Salman Rushdie's Shame is as much a contemplation of the migrant artist as it is an engagement with the problems of narrating Pakistan - a nation superimposed upon an Indian geopolitical substrate and created-indivision, comprising a sizeable (im)migrant population created by Partition's displacement of 12 million people across South Asia (and the deaths of 1 million). If Shame speaks of the artist-figure - Omar Khayyam, who provides the model for the novel's peripheral hero, Omar Khayyam Shakil - with the consolatory sentiment that something can 'be gained' in the translations of the migrant (Shame, p.29), then the shifting nature of reading practices should permit us to indulge in similarly beneficial transports. In effect, Shame's, insistence upon the primacy of translation authorises the changeable character of our acts of interpretation. As Rushdie's fiction is keenly aware, translation always addresses at least two places, whether it involves a movement between a source language and a target language, or the migrant's movement across borders and cultures. As I hope to show, much of Shame's imaginative work consists in a doubleness of articulation that not only addresses post-Partition Pakistan and racism in Britain in the early 1980s, but may also enable literary criticism as a political act within its own place and time.

Salman Rushdie's shorter fiction, the novella Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and the short story collection East, West (1994), is distinguished by old-fashioned qualities associated with storytelling: the ability of a good story to give counsel and comfort and the potential for remaining meaningful well beyond the season in which the tale was first told. Almost any reading of these works, Rushdie's first publications after the fatwa of 1989, is likely to seem overly determined by the fateful event, but in the final analysis, these are books that outlast this immediate context to pose and answer enduring questions about home and the world, the power of speech and language, and the promise of stories. These themes are not new, even if the context imbues them with unprecedented urgency. The challenge and danger of writing fiction about issues that matter - language, religion, politics, history, identity, tyranny, migrations - have been familiar to the author since his turn to subcontinental material in Midnight's Children and continue to be relevant in works that follow.

Conceived in a commitment made to his son Zafar to write a book for children, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, published a scant year after the fatwa, is a book that keeps its word. 'There's no more absolute thing', Rushdie explained, 'than a promise to your child. You can't break it.' Looking back on the dismal months following the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa and his confinement, Rushdie admits to feelings of doubt: 'I spent an awful lot of time thinking I would never write again, not because I couldn't but because I didn't want to.'

The publication of Salman Rushdie's fourth novel The Satanic Verses in September 1988 released an unforeseen process of reaction and protest against and for the novel and its author. The protests against the book concentrated on the issue of alleged blasphemy against Islam while those defending it argued for freedom of expression. The protest culminated in the fatwa, or a legal statement, by Ayatollah Khomeini on Rushdie, condemning him to death for intentionally opposing Islam:

Consequently, Rushdie was forced to live in hiding for fear of assassination. In the process, the novel itself attained the status of being talked about while it remained notoriously unread. The novel will be discussed here as a text: first its structure, characterisation and stylistic features, then the wide range of themes it discusses and its intertextual reaches. The discussion will close by considering the ethical issues Rushdie's novel raises.

Despite its often misrepresented reputation, The Satanic Verses is a complex, ambitious and rewarding novel which explores questions of identity and belonging. The novel's two main characters, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, are travelling in a jumbo jet which is blown up by terrorists over the English Channel. When they begin their fall - literally and metaphorically - they go through a process of transformation in which they become adversaries.

Midnight's Children is a grand book, in the ambition and the scope of its subject, and in the daring and dynamism of its method. It is also an intimate book, attentive to childhood memories of people and neighbourhoods. In both these respects, subject and method, the novel has sources which influenced and informed its construction, and these will be discussed in more detail below. One of them is the novel The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, first published in German in 1959. In 1985, Rushdie paid this tribute to Grass and to the novel:

This was four years after the publication and great triumph of his own Midnight's Children, a novel which demonstrates the daring that Rushdie claims Grass inspired in him, and which in its own right has inspired a generation of Indian writers. Midnight's Children is now a central text in the study of the postcolonial phenomenon in writing in English, and has engaged the attention of scholars and critics, as well as the general student of literature.

Flapping Eagle, the Amerindian protagonist of Salman Rushdie's Grimus (1975), has many of the characteristics of the prototypical Native American trickster. He is both 'a creator of order out of chaos and a destroyer of order which represses creative energies, [as] an animal being and a spiritual force', and '[w]hatever else he may be, [he] is also a SURVIVOR who uses his wits and instincts to adapt to changing times'. In her anthropological study In Favor of Deceit (1987), Ellen B. Basso points out that '[t]he widespread occurrence of trickster characters in folklore has long been an intriguing puzzle to anthropologists and folklorists, who have written insightfully - but exceedingly sporadically - about these mythological figures'. Franz Boas was, for instance, impressed by 'the “troublesome psychological discrepancy” between the apparently incongruous attributes of the “culture hero” (who makes the world safe and secure for human life) and the “selfish buffoon” (who ludicrously attempts the inappropriate)'. Others have emphasised the trickster's explicit status as an outsider - 'strikingly antisocial, marginal, or ambiguous' - and that he represents, in Karl Kerényi's words, the 'spirit of disorder, [as] the enemy of boundaries'.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) and Fury, published two years later in 2001, warrant critical attention as a pair of texts not only because of their overt intertextual references, nor even because they are bound together by the density of their shared themes, concerns and attitudes, but also because they represent a profound ideological shift in Rushdie's writing. The shift began to emerge in his non-fiction from as early as 1992 but remained embryonic in his major fictional work until the publication of The Ground Beneath Her Feet. It is signalled most obtrusively there by the relocation of Rushdie's imaginative geography away from the Indian subcontinent. Fury consolidates this departure; whilst the earlier novel had embedded substantial portions of the narrative in Bombay, this latter work barely touches upon Indian space at all, except for a few oblique references to the childhood of its protagonist, Professor Malik Solanka. Although India figures in the narrative as the site of a repressed but nevertheless significant trauma, the putative centre of this novel, as in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, is the West and specifically the United States. In place of Bombay, which Rushdie had chronicled with almost Dickensian exhaustiveness, there is New York, 'the beating heart of the visible world'. The reasons for this shift, and its effects on Rushdie's fiction, will be the object of this essay.

Accompanying the geographical relocation are two other themes that bind The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury together: globalisation, driven by the irresistible energies of consumer capitalism, and a global media and telecommunications network with its attendant culture of celebrity.

” / Any study of Rushdie remains incomplete, indeed deficient, if not seen through the literature of migration and cinema. To read Rushdie through these - demographic shift and artistic form - simply means that we are more likely to get our understanding of him right than if we do not. The fact of diaspora, of the trauma of migration, explains many facets of Rushdie's reading of culture: his emphasis on the mongrelisation of our lives, delight in the chutnification of history, and importance given to the moment when 'newness' enters the world. Indeed, some, like Timothy Brennan, have found Rushdie's anti-nationalist, non-foundational reading of the nation state particularly prescient. The fact of cinema explains a number of matters of representation in the Rushdie corpus which without an understanding of cinema would be lost. Given the brief of this chapter, though, we may want to set aside the theme of migration and diaspora, referring to it only in as much as it impinges on our reading of Rushdie's engagement with cinema, in particular Bollywood/Bombay cinema.

When Rushdie writes about Indian urban culture as a culture 'full of fakery and gaudiness and superficiality and failed imaginations' but also full of 'high vitality, linguistic verve' and metropolitan excitement, he reads Indian urban culture through the eyes of his beloved Bombay and its dominant art form, the Bollywood cinema. The homage to Bombay and its cinema began early as is evident from Rushdie's tribute to The Wizard of Oz. We note that Rushdie saw the film at the Metro Cinema in 1957 at the age of ten, a crucial age at which he also saw, as it seems from his novels, two Bollywood films which had a decisive influence on him: Shree 420 ('Mr 420', 1955) and Funtoosh ('The Madhatter', 1956). Metro Cinema, now decrepit, is at the corner of First Marine Street (Anandilal Podar Marg) and the Esplanade (Mahatma Gandhi Road), next to Cinema Lane and not too far away from the Dhobi Talao area.

The Moor's Last Sigh, Rushdie's first major publication after The Satanic Verses, was written in the shadow of the fatwa and in the wake of Rushdie's political exile from his former homeland. The novel appears to replicate the author's predicament by foregrounding a sense of banishment and impending death, opening and closing the eponymous Moor's narrative with his premature death in exile. Exile and death thus frame the rich narrative collage that constitutes this saga of the Catholic-Jewish Da-Gama-Zogoiby family, containing the events in a foreclosed temporal register that offers both cultural and historical density to the text. The Moor's retrospective narration 're-covers' - simultaneously reclaims and layers - four generations of family history drawing intricate connections between fiction and history by drawing on the trope of the palimpsest - a writing surface upon which the original traces have been overwritten. This trope - which I explore in depth later - is central to the model of historiography as re-covery in the text and reflects the contingency of historical narration, its production within a specific historical moment. Indeed, this novel is one of Rushdie's most 'readerly' texts in that its prime concern, as Stephen Baker has pointed out, is 'the rediscovery of a creative, historical dimension in the reading process itself'. It is appropriate therefore to begin by applying these terms to our own reading of the text: to reflect upon its own moment of production as part of our engagement with a 'palimpsestic', or multilayered, reading of the novel.

'The past is home albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time.' Salman Rushdie wrote that in 1982, in the early period of his new fame as the author of Midnight's Children, which had won the Booker Prize in 1981. The elegiac tone is striking. Many years before the fatwa threatened to make Rushdie's exile from India a permanent one, and at a time when he was 'enjoying the unique pleasure of having written . . . a book that people liked', he laments the loss of the city his novel celebrates. Clearly the present life, London and fame, have not displaced the memory of India and Bombay as a constitution of 'home'. Rushdie here describes a sense of being absent from his most intense reality that will be familiar to his migrant readers. The 'lost city in the mists of lost time' is Bombay in the 1950s, which is the period when Rushdie grew up, and which is the period of childhood in Midnight's Children. It is to this time and this city that Rushdie locates the best of India's possibilities, a time when Nehru's vision of a tolerant and plural India seemed achievable, and in a city which in some ways appeared to have made its own way towards that vision.

Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay in 1947, the year of India's partition and independence. He was born in June, some weeks before the date of India's independence (15 August), but the family joke was that the young Salman's appearance was the true cause of the departure of the British. This linking of the birth of a child and the birth of a nation provided 'the germ of a novel, Midnight's Children'. In the meantime, he had plenty of other things to do before he got to write that novel. He attended Cathedral School in Bombay, an English Mission School, just like his narrator Saleem would do in the novel ('In my nearlyninth year I had begun to attend the Cathedral and John Connon Boys' High School'). He was at the school until 1961, when he was sent to Rugby School, a famous boarding school in England.

Thus writes Salman Rushdie of his protagonist Professor Malik Solanka who resigns from his job at King's College, Cambridge opting out of the academy and cashing in on the lucrative world of television to make a series of 'popular history-of-philosophy' programmes. The programme is eventually a success and is aired under the title 'The Adventures of Little Brain'. It stars his collection of 'outsize egghead dolls', all made by himself, representing great thinkers. The chief 'knowledge-seeker' is the 'female time-travelling doll Little Brain' - echoing other Rushdie characters who journey through space and time, including Gibreel Farishta in The Satanic Verses, shuttling between twentieth-century Britain and seventh-century 'Jahilia', and Flapping Eagle in Grimus who falls through a hole in the Mediterranean into a different dimension. Little Brain is a 'hip, fashion-conscious, but still idealistic Candide, his Valiant-For-Truth in urban-guerrilla threads, his spiky-haired girl Basho journeying, mendicant bowl in hand, far into the Deep North of Japan'. She is the only doll he falls in love with and who breaks his heart. Appropriated by popular television she is turned into a celebrity and her intellect dumbed down for the mainstream viewing public.

At the turn of the millennium, Salman Rushdie left London, his home for the previous thirty years, for New York, declaring the English literary scene to be bitchy, insular and smug. The move was portrayed in some quarters as a desertion of the country that had sheltered him during the dark years of the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa, with the popular press particularly acerbic in some of its comments. Even the liberal broadsheet newspaper the Guardian joined the personalised attacks, merging Rushdie's complex private life with the plot of his ill-received 2001 novel Fury in a spoof 'condensed account' of the novel: 'Self-regarding fiftysomething man dumps his wife, moves to New York, meets the most beautiful woman in the world and writes about it.'

As the latest in a long line of controversies accompanying the author, the storm over Rushdie's relocation might serve as anecdotal evidence of the fraught relationship between the writer and the British cultural establishment, and as an instance of the inherent difficulty of placing Rushdie in relation to Britishness in general, and the English literary tradition in particular. Moreover, attempting to characterise 'the English tradition' itself is an exercise beset with snares. Looking back into the recent history of literary criticism the picture appears to have been clearer, at least to cultural conservatives. Writing in an essay entitled, 'The Englishness of the English Novel' (1981), Q. D. Leavis - with enviable certainty - described an 'instinctive national preference' leading to a 'demand on creative writers for inwardness, understanding, and the Shakespearian “fullness of life”': something which was, for her, attainable only when English authors chose 'to write from their roots'.

In his famous analysis of Britain in the 1890s, Holbrook Jackson saw the fin de siècle as a transitional point between the rule-bound certainties of Victorian society and the revolutionary ethos of modernism. This cultural melange of old and new is especially prevalent in the visual arts of the last decades of the nineteenth century, when worship of a mythic past conspired with a zeal for novelty. British artists during this period engaged with the same issues as their Continental counterparts, but their versions of fantasy and neophilia were unique: the same decades witnessed James McNeill Whistler's attenuated poetic visions of the Thames; Frederic Leighton's monumental reconstructions of the classical past; the novel, yet medievalising, furniture designs of William Morris and the Glasgow School; Burne-Jones's languid androgynous figures; and Aubrey Beardsley's perversely erotic drawings and engravings. Despite many artists' professed rejection of both tradition and the ugliness of the modern world, the visual artists of the fin de siècle shared with literature an engagement with prevalent ideas: the legacy of Charles Darwin, the economic critique of Karl Marx and the psychological concerns of the generation that preceded Sigmund Freud. Artists abandoned Darwin's scientific naturalism, but were drawn constantly to organic forms and the negative implications of natural selection - that is, the extinction of a decadent species, rather than survival of the fittest. The inspiration of Marx and his English followers led artists to consider craft and furniture-making as a newly dignified part of their profession. A pan-European obsession with neurosis and anxiety found its way into the tense mood and hermetic subject matter of many prints, drawings and paintings.

In 1895 Max Nordau's Degeneration was translated and presented to an English readership. Opening with an attack on wealth and luxury, it seems at first to echo a familiar liberal assault on aristocratic decadence. But Nordau's tone soon changes, and for the most part Degeneration forms a long diatribe against 'the new aesthetic tendencies' in contemporary art, in particular mysticism, Impressionism and Symbolism, encompassing the writings of Tolstoy, Ibsen, Ruskin, Zola, Nietzsche and Baudelaire, the music of Wagner, and the art of Burne-Jones and D. G. Rossetti. In a sweeping overview that reproduces the 'hysteria' that he claimed to see all around him, Nordau insists that the work of modern artists displays all the symptoms of morbidmental pathology. It is they who are both causes and symptoms of contemporary decline and who need, like criminals and the insane, to be studied in the light of the developing disciplines of psychology, psychiatry and criminology.

Between January and May in the same year, H. G. Wells's story The Time Machine appeared as a monthly serial in the New Review. It too paints a stark picture of universal decline. But Wells sets the 'dusk of nations' far into the future, and uses the possibilities of both science and fiction to speculate on scenarios beyond the boundaries of the present. The laboratory dissolves as the time machine accelerates into the future, and the process of evolution is imaginatively speeded up.