Salman Rushdie

Born 19 June 1947. Indo-British writer.

His major works are Midnight's Children (1980) and The Satanic Verses (1988). His style has often been compared to the Latin American magical realism. Usually his novels take place in the Indian subcontinent.

Childhood and Education

Salman Rushdie is born 19 June 1947 in Mumbai (then Bombay), India, to businessman Anis Ahmed and his wife Negin Rushdie and grows up in a prosperous Muslim family. In 1954, Rushdie joins an English mission school in Mumbai before he is sent to the prestigious public school Rugby in England at the age of 14. Here he encounters many of the literary works that later influence his own writings such as e.g. the works of James Joyce. Rushdie reads history at Kings College, Cambridge, from which he graduates in 1968. In those years, Rushdie becomes a British citizen.

Early Career

He moves to London, where he works as an advertising copywriter but also starts working on fiction. After his first novel The Book of The Pir fails to be published, in 1975, his novel Grimus appears with limited success. Rushdie marries Clarissa Luard in 1976. Midnight's Children is published in 1980 and wins Rushdie the 1981 Booker Prize. The novel’s title refers to a speech by India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who, addressing the people of India, described the creation of the two new states India and Pakistan “at the midnight hour” on the 15th of August, 1947. India and Pakistan can be seen as “Midnight’s Children” accordingly. Using Magic Realism, the novel presents this as all the children who are born at the midnight hour (including the narrator Saleem Sinai himself) and because of this got strange superhuman gifts.

The novel Shame, set in Pakistan, is published in 1983 and in 1986, Rushdie visits Nicaragua and publishes the travelogue The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey one year later. Rushie divorces Clarissa Luard and marries the American novelist Marianne Wiggins.

The Satanic Verses-Controversy

In September 1988, Rushdie publishes The Satanic Verses, a novel that wins him the Whitbread Prize but also leads to a lot of controversy. Apart from being banned in many countries, such as India and South Africa, The Satanic Verses causes protests about the book’s portrayal of the foundation of Islam and even leads to riots. It is publicly burned by a large Muslim community in Bradford, England. Despite these protests, Salman Rushdie refuses to apologise and the publishers do not withdraw the novel.

Iran’s religious and political leader Ayatollah Khomeini pronounces the sacred command fatwa on Rushdie, in which the Ayatollah commands that Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was blasphemous and that all believers of the Islam had the duty to “hunt the author down and kill him” (Blake 6). A bounty of £1.5 million is placed on his head. Following the religious persecution of a British citizen, the British government grants Rushdie the highest level of police protection and security. From this time on, Rushdie has to live in constant secrecy, without being able to show himself publicly without guard and only briefly. Several translators and publishers of The Satanic Verses are killed or injured and even though, Rushdie has never been harmed, at least 37 people have died so far. Marianne Wiggins separates from him in the aftermath of these events but Rushdie continues writing.

Continuing Works

In 1990, Rushdie publishes Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a book for children which wins him a Writer’s Guild award. Between 1991 and 1995 he also publishes Imaginary Homelands, a collection of reviews and essays, a short book on the film The Wizard of Oz, East, West, a collection of short stories, and The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), another novel that is awarded by a Whitbread Prize as well. In 1999 and 2001 he publishes his novels The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury. Between 2005 and 2010 the novels Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence and Luka and the Fire of Life are published, and in 2004, his collection Step Across This Line appears.

Beliefs and Cultural Aspects

Being educated both, in India and in Britain, Rushdie grew up under the influence of Muslim and Indian literature such as Thousand and One Nights and Maharabharata, the tale of dynastic conflict among the Hindu gods, before he was exposed to literature in English by Shakespeare, Dickens or Joyce. Therefore, Salman Rushdie is regarded as part of what has been described as ‘Indo-Anglian’ culture, describing people who speak and write in English but come from an Indian background. Many of Rushdie’s novels are about people from South Asia, how they have come to inhabit parts of the western world, and how they are troubled by this.

As a schoolboy in Rugby, Rushdie also encountered racism. Some of his schoolfellows saw and treated him as a racially inferior alien. Therefore, racism is also a part of Rushdie’s representations of British city life. Although growing up as a Muslim, Rushdie later loses his faith and becomes part of a society which is sometimes referred to as “post-Christian” (Blake 13). Whereas Rushdie, because of his British Asian status, at first was often expected to speak as a representative of British Asians more than as an individual, the public reception of The Satanic Verses made it impossible for Rushdie to be seen as such. The success of his works, however, made him a pioneer for other writers of Asian background by making the world more receptive for their works.

Postmodernism

Rushdie is widely accepted as a postmodernist writer. However, he strongly insists on the importance of a hybridity from which “the new” emerges, without claiming to defend authentic traditions. He regards the flux of identity in postcolonial big cities as London and Bombay as a form of life that destabilised any sense of the term “western superiority” (Blake 64).

Citations

Blake, Andrew. Salman Rushdie: A Beginner’s Guide. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2001.

Cundy, Catherine. Salman Rushdie. Manchester: MUP, 1996.

--Grossc6f 12:22, 1 June 2012 (UTC)