Salman Rushdie’s most recent novel Shalimar the Clown represents in many respects the writer’s mature development. It is as if all the peculiar virtues and faults of his earlier works have achieved their apotheosis. There is the now familiar fervid imagination, the wild excrescences of language, the reheated magical realism, the obsessive punning, the pot-boiled and re-imagined history, along with the equally familiar vulgarity of characterisation, the uncontrolled flowering of political and social clichés, and the peculiar lack of any insight into the human condition.
Shalimar the clown is a gifted acrobat and tightrope walker, who lives in a peaceful village in the lush province of Kashmir, among mountain meadows and lakes. He falls in love with the beautiful and provocative Boonyi. Their courtship is the expected conflation of Mills & Boon, heightened (or lowered) by Rushdie’s absurdly exaggerated language. But this is not enough to propel a large ambitious work, and so Boonyi, determined to see the greater world, first seduces and then becomes the mistress of the great Western diplomat and polymath Max Ophuls. Tragedy follows. Tired of being treated merely as a sex object, Boonyi becomes enormously fat. When she finally returns to her Kashmir roots she seeks forgiveness from her husband and (as part of her penitence) leaves behind a daughter conceived with Max Ophuls. Shalimar the clown, wounded to the core, sets out on revenge. He is prevented from killing his wife by his promises to his relatives, but meanwhile he becomes a jihadist and sets out to assassinate Max Ophuls, who has become American head of counter-intelligence.
Throughout the work, Rushdie, instead of exploring the life of his characters, rushes ahead at breakneck speed, as though desperately trying to fill in the vacuum of his themeless plots with chiaroscuro effects. When he becomes tired of one character he simply produces another. At certain points one groans inwardly as yet another “colourful” figure is introduced.
Shalimar the clown was not the only local male to have Boonyi Kaul on the brain. Colonel Hammirdev Suryavans Kachhwaha of the Indian Army had his eye on her for some time. Colonel Kachhwaha was just thirty-one years old but liked to call himself a Rajput of the old school, a spiritual descendant — and, he was certain, a distant blood relation — of the warrior princes, the old-time Suryavans and Kachhwaja rajas and ranas who had given both the Mughals and the British plenty to think about in the glory days of the kingdoms of Mewar and Marwar, when Rajputana was dominated by the two mighty fortresses of Chittorgarh and Mehrangarh …
This introduction soon degenerates into the usual punning about names. Colonel Kachhwaha is never explored as a human being, but instead becomes the object of the writer’s obsessive showing off. Thus it would appear that:
… once people heard his surname, they inevitably wanted to shorten it to Kachwa Karnail, which is to say “Colonel Turtle” or “Tortoise”. So Tortoise Colonel he became, and was forced to look for his metaphors of self-description closer to the ground. “Slow and steady wins the race, eh, what?” he practised; and “Tortoise by name, damned hard-shelled by nature.” But somehow he could never bring himself to say, “My dear chap, just call me Turtle,” or, “I mostly go by Tortoise, don’t you know — but it’s just plain Torto to you.” His testitudinarian fate further soured a mood which had already been ruined by his father …
And so it goes on, endlessly, for page after over-written page, with purple passages passing lightly over the characters, leaving the inner life largely untouched. Sometimes Rushdie hardly bothers with character at all, and becomes so involved in the expression and display of his own literary virtuosity that the character in question all but disappears under the author’s verbal posturing. As an example of the tiresomeness of the language I offer the following sample of the relentless monotone of Rushdie’s prose. It would seem that the military camp over which Colonel Kachhwaha presides is constantly expanding, so it is called, with typical heavy-handed punning, Elasticnagar. As a result of these inherent characteristics, it appears to follow ineluctably that:
Elasticnagar was unpopular, the colonel knew that, but unpopularity was illegal. The legal position was that the Indian military presence in Kashmir had the full support of the population, and to say otherwise was to break the law. To break the law was to be a criminal and criminals were not to be tolerated and it was right to come down on them heavily with the full panoply of the law and with hobnailed boots and lathi sticks as well. The key to understanding this position was the word integral and its associated concepts. Elasticnagar was integral to the Indian effort and the Indian effort was to preserve the integrity of the nation. Integrity was a quality to be honoured and an attack on the integrity of the nation was an attack on its honour and was not to be tolerated. Therefore Elasticnagar was to be honoured and all other attitudes were dishonourable and consequently illegal. Kashmir was an integral part of India. An integer was a whole and India was an integer and fractions were illegal. Fractions caused fractures in the integer and were thus not integral. Not to accept this was to lack integrity and implicitly or explicitly to question the unquestionable integrity of those who did accept it. Not to accept this was latently or patently to favour disintegration. This was subversive. Subversion leading to disintegration was not to be tolerated and it was right to come down on it heavily whether it was of the overt or covert kind. The legally compulsory and enforceable popularity of Elasticnagar was thus a matter of integrity, pure and simple, even if the truth was that Elasticnagar was unpopular. When the truth and integrity conflicted it was integrity that was to be given precedence. Not even the truth could be permitted to dishonour the nation. Therefore Elasticnagar was popular even though it was not popular. It was a simple enough matter to understand.
Such inflated fanciful nonsense is painful. No doubt it is meant to be playful but it tells us nothing and there is no excuse for trying the reader. The essence could be summarised in a few sentences, perhaps even a single sentence. It could be argued that the passage above is a satire on the heavy-footed military mind. But if this is meant to be a sample of the way the colonel thinks it is nothing short of ludicrous. If it is funny, it is perhaps not quite in the way the author intended.
A better writer than Rushdie would have created in Colonel Kachhwaha a sympathetic character — loyal, brave, carrying out his duty with exemplary sincerity, and falling heavily in love with the heroine Boonyi, the story’s femme fatale. Instead Rushdie presents his usual caricature of the military commandant, preferring his own voice once again over any elucidation of the character’s inner life.
Even in occasional passages addressing sombre subject matter, the voice of the author almost invariably intrudes. When Max Ophuls considers the fate of his two Jewish parents in the concentration camps, Rushdie spoils what could have been a rare moment of genuine sympathy and pathos by reaching towards a typically authorial conclusion.
After the war he found out how their story had ended. He learned the numbers burned into their forearms, memorised them and never forgot. The record showed they had been used for medical experimentation. They were old and losing their reason and good for nothing and so a use had been found for them. After lifetimes lived mainly in their now enfeebled minds they ended up as mere bodies, bodies that reacted this way to pain, this way to greater pain, this way to the greatest pain imaginable; bodies whose response to being injected with diseases was of interest, of high scientific interest. So they were interested in learning? Very well then. They had helped the advancement of knowledge in a valuably practical way. They never made it to the gas chamber. Scholarship killed them first.
This last sentence is typical and quintessential Rushdie, as though the author cannot resist having the last word, interpolating his own ironic overview at the end of a passage at the expense of addressing a subject of great seriousness and justified sobriety. It is unlikely that Max Ophuls would consider his parents in that way, would have summarised their tragic fate in the form of a light and clever quip. Instead, the passage constitutes a perfect demonstration of where Rushdie’s true interests lie — not in the characters he describes, but his own opinions of them and the tribulations they suffer.
In another part of the book Rushdie seems to provide an almost subconscious insight into what is perhaps his own worst failing as a writer. Considering Shalimar’s two brothers, he writes:
At the age of nineteen, the twin eldest sons of Abdullah and Firdaus Noman, Hameed and Mahmood, were gentle, gregarious fools whose only interest in life was to make each other laugh. Accordingly they had contentedly lost themselves in the comic fictions of the bhand pather, and were so immersed in their imaginary world, in creating burlesque versions of pratfalling princes and clumsy gods, cowardly giants and devils in love, that the real world lost its charm for them, and perhaps alone of all Kashmiris they became immune to its natural beauty.
In his own caricatures of human character, in his search for the most colourful expressions, Rushdie himself appears immune to the natural beauty of the world, the minute and telling insights that give a character soul and weight. Instead his characters resemble puppets. They scream, cry, shout, fart, fuck, suffer acute depression, have glorious and unlikely adventures, but do not remotely inhabit the page. More particularly, they do not have the quiet interior lives of real people. Instead, they seem to be permanently on the stage, and the entire work is conducted at full volume, as if the author is one of those motor-mouth stand-up comics who is terrified that if he turns off the talk the audience will disappear.
The strange truth is that Rushdie is the McGonagall of English novelists, one of those autodidacts whose egos are both so large and fragile that they simply drive themselves onwards, convinced of their genius, as one prancing cliché follows another.
Rushdie’s political and social outlook is a combination of modish leftism and caustic cynicism about the motives of his fellow human beings. As an example of the writer’s true nature, Rushdie’s views of women are almost invariably underwritten by chauvinism. They only exist as the playthings of men, to be loved, hated, discarded, and to bear children. Typically of Rushdie’s chauvinism, the only sexually alluring women are extremely youthful. But men, such as Max Ophuls himself, if anything increase in sexual attractiveness as they get older.
Paradoxically, Rushdie’s only genuine attempts at individual human characterisations concern cities, which (maddeningly for this reader) are ascribed human attributes. Paris, for example, is somehow inherently decadent, weak, a caricature of a cocotte. The youthful Max Ophuls, comparing it with his own city of Strasbourg, senses this character and expresses it in terms of disdain and revulsion.
But in his heart he blamed the capital, blamed it for its arrogant weakness, for presenting itself to the world — to him — as a vision of high civilisation which it did not have the force to defend. The future of Strasbourg was a chapter in its back-and-forth frontier history. The fall of Paris was Paris’s fault.
The notion that a city has a human-like character is itself something of a cliché. Once you assert, on largely a priori grounds, that Paris is weak, the apparently strong conclusion (“The fall of Paris was Paris’s fault.”) is revealed as little more than a tautology based on the initial false premise. Although dressed up in pretty language, Rushdie’s view of Los Angeles is also conventional enough:
The beautiful came to this city in huge pathetic herds, to suffer, to be humiliated, to see the powerful currency of their beauty devalued like the Russian rouble or the Argentine peso; to work as bellhops, as bar hostesses, as garbage collectors, as maids. The city was a cliff and they were its stampeding lemmings. At the foot of the cliff was the valley of the broken dolls.
In parallel, we could argue, Rushdie’s characters come to his fiction in huge pathetic herds, to suffer, to be humiliated, to see the powerful currency of their individuality devalued like the Russian rouble or the Argentine peso; to be assigned arbitrary roles as gods, divas, ambassadors, clowns, sex symbols, never to exist as individuals with any kind of autonomous interior life but merely as the puppets of the all-seeing, god-like author. If, following the analogy with Los Angeles, Rushdie’s novels are a cliff, then its characters are stampeding lemmings. At the foot of the cliff lies the valley of the broken dolls.
If Rushdie substitutes for genuine fiction his own brand of colourful over-writing, his faux magical realism is borrowed largely from writers such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, though it lacks both the integrity and historical tradition of South American literature. Thus, at the peaceful death of the elderly Sikh, Sardar Harbans Singh, in his garden, all the bees stop buzzing and the air becomes silent.
Sardar Harbans Singh passed away peacefully in his wicker rocking-chair in a Srinagar garden of spring flowers and honeybees with his favourite tartan rug across his knees and his beloved son, Yuvraj the exporter of handicrafts, by his side, and when he stopped breathing the bees stopped buzzing and the air silenced its whispers and Yuvraj understood that the story of the world he had known all his life was coming to an end, and that what followed would follow as it had to, but it would unquestionably be less graceful, less courteous and less civilised than what had gone.
But what does this actually mean? Are we genuinely expected to believe that the bees stopped humming and the air itself became quiet when the elderly Singh died? And that the world became less graceful, courteous and civilised than before? Actually, setting aside this prettified tosh, we can safely assume exactly the opposite — that the bees buzzed pretty much the same after Sardar Harbans Singh’s death (or any other individual’s death) as before. And, ahem, the amount of grace, courtesy and civility (or civilisation) before Singh’s death and after was also likely to be pretty much the same. The question remains: why does Rushdie feel compelled to write this sentimental, overblown nonsense, this absurd unintentional parody of a magical realist tradition which he has only partially digested and clearly does not understand?
The answer, I suspect, lies in Rushdie’s own character and his personal system of values. This is a man who is firmly ensconced in the material world, who fashionably flays the evils of consumerist capitalism while famously enjoying the high life, who delights in personal fame and who is wedded to what amounts to a vulgar celebrity view of that world. In his own life Rushdie is jealous, angry, immersed in literary politicking and vendettas (his spats with John le Carré, Mario Vargas Llosa and, more recently, John Updike — all significantly greater writers — are but three examples). This is the man who loves to collect literary prizes and who, having won the Booker for Midnight’s Children, was so consumed with anger when his next book, Shame, did not achieve the same, that he rose in dark anger from his table, upsetting coffee cups and glasses, and stormed from the room. This is the man who, always quick to jump to a modish political view, described Mrs Thatcher as Mrs Torture until he was compelled subsequently (when the Iranian fatwa was imposed on him by people who did indeed know something about torture) to beg Mrs Thatcher’s government for personal protection — protection which that government unstintingly provided at the British taxpayer’s expense. This is the same man who, having proclaimed his writerly independence in the most grandiloquent terms, disconcerted his allies and faithful supporters by arranging a demeaning rapprochement with certain senior figures of Islam in order to attempt, unsuccessfully, to lift the fatwa.
Shalimar the Clown, as you might expect from a writer with Rushdie’s somewhat materialistic worldview, is driven largely by revenge. Hatred is the machine that powers the plot. When Boonyi deserts her husband for the great Western diplomat Max Ophuls, and becomes his mistress, she sets in motion a creaky melodrama. Shalimar’s entire character becomes infused with jealousy and the lust for revenge. When Boonyi, bored with being merely the sexual plaything of Max Ophuls, becomes enormously fat, and bears a child, she gives up her lover in order to return to her husband. Will Shalimar forgive her even when Boonyi sacrifices the chance of ever seeing her child again? Of course not, for the simple reason that Shalimar does not exist as an independent character. He is the puppet of Rushdie, who needs Shalimar's unforgiving nature in order to complete his own creaking plot mechanism.
Pity the poor reader, searching for some signs of maturity, kindness, or interior life in this cast of lightweight or non-existent characters — for any human or humane figure with whom to identify. He or she is faced instead with caricatures whom it would be difficult not to despise. As a consequence, beneath the superficial level of Rushdie’s overactive prose, there is no active engagement of the reader’s sympathies.
Given that Rushdie himself seems energised and obsessed by revenge, it is perhaps not surprising that, in rare passages of virtuosity, what Rushdie does best is rage, genuine rage at the iniquity of human behaviour, not least when that behaviour is driven by religious or ideological passions. Kashmir, so Rushdie argues, was something of a rural paradise for five million souls before the battle for supremacy between the Indian army and the Muslim insurgents ripped it apart, before the peace and prosperity of that land was destroyed and its peoples butchered. Here at least Rushdie demonstrates genuine force and descriptive power. He recounts how, even in the refugee camps where the remainder of the brutalised population huddled in abject fear:
There was one bathroom per three hundred persons in many camps why was that and the medical dispensaries lacked basic first-aid materials why was that and thousands of the displaced died because of inadequate food and shelter why was that maybe five thousand deaths because of intense heat and humidity because of snake bites and gastroenteritis and dengue fever and stress diabetes and kidney ailments and tuberculosis and psychoneurosis and there was not a single health survey conducted by the government why was that and the pandits of Kashmir were allowed to rot in their slum camps, to rot while the army and insurgency fought over the bloodied and broken valley, to dream of return, to die while dreaming of return, to die after the dream of return died so that they could not even die dreaming of it, why was that why was that why was that why was that why was that.
When both the Indian Army and the jihadists burn the homes and torture and kill the inhabitants of the small village which lies at the centre of this part of the novel - a community of diverse faiths which until then has lived in relative harmony, bound together by its rich traditions and folk customs and songs and plays with ceremonial swords - Rushdie lists the crimes of their persecutors with a brutal clarity whose passion is made only greater by its objectivity. It ends in the following peroration:
Who lit that fire? Who burned that orchard? Who shot those brothers who laughed their whole lives long? Who killed the sarpanch? Who broke his hands? Who broke his arms? Who broke his ancient neck? Who shackled those men? Who made those men disappear? Who shot those boys? Who shot those girls? Who smashed that house? Who killed that youth? Who clubbed that grandmother? Who knifed that aunt? Who broke that old man’s nose? Who broke that young girl’s heart? Who killed that lover? Who shot his fiancée? Who burned the costumes? Who broke the swords? Who burned the library? Who burned the saffron field? Who slaughtered the animals? Who burned the beehives? Who poisoned the paddies? Who killed the children? Who whipped the parents? Who raped that lazy-eyed woman? Who raped that grey-haired lazy-eyed woman as she screamed about snake vengeance? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that dead woman? Who raped that dead woman again?
But even these great perorations about mass human cruelty are subverted by the story itself. Shalimar the clown, instead of attempting to understand or forgive the terrible circumstances of a small, innocent country torn apart by larger forces, becomes himself the embodiment of revenge, a jihadist who dedicates his life to killing, his final ambition being the killing of Max Ophuls, his wife’s former lover. Ophuls, finding himself in disgrace after the details of his affair with Boonyi become public, is forced to retire from public life as ambassador to India but eventually becomes America’s secretive head of counter-terrorism, directing his agents from his stronghold in Los Angeles. Shalimar manages to infiltrate his household and become his chauffeur, and finally achieves his dream of assassination. But he discovers that Max Ophuls is looking after a daughter who, when Shalimar meets her and witnesses her eerie resemblance to his hated wife, knows that she is Boonyi’s daughter.
What is Shalimar’s response to this young woman, Kashmira Ophuls, who is entirely innocent of all the supposed crimes of both her father Max Ophuls and her mother Boonyi? Forgiveness? A sense of wonder at the strange irony of life? An overwhelming sense that if the cycle of revenge is ever to cease then bitterness itself must finally end, that a new and fresh generation can wash clean the sins of its forebears? Of course not. Because Rushdie is transfixed by hatred, and sees the world entirely in terms of revenge, you know the answer. Shalimar must kill Kashmira Ophuls too, in order to wipe out the final evidence of his personal shame.
But Kashmira has inherited some of the more sterling traits of her father. She manages to escape Shalimar’s vengeance and watches with satisfaction when he is caught, tried for her father’s murder, sentenced to execution and placed on death row in San Quentin prison. Death row is itself a living death, characterised by constant temporary reprieves as appeals are lodged and processed, by the continuous raising and lowering of hope. Now it is Kashmira’s turn to persecute Shalimar, to indulge in her own rage for revenge against the man who killed both her mother and her father. While Shalimar is racked by his own demons, and screams in his cell at night, she sends him letter after letter accusing him ceaselessly of his crimes in order to prolong his suffering and perpetuate his private torture.
Do we care any more for this beautiful young woman who has inherited wealth from her father and now works ceaselessly to build up her fitness, to put aside all gentle things in order to become a warrior who will avenge her father’s and mother’s death — who has chosen to become an agent of destruction? Hardly. Like nearly all the other characters in the book, she is hollowed out by rage and revenge.
We have another direct insight into Rushdie’s view of the more gentle side of human nature when the kindly Sikh merchant Yuvraj makes plain his love for Kashmira. Yuvraj, as we would expect from Rushdie, is not a real character, but a caricature or fall-guy for all the gentle virtues Rushdie ignores and effectively despises. Solicitous of her health, he attends to her fever. Yet when she recovers she rebuffs him:
“Attend to your business,” she told him coldly, “because I have to attend to mine.” He flinched slightly, nodded once, and left her to her packing. When she was ready she stayed indoors until it was time to leave, refusing to set foot in the garden lest its soporific enchantments weakened her resolve. He was all injured nobility, stiff and monosyllabic. How second-rate men are, she told herself. Why would any woman yoke herself to a species of such pouting mediocrity? He couldn’t even say plainly what was written all over his face. Instead, he flounced and sulked. It was men who went in for the behaviour they had the effrontery to call feminine, while women carried the world upon their backs. It was men who were the cowards and women who were the warriors. Let him hide behind his pots and rags if he wanted! She had a battle to fight, and her war zone was on the far side of the world.
Kashmira believes women are superior to men, in other words, because they are even less susceptible to the gentle virtues than men, and because they have more important things to do, like carrying out personal vendettas of hatred and revenge. (I look forward, incidentally, to the first person who tells me that Rushdie is making the point that revenge is self-perpetuating. My answer, one of many that I could give, is that it is certainly self-perpetuating if the world is made of people like Rushdie, who both glorify revenge and pour scorn on those — such as the gentle Juvraj — who reject its imperatives and refuse to become its pawns.)
But before reaching the book's final chapter we are forced again to witness one of Rushdie’s perpetual and self-imposed faults. He begins by describing, with considerable power, the conditions under which Shalimar survives in prison:
There is no night at San Quentin. At night the state prison looked like an oil refinery. Banks of floodlights banished the darkness, illuminating the cell blocks, the exercise yard and the Point San Quentin village, outside the prison’s main gate, where many correctional facility employees made their homes.
So far, so good. But in chronicling Shalimar’s escape Rushdie cannot resist another superfluous and utterly unnecessary piece of magical realism.
It was on account of the brightly illuminated night that many guards and villagers afterwards swore that they had seen the impossible, they swore to their friends and the police and the information media, and refused to budge from their story in spite of the universal scepticism, that a man had run flat-out off the corner of a walled area near the adjustment centre on death row and had simply taken off, had continued on his way as if the wall stretched out into the sky like the wall of China or such, had gone scooting up into the air just as if he were running up a hill, his arms stretched out, not like wings, really, more to balance him, or so it seemed. He ran higher and higher until the lights of the prison couldn’t pick him out any more, and maybe he ran all the way to paradise, because if he did fall to earth someplace in the neighbourhood then nobody in the San Quentin community ever heard a thing about it.
Even magical realism has its own strict laws and internal consistencies. Shalimar has flown into the sky, disappeared into heaven. So why, then, do we find a little later that this same Shalimar is still very much on the earth, in material form, and in determined pursuit of Kashmira Ophuls? The answer is simple and obvious. Rushdie uses half-digested magical realism merely for decorative effect.
The book moves towards its tedious and predictable end when Shalimar finally manages to enter the high-security stronghold which Kashmira has inherited from her father. Shalimar, the great jihadist, enters the room in which Kashmira is hiding, with her night vision goggles and the “golden bow” with which she has constantly practised for just this moment. The conclusion of the book invokes the final orgasm of violence and revenge as Kashmira sees the hated figure of her step-father enter the room and, slowly drawing back the arrow, she knows that now she can finally kill him.
This reader closed the book with a yawn, secure in the knowledge that certain people, particularly those with overweening egos, are incapable of learning or changing. To read four hundred closely printed pages, based on the creaking machinery of bitterness and revenge, without a single sympathetic character or any serious insight into human nature, is something of a chore. The final disappointment is in no way countermanded or ameliorated by the occasional undoubted powers of description. Instead the author’s monomaniacal voice, his predictable and shallow manipulations, left me with a sense of profound relief at having finished a difficult task.
Rushdie is now sixty years old, and has been writing for most of his adult life. It is unlikely that he will change his style or his character. We are now in a position to form a mature judgement on his writing. His chief faults — a preference for his own narrative voice, an almost pathological lack of interest in the interior lives of his characters, a tendency towards shallow philosophising and clichéd commentary — can now be seen as common to most if not all of his works. They are, if you like, the core of his art. As if in confirmation, in Shalimar the Clown we see these faults not only reasserted but, if anything, consolidated and thrown into sharper relief.
Turning to Rushdie’s own circumstances, the political barbarity of the fatwa placed against him by Iran has by now lost much of its historical horror and psychological frisson. Fresher horrors have been laid over it. History moves on, and l’affaire Rushdie becomes merely one of history’s sedimentary layers. Now that the dramatic exoticism of Rushdie’s life no longer overshadows the work, it becomes possible to consider the work itself more or less objectively. In so doing the deeper truths about that work become difficult to hide or evade. Taking all things into account it is impossible not to reach the conclusion that this is a minor writer — colourful and self-assertive, to be sure, with a talent for self-dramatisation and occasional strong description — but one who offers no significant contribution to literature or the novel or the way in which we see ourselves. Instead, we may safely predict, Rushdie will increasingly be perceived as representative of a peculiar lacuna in British and American literary life, during which a relatively small number of literary establishment figures — a few publishers and literary critics — have managed to impose their own somewhat limited and shallow tastes on the wider public.
One of the peculiarities of Rushdie’s position as a writer appears to be a curious inverted racism, a protective cloak composed partly of ignorance and partly of the last residues of colonial guilt. While it lasted, Rushdie seemed to inhabit a special enchanted sphere which protected him from normal criticism, at least from Western readers and reviewers. This too is part of history’s receding tide. Recently, more than one Indian writer or critical reviewer has argued that Rushdie remains largely unpopular in India and Pakistan, not least because the image he projects of both India and Pakistan is patronising, a Western view dressed up for Western readers who do not know better. These same critics point to the simpler, but infinitely more profound and humane works of indigenous writers such as G. K. Narayan.
Pankaj Mishra, a novelist based in New Delhi and Simla, has commented on Rushdie's peculiarly hectoring tone directed towards indigenous Indian novelists who write on Indian subject matter:
In Rushdie's introduction to his recent anthology of Indian writing, he accused literature in Indian languages of "parochialism" - a false and arrogant assumption, if ever there was one. In the same introduction - ridiculed in India for its many blunders - Rushdie recommended world travel for all writers.
Mishra, in a review of Rushdie's novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, criticises Rushdie in terms which seem to run parallel with those set out in those article, indicating - in a manner which may perhaps be surprising to Rushdie - substantial common ground between his Indian perspective and this writer's "Western" one. According to Mishra, Salman Rushdie has generated:
an alarming new kind of anti-literature, with banal obsessions and empty bombast, pseudo-characters and non-events ... Rushdie has produced much of this kind of writing, which is easy to do but hard to read, and has spawned among Indian writers in English several facile imitations, novels blithely liberated from such considerations as economy, structure, suspense, irony, plausibility of events, coherence of character, psychological motivation: in short, everything that makes the novel an art form.
Shalimar the Clown is, in certain important senses, a defining work. Rushdie’s style and personal preoccupations have been honed and brought to a fine edge. It is arguably his best novel to date. But that merely underlines the emptiness of the experiment, and by extension the structural, philosophical and literary faults of this absurdly over-rated writer. Given such a background, it is perhaps inevitable that as the self-dramatising aspects of Rushdie’s character grow more apparent so, inversely, Rushdie’s oeuvre will sink to its deserved position. This will amount, in the end, to that of an exotic fabulist of limited intellect, with some serious endemic faults, who has contributed nothing of significance to the development of the novel, but who instead will come to occupy a small, colourful footnote in literature’s grand history of temporary fashions.
