Salman Rushdie's creation, Saleem Sinai, has a self-proclaimed "overpowering desire for form" (363). In writing his own autobiography Saleem seems to be after what Frank Kermode says every writer is a after: concordance. Concordance would allow...

Though Salman RushdieÃÂÂs MidnightÃÂÂs Children if full of comic details and humorous anecdotes of Saleem SinaiÃÂÂs family history, the overall tone of the novel is in sharp contrast. Destruction and deception pervade much of the novel, and in the...

“To understand just one life you have to swallow the world” – Explore the presentation of Saleem as an allegory for India in ‘Midnight’s Children’

The peculiarity of the title ‘Midnight’s Children’ makes it immediately obvious that this novel is...

India – a subcontinent defined by its exceptional diversity, caused by its outstanding history. It has always been a country easy to love, but hard to describe. Salman Rushdie is said to be one of the first authors to have truly written from the...

In Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie uses witch imagery to depict Indira Gandhi as the Widow. Critics have discussed the historical context of this decision, with some finding it problematic. However, by interpreting the Widow as an element of...

“Postcolonialism can be seen as a theoretical resistance to the mystifying amnesia to the colonial aftermath. It is a disciplinary project dedicated to the academic task of revisiting, remembering, and, crucially, interrogating the colonial past”...

In Atlas of the European Novel, Franco Moretti argues that “The novel functions as the symbolic form of the nation-state ...and it’s a form that not only does not conceal the nation’s internal divisions, but manages to turn them into a story.” He...

"Please allow me to introduce myself, / I'm a man of wealth and taste, / I've been around for a long, long year / Stolen many man's soul and faith / ... / Pleased to meet you / Hope you guess my name" sings the gravelly voice of Mick Jagger at the...

In The Satanic Verses, it seems that no relationship is a relationship between equals. Everyone is paired with an opposite: dominant and submissive, god and worshipper, angel and devil, faithful and adulterous. This inequality creates toxic, even...

“Imagination is the only weapon

In the war against reality.”

- Jules de Gaultier, French Philosopher

Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are literary works related by the common...

Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories is in many ways a simple fairy tale about magical people in a magical land. Rushdie himself admits that he first came up with the basic idea for the novel while telling stories to his son in the...

As easy as it is to take advantage of simplicity, some authors understand the depths of the complex world enough to transcend boundaries and speak to both the fruitful guiltlessness of youth and the world’s seeds, hardest to swallow. In 1990,...

Ecological coordinates of environmental parameters surface persistently in Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories as markers of generic wellbeing. Although apparently simplistic, these motives are embedded in processes of cultural meaning-making...

The Grammar of the Idols

Salman Rushdie’s “The Prophet’s Hair” reflects on religious practice and worship as a number of people cross paths with a sacred relic that has been stolen from their mosque. A vial, containing a strand of hair from...

Undoubtedly among the most controversial authors of recent times, Salman Rushdie’s writings delight, shock, irritate and even anger the readers. He is famous for his complex writing style which is presented in all his writings. His novel Shame is...

The first chapter of ‘Shame’ refers to the Garden of Eden, and does so in a manner with implications for the entire narrative. One may interpret the Shakil household as a subversion of Eden. In the Garden of Eden, Eve encounters a crafty serpent...

Although Salman Rushdie's Shame is considered by some critics a feminist text, others find that Rushdie's novel "reinscribes the patriarchal role of women as passive", as commented by Stephanie Moss, in her essay “The Cream of the Crop: Female...

Rushdie’s text immures the reader in its vortex of referential layers. Like him, his meanings exist “at an angle to reality”, and often, in their profusion, produce beguiling multiplicities of deliberately and carefully crafted connections....

Generic plurality is a matter of political statement for Rushdie. Intertextuality is an integral part of his historiographical metafiction. A variety of generic modes, with their points of origins both Asian and Euro-American, interpenetrate and...

Cosmopolitanism is defined in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as “the idea that all human beings, regardless of their political affiliation, are (or can and should be) citizens in a single community”. This belief not only applies to...