| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
In addition, within these three writers’ works, we can see the operations of exile, how the biographical and linguistic exile of these writers comes to be processed and represented, reflected and distorted, and the effect that the concept of exile (that resounds throughout their works) has on the literary and historical contexts that are their new “homes.” These novelists treat exile not simply as a condition of the post-colonial world, but as a central means to understand the self. Rather than labeling them proponents of any post-colonial literature, therefore, we should perhaps call these three novelists the most important artists of a new genre: a literature of exile.
Salman Rushdie is an Anglo-Indian writing in English, often on the subject of the home he left when he was still a schoolboy. He was born in Bombay (which has since been renamed Mumbai) on June 19, 1947—the year of Indian independence and the year that acquires so much importance in his most critically acclaimed novel, Midnight’s Children (1981). However, when still a child, he moved to England and was schooled at two of the pillars of the British establishment: Rugby and Cambridge. Consequently, his homeland was necessarily doubled between the Indian subcontinent (he was later also to live in Pakistan, with his family) and the British Isles, to where he returned a second time to work in an advertising agency before beginning his career as a novelist.
It is precisely this double identity that informs a great deal of Rushdie’s literature—from his first novel, Grimus (1975), to his most recent novel, Shalimar the Clown (2005), and to his most recent nonfiction and travel writing works such as Step Across the Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–2002 (2002) and the article, “The East is Blue” (2004). He is able to write about both the culture of his parents and his newly adopted culture from the position of a partial outsider to both and is able to understand both sides of a sometimes (often violently) opposed set of cultural constructions. This is not to say that Rushdie’s writing career has been one in which he feigns a transcendental stance, a distanced style, that sets him above both cultures, as an objective and unbiased third party.