| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
The case is quite the reverse. His writing is very much at ground level; it locates itself within the heady back and forth of cultural interchange. Like a geneticist, Rushdie splices and inextricably interweaves a double helix from the quite separate societies of which he has been a part. Salman Rushdie crosses English literary references with Quranic exegesis and mixes Indian folklore with modern American slang. The interweaving of mesmerizing performance has secured him a place, along with Gabríel García Márquez, as one of the foremost writers of magical realism. It is within the conjunction and disjunction of these different strands of cultural reference that the density and the richness of Rushdie’s prose create the “imaginary home.”
However, as the events that surrounded the publication of The Satanic Verses showed, the resonances of this cultural mix of Rushdie’s novels (an admixture caused by Rushdie’s role as the exile) were felt not only in literary circles. Shortly after its publication in 1998, The Satanic Verses , Rushdie’s fourth novel—in which the figure of Mahound presented a thinly disguised representation of the prophet Mohammed—led to the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In the clash between East and West that was created by the controversy, one can see the importance of the form of writing that Rushdie, as exile, creates in his novel. For by interweaving both Western and Islamic cultures, Rushdie goes beyond the facile accusation that he is a traitor to his roots or has given in to the heathen land he now calls “home.” Rather, he issues a challenge to both the fundamentalists of the Western ideal and of Islam to consider the possibility that history and truth are not the static edifices their dogmas would wish them to be. The magic of Rushdie’s particular brand of magical realism is that it can force the single and unified worlds that are the sole objects of fundamental belief to face up to the changeability and shifting nature of the world.
Bharati Mukherjee is an American citizen (as she sees herself) of Indian heritage who writes of emigration as a question of negotiating the gender and ethnic implications of subjectivity.