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Salman Rushdie: The Migrant in the MetropolisRukmini 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 — 30To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09528829008576260URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528829008576260

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Salman RushdieThe Migrant in the Metropolis

Rukmini Bhaya Nairand Rimli Bhattacharya

1 Rushdie's own workrepeats this image of'a portioned shore'(SV 4). See alsoCh. VIII 'The Partingof the Arabian Sea'(SV 473-507) and thefinal 'far horizon'passage (SV 546-7).

INTRODUCTION

We begin with a song and a poem, the first by a contemporary but anonymousIndian and the second by Cafavy, one of the earliest and most famous of Greekmodernist poets, because together they suggest two trends that constantly recurin representations of exile. In the interests of pithiness, we shall describe theformer theme as nostalgia and the latter as nemesis.

In my native village, there tuas a banyan treeWe 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)

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

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2 Salman Rushdie, TheSatanic Verses, Viking,London, 1988.

3 Salman Rushdie,Shame, RupaPaperback, New Delhi,1982.

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 lostprelapsarian gardens of a 'native' past thus coexists in the immigrantconsciousness with an equally acute sense of nemesis, that this past is not reallydead, not really forgotten, and that at any time the God left behind may visitretribution on the deserters from Eden who now crowd the neonlit capitalsof the world.

The aerial fall from grace with which The Satanic Verses* (SV) begins veryclearly marks the migrant's passage to a fraught, human 'freedom', that hasto be (at)tested in the metropolitan wilderness of Mahavilayat, the ultimatein both unfamiliarity and seduction. Less apparently in Shame (S) the hero ofthe novel, like the earth itself, is under 'angelic pressure'.

Hell above, Paradise below;.. .he (Omar Khayyam Shakil) grew up between twineternities, whose conventional order was, in his experience, precisely inverted;that such headstandings have effects harder to measure than earthquakes, forwhat inventor has patented a seismograph of the soul?; and that, for OmarKhayyam...their presence heightened his feeling of being a person apart.3

For Rushdie, the master-trope of the immigrant, embodied at one level in allthree 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 appeardesigned 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 thereare no privileged representations of reality, no single tongue in which 'truth'may confidently be asserted. The twentieth century, whose child Rushdie hasso often identified himself as, is one in which multiple meanings,interconnected but never identical metaphors and myths, have become aninalienable part of the belief systems of its intelligentsia.

In this essay, we hope to show that Rushdie's own temporal, spatial, as wellas political identity is governed by the linguistic zone he inhabits. This territoryhas been intrepidly marked out by him, in it he is monarch, but the largerempire within which Rushdie's glittering principality falls, we argue, is theempire of the media. The following sections explore some of the dangers, aswell as some of the attractions, of this alliance for a literary migrant whosemarvellous dexterity can only be displayed in the foremost language of the'first' world.

THE MEDIA

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

This century has been the century of mass movements, of dislocations andrelocations on a scale that had not been possible before. In particular, thetwentieth century has been characterised as "a period of extraordinary literarymigrations".4 It is also without doubt a period when the media hasinescapably entered our lives, no matter which world we inhabit. This secondfact in conjunction with the first entails that most representations of thephenomenon of migration are currently being formed by specific interventions

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5 Bruce Bennett (ed.), ASense of Exile, op cit.

of the media.* Any individual, however talented or committed, appearstherefore in a relatively marginalized powerless position to speak for themigrant, or any other cause, unless s/he has access to media at someinstitutional, collective or personal level. Conversely, the gifted individual whohas links with the media is transformed from being powerless to being acreature with tremendous political potential, and thus attendant moralresponsibility. 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 (filteredthrough a colonial sieve) from a metropolis for an essentially metropolitanreadership, it is not enough to merely look at this or that character as a partof a 'textual enactment' of the 'migrant's condition'. It is also necessary tosituate the trajectories marked/mapped out by individual characters within thelarger site of the producing, publishing and consuming world whoseboundaries have long dissolved from the purely 'literary' to the messily'political' — the as yet unresolved trail that the publication of SV marks. Inaddition to migrations which occur as exporting/importing of cheap labour ora result of a spillover of wars fought elsewhere in the margins, there is a moreelitist class of migrants who in pursuit of higher education or professionaldegrees flock to the Western urban centres. It is for these migrants that theattention and influence of the media may be crucial. What makes Rushdiespecial is that he belongs to a very select subgroup of "Third World'** immigrant

* We wish to avoid essentialising the media, which itself comprises several interestgroups. However, it does seem to us that the professionalisation of world media hasmeant 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 tothe consumer, for example via categorisations of immigrant peoples such as theVietnamese 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 verydifferent movements to the same common denominator. As a result, the phenomenonof migrations from 'disturbed areas', for instance, Kashmir, are read in terms of easilyassimilable phrases such as 'foreign hand' or 'Muslim fundamentalists'. In many waysRushdie himself is fighting this corporate effect of the media; but we discuss more fullythe implications of his strategies in the body of our essay.

** See Timothy Brennan's description of the 'cosmopolitan intellectual' as 'spokespersonfor a kind of permanent immigration' (p 35).

Brennan's explication of his use of the term "Third World', which we use in muchthe same sense in our paper, is relevant here. Brennan writes: "I share the views ofAijaz Ahmad and others who argue that it has no theoretical content whatsoever. Ashe (Ahmad) says, 'we do not live in three worlds but in one', mutually affected andaffecting. Obviously the term has less to do with what a country essentially is — whatcolour 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 theera of the 'Non-aligned Nations', 'Third World' has meant simply those countriesdecolonising from what E.P. Thompson once called 'Natopolis'. It has a political nota sociological meaning. To use the title Salman Rushdie and the Third World for this bookis then not only to place Rushdie in it but to suggest his antagonistic relationship toit." (Preface, xiii-xiv)

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

7 We do not suggest thatthis is a transgressionof authorial privilege,but rather that it couldhave problematicpolitical implications, apoint discussed in thefinal section of ouressay.

writers who write in English, in CAPITALS, from capitals. Although they comefrom a multilingual country, they are also members of a post-colonial elite whoregard English as one of their languages, and also as their primary language.*

The original accident (rather than the original sin) of a class position ultimatelymeans the deconstruction of the 'All India Radio' metaphor in Midnight'sChildren6 (MC) where Saleem with his magic powers can both tune in to andbroadcast to all the other midnight's children. This metaphor is once againdevastatingly used in SV as the means of revenge and betrayal adopted bySaladin Chamcha "the Man of a Thousand Voices". The Saleem/Shiva,Gibreel/Saladin split as epitomised in MC and SV is actually played out byRushdie at a global level. His position as a Third World cosmopolitan makesit possible for him both to record the reality of the present historical situation(mass movements to the multi-national composite metropoles) and to representit as an extended mirroring of his personal dilemma.

The problem of India is the problem of Babel. Rushdie translates this centralquestion of identity to the problem of racism and fundamentalism which canthen assume truly global proportions in SV. We discern several semi-permeablelayers of appropriation here. Although much oversimplification is inherent inan analysis of this sort which attempts to sort into categories the complexitiesof the immigrant's situation, we will suggest something like the followingpattern 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, bringas their baggage the problem of many conflicting tongues.Rushdie, who is predominantly monolingual in English, transmutes thisconundrum of Babel coming to Babylon, (or the Third World migrant, withhis acute linguistic sensibility, losing his languages in homogenizing Westerncities), into a somewhat different object. In SV, Rushdie's concern with racismand world wide fundamentalism seems to involve a licence to transit, perhapstoo easily, between immigrant linguistic anxieties and other dangers whichthreaten not so much immigrants' speech, but more specifically the speechof 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 thecharacters in SV. While the loss of language is indeed equated with loss ofidentity for many of the characters,** it is the immediacy of Rushdie's authorial

* We have elaborated on that relationship in this essay, focussing on the Englishlanguage as the terrain within which Rushdie is situated for reasons of history and whichhe then uses to contest what he perceives as encroachments on issues of 'freedom'.Rushdie's strength and vulnerability arise from this somewhat quixotic relationship hehas with a primary language of the 'First World'.

** See for example, Rushdie's lament in the opening pages of SV (p 4) where asomniscient author he describes "the migrants aboard the disintegrating aircraft";"mingling with the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, therefloated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues...". Among the characters in SV, however, Mishal proves an interestingexception; her refusal to speak her mother Hind's tongue, even though she understandsit, is actually a factor in ensuring her active participation in the new world.

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8 Salman Rushdie, 'InGood Faith', TheIndependent on Sunday,London, A Feb 1990.

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

crisis which works as the real spine of this epic of immigration, which recordsthe misadventures, metamorphosis, and return of the prodigal son.

Language, or more specifically, a narrative strategy which foregroundslanguage (puns, parody, allegory) is Rushdie's means of combatting thesmooth, closed world of the seamless discourse generated by TV, films,newspapers and popular magazines with their persuasive and seductive powersand their illusion of choice. It is also the means of fighting fundamentalismand racism (the twin faces of bigotry, as Rushdie has consistently maintainedsince 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 SaladinChamcha's to return 'home', or like Gibreel, to conquer without selfconsciousness, or like Saleem and Omar Khayyam to disintegrate, but to writethe new testament of the twentieth century — the postmodernist hybrid novel.'In Good Faith',8 the acclaimed lecture delivered from exile, states explicitlyin a non-fictional form what has constantly underlined Rushdie's ideology ofthe practice of fiction. In yet another defence, Rushdie offers a similarexplication of his position:

Unable to accept the unarguable absolutes of religion, I have tried to fill up thehole with literature...where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in humansociety...there I hope to find...the truth of the tale, of the imagination, of theheart... SV is a clash of faiths...or more precisely it's a clash of languages... It'shis word [Khomeini's] against mine.9

This linguistic battle, which is as much Rushdie's struggle with his own internaldemons, as with the eternal forces of religion, given Rushdie's situation asmediating and mediated Third World immigrant, must inevitably be foughtin the metropolitan field, to which arena we next turn our attention.

10 See RaymondWilliams, The Countryand the City,"The Metropolis',pp 279-288, forconnections betweenthe metropolis andhinterland, empire andcolony: "Thus themodel of city andcountry, in economicand political "relationships, has gonebeyond the boundariesof the nation-state, andis seen but alsochallenged as a modelof the world."

THE METROPOLES

A singular defining characteristic of immigration, whatever the initial cause(wars, civil and internecine, revolutions, repressive regimes, economic factorsdetermining the movements of labour, industrial and technological changes,and recently even, as with Hong Kong, the expiry of a lease), is a perceivedmovement originating in the 'periphery' and culminating in the 'centre'. InRushdie's case, Bombay functions at the national level as the metropolitancentre which is composed not only of the local Maharashtrian population, butwhich draws like a magnet huge proportions of rural migrants as well as othernon-working class sections from small towns; and it is also the metropoliswhich, seen in relation to what Raymond Williams called the 'metropolitancountry', is itself transformed to the periphery.10

* Rushdie appears to have anticipated this charge of 'secular fundamentalism' by bothnaming it and laying it at the door of 'apologists of religion' in his Herbert Read MemorialLecture, 1990. The valorisation of "novelists ... those creators of the most freakish, hybridand 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 littlesuspect. 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 sacrosantposition of Caesar's wife.

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Rushdie's creative response to the various aspects of these phenomena hasbeen both to lament and celebrate the rootlessness of the migrant and linkit to what he calls his "postmodernist, post godless" stance. One may tracein his three celebrated texts, MC, S and SV a movement from lament to apossible celebration of rebirth. This is most explicit in the connections we drawlater in this essay between the locale of each of these texts and the respectiveclosures in each.

The by now familiar configuations and confrontations of the eclectic selvesof Saleem, Omar Khayyam and Saladin and Baal, on the one hand, and thefundamentalist types like Shiva, Tai, Raža Hyder and Mahound on the otherare indicative of a balancing act that the author, Rushdie, must constantlyperform in order to practice his own faith in the real world. The followingschema places Rushdie's three novels, their protagonists and alter egos, aswell as their metropolitan anchors, in relationship to each other. Like most'structural' depictions, however, it is intended only to serve as a point ofdeparture for further exegesis.

THE IMMIGRANT Descends from Aboveis NOSTALGIC for Eden

Rises from Belowis pursued by NEMESIS

empyrean (AIRWAYS) CrnES exemplify lateral distances

the ^immigrant'smovement

isbetweentheseverticalpoles >U

morass (EARTH)

ISLAMABAD/LAHOREmohajir

(site-cantonment)

Omar Khayyam

(epicurean/iconoclast)

Affect

History Religion

BOMBAY/DELHImigrant

(site-pavement)

Saleem Shiva

epicurean iconoclast

History

Affect Rel.

LONDON/BOMBAYimmigrant

(site-restaurant)

Shaitan Saladin

icon vs. epic(pun intended)

Religion

Affect Hist.

The apex of the triangle alters as Rushdie explores the emotion of shame inthe novel of that name, the nationalist allegory in MC and, finally, themotivations/ motifs of religion in SV, yet the issues remain interconnected.SV, the last in the serialisation of the migrant's adventures, takes farthest andmost seriously, as we have suggested earlier, the task of interconnectingdifferent worlds, diverse problems in the city, even at the risk of being morallyas well as linguistically facile.

Rushdie textually anticipates the charge of a fragile cosmopolitanconsciousness in a passage in SV (p 439) where "Chamcha offers conventionalcosmopolitan 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'slist and by extension of Rushdie's own narrative strategy, which cannot speakof London or Bombay without invoking other cities, other worlds and times,real and constructed. Thus, the list of Alphaville, Bombay, Babylon, TheMetropolis, London and Jahilia merges with Gibreel's conquest of London ina make-believe Dickensian studio-set.

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11 The phrase 'polyglottree' is Rushdie's own.See p 83, 'The IndianWriters in England', inMaggie Butcher's (ed.)The Eye of the Beholder:Indian Writing inEnglish, MacMillan,1989.

12 The blurbs ofRushdie's books offera representative rangeof affirmations: "Indiahas produced aglittering novelist —one with startlingimaginative andintellectual resources, amatter of perpetualstorytelling." (V.S.Pritchett in The NewYorker). "Anexhilarating...extraordi-nary contemporarynovel...a roller coasterride over a vastlandscape." (AngelaCarter, The Guardian)

This strategy of representation allows Rushdie, in the tradition of Calvino'sInvisible 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 genealogyin a 'polyglot tree',11 since it makes for authentic cosmopolitanism; the worldof the book becomes the immigrant writer's home.

The city is a place of laterally defined distances, the spatial locus of manyfar-flung outposts, different worlds. Here the asymmetries of power, must benegotiated through a reliance on the human self as the supreme arbiter ofdestiny; in this setting, both media and authorial will seem to collude to presentRushdie himself as that superior being. Among those who have made aresounding success of a space not theirs by the conventions of history, manyFirst World voices12 inform us that Rushdie is prima inter pares. His superbmastery 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 theredefinition of power, which the immigrant's position almost always involves,cannot but result in the politics of retaliation.* However clever, howeversympathetically portrayed in fiction and media, the immigrant remains a dosecousin of the outcast(e). It appears to be his role, his destiny, (and in this readingwe 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 warfareon the citadels of power, rather than in terms of a battle, though he may wellmake use of the sabre-rattling rhetoric of an all-out war ["Mishal had developedthe 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 revealssomething of this strategic inclination. He attacks with elan and his triumphsare greatly applauded by all those (few or many?) who feel a sneaky orsubstantial empathy with the outsider, but his losses can be, as the world hasstartlingly witnessed, overwhelming, because his control over, and thereforeperhaps his commitment to his own position, is shaky. The valorization ofdoubt over many other conditions as symptomatic of the human condition isnot by any means accidental in Rushdie's oeuvre.

* Brennan (p 145) rightly emphasizes the need to "locate the class resentments thatare simmering beneath the surface of an affair that has persistently been seen in religiousterms alone." In this context, it is instructive to situate the banning of SV with therealpolitik of Indian electoral trading. (General Elections in India were held in September1989). 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., whosevoice as a spokesman for Indian Muslims was itself a subject of some controversy. Theban called on by Shahabuddin ostensibly to preclude offense to Muslims, was in facta means to make the book an issue. However, Rushdie's immediate and righteousresponse 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 IndianExpress, October 8, 1988).

The politics of retaliation, on examination, turns out to be very much more complicatedthan simple confrontations between 'fundamentalism' and 'democracy' as Rushdie, andmany others of a liberal persuasion, would have it.

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13 On 'reclaimingmetaphors', see pp 186and 281 in SV as wellas Brennan's chaptersdiscussing thisnarrative strategy.

THE MIGRANT

The preceding argument allows us to posit certain consonances between thefigure of the doubting author as a controller of (specifically novelistic)discourses, and the figure of the unsure immigrant as a controller of (specificallyurban) environments. Both the immigrant and the authorial self created byRushdie are described iteratively as 'marginal', 'peripheral', 'outcast','iconoclastic', etc. Yet fictional as well as publishing strategies place centre stagethese avowedly decentred figures. The irony of a media star such as Rushdieassigning himself, and being assigned, the place of an immigrant, is at leastas telling as the irony of an author signing his own death warrant in his'prophetic' fiction, and may indeed be a manifestation of the samephenomenon. The religious outcast, the anti-hero of the nationalist allegory,and the empathetic author may all, without contradiction, wear the mask ofthe 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 deeplyengaged major Western novelists of the twentieth century (Camus, Sartre,Borges), if in extremely diverse ways. Rushdie gives this constant theme avigorous post-colonial turn. By focussing on the 'exit-tentialism' of Third Worldimmigrants in search of "the forgotten meaning of hollow booming words,land, belonging, home" (SV 4), by documenting their efforts to reclaim the verbalas well as virtual treasures that were 'stolen' from them in a colonial past.13

Rushdie brilliantly interrogates the notion of community in a contemporary urbancontext. Rushdie's genius has been to show that the numerically significantintrusion of Third World immigrants into previously well-defined metropolitancentres, has qualitatively changed notions of community in the West. It hasintroduced visible cracks and fissures, where earlier dichotomies of class weremaybe better hidden, less glaringly apparent.

The demonology Rushdie invokes is cleverly fashioned to this end. HisKhayyams, Farishtas and Shaitans openly flaunt other traditions, not tomention other tastes, in food, in music, in dress. Moreover, they can affordthe luxury of 'bad' taste in a way that locals simply cannot. A great deal ofRushdie's linguistic energy is in fact expended on a textual demonstration ofthe immigrant's (in this case, his own) lack of a corresponding inhibition inthe use of the English language. Just as the immigrant disturbs the smoothsurfaces of settled community living, so Rushdie challenges received ideas about'correct' English usage. The immigrant, steeped in doubt as Rushdie claimshe is, makes a special strength of questioning the basic linguistic premises ofhis 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 ofthe immigrant's discursive strength (most amazingly exemplified in Rushdiehimself) and his political weakness.

His visible differences, his b(l)ack streets, his twilight professions, stake outthe immigrant as a site of resistance to the homogenhation which overtakes manymetropolitan cultures. As Rushdie has shown, the immigrant may speak thelanguage of the dominant community but he speaks it always with a difference.The specificities of the immigrant group, including sub-groups whose interestsRushdie foregrounds in SV (immigrant Bangladeshis, emigre Poles,transatlantic Americans, expatriate Parsees), are always more obvious thanthose of the home-bound nation. Yet this brings in its wake the now welldocumented 'failure' to fully integrate that is typical of immigrant groups

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14 As Rushdie himselfhas repeatedlyasserted: "SV is notan anti-religious novel.It is...an attempt towrite about migration,its stresses andtransformations fromthe point of view ofmigrants from theIndian subcontinent toBritain." (The Times ofIndia, 27 January 1989)

15 Timothy Brennan,Salman Rushdie and theThird World, p 163.

everywhere. Resistance or integration? This, at its crudest, is the dilemma ofthe immigrant community, which after all is in many ways the mirror of thedominant community, and it is one which Rushdie's latest novel, SV, attemptsto resolve — however tentatively.

SV is a novel about migrants or globe hoppers in general and one that triesto map the travels and travails of the Indian immigrant in particular.14 In ourbrief textual exegeis we consider the two pairs of subcontinental survivors —Mishal-Hanif and Saladin-Zeenie in their respective contexts. We begin withBombay, to which city Rushdie attributes his (and his heroes') cosmopolitanand 'lackadaisical' attitudes. Much of the nostalgic, but also pessimistic, returnto the years of belonging in Bombay is established through the childhood worldof Saleem Sinai in MC. Saleem's version of the language riots, his genuinedismay and inability to comprehend religious/political events and the deliberatecollage of dreams and memories, facts and fiction as a narrative technique arepartly an attempt to see the subcontinent's history in footnotes, although neverreally from below.

There is, however, a distinct shift of vision and view in SV, about whicha critic remarks: "Rushdie comes [in this novel] to terms for the first time withescapism of his earlier work".15 Saladin's unloved childhood, his valorizationof Vilayet, the dream city, his subsequent acquisition/possession of that city,wife and career and his consquent transformation into Shaitan make it possiblefor Rushdie not only to explore the many worlds and lifetimes that Chamchahas travelled, but more importantly, to question cosmopolitanism in both themetropoles 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 indictmentof 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'sa 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)

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 ischaracteristic of Saladin and his language. But Saladin's reconciliation withhis dying father and the beginning of a new, avowedly more involved life withZeeni Vakil in Bombay is embarrassingly close to the happy ending of too manyHindi films of the 60s and the 70s, with their binary worlds of 'Purab aurPaschim', films which form the staple of Rushdie's parodies.

The one difference here is the 'new' Indian woman, as exemplified in Zeeniewho 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 genderand is therefore a proper mentor to the still stumbling/fumbling Saladin.

The strong woman at the other end is Mishal who succeeds in reclaiminga portion of Brixhall because she has no 'long suppressed locutions' to contendwith, and because she can fight with equal success the skinheads on the streetsas 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 subsequenthesitation between Mishal and Zeenie are thus stops in this complicated routeto belonging. While his final return to the 'radical chic' in the dhabas of Bombaystill situates him in the periphery, the opposite is true of his initial

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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 theirdisparate crises. As the first of the paired prototypes of successful individuals,Gibreel functions as peripheral 'voice', while Saladin, the other half, is thevisible, smelly component. When Saladin is offered sanctuary in this cafe ofthe flotsam and jetsam, there is a violent bringing together of two classes ofimmigrants who have always lived in two different worlds in the same city.Rushdie deconstructs with great sensitivity the homogenized identity imposedby the whites and often 'assumed' by the non-whites, of all immigrants simplyon the basis of a common country of origin, despite a world of difference inclass, gender, language, intellectual or economic status. Sufyan, theBangladeshi proprietor of the Shaandaar insists on offering Saladin refuge;his argument being that however monstrous, he (Saladin) is after all "one oftheir kind". Once alone in his attic cell, Saladin's 'gratefulness' is recordedin 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 partiallysuccessful. Instead of the disintegrating or monster-like protagonists of theearlier texts and their funtoosh endings, SV ends on a note of redemption andregeneration. Both the survivor pairs represent 'new blood' after the failureof 'a dying generation'. "Only when the Shaandaar was ready to reopen underher [Mishal's] management did Hind Sufyan's ghost agree that it was timeto be off to the after-life, whereupon Mishal telephoned Hanif and asked himto marry her." (SV 515)

Saladin's own belated acknowledgement of familial roots in Bombay, doesnot, however, as we have already stated, seem to us equally plausible in termsof contemporary social-cultural problems. We digress somewhat in order toexplicate this position.

16 Narendra Panjwani,'Saffron vs Spectrum',The Times of India,25 March 1990.

17 Ibid.

In the recent Assembly elections, the Shiv Sena-BJP (arguably one ofIndia's strongest fundamentalist combinations) won an overwhelmingmajority in (Greater) Bombay — "the nation's most potent symbol ofcosmopolitanism".16 The extreme juxtaposition suggested by Panjwani is notjust catchy journalism, but a fairly representative instance of contrastiveexclusion, as if a city or its culture was either cosmopolitan (liberal, eclectic,hybrid) or provincial (chauvinistic, fundamentalist). The article goes on toconsider the rise in "sons-of-the-soil" movements in India from the point ofview of the "dislocated urban poor" in Indian metropoles who experience"homelessness on settling down in the city". Panjwani observes: "This senseof dislocation is perhaps more drastic in them than in us. It is here that theHinduttva call fills a cultural vacuum symptomatic of the fragility of the treeof cosmopolitanism".17

The 'happy ending' of SV does not cover this space between 'Hinduttva'and 'cosmopolitanism', seemingly two irreducible categories, although Rushdiedoes indicate his awareness of the 'gap' in an early narrative aside. DescribingSaladin's first flight to England, the author muses:

How far did they fly? Five and a half thousand as the crow. Or: from Indiannessto Englishness, an immediate distance. Or, not very far at all, because they rose

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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 moreterrifying space. (SV 55)

Unfortunately the urge to universalize the immigrant experience provesstronger than such reflective and cautionary asides. The specificities ofincidents, movements and peoples are swept aside in the fictive celebrationof a return.

As an author whose strategy is to foreclose the gap between himself andhis beleaguered fictional heroes, Rushdie has achieved a unique success inbringing before a world audience 'the compleat immigrant'. He himselfpossesses the immigrant drive par excellence, that uneasy ambition18 whichenables him to belong to the very establishment whose existence he purportedlythreatens. The incipient query has to be given voice — Has he then beenco-opted?

18 The Times magazinequoted Rushdie'spublisher and friend ashaving remarked thathad the author of SVwon the Nobel Prizeonce, he would not besatisfied until he wonagain.

THE MORAL MINORITY

Rushdie's on-record utterances are politically correct to a T, as displayed forinstance in his relentless pronouncements against the Thatcherite regime, orthe Indian policy in Kashmir, even from limbo.* Yet, there is something ofa 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, thisstrife-torn community? Little empathy exists between Rushdie, whose left-wingviews any intellectual educated in the 'Western' political tradition, wouldimmediately recognise, and the embattled, linguistically and culturally alienatedpeoples who will not understand Rushdie's speech/speeches.

Rushdie, despite his incarceration, stands in the bright limelight. His audienceis the glitterati, the intelligentsia of both the Third and First Worlds. His brilliantrepresentations of the soft underbelly of culture are important and liberatingas 'art'. Rushdie is superbly accomplished as a commentator, but his wordshave strayed to places where verbal dexterity alone cannot rescue an author.Political commitment and courage are not the same as authorial vision andunderstanding; 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 TheIndependent, Rushdie's views on "the issue of self-determination, focussing mainly onthe Kashmir problem". Rushdie's hard-hitting critique of Indian secularism (specifically,"the failure of Indian secularist policies in Kashmir") which has forced the Kashmiripeople "to choose between tanks and mosques" exposes quite 'correctly' the flaws inthe 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, becausehe identifies this crisis of the 'Indian' state as primarily a political, rather than areligious/pragmatic one.

The article is also indicative of the kind of newspaper space granted to Rushdie, whomthe 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 certainindisputable facts by turning them into descriptive epithets is an effective way of bothclaiming the reader's attention and controlling his/her response.

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19 Although therelativism implied bythis position may bequestioned, it iscertainly one which a'humanist' writer likeRushdie needs to takeaccount in his radicalcriticisms of other,more conservativepoints of view.

the two.* Notwithstanding his image in the media, Rushdie is not a Che, aMandela or Chedi Jaggan. Although he has handled political material in hisnovels, and these materials have turned out to be explosive, it does not followthat he must be granted political safe conduct. Rushdie's fulminations againstfundamentalism in religion, conservatism in politics, nationalism in the stateare comfortably positioned vis-a-vis other left intellectuals like himself.

One may not criticise a writer, especially one of Rushdie's humanity andstature, for not writing a different book. However, as a political agent Rushdie'sposition is far less invulnerable. As Bhikhu Parekh has pointed out, Rushdiehimself could be seen as encroaching upon the freedom of other people tovoice their own opinions, however 'medieval' certain of these opinions maysoundto a sophisticated intelligence like his own. The concerned writer, likethe liberal segments of the First World academia to which he broadly belongs,does need to exercise caution over his appropriation of reasoning ability, well-meaning though this intervention may be. Ways of reasoning, methods of self-preservation, developed by communities over time, might encode ideas about'freedom' not easily accessed, and therefore often dismissed, by those whostand outside the systems they 'rightly' criticise.19

The immigrants who in another famous inscription were so ambiguouslydescribed as "the huddled masses yearning to be free, the wretched refuseof your teeming shores" may reserve the right to be mortally suspicious ofa language they do not share, a 'troublesome' form of the novel that they donot appreciate and emotions that they do not feel in quite the tone that Rushdiedescribes them. For example, Rushdie posits 'doubt' as one of the mostattractive features of the immigrant mind-set, thereby drawing on a Europeanliterary repertoire, typical of this century, but evident in Romantic writing andencapsulated, for instance, in the nineteenth century verse from Tennysonwe quote below:

There lives more faith in honest doubt,Believe me, than in half the creeds.

(In Memoriam xcvi)

This literary elevation of doubt to the status of a 'creed' seems to influenceunduly Rushdie's portrayal of the immigrant mentality in the pages of hisnovels (and perhaps outside them as well). In the orchestrated movementsbetween empyrean and morass that we have postulated in Rushdie's work,the immigrant 'discovers', 'creates' and 'frees' himself in terms of historicalpossibilities. Memory thus becomes indistinguishable from creativity in thenovelist's art, but not necessarily so in the actual immigrant's mind. Fragmentsof religious faith, traditional/conservative beliefs help the immigrant re-positionhimself, '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 couldcoexist 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 showcalled 'Conversations with Writers' in the aftermath of the publication of The Jaguar Smile: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, inthis talk with Charlotte Cornwell, that he had "always conceived of writers as beingconcerned about public affairs as well as private".

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20 The consequentmovement towards anaffiliation with a globalMuslim brotherhood isto be understood notmerely in terms of thedogmatic language of'fundamentalism' butin terms of a genuinesearch for'brotherhood' amongthe dispossessed, asearch Rushdie cannotbut support.

environment. When that stability is blown to bits by an author as wellensconsed and integrated as Rushdie, panic results. The neuroses of nemesisreplace the certainties of nostalgia.20 Thus many moderate Muslims, who haveno quarrel with artistic choices exercised by an individual writer, still claimthat Rushdie has set back the cause of a less conservative interpretation of Islamby a hundred years simply by being heedless of (geo)political realities. Thesincerity of Rushdie's views was never in question, nor his absolute grace asa writer, what has perhaps made many uncomfortable is his naivete. As anavowed apostate his mandate for change has not been from within the Islamicfold; from without it, he simply failed to gauge the intricacies of situation andcomplexities of mood in various camps — Islamic, Indian, immigrant.

This could be called a post-hoc view, but it was what prevented many Indianintellectuals from resisting the ban on the novel, once it was called for byShahabuddin and others. The people who died for Rushdie's book in BhendiBazaar were outcasts of a different sort from Rushdie himself. They wereoutcasts because they could never read or evaluate what Rushdie had written;nor could the 'intermediaries' who 'interpreted' Rushdie for them. If Rushdiewrote for neither of these groups, did his work matter to them? Yes, simplybecause its impenetrability made it the ideal material for exploitation by themullahs. 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 haveso much power of life and death over people. If Rushdie did not 'know' thathis passages about Mahound taken out of context, could be and would be usedby Islamic fundamentalists to strengthen their own grip, then surely he wasout of touch with and ignorant of the Islam he sought to liberate; and if hedid 'know' his work would cause a furore, then he stands indicted ofcarelessness and callousness. Paradoxically, Rushdie seems to be an immigrantfrom the immigrant community, and an outsider among outcasts. With whomdoes he then truly stand?

To be alone is part of the myth of both writer and immigrant, but for a politicalactivist, isolation is a tragedy. It renders activism meaningless. At the currenttime, Rushdie's role as a great writer and intellectual, seems somewhat at oddswith his role as a political spokesman for immigrant, Islamic or Third Worldrights.

CONCLUSION

This essay has suggested that the immigrant and his self-appointedrepresentative, the author, are both governed in the global metropolitan contextby 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 laiddirectly at the door of television, radio, newspapers, magazines and journals,always under professional/political pressure to create, promote and advertisenews. In this sense, the business of the media is as much to formulate as toinform.

Opinions in the metropolis are generally articulated in two main centres —media and academia. The dangers of circulating in the media a text whichremains unread are paralleled in academia by arcane over-readings. Nowhereare possibilities of collusive interaction between these two spheres more evidentthan in the case of the mega-star Rushdie — an urban(e) writer of elite Third

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World origins, who has been gravely hailed as a whole "continent finding its

21 Clark Blaise, NEW YorkReview of Books.

22 Mimi Mamoulian inSV actually announcesthat she "has readFinnegan's Wake and(is) conversant withpostmodernist critiquesof the West" (SV 261).

23 Uma Parameswaran'sessay 'We-TheyParadigm in Rushdie'sThe Satanic Verses'offers another exampleof a critic whosuccumbs to theparodic temptation touse Rushdie's ownnarrative style inacademic treatment ofhis work.

24 Timothy Brennanmcit. op.

voice".21

It seems unnecessary to plead the case for 'voices', modernist as well asclassical, flourishing in India quite independent of both Rushdie and the Englishlanguage. In support of our particular argument, we simply wish todemonstrate that, given an extensive and insidious system of peer review andpatronage, Rushdie's much vaunted espousal of the immigrant's 'native'multilingualism and multiculturalism falls on deaf ears. The powerlessness ofhis particular variety of linguistic subversion, attributed to the immigrant, butfashioned to appeal to the most elite coteries of First World academia, is amplyand 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 soabsolute.22 The privileged academic and the elite immigrant thus draw onsimilar vocabularies. For example, it is fashionable in critical theory today tospeak of the hazards of contamination, the manner in which an 'infection' suchas Deconstruction can spread across disciplines. As academic readers ofRushdie, we recognize that Rushdie's texts not only consciously deconstructthemselves, but continuously invite readers to 'perform' in similar waysthemselves. 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 disingenuoussentence with which the essay begins is itself a case in point. The experienceconvinced us that the virus of word-play was particularly endemic incircumstances where the plaisirs du texte literally preclude any sustained interestin the political issues Rushdie himself raises.

Such a reduction of politics to a game of linguistic one-up-manship seemsultimately an exercise in trivialisation. In India separatist movements,communal and linguistic dissonances severely problematise Rushdie'srepresentation of displacement, the nostalgia and nemesis that emigrationengenders. Perhaps one of the most stimulating responses to Rushdie in ourcontext, a reaction which avoids the simplistic alternatives of rejection orreification as they have been posed for us in many sections fo the media, isto articulate within academia the specifically political implications of Rushdie'stexts. Brennan's exposé of the 'myth of the nation'24 as it is worked out inRushdie's writings, is a valuable contribution to this enterprise. Subcontinentalexplorations of Rushdie could differ, for example, from Western appreciationsin their strategic use of his texts to understand our own collaborationist projectsand practices within the post-colonial classroom, where the English languageand its literature are accorded such unnatural respect. For this reason, anytreatment which simply mimics receptions of Rushdie in the West by essentiallyevaluating him in terms of his linguistic legerdemain appears to uspedagogically and professionally unsatisfactory. To interpret Rushdie, in thebest traditions of the ivory tower, as an author whose professedly postmoderncomplexes/complexities are in fact universal, is to be controlled by those'puppet-masters' strings' of the media that Rushdie so perspicaciously warnsus against in SV, strings that are inevitably pulled from the faraway metropoleswhere his texts were first distributed and (ac)claimed. For academics in thesubcontinent, Rushdie is a test-case; if we fail to examine the enigma of hisarrival amongst us via the First World, we fail also in our quest for a thirdRushdie — one not wholly formed/framed by either media or academia.

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