coolie

Coolie (1936) by Mulk Raj Anand gives a clear and poignant description of the poor face of India, telling the story of a 15-year-old boy who has to work as a child labourer and eventually dies of tuberculosis. It is the story of Munoo who is forced to leave his village out of necessity and poverty to work in the city as a child labourer. The novel shows his adventures and escapades as he works as a servant, factory worker, rickshaw driver far away from his home. The story is told from the eyes of the narrator and brings to light the inevitable and hidden evils of the Raj, right from exploitation, caste ridden society, communal riots, and police injustice. The novel takes us to different places and cities showing the inhuman and degrading treatment that the poor Munoo gets at the hands of the socially, economically, and politically affluent and higher classes of Indian society and how he copes with all circumstances alone. Anand was able to strike a cord in the hearts of the conscientious indians with the beautiful and real to life portrayal of the down trodden masses of Indian society,the so called have nots. Mulk Raj Anand was much appreciated and recognized for this novel and was one of those people who were highly influenced by Mahatma Gandhi. And this influence is clearly seen in all his works including Coolie. True to his Marxist spirit, he always portrayed the real India, and more specifically the poor India. He is also regarded as one of the first Indian writers in English who started the trend of using Hindi and Punjabi phrases in his writings to enrich and enhance the language. Also caled the Charles Dickens of India by many literary figures, Anand's novels deal with the underdog. Coolie is one classic example of the story of the underprevileged class of the society and of the oppressed people who cannot even make both ends meet.

Imaginary Homeland
Trafficking Culture in Postcolonial Literature, Postcolonial Fiction and Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands (1991) Maria DegabrieleTrafficking in culture between nations, as a metaphor for exchange, use value, status, desire, political motivation, international relations, and so forth, became evident when a broad picture of the flow of literature, criticism, and theory emerged from the work of so-called Third World writers. Because the flow is complex, multi-directional, and always changing, no model on its own can adequately open up the debate on postcolonial literature.
In this paper I will look at what happens when a writer reproduces a world which is at odds with empiricist visions of a commonwealth of culture. I will also look at how English can be used as a currency for exchange, rather than exploitation and profit.
In thinking about ways of writing to or from metropolitan centres, multiculturalism and postcolonialism, Timothy Brennan in Salman Rushdie and The Third World (1989), contextualizes well-known writers like Mario Vargas Llosa, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, Isabel Allende, Gabriel Garcia Marques and Bharati Mukherjee, as 'Third-World Cosmopolitans'. The common thread is that they deal with change and continuity, strangeness and familiarity, in a complex, multicultural world. Their literature consciously alludes to the effects of decolonization and the role of the 'West', and that cosmopolitan centres are receptacles of 'democracy', not just attractions of high capitalist city culture (Brennan, p 52).
Third World
The way Brennan himself uses the term reflects the ambivalence of 'Third-World' as a term used by many literary critics. 'Third World', like 'multicultural', is a term which is both enabling and, at times, disabling 1. It is disabling in that it forms a categorical ghetto into which writers who do not conform to the old established canon of English Literature can be slotted. These writers are often mentioned and then ignored. At best, these 'new' writers have suddenly been 'discovered', and the (Third) world they represent and inhabit has become the darling of other (Western) disciplines.
The introduction of 'Third World' is not meant to merely expand existing canons but to effect the methodology of criticism. 'Third World' and 'multicultural' are becoming enabling categories by claiming their own centrality.2 Third World and multicultural writers are describing, reproducing and addressing a heterogeneous and international (and this is often what passes for 'postcolonial') readership. 'Third World' is a useful term which makes it possible to talk about this body of writers who deal with issues which are both specific and international. The way Brennan links 'Third World' and 'cosmopolitan' indicates that these writers speak from, rather than simply to, a complex cosmopolitan centre.
Trinh (1989,p 98) explains this apparent ambiguity as a development from repression towards empowerment. She says that 'Third World' is a semantic construction of the bourgeois mentality of the West which replaces the pre-Independence 'savages'. Nevertheless, this lumping together of 'poor' non-aligned nations, which denies their individualities, has been turned around to become an empowering tool, one which has grown to include even parts of the First World (as in the case of Afro-American, or Indo-Anglian). So now "what is at stake is not only the hegemony of Western cultures, but also their identities as unified cultures". Rushdie explains how he is constantly asked whether he is British or Indian, and, where his work deals with Pakistan, is he "'British-resident Indo-Pakistani writer'? You see the folly of trying to contain writers inside passports" (Rushdie, 1991, 67).
English
There is no unified discourse between English (language and canon) and non-English, other languages and other uses of English, which can be easily reduced to something called the 'postcolonial'. If it is, then we see the maintenance of the colonizer/colonized relationship clearly at work.
Rushdie describes a world which is repressively colonized (whether it is India, Pakistan, and/or Britain) and also he engages with and celebrates a complex inner world. In other words, he produces an English language world which is not Anglo-centric. He explains how "those peoples who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it - assisted by the English language's enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers" (1991, p 64). Throughout the essays in Imaginary Homelands Rushdie keeps in mind the idea of 'English literature' as practice. He maintains that this practice involves two sometimes contentious acts, or processes. That is, that as a colonized person, when he uses English, he is using his master's language, and yet, how else can one express oneself in a largely Anglophone world. He says that "to conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free". Colonization is not only political but also cultural, as epitomized in institutionalized linguistic practices.
Rushdie's experience of bad times is not just that of an observer. Despite his relative privilege (being educated, middle class, anglified, fair skinned, and male) his reading of bad times is filtered through being part of a minority all his life. He was a member of an Indian Muslim family in Bombay, then of a migrant family in Pakistan, and now as a British Asian. Let's not forget that now, for over three years he has been in exile in Britain, for fear of his life. The supreme irony is of course that his crime was to dare to "open the universe a little more" (1991, p 21). He is now in this predicament precisely for having articulated the impossibility of hanging on to one (any) dogma while exploring the world's complexities.
Rushdie's objection to the 'Commonwealth Literature' category is that "the term is not used simply to describe, or even misdescribe, but also to divide" (1991, p 66). Although the Commonwealth still divides and rules, the English language, its common currency, is what Ashcroft et al would call English3.
The non-white market for English is booming. But buying English does not mean abandoning other currencies. Nevertheless, those participating in this language/literature exchange clearly belong to the middle classes. The poor have what Memmi (1965, p 107) calls 'native languages' and the middle classes, who largely have taken up the colonizers discourse and govern and administer for the colonizer by remote, have 'cultural languages'. Pure bilingualism does not exist. Languages are organized in a hierarchy so that English is the most valuable. One could re-order Memmi's classifications to call the 'native languages' the new 'cultural languages' and to call the 'cultural languages' English. This is what Ashcroft et al (1989) refer to as english and English, with english being the postcolonial, localized use of a widely recognizable currency.
In pointing out that "the act of writing texts of any kind in post-colonial areas is subject to the political, imaginative, and social control involved in the relationship between colonizer and colonized" (p 29), Ashcroft et al alert us that however new, liberal, challenging or even subversive postcolonial writing is, the colonizer/colonized relationships remain. In other words, as long as texts are classified along purely nationalistic boundaries, then the imperial dialected exchange between colonizer and colonized continues.
Orientalism
Said's work in Orientalism (1978), as an archaeology which uses Foucauldian ideas of the knowledge/power nexus, is an indispensable analysis in that it exposes the textual production of the East in the British Empire. It is this period of Empire which, in Rushdie's words, "provided justification for the supremacist ideology of imperialism" (1991, p 166). The essay "On Palestinian Identity: a Conversation with Edward Said" (pp 166-184) is an exchange between two writers who have shaken the world into rethinking old, but persistent, categories, especially those of East/West, First World/Third World, and so forth. Said did his bit of disruption by reading "the world as closely as he reads books" (p 166), challenging (ideas of) knowledge with an analysis of events and the reportage and reproduction of the world. Rushdie did his share (some would argue more than) of disruption through writing fiction (or meta-fiction). The Conversation opens with a lengthy description by Rushdie of Said's work, especially his (then) most recent book, After the Last Sky (1986). It is described as being about displacement, exile, and Palestinian identity. Whereas Said's other texts are largely about the Palestinian diaspora from Palestine, After the Last Sky captures in photos (by Jean Mohr) the experience of diaspora inside Palestine. Said writes about the photos and concatenates them thematically.
'Third World' is (re)constituted as a cultural Other, in the same way that Said (1978, Orientalism) describes the way that the West 'discovered', wrote about and so circulated the East. It is no coincidence that the Third World becomes 'interesting' at the same time that the First and Second Worlds develop what Memmi calls "a neo-Eastern style" (1965, p 104). The orientalist approach to the world in general and literature in particular is a prerequisite for one which speaks of 'Commonwealth Literature', and, as Brennan elaborates, 'Third World' literature. There appears to be an open market for literature/culture, but it's pretty clear who is making the profit.
Commonwealth
In his essay "'Commonwealth Literature' Does Not Exist" (1992, pp 61-70), Rushdie describes the category 'Commonwealth Literature' as a ghetto, created by those who practice English literature 'proper'. "Every ghetto has its own rules" and "one of the rules, one of the ideas on which the edifice rests, is that literature is an expression of nationality" (p 66), and that culture springs from tradition. He says that "what we are facing here is the bogy of Authenticity ... (which) is the respectable child of old-fashioned exoticism. It demands that sources, forms, style, language and symbol all derive from a supposedly homogeneous and unbroken tradition" (p 67). An exoticized culture must always show its credentials in order to prove itself worthy of 'special' attention.4 While Western cultures are seen as dynamic, progressive, and developed it is demanded of exoticized cultures to be original, pure, simple and preferably religious. At its worst, the term postcolonial implies a kind of pre-colonial (primitive) purity which has become corrupted because it could not resist the colonizers (modern) domination. It does not take into account that the process of colonization changes both the colonizer and the colonized and that cultural exchange is heterogeneous and not singular. Racial, cultural, linguistic singularity, or purity, is not only unlikely but also a pathological pursuit.
Postcolonial Writing
Having suggested this disabling aspect of the postcolonial, it still appears to be a useful term of reference in relation to a large inter(or post)national body of texts.
There is a growing body of literature which is refusing to occupy the margins, a place reserved for the Others because their 'cultural' identity does not conform with the old Eurocentric, nationalistic identities. Brennan describes how writers like Rushdie at least stopped and sometimes reversed this ongoing imperial process. They tamed and reinterpreted the exhausted idea of Empire, which had become known as the 'nation', into questions and ideas about decolonization, new writings and "that the world is one (not three) and that it is unequal" (Brennan, p x).
Brennan describes how postcolonial fiction has mapped postcolonial territory largely through 'magical realism'. And this territory in the imagination is postnationalistic and polycultural. It simultaneously expresses its own partiality and plurality while resisting hegemonic cultural repression.
Cultural theories of decolonization look at centre/periphery conflicts, cultural valorization and suppression, together with questions of gender, class, and ethnicity. Paradoxically they run the risk of repeating the dominating process, in creating a national culture. One way of avoiding this repetition is to be conscious of the idea of culture as exchange and cultural identity as a strategy, not a given.
Culture does not develop along purely ethnic lines but in complex patterns of what Paul Gilroy, in Brennan, describes as 'syncretism'5. The Third World cosmopolitan writers flee from a fixed national and ideological identity. One of the consequences of being colonized, migrating, and being identified with 'minorities' wherever they go, these writers are, as a by-product of their popularity, changing the face of Literature, from English Literature, the monolithic canon which reproduces ideologies of Empire, Commonwealth and nation, to writing-in-English, which disperses the repressive apparatus of language currency.
Black urban London is used by Gilroy (in Brennan) to look at the reggae scene, and by Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi (in his film scripts and novel), to look at questions surrounding colour and class in Thatcherite England, illustrating the possibility of using English to describe multiple visions of life in London.
Imaginary Homelands
Imaginary Homelands (Rushdie, 1991) is a collection of essays, reviews, and interviews which were made from 1981 to 1991. Rushdie's writing deals with the political, cultural, and imaginative (ex)changes which took place in the East and the West. Rushdie shows how although past geo-political colonialism largely continues as a cultural process in the present, things are nevertheless unavoidably changing. Things always have changed, but the difference is that now subaltern groups are writing their/our own stories.
In Imaginary Homelands Rushdie admits to the fictional polishing up of history/memory so as to be able to represent it as either history or fiction. (The result is meta-fiction, which is discussed below.) It is this inquiry into reality and memory, and how one is effected by historic and cultural movement, translation, migration, that underscores much of Rushdie's writing. He establishes his political context in the first two chapters, and then, the paper "Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist" acts as a kind of preface to the literature he reviews.
During this period of 1981 to 1991, Pakistan was in a state of political transition, Britain was under the iron rule of Thatcher, and the US was under Regan's conservative rule. It is as though political rupture and not just a changing World Order, but perhaps a World Order of change, provided the kind of environment which was receptive to Rushdie's writing. He says that it was during this period that he finally was able to make a living from his writing. "Bad times, after all, traditionally produce good books" (1991, p 3).
Rushdie's exposition of the brutal actuality of British colonial imperialism is juxtaposed with some passages about what life's really like in parts of England.
This is England. Look at the bright illuminations and fireworks during the Hindu Festival of Lights, Divali. Listen to the Muslim call to prayer, 'Allahu Akbar', wafting down from the minaret of a Birmingham mosque. Visit the Ethiopian World Federation, which helps Handsworth Rastas 'return' to the land of Ras Tafari. These are English scenes now, English Songs (p 117).This passage describes contemporary England, a place where 'being English' is represented as being very diverse. It is no longer seen as being culturally homogenous. This passage is reminiscent of a part of the movie "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987)"6. There is a particular scene in the movie where Sammy describes London to his Indian father. For Sammy, London is home and it occupies an internal space. He is a Londoner at heart. This discussion of ideas and differing imaginary realities is very common in postcolonial works.
Imaginary Homelands presents itself as a kind of matrix of interdependent issues. These include lived reality, democracy, migration, memory, politics, the relationships between literature/writing/reading, art, imagination, and love.
One can look at Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands to see how different narratives, from the macro narratives of nationalism to the micro narratives of novels, all work to create different, often competing, realities. It is this creation of a textual reality, through the practices of memory, history and fiction, that is central to much of Rushdie's writing. Rushdie says that "we remake the past to suit our present purposes, using memory as our tool" (p 24). In other words, we remember and write in order to know and have some control over the production of our present.
Keeping this in mind then one can easily see how, as Rushdie says, there are different versions of reality. An artist's version of reality may differ from a politician's, and "if writers leave the business of making pictures of the world to politicians, it will be one of histories great and most abject abdications". Politically conscious fiction is made up of "books that draw new and better maps of reality".
The essays in Imaginary Homelands are varied. Chapters 1 and 2 (9 papers dated from 1982 to 1988) are political accounts of India and Pakistan from 1947. These accounts are interwoven with, and explanations of, Rushdie's own novelistic writing, especially Midnight's Children. Chapters 8 to 11 (36 papers dated from 1987 to 1989) are mostly made up of reviews of some of the most prominent writing in English. There are also accounts of Rushdie's travels and the writers he met. Chapter 12 (5 papers dated 1981 to 1991) opens with a review of Naipaul's "Among the Believers" which is critical of the way in which Naipaul presents an almost entirely negative picture of Islam. This essay is strategically placed to show that, despite his high esteem for Naipaul, Rushdie seeks the truth at all costs, for the rest of the papers are self-defensive pieces. In these, Rushdie discusses ideas like God, religion, post-modernism, authority, Islam, fiction, and freedom of expression. Rushdie's critical work is about the grand narrative and who should have power over it, "because those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts" (p 432).
The first essay, "Imaginary Homelands", is about Midnight's Children. It is largely about the provisional nature of truth. "Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved" (p 12). Saleem says that "illusion is itself reality" (p 13). And this surfacing, or making visible, of the reality of an inner life of competing voices, recurs in Rushdie's work. As Rushdie wrote Midnight's Children he used his own remembered version of truth. "It is memory's truth ... and only a madman would prefer someone else's version to his own" (p 25). Midnight's Children is not the history of India. Because "history is always ambiguous" (p 25), one can engage with the reality of a novel as a work of art, which is not to diminish its honesty.
In Midnight's Children the 'Riddle of Midnight' is: does India exist? At midnight of 15 August 1947 Rushdie was one of at least 1,000 babies born in India. That generation, which was too young to remember the Empire or the ongoing liberation struggle, became 'Midnight's Children'. This is similar to a question he poses in another essay, "The Location of Brazil" (pp 118-125) ("Brazil" is Terry Gilliam futuristic movie), where he asks these vast, impossible questions and then goes on to answer them in terms of lived realities. India exists because, as Robi Chatterjee (an interviewee) explains, Indians are born here and continue to live here. It has nothing to do with nationalism. Likewise Brazil exists in the cinema itself, "because in the cinema the dream is the norm" (p 125). And this reference to dream (and flying) relates to Rushdie's ongoing discussion on migration. He makes the connection between the world of the imagination and the physical world as evident in 'real' frontiers, as they are neither political nor linguistic but imaginative.
Rushdie speculates on the past/future location of Brazil (this place of dream). He says that these days, as we contemplate the end of time, there is a tendency to fall into nostalgia. He uses the same sort of language when he talks about migration, saying that the imaginative present is made up of fragmented remains of the past. He says, in "Imaginary Homelands", that "it may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated ... but ... the writer who is out-of-country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form ... of his being 'elsewhere'" (p 12). And in "The Location of Brazil" he says that "to be a migrant is perhaps to be the only species of human being free of the shackles of nationalism (to say nothing of its ugly sister, patriotism). It is a burdensome freedom" (p 124). This chapter deals largely with how cultural displacement reveals the provisional nature of truth, and how the imaginary (not to mean untrue) positions we occupy actually create or colour our world.
We write, or textualize our world. He says that "redescribing a world is the necessary first step towards changing it" (p 14). And this is done by pushing the limits, challenging and changing not only the boundaries but also the imagined centre. As "we read the world" (p 25), we are the texts we produce. Spivak uses the expression of 'worlding' to mean that our description of the world is not mere reportage, but that textual practice actually contributes towards making it what it is. "Our role (as custodians of culture) is to produce and be produced by the official explanations in terms of the powers that police the entire society ... . Our circumscribed productivity cannot be dismissed as a mere keeping of records. We are part of the records we keep" (Spivak, 1988).
Another aspect of Rushdie's work which is relevant to the question of postcoloniality is concerned with questions of identity. He is not obsessed with finding some kind of proper personal identity as property, as it would (using Spivak's words, 1990) reflect both the self-duping and the oppressive power of humanism. He says that "identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools". And it is this sense of difference which is a source of writing. In his Herbert Read Memorial lecture of 1990 (delivered by Harold Pinter) he says that writing forges "a different kind of identity, as the reader and writer merge, through the medium of the text, to become a collective being that both writes as it reads and reads as it writes. This 'secret identity' of writer and reader is the novel form's greatest and most subversive gift".
As a writer, born in India, living in Britain, and a renegade Moslem, Rushdie is sensitive, to say the least, about his particular situation. Yet he frames it so that its particularities are relevant to the world. Indo-Anglians in Britain "are not willing to be excluded from any part of our heritage; which heritage includes both a Bradford-born Indian kid's right to be treated as a full member of British society, and also the right of any member of this post-diaspora community to draw on its roots for its art, just as all the world's community of displaced writers has always done". Indians and Pakistanis living in Britain are in the unenviable position of first having been colonized by the British in the eighteenth century to 1947 with India becoming free, then migrating to Britain to escape the poverty (which became more conspicuous with the increased industrialization Britain brought), and then being treated as foreigners in Britain.
Rushdie explains how Commonwealth Literature is created and sustained by critics and academics, not novelists. He says that the term Commonwealth Literature "permits academic institutions, publishers, critics, and even readers to dump a large segment of English Literature into a box and then more or less ignore it" (p 66). It reconfirms English Literature at the centre. And this is a fiction. Although certain countries don't belong to the Commonwealth, their authors apparently belong to its literature. England is not included. There are so many differences amongst these writers that it is difficult to see what they have in common. It is easier to see what they don't have in common. They are not Britons, Irish, U.S. whites, and they have experiences other than English (the kind of English which is not the english which Ashcroft et. al. refer to). Rushdie calls this an exclusive ghetto.
By naming and positioning such politically conscious writing in relation to English Literature (the sort which Rushdie reviews in this text), the intelligentsia which produces this fictive Commonwealth Literature appears to be committing a similar (neocolonial) act as what Said describes in Orientalism. That is, there is a textual production of the Other going on.
These essays of Rushdie's which have been written over a period of 10 years, make it painfully clear that his movement from one form of repression to another, and his analysis and articulation of the complexities of a changing world, have culminated in this present state of affairs, where he lives under constant threat of death.
Notes
1 Derrida's discussion on 'pharmakon' is about writing as both poison and cure, as a threat to spoken language, and as an indispensible way to record and transmit language (Norris, 1987, Derrida).
2 Spivak develops this idea in In Other Worlds (1988) in the essay "Explanation and Culture: Marginalia" (pp 103-117) by refering to Derrida's deconstruction of centre/margin. She says that "The only way I can hope to suggest how the center itself is marginal is by not remaining outside in the margin and pointing my accusing finger at the center. I might do it rather by implicating myself in that center and sensing what politics make it marginal" (p. 107).
3 This is similar to Trinh's distinction between I/i, wherein I is the unified, all-knowing subject and i is the plural, non-unitary subject (1989).
4 Trinh elaborates this in her discussion of the 'underdeveloped', 'needy', and 'special' Other (1989).
5 Brennan, 1989, pp 50-51. Postcolonial cultures are fluid unities. Ethnicity is not absolute but complex, and it expresses itself in cultures as part of that culture only insofar as it modifies it and modifies the very idea of culture.
6 Script written by Hanif Kureishi, who also wrote The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and the script for the film "My Beautiful Laundrette", which is also set in Thatcherite England and deals with race, class and sexuality.

Salman Rushdie: the ambivalence of migrancy - Critical Essay
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2001 by Shailja Sharma
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In her essay on The Satanic Verses, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak temporarily brackets her discussion of the Rushdie affair in order to "attempt the impossible: a reading of The Satanic Verses as if nothing has happened since late 1988" (219). A short while later, she returns to the "cultural politics" of the controversy in order to reconnect the book with its notorious context, the debate between the twin demonologies of "Islam" and "free speech and secularism." The attempt to separate the book from its reception is interesting, not because it can't be done, or done well, but in the way it raises the issue of the Rushdie text and its "proper" audience, its desired reading constituency. Within the field of a text that is marked as "high culture" with respect to its literary antecedents--surrealism, magic realism, and European modernism--and its potential sphere of evaluation, the Booker Prize--the interventions by South Asian Britons in Bradford, Birmingham, Bolton, and London, and by self-serving politicians i n India and Pakistan, along with their range of mis- or nonreadings, are clearly part of a debate that is not intended to be theirs.Yet The Satanic Verses, as Spivak and a number of other commentators, including Rushdie, have pointed out, is a novel about migrancy in general and about South Asian immigrants to Britain in particular. (1) One of the problems that attends any investigation of migrancy in Rushdie's work is the almost limitless applicability of the concept, fostered not inconsiderably by the author's own moves from India to Pakistan to England, and now to New York. In this essay I discuss the ambivalent ways in which migrancy recurs in Rushdie's life and work as a concept he celebrates, yet one that has historically had undesired consequences for him.Migrancy can be called the reigning trope of the twentieth century Writers such as Beckett, Joyce, and Rushdie have made it a determining feature of counterhegemonic literature and politics. Rushdie is not alone in being fascinated by the liberatory and metaphysical connotations that attach themselves to the concept. Migration refers not only to the displacements of people in history but to a state of displacement that befalls humankind in general. In his essay on Gunter Grass, Rushdie proclaims, "We all cross frontiers; in that sense, we are all migrant peoples" (279). While that may be true on some abstract level, still we all cross them differently, and thus we are not all migrants in the same way. That experiences of migration differ, I think, is one of the crucial distinctions to be made in any discussion of the subject.
An attendant problem involves Rushdie's shifting claims about the relationship between his novels and history While any straight correspondence between the two would be facile, Rushdie's changing positions with regard to the historicity of The Satanic Verses invites a questioning of the reasons behind such claims and disclaimers. In his letter to Rajiv Gandhi, Rushdie insists that "the book isn't about Islam, but about migration, metamorphoses, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay... How much further from history could one get?" (Appignanesi 35-36). Later, however, in the Observer, he claims that the book is an attempt to "discuss the growth of Islam as a historical phenomenon, as an ideology born out of its time" (Appignanesi 62). And in the same essay, he explains the novel as "an attempt to write about migration, its stresses and transformations, from the point of view of migrants from the Indian subcontinent to Britain." In the first case migration is a category far removed from history, and in the second it is inextricably a historical event. The status of such statements as truth claims is hardly the issue. The point, rather, is to understand these shifting patterns of migrancy's relation to history as they appear in his work. While the strategy of disaffiliation that Rushdie performs may in part be attributable to a rhetorical line of defense necessitated by the attacks on his book, exactly what his concept of migration is, and what his place in the migrant population is, still remain to be examined.
The frequent slippages that Rushdie performs, in which he invites his readers' collusion, among tropes of migrancy, immigration, and exile as they traverse semantic, linguistic, and cultural fields often lead to an under-privileging of the political arenas from which immigrant and diaspora politics often emerge. Within such arenas of political and anti-institutional critiques, Rushdie himself is a vocal participant, as can be seen from essays such as "Outside the Whale" and "Handsworth Songs." However, in the explicatory glosses through which Rushdie has sought to project the authorial meaning of his work, his use of the term migration robs it of a certain specificity of history and class. This is especially apparent in the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses. As Tim Brennan points out, it is important to locate the "class resentments that are simmering beneath the surface of an affair that has been seen in religious terms alone" (145). Locating these class tensions not only serves to defuse the simpli stic opposition between secularism and fundamentalism but also uncovers the fissured state of class relations within a community that both the British government and well-meaning liberals seek to portray in homogenizing terms. In that context, Rushdie's claim that his text is written "from the point of view of migrants from the Indian subcontinent" is complicated by the controversial and politicized reception of the novel by some of these migrants.
To the extent that Rushdie is part of the Western literary intelligentsia, practiced, like Mimi Mamoulian, in the art of "postmodernist critiques" (Satanic 261), or in Edward Said's words, someone who writes "both in and for the West" (Appignanesi 165), he is removed, in terms of class and cultural capital, from the majority of working-class and petty bourgeois people who make up the bulk of the migration to Britain from the Indian subcontinent. A sensitivity toward class differences does not imply a strict identitarianism or a rejection of cultural production as an effective means of intervention in society. It does, however, make us think about Rushdie's right to speak for a segment of people with whom he may share nothing more than a place of origin and a political sympathy. The myth that Rushdie represents, in some unproblematic way, the experience of immigration, or more generally, postcoloniality, is often fostered by First World critics eager to sacrifice ideological differences to easy definitions. T his myth hides the fact that Rushdie writes primarily for a metropolitan readership from a relatively secure position within the metropolitan intellectual Left. As such, he is a part of the British intellectual field, which, while allowing for various shades of political allegiances, remains a relatively privileged arena. It is in his 1999 novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet that we most clearly see the kinds of displacements that are closest to Rushdie's own experience. In that work, both protagonists initiate their wanderings purposefully, driven by their affiliation to rock music as well as their desire for fame and each other. Not for them the mundane problems of earning a living or experiencing the loss of language, culture, and home. Culturally, imaginatively, linguistically, they arrive at home in the country of immigration, the United States of America.
Rushdie situates himself in a position of perpetual in-betweenness, a migrant caught between three countries, unable to exist comfortably in any one. The trajectory of his work (including his essays and journalism) shows an increasing concern with metafictional issues of representing peripheral histories and experience through a combination of modernist metropolitan and Third World narrative styles adequate to the postcolonial experience. More problematically, his work is often concerned with locating himself in relation to the diaspora culture in Britain, which is reflected most clearly in his essays but also in the pattern of his novels that mirror his own migration and settlement--India, Pakistan, and Britain. In an interview with Madhu Jain of India Today in September 1988 (Appignanesi 30)-the same interview that provoked Syed Shahabuddin to call for The Satanic Verses to be banned in India (Appignanesi 37-41)-Rushdie concurs in seeing Midnight's Children, Shame, and The Satanic Verses as "a body of work ," and The Satanic Verses as the last of a trilogy. The trilogy moves steadily westward, especially in its political concerns, notwithstanding the happy ending of Chamcha and Zeenie Vakil in Bombay at the end of the third novel.
This essay aims at an examination of Rushdie's work as being about the Indian diaspora in the metropolis. In concentrating on The Satanic Verses in particular, along with some essays from Imaginary Homelands, I situate Rushdie, literarily and politically, in the immigrant communities to whose experiences he gives fictional flesh, This situation, of necessity, involves an unfair absence of attention to his cultural and literary connections to the subcontinent. In including a discussion about the Rushdie affair as it is known, I understand it to be (in spite of its apparent international and universalizing character, and in spite of the very real threat to Rushdie's life), at bottom a debate about different versions of cultural authority in a Britain that has to deal with a diasporic population's political coming of age.
So while it would be relatively easy to insulate the book from the controversy, it may also be true that it is the imbrication of the two that highlights transactions between dated versions of Britishness and the diaspora's demands for genuine pluralism. Talal Asad emphasizes this in his reading of the Rushdie affair, connecting the religious demands of Britain's Muslim subjects with British liberal secularist ideas and finding these ideas reduced and wanting. By privileging cultural assimilation over diversity, the British political and cultural establishment seemed to insist on its "demands to exclusive loyalty and its totalizing cultural projects" (Asad 266). Any reading of Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, then, has to recognize the ways in which the novel intervened in these opposing cultural agendas.
Unlike authors such as Farrukh Dhondy, Kazuo Ishiguro, and even Hanif Kureishi, Rushdie did not begin his career in Britain with gestures of political resistance within diaspora communities there. Instead, as Tim Brennan points out, he combined the traditions of "Commonwealth" literature, the Raj novel, and anticolonial polemic to "record the totality of neo-colonialism as a world system, with its absurd combinations of satellite broadcasts and famines, popular uprisings and populist rant, forced migration and tourism" (xii). The mapping of this system concentrated, geographically speaking, on the subcontinent, though arguably, in terms of form, Rushdie owed much more to postwar modernists in Europe and Latin America--what Brennan calls "Third World thematics as seen through the elaborate fictional architecture of European high art" (27). Though not nation-centered, his work still remained obsessed with the space of the nation he had moved away from and the failures of its nationalism.
Compare the satire and sheer breadth of Rushdie's familiarity and engagement with the failures of modern India and Pakistan to the more distant ironies of someone like Farrukh Dhondy. Dhondy reserves his political polemic for his writing based in England, plays such as The Bride and short-story collections such as Brick Lane, which take as their subjects the everyday struggle of diaspora communities against the twin oppressions of British racism and community conservatism. (2) In the novel Bombay Duck, Dhondy moves from Britain to India only to find remnants of Britain in the strangest places. His protagonist, a black Caribbean actor called Gerald Blossom, aka Ali Abdul Rehman, goes to India as part of an avant-garde theater group putting on the Ramayana. At the son et lumiere at the Red Fort in New Delhi, the locus of the failed anti-British revolution of 1857, he hearsvoices which are familiar to me, at least two of them, from the London stage..., they are Indian actors from England, some RADA training, a piece at the National, a stint with the Royal Shakespeare, a part in Jewel in the Crown, and we home. Commenting now on the Red Fort and how it changed hands through many cultures, the Hindus and the Muslims and all this kinda ting. (129-30)
However, the point of view of Ali, the ironic jibe at Paul Scott's TV opus notwithstanding, remains that of an outsider. His critique of India remains connected to Britain, especially in Dhondy's efforts to present a composite "black" view, comprising both South Asian and Caribbean immigrants, the political imperative for which is rooted in British race politics. To this outsider view, contrast Rushdie's incestuous knowledges of cultural quirks from various aspects of life in Bombay, the dialects of Parsees and Anglo-Indians, the stiffness of the Cathedral School socials, the Kolynos Kid, and the "Funtabulous Faluda" at the Pioneer Cafe, where the decor reflects the failed hopes of the radicals and the poets (Midnight's Children). In Dhondy's book, Ali's Indian lover is called Anjali, almost the same as Anjali, the Eurasian princess in M. M. Kaye's pulp Raj novel, The Far Pavilions, a reminder of how the Raj "revival" in England elided the more important issues of race and discrimination.
Or contrast, for instance, the journalistic guns-and-heroin view of Pakistan in Hanif Kureishi's ambivalent arrival "home" in "The Rainbow Sign" with Rushdie's account of the politics of the "Land of the Pure" (Shame 73). Kureishi focuses on the oddities of Pakistan's relationship with Britain. In fact, every aspect of his interaction with his Pakistani friends and cousins becomes an instance to ruminate on Pakistan's omnipresent, multifaceted relationship to Britain:
In Pakistan, England just wouldn't go away. Despite the Lahore lawyer, despite everything, England was very much on the minds of the Pakistanis. Relics of the Raj were everywhere: buildings, monuments, Oxford accents, libraries full of English books, and newspapers. Many Pakistanis had relatives in England; thousands of Pakistani families depended on money sent from England.... It was happening all the time--the closeness of the two societies, and the distance. (24-25)
Rushdie's Pakistan, on the other hand, self-destructs less from its relationship with England than from the weight of its own imperfect history and its own exploitative elite, civil and military. His narrative of the Hyder and Harappa family fortunes explores not just the legacy of British colonialism but postcolonial complicity in the perpetuation of unequal power relations. Nevertheless, as Aijaz Ahmad points out, it is
this tendency either to individualize completely the moral failures of a ruling class (Bhutto, or Zia, or whoever, is a bad character) or to spread them far too widely through society at large (the country was made wrong; what do you expect?) which gives to Rushdie's laughter, so salutary in some respects, the ambiance, finally, of the modern cartoon. (141)Ahmad points out, quite accurately, that the postmodern refusal in Rushdie's work to subscribe to any larger frame of history than the individual leads to an ethics of despair that both grants too much agency to the elite and ignores other forms of resistance (154-55). The point to be made in the context of Kureishi, however, is that Rushdie, not just by locating his earlier novels in India and Pakistan but also by analyzing their history, does not see these countries as indissolubly linked to the British mother node.
In part, the different emphases are explicable in terms of political beliefs and generational shifts, and in part they depend on the weight given by each writer to notions of home and belonging. Dhondy clearly sees his role as one of principled intervention in the cultural sphere of a multicultural Britain. Historically, Dhondy has been involved in school education programs (he worked as a schoolteacher early in his career) and with Channel 4 as a scriptwriter and editor. Despite an upbringing similar to Rushdie's in terms of class and education, Dhondy, once in England, intervened early in British politics. A socialist and activist sympathetic to black radical politics in the 1960s and 70s, Dhondy has always seen his intellectual life and politics in terms of speaking to the cause of all minorities, not just South Asians. His recent biography/memoir of C. L. R. James certainly attests to his commitment to that position.Kureishi has been defined as representative of second-generation South Asians who have at best a troubled and attenuated relationship with countries called "home," a concept he ridicules as a false comfort:
I know Pakistanis and Indians born and brought up here who consider their position to be the result of a diaspora: they are in exile, awaiting return to a better place, where they belong.... It is not difficult to see how much illusion and falsity there is in this view. How much disappointment and unhappiness might be involved in going "home" only to see the extent to which you have been formed by England and the depth of attachment you feel to the place, in spite of everything. (37)
However, the ridicule of "home" depends in part on the degree of community one experiences in dispora, and "attachment" has more to do with the comforts of class and cultural privilege than with the simple opposition between nostalgia and pragmatism. Kureishi's career over the past decade has shown a steady "mainstreaming" effect, most recently seen in his autobiographical novella Intimacy, in which race is downplayed to extinction while urban middle-class status becomes the primary filter of belonging and examination. It is important to recognize, however, that even as we read writers as being unproblematically representative of communities, the modes of insertion into British society that offer possibilities of a choice for Dhondy and Kureishi are not uniformly spread across the class or gender spectrum.
While class privilege is far from absent as a factor in Rushdie's work, (3) what he refuses are the relative securities of belonging to one country alone: one history, one loyalty, one language, and one set of problems. Insisting on the literary fecundity of his multiple belongings, Rushdie uses the postlapsarian world of the immigrant to politicize his novel of memory, which encompasses both East and West. As early as Shame, he intervenes in the narrative of the novel to draw instructive parallels between immigrant figures in contemporary Britain such as Anna Muhammad and his women characters in Q. or Karachi, or "Peccavistan." The two narrative tracks echo one another in their exploration of sharam (shame) and yet retain their specific burdens of critique. Of course, in The Satanic Verses, the concern with British racism toward its ethnic minorities takes over and overwhelms the narrative that in a sense is its progeny, the story of Mahound/Gibreel; Ellowen Deeowen casts its shadow on both Jahilia and Peris tan.
The deliberately hybrid, mongrel, multireferential nature of the literary and experiential inheritance that Rushdie claims, not just from East and West but from all corners of the world, is an exciting guide for detecting literary footprints in his work, but obstructs any attempt to define a national or literary influence for it. Rushdie himself is scarcely any help. In the essay "Imaginary Homelands," he suggests that migrancy, either as a literal or literary (imaginative) experience, has marked writers as diverse as Borges, Heinrich Boll, Gogol, Cervantes, Kafka, Melville, and Machado de Assis. Unarguable as the list is, it becomes disturbing when Rushdie claims similar experiences of displacement and minority status, thus losing the political charge and demographic scale that marks twentieth-century migration from the periphery to the metropolitan world:
Let me suggest that Indian writers in England have access to a second tradition, quite apart from their own racial history. It is the culture and political history of the phenomenon of migration, displacement, life in a minority group. We can quite legitimately claim as our ancestors the Huguenots, the Irish, the Jews; the past to which we belong is an English past, the history of immigrant Britain. Swift, Conrad, Marx are as much our literary forebears as Tagore or Rammohun Roy. America, a nation of immigrants, has created great literature out of the phenomenon of cultural transplantation.... it may be that by discovering what we have in common with those who preceded us into this country, we can do the same. (20)
The troublesome issue of race in immigration has been elided entirely by Rushdie in this ode to the pleasures of migrancy. The "freedoms of the literary migrant," as Rushdie calls them later in the same essay (21), scarcely include defining the process of race relations in Britain as a matter of cultural transplantation or the discovery of common cause between an Indian grocer and long-dead lights of English literature. What Rushdie is doing is arrogating to himself a cultural tradition based on an elite education system, both in Britain and India, and using this tradition to speak prescriptively for a very diverse set of people.
Even if one discounts some of his pronouncements as so much rhetorical pomposity, it is not untroubling when Rushdie compares his situation to Western writers who have been "eclectic in their selection of theme, setting, form ... raiding the visual storehouses of Africa, Asia, the Philippines," and insists that "we must grant ourselves an equal freedom" (20). It is surely no news to Rushdie that artistic eclecticism, as he chooses to call it, was also related to the "raiding" of colonies by Western countries. In this case, the concept of "equal freedom" is not just ideologically repulsive but impossible. While the implicit point of Rushdie's argument here is the justifiable claim that writers should not have to be held to any literal accounting of national origins and traditions, and that a diverse set of influences shapes a postcolonial writer's imagination, this argument elides the differences between migrants. Rushdie, whose entire career is based on the questioning of historical givens and beliefs, invok es the metafictional trope of migrancy to invoke an absolute of root-lessness and hybridity. (4)
Conversely, one must recognize that it is precisely Rushdie's freewheeling use of hybridity, particularly linguistic hybridity, that gives his work its iconoclastic, transgressive edge. Saleem's challenge to authority in Midnight's Children is evident not just in his abilities as a "radio station" but also in his mixed Anglo-Indian parentage, his refusal to stay within the confines of Methwold's estate when he follows Ameena Sinai to the Pioneer Cafe, his presence at the table with the pepper pots. On the level of language, Rushdie translates Hindi and Urdu demotic speech patterns freely into English and inflects the language of his characters with dialect patterns particular to the class, region, or community they belong to. For example, the frequent use of interjections such as "yaar" in the speech of Gibreel Farishta, or Ameena Sinai's use of terms such as "whatsitsname," are direct translations from the spoken Hindostani.
There are many puns, often around names, that Rushdie refuses to translate for the benefit of his Western reader: the Rani of Cooch Naheen is literally the queen of Nothing at All. In Rushdie's work, names take on the nature of a long-drawn-out, historically evocative joke, as in Saladin Chamcha (spoon, yes-man) or Naveed (good news) Ryder. Mimi Mamoulian, as her name suggests, is deceptively ordinary (mamaoli). Iskandar Harappa refers both to subcontinental claims to antiquity (Harappa) and to its actual miscegenated lineage (Iskandar, or Alexander, a nod to the Greek conquest of Northwest Pakistan and the Punjab). Such examples can go on and on. The pleasures of reading Rushdie thus vary with the linguistic range of his readers. For his readers in the West, his dizzy stylistics, his use of myth, his pace of narration, and his magic realism are presumably more captivating. For his subcontinental readers, however, the text's appeal lies not so much in the complex relationship between fantasy and history, as Rushdie points out ("Midnight's Children and Shame" 2-3), but rather in its extended verbal and political satire. Literature in Hindi and Urdu has had its share of postindependence satirists such as Krishan Chandar and Rajinder Singh Bedi; but Rushdie is unusual among English-language satirists for not attempting the bilingual humor.
Rushdie's is one method of writing migration, not like Samuel Beckett's--through an aesthetics of privation and sparseness--but by reveling in his multiple languages and belongings and by playing each off the other. As Rushdie himself points out, "however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not infertile territory for a writer to occupy" ("Imaginary Homelands" 18). But it is in The Satanic Verses that Rushdie chooses as his literary territory the in-between space of the immigrant, with the bilingual, bicultural baggage this involves. Many critics have claimed that the novel's underlying theme is the questioning of established pieties and traditions, that Rushdie explores religious doubt as part of the larger pattern of interrogating hegemonic versions of authority, whether of state, ideology, or culture. While this view is arguable in terms of a larger concern that Rushdie entertains through his writing, I would like to examine The Satanic Verses as a text that takes as its central concern the l ives of (predominantly) subcontinental Asians in contemporary Britain. Even though Rushdie interchangeably calls them "migrants," "exiles," or "immigrants," thus refusing to entertain notions of class difference that these terms generally imply, his characters in the text are identifiably members of the postindependence immigrant communities in urban Britain. Their different relationships to British society, against the background of tense race relations in 1980s Britain, form the stuff of the novel.
Is migrancy part of the punishment for sins committed, as the epigraph to The Satanic Verses seems to suggest, (5) or is it a chance at a better, free life, as the American myth maintains and Chamcha persists in thinking? His eventual return to India might suggest the former, but then again, there are numerous other characters in the novel whose experience suggests otherwise. The seductive nature of Rushdie's prose and his overextended use of myth, metaphor, symbolism, and parallelism make it easy to slip into a metaphysical way of thinking where migrancy and travel become the tropes of twentieth-century life.
When Gibreel and Chamcha are yielded up to England by the broken halves of the airplane Bostan, their method of arrival, in all its transmogrifying, reincarnating character, is carefully set beside the usual humiliation of immigrant arrival at Heathrow:
Quite a quantity of wives who had been grilled by reasonable, doing-their-job officials about the length of and distinguishable moles upon their husbands' genitalia, a sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy the British government had cast its ever-reasonable doubts.... (4)
As they fall through the air, their range of expression sets up the initial opposition between the good and the bad immigrant. Gibreel, the angel, sings an old Hindi film song whose patriotic text insists on the cosmopolitan's "inviolately subcontinental heart" (6), while Chamcha, the more-British-than-thou toady, counters this blasphemy over England by singing the verses of one James Thompson (1700-1748).
In Saladin Chamcha, Rushdie draws the figure of the ideal immigrant, the kind held up as an example of what all immigrants ought to be. Upwardly mobile, imperially hungover, his Indian accent hidden not just under a British accent but under a "Thousand Voices and a Voice" (60), he inherits and marries money and he assimilates, where assimilation means the deliberate forgetting of other existences. At the beginning of the book, "home" to Chamcha is associated with feelings of shame, with the threat of losing the stash of cultural capital that makes him a proper Englishman. Thus when his initial rejection of Zeenie's suggestion of a return to India ("When you have stepped through the looking-glass you step back at your own peril. The mirror may cut you to shreds" [58]) gives way uncontrollably to a return of the repressed ("The black fellow creeping up behind" [531). Saladin, actually Salahuddin Chamchawala, panics at the prospect of multiple mortifications:
How had the past bubbled up, in transmogrified vowels and vocab? What next? Would he take to putting coconut-oil in his hair? ... What further, diabolic humiliations were in store? He should have known it was a mistake to go home, after so long, how could it be other than a regression; it was an unnatural journey.... (34)
In the metamorphosis from Saladin Chamcha to unnatural goat-man, Saladin tries his best to retain the vestiges of his bowler-hatted, English self with his tweedy-voiced wife, but fails. This degeneration renders the manticore's analysis perfectly comprehensible: "They describe us. That's all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct" (168). (6) It is proper, then, that in the loss of his class and caste in a society where these things matter, Chamcha should end up in the mirror image of his life with Pamela, at Shaandaar (glorious) Cafe. which to him is anything but.
Hind's attitude in the face of her daughters' remarkable adaptation to British life (Bangladesh, Anahita decides, is nothing more for her than "Bungleditch") reflects some of the same paranoia and xenophobia that marks the Imam. The Imam of Desh (country) is the character who most strenuously resists any degree of adjustment to Britain, seeing his stay there as strictly functional. His presence in Britain is due not to immigration but to exile. His efforts are directed at not knowing where he is, "ignorant and therefore unsullied, unaltered, pure" (207). In exile, his thoughts are directed at his eventual return, and Britain, while being present, is strictly marginal. "The curtains, thick golden velvet, are kept shut all day, because otherwise the evil thing might creep into the apartment: foreignness, Abroad, the alien nation" (209). The binaries through which he invokes his location, Desh vs. Abroad, are structured to signify what Bhabha calls the heimlich pleasures of the hearth vs. the unheimlich terror of the other (Bhabha 23). In Abroad, the Imam does not see, cook, furnish. "Exile," he says, "is a soulless country.... In exile all attempts to put down roots look like treason: they are admissions of defeat" (208). The Imam's refusal to acculturate or assimilate is but an extreme version of the voluntary cultural ghettoization that is an aspect of immigrant communities.
England, according to the Imam, is a hospitable country: "they take all types" (208). Since England is populated by a diversity of people, this encourages in its inhabitants a susceptibility to the rhetoric of nativism and true belonging. In the section titled "A City Visible but Unseen," Chamcha protests against being fed Indian food instead of "cereal complete with toy silver spacemen" (258). Ever the proper Englishman, he tries to explain "that he thought of himself, nowadays, as, well, British." The humor in this self-characterization is perhaps not entirely a result of his "nowadays" state as a devil incarnate. It also has to do with the colonial stereotype of the "brown sahib" and the impossibility of a reviled "Paki" thinking he was more British than the Bangladeshis, who were, after all, his "own people." He rejects Mishal and Anahita's claim to be equally British, based largely on his belief that being British entails a certain class attitude that they lack: "But they weren't British, he wanted to t ell them, not really, not in any way he could recognize" (259).
The overwhelmingly cultural aspects of these degrees of belonging and unbelonging that Rushdie emphasizes are reflected in his prose, a sly parody of versions of high modernism. Although at the beginning of Chamcha's fall, he counters vulgar Hindi film songs with the religious fervor of James Thompson, later in the novel he thinks or listens in the various tones of an Eliot, Joyce, or Beckett, the three high-modernist exiles non pareil. Paraphrasing Beckett's characters in Waiting for Godot and Malone Dies, Mimi sums life up for Chamcha in its absurdist totality: "Age, Chamcha: it's all humiliations. You get born, you get beaten up and bruised all over and finally you break and they shovel you into an urn" (260). Like Prufrock, Chamcha struggles to dissociate his sensibility from his surroundings, even himself: "I have become embroiled, in things, in the world and its messes, and I cannot resist. The grotesque has me, as before the quotidian had me, in its thrall. The sea gave me up; the land drags me down" (260). That the mermaids refuse to call Chamcha, the immigrant trying to be British, as he paces his room in the Shaandaar Cafe, is hardly a surprise to the Western or subcontinental reader of The Satanic Verses, but it is a source of frustration for him. "Abandoned by one alien England, marooned within another" (270), Chamcha takes no comfort from the surprisingly prescient analysis of his state by Mr. Sufyan: "Your soul, my good poor dear sir, is the same. Only in its migration it has adopted this presently varying form" (277). Migration, then, has a lot to answer for.
Cultural capital, based in most cases on financial capital and class privilege, spreads its tentacles both on the Left and the Right. On the Left, the character Hanif Johnson, a blue-eyed, fair-skinned Labour party young hopeful, Mishal Sufyan's lover, joins radical chic with his command over language: "Hanif was in perfect control of the languages that mattered: sociological, socialistic, black-radical, anti-anti-anti-racist, demagogic, oratorical, sermonic: the vocabularies of power" (281). Jumpy Joshi cogitates in his Joycean diatribe against the Hanif's privileges: "The real language problem: how to bend it shape it, how to let it be our freedom, how to repossess its poisoned wells, how to master the river of words of time of blood: about all you haven't got a clue" (281). Chamcha, of course, is the character who starts out on the Right and ends up being attracted to both Mishal and Zeenie, women on the Left. More importantly, as the Shaitan (devil) incarnate, he becomes a symbol of resistance for black British youth fighting against racism. Through Chamcha's metamorphosis and its appropriation by the antiracists, Rushdie ironically plays off the stereotyping of immigrant youth as antisocial criminals:
"Chamcha," Mishal said excitedly, "you're a hero. I mean, people can really identify with you. It's an image white society has rejected for so long that we can really take it, you know, occupy it, inhabit it, reclaim it and make it our own." ... "Go away," cried Saladin, in his bewilderment. "This isn't what I wanted. This is not what I meant, at all." (287) (7)
The stuff of Gibreel's dreams, on the other hand, is more ambitious: he wants to transform London itself. In yet another reversal of the postcolonial immigrant experience, Gibreel, instead of fitting in, decides to "fix" London to suit himself in a marvelously portentous and bathetic scene. A vengeful postcolonial angel, he flies over London personifying the return of the repressed. "Did they not think that their history would return to haunt them? ... Native and settler, that old dispute, continuing now upon these soggy streets, with reversed categories" (353). At the conclusion of his analysis, Gibreel decides: "the trouble with the English was their ... In a word, Gibreel solemnly pronounced, their weather." His task is then to turn London into a tropical city, which will achieve a number of other effects:
increased moral definition, institution of a national siesta, development of vivid and expansive patterns of behavior among the populace, higher quality popular music, new birds in the trees, new trees under the birds.... Emergence of new social values, friends to commence dropping in on one another without making appointments, closure of old folks' homes, emphasis on extended family Spicier food; the use of water as well as paper in English toilets; the joy of running fully dressed through the first rains of the monsoon.... Standing upon the horizon, spreading his arms to fill the sky, Gibreel cried: "Let it be." (354)
This effort by Gibreel to "tropicalize" London draws on a familiar list of charges laid at the door of immigrant peoples by the British: large, informal families; lax work ethics; flashy clothes and music. In Gibreel's list, however, these "faults" become desirable qualities that the British lack. This messianic zeal on the part of Gibreel comes to a sad and realistic end when he finds himself back at Alleluia Cone's door.
Rushdie thus provides us with four versions of cultural "translation," as he calls it, examples of: (1) the English sahib, fashioned, as Chamcha himself admits, in the mold of Nirad Chaudhri or V. S. Naipaul, transformed from a creature of "selected discontinuities" (60) to a slightly more self-aware but still resentful self; (2) the "untranslated" man, in the figure of Gibreel, who wants to transform Britain in the mold of the other country; (3) the resolutely religious man, the Imam, who refuses all transactions with the foreign country and for whom Britain remains a transit station on his way back home; and (4) the hardworking immigrant family, the Sufyans, who represent a generational split between nostalgia on the one hand and ready forgetfulness on the other.
An excess of memory is opposed to a refusal of memory. In Mishal and Hanif, Rushdie presents the new generation of black British youth, the postdiaspora--those who, after being orphaned, can say "The world is real, We have to live in it; we have to live here, to live on" (469).
However, the central question in the novel about migrancy and its body- and mind-altering effects remains tied to the multiple changes of Salahuddin Chamchawala. In the last section of the book, after destroying Gibreel and Alleluia's love affair in retribution for Gibreel's silence, after being rescued by Gibreel from the fire at the Shaandaar Cafe, and after suffering a heart attack, the anglicized Saladin recovers his identity as the brave, the native, Salahuddin. The narrative device that prompts his return "home" is his father's death. However, why he decides to stay- apart from the satisfaction of reconciling with his father and inheriting a lot of money-remains unclear. Does his decision have to do with his sojourn at the Shaandaar Cafe or with the experience of marginality that led him there? Does he discover that Britain, the repository of Civis Britannicus sum, has forfeited her graciousness? On the contrary, Saladin insists that "Empire was no more, but still he knew 'all that was good and living w ithin him' to have been 'made, shaped and quickened' by his encounter with this islet of sensibility, surrounded by the cool sense of the sea" (398). Is his return, then, simply an authorial ploy to effect closure? Why had Chamcha's position become untenable in London?
The transformation of an upper-class, Anglophile Indian through exposure to the seamier sides of British racism involves a process of classement for Chamcha. The way into any progressive politics in Britain is problematic for him because of his class prejudices, his skepticism, and the concomitant ridicule of figures such as the supporters of Uhuru Simba. However, leftist politics in Bombay, as portrayed by Rushdie, prove more accessible. Furthermore, Chamcha has no real personal or professional ties to keep him in Britain. Rushdie does such a good job of delineating the multifarious discomforts of expatriate life in Britain that any resolution could only involve Chamcha's return to Bombay. The only constructive politics of resistance in the novel belongs to a different generation and class from Chamcha's. I suggest that it is Rushdie's discomfort with the option of organized politics, determined largely by his class affiliations, that leads him to reject the possibility of Chamcha's remaining in Britain on j ustifiable grounds. (Like Saleem Sinai, Chamcha draws on many incidents from Rushdie's own life. In an interview, Rushdie once suggested that he was thinking of returning to India before the Ayatollah's fatwa put paid to any such plans [Appignanesi 31]. This does not suggest that Rushdie is merely writing his life. It only indicates that he himself remains an uneasy member of the British diaspora. The dream of return that Kureishi mocks is still within Rushdie's horizons.)
While Rushdie's literary and no doubt, political sympathies lie with British minorities and immigrants, his class position allows him choices that they might not have (witness his recent move to New York). This allows him gestures of solidarity but not solidarity itself. When the Rush-die affair broke, it was certainly the perception that Rushdie was not one of them that exposed him to the charge of being unrepresentative of the immigrant community-a charge repeated on many occasions by Muslim scholars and anti-Rushdie spokespeople.
The Rushdie affair foregrounds the schism within the Asian community in Britain between the upper-class, educated expatriates or emigrants and the petty bourgeois or working-class immigrants who arrived after decolonization in response to opportunities in the British labor market. For the most part these factions existed separately from each other, but in the wake of the controversy over The Satanic Verses, they stood clearly opposed. The ostensible cause of this opposition was religion. The weary binaries of secularism vs. religion, progress vs. traditionalism, and enlightened elite vs. uneducated masses were dutifully invoked, and underlying them all were the stereotypes of West vs. East, the determinedly Orientalist character of the diatribes. However, the writings provoked by the Rushdie affair itself considerably complicate the opposition between "bad religious fanatics" and "good secular intellectuals."
Rushdie's critics have consistently raised issues of class. They have also pointed to the demonizing of Islam, which does not hesitate to link Islam to media images of terrorism and to fundamentalism and anti-Western rhetoric. (8) In Postmodernism and Islam, Akbar S. Ahmad cites the Rushdie case as a double betrayal of the majority immigrant population, first by the British, who did not accept them, and then by their own educated elite, who made fun of them. "The elite only condescended to raid their community long enough to pick up the material for a short story or play (of Dhondy's Tandoori Nights variety ...)" (174-75). (9) Kureishi, Tariq Ali, and Rushdie come in for criticisms of pandering to English stereotypes of Orientals. "Consider Kureishi.... His almost perfect mimicry makes him noteworthy. The humor, cynicism, lively language, exaggerated priapism, and a pace that never lets up ... reflect popular English taste" (127). Kureishi, Ali, and Rushdie are, according to Ahmad, "extreme examples of the su ccess of Macaulay." "Macaulay's Minute," it will be remembered, set forth the educational mission of the British quite clearly:
We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. (Macaulay 729; my emphasis)
Ahmad's rhetoric calls to mind Mufti's description of the two levels of critique emanating from Islamicists: cultural critique, directed at modern or Western practices ranging from eating habits to educational methods; and social critique, directed at neocolonial structures of domination and exploitation. According to Mufti, it is the conflation of these two levels that lends force to the arguments of Shabbir Akhtar and Akbar Ahmad.
However, we must be attentive to the demonization of Islam that often accompanies defenses of Rushdie. An example can be found in the opening of Malise Ruthven's A Satanic Affair. (10) Ruthven begins his book with a description of British Muslims:
They came in thousands from Bradford and Dewsbury ... from Stepney and Whitechapel in London's East End.... They wore white hats and long baggy trousers with flapping shirt tails. Most of them were bearded; the older men looked wild and scraggy with curly, grey-flecked beards--they were mountain men from the Punjab, farmers from the Ganges delta, peasants from the hills of Mirpur and Campbellpur. After decades of living in Britain, they still seemed utterly foreign ... they seemed like men from the sticks, irredeemably provincial. (1)
Apart from his geographical errors, Ruthven relies on "wild and scraggy" metaphors that portray the Muslims as savages, not capable of having any opinion on a book. Similar examples can be found in other writings, which consistently imply that the anti-Rushdie protesters could not have read or understood the book.
Bhikhu Parekh, writing in the Independent, commented that "the context of deep suspicion and alienation prevailing between the Asian community as a whole and its intellectuals" should not be underestimated (Appignanesi 121-24). Once again linking Dhondy and Kureishi with Rushdie, he thinks that "Many Asians view their intellectuals as being as racist as the whites." While racism per se might not be the issue here, it is certainly fair to say the Asian intellectual class has more in common with the white intelligentsia than with the class of fellow Asians represented by Muhammad Sufyan.
Thus the context of class conflict among South Asian immigrants in Britain, conflict that is articulated in Rushdie's novel itself, provides a rather different perspective on the Rushdie affair from the simple dualism of bigotry vs. free speech. While Rushdie has consistently written against racism and the need for political engagement against forces of the Right, he has done so more in a position of solidarity with the mainstream Left in Britain than with the South Asian community. He was a member of Charter 88, an anti-Thatcher manifesto, and of the 20th June group, which was organized by Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser. Though clearly antiestablishment, neither of these coalitions took a particular stand on minority issues. As far as most Muslims were concerned, affiliations of this nature paradoxically placed Rushdie within the establishment and thus aligned him with the enemy.
It seems to me that insofar as the Rushdie affair brought to the fore class tensions that pre-existed in the Asian community in Britain, it served to highlight different aspects of immigrant life and migrancy, differences that had long been suppressed under the debates over racism and minorities, differences that have since been subsumed under readings of The Satanic Verses as a novel of migrancy. The uniformity of the immigrant experience, in other words, has been called into question. Whether the opening of these schisms is detrimental to any collective politics is another issue, and far more complex. This division certainly encourages us to conceive of a more nuanced politics of "minority" representation within diaspora communities in Europe.
Notes
(1.) In his essay "In Good Faith," Rushdie calls the novel "a love song to our mongrel selves" (394, my emphasis). See also Talal Asad, Rukmini B. Nair, and Rimli Bhattacharya.
(2.) An early collection of Dhondy's short stories called Poona Company is based in Pune, India, but the tone of the writing there is largely uncritical and nostalgic. What it has in common with collections such as Brick Lane is the narrative technique of revealing social insights through a child's point of view
(3.) Rushdie acknowledges the benefits of class privilege in "Imaginary Homelands":
I can't escape the view that my relatively easy ride is not the result of the dream-England's famous sense of tolerance and fair play, but of my social class, my freak fair skin and my "English" English accent. Take away any of these, and the story would have been very different. Because of course, the dream-England is no more than a dream. (18)
(4.) For Rushdie's destabilization and debunking of authoritative history, see Brennan 85 and David Lipscomb.
(5.) The epigraph is as follows:
Satan, thus being confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste or air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is ... without any fixed place, or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon. (Daniel Defoe, The History of the Devil)
Defoe's wanderer, Satan, is also an angel, a duality of opposites like Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta and like Gibreel and Mohammad/Mahound--fallen heroes, all of them.
(6.) These "pictures" suggest films--moving pictures--as well as verbal representations. In addition to the stereotyped pictures of "Pakis" in news reports, Rushdie may also be alluding to the rash of Raj films that he wrote against in the essays "Outside the Whale" and "Attenborough's Gandhi." In these films, including Jewel in the Crown, The Far Pavilions, and Heat and Dust, the stereotype of the animal-like, sex-starved Indian is not uncommon. These images are often set in relief against the image of the perfectly fastidious Englishwoman or man.
(7.) The reference, of course, is to "Prufrock." The poem is haunted, much like Rushdie's novel, by indeterminacy and loss of status.

Biography

I can't escape the view that my relatively easy ride is not the result of the dream-England's famous sense of tolerance and fair play, but of my social class, my freak fair skin and my "English" English accent. Take away any of these, and the story would have been very different. Because of course, the dream-England is no more than a dream. (18)
(4.) For Rushdie's destabilization and debunking of authoritative history, see Brennan 85 and David Lipscomb.
(5.) The epigraph is as follows:
Satan, thus being confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste or air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is ... without any fixed place, or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon. (Daniel Defoe, The History of the Devil)
Defoe's wanderer, Satan, is also an angel, a duality of opposites like Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta and like Gibreel and Mohammad/Mahound--fallen heroes, all of them.
(6.) These "pictures" suggest films--moving pictures--as well as verbal representations. In addition to the stereotyped pictures of "Pakis" in news reports, Rushdie may also be alluding to the rash of Raj films that he wrote against in the essays "Outside the Whale" and "Attenborough's Gandhi." In these films, including Jewel in the Crown, The Far Pavilions, and Heat and Dust, the stereotype of the animal-like, sex-starved Indian is not uncommon. These images are often set in relief against the image of the perfectly fastidious Englishwoman or man.
(7.) The reference, of course, is to "Prufrock." The poem is haunted, much like Rushdie's novel, by indeterminacy and loss of status.
The culturally and religiously diverse worlds of both India and Great Britain offer Rushdie a wealth of concerns and themes that consistently reflect and refract throughout his works.
Ahmed Salman Rushdie was born into the liberal and prosperous Muslim family of Anis Ahmed Rushdie and Negin Rushdie in Bombay, India, on 19 June 1947, the year Pakistan divided from India at the end of British colonialism in South Asia. Rushdie has said of the relaxed religious climate in his home, "Although I came from a Muslim family background, I was never brought up as a believer, and was raised in an atmosphere of what is broadly known as secular humanism." Despite the movements of Muslims north to Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs south to India, Rushdie's family remained in Bombay during his childhood. Although the family later resided in Pakistan, it is India, and most especially Bombay, which is home to Rushdie's complex vision. India, as large as all of Europe, contains one-sixth of the human race. Within this country exists one of the most diverse human cultures: fifteen major languages and innumerable others are spoken by Indians of varied backgrounds including Hindu, Christian, Parsi, Muslim, and Sikh.
Bombay, a city built by foreigners upon reclaimed land, epitomizes the Indian and subcontinental identity crisis of this native mélange overlaid with the powerful remnants of European colonialism. In 1961 at thirteen Rushdie went to England to be educated at Rugby. Ian Hamilton records Rushdie as saying that while at school he "had a pretty hideous time from my own age group: minor persecutions and racist attacks which felt major at the time . . . I never had any friends at school, and I don't now know a single person I was at school with." Incidents from these early years appear refigured in Rushdie's fiction, such as the kippered herring passage in The Satanic Verses (1988) in which Saladin's humiliation in front of the other boys because he is unable to bone his fish illustrates his uncomfortable sense of not fitting in.
From 1962 to 1964 Rushdie's family joined him in England, and their neighborhood in Kensington provides one of the settings of The Satanic Verses. Although they had become British citizens, his family moved to Karachi, Pakistan, and founded a family business, a towel factory. In 1965 Rushdie followed his father's precedent by studying at Kings College, Cambridge, where he received his M.A.
in history with honors in 1968. Yielding to family pressure, he returned to Pakistan, where he worked in television production and publishing until instances of what he considered irrational government meddling with movie endings, essay publication, and television content convinced him to return to London. He details this experience later in "Censorship" in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991 (1991). During the 1960s, although occasionally on welfare, he had jobs in television, publishing, and advertising. His work with advertising executives, while writing television commercials for Ogilvy and Mather, inspired the character of the bigoted Hal Valance in The Satanic Verses.
In 1970 Rushdie met Clarissa Luard, whom he married in May 1976. During this time he completed his first two novels. In 1971 "The Book of the Pir" (parts of which reappear in other forms in The Satanic Verses) was rejected, but in 1975 Grimus, a science-fiction parody that mixes diverse Nordic and Asian mythologies, was published. Grimus was not, however, a success. In Imaginary Homelands Rushdie comments on his early efforts: "Before Midnight's Children [1981], I had had one novel rejected, abandoned two others, and published one, Grimus, which, to put it mildly, bombed." From this point on, however, he turned to the subject matter which he knows best and can handle most successfully: South Asia.
He did retain what was best in Grimus-- an experimental and playful use of language that he would develop more fully in later novels. From 1976 to 1983 Rushdie served as the executive member of the Camden Committee for Community Relations, assisting emigrants from Bangladesh. This experience in dealing with others' cultural displacement, along with other incidents about this time, sensitized him to the problem of racism in Britain. Here he saw the fractured identity of exiles, emigrants, and expatriates, their sense of loss. Their uncertainties confirmed his own questions about what he calls "the provisional nature of all truths." Rushdie also became sensitive to his own designation as "Indian," which simultaneously places him inside and outside of British culture. The British Indian community itself is varied and includes political exiles, first-generation migrants, affluent expatriates, naturalized Britons, and people born in Britain who may have never seen the subcontinent. Aware that his English accent and what he has called his "freakishly light skin" ironically made him seem less Indian than others, he battled with his Indo-English identity and his strong identification with his life in Britain.....