. He is always conscious of the

fact that, “historical coincidence have littered, and perhaps befouled, my family

existence in the world” (119). He finds history eagerly waiting for his arrival, when

he says:

At the end of that January, history and finally by a series shoves,

brought itself to the point at which it was almost ready form to make

my entrance. There were mysteries that could not be cleared up until I

stepped on the scene. (119)

The novel portrays India’s historical events after independence through

Saleem’s familial and personal story. In the same way the story of his grandfather

Aadam Aziz reflects the historical events of his personal stories in the pre

independence period. The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre also known as Amritsar

Massacre which Aadam Aziz participated was a brutal massacre that occurred on

April 13, 1919 in the Indian city of Amritsar:

The largest compound in Amritsar is called Jallianwala Bagh. ... On

April 13th, many thousands of Indians are crowding through this

alleyway. ‘It is peaceful protest,’ someone tells Doctor Aziz. ... He

arrives at the mouth of alley. ... He is, I know, felling very scared,
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because his nose is itching worse than it ever has; but he is a trained

doctor, he puts it out of his mind, he enters the compound. (40)

This blending of history and fictional stories of Saleem and Aadam Aziz are

examples of hybridity.

There are many instances in Midnight’s Children where Rushdie uses the

framework of magic realism. Saleem’s gift of having an incredible sense of smell

allowed him to find out emotions and thoughts of others, came from his

grandfather Aadam Aziz, who also had a large nose and the magical gift to judge

others mind. For example, Aadam’s sensitive nose ultimately saved him from

being killed in the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. The sneeze of Aadam Aziz provides

a sense of humour and cheerfulness that distracted the violent attack of massacre:

... fifty men put down their machine-guns and go away. They have

fired a total of one thousand six hundred and fifty rounds into the

unarmed crowd. Of these, one thousand five hundred and sixteen

have found their mark, killing or wounding some person. (41-42)

Rushdie very beautifully plays with magic realism in such serious and realistic

incidents of history.

Like Rushdie, the characters in the novel attempt to solve the mystery of

their own identities. For example, Aadam Aziz becomes familiar with his future

wife, Naseem. He is allowed to examine her body through a singular hole in a

white perforated sheet. “So gradually Doctor Aziz came to have a picture of

Naseem in his mind, a badly-fitting collage of her severally-inspected parts. This

phantasm of a partitioned woman began to haunt him…” (22). In this way, Aadam

joins together the body of Naseem’s appearance. The perforated sheet is repeatedly
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mentioned throughout the text to present the fragmented identities that Aadam

Aziz attempts to solve it. Saleem and Aziz character brings out their experience

with history at different period of time, which is hybridization.

In Midnight’s Children, the self-determinant fantasy of creating a new India

depends upon Saleem's key roles as an author, and national spokesman. Saleem is

repeatedly damaged by his unreliable narrative with its biased truths and deviation.

He is a mixture of many cultures and religions, born and raised by wealthy Muslim

parents Ahmed Sinai and Amina, he is by birth the son of a low caste Hindu and

Englishman. Saleem’s distractive blue eyes present his biological mistake, in real it

links to his Kashmiri heritage, as well as his birthright from his English father.

Saleem is therefore a hybrid a product of the Englishman William Methwold.

Methwold seduced Vanita the wife of the street singer Wee Willie Winkie, who are

the real parents of Saleem. Therefore, “I became the chosen child of midnight,

whose parents were not his parents, whose son would not be his own...” (157).

However, when the family discovers that Saleem is exchanged at birth with his

midnight enemy Shiva, made no difference “it made no difference!” he exclaims.

“In a kind of collective failure of imagination, we learned that we simply could not

think our way out of our pasts” (137).

Therefore, Saleem is a hybrid of an Anglo-Indian. Padma exclaims with

horror, “An Anglo? ...what are telling me? You are an Anglo-Indian?” (158).

Saleem himself does not refuse the charge that he is an Anglo – Indian, leaving

uncertain to the racial details of his birth. The narrative that repeatedly charges

doubts on its own reliability, as the story of Vanita’s seduction by Williams

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Methwold are never revealed. Thereby the question is whether Methwold is

Saleem’s biological father or not, Saleem tells:

…My inheritance includes this gift, the gift of inventing new parents

for myself whenever necessary. The gift of giving birth to fathers and

mothers… How many things peoples notions we bring with as into

the world, how many possibilities and also restrictions of

possibilities, Because all of these were the parents of the child born

that midnight and for every one of the midnight children there were

as many more. (144-45)

By upholding his place in the family, his naturalized birthright, Saleem reminds of

the unavoidable British legacy in India. Saleem is unconcerned with who his true

father is. The narrative of his life is spent not in finding out the origin of his birth,

but rather to know the increasing number of his origin. Therefore, Saleem is not an

heir of single parents, but he is a binary product of many. He stands in-between

East and West. His fathers are Ahmed Sinai, Wee Willie Winkie, William

Methwold, Nadir khan, Hanif Aziz, General Zulfikar and Picture Singh. They not

only represent racial or religious categories of India but also bring out the hybridity

between various classes present in India.

Saleem retells the history of India by public and private stories. They are

carefully linked and interdependent. Even before his actual birth, he is aware of the

historical dates and important events of history. His birth which is a private event

becomes public because of his mother’s announcement as “‘Listen well’ I am with

child. I am a mother who will have a child, and I am giving this man my shelter.

Come on now, if you want to kill, kill a mother also and show the world what men
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you are!” (100). And the letter is sent by the Prime Minister stating that Saleem’s

life is to be a mirror of public events, for India. Later Saleem describes himself as a

“handcuffed to history” (3). All these events are personal, but in Saleem’s narrative

they are made public to make the text fairy tale. Rushdie deliberately makes

changes in the dates and events of history through his protagonist to make it a

fairytale. He says: “I took to hiding myself, from an early age in my mother’s large

white washing-chest; because although the creature was inside me ... I buried

myself in fairy-tales” (210).

Rushdie is very particular that history should add some meaning to his

novel. He says that, hence he is writing a fairy tale, he has made Saleem make

mistakes deliberately in his narration through a weak memory. He constantly

works to rebuild the traditional method of historical discussion and questions the

notion of what history means. He attempts a new way of writing his own history.

Saleem alters the facts of Indian history according to the listener’s interest:

Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far gone, in my

desperate need for meaning that I’m prepared to distort everything-to

re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself

in a central role? Today, in my confusion I can’t judge. I’ll have to

leave it to others. For me, there can be no going back; I must finish

what I’ve started, even if, inevitably, what I finish turns out not to be

what I began. (230)

Saleem Sinai’s narrative position in the novel makes him central of hybridity. He

self-consciously narrates his story with theatrical and literary devices. Saleem’s

authorship and creation of his life’s narrative becomes inextricably linked to the
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Independence of India. As a postcolonial writer Rushdie makes Saleem choose his

story and blend history according to his wish. Saleem as a character with the story

and a participant in history changes the events of history for the growth of India’s

maturity and individuality:

How in what terms, may the career of a single individual be said to

impinge in the fate of a nation? I must answer in adverbs and

hyphens: I was linked to history both literally and metaphorically

both actively and passively. (228)

Saleem’s connection to history exists in four distinct forms: actively -

literally, passively - metaphorically, actively - metaphorically and passively -

literally. Saleem expands on the different categories: “By the combination of

‘active’ and ‘literal’ I mean, of course, all actions of main which directly literally,

affected or altered the course of, seminal historical events” (331) and he defines

the other categories as follows:

The union of ‘passive’ and ‘metaphorical’ encompasses all socio-

political trends and events which, merely by existing, affected me

metaphorically. … Next, ‘passive’ and ‘literal’, when hyphenated,

cover all moments at which national events had a direct bearing upon

the lives of myself and my family. … And finally there is the ‘mode’

of the ‘active – metaphorical’, which groups together those occasions

on which things done by or to me were mirrored in the macrocosm of

public affairs, and my private existence was shown to be symbolically

at one with history. (331)

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Saleem’s character affects the course of history in the active – literal mode.

He also causes changes between the history of real life and the history of the

fictional world. For example, the assassination date of Mahatma Gandhi is

projected wrongly. Twenty pages later in the novel, upon reviewing his work,

Saleem admits “Re-reading my work, I have discovered an error in chronology.

The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date.

But I cannot say, now, what the actual sequence of events might have been” (230).

The purpose of this deliberate mistake is to highlight the difference between

history and fiction. Rushdie stresses the telling of this story as an act of creation or

recreation from the mind and memory of Saleem. Although factually incorrect, his

recollection of the date of the Mahatma’s death is very real and truthful and he is

unable to change the reality. “In my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong

time” (230). Therefore Rushdie has changed history according to his wish, which

is a characterization of hybridity.

Rushdie writes about Bombay to be the city built up by foreigners upon the

domestic land and it is entirely Indian in spirit and sentiment. Gyan Prakash in

“The Idea of Bombay” says about Bombay “as a city that we had heard of

New York, Paris and London but they were foreign exotic places with no

emotional resonance for us. Bombay on the other hand was our own a part of

India” (3). The setting of Bombay in the novel has various forms of hybridity.

Bombay is a city that embodies multiplicity in diversity. Bombay’s history

expressed by Saleem in the novel explains the process of Indian colonization by

the various Europeans such as Portuguese and British. Bombay plays a central role

in the Indian independent movement. The city with its religious diversity, social
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caste differences and multiplicity illustrate the struggles of forming a postcolonial

identity.

Bombay became a major centre of shipbuilding textiles and manufacturing.

The people of Bombay became the hero of the postcolonial nation because of their

efforts on business and law. Trading communities from Hindus and Muslims

played an important role for the development of the city. The city becomes the

sources of hybridity as Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and Christians lived together.

Bombay’s massive population with various religious and social backgrounds

brings out the hybrid concept to present the theme of hybridity. Saleem comes

from middle class Muslim family, “ayah” Mary Pereira is a Christian family and

Shiva is a Hindu comes from an extremely poverty family, that echoes the

religious and social diversity in the city. Saleem begins his narration from the city

of Bombay “I was born in the city of Bombay…once upon a time” (3) that

illustrates the hybridity between his birth and independence of India. Saleem

claims Bombay as his story’s setting and his own place of origin, his birthplace. In

introducing his birth at Bombay made Saleem comfortable, but the time portrayed

by him was uncomfortable for the characters to believe. The novel describes the

origin of Bombay and illustrates the city’s evolutions and changes. Saleem

describes the first setters of the city:

The fishermen were here first…at the dawn of time, when Bombay

was a dumb-bell-shaped island tapering, at the centre, to a narrow

shinning strand beyond which could be seen the finest and largest

natural…fish lover of us all. …There were. …may well have become

the city’s. (121-22)

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These ancient images of Bombay show how India remained a conquered

land throughout its history with the “Kolis” arriving first on Bombay’s shores, than

by Portuguese and British. This illustrates the multiplicity of the people of Bombay

and their theatricality as an authentic Indian citizen with diversity. Portuguese and

British illustrated their power by shifting the city’s association with “the benign

residing influence of the goddess Mumbadevi, whose name-Mumbadevi,

Mumbabai, Mumbai-may well have become the city’s” (122). Even after

independence, Bombay remains connected with the British in trading. The final

change in power to India from British as a change occurred in the “dominion” of

Bombay: “in August 1947, the British, having ended the dominion of fishing-nets,

coconuts, rice and Mumbadevi, were about to depart themselves; no dominion is

everlasting” (124).

The role of multiple parentages in Saleem’s life is a good example of

hybridity. Switched by Mary Pereira at birth and raised by parents that are not

biologically his own. He says

Even a baby is faced with the problem of defining itself; and I’ am

bound to say that my early popularity had its problematic aspects,

because I was bombarded with a confusing multiplicity of views on

the subjects. (178)

Like Rushdie, who is a product of multiple nations such as India, Pakistan and

England, Saleem sorts his own multiple identities. Rushdie made Saleem meet the

multiple diverse peoples in the city of Bombay and bring out the multiple in his

narration and to create new story from those stories.

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Midnight’s Children as a postcolonial novel depicts Nehru’s vision of

modern India, where the family attempts to welcome hybridity in religion, caste,

language and ethnicity in order to modernize India. Nehru offered that India will

be a model for the entire nation where the children may settle in peace. He

exhorted the Assembly to “build the noble mansion of free India, where all her

children may dwell” (647). Rushdie changes the metaphor through Saleem,

towards the end where he compares his son to India’s future. He says:

All in good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his

son who will not be his, his who will not be his, until the thousand

and first generation, until, a thousand and one midnights have

bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have

died, because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight’s children

to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy, and

be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be

unable to live or die in peace. (647)

Saleem reflects the relationship between the reader, narrator and nation.

The meaning and narrative pleasure depends upon the alignment of the narrators

with postcolonial India. The metaphor is created through the family epic of content

and structure of Saleem’s life story. When Saleem announces at the beginning of

the novel, “I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning--

yes, meaning-something” (4) to achieve the modern vision of Nehru, but towards

the end he finds he was unable to achieve it therefore he predicts that Aadam, the

infant he raises as his son, will continue to work:

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was a member of a second generation of magical children who would

grow up to be far tougher than the first, not looking for their fate in

the prophecy of the stars, but forging it in the implacable furnaces of

their wills. (534)

Rushdie observes the future of India through Aadam Sinai. He wishes the city of

Bombay to be peace and live with harmony.

Rushdie uses migration, rootlessness, searching for identity, mixing of

various religions in the city of Bombay, blending of East and West, magical

elements presented in the Midnight Children’s Conference, telepathy scene,

deliberate change of dates in history and multitude in the mind of Saleem, all these

elements bring out the concept of hybridity that has been used in this novel.

Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children describes hybridity of Indian history and

the idea has been shifted to Pakistan in his next novel Shame. As Midnight’s

Children mythologizes a new independent nation with hope and dream, Shame

mythologizes the acts of shame and shamelessness of another new nation called

Pakistan, which was created by partition of Indian subcontinent. This new nation

divided people from people, resulting in physical and moral scars on individuals,

families, neighbourhoods, towns and cities. Pakistan was a part of India when

India got its independence from the British Empire in 1947. In 1971 the partition

took place, by dissociation of Pakistan and Bangladesh from India. Rushdie’s

family migrated from India to Pakistan. This novel describes his dislike about the

politics in Pakistan.

The narrator describes the origin of Pakistan. He observes: “To build

Pakistan it was necessary to cover up Indian history, to deny that Indian centuries
 74

lay just beneath the surface of Pakistan Standard Time. The past was rewritten;

there was nothing else to be done” (87). According to the narrator’s view, there is

no true history; history can be rewritten according to his wish. But the problem

arises in writing it; he says:

As for me: I, too, like all migrants, am a fantasist. I build imaginary

countries and try to impose them on the ones that exist. I, too, face the

problem of history: What to retain, What to dump, how to hold on to

what memory insists on relinquishing. (87)

The narrator has gathered certain facts from the past history and made it a fantasy

to describe Raza Hyder’s victory in the battle of “Aansu” very effectively. He just

mentions Hyder’s drive away to the battle field, and at once gives, “an extract from

the family’s saga of Raza and Bilquis, given in the formulaic words” and the

legend begins: “When we heard that our Razzoo had pulled off an attacking coup

so daring...” (78).

The mingling of fantasy and history is clearly commented by Rushdie:

“By now, if I had been writing a book of this nature, it would have done me no

good to protest that I was writing universally, not only about Pakistan... Fortunately,

however, I am telling a sort of modern fairytale, so that’s all right ...” (70). The policy

that the narrator adopts to overcome the natural problems is to change history

according to his wish, by replacing realism with surrealism.

The protagonists of the novel Iskander Harrappa and Raza Hyder are

modelled on the real powerful political personality of Zulfikhar Ali Bhutto and the

General Zia Ul Haq in Pakistan’s history. The backdrop of the main story is the

political history of Pakistan, where the leaders control the needs of the people for
 75

their own purposes. Iskandar Harappa rises to power and falls suddenly and Raza

Hyder made use of the opportunity and became cause of Harappa’s death.

Rushdie recreates the major strands of the contemporary history of

Pakistan, where politics is a kind of family quarrel. He tells the story of a very

small group of people who are responsible for the making of history. The centre of

power is peripheral figure of the novel Omar Khayyam Shakil, the hero of the

novel and Sufiya Zinobia the heroine of the novel who symbolizes the literal way

of Pakistan. However, there is another figure, the narrator himself who emphasises

his own marginal status, as a loose symbol for Pakistan, in aligning himself with

the other peripheral figures of the novel, inaugurates an imaginative coalition

between himself and them. The narrator conflates himself with his hero Omar

Khayyam Shakil and points out that he was not very popular in his native Persia

but existed in the West “in a translation that reality is a complete reworking of his

verses” (29).

Like Saleem Sinai, the narrator being universal at the centre of all things

and claims the authority to speak about Pakistan. The narrator’s expression of

Pakistan’s misfortune is marked by a keen consciousness of his own intrusion into

the original affairs. He also examines the problematic nature of all languages and

specific difficulties in speaking English. A protestor shouts:

Outsider! Trespasser! You have no right to this subject! … I know

nobody ever arrested me. Nor are they ever likely to Poacher! Pirate!

We reject your authority. We know you, with your foreign language

wrapped around you like a flag: speaking around us in your forked

tongue. What can you tell but lies? I reply with more questions! is
 76

history to be considered the property of the participants solely? In

what courts are such claims staked, what boundary commissions map

out the territories? (28)

Rushdie uses English with awareness that it is an ambiguous choice for a

writer to choose the language of imperialism to his own wish. The choice of

language indicates the audience for whom the writer writes. Rushdie chooses

English to write his novels as English in India has a moreprivileged position than

in other postcolonial countries. Rushdie legitimatizes the spoken language by

reflecting the Indianization of English. Rushdie’s dialects and phrases are often

fictional work like angrez for an Englishman, babuji for a clerk or semi-anglicized

intellectual and bewaqoof for an idiot or fool. His option of words from Hindi and

English brings out his rights as a postcolonial writer, mingling the concept of

hybridity.

The narrator in Shame represents himself to be an appropriate narrator of

Pakistan’s post-colonial history. As an immigrant he brings out his migrant status

and the status of Pakistan and India. “I, too, know something of this immigrant

business. I am an emigrant from one country (India) and a newcomer in two (England,

where I live, and Pakistan, to which my family moved against my will)” (85). When

he describes the status of Pakistan: “When individuals come unstuck from their

native land, they are called migrants. When nations do the same (Bangladesh),

that act is called secession; ... I may be such a person. Pakistan may be such a

country” (86). The term “‘Pakistan’ is an acronym, was originally thought up in

England by a group of Muslim intellectuals” (86). Pakistan, in other words was

“dreamt” into being by “Muslim” intellectuals located in England.

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“P for the Punjabis, A for Afghans, K for the Kashmiris, S for Sind and the

‘tan’ for Baluchistan” (87) brings peoples under this double secession of hybridity.

The rewritten past of Pakistan by the immigrants proved to be a failure of the

dreaming mind. Rushdie is not sure for the cause

Perhaps the pigments used were the wrong one … a picture full of

irreconcilable elements, midriff baring immigrant saris versus

demure, indigenous Sindhi, Shalwar – Kurtas, Urdu versue Punjabi,

now versus then: a miracle that went wrong. (87)

Therefore, he is tempted to give his fairyland a title namely “Peccavistan” from

the word paccavi meaning “I have sind”. He says “‘Peccavi’. I have Sind. I’m

tempted to name my looking-glass Pakistan in honour of this bilingual (and

fictional, because never really uttered) pun. Let it be Peccavistan” (87).

As Rushdie, his narrator is also located in England. As a writer “the job of

re– writing [Pakistan’s] history” was “commandeered,” first by “the immigrants,

the mohajirs. “Who commandeered the job of rewriting history? - The immigrants,

the mohajirs. In what language? - Urdu and English both imported tongues” (87).

The narrator suggests that separating Pakistan is an act of past that formed as “a

palimpsest on the past,” thereby “obscur[ing] what lies beneath.” By rewriting

history Rushdie and his narrator insisted on their tripartite of being an Indian,

Pakistani and British. A multiple hybrid dislocations of Rushdie are clearly stated

in “The Indian Writer in England” that he “is not will to be excluded from any part

of his heritage” (87). He is like the mohajirs, who demanded that Pakistan’s

history should be rewritten, be imposed, that of the previous Indian history. He

undertakes to sallow up what lies beneath just as the mohajirs suppressed the
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histories of Pakistan. The “suppressed history” includes “excluded” histories of

women in a traditional patriarchal history.

But Rushdie and the narrator claims to be writing an alternate oppositional

history. For example studying the occurrence of “purdah” in the patriarchal Islam

society is more traditional. The word “purdah” has two distinct meanings. One is

physical, in the sense of women wearing a veil or burqa to cover their faces from

public view; the other is more complex where women live in seclusion, both from

men and from the sphere of civic and public action. One might be in “purdah” for

both ways, and still they are in control of the individual and public affairs, as the

Islam tradition says that women should be behind mask and net screen. Similarly,

one might not be in “purdah” and yet could be habitually influenced by “purdah”

culture and this is the aspect of the postcolonial writers. Rushdie’s Shame starts

with an impending death that highlights the negative aspects of “purdah” culture.

His statement is that society need not overlook “purdah,” not only because it

oppresses women but because such oppression unleashed a violence that will

destroy all the society. As he says in Shame it “humiliates people for long enough

and a wildness bursts out of them” (117)

Shame is a politically charged novel because it presents “a mohajirs eye

view”. Rushdie’s family came as mohajirs to Pakistan; therefore mohajirs is an

Arabic word referring to separation and migration. Exclusively the word mohajir is

used to denote the figure of the Muslim migrant and it is not applied to the Hindu

and Sikh populations. The narrator seems to privilege the mohajir, who is like

Omar Khayyam, the novel’s dizzy peripheral hero culturally positioned at “The

Rim of Things”. Omar’s loyal hesitates from the origin towards the end and the
 79

choice of shame and shamelessness reflects the mohajir’s. Rushdie as a mohajir

repeats the political scope as an Angezi or English brings out his multiple position

as a hybrid. Rushdie situates the diasporic condition in a Pakistani context because

it fictionally allows him to return to a place of reality and to write about the socio –

political fabric of the nation. He used the magic realist way of narrating the real

picture of Pakistan. He writes “the country in this story is not Pakistan or not

quite” (29) or “I may be such a person. Pakistan may be such a country” (87).

Rushdie blends the native tongue with English and adds new dimensions of

beauty and charm to his style of narration that marks him to be one of the most

successful postcolonial writers. Narrator’s feeling is often brought out with

“plaintosee” and the characters go on asking “don’tyouthinkso”. Even a feeling of

lost by a character is aptly embedded in “wheream I;” all these words become the

typical aspects of Rushdie’s writing. The use of ambiguity highlights him to be a

postcolonial writer. He states:

To unlock a society look at its untranslatable words. Takallouf is a

member of that opaque, world - wide sect of concepts which refuse to

travel across linguistic frontiers: it refers to a form of tongue – typing

formality, a social restraint so extreme as to make it impossible for

the victim to express what he or she really means, as species of

compulsory irony which insists for the sake of good form, on being

taken literally. (104).

Through words which are unique and do not find equivalents in a foreign

languages used in a country reflects its society’s needs and ways of living. Along

with English, Urdu serves as a local language to express the society of Pakistan.
 80

English as a universal language used in Pakistan cannot be avoided. The languages

used in Pakistan are good example of creating a hybrid, where two or more

cultures influence one another to produce something new.

Certain untranslated words also came as the fusion of East and West and

has an Indianized ending such as “Customswallahs” which shatters all the glamour

of a customs officer’s job and gives it a tinge of serving the sahib. And certain

words have been abrogated:

Bilquis Hyder’s head whirled. Trapped in a language which contained

a quite specific name for each conceivable relative, so that the

bewildered new – comer was unable to hide behind such generic

appellations as ‘uncle’, ‘cousin’, ‘aunt’, but was continually caught

out in all her insulting ignorance. Bilquis’s tongue was silenced by

the in – law mob. (75)

By way of gathering the essential linguistic peculiarities, Rushdie makes use of

literal translation of words such as “sister fucker”, spellings for “biskuits”, idioms

like “allowing their necks to meet”, unique word combinations as “black hair;

shifting, shifting,” etc. for understanding bitterly.

As a postcolonial text the native realities get subsumed in the realities of

the west and it becomes very difficult to rise above the throttling of values. So

magical realism as a tool with its support in fantasy becomes a solution to restore

history. Rushdie attempts to study the rise and fall of many true and imagined

events in history. The fall of Bhutto on one hand and on the other hand he seeks

Khayyam, Hyder, Babar and rest to restore their life.

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Hyder and Babar were the glorious rulers of the Mughal dynasty whereas

the character of Harappa brings out the make – up of modern day sin that lies in the

Islamic pre-colonial period. Timothy Brennan in “Salman Rushdie and the third

world: Myths of the Nation” feels that the history in Shame “is a history filtered

through the ambitious self – images of its protagonists – the history they in effect

‘try on’ to inflate their importance” (53).

The story of the novel blends with the story of Shakil sisters in the form of

magic realism. The mingling of the western culture to the Indian culture is

reflected in the party, after their father’s death. Shakil sisters came to know after

their father’s death that his enormous debts had been covered behind the wall of

the patriarchal society. In settling the accounts, they lost all the vast estates around

“Q.”. Only the unmanageable infinite mansion of Nishapur was left to them. In

their abhorrence for their father they threw a party to celebrate his death and their

financial ruin. Invitations embossed in gold were issued to only a few local non –

white Zamindars and their wives and mostly to the “Angrez Sahibs” and “their

gloved begums!”:

... sisters had committed the ultimate solecism: invitations, scorning the

doormats of the indigenous worthies, had found their way into the

Angrez Cantonment, and into the ballroom of the dancing sahibs. ... the

sisters were visited by a uniformed and ball-gowned crowd of

foreigners. The imperialists! – the gray –skinned sahibs and their gloved

begums! – raucous-voiced and glittering with condescension, they

entered the mirror worked marquee. ‘Alcohol was served’. (15-16)

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Rushdie calls them the imperialists. It was a wild night with flowing alcohol and

western style, music and dance as an influence of the western culture reflects

hybridity.

The dialectic of shame and shamelessness is symbolically entwined with

the power struggles of Bhutto and Zia via Iskander Harappa and Raza Hyder.

Arjumand Harappa the daughter of Iskander described famously as “Virgin

Ironpants” (107) is loosely modelled on Benezir Bhutto. The first Prime Minister

of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujib and General Yahya Khan are models for the

character of President Shaggy Dog and Sheikh Bismillah respectively. Robert

EMC Dowell writes in “World Literature Today” for instance:

Salman Rushdie has attempted in Shame to illuminate Pakistan’s

hideous political realities in an extravagant satire in which Raza acts

out the role of the Pakistani General Zia-ul- Haq, while Iskander

(Harappa) represents the deposed ( and later executed) head of state,

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. But one might fairly ask how many readers will

know enough of the inside details of these men’s lived and of the

grim events of the new nation of Pakistan to appreciate a satire on

them. (328)

In the conflict between Raza Hyder and Iskander Harappa for leadership

brings out the true history of Pakistan. Hyder is appointed to guard the gas fields

against the local tribes. He obtains a military conquest and enjoys a meteoric rise;

as a result a martial law is imposed; thereby he becomes the administrator. Raza

ruthlessly sends the prisoner to be hanged, that ultimately led him to his downfall.

He was demoted from his position as a minister to a commander in the military

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training unit. As the successor of Raza Hyder, his cousin Little Mir Harappa

prompts Iskander Harappa to be the minister. Raza was angry for leaving his

power and behaved wickedly to his way of living. Subsequently his immoral crony

Omar and his mistress Pinkie Aurangzab made him unfit to his political agenda.

D.C.R.A Goonetilleke in “Salman Rushdie” observes:

Isky, like Bhutto, is self – contradictory man, the scion of an

enormously wealthy landowning family (the surname Harappa is

double appropriate because the site of the Harappan civilization

borders Bhutto’s family estate in the sind province), patrician,

Westernized, yet he adopts a populist manner to succeed as a

politician – rhetorical speeches, bad language, and histrionics. (58)

The entire story of Shame is about Raza Hyder and Chairman Iskander

Harappa and the surprising marriage of Sufiya Zinobia to Omar Khayyam Shakil.

The climax reaches with the hanging of the chairman Iskander Harappa. Rushdie

sums up his destiny, “six years in power, two in jail, and eternity underground”

(225-226). Iskander Harappa’s daughter Arjumand later recollects the power

through elections which was not straight forward. “How could they be in that

country divided into two wings a thousand miles apart, sundered by the land mass

its greatest foe, joined by nothing but God” (178).The creation of nationalism in

Pakistan was made through the burden of laws by the leaders, without considering

the people . The political scenario is fictionalized in the figures of Harappa and

Hyder, similar to the relationship between Zia and Bhutto.

The relationship between Bhutto and Pakistan is similar to the marriage of

Omar to Sufiya. Through marriage Omar ultimately reinforces his power over
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Sufiya and through election Arjumand reinforces her power. In history it was

Bhutto who reinforced power through elections. Sufiya and Omar are polar

opposites; they are married in spite of their huge difference in age. The incident

that brings them together is interesting to explore. Sufiya is put in the hospital

during a life – threatening illness under Omar’s care. The disease is of vaccinated

origin, “a hot flush spread from scalp to the soles of her feet” (234), brought by

Sufiya upon herself as a “plague of shame.” Omar seems to be the right consultant

to treat her not only because he is a vaccinated person, but also because he is one

with no shame, the best treatment of shame being the shameless. By marrying

Sufiya, Omar saved and redeem her from shame.

Rushdie has exposed how shame becomes a part in the construction of a

society, where several people grow upon “a diet of honour and shame” (115)

within them, “But shame is like everything” (116) that has to be rejected in order

to understand each other. Studying upon the nature of rejection of shame in

between men and women is highly misdirected because women are only products

of male shamelessness. Sufiya is a picture of the treatment that women receive in

Pakistan.

Raza Hyder’s only misery is his home, as one daughter commits suicide

and the other becomes an uncontrollable monster, who is able to tear both people

and animals. His political acts of shame ultimately lead to his wife’s suicide and

his own miserable end, which he had planned for chairman Harappa. Sufiya

Zinobia is perhaps the most powerful character Rushdie has created. He had

created her with many stories of vampires and folktales of ghost. She is seen as an

embodiment of evil or ghost perpetrated by the leadership of the nation, especially

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by her own father. Just like Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children personify India’s

independence and who is responsible for the control of a nation, Sufiya personifies

Pakistan, but she is controlled by her father. The author narrator gives three

incidents that he had heard about London that was responsible for the creation of

Sufiya Zinobia.

Shame is a reflection on gender politics. Society sees that Sufiya becomes

seriously ill, develops right to fight for her rights and privileges. Narrator’s

imagination goes beyond the communal possibility, when Sufiya becomes illogical

and destroys men, fields, animals and finally murders her husband, the peripheral

hero, Omar Khayyam Shakil. Sufiya Zinobia, an outcaste from ordinary society,

moves into a world of fantasy and make believe. Magical realism seems to explain

the reality of a postcolonial environment because of two separate realities which

are relevant and neither of which is completely accurate or work simultaneously.

They demonstrate the magical realism has a hybrid nature. The double side of

Hyder and the bending character of Sufiya Zinobia bring out the hybridization

presented in the novel.

Rushdie included the fantastic elements without showing surprise that these

elements are present in the novel. And in this casual manner that magical realism

finds strength as a tool of social criticism tool. Issues from people’s daily life are

presented as something very ordinary. The hybridity in the character of Omar

Khayyam as a doctor and a husband is revealed in his treatment he gives to Sufiya.

As a doctor he finds out that it is “a hypnotic trance the subject can require what

seems like superhuman strength Pain is not felt, arms become as strong as iron bar,
 86

feet run like the wind. Extraordinary thing”. As a husband he treats her “I shall

watch her closely;” “there is a possible treatment” (234).

The novel is actually based on the rude corruptions of an oppressive nature

of two rulers, Raza Hyder and Harappa whose fictional images portray their real

identity. For example, the quintessence of Zia’s method of governance-

Islamization-cannot be messed in this dictate:

But the third reason is that these are laws, my dear fellow, which we

have plucked out of the wind. These are the holy words of God, as

revealed in sacred texts. Now if they are holy words of God, they

cannot also be barbaric. It is not possible. They must be some other

thing. (245)

Rushdie gives a semi-invisible representation of the misdeed of the two controlling

rulers of Pakistan. The most interesting is that, there is no basic fundamental

difference between the attitudes of the military dictators and the civilian. The self-

confessed portion of the conversation, as the narrator says, “I am forced to reflect

that world in fragments of broken mirrors” (69) pictures the symbolic characters.

While mirroring the criminalities of the two dictatorial manners, Rushdie has

excluded the day to day suffering of the common people. Perhaps in excluding the

details, he seeks to focus on the socio – political aspect of the misdeeds under the

dictator’s rule. The close correspondence between history and fiction is further

strengthened by the representation of major events in the careers of the

protagonists Raza:

‘Take over a government and you don’t know your pricks from your

sticks’. The opposition had never accepted the election results. ...
 87

Army was sent to fire on civilians. ... Arjumand Harappa tempted

fate. ... General Hyder was at first reluctant of move... falling with

him. On the morning after the coup Raza Hyder appeared on national

television. He was kneeling on a prayer-mat, holding his ears and

reciting Quranic verses; then he rose from his devotions to address

the nation. This was the speech in which the famous term ‘Operation

Umpire’ was first heard by the people. (223)

Through a postcolonial interpretation, Rushdie encourages his western audience to

view the life of Pakistan.

The narrator’s tale is one that insists on “excavating what lies beneath” the

histories of Pakistan’s intellectual and political leadership suppress or exclude.

Narrator’s fairy tale distorts the official truth only to draw “better maps of reality” (100).

Thus Shame’s “anti-history” is about Raza Hyder and Iskander Harappa. Rushdie

depths his truth against the “politicians” version and his fabulous tale gives the lie

to the official truth. This artistic journey through myth and fable has been marked

by awareness to produce a mythic Pakistan. Fabulous story of a mythic land called

Pakistan is imposed upon the actually history of Pakistan.

The paradox lies in the fact that the “Military dictators, venal civilians,

corrupt civil servants brought judges,” are the pale, phantom images of the

“exclusion” of Pakistan’s official history, caricatures of real life personalities. In

juxtaposing the real with the fantastic, Rushdie presents the “anti-history” of

Pakistan. Unlike conventional history that describes the golden ages and glorious

conquests, the novel describes the real events and its tragedies about Pakistan.
 88

Rushdie is aware of his limitation in respect to real country called Pakistan.

He dreams and imagines a postcolonial, theocratic state called Pakistan and

connects the mythic land with the “new moth nibbled land of god.” Thus, Shame is

a real document of the postcolonialist as well as a myth of the nation. The theme of

the text is mainly the colonial determination of modernity, the corruptions of post

colonialist and myths of the nation and separation of India.

The Moor’s Last Sigh is another version of Midnight’s Children that used

unbelievable fantastic family history to retell the story of modern India. The novel

is a family saga with the family chart of the birth and death of the Da Gama and

Zogoiby families. It is a novel about the Indian history told from the perspective of

minorities rather than the Hindu or Islamic Indians. The spreading of western

rationalism, during the nineteenth century was the major event of independent

movement until the progressive vision of Nehru. This modern vision of Nehru was

destroyed by the Emergency rule of Indira Gandhi. Indira Gandhi’s unacceptable

Emergency period of nationalism was replaced by obsessive people of India, who

violently destroyed whatever they regard as non- Hindu. Thereby the Jews who

were considered to be a non Hindu have become the rootless Moraes and symbol

of India’s helpless minorities. The narrator has become a homeless emigrant

representing the Jews.

Rushdie’s first full length post fatwa novel The Moor’s Last Sigh, presents

clearly the form of nostalgic tale about a fallen empire. The sigh refers to the last

Nasrid King who handed over the keys of Alhambra to the conquering Catholic

Monarchs of Spain- Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile.

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It was four and a half centuries old, the last crown to fall from the

head of the last prince of al-Andalus; nothing less than the crown of

Granada, as wom by Abu Abdallah, last of the Nasrids, known as

‘Boabdil.’ (79)

The major part of the novel is a Jewish – Indian, Moreas Zogoiby the protagonist,

who tells about the family quarrel, disloyalty, disillusioned artists, caste politics

and communal violence. The major theme presented in the novel is the migration

of the Jew from Spain to India and returning to Spain from India, the novel starts at

Spain and ends at Spain.

The Moor’s Last Sigh portrays the local culture and tradition of the Indian

traders before independence. Rushdie’s fiction has come to stand for the writing of

postcolonial literature that brings together the peaceful textual spirit of the trader

culture, with the historical and political struggles. It is a text with self-consciousness

that is constructed from a multiple of hybridity. Rushdie reintroduces a sense of

political and historical content in the creation of the novel. While engaging in a

process of self – revision, his fiction often seems to predicate the needs to revise

and to reassemble his narratives on English and European tradition. The title not

only invokes the end of the Granadan Islamic rule but also brings the end of the

Cordoban courts that are familiar to the western audience. This brings out

Rushdie’s multiplicity to understand the world and accept the world with hybridity.

The Moor’s Last Sigh portrays Bombay as the place of love and art than

with the national political events like Midnight’s Children. The novel is a

pessimistic updating of Indian political history, chronicling the rise of corruption

and Hindu fundamentalism at Bombay. Multidimensional portrayal of Bombay as

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the centre of globalization in India is highly portrayed by Rushdie in this novel.

Aurora’s painting brings out the idea of multitude in choosing her character from

the city of Bombay. She sketches the day to day lives of the people of Bombay.

She goes among them as the “unblinking lizard on the wall of history, watching,

watching, watching” and dreaming (131-32). She is a “social realist” artist. “She

returned day after day to her chosen scenes, and in slow steps the magic works,

people stopped noticing her; they as a house and even had curtains over its

windows, and allowed the truth of their lives to return to their faces” (130).

The Moor’s Last Sigh tells the complicated history of a Christian – Jewish

family in India. Moraes’s father, Abraham Zogoiby is a South-Indian Jew, who

claims descent from Spain when the last Moorish King Sultan Boabdil of Granada

was driven out by the Catholic armies. And his mother Aurora da Gama was the

last in the prosperous Portuguese family of Vasco da Gama. “CHRISTIANS,

PORTUGUESE AND JEWS: Chinese tiles promotion godless views; pushy ladies,

skirts- nor- saris, Spanish shenanigans, Moraesish crowns... can this really be

India?” (87). Moraes and his father represent the three major western influences of

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. He is the last survivor of a family descended

from Vasco da Gama, therefore Moraes is half Jewish and half Christian narrator.

The hybridization of globalization is been presented from his birth.

The Moor’s Last Sigh envisions shift from traditional to globalization,

specifically through Aurora’s painting. She attempts to imagine a world where

there is no insider and outsider issues, to separate or to prevent an individual from

interacting with each other. In her painting, she creates a world with nationality;

there are no boundaries and divisions among the countries. She is attempting to
 91

create “one universe, one dimension, one country, one dream” where people and

creatures of all types walk the beach together without boundaries, divisions and

margins in her paintings:

‘This seaside, this hill, with the fort on top. Water-gardens and

hanging gardens, watchtowers and towers of silence too. Place where

worlds collide, flow in and out of out another, and washofy away.

Place where an air-man can drowno in water, or else grow gills;

where a water-creature can get drunk, but also chokeofy, on air. One

universe, one dimension, one country, one dream, bumpo’ing into

another, or being under, or on top of. Call it Palimpstine. And above

it all, in the palace,…’. (226)

Rushdie describes Aurora’s painting of Moraes as a hybrid form of

painting. The word “Moor” is connected with two paintings made by two different

painters. The first is the painting of Aurora Zogoiby and secondly, an artist paints

over or repainted the famous sigh. In Aurora’s painting, she mingles the various

multi-cultural characters within a single painting “an attempt to create a romantic

myth of the plural, hybrid nation; she was using Arab Spain to re – imagine India”

(227). Aurora’s major paintings chronologically trace her development as an artist

and the progression of her ideas of a globalized world. She re – envisions India,

where people are co-operative and collaborative with diverse in culture, just like

Alhambra capital of Spain, was in the times of Boabdil. Rushdie stresses the

various religions presented in Aurora’s painting as a form of hybridity: he says

“Aurora Zogoiby was seeking to paint a golden age. Jews, Christians, Muslims,
 92

Parsis, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains crowded into her paint – Boabdil’s fancy – dress

balls” (227).

Rushdie interweaves Indian and Spanish history throughout the novel.

Moraes’s Grandmother Isabella Souza in nicknamed Queen Isabella and even

credited with her own form of “reconqvista” (43-44). The Jewish ancestors of

Abraham Zogoiby had came to India during the Christianization of Spain.

According to family myth, the Indian Zogoibys are descended from Boabdil.

Rushdie’s fascination with Spain and Spanish history turns him as a model of a

multicultural society “the fabulous multiple cultural of ancient al - Andalus” (398).

He wishes the post independent India to be like that of the multi-cultural nation of

Spain. India faced multi- cultural problems during the transformation of the

Muslism rulers to the Christian and Jewish.

The Moor’s Last Sigh represents “an elegy for a lost age,” says Paul Canter

in “Tales of the Alhambra: Rushdie’s use of Spanish History in The Moor’s Last

Sigh.” He also says that “for an era where different religions, culture and

ethnicities could have existed as palimpsest as they did in Arab Spain four and half

centuries ago” (323), whereas Rushdie tries to create a super hybridity of Moorish

Spain and Mughal India as the architectural styles of the two cultural fuses in

Aurora artistic vision: “The Alhambra quickly become a not – quite – Alhambra;

elements of Indian’s own red forts the Mughal place – for tresses in Delhi and

Agra, blinded Mughal Splendors with the Spanish buildings Moor’s grace” (226).

Paul Cantor also states:

In the dream of different cultures merging into a larger unity attracts

Rushdie to Spanish history. Moorish Spain appears to have solved the

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problem that has figuratively and literally torn India apart in the

twentieth century. Religious conflicts between Hindus and Muslims

led to the division of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan and

later to the splitting off of Bangladesh but even within contemporary

Indian product tension that periodically erupt into murderous

violence. (324)

The Emergence of “anti – democratic political leaders,” the alarming of

Hindu nationalism and the global market economy have shattered the democratic

secularist vision that Gandhi and Nehru had for India after independence. Rushdie

strongly protested the assumption of Indira Gandhi’s emergency powers in 1975

for the rise of nationalism and globalization, but it has resulted in people’s

separation, “After the Emergency people started seeing through different eyes.

Before the Emergency we were Indians. After it we were Christian Jews” (235).

Rushdie’s Moorish Spain offers a historical alternative to the miserable vision of

religious violence. Moorish rule lasted nearly eight centuries in Spain and during

much of their period Muslims, Christians, and Jews were able to live together in

peace and harmony and encourage each other for their greater cultural

achievements. Even though Moorish Spain was separated by architecture,

astronomy, medicine, mathematics, music, literature and philosophy, they have

achieved their goal and became superior in the cultural development in Europe.

The complex interaction of Islamic and Jewish philosophers in Moorish Spain is a

good example of the fruitful hybrid nature of the culture. Atef Laouyene in

“Andalusian Poetics: Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh and the Limits of Hybridity”

states:
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Andalusian history and India’s national narrative in The Moor’s Last

Sigh is less nostalgia for an exotic and lost Golden Age, as many

Rushdie critics have suggested, than an attempt to map out the limits

of postcolonial hybridity as an empowering subject position (145).

In spite of the historical accuracy, it points out the cultural politics of diaspora that

provides an index to the study of hybridity. The Emergency rule in India turns the

Moraes and his family from Indian into Christian-Jews. As Dohra Ahmad in “This

Fundo Stuff is Really Something New: Fundamentalism and Hybridity in The

Moor’s Last Sigh” puts it “Indian Jews represent the ultimate test of the category

of Indianness to absorb diverse subjects. … Jews are important both in their own

right, and also as symbolic of a more generalized minority existence in India” (4).

Through the identification of the narrator, Moraes and his family have a

connective metaphor towards family tales of subjectivity and national identity. In

the novel’s postcolonial India, the family metaphor attempts to show a difference

in religion, caste, language and ethnicity in order to reach globalization. Moraes

towards the end of the novel dies with the hope that the world will regain its peace

and harmony and he will awake and enjoy it in future:

I will rest, and hope for peace. The world is full of sleepers waiting

for their moment of return: ... I’ll drink some wine; and then, like a

latter-day Van Winkle, I’ll lay me down upon this graven stone, lay

my head beneath these letters R I P, and close my eyes, according to

our family’s old practice of falling asleep in times of trouble, and

hope to awaken, renewed and joyful, into a better time. (433-34)

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The novel portrays Rushdie’s double exiled position at national and the

individual level. His dialectical interrelationship between the author, narrative and

the nationality has been brought out in the novel. The narrative pleasure of the

novel depends upon the placement of the narrator with postcolonial India and its

allegory is built through content and structure of the family epic. Moraes the son of

a Christian mother and Jewish father represents the minority perspective. Rushdie

brings out the political history of India from the Moorish invaders to the

Emergency period of Indira Gandhi. Rushdie says the Christian Jews enjoyed the

rights in the pre-colonial India where as in present, they are treated ill. As a magic

realist text, Rushdie makes it a place to create and recreate the potential beauty and

harmony of the aesthetic India in the multiple form of hybridity. Timothy Brennan,

one of Rushdie’s most passionate critics in “Cosmopolitans and Celebrities” reads

Rushdie’s semantic and textual hybridity as a choice of cosmopolitanism over

political action. He says:

[P]ropelled and defined by media and market, cosmopolitanism today

involves not so much an elite at home, as it does spokespersons for a

kind of perennial immigration, valorized by a wandering, and rife

with allusions to the all – seeing eye of the nomadic sensibility. (2)

Rushdie’s playful satirical writing is evidence to hybridity. His style of

language, form and allusion remains authentic even after the narration of the

genealogies or family saga. In Rushdie’s novel hybridity is loaded with self-

conscious inferences of the colonial relationship of India. In The Moor’s Last Sigh,

the story of India is told by a descendant of the last Moorish Sultan, the literal and
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aesthetic references to the decline of the Moorish empire make the fictional tale

more unusual.

Mine is the story of the fall from grace of a high-born cross-breed:

me, Moreas Zogoiby, called ‘Moor’, for most of my life the only

male heir to the spice-trade-‘n’-big-business crores of the da Gama-

Zogoiby dynasty of Cochin, and of my banishment from what Ihad

every right to think of as my natural life by my mother Aurora, nee da

Gama, most illustrious of our modern artists. ... What was true of

history in general was true of our family’s fortunes in particular...

descent from great Vasco da Gama himself... . (5-6)

Rushdie’s feels unhappy for the disappearance of the Jewish community in

India; he gives a lot of detail about the Jewish and their treatment at Cochin in

order to bring the hybridity present in India. Samir Dayal in “Subaltern Envy?

Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh” consistently codes Rushdie as a Muslim

and his creation of Moraes’s primary identity as a marker of hybridity: “presumptive

hybridity: his colonization – and – displacement of the structural place of the

minority figure” (267) and Moraes as “an instance of the appropriation of

subalternity” (268). Moreas’s involvement in communal violence brings out

Rushdie’s oppression to violence:

Violence was violence; murder was murder two wrongs did not make

a right. … In the days after the destruction of the Babri Masjid ‘justly

enraged Muslim’/ ‘Fanatical Killer’ (… use your blue pencil as your

heart dictates) smashed up Hindu temples, and Killed Hindus, across

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India and in Pakistan as well. … They surge among us. …Hindu and

Muslim, Knife and pistol, Killing, burning, looting” (365).

The construction of Jewishness in The Moor’s Last Sigh is very clear.

When asked by Raman Fielding to Abraham Zogoiby to participate in an illegal

bomb project, he realizes that he is a Jew, he had been a “no – community man –

and proud of it” so the surprise is an “astonishment” (336). His father, Abraham,

who has been raised in the Cochin Jewish community, responds to the Moraes’s

announcement with derision: “You’ll be wanting a yarmulk now’. …[he] sneered.

And phylacteries. Lessons in Hebrew, a one – way trip to Jerusalem?” (341)

Moreas declares himself to be Jewish and refused to participate in Abraham’s plan:

I refused to be involved with the covert operation of the Khazana

Bank, in particular the manufacture of the so-called Islamic bomb.

‘You’ll be wanting a yarmulke now,’ my father sneered. ‘And

phylacterier. Lessons in Hebrew, a one-way trip to Jerusalem? Just,

please, to let me know. Many of our Cochin Jews, by the way,

complain of the racism with which they are treated in your precious

homeland across the sea.’ (341)

Revathi Krishnasamy’s in “Mythologies of Migrancy: Postcolonialism,

Postmodernism and Politics of (Dis)location” says:

[B]y decontaminating the migrant of all territorial affiliation and social

affinities, the mythology of Migrancy ironically reinvents, in the very

process of destabilizing subjectivity, a postmodernist avatar of the free –

floating bourgeois subject. Once this autonomous and unattached

individual, this migrant, exiled or nomadic consciousness, is legitimized

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as the only true site of postcolonial resistance, all other forms of

collective commitment get devalued as coercive and corrupt. (143)

Another example of hybridity used by Rushdie in the novel is the mingling

of East and West through the characters, Epifania and Francisco’s marriage.

Epifania is the true believer and upholder of her western values, she likes

everything to be English and stick to her Catholic values handed down to her from

her Portuguese heritage. She and Francisco are polar opposites, but she suffocates

her husband and this leads to his premature emotional death. Rushdie again

introduces the element of misogyny in Epifania’s portrayal. Like Sufiya in Shame,

she is compared to the black window spider, the only difference being that unlike

the spider, Epifania waits for a good opportunity before suffocating her husband to

death “Epifania swallowed the news of his death without a tremor. She ate his

death as she has eaten his life; and grew” (24).

Rushdie portrays the behaviour of the Indian population during the colonial

era through Epifania and Francisco. Moreas’s great grandfather Francisco da Gama

rebels against colonial exploitation and announces to his family that “The British

must go” whereas his wife Epifania claims that the British Raj has been purely

beneficent, something for which all Indians should be thankful:

What are we but Empire’s children? British have given us everything

isn’t it? – Civilization, 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 plate. Then why speakofy such treason? (81)

Rushdie is critical to the character of Epifania; he feels that Europeans have

not contributed anything to India. The Moor’s Last Sigh strictly comes under the
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global context of colonial repression and postcolonial resistance in which the

history is more important than that of the Da Gama Zogoiby dynasty, at the same

time the family history of Da Gama Zogoiby is inseparable from that of India’s

history. He gave the family’s origin as “beneath [Boabdil’s] roof, and then between

his sheets” (82).

Rushdie’s portrayal of Boabdil’s discreditable story reveals suggestive

reference to the drawback of medieval Spain, but the glory of Arab Andalusia from

the modern politics, became the possible recoverable place of a multicultural

utopia. The marriage of Da Gama and Epifania leads to the birth of two sons

Camoens Da Gama and Aries Da Gama. Aires and his wife Carmen bears no

children, while the union of Camoens and his wife Isabella leads to the birth of a

daughter, Aurora. Aurora Da Gama finds a mate in the Jew called Abraham

Zogoiby. They had four children namely Christen, Inamorata, Philomena and

Moreas. Moreas life becomes an allegory for that of the Indian nation as he is a

hybrid character in terms of race. His lineage interweaves history and fabulous

family story “Like Boabdil, the Spanish Moraes that he is palimpsest over, Moreas

Zogoiby, in his metaphorical role is a unifier of opposites, a standard - bearer of

pluralism … a symbol – however approximate – of the new nation….” (303).

Moreas and his mother Aurora becomes an analogy for the nation like the city of

Bombay that represent hybridity.

Rushdie’s personal experience after fatwa, a religious order issued by a

Muslim leader, has also put a light on the immigration. Moraes’s narrating events

of his life reflects the life of Rushdie. Moraes was born within four and half

months, half the normal child, when he was one year, he looked like a man of
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twenty and in the same way Rushdie was psychologically been affected by his

fatwa and he had to go in underground existence as he was to put to death at an

early age. He comments “Speaking for myself at this late hour? Just about

managing, thanks for asking: though old, old, old before my time” (53).

Moreas Zogoiby’s life is at twice the speed he ought to be in his prime. He

is aged too quickly and old and weakened as the post – independent India. Aurora

uses Moraes the ultimate unfit as an inspiration and object of luck for her work.

She attempts to paint a world in which he is no longer an outsider but rather a

representative of an ultimate alliance between people, where illusions of

boundaries are broken and people are bound together by their humanity at the same

time celebrating their difference. The major paintings of Moraes represent the idea

of ideal hybridized world. Aurora’s painting blends her family members’ images

within the crowd to show that she feels a basic separation between peoples of all

sorts but that was impossible. The separation is only a fantasy of human minds; the

family in India cannot be isolated anywhere. She paints every picture at the mural

as a part of “Mother India,” with love and care. Her opinion is that people in India

have a common law, whatever traditions or religion they may be, but they are

bound as children of India.

Aurora creates her first major painting at her teenage; she was house

arrested for throwing out some precious items from the house. In her frustration

she started to paint in the vast mural on wall and ceiling of her room which brings

out the hybridity of her family’s past, present and future into one image: “[t]he

room was her act of mourning” (61). At the centre of her painting was Isabelle’s
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face and when her father Camoens sees the mural painting for the first time, they

weep in mourning, that brings Aurora’s major theme to emerge:

Aurora had composed her giant work in such a way that the images of

her family had to light their way through his hyper – abundance of

imagery she was suggesting that the privacy of cabral Island was an

illusion and this mountain this hive, this metamorphic line of

humanity was the truth. (60)

Family events inspired her wall painting but they do not dominate it; they appeared

at the centre of her painting but what attracted most of the viewers’ eyes was the

crowd of different people present in her painting. Camoens views her painting for

the first time: “The rapid rush of the composition draws him on world, for away

from the personal and into the throng, for above and around itself the dense

crowed, the crowd without boundaries” (60). The “crowd without boundaries” is

very important because it interweaves with the family, rather than the place

secluded on Cabral Island separated from the rest of the world. Therefore, it brings

out Aurora’s feelings that boundaries and borders are entirely imaginary and man

created it. Though he is separated from India, his love for the nation is inseparable.

Aurora chooses to paint her scenery in Alhambra under Boabdils rule. She

has erased all boundaries that she can possibly erase and has created her own

Alhambra. She inter-mingles those peoples and creatures and shows them sharing a

land and a sea together. There are no divisions of time, reality, fantasy, wealth,

poverty and ethnicity. She has created a world in which literally all boundaries are

broken. Aurora says that she has created a Palestine land that presented certain

face, but that face is the product of its history, layers and diversity. All Indians
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share these histories, layers and diversities all over India. Aurora’s inspiration and

centrepiece in her painting is Moraes; he is the ultimate hybrid in the novel. He has

a wide variety of cultural and ethnic histories like that of India.

Jonathan Rutherford in “Identity, Community, and Culture” says about

Rushdie’s usual themes:

[it] is hardly surprise[ing] to find a narrator and title character who

claims from Portuguese stock lives in India, speaks English, bears an

Arabic last name and seem to be a letter day incarnation of his

legendary ancestor Boabdil the last Moorish king of Spain. (94)

But Rushdie does not stop at marking Moraes merely a cultural hybrid but he also

makes Aurora to erase the boundaries between the countries. Moraes’s placement

at the centre of the narrative in novel confirms Rushdie’s well established interest

in hybrid identities. Jew, Muslim and Indian provide as index to the text’s

exploration of hybridity. Moraes the half Jewish and half Christian is on his way to

self exile in Spain.

Salman Rushdie’s Fury is an intellectual and autobiographical novel set in

New York. It is a study of the protagonist’s personal fury on a universal context.

Rushdie as multicultural immigrant from India to England and England to America

vividly portrays the sensitive psyche, pain and suffering of the immigrant in this

novel. He voices for the immigrant caught up in the circle of a multicultural world,

who is trying to define their identity, as a cultural hybrid in the multicultural

society. Rushdie as well as Homi Bhabha considered this hybridization of cultures

as the central aspect of postcolonialism and a product for the growth of

globalization.
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Fury explores the hybrid nature of the characters: “Everywhere you looked,

through Professor Malik Solanka, the fury was in the air. Everywhere you listened

you heard the beating of the dark goddesses’ wings” (123). In this exploration of

the self, the fury within the protagonist adopts a psychoanalytical as well as

sociological study of the world. The narrative is quite simple, the hero of the novel

Malik Solanka migrated from Bombay to London, studied and settled as a

Professor at King’s College, Cambridge. Solanka got married Sara first, it was a

failure, then he married to Eleanor and had a son called Asmaan. Solanka as a

historian is not happy with the academic life:

Professor Solanka in the late 1980s despaired of the academic life, its

narrowness, infighting and ultimate provincialism. ‘The grave yawns

for us all, but for college dins it yawns with boredom’, he proclaimed

to Eleanor, adding, unnecessarily as things turned out, ‘Prepare for

poverty’. Then to the consternation of his fellows, but with wife’s

unqualified approval, he resigned his tenured position at King’s

Cambridge. (14)

Professor Solanka finally gave up the academic life at Cambridge and

turned to be a businessman, doing philosophical dolls for television. Salman

Rushdie as an immigrant chooses his character to be immigrant such as Saleem

Sinai, Omar Khayyam Shakil, Moraes Zogoiby, Malik Solanka and finally

Shalimar the Clown. Malik suffers as an immigrant:

He was vulnerable to demons. He heard their bat-wings flapping by

his ears, felt their goblin fingers twining around his ankles to pull him

down to that hell in which he didn’t believe but which kept cropping
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up in his language, in his emotions, in the part of him that was not his

to control. (82-83)

Professor Solanka lives in an English society and extremely conscious of

his fall and carefully thinks over the difference between him and other emigrants in

New York. The emigrants from other countries settle down without making any

difference in life, they mingle, but being an emigrant form India and to settle in

other country is almost like a mask for Solanka. He did not reveal his Indian

identity in order to escape from the crime. The story behind the crime goes on to

reveal that his friend Jack Reinhart, a black American has been murdering young

American girls. Solanka had already identified himself with this friend by the

police and has a possibility of committing the same murders himself unconsciously

because of his fury. This “identification” and the “merging of identities” are the

main story of the novel Fury.

Malik Solanka is an example of a fragmented “self”. Solanka as a migrant

from India to England had a childhood experience of rejection and alienation from

his family: “As the bonds of family weakened, the furies began to intervene in all

of human life” (251). He is neglected and severed by his re - married mother and

his step - father. Abused by his step - father and emotionally alienated from his

mother, Solanka is further pushed to the edge of fury when he migrated to

England:

… in 1963, the eighteen-year-old Solanka had needed rescuing. He

had spent his whole first day at college in a state of wild, over-

weening funk, unable to get out of bed, seeing demons. The future

was like an open mouth waiting to devour him…, and the past –
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Solanka’s links with his family were badly eroded –the past was a

broken pot. Only this intolerable present remained, in which he found

he couldn’t function at all. (20)

Unable to manage with the cultural differences, he wildly follows the dictated

western society which shocks as well as attracts him with its liberality. He tries to

adjust himself, but his adjustment is merely a cover-up; he enters into relationship

of marriage only to throw away his fury: “Solanka had never thought of himself as

a bolter or quitter, yet he has shed more skins than a snake. Country, family and

not one wife but two had been left in his wake. Also, now, a child” (29).

Rushdie is alienated from India and he is very tired of writing about India

and Indians, thereby he just mentions Bombay as Solanka’s birth place and does

not give any details like that of his previous works. Solanka’s Bombay throws light

on the dirty actions of his step - father, which is not only associated with Bombay

alone but present all over the universe. Therefore, he reflects his relationship with

the family and not with Bombay. The reason for Solanka’s “fury” is a secret

identity which he carries throughout the novel. His father is an Indian, who

neglected them and his mother soon after his birth, got married to another man.

His stepfather was a sexual deformer; these reasons brought fury within him.

Young Solanka wanted to forget both these facts. Therefore he settled with the

mask of an English wife and a respectable job in England. The metaphor of the

masks is ultimately the dolls that become a symbol for the intellectual garb of an

individual or nation that is trying to become famous by adopting the western

philosophy. The exile was declared by his family and not offered by Bombay.
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The exile is offered to Solanka by his education at Cambridge. The

profession of a philosopher and historian made his personal and intellectual exile.

Migrant to a foreign land alienated him socially and culturally. His yearning to re-

connect his roots, his native, reflects in the form of the dolls that he creates, giving

them life and a past. As he was investigating the creation of Little Brain to be his

mask, he comes to know that he is fighting for the survival of life with the mask

and it made him to live at England. Salanka, celebrity intellectual and retired

historian ideas has left his wife and son and goes to New York; he thinks New

York will be place of interval for his fury and his family life. He says through

walking abnormally on the streets of the city in the novel’s early pages. Malik’s

thoughts indicate some of this contempt:

In all of India, China, Africa, and much of the southern American

continent, those who had the leisure and wallet for fashion-- or more

simply, in the poorer latitudes, for the mere acquisition of things –

would have killed for the street merchandise of Manhattn, as also for

the cast – off clothing and soft furnishings to be found in the opulent

thrift stores. (5)

But America was not the place of peace he expected and continues, “America

insulted the rest of the planet […] by treating such bounty with the shoulder-

shrugging casualness of the inequitably wealthy” (6).

Rushdie’s attempt to interfere the charges of fatwa imposed at him through

Solanka. Solanka’s life is deliberately made by Rushdie to separate himself from

his life and his celebrity of consumer culture and the media that markets him, in
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order to reflect Rushdie’s separation. He says these dolls which had earlier

performed the role of his substitute family are his real relatives:

Malik locking his thoughts away, confiding only in whispers, only in

the hours of darkness, to the dolls who crowded around him in bed,

like guardian angels, like blood kin: the only family he could bring

himself to trust. (223)

Media throws him out and by marketing his doll “Little Brain,” it separated him

from his life. In the dolls play narration by Solanka, the dolls and puppets play the

role of human being; they give a fable touch to the story mingling the traditional

puppet-show and the computerized animation film. It is an interesting novel of

experiment by Rushdie through the story telling technique, where the dolls and

puppets film not only portray the story but also briefly brings out the human

predicament as imagined by the novelist:

His earliest dolls, the little characters he had made, when younger, to

populate the house he’d designed, were painstakingly whittled out of soft

whitewoods, clothes and all and afterwards painted, the clothing in vivid

colours and the faces full of tiny but significant details: … Since those

distant beginnings he had list interest in the houses, while the people he

made had grown in stature and psychological complexity. Nowadays

they started out as clay figurines. … Such was the paradox of human

life: its creator was fictional but life itself was a fact. (26)

Truly Malik Solanka echoes not only Rushdie’s physical condition, but also

his mental make-up. As the novel begins Solanka walking abnormally in a park of

New York in a melancholic mood as if he has turned senile, old fashioned in apt to
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“reconcile himself to and increasingly phoney … reality” (7). He is fed up with the

life in England and goes to New York with hope, but New York does not offer him

a better situation. He expects America to “eat me … and give me peace” (5).

Solanka has come to America to be free of the anger, fear and pain associated with

his “back-story” (50). However, as he settles to a new life, unexpected sources of

frustration emerge to distress him from the past, he sees himself as an intellectual

hitting wealthy Little Brain, as a Cambridge don, the fury follows. But he feels that

America has a good future by the new settlers in the near future:

He felt the dull irritation, the slow anger, of the fool. He felt like a

drone, or a worker ant. He felt like one of the shuffling thousand in

the old movies of Chaplin and Fritz Lang, the faceless ones doomed

to break their bodies on society’s wheel knowledge exercised power

over them from on high. The new age had new emperors and he

would be their slave. (45)

Still New York appears to Solanka as a goal of the world’s lust and the “Insult”

made the rest of the planet more eager than ever. The novelist is conscious of the

psychological aspect of the people’s fascination for America and perhaps he is one

among them. He chooses this country for migration, though he knew New York

City as a circle of hell, bore to death with full volume and metropolitan city of

fury. For Solanka, America is a possible refuge from his own past, he wants to lose

his root and his past identity forever in America.

Even though the novel begins in America, it pictures Solanka’s painful life

in London and his childhood days in Bombay. Solanka is unable to cope with the

realities of life’s frustration. In a moment of rage he loses control and stands at the
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very edge of tragedy and finally saved at the nick of time by the realization of his

son’s presence. His son Asmaan is the only person who gives meaning to his

disordered life, who also plays the role of his principles, “Asmaan twisted in him

like a knife” (126). Solanka escaped not only from his family and his past, but also

from the country through his son Asmaan, “He had conceived, in that instant, an

almost religious belief in the power of flight. Fight would save others from him

and him from himself” (80).

Geographical distances are not able to put out the flames of fury within

Solanka. His situation moves back rapidly taking him closer and closer to the edge

of complete and complex mental break-down. Mixing problems between the

mental fury of Solanka away from his life and the horrible murders of the three

society girls, Rushdie shifts the focus to the collective fury of human beings

towards the world:

Life is fury, he’d thought. Fury –sexual, oedipal, political, magical,

brutal—drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of

furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also

violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of

blows from which we never recover. The furies pursue us. (30-31)

Portraying the essence of modern contemporary society, Rushdie mixed a variety

of elements each having its own distinct flavor. This mixture or “chutnification,”

the author calls it multiculturalism. This hybridity is identified in the social setting,

where different cultures blend with one another mainly through the process of

immigration.
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The novel explores both destructive and constructive features of fury. The

innermost theme of the novel is broken marriage which results in fury. Solanka

fury starts from his first marriage between Sara and Solanka that breaks, again his

second marriage to Eleanor also breaks. In the same way Jack Rhinehart and

Bronislawa become a failure. Neela Mahendra is also a victim of broken marriage

and is looking for a new companion. There is nothing new or shocking as in the

western culture. Marriage is a matter of convenience and an easily broken relation.

The character of Jack Rhinehart is another example of the author’s agony for the

immigrant. Rhinehart’s character is a stark portrayal of the level of conflict caused

by multicultural society. His anger is focussed not only on white racists, but also

onhis fellow blacks for their lack of ethic unity. Rhinehart is angry at rich white

American’s “gilded milieu” and its “crassness, its blindness, its mindlessness, its

depthless surfaceness” (57). Description of the immigrant’s problems and their

strength was the idea of his familiarity and his eagerness to bring out unity among

the people resulting in his tragedy.

Rushdie’s protagonist Solanka is a victim of “unbelonging.” Finally,

Solanka considers the life in America cannot destroy his fury but he can accept it

as a part of his life. After meeting Ali Majnu, Solanka comes to believe that almost

everyone is provoked by different kinds of furies: “Human life was now lived in

the moment before the fury, when the anger grew” (129). The example of hybridity

is presented by the character Ali Majnu, the novice taxi driver in New York as

Solanka says:

Manju meant beloved. This particular Beloved looked twenty-five or

less, nice handsome boy, tail and skinny, with a sexy John Travolta
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quiff, and here he was living in New York, with a steady job: what

had so comprehensively gotten his goat? … Beloved Ali was Indian

or Pakistani, but, no doubt out of some misguided collectivist spirit of

paranoic pan- Islamic solidarity, he blamed all New York road users

for the tribulations of the Muslim world. (65-66)

Solanka returns to England as a last attempt to protect his remaining link

to life and that is his relationship with his son. Searching for identity is not a lonely

journey; it is a journey of an individual in blending of the self with the others;

therefore Solanka wanted to find his identity with his son. He was worried by the

ghosts of his past and tormented by the cultural diversities of his life in America.

Love frees him from such imprisonment and enables him to deconstruct the

boundaries between the self and the other. Asmaan his son becomes his future life

and he has lots of hope towards his future.

Thus, Fury has represented the fury of a man in front of various cultures

and his difficulty in settling to the modern world. Rushdie points out towards the

end of the novel that act of love, acceptance and celebration of life in its multi-

cultural, multi-faceted and multicoloured aspects are the only solution for such

difficulty.

Rushdie deals with colonial discourse that presides over the description of

Kashmir in Shalimar the Clown. He looks at the different factors that have

gradually eroded the beautiful city of Kashmir and brought Kashmir to the edge of

destruction. Just as Midnight’s Children, Shame and The Moor’s Last Sigh, the

novel Shalimar the Clown also portrays the distinction between reality and fantasy.

Across the globe and moving through history, the novel is an extensive study of
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Kashmir. The valley of Kashmir has been figured already in Haroun and the Sea of

Stories and particularly mentioned in Midnight’s Children. In Midnight’s Children

Rushdie’s concern is about Kashmir’s irritable condition that has been brought out

through the boatman Tai, who considers himself to be more a Kashmiri than an

Indian. At Chhumb in the year 1947 during the partition, he was killed by the

opposing forces of India and Pakistan.

Just as Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of Midnight’s Children is born at the

midnight’s stroke on 15th August 1947 and becomes a mirror of post-partition

Indian. In a similar way, the two protagonists of Shalimar the Clown, Norman Sher

Noman or Shalimar the Clown and Bhooni or Boonyi Kaul Noman are born on the

last night of Kashmir under the Maharaja rule. Manoj Nair in “The Novelty of

Words Lives On” states:

The novelist in Shalimar the Clown tries to understand the global

phenomenon of terrorism especially in Kashmir, through the psyche

of Shalimar, a terrorist, who, with his personal anguish and dilemmas

seems to be representative of quite a number other terrorists. (4)

Salman Rushdie’s, Shalimar the Clown is a multi-standard novel that has a deep

plumbing phenomenon of inter-relatedness of different persons and places spread

over for about two decades. Rushdie’s connections between globalization and

localization are clearly mentioned:

Everyone’s story was a part of everyone’s. Shalimar the Clown at

forward camp 22 befriended the luminous little man who had fought

with Afghans and al-Qaeda against the Soviet Union, who had

accepted U.S. arms and backing but loathed the united stated because
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American soldiers had historically backed the settlement of Catholics

in Mindanao against the wishes of the local Muslims. (269)

Rushdie as an avid defender and celebrator of cultural hybridity has

highlighted the globalization. As a defender he says that a hybridized world has

deconstructed and exploded the notions authentic essences and as a celebrator, he

celebrates the unity among the people to think beyond the differences between the

cultural, racial and national identity. Rushdie as an immigrant, who is caught

between three countries is in a position of an everlasting “in-betweenness” and he

is unable to survive comfortably to either countries. Shalimar the Clown is seen as

an example of the contemporary postcolonial novel that debates the themes of

multiculturalism, globalization, identity, tradition, terrorism, neo-imperialism,

Islamic radicalism of US foreign policy and the Indian state’s military presence in

Kashmir.

Kashmir becomes an idealized place, valued not so much for its beauty or

uniformity but rather for the manner in which it symbolizes how culturally

different societies can create a heritage of tolerance and civilization. Rushdie

attempts to celebrate beauty of Kashmir’s variability of identity, the energy of

spaces and the interaction between the global and the local during the pre-

independence period. And he strongly protests the current disturbed world that is

in need of effective multiculturalism. Shalimar the Clown voices the concept of a

borderless world of hybridity and its implications is brought out by Rushdie that

“everywhere was now a part of everywhere else. Russia, America, London,

Kashmir. Our livers, our stories, flowed into one another’s, were no longer our

own, individual, discrete” (37). The theories of globalization have moved from
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cultural imperialism or neo- imperialism to the analysis of hybridization and

interrelationship of global societies.

Rushdie celebrates the cultural mixture through presenting Pachigam as

land of eternal beauty and charm, where peace, love, and brotherhood portray the

Kashmiri way of life. In Pachigam, Muslims and Hindus live in a peaceful

coexistence:

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. This was how things had to be. This was Kashmir. (57)

By presenting Kashmir as the ideal world with its unique way of life, where

differences and divisions are non-existent, Rushdie highlights and explores a

dialect form of cosmopolitanism in this novel.

Rushdie’s symbolic hypothesis of the novel is combining personal human

element with globalization. The element of displacement in human being is

brought out through the arena of Kashmir. Kashmir is Macando or Bombay or

Gupland or Chupland to Rushdie, but he merges with a human importance in the

context of hybridity. Kashmir portrays the romantic, patriotic and terrorist image

and symbol of human life which Rushdie wanted to picture in his novel. He

wanted to portray a fictional Kashmir but mystified in truth and fantasy therefore,

there was more real truth than imaginary truth. This is not the story of Shalimar or

Max Ophuls or India, but is about the tragedy of Kashmir and Kashmiris.

Rushdie brings out the ideal of Kashmir, the ethos or the values of

Pachigam which serve as the basis for hybridity within it. He tends to erase or
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reduce the threatening aspects of religious and class differences. This point is

clearly personified by Abdullah Noman, Shalimar’s father, when he declares that:

Kashmiriness, the belief that at the heart of Kashmir culture there

was a common bond that transcended all other differences] … [So we

have not only Kashmiriness to protect but Pachigaminess as well.We

are all brothers and sisters here]…[There is no Hindu-Muslim issue.

Two Kashmiri-two Pachigami- youngsters wish to marry, that’s all. A

love match is acceptable to both families and so a marriage there will

be; both Hindu and Muslim customs will be observed. (110)

Rushdie invokes the ideal of Kashmir in his portrait of the village of Pachigam,

particularly in his description of the romance between Shalimar the Clown and

Boonyi. Though Shalimar the Clown is Muslim and Boonyi is Hindu, their

marriage is welcomed by the villagers and they are married in the name of

Kashmiriyat. Their marriage represents the victory of Kashmir and comprises a

national romance that bridges cultural and religious differences. Kashmir is

depicted in this hybrid image as worldly and anti-communal place, where the

romance between Shalimar the Clown and Boonyi serves to show the powerful

spirit of Kashmir. Rushdie wants to introduce Pachigam as culturally rich, hybrid

and diverse place where peace remains between human being without any

difference in their religion. He also wanted to portray the pre-colonial societies

were multi-cultural and hybridity cherished along with their diversity.

Rushdie clearly pictures the village of Pachigam and its surroundings

through his characters. The beauty of the village has been brought out through the

mouth of a vanishing trick specialist Sarkar, the Magician, who narrates the origin
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of Shalimar Bagh, the garden close to Pachigam. Kashmir is a paradise on earth

and the heavenly tooba tree has been planted on this earthly place in the centre of

Shalimar Bagh. Rushdie combines myth and history to declare that some spiritual

men exposed the presence of the tree on earth to Emperor Jahangir who has built

the Shalimar Bagh around it. The emperor died before reaching the long-lasting

heaven of his earthly paradise, his Bagh. This idea is repeated in the middle of the

narrative by Rushdie as: “Paradise too was a garden – Gulistan, Jannat, Eden- and

here before him was its mirror on earth” (127). Rushdie celebrates in contrast

between myth and history and his own experimental views with the incredible and

wondrous beauty of Kashmir. The Mughal gardens Nishat, Chashma Shahi and

Shalimar are part of landscape as well as the mindscape and add shine to the lives

of the people of Kashmir. For example, Shalimar Bagh evokes strong multiple

emotions in the hearts and minds of characters in the novel. Abdullah Noman

reveals:

closed his eyes and conjured up to long-dead creator of this

wonderland of swaying treesm, liquid terraces and water music, the

horticulturalist monarch for whom the earth was the beloved and such

gardens were his verdant love. Songs to it. (127-128).

Before the arrival of American Ambassador and other destructive forces,

the Kashmiri people had no rooms for cultural or religious clashes in the Kashmiri

community. Though Boonyi belongs to a Hindu and Shalimar is a Muslim, their

prohibited affair was welcomed by their families and communities. Their village

Pachigam had a familiar principle of “Kashmiriyat, Kashmiriness, the belief at the

heart of Kashmiri culture. There was a common bond that transcended all other
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differences. …We are all brothers and sisters here” (71) and Shalimar’s father,

Abdullah, the leader of a Felliniesque band proclaims that they don’t have any

difference between the Hindu-Muslim in this village. In Pachigam, people of all

religions jointly participate in the arts that are the basis of the village’s nutrition

and when differences and hostility arise, they are inactive by unity and common

respect. In a nutshell, through the novel the Kashmiri people celebrate cultural

pluralism and the act of cultural translation leads to the rejection of the importance

of a previous unique or culture society.

Shalimar the Clown not only tells the story of Pachigam, but it is story of

the universe. The novel begins and returns at the end of Los Angeles and at times

moves to Kashmir then crosses the continental Europe and England through a flash

back technique. Its chief characters, Shalimar the Clown, Max Ophuls, Boonyi and

Kashmira, are closely linked as a hybrid. Rushdie as a forceful champion of the

hybrid declares that the community of Pachigam is a multicoloured society that

becomes a good example for globalization.

Edward Said in “Culture and Imperialism” says that “All cultures are

involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous,

extraordinarily differentiated and un-monolithic” (82). In this context of

globalization and global migration, people travel freely and they export and import

new ideas. There is no way of returning into homogenous and unified cultures,

because cultures are all marked and influenced by cultural hybridism. To show the

fact that places are dynamic and changing, Rushdie describes how Alsace, a

French city, was historically subject to the Frenchification, de-Frenchification and

Germanification. This period of migrantion and multifaceted globalization has

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irritated Rushdie: “Get smashed and then they are no longer the places they were”

(363), and Pachigam is a good example, where the peace, harmony and tolerance

prevailed village changes its idealized place into a battlefield between two

ideological poles, Islamic radicalism and the Indian army. Rushdie also highlights

the impact of globalization on spaces and this is obvious in his description of Los

Angeles, Paris and Strasbourg as “shape-shifted” spaces (141). Therefore they are

no longer themselves. This indicates that places are no longer firm, bounded and

equipped, but rather they are dynamic and changeable where the identities are in a

constant state of interaction.

Pachigam is a place of the innocent where the people mingle without any

difference between Hindus and Muslims. Their hybridity, multi-faith and multi-

cultural world of peaceful Kashmir is destroyed by the intrusion of repressive

forces. Increasing influence of strange presence on the Kashmiri landscape slowly

starts corroding and degrading the values of Pachigam, the Kashmiriyat and this

influence can be seen in the radical preaching of Bulbul Fakh, the “iron mullah.”

He lectures on the conflict between Muslim Pakistani and Hindu Indian over

Kashmir and made the difference between them by his speech. And the next event

that made the difference was the arrival of Maximilian Ophuls who represented the

American presence in the subcontinent by their exports and imports. Because of

these external forces, Pachigam ceases to exist. Charged with harbouring

extremists, the village bears the full brunt of the violence of the Indian armed

forces. Everyone is killed, people and life are totally obliterated from the place

where love had once bloomed and blossomed. Peaceful Pachigam is destroyed and

becomes only a name on outworn maps; “the village of Pachigam still existed on
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maps of Kashmir, but that day it ceased to exist anywhere else, except in memory”

(309). Thus, the old Kashmir is seen as a tolerant and eclectic society compressed

from all sides by “the new zerotolerance world” (290). Through the novel, Rushdie

expresses “sadness for the ideal that has been lost in Kashmir and in so many parts

of the Muslim world, the ideal of tolerance and secular pluralism” (290).

Significantly, the presence of the Indian army, the influence of the US and

the coming of the Jihadists from Pakistan helped Islamic radicalism to spread in

Kashmir. The Islamist radicals target Kashmiri moderate Muslim voices and

impose the burqa and the veil on Kashmiri women. Under the supervision of the

Iron Mullah Bulbul Fakh, the fighters are all instructed in the singularity of truth,

the truth of a religious fervour that infuses their mission. The Iron Mullah, for

example, says:

Question of religion can only be answered by looking at the condition

of the world. When the world is in disarray then God does not send a

religion of love. At such times he sends a martial religion, he asks

that we sing battle hymns and crush the infidel. The iron mullah says

that at the root of religion is this desire, the desire to crush the infidel.

This is the fundamental urge. (262)

Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown reflects a conception of post - colonial

identity. All characters in the novel have a purposeful or accidental experience of

journey in search of an attractive position for themselves and to have their

identities in the society, but they don’t have any identity and they don’t belong to

any place. For example, Boonyi Kaul changing her place represents the possibility

of finding her identity far from her birth country, she “looked like a poem” (100)
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but after neglected by her husband, she found herself contaminated and lost.

Realizing her mistake Boonyi scolds Max, who represents the American neo-

imperialism and economic globalization:

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. I am

the meaning of your so-called love, your destructive, selfish, wanton

love. Look at me. Your love looks just like hatred. I never spoke of

love, she was saying. I was honest and you have turned me into your

lie. This is not me. This is not me. This is you. (205)

Rushdie attempts to bring out the hybrid impurities of cosmopolitan culture,

globalization has changed the peace and harmony of each and every family in

Kashmir, as he says that “the loss of … one family’s home” is “the loss of every

home” (138).

Rushdie instead of seeking to recover lost traditional motherland, people

accept hybridity as a part of globalization. The novel’s main characters are craving

and yearning for accepting the global culture. The seduction of Boonyi by Max has

produced a hybrid subject. India or Kashmira Noman, the literal child of East and

West, of the close and far and of the global and local, who lives in America and is

left with no particular identity to cling to. Her father Max is somebody from

everywhere; he is a polyglot cosmopolitan whose identity floats over global

spaces. The message Rushdie wants to convey is that in this period of intense

globalization “everyone in the world has two fatherlands” (140). Boonyi

misbehaved the established moral, social and cultural values of her village

Pachigam and escapes with an American ambassador Max. She hates her village
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and is eager for liberation and thus she accepts the ambassador’s offer of change

“in search of a future” (367).

The novel starts with the description of Los Angeles, it is a city of rootless

people, mostly immigrants, who live in a sort of midpoint. They don’t belong to

any one place; they are immigrants who have a lot of identity and belong to two or

more countries at times. For example OlgaVolgo, Kashmira’s neighbour says:

today I live neither in this world nor the last, neither in America nor

in Astrakhan. Also I would add neither in this world nor the next. A

woman like me, she lives some place 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. (9)

Rushdie’s characters live in a situation of not belonging; they easily change their

identities and affiliations according the author’s wish.

Rushdie finally confirms that “there was no India. There was only

Kashmira and Shalimar the clown” (398). Through this deadly confrontation

between Kashmira and Shalimar the clown, Rushdie declares the rebirth and

deterritorialized Kashmir. In other words, Kashmira’s killing of Shalimar reflects

the destroying present Kashmir and rebirth of the peaceful Kashmir.

Rushdie’s novels represent a new life and a new beginning with the

dissolution of all divisions and segments. The multicultural and hybrid world is

welcomed on the horizon that has no place for any kind of divisions or borders.

Chapter-III

History and Fantasy in the Postmodern Era