Salman Rushdie (b. 1947 in India) entered the literary field with his novel Grimus in 1975. In that science fiction fantasy novel he developed the idea of all-purpose quotes, philosophical phrases that would be suitable for all situations. With such quotes, people could bring meaning to their lives, for ‘the all-purpose quote increases our awareness of the interrelations of life’. With this idea, Rushdie began an œuvre that would be constantly aware of the contextuality of writing.
In this essay I will discuss the way Rushdie emphasises the significance of contextuality. Although Rushdie writes in the fashion of magical realism – that is, mixing the realist with the magical – his works are always (with the exception of Grimus and the children’s books Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and Luka and the Fire of Life (2010)) keenly embedded in historical or contemporary contexts. Furthermore, Rushdie, a history graduate from Cambridge, frequently also provides metatextual and metacontextual commentary on the contexts he writes about.
The focus of the essay will be on three of Rushdie’s novels that were published after Grimus but before the Satanic Verses affair: Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983) and The Satanic Verses (1988) itself. Together with The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999) and The Enchantress of Florence (2008), these books form what can be called Rushdie’s ‘India cycle’, although the Indian subcontinental context is in many ways relevant also for his other novels. My analysis of Rushdie’s novels will consider, among other things, the political history of India and Pakistan, communal violence, religious sectarianism and popular culture. Theoretically, I will be using a postcolonial framework, within which Rushdie’s works hold a particularly central place for subcontinental writing, with Midnight’s Children as the key novel.