MkR

 

• Salman Rushdie: Critical Essays: (Vols 1 - 11) , New Delhi : Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, 2006.

General Preface:

Salman Rushdie: In Search of an ‘Imaginary Homeland'

Salman Rushdie would define “ a poet's work” as : “To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep. And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish him”( Hamilton 112). Perhaps Rushdie himself best illustrates his definition. The author has, indeed, emerged over the years as one of the most controversial figures of our times who excites contrary feelings , both in his favour and against him, and both perhaps equally strong. But whether admired or criticized, the fact remains that Rushdie is a writer who cannot be ignored.

Rushdie is admired, and also disliked, in some quarters as a writer of brilliant political satire. Of course, there cannot be any question about Rushdie's commitment to struggle for freedom of expression, for speech to the silenced, for power to the disempowered, which he carries on through his satire. But Rushdie is much more than a satirist.

One of the major preoccupations of Rushdie's art is the issue of the migrant identity. Many of his characters are migrants drifting from shore to shore in search of some ‘imaginary homeland', and obviously the author identifies himself with his migrant personae in this regard, since in personal life he has been no less a migrant , drifting between India, England, Pakistan, US, and finally exiled, and nowhere at home among all these several homes. Search for identity is perhaps the one recurring theme in Rushdie's works, and understandably themes of ‘double identity', ‘divided selves' and ‘shadow figures' persist in his writings as correlative for the schismatic/dual identity of the migrant, as well as the necessary confusion and ambiguity of the migrant existence. Still what is remarkable is the way Rushdie has made migrancy a fructifying experience for himself. He has benefited from what he called the “double perspective” of the migrant writer ( Imaginary Homelands ) who simultaneously commanded the perspectives of both the insider and the outsider. Rushdie describes the world from this unique point of view of the migrant narrator. He is also conscious of his role in this regard in ‘re-describing' the world , and thus creating a new vision of art and life. As he would say, “To migrate is to experience deep changes and wrenches in the soul, but the migrant is not simply transformed by his act, he also transforms the new world. Migrants might well become mutants, but it is out of such hybridization that newness can emerge”. (B.B.C. Interview) With the growing wisdom of a visionary Rushdie has come to perceive the migrant's experience in its universal dimension. As he writes in Imaginary Homelands :

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated,

that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to me evidently true;

but I suggest that the writer who is out-of-country and even out-of-language may

experience this loss in an intensified form … This may enable him to speak

properly and concretely on a subject of universal significance and appeal.

By exercising what he describes as the migrant writer's privilege—to “choose his parents”—Rushdie has ‘chosen' his inheritance from a vast repertoire of literary parents, including Cervantes, Kafka, Melville, and a large number of Indian poets and oriental oral narrators among others.

For the students and readers of English literature Rushdie has carved out a niche for himself as one of the great masters of the postmodern novel. His novels and stories derive their special flavour from the author's superb handling of the characteristic postmodern devices of magic realism, palimpsest, ekphrasis ; he would also indulge in self-mockery , parody, subversive hilarity and intertextual allusions, weird and contorted points of view regarding history, -- some of the typical features of postmodern novel. Ekphrasis , as Coetzee claims, becomes in Rushdie's hands, a “handy device to recall the past and foreshadow the future.” His fantasy too can be considered a form or way of exaggerating the real. Rushdie has been rightly compared to such literary innovators - stalwarts of our times as Gunter Grass, Milan Kundera , Gabriel Garcia Marquez , et al.

Rushdie has introduced a highly entertaining narrative style, which uses a magnificent prose combining the oral traditions of the orient with the literary tradition of the occident in order to present his insights into universal human experience.

Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay in the year India won independence after nearly two centuries of British rule. His father was a Cambridge-educated businessman, while his father's father was an Urdu poet. At fourteen the boy was sent to England , to the famous Rugby School . The following year his parents moved to Pakistan . Thus migrancy and the pain of having divided loyalties had an early impact on the boy's mental make-up. After completing school Salman studied at King's College, Cambridge , and after graduation in 1968 took up several jobs intermittently .Rushdie's debut novel Grimus came out in 1975, and since then he has not looked back.

Grimus , an anagram of ‘Simurg', an immense mythical bird of pre-Islamic Persian folklore, is a fantasy, which describes in witty prose the odyssey of the ‘Flapping Eagle' in search of truth. David Wilson prophetically remarked in 1969 that “the book takes off like Flapping Eagle's namesake. Rushdie is a talent to watch”( Publishers' Weekly 30 July 1979). As if to fulfill the prophecy Midnight's Children (1981) , Rushdie's Booker-winning novel brought him instant international fame. In this novel which is full of exuberance and fantasy, Rushdie rewrites contemporary history of India in the form of a complex comic allegory and in exuberant style full of colour, taste and ‘loud bravado'. While noting Rushdie's stylistic affinity with Gunter Grass, no less a critic than Valentine Cunningham felt that “the disciple is, if anything, more energetic than his master in resembling contorted viewpoints” ( TLS 15 May 1981).

If Midnight's Children focused on India 's tryst with destiny in 1947, Shame (1983) directs our attention to contemporary Pakistan , by introducing thinly veiled political figures from real life, and using the story of a family as the metaphor for a country. With fine critical insight Rushdie presents the related themes of honour and shame, shame and shamelessness as cultural influences shaping individuals. While it does not have the range and depth of Midnight's Children , there are obvious points of correspondence—thematic and stylistic—between the two books.

The Satanic Verses (1988), which got the Whitebread Award, and also earned the fatwa is a spectacular story using a real act of terrorism which blew up an Air India Boeing 747 in 1985. In Rushdie's story the Air India jumbo jet explodes 30,000 feet above the English Channel bringing down Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, two Indian actors. Even as they are coming down without parachutes or wings Farishta is in high spirits. “ ‘To be born again', sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die. Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won't cry? How to win the darling's love , mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to be born again…' ” . Somehow they are saved and then follow a most bizarre sequence of events described in an inimitable style. How the novel shook the world and sent its author into hiding is known story.

The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) was the first major novel of the author to come out from the underground. Here again Rushdie focuses on contemporary Indian life, particularly the life of the minorities and low-castes as targets of Hindu terrorism. The story of a semi-historical semi-fictitious family is a superb fantasy, which spans over centuries, stretching from Vasco da gama to Moraes, and a family saga is made to capture the nostalgia and yearnings of a nation. The narrator-hero Moraes Zogoiby or “the Moor” is of mixed origin , related to the early Portuguese Christian merchant settlers in South India on his mother's side, and the Jews who came to India following the 1492 Spanish purge. Moraes tells the history of his family in India from inside a Spanish fortress where he is kept imprisoned. The narrator uses here a complex style interweaving symbolism, magic realism, and layering of meanings. The Moor's Last Sigh , a fantastic narrative with profound historical insight, which crosses over the boundaries and borderlines of historical times and social spaces, also marked Rushdie's re- emergence as an active literary figure once again after the fatwa. By means of his delightful handling of the puns, verbal games, buffoonery and other elements in the language Rushdie once again demonstrates his brilliant command of the English language.

The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999) , set in the world of rock music, embodies a tragic apprehension of life, which, however, holds in a superb aesthetic balance the Dionysian and the Apollonian visions .

Fury (2001) uses the fantasy of a science fiction to underscore Rushdie's persistent theme of exile and search for roots amidst rootlessness. Malik Solanka, a former Cambridge professor, leaves behind his past , including a wife and son, and comes to settle in New York with an animated doll, Little Brain, but only to get involved again with real life women , Mila and Neela.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), a fantasy supposedly meant for entertaining children, can be enjoyed alike by both children and adult readers. Written during the early years of the fatwa the book carries reverberations of the same. Thus the reader does not have difficulty in identifying Rashid , the Shah of Blah, who is a father and a storyteller, and has lost the ability to tell a story to Haroun who is supposed to represent Rushdie's real-life son Zafar. However, it is interesting to note how Rushdie succeeds in sublimating personal fears and anxieties into delightful flights of imagination which can be found exhilarating to children, and no less stimulating to the grown-ups, although the sense of a precariousness, of an uncertainty and fear, hangs on. Still the author does not hesitate to remind the reader of the basic issue of freedom of speech, of the very serious authorial issue of ‘rescuing' the ‘sea of stories' from the ‘Chupwalas' or silencing forces. In this book Rushdie experiments with a marriage of two genres, allegory and fantasy by means of conjuring a fairytale atmosphere which is simply fascinating.

Apart from his major fiction Rushdie has written some memorable non-fiction which also resonates with similar philosophical and artistic preoccupations. Among this the most well-known is Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism (1991). Step Across this Line (2003) is an anthology of his non-fictional writing during the period from 1992-2002.

As Rushdie writes in his last[as yet] novel, Fury , “Mystery drives us all. We only glimpse their veiled faces, but their power pushes us onward, toward darkness. Or into the light”. Rushdie continues his journey onward, and it is our privilege, surprise and delight to watch in fascination his ‘onward journey'.

Editors

Mohit K.Ray/ Rama Kundu