Rushdie, Salman (1947–)

Ahmed Salman Rushdie was born into a liberal, business-owning Muslim family in Bombay in the year of India's Independence and Partition. He moved to England in 1961, where he was educated at the elite Rugby school and King's College, Cambridge. His family moved to Karachi in 1964, but except for brief phases, Rushdie has lived mostly in London and New York City. He worked in television, theater, advertising, and immigrant assistance before becoming established as an author. He is a now seen as a major figure in the development of the Anglophone Indian novel, an inheritor of the achievements of G. V. Desani and Raja Rao and, in turn, a major influence on subsequent writers, sometimes referred to as Rushdie's Children, such as Arundhati Roy, Shashi Tharoor, and others.

The 1981 novel Midnight's Children launched his reputation as a noteworthy global writer, won the Booker Prize, and generated overwhelmingly positive reviews and a new body of scholarship. An innovative bildungsroman, Midnight's Children tells the story of India's national development allegorically through the life of protagonist Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight on Independence Day. The novel uses modernist and postmodernist formal techniques—multiple narrative threads, self-conscious irony, prolific and varied cultural allusions—and is indebted to literary predecessors, including Gabriel García Márquez, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Flann O'Brien. It is also an original and prototypically postcolonial work, transforming English to make it express the experience of the colonized, while fusing Indian and Islamic cultural traditions and Western literary influences with dizzying eclecticism.

Rushdie's fame reached beyond the literary and academic worlds due to the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses (1988). This ambitious, diverse, and innovative novel combines fantasy and sociopolitical themes, and it won Rushdie Germany's Author of the Year Award and Britain's Whitbread Prize. It moves between the global cities of London and Bombay as it draws on Islamic cultural traditions and poetic genres and English novelistic conventions in telling the story of Gibreel Farishta (Gabriel Angel). The novel was overshadowed by public charges that its parodic treatment of Islam was blasphemous. Several countries banned the novel, and Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwah against Rushdie, promising a reward for his death, in 1989. These events sent the author into hiding, and generated a campaign of defense around him, but it also elicited a storm of racist denunciations of Islam in Britain and the United States.

Although his earlier work established him as a critic of imperialism, in the course of his career many identify a political shift right. This can be seen in the contrast between two nonfiction works: Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987), which champions the Sandinistas' struggle against domestic and foreign repression, and Step Across This Line (2002), which includes denunciations of Islamism as the greatest threat to world civilization but lacks equivalent condemnations of the imperialist violence of the United States and its allies.

In 1994, Rushdie won the 25th anniversary Booker of Bookers award. He has maintained a steady pace of publication, and though none of his later novels, which include The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), Fury (2001), and Shalimar the Clown (2005), has received the acclaim conferred on Midnight's Children, nor the attention given to Satanic Verses, Rushdie is widely acknowledged as one of the most significant contemporary fiction writers in English.

...