This article was downloaded by: On: 9 February 2011 Access details: Access Details: Free Access Publisher

Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 3741 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Third Text

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713448411

Salman Rushdie: The Migrant in the Metropolis

Rukmini Bhaya Nair; Rimli Bhattacharya

To cite this Article Nair, Rukmini Bhaya and Bhattacharya, Rimli(1990) 'Salman Rushdie: The Migrant in the Metropolis',

Third Text, 4: 11, 17 30

To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09528829008576260 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528829008576260

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

17

Salman Rushdie
The Migrant in the Metropolis Rukmini Bhaya Nair and Rimli Bhattacharya

Downloaded At: 16:34 9 February 2011

INTRODUCTION We begin with a song and a poem, the first by a contemporary but anonymous Indian and the second by Cafavy, one of the earliest and most famous of Greek modernist poets, because together they suggest two trends that constantly recur in representations of exile. In the interests of pithiness, we shall describe the former theme as nostalgia and the latter as nemesis.
In my native village, there tuas a banyan tree We used to sit under it, river used to flow under, Cow used to come and wander, o amar mind .... What 1 have left behind.... ANON (circa 1970) You said, 'I'll go to another country, go to another shore1 Find another city better than this one...' You won't find a new country, won't find another shore. This city will always pursue you.... You'll always end up in this city. Don't hope for things elsewhere. Now that you've wasted your life here, in this small corner. You've destroyed it everywhere in the world. CAFAVY (circa 1900)

1 Rushdie's own work repeats this image of 'a portioned shore' (SV 4). See also Ch. VIII 'The Parting of the Arabian Sea' (SV 473-507) and the final 'far horizon' passage (SV 546-7).

There is, of course, an obvious sense in which the migrant plays God, for he re-creates himself in a new life, reconstitutes himself in a new place. The city,

18
perhaps the greatest tangible symbol of human inventiveness, is the most 'natural' setting for this process, precisely because it is a centre of artifice, Babylondon, in one of Rushdie's favoured puns. Nostalgia for the lost prelapsarian gardens of a 'native' past thus coexists in the immigrant consciousness with an equally acute sense of nemesis, that this past is not really dead, not really forgotten, and that at any time the God left behind may visit retribution on the deserters from Eden who now crowd the neonlit capitals of the world. The aerial fall from grace with which The Satanic Verses* (SV) begins very clearly marks the migrant's passage to a fraught, human 'freedom', that has to be (at)tested in the metropolitan wilderness of Mahavilayat, the ultimate in both unfamiliarity and seduction. Less apparently in Shame (S) the hero of the novel, like the earth itself, is under 'angelic pressure'. Hell above, Paradise below;.. .he (Omar Khayyam Shakil) grew up between twin eternities, whose conventional order was, in his experience, precisely inverted; that such headstandings have effects harder to measure than earthquakes, for what inventor has patented a seismograph of the soul?; and that, for Omar Khayyam...their presence heightened his feeling of being a person apart.3
Downloaded At: 16:34 9 February 2011

2 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, Viking, London, 1988.

3 Salman Rushdie, Shame, Rupa Paperback, New Delhi, 1982.

For Rushdie, the master-trope of the immigrant, embodied at one level in all three of his heroes, and at another in himself as author and as a (media) personality, certainly seems to involve the 'feeling of being a person apart'. However, this rather general and seemingly common notion of individuality, is problematised in all of his three books through uses of language that appear designed to upset most claims of a coherent and stable subjective consciousness. Rushdie paradoxically guarantees his own status as a controller of discourses, a Superself, only by stressing that, as an immigrant, he 'knows' that there are no privileged representations of reality, no single tongue in which 'truth' may confidently be asserted. The twentieth century, whose child Rushdie has so often identified himself as, is one in which multiple meanings, interconnected but never identical metaphors and myths, have become an inalienable part of the belief systems of its intelligentsia. In this essay, we hope to show that Rushdie's own temporal, spatial, as well as political identity is governed by the linguistic zone he inhabits. This territory has been intrepidly marked out by him, in it he is monarch, but the larger empire within which Rushdie's glittering principality falls, we argue, is the empire of the media. The following sections explore some of the dangers, as well as some of the attractions, of this alliance for a literary migrant whose marvellous dexterity can only be displayed in the foremost language of the 'first' world. THE MEDIA This century has been the century of mass movements, of dislocations and relocations on a scale that had not been possible before. In particular, the twentieth century has been characterised as "a period of extraordinary literary migrations".4 It is also without doubt a period when the media has inescapably entered our lives, no matter which world we inhabit. This second fact in conjunction with the first entails that most representations of the phenomenon of migration are currently being formed by specific interventions

4 Meenakshi Mukherjee, 'The Exile of the Mind' in Bruce Bennett's (ed.) A Sense of Exile, The Centre for Studies in Australian literature, 1988.

19
of the media.* Any individual, however talented or committed, appears therefore in a relatively marginalized powerless position to speak for the migrant, or any other cause, unless s/he has access to media at some institutional, collective or personal level. Conversely, the gifted individual who has links with the media is transformed from being powerless to being a creature with tremendous political potential, and thus attendant moral responsibility. Rushdie typifies this genius with a moral burden, whom Bennett, summarising work by Sullivan, described in the following words: ...in post colonial sodeties, [those] who have 'mastery of metaphor and insight' may be the 'gifted victims'; their gift is to subvert conventional narrative patterns, to discover in their sense of exile new treasure hoards of language.5 In the case of a writer like Rushdie who has been as it were 'thrice displaced', but who is eventually producing texts in a metropolitan language (filtered through a colonial sieve) from a metropolis for an essentially metropolitan readership, it is not enough to merely look at this or that character as a part of a 'textual enactment' of the 'migrant's condition'. It is also necessary to situate the trajectories marked/mapped out by individual characters within the larger site of the producing, publishing and consuming world whose boundaries have long dissolved from the purely 'literary' to the messily 'political' the as yet unresolved trail that the publication of SV marks. In addition to migrations which occur as exporting/importing of cheap labour or a result of a spillover of wars fought elsewhere in the margins, there is a more elitist class of migrants who in pursuit of higher education or professional degrees flock to the Western urban centres. It is for these migrants that the attention and influence of the media may be crucial. What makes Rushdie special is that he belongs to a very select subgroup of "Third World'** immigrant * We wish to avoid essentialising the media, which itself comprises several interest groups. However, it does seem to us that the professionalisation of world media has meant that the constitution of news has become largely a matter of 'naming', 'labelling' and 'slotting'. Larger decisions of policy are thus 'simply and effectively' presented to the consumer, for example via categorisations of immigrant peoples such as the Vietnamese as 'boat people' or the Central Americans as 'cheap labour'. In India, collocations like 'scooter-borne terrorists', 'hard-core militants' and 'anti-social elements' and convenient but dehumanising acronyms (LTTE, JKLF, ABSU, AISSF) reduce very different movements to the same common denominator. As a result, the phenomenon of migrations from 'disturbed areas', for instance, Kashmir, are read in terms of easily assimilable phrases such as 'foreign hand' or 'Muslim fundamentalists'. In many ways Rushdie himself is fighting this corporate effect of the media; but we discuss more fully the implications of his strategies in the body of our essay. ** See Timothy Brennan's description of the 'cosmopolitan intellectual' as 'spokesperson for a kind of permanent immigration' (p 35). Brennan's explication of his use of the term "Third World', which we use in much the same sense in our paper, is relevant here. Brennan writes: "I share the views of Aijaz Ahmad and others who argue that it has no theoretical content whatsoever. As he (Ahmad) says, 'we do not live in three worlds but in one', mutually affected and affecting. Obviously the term has less to do with what a country essentially is what colour its native's skins, what longitude or latitude it occupies, what size its GNP than what it does. From the first meetings of Nehru and Nasser in the 1950's until the era of the 'Non-aligned Nations', 'Third World' has meant simply those countries decolonising from what E.P. Thompson once called 'Natopolis'. It has a political not a sociological meaning. To use the title Salman Rushdie and the Third World for this book is then not only to place Rushdie in it but to suggest his antagonistic relationship to it." (Preface, xiii-xiv)

Downloaded At: 16:34 9 February 2011

5 Bruce Bennett (ed.), A

Sense of Exile, op cit.

20
writers who write in English, in CAPITALS, from capitals. Although they come from a multilingual country, they are also members of a post-colonial elite who regard English as one of their languages, and also as their primary language.* The original accident (rather than the original sin) of a class position ultimately means the deconstruction of the 'All India Radio' metaphor in Midnight's Children6 (MC) where Saleem with his magic powers can both tune in to and broadcast to all the other midnight's children. This metaphor is once again devastatingly used in SV as the means of revenge and betrayal adopted by Saladin Chamcha "the Man of a Thousand Voices". The Saleem/Shiva, Gibreel/Saladin split as epitomised in MC and SV is actually played out by Rushdie at a global level. His position as a Third World cosmopolitan makes it possible for him both to record the reality of the present historical situation (mass movements to the multi-national composite metropoles) and to represent it as an extended mirroring of his personal dilemma. The problem of India is the problem of Babel. Rushdie translates this central question of identity to the problem of racism and fundamentalism which can then assume truly global proportions in SV. We discern several semi-permeable layers of appropriation here. Although much oversimplification is inherent in an analysis of this sort which attempts to sort into categories the complexities of the immigrant's situation, we will suggest something like the following pattern of slippages: The Media, which articulates metropolitan culture, claims Rushdie. Rushdie, the elite cosmopolitan, then speaks for all other migrant groups.7 Subcontinental migrants, whom Rushdie most closely identifies with, bring as their baggage the problem of many conflicting tongues. Rushdie, who is predominantly monolingual in English, transmutes this conundrum of Babel coming to Babylon, (or the Third World migrant, with his acute linguistic sensibility, losing his languages in homogenizing Western cities), into a somewhat different object. In SV, Rushdie's concern with racism and world wide fundamentalism seems to involve a licence to transit, perhaps too easily, between immigrant linguistic anxieties and other dangers which threaten not so much immigrants' speech, but more specifically the speech of elite liberals like Rushdie himself. The importance given to language as a constituent of identity, we contend, carries a particular relevance for Rushdie which it does not for many of the characters in SV. While the loss of language is indeed equated with loss of identity for many of the characters,** it is the immediacy of Rushdie's authorial

6 Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children, Pan Books, London, 1982.

Downloaded At: 16:34 9 February 2011

7 We do not suggest that this is a transgression of authorial privilege, but rather that it could have problematic political implications, a point discussed in the final section of our essay.

* We have elaborated on that relationship in this essay, focussing on the English language as the terrain within which Rushdie is situated for reasons of history and which he then uses to contest what he perceives as encroachments on issues of 'freedom'. Rushdie's strength and vulnerability arise from this somewhat quixotic relationship he has with a primary language of the 'First World'. ** See for example, Rushdie's lament in the opening pages of SV (p 4) where as omniscient author he describes "the migrants aboard the disintegrating aircraft"; "mingling with the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mothertongues...". Among the characters in SV, however, Mishal proves an interesting exception; her refusal to speak her mother Hind's tongue, even though she understands it, is actually a factor in ensuring her active participation in the new world.

21
crisis which works as the real spine of this epic of immigration, which records the misadventures, metamorphosis, and return of the prodigal son. Language, or more specifically, a narrative strategy which foregrounds language (puns, parody, allegory) is Rushdie's means of combatting the smooth, closed world of the seamless discourse generated by TV, films, newspapers and popular magazines with their persuasive and seductive powers and their illusion of choice. It is also the means of fighting fundamentalism and racism (the twin faces of bigotry, as Rushdie has consistently maintained since the Satanic affair). Rushdie's position is close to an evangelist writer's, except that his faith is literature and his Holy Book the novel.* Rushdie's response to his own language sickness is not like Saladin Chamcha's to return 'home', or like Gibreel, to conquer without self consciousness, or like Saleem and Omar Khayyam to disintegrate, but to write the new testament of the twentieth century the postmodernist hybrid novel. 'In Good Faith',8 the acclaimed lecture delivered from exile, states explicitly in a non-fictional form what has constantly underlined Rushdie's ideology of the practice of fiction. In yet another defence, Rushdie offers a similar explication of his position: Unable to accept the unarguable absolutes of religion, I have tried to fill up the hole with literature...where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society...there I hope to find...the truth of the tale, of the imagination, of the heart... SV is a clash of faiths...or more precisely it's a clash of languages... It's his word [Khomeini's] against mine.9 This linguistic battle, which is as much Rushdie's struggle with his own internal demons, as with the eternal forces of religion, given Rushdie's situation as mediating and mediated Third World immigrant, must inevitably be fought in the metropolitan field, to which arena we next turn our attention. THE METROPOLES A singular defining characteristic of immigration, whatever the initial cause (wars, civil and internecine, revolutions, repressive regimes, economic factors determining the movements of labour, industrial and technological changes, and recently even, as with Hong Kong, the expiry of a lease), is a perceived movement originating in the 'periphery' and culminating in the 'centre'. In Rushdie's case, Bombay functions at the national level as the metropolitan centre which is composed not only of the local Maharashtrian population, but which draws like a magnet huge proportions of rural migrants as well as other non-working class sections from small towns; and it is also the metropolis which, seen in relation to what Raymond Williams called the 'metropolitan country', is itself transformed to the periphery.10

8 Salman Rushdie, 'In Good Faith', The Independent on Sunday, London, A Feb 1990.

Downloaded At: 16:34 9 February 2011

9 Salman Rushdie, 'Agenda', The Times of India, 27 Jan 1989.

10 See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, "The Metropolis', pp 279-288, for connections between the metropolis and hinterland, empire and colony: "Thus the model of city and country, in economic and political " relationships, has gone beyond the boundaries of the nation-state, and is seen but also challenged as a model of the world."

* Rushdie appears to have anticipated this charge of 'secular fundamentalism' by both naming it and laying it at the door of 'apologists of religion' in his Herbert Read Memorial Lecture, 1990. The valorisation of "novelists ... those creators of the most freakish, hybrid and metamorphic of forms, the novel" and, by extension, literary discourse as a whole, does however make Rushdie's warnings about "not becoming what we oppose" a little suspect. The philosophy of literature attributed to Rushdie's surrogate self, Baal, in SV (p 370) reflects the self-same tendency to place the writer (read novelist) in the sacrosant position of Caesar's wife.

22 Rushdie's creative response to the various aspects of these phenomena has been both to lament and celebrate the rootlessness of the migrant and link it to what he calls his "postmodernist, post godless" stance. One may trace in his three celebrated texts, MC, S and SV a movement from lament to a possible celebration of rebirth. This is most explicit in the connections we draw later in this essay between the locale of each of these texts and the respective closures in each. The by now familiar configuations and confrontations of the eclectic selves of Saleem, Omar Khayyam and Saladin and Baal, on the one hand, and the fundamentalist types like Shiva, Tai, Raa Hyder and Mahound on the other are indicative of a balancing act that the author, Rushdie, must constantly perform in order to practice his own faith in the real world. The following schema places Rushdie's three novels, their protagonists and alter egos, as well as their metropolitan anchors, in relationship to each other. Like most 'structural' depictions, however, it is intended only to serve as a point of departure for further exegesis.

Downloaded At: 16:34 9 February 2011

THE IMMIGRANT empyrean (AIRWAYS) the ^ immigrant's movement is between these vertical poles >U morass (EARTH) History

Descends from Above is NOSTALGIC for Eden

Rises from Below is pursued by NEMESIS

CrnES exemplify lateral distances BOMBAY/DELHI migrant (site-pavement) Saleem Shiva LONDON/BOMBAY immigrant (site-restaurant) Shaitan Saladin icon vs. epic (pun intended) Religion Rel. Affect Hist.

ISLAMABAD/LAHORE mohajir (site-cantonment) Omar Khayyam (epicurean/ iconoclast) Affect Religion

epicurean iconoclast History Affect

The apex of the triangle alters as Rushdie explores the emotion of shame in the novel of that name, the nationalist allegory in MC and, finally, the motivations/ motifs of religion in SV, yet the issues remain interconnected. SV, the last in the serialisation of the migrant's adventures, takes farthest and most seriously, as we have suggested earlier, the task of interconnecting different worlds, diverse problems in the city, even at the risk of being morally as well as linguistically facile. Rushdie textually anticipates the charge of a fragile cosmopolitan consciousness in a passage in SV (p 439) where "Chamcha offers conventional cosmopolitan answers. His movie list included Potemkin, Kane, Otto e Mezzo, The Seven Samurai, Alphaville etc." Gibreel's retort "You've been brainwashed" and his own list of ten Indian 'hits', popular films, is an indictment of Saladin's list and by extension of Rushdie's own narrative strategy, which cannot speak of London or Bombay without invoking other cities, other worlds and times, real and constructed. Thus, the list of Alphaville, Bombay, Babylon, The Metropolis, London and Jahilia merges with Gibreel's conquest of London in a make-believe Dickensian studio-set.

23

11 The phrase 'polyglot tree' is Rushdie's own. See p 83, 'The Indian Writers in England', in Maggie Butcher's (ed.)
The Eye of the Beholder: Indian Writing in English, MacMillan, 1989.

Downloaded At: 16:34 9 February 2011

12 The blurbs of Rushdie's books offer a representative range of affirmations: "India has produced a glittering novelist one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a matter of perpetual storytelling." (V.S. Pritchett in The New
Yorker). " A n

exhilarating...extraordinary contemporary novel...a roller coaster ride over a vast landscape." (Angela
Carter, The Guardian)

This strategy of representation allows Rushdie, in the tradition of Calvino's Invisible Cities, to suggest the fictionality of all cities, as constructs of the mind, thus erasing to some extent the detailed histories that he also attempts to record. However, this sort of fictional pluralism supports Rushdie's avowed genealogy in a 'polyglot tree',11 since it makes for authentic cosmopolitanism; the world of the book becomes the immigrant writer's home. The city is a place of laterally defined distances, the spatial locus of many far-flung outposts, different worlds. Here the asymmetries of power, must be negotiated through a reliance on the human self as the supreme arbiter of destiny; in this setting, both media and authorial will seem to collude to present Rushdie himself as that superior being. Among those who have made a resounding success of a space not theirs by the conventions of history, many First World voices12 inform us that Rushdie is prima inter pares. His superb mastery of the discourse of displacement has ensured that, living by his wits, he has succeeded in outwitting the immigrant's nemesis. Almost. However, as the real-life drama of the fatwa shows, the immigrant is never wholly safe. His post-lapsarian world is always informed by threat, simply because the redefinition of power, which the immigrant's position almost always involves, cannot but result in the politics of retaliation.* However clever, however sympathetically portrayed in fiction and media, the immigrant remains a dose cousin of the outcast(e). It appears to be his role, his destiny, (and in this reading we are certainly to an extent guided by the media), not to be in absolute control. The immigrant author must think in terms of skirmishes and guerilla warfare on the citadels of power, rather than in terms of a battle, though he may well make use of the sabre-rattling rhetoric of an all-out war ["Mishal had developed the habit of talking about the street as if it was a mythological battle-ground" (SV 283, italics ours)]. Rushdie's attitude towards the production and packaging of his texts reveals something of this strategic inclination. He attacks with elan and his triumphs are greatly applauded by all those (few or many?) who feel a sneaky or substantial empathy with the outsider, but his losses can be, as the world has startlingly witnessed, overwhelming, because his control over, and therefore perhaps his commitment to his own position, is shaky. The valorization of doubt over many other conditions as symptomatic of the human condition is not by any means accidental in Rushdie's oeuvre.

* Brennan (p 145) rightly emphasizes the need to "locate the class resentments that are simmering beneath the surface of an affair that has persistently been seen in religious terms alone." In this context, it is instructive to situate the banning of SV with the realpolitik of Indian electoral trading. (General Elections in India were held in September 1989). The initial source of information was apparently just a standard book review (Madhu Jain in India Today) which was then used by Syed Shahabuddin, M.P., whose voice as a spokesman for Indian Muslims was itself a subject of some controversy. The ban called on by Shahabuddin ostensibly to preclude offense to Muslims, was in fact a means to make the book an issue. However, Rushdie's immediate and righteous response seems an exceedingly naive assessment of the pre-electoral scenario in India: "I am deeply shocked. Shame was banned in Pakistan, but I had thought better of India." Rushdie then goes on to declare: The question is democracy itself... [India should] "abandon the pretence of being a civilised free country if it allowed the ban." (The Indian Express, October 8, 1988). The politics of retaliation, on examination, turns out to be very much more complicated than simple confrontations between 'fundamentalism' and 'democracy' as Rushdie, and many others of a liberal persuasion, would have it.

24

THE MIGRANT The preceding argument allows us to posit certain consonances between the figure of the doubting author as a controller of (specifically novelistic) discourses, and the figure of the unsure immigrant as a controller of (specifically urban) environments. Both the immigrant and the authorial self created by Rushdie are described iteratively as 'marginal', 'peripheral', 'outcast', 'iconoclastic', etc. Yet fictional as well as publishing strategies place centre stage these avowedly decentred figures. The irony of a media star such as Rushdie assigning himself, and being assigned, the place of an immigrant, is at least as telling as the irony of an author signing his own death warrant in his 'prophetic' fiction, and may indeed be a manifestation of the same phenomenon. The religious outcast, the anti-hero of the nationalist allegory, and the empathetic author may all, without contradiction, wear the mask of the immigrant wanderer, "in that metropolis of tropes and whispers" (SV 106), to use Rushdie's own apt phrase. Alienation, displacement, doubt, the presence of the outsider, have deeply engaged major Western novelists of the twentieth century (Camus, Sartre, Borges), if in extremely diverse ways. Rushdie gives this constant theme a vigorous post-colonial turn. By focussing on the 'exit-tentialism' of Third World immigrants in search of "the forgotten meaning of hollow booming words, land, belonging, home" (SV 4), by documenting their efforts to reclaim the verbal as well as virtual treasures that were 'stolen' from them in a colonial past.13 Rushdie brilliantly interrogates the notion of community in a contemporary urban context. Rushdie's genius has been to show that the numerically significant intrusion of Third World immigrants into previously well-defined metropolitan centres, has qualitatively changed notions of community in the West. It has introduced visible cracks and fissures, where earlier dichotomies of class were maybe better hidden, less glaringly apparent. The demonology Rushdie invokes is cleverly fashioned to this end. His Khayyams, Farishtas and Shaitans openly flaunt other traditions, not to mention other tastes, in food, in music, in dress. Moreover, they can afford the luxury of 'bad' taste in a way that locals simply cannot. A great deal of Rushdie's linguistic energy is in fact expended on a textual demonstration of the immigrant's (in this case, his own) lack of a corresponding inhibition in the use of the English language. Just as the immigrant disturbs the smooth surfaces of settled community living, so Rushdie challenges received ideas about 'correct' English usage. The immigrant, steeped in doubt as Rushdie claims he is, makes a special strength of questioning the basic linguistic premises of his society,, again in a manner that just may not strike the bona-fide insider. His instability is thus once again fictionally established as both the source of the immigrant's discursive strength (most amazingly exemplified in Rushdie himself) and his political weakness. His visible differences, his b(l)ack streets, his twilight professions, stake out the immigrant as a site of resistance to the homogenhation which overtakes many metropolitan cultures. As Rushdie has shown, the immigrant may speak the language of the dominant community but he speaks it always with a difference. The specificities of the immigrant group, including sub-groups whose interests Rushdie foregrounds in SV (immigrant Bangladeshis, emigre Poles, transatlantic Americans, expatriate Parsees), are always more obvious than those of the home-bound nation. Yet this brings in its wake the now well documented 'failure' to fully integrate that is typical of immigrant groups

Downloaded At: 16:34 9 February 2011

13 On 'reclaiming metaphors', see pp 186 and 281 in SV as well as Brennan's chapters discussing this narrative strategy.

25
everywhere. Resistance or integration? This, at its crudest, is the dilemma of the immigrant community, which after all is in many ways the mirror of the dominant community, and it is one which Rushdie's latest novel, SV, attempts to resolve however tentatively. SV is a novel about migrants or globe hoppers in general and one that tries to map the travels and travails of the Indian immigrant in particular.14 In our brief textual exegeis we consider the two pairs of subcontinental survivors Mishal-Hanif and Saladin-Zeenie in their respective contexts. We begin with Bombay, to which city Rushdie attributes his (and his heroes') cosmopolitan and 'lackadaisical' attitudes. Much of the nostalgic, but also pessimistic, return to the years of belonging in Bombay is established through the childhood world of Saleem Sinai in MC. Saleem's version of the language riots, his genuine dismay and inability to comprehend religious/political events and the deliberate collage of dreams and memories, facts and fiction as a narrative technique are partly an attempt to see the subcontinent's history in footnotes, although never really from below. There is, however, a distinct shift of vision and view in SV, about which a critic remarks: "Rushdie comes [in this novel] to terms for the first time with escapism of his earlier work".15 Saladin's unloved childhood, his valorization of Vilayet, the dream city, his subsequent acquisition/possession of that city, wife and career and his consquent transformation into Shaitan make it possible for Rushdie not only to explore the many worlds and lifetimes that Chamcha has travelled, but more importantly, to question cosmopolitanism in both the metropoles of the novel. Zeenie Vakil, Saladin's guide to Bombay, is savvy; as the text underscores, she knows her city. While 'educating' Saladin she offers a scathing indictment of the earlier representation of Bombay provided by the narrator in MC: What do you know of Bombay? Your own city, only it never was. To you, it's
a dream of childhood. Growing up on Scandal Point is like living on the moon... Did Shiv Sena elements come there make communal trouble? That wasn't Bombay, darling,... That was Wonderland, Peristan, Never-Never, Oz. (SV 55)

14 As Rushdie himself has repeatedly asserted: "SV is not an anti-religious novel. It is...an attempt to write about migration, its stresses and transformations from the point of view of migrants from the Indian subcontinent to Britain." (The Times of India, 27 January 1989)

Downloaded At: 16:34 9 February 2011

15 Timothy Brennan,
Salman Rushdie and the Third World, p 163.

She and her group of activists are at home both in the city and in 'their kind' of English, unlike the 'Indian translated into English-medium' that is characteristic of Saladin and his language. But Saladin's reconciliation with his dying father and the beginning of a new, avowedly more involved life with Zeeni Vakil in Bombay is embarrassingly close to the happy ending of too many Hindi films of the 60s and the 70s, with their binary worlds of 'Purab aur Paschim', films which form the staple of Rushdie's parodies. The one difference here is the 'new' Indian woman, as exemplified in Zeenie who is a professional surgeon, and an activist and an uninhibited single woman. She is projected as someone who has worked out the karma of class and gender and is therefore a proper mentor to the still stumbling/fumbling Saladin. The strong woman at the other end is Mishal who succeeds in reclaiming a portion of Brixhall because she has no 'long suppressed locutions' to contend with, and because she can fight with equal success the skinheads on the streets as well as the faceless Insurance Company which forms part of the same system. In the novel, Saladin's betrayal of/and by his first wife and his subsequent hesitation between Mishal and Zeenie are thus stops in this complicated route to belonging. While his final return to the 'radical chic' in the dhabas of Bombay still situates him in the periphery, the opposite is true of his initial

26
metamorphosis in London. The real centre of Rushdie's text (as indeed of the new map of London) is the Shaandaar Cafe, its temporary (illegal) inmates and permanent (legal) intimates marking an intersection of the immigrant community and their disparate crises. As the first of the paired prototypes of successful individuals, Gibreel functions as peripheral 'voice', while Saladin, the other half, is the visible, smelly component. When Saladin is offered sanctuary in this cafe of the flotsam and jetsam, there is a violent bringing together of two classes of immigrants who have always lived in two different worlds in the same city. Rushdie deconstructs with great sensitivity the homogenized identity imposed by the whites and often 'assumed' by the non-whites, of all immigrants simply on the basis of a common country of origin, despite a world of difference in class, gender, language, intellectual or economic status. Sufyan, the Bangladeshi proprietor of the Shaandaar insists on offering Saladin refuge; his argument being that however monstrous, he (Saladin) is after all "one of their kind". Once alone in his attic cell, Saladin's 'gratefulness' is recorded in the following protest: "I'm not your kind", he said distinctly into the night. "You're not my people. I've spent half my life trying to get away from you." (SV 253) In both cities, the search for one's 'kind' appears at least to be partially successful. Instead of the disintegrating or monster-like protagonists of the earlier texts and their funtoosh endings, SV ends on a note of redemption and regeneration. Both the survivor pairs represent 'new blood' after the failure of 'a dying generation'. "Only when the Shaandaar was ready to reopen under her [Mishal's] management did Hind Sufyan's ghost agree that it was time to be off to the after-life, whereupon Mishal telephoned Hanif and asked him to marry her." (SV 515) Saladin's own belated acknowledgement of familial roots in Bombay, does not, however, as we have already stated, seem to us equally plausible in terms of contemporary social-cultural problems. We digress somewhat in order to explicate this position. In the recent Assembly elections, the Shiv Sena-BJP (arguably one of India's strongest fundamentalist combinations) won an overwhelming majority in (Greater) Bombay "the nation's most potent symbol of cosmopolitanism".16 The extreme juxtaposition suggested by Panjwani is not just catchy journalism, but a fairly representative instance of contrastive exclusion, as if a city or its culture was either cosmopolitan (liberal, eclectic, hybrid) or provincial (chauvinistic, fundamentalist). The article goes on to consider the rise in "sons-of-the-soil" movements in India from the point of view of the "dislocated urban poor" in Indian metropoles who experience "homelessness on settling down in the city". Panjwani observes: "This sense of dislocation is perhaps more drastic in them than in us. It is here that the Hinduttva call fills a cultural vacuum symptomatic of the fragility of the tree of cosmopolitanism".17 The 'happy ending' of SV does not cover this space between 'Hinduttva' and 'cosmopolitanism', seemingly two irreducible categories, although Rushdie does indicate his awareness of the 'gap' in an early narrative aside. Describing Saladin's first flight to England, the author muses: How far did they fly? Five and a half thousand as the crow. Or: from Indianness to Englishness, an immediate distance. Or, not very far at all, because they rose

Downloaded At: 16:34 9 February 2011

16 Narendra Panjwani, 'Saffron vs Spectrum',

The Times of India,

25 March 1990.

17 Ibid.

27

from one great city, fell to another. The distance between cities is always small; a villager, travelling a hundred miles to town, traverses emptier, darker more terrifying space. (SV 55)

Unfortunately the urge to universalize the immigrant experience proves stronger than such reflective and cautionary asides. The specificities of incidents, movements and peoples are swept aside in the fictive celebration of a return. As an author whose strategy is to foreclose the gap between himself and his beleaguered fictional heroes, Rushdie has achieved a unique success in bringing before a world audience 'the compleat immigrant'. He himself possesses the immigrant drive par excellence, that uneasy ambition18 which enables him to belong to the very establishment whose existence he purportedly threatens. The incipient query has to be given voice Has he then been co-opted?

Downloaded At: 16:34 9 February 2011

THE MORAL MINORITY

18 The Times magazine quoted Rushdie's publisher and friend as having remarked that had the author of SV won the Nobel Prize once, he would not be satisfied until he won again.

Rushdie's on-record utterances are politically correct to a T, as displayed for instance in his relentless pronouncements against the Thatcherite regime, or the Indian policy in Kashmir, even from limbo.* Yet, there is something of a question-mark that hangs over the audience to whom he addresses himself. Rushdie has often and sincerely lamented the fact that the very people immigrants in Britain to whom SV was addressed, bitterly reject his work. What, then, can we make of the claim that Rushdie speaks to, and for, this strife-torn community? Little empathy exists between Rushdie, whose left-wing views any intellectual educated in the 'Western' political tradition, would immediately recognise, and the embattled, linguistically and culturally alienated peoples who will not understand Rushdie's speech/speeches. Rushdie, despite his incarceration, stands in the bright limelight. His audience is the glitterati, the intelligentsia of both the Third and First Worlds. His brilliant representations of the soft underbelly of culture are important and liberating as 'art'. Rushdie is superbly accomplished as a commentator, but his words have strayed to places where verbal dexterity alone cannot rescue an author. Political commitment and courage are not the same as authorial vision and understanding; history has taught us that it is certainly a mistake to conflate

* See for example, L.K. Sharma (The Times of India, May 6, 1990) who quotes from The Independent, Rushdie's views on "the issue of self-determination, focussing mainly on the Kashmir problem". Rushdie's hard-hitting critique of Indian secularism (specifically, "the failure of Indian secularist policies in Kashmir") which has forced the Kashmiri people "to choose between tanks and mosques" exposes quite 'correctly' the flaws in the BJP 'nationlist' rhetoric on Indian 'democracy' and unity 'at any cost'. In this case, Rushdie's perspective has a validity that many on-the-spot reports do not have, because he identifies this crisis of the 'Indian' state as primarily a political, rather than a religious/pragmatic one. The article is also indicative of the kind of newspaper space granted to Rushdie, whom the reporter introduces as "Salman Rushdie, the writer-in-hiding" and a little later, as "The controversial author, who commands a high fee." The highlighting of certain indisputable facts by turning them into descriptive epithets is an effective way of both claiming the reader's attention and controlling his/her response.

28 the two.* Notwithstanding his image in the media, Rushdie is not a Che, a Mandela or Chedi Jaggan. Although he has handled political material in his novels, and these materials have turned out to be explosive, it does not follow that he must be granted political safe conduct. Rushdie's fulminations against fundamentalism in religion, conservatism in politics, nationalism in the state are comfortably positioned vis-a-vis other left intellectuals like himself. One may not criticise a writer, especially one of Rushdie's humanity and stature, for not writing a different book. However, as a political agent Rushdie's position is far less invulnerable. As Bhikhu Parekh has pointed out, Rushdie himself could be seen as encroaching upon the freedom of other people to voice their own opinions, however 'medieval' certain of these opinions may soundto a sophisticated intelligence like his own. The concerned writer, like the liberal segments of the First World academia to which he broadly belongs, does need to exercise caution over his appropriation of reasoning ability, wellmeaning though this intervention may be. Ways of reasoning, methods of selfpreservation, developed by communities over time, might encode ideas about 'freedom' not easily accessed, and therefore often dismissed, by those who stand outside the systems they 'rightly' criticise.19 The immigrants who in another famous inscription were so ambiguously described as "the huddled masses yearning to be free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores" may reserve the right to be mortally suspicious of a language they do not share, a 'troublesome' form of the novel that they do not appreciate and emotions that they do not feel in quite the tone that Rushdie describes them. For example, Rushdie posits 'doubt' as one of the most attractive features of the immigrant mind-set, thereby drawing on a European literary repertoire, typical of this century, but evident in Romantic writing and encapsulated, for instance, in the nineteenth century verse from Tennyson we quote below: There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.
(In Memoriam xcvi)

Downloaded At: 16:34 9 February 2011

19 Although the relativism implied by this position may be questioned, it is certainly one which a 'humanist' writer like Rushdie needs to take account in his radical criticisms of other, more conservative points of view.

This literary elevation of doubt to the status of a 'creed' seems to influence unduly Rushdie's portrayal of the immigrant mentality in the pages of his novels (and perhaps outside them as well). In the orchestrated movements between empyrean and morass that we have postulated in Rushdie's work, the immigrant 'discovers', 'creates' and 'frees' himself in terms of historical possibilities. Memory thus becomes indistinguishable from creativity in the novelist's art, but not necessarily so in the actual immigrant's mind. Fragments of religious faith, traditional/conservative beliefs help the immigrant re-position himself, 'shore' up his existence, give him much needed stability in a hostile
* Compare the cases of Yeats and Pound, where a degree of political conservatism could coexist with the most sublime and 'truthful' poetry. Greatness as a writer does not, unfortunately, guarantee correctness in one's political views. Rushdie himself has consistently identified his writing with his politics. In a TV show called 'Conversations with Writers' in the aftermath of the publication of TheJaguarSmile: A Nicaraguan Journey, he remarks that England did not always have "a quietist tradition" of writing and then cites the case, from his 'own tradition', of Faiz Ahmed Faiz who "wrote brilliant political poetry and lyrical love poetry". Rushdie also emphasizes, in this talk with Charlotte Cornwell, that he had "always conceived of writers as being concerned about public affairs as well as private".

29
environment. When that stability is blown to bits by an author as well ensconsed and integrated as Rushdie, panic results. The neuroses of nemesis replace the certainties of nostalgia.20 Thus many moderate Muslims, who have no quarrel with artistic choices exercised by an individual writer, still claim that Rushdie has set back the cause of a less conservative interpretation of Islam by a hundred years simply by being heedless of (geo)political realities. The sincerity of Rushdie's views was never in question, nor his absolute grace as a writer, what has perhaps made many uncomfortable is his naivete. As an avowed apostate his mandate for change has not been from within the Islamic fold; from without it, he simply failed to gauge the intricacies of situation and complexities of mood in various camps Islamic, Indian, immigrant. This could be called a post-hoc view, but it was what prevented many Indian intellectuals from resisting the ban on the novel, once it was called for by Shahabuddin and others. The people who died for Rushdie's book in Bhendi Bazaar were outcasts of a different sort from Rushdie himself. They were outcasts because they could never read or evaluate what Rushdie had written; nor could the 'intermediaries' who 'interpreted' Rushdie for them. If Rushdie wrote for neither of these groups, did his work matter to them? Yes, simply because its impenetrability made it the ideal material for exploitation by the mullahs. Rushdie is no simple writer of tracts, he needs interpreters, critics, apologists; he therefore leaves himself quite open to the criticism that he acted 'irresponsibly' in a context where the forces of religious fundamentalism have so much power of life and death over people. If Rushdie did not 'know' that his passages about Mahound taken out of context, could be and would be used by Islamic fundamentalists to strengthen their own grip, then surely he was out of touch with and ignorant of the Islam he sought to liberate; and if he did 'know' his work would cause a furore, then he stands indicted of carelessness and callousness. Paradoxically, Rushdie seems to be an immigrant from the immigrant community, and an outsider among outcasts. With whom does he then truly stand? To be alone is part of the myth of both writer and immigrant, but for a political activist, isolation is a tragedy. It renders activism meaningless. At the current time, Rushdie's role as a great writer and intellectual, seems somewhat at odds with his role as a political spokesman for immigrant, Islamic or Third World rights. CONCLUSION This essay has suggested that the immigrant and his self-appointed representative, the author, are both governed in the global metropolitan context by the media, which spreads the word, whether it is Rushdie's or Khomeini's. Much of the escalation which led to Rushdie's present absence can be laid directly at the door of television, radio, newspapers, magazines and journals, always under professional/political pressure to create, promote and advertise news. In this sense, the business of the media is as much to formulate as to inform. Opinions in the metropolis are generally articulated in two main centres media and academia. The dangers of circulating in the media a text which remains unread are paralleled in academia by arcane over-readings. Nowhere are possibilities of collusive interaction between these two spheres more evident than in the case of the mega-star Rushdie an urban(e) writer of elite Third

Downloaded At: 16:34 9 February 2011

20 The consequent movement towards an affiliation with a global Muslim brotherhood is to be understood not merely in terms of the dogmatic language of 'fundamentalism' but in terms of a genuine search for 'brotherhood' among the dispossessed, a search Rushdie cannot but support.

30

21 Clark Blaise, NEW York Review of Books.

22 Mimi Mamoulian in SV actually announces that she "has read Finnegan's Wake and (is) conversant with postmodernist critiques of the West" (SV 261). 23 Uma Parameswaran's essay 'We-They Paradigm in Rushdie's
The Satanic Verses'
Downloaded At: 16:34 9 February 2011

offers another example of a critic who succumbs to the parodic temptation to use Rushdie's own narrative style in academic treatment of his work. 24 Timothy Brennanm cit. op.

World origins, who has been gravely hailed as a whole "continent finding its voice".21 It seems unnecessary to plead the case for 'voices', modernist as well as classical, flourishing in India quite independent of both Rushdie and the English language. In support of our particular argument, we simply wish to demonstrate that, given an extensive and insidious system of peer review and patronage, Rushdie's much vaunted espousal of the immigrant's 'native' multilingualism and multiculturalism falls on deaf ears. The powerlessness of his particular variety of linguistic subversion, attributed to the immigrant, but fashioned to appeal to the most elite coteries of First World academia, is amply and ironically evident in assessments such as the one we have cited above. Literary academics read Rushdie, even if somewhat unwillingly at times, as one of their own kind, because his familiarity with critical discourse is so absolute.22 The privileged academic and the elite immigrant thus draw on similar vocabularies. For example, it is fashionable in critical theory today to speak of the hazards of contamination, the manner in which an 'infection' such as Deconstruction can spread across disciplines. As academic readers of Rushdie, we recognize that Rushdie's texts not only consciously deconstruct themselves, but continuously invite readers to 'perform' in similar ways themselves. In the process of writing this particular essay, puns (acamedia, La(w)hore, multiplicity/multiple cities, metro-polis as the 'cinema city', Gibreel, academic quoteries etc.) suggested themselves to us constantly. Repeatedly, we found ourselves adopting a parodie mode;23 the somewhat disingenuous sentence with which the essay begins is itself a case in point. The experience convinced us that the virus of word-play was particularly endemic in circumstances where the plaisirs du texte literally preclude any sustained interest in the political issues Rushdie himself raises. Such a reduction of politics to a game of linguistic one-up-manship seems ultimately an exercise in trivialisation. In India separatist movements, communal and linguistic dissonances severely problematise Rushdie's representation of displacement, the nostalgia and nemesis that emigration engenders. Perhaps one of the most stimulating responses to Rushdie in our context, a reaction which avoids the simplistic alternatives of rejection or reification as they have been posed for us in many sections fo the media, is to articulate within academia the specifically political implications of Rushdie's texts. Brennan's expos of the 'myth of the nation'24 as it is worked out in Rushdie's writings, is a valuable contribution to this enterprise. Subcontinental explorations of Rushdie could differ, for example, from Western appreciations in their strategic use of his texts to understand our own collaborationist projects and practices within the post-colonial classroom, where the English language and its literature are accorded such unnatural respect. For this reason, any treatment which simply mimics receptions of Rushdie in the West by essentially evaluating him in terms of his linguistic legerdemain appears to us pedagogically and professionally unsatisfactory. To interpret Rushdie, in the best traditions of the ivory tower, as an author whose professedly postmodern complexes/complexities are in fact universal, is to be controlled by those 'puppet-masters' strings' of the media that Rushdie so perspicaciously warns us against in SV, strings that are inevitably pulled from the faraway metropoles where his texts were first distributed and (ac)claimed. For academics in the subcontinent, Rushdie is a test-case; if we fail to examine the enigma of his arrival amongst us via the First World, we fail also in our quest for a third Rushdie one not wholly formed/framed by either media or academia.