Rushdie looks East again

Rushdie looks East again
By Shashi Tharoor
"The Hindu", Online edition of India's National Newspaper
October 08, 2005

Shalimar the Clown is a manifestly mature work: the writing is more disciplined than in the earlier novels, well-paced and focussed, with fewer Rushdiean loose ends.

"In seeking answers to the great dilemmas of our time, Shalimar ... is an impressive addition to an oeuvre that has already narrated a vision of the subcontinent into being, and is doing the same for the world."

PHOTO: REUTERS

HIS NINTH NOVEL: It will be an occasion to celebrate the new voice Rushdie has introduced to the world of English language fiction.

THE extent to which the Satanic Verses controversy has dominated our perception of Salman Rushdie's work is an injustice. Mention Rushdie, and some see a stirring symbol of the cause of freedom of expression in the face of intolerant dogma; others, particularly in the Islamic world, find a blasphemous crusader for secularist social subversion. Neither image may be inaccurate, but reducing him to this emblematic figure has only served to obscure his true literary contribution — as, quite simply, one of the best and most important Indian novelists of our time.
A new voice

The publication of Salman Rushdie's ninth novel — in what will soon be the silver jubilee year of his epochal Midnight's Children — offers an occasion to celebrate the astonishing new voice he has brought into the world of English-language fiction, a voice whose language and concerns have stretched the boundaries of the possible in English literature. Shalimar the Clown adds the murderous incertitudes of the world of 9/11 to his repertoire; it is topical and typical, a novel derived from today's headlines and yesterday's hopes.
Max Ophuls, a former American Ambassador to India and lately his country's counter-terrorism chief, is assassinated in Los Angeles as the novel begins, his elegant throat gruesomely slit on the front steps of the apartment building in which lives his illegitimate daughter, India. The killer is his chauffeur and valet, a Kashmiri known as Shalimar the Clown.
Having brilliantly set the scene and introduced the principal characters — no one more compellingly than Max, an Alsatian Jew, hero of the French Resistance in the Second World War, linguist, forger, philanderer and dandy, a man who deals in "the future, the only currency that mattered more than the dollar" — Rushdie then transports the reader through a succession of dazzling background stories. Max's wartime exploits are rendered with the tautness of an adventure novel. In parallel unfolds the courtship of Shalimar and his childhood love, Bhoomi or "Boonyi" Kaul, the Hindu dancing-girl who marries him in a defiant celebration of Kashmiri secularism, then abandons him for the entranced Ambassador, whose child she bears.
The personal and the political

As always with Rushdie, the personal is entwined with the political: the tangled love affairs of the protagonists unfolds against a backdrop of Partition, increasing Hindu-Muslim tension, the infiltration of Islamist jihadists into the Kashmir Valley, mounting and brutal military repression and the destruction of the peaceful, syncretic Kashmir from which Rushdie derives his own heritage. No novelist has more vividly dramatised the expulsion from the Kashmir valley of the Hindu Pandits, nor the atrocities committed by soldiers on innocent Muslim villagers in the name of territorial integrity. Shalimar becomes a skilled terrorist, bringing death upon the enemies of Islam across the world, but intent, above all, on exacting revenge.
So Shalimar is a novel of mourning, not least for the loss of the "Kashmiriyat" which Rushdie so lovingly evokes in his portrait of idyllic village life, where Hindus and Muslims laughed and loved together, performing folk-dance plays about tolerant Kashmiri kings and cooking up the great Kashmiri super-wazwaan, the "Banquet of Sixty Courses Maximum". It is also a novel of affirmation: "To be a Kashmiri" was to value what was shared far more highly than what divided." In the climactic scene, a tense showdown occurs between India Ophuls, now renamed Kashmira, and Shalimar the Clown, the lapsed son of Kashmiri syncretism now turned into an implacable and ruthless terrorist. The reader is left in no doubt who will win.
Shalimar the Clown is a manifestly mature work: the writing is more disciplined than in the earlier novels, well paced and focused, with fewer Rushdiean loose ends. Some of the minor characters — such as the Indian army officer Hammirdev Kachhwaha, the bachelor soldier "married to Kashmir", who proceeds to assault and torture his bride into submission before meeting his own surrealistic end — are little more than caricatures. But they are always interesting, because in Rushdie's hands they are memorable even when they are unbelievable. (Particularly unforgettable is the malodorous Iron Mullah, the inflexible fanatic whose body is made up of assorted metal machine-parts.)
There is magic realism here as in his earlier books — girls who have visions of the future, a man who tastes words and sees the colour of sounds, a woman who conjures up a plague of snakes from the grave to avenge herself. But for all the omens and portents, the magic in Shalimar is firmly at the service of the realism. In seeking answers to the great dilemmas of our time, Shalimar the Clown is an impressive addition to an oeuvre that has already narrated a vision of the subcontinent into being, and is doing the same for the world.