As an accompaniment to this presentation, please read the Introduction to Salman Rushdie in the Norton Anthology.

Salman Rushdie was born in 1947 in Bombay, India, later moved with his family to Pakistan, and eventually settled in England.  His multicultural background gave him a unique understanding of the immigrant identity and the sense of cultural displacement many colonial British subjects experienced in the period following the dismantling of the empire—especially the diaspora, those of Indian descent who migrated to Britain or other countries. Rushdie’s migratory experience engendered in him a fascination with multiplicity, cultural diversity, and hybrid identities that would later dominate his fiction. In 1967 he received an M.A. with honors from King’s College, Cambridge, and moved to London, where he worked in acting and advertising.

In 1981, Rushdie achieved critical success as an author with his second novel, Midnight’s Children, which won the Booker McConnell Prize, Britain’s most prestigious award for fiction writing.  In focusing on the fates of those born when the Indian subcontinent was divided, creating the nation of Pakistan, Rushdie’s novel became an allegory for the birth of independent India.  The division of the subcontinent (which occurred just after Rushdie’s birth), and the divided nature of Pakistani culture as it struggled to create a separate identity in a post imperial environment, also contributed to Rushdie’s sense of the tremendous diversity of the postcolonial world.   Describing Pakistan as a “fragmented, frightening palimpsest, increasingly at war with itself,” Rushdie claimed that the history of Pakistan is a “duel between two layers of time, the obscured world forcing its way back through what-had-been-imposed.”  This conception of the postcolonial world as a battle between the repressed traditions of a precolonial past and the imposed traditions of colonial culture appears throughout his fiction, including the story “The Prophet’s Hair.”  But in addition to depicting the chaos and fragmentation that can result from such culture clash, Rusdie’s work also celebrates the vitality and creativity of a process that can give rise to new, more vibrant cultures. His work, however, also maintains an awareness of the violence and destruction that can come of adhering too rigidly to past traditions, a danger that became very apparent in his own life with the publication in 1988 of his most controversial novel, The Satanic Verses.  The novel is a fantasy/satire featuring two expatriated Indians in Britain, trying to come to terms with their Islamic past in a postmodern, postcolonial society.  A section of the novel describing the birth of a religion similar to Islam was deemed blasphemous by Muslim fundamentalists intent upon protecting their religious traditions from the encroachment of other cultures (particularly Western cultures); and in 1989 the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran declared the book an offense to Islam and issued a fatwa (religious proclamation) ordering Rushdie’s assassination, declaring that "Anyone who dies in the cause of ridding the world of Rushdie, will be a martyr and will go directly to heaven.”  The fatwa stated: “The author of The Satanic Verses, a text written, edited, and published against Islam, against the Prophet of Islam, and against the Koran, along with all the editors and publishers aware of its contents, are condemned to capital punishment. I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to execute this sentence without delay, so that no one henceforth will dare insult the sacred beliefs of the Muslims.”  As a result of the fatwa, two people involved in the novel’s publication were attacked by Muslim extremists (one, a Japanese translator, was killed), and Rushdie was forced to go into hiding under the protection of the British government.  The Satanic Verses was banned in most Islamic countries, including India, Pakistan, South Africa, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. 

Rushdie became a symbol of artistic freedom to artists worldwide, as exemplified in the above sculpture, “Salman Barbeque,” by artist William Ross, which depicts the following: “A stern Ayatollah Khomeni roasts a bound Salman Rushdie over a burning copy of Rushdie's proscribed book, The Satanic Verses. The alternating pen and sword on the propeller blades signify the eternal struggle between freedom of expression and repressive intolerance, while the chilling text of the Ayatollah's fatwa, or death sentence, is printed on the whirligig's tail. ‘Salman Barbeque’ was exhibited at the Center on Contemporary Art (Seattle, WA), where the respected art critic Mathew Kangas selected it as his "best-of-show choice", and at the Bellevue Art Museum (Bellevue, WA) in 1996”  (<http://www.seanet.com/~billr/bbq.htm> Accessed July 22, 2001).

Rushdie’s work has been described as belonging to both postcolonial and postmodern categories of fiction.  Therefore in approaching Rushdie’s story, “The Prophet’s Hair,” you should review the central concepts of Postmodernism described in the PowerPoint presentation on the Twentieth Century. His sense of the fragmented nature of cultural experience in the postcolonial world has caused Rushdie to turn to postmodern forms and techniques for expression, including parody, satire, and the postmodern notion of the world as a simulacrum, a simulation or combination of multiple realities.  The multiculturalism arising from postcolonial heritage creates that postmodern sense of no fixed truths, no set realities, so the human experience becomes a  wild conglomeration of cultural signs from many societies and historical eras.  Rushdie responds to this dilemma of confusion in the postmodern way—with humor—parody and satire that flourish on incongruence.  Thus, he cheerfully embraces the confusion and multiplicity of the postmodern/postcolonial environment as rejuvenating forces and “celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs” (Rushdie qtd. in The Norton Anthology, p. 2842). In defending his novel The Satanic Verses (please read his defense on p. 2842—it encapsulates his artistic theory), Rushdie claims that Muslim fundamentalists who objected to the novel believe that “intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own.”  But Rushdie points out that his novel “rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure” as leading to cultural stagnation and sterility.  On the contrary, “Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world.”  Creating this “newness” by cultural change and a mixing of cultures is, according to Rushdie, “the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it” (p. 2842).  Thus, the migratory nature of the postcolonial experience is not necessarily culturally debilitating, but can be creative and renewing, leading to the development of new worlds.  In his novel Shame, Rushdie attests, “Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places” (NewYork: Aventura/Vintage, 1984, p. 90).  If we cling blindly to our cultural roots and resist change, we resist the potential for enrichment, Rushdie argues. However, Rushdie’s fiction also deals with the negative consequences of denying our cultural roots.  While celebrating the limitless possibilities afforded by cultural change, he warns against the effects of letting one’s cultural traditions be entirely eclipsed by new cultures.  Coming from a divided nation and an immigrant existence, Rushdie asserts: “What is the best thing about migrant peoples and seceded nations? I think it is their hopefulness. . . . And what's the worst thing? It is the emptiness of one's luggage. I'm speaking of invisible suitcases, not the physical, perhaps cardboard, variety containing a few meaning-drained mementoes: we have come unstuck from more than land. We have floated upwards from history from memory, from Time."   Totally denying one’s cultural history in the face of postmodern “newness” leads to historical dislocation.  And the loss or repression of a cultural history can be profoundly damaging, as we see in the fable of “The Prophet’s Hair.”  Repressing one’s native traditions in an attempt to replace them entirely with a new culture can result in the past returning with a vengeance, as Rushdie’s short story suggests. Rushdie’s fiction implies that the most rewarding cultural experience comes instead from accepting our cultural past and integrating it with the new worlds we encounter. Thus, for Rushdie, the heritage of colonialism, the clash of cultures which demands the integration of old and new, can give rise to dangerous cultural conflicts, but can also create a world of infinite possibilities. 

Rushdie depicts the infinite possibilities of the diverse postcolonial world through the use of fantasy, or “magic realism,” a literary form that combines realism and fantasy.  For instance, his novel The Satanic Verses opens with the two Indian heroes facing the tragedy of a plane crash as they migrate from India to Britain; however, when both miraculously survive the crash without a scratch after falling thousands of feet from the exploding plane, they’re revealed to be earthly incarnations of an Islamic angel and demon, playing out an ancient mythological/religious conflict in a new environment.  The notion that a meeting of old and new worlds can give rise to miracles runs throughout Rushdie’s fiction.  He uses the fantastic to suggest the wildly unlikely cultural combinations found in culturally diverse postcolonial societies and the magical potentialities that these unusual combinations create.  Rushdie’s use of the fantastic to express his experience of Indian culture also derives from his lifelong love of Indian cinema (popularly known as “Bollywood”, since the Indian film industry originated in Bombay), cinema that reflects the fragmented, diverse nature of the postmodern/postcolonial society with its fantastic mixture of filmic genres.  An Indian film typically combines features of the musical, action/adventure, melodrama, comedy, and romance, a conglomeration that Rushdie and Indian audiences find “magical”—an escape from a stagnant reality into a realm of possibility and hope.  In his essay, “A Short Text About Magic,” Rushdie describes the fantastic formula common to Indian cinema (which also matches Rushdie’s fiction): “Sex goddesses in wet saris (the Indian equivalent of wet T-shirts), gods descending from the heavens to meddle in human affairs, supermen, magic potions, superheroes, demonic villains . . . Have always been the staple diet of the Indian filmgoer” (p. 11).  And as in Rushdie’s novels, the fantastic world of the cinema has become reality for a dispersed and diverse Indian population because, as critic Jennifer Takhar notes, Bombay cinema “provides a means of psychological investment for the South Asian diaspora all over the world”; its fantastic conglomeration of disparate cinematic elements reflects the “cultural disorientation . . .experienced by the displaced Indians who try to adapt to their newfound environments” (“Bollywood Cinema in Rushdie’s Fiction,” <http://landow.stg.brown.edu/post/pakistan/literature/rushdie/takhar16.html> Accessed July 20, 2001).  Takhar remarks, “The Indian diaspora . . . Have come to heavily depend on Bollywood’s incredible films in shaping their own reality in their new homelands” (“Identity Through Bollywood Cinema: The ‘Reel’ or ‘Real’ Zone?” <http://landow.stg.brown.edu/post/pakistan/literature/rushdie/takhar15.html> Accessed July, 20, 2001).  Thus, both in Indian immigrant culture and in Rushdie’s fiction, fantasy becomes reality, a natural consequence of the diverse postmodern condition that is pregnant with remarkable possibilities. Finally, in drawing upon the techniques of the cinema in his fiction, Rushdie is distinctly postmodern, using the simulated reality of mass media to express the cultural reality of a fantastic and fragmented world.