It is not hard to establish Salman Rushdieʹs fame: his novels have sold in their millions and been translated into multiple languages; the MLA international bibliography lists over seven hundred journal articles and book chapters written about his fiction; and there are currently in excess of thirty published monographs on various aspects of his life and work. Rushdie himself makes regular appearances at major international conferences and literary events, he gives frequent interviews and lectures, he is the subject of a number of documentaries and has appeared in films – both as a performer (a comical cameo inBridget Jonesʹs...

In a journalistic reflection on theGranta Magazineselection of the ʹBest of the Young British Novelistsʹ for 1993, Salman Rushdie rejects the idea, temporarily mooted in the early 1990s, that the years of Margaret Thatcherʹs government (1979–90) had produced a ʹlost generationʹ of writers. Such a notion, Rushdie suggests, is disproved by the most cursory survey of a literary scene that includes such budding luminaries as Louis de Bernières, Tibor Fischer, Lawrence Norfolk and A. L. Kennedy. Nevertheless,, Rushdie goes on to imply, there remains an element of truth in the common supposition that the dominance of Thatcherism...

Towards the close of the eighteenth century, as the British parliament became yearly more concerned with the role played by its representatives in Indian administrative affairs, debates concerning the moral obligations of colonial rule intensified. For the East India Company, who had hitherto enjoyed an unquestioned dominance in the shaping of policy in India, the sub-continent was a resource to be mined, rather than a culture (or body of cultures) to be nurtured, so methods of governance that ensured minimal disruption of daily Indian life, and hence minimal disruption of trade, were favoured. Increasingly, however, a powerful consortium of interests...

Attention to the epic, oral, filmic, televisual and photographic models employed in Rushdieʹs novels give some indication of the referential range of his fiction – but the above account has by no means exhausted the potential list of Rushdieʹs influences. Treated comprehensively, such a list would run to many pages, and would, no doubt, become very boring.¹ Rushdieʹs reasons for practising such a referential artform may be explained in various ways; but certainly one of the central explanations must be that Rushdie writes in this way because he believes, and because he wishes to assert that he believes, that the...

If the reservoir of Rushdieʹs imaginative resources is substantially fed by stories drawn from the complex intertextual sea of world narrative, it is also generously topped up by events taken from his own biography and family history.Midnightʹs Children, for instance, borrows extensively from Salmanʹs early life to supply the details of Saleemʹs childhood; it also tells the ʹfamily secretʹ that his mother had been married before and offers a fictionalised and comedic version of his fatherʹs addiction to alcohol. Likewise,Fury, written twenty years later, harvests Rushdieʹs experience of his separation from his wife Elizabeth West and young son...

Scenarios borrowed from science fiction fantasy appear in several of Rushdieʹs novels.Haroun and the Sea of Storiesfeatures a journey to a magical moon on an automaton bird,The Satanic Versesalludes to the genre self-consciously by making several of its characters voice-over actors in a popular science fiction television show, andFurytraces its protagonistʹs fascination with the form back to his youth in the 1960s when he, like Rushdie, was a devourer of ‘science fiction novels of… the formʹs golden ageʹ (F, 169). The science fictional imagination is at its strongest, however, in Rushdieʹs first publicshed fiction,...

Upon completingMidnightʹs ChildrenRushdie shifted his focus from a pan-Indian fiction of South Asia in the twentieth century to a more localised response to Pakistani politics in the 1970s and early 1980s. Specifically, RushdieʹsShametraces a fictionalised, and heavily fantasised, path through the rise to political power of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (who appears as Iskander Harappa), Bhuttoʹs appointment of Zia ul-Haq (Raza Hyder) as his army chief of staff in 1976, Ziaʹs deposition of Bhutto after the army was called in to quell street rioting in July 1977, the execution of Bhutto on the charge of ordering a...

In 1988, after a short creative detour to Nicaragua in his travelogueThe Jaguar Smile, Rushdie published his fourth novel,The Satanic Verses. LikeMidnightʹs ChildrenandShamebefore it,The Satanic Versesis a strongly satirical text that takes, as one of its dominant socio-political agendas, the condemnation of the abuse of power and authority. Unlike the two earlier novels, however,The Versesshifts its attention away from the abuses committed by South Asian political leaders towards the abuses that flourished under Margaret Thatcherʹs Prime Ministerial watch in 1980s Britain. Specifically the novel, in its dominant narrative line, sets...

At the midnight moment of Independence the new Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, made a now famous address to the nation that has remained a testament to the optimism of the times. In this speech, which is cited several times inMidnightʹs Children, Nehru gives voice to his desire to create a secular, democratic, tolerant, pluralist and socially just nation – ʹthe noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwellʹ.² ʹWe are citizens of a great country on the verge of a bold advanceʹ, he announced from the Red Fort in New Delhi:

and we have to...

Rushdieʹs bitter critique of Abrahamʹs cynical business practices inThe Moorʹs Last Sightends, overwhelmingly, to emphasise the destructive effects of rapacious economic globalism in India. Corruption, hypocrisy, violent crime and secret links with backalley politics are daily fare for the super-capitalist Abraham, and all resources available are placed at the service of his mock-Satanic ambitions to own the city of Bombay, and, in owning it, eradicate any local character it might once have had. Rushdieʹs following two novels,The Ground Beneath Her FeetandFury, also take globalisation as a central theme. These latter fictions, however tend to reflect...

Timothy Brennan in his critical studySalman Rushdie and the Third Worldidentifies Rushdie as being a member of a distinctive and historically original group of writers that has come to prominence in the period following the formal dissolution of the British Empire. These writers are described by Brennan asThird World cosmopolitans: migrant intellectuals who are identified with a Western metropolitan elite in terms of class, literary preferences and educational background, but who, by virtue of ethnicity, are also presented by the media and publishing industries as being ʹthe interpreters and authentic public voices of the Third Worldʹ.¹ Such...