Salman Rushdie’s work has been linked to innovations in form in relation to the genre of the novel. What he has been most credited for is the bringing of subcontinental storytelling traditions into the Indian novel in English. This chapter traces these origins with reference to prose and poetry contexts of Urdu and Hindustani, so important to Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Enchantress of Florence, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Moreover, the chapter considers his engagement with poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a family friend and a much admired poet. Rushdie’s position in relation to Urdu opens up stylistic innovations on his part as well as an indebtedness to the storytellers and writers who have engaged with the tradition/modernity debate before him. This chapter thus considers Rushdie as part of a wider contextual framework of ideas of the secular and sacred on the Indian subcontinent, often neglected in discussions of his work.

This chapter offers a pluralist reading of transitional justice built around three meanings of pluralism. The first is value pluralism – the idea, dear to Isaiah Berlin, that values are irreducibly manifold, potential conflicting and frequently incommensurable in such a way that they cannot be ranked or weighed on any single scale. The second meaning of pluralism is cultural pluralism. It refers to the fact that there are many different cultures, many different collective ways of life, none of which can claim superiority. While insisting on the possibility of a cross-cultural conversation around core values, the proposed pluralist approach rejects the normal model’s tendency to reduce transitional justice to one set of (Western) cultural forms. The third form of pluralism briefly considered is legal pluralism, meaning the coexistence of competing legal orders. Discussing Rwanda’s experience with the so-called gacaca courts, the chapter suggests a pluralist understanding of the rule of law flexible enough to accommodate cultural variation while remaining committed to what I take to be its universal core. The chapter ends by proposing a pluralist method for thinking about transitional justice, which is linked to basic commitments referred to as sense of reality, anti-monism, situated thinking, decolonised cosmopolitanism and fallibilistic mentality. The chapter argues that these commitments can help mitigate a number of problematic trends in contemporary transitional justice discourse and practice.

This chapter examines the vision of key non-fictional essays written by creative writers such as C. L .R. James, Wilson Harris, George Lamming, Salman Rushdie, etc. and puts them in dialogue with the critical and theoretical debates of major literary and cultural critics such as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Homi K. Bhabha, Avtar Brah, and others. Pointing to shared areas of concern, elements of synergy, and extracting elements which illuminate the historiography of creative and critical exchange, this chapter focuses on particular moments of cultural intervention. It traces how the history and development of this body of writing – which has now gained belated acknowledgement – as well as the literary, cultural, and theoretical debates that have surrounded it are inextricably linked with its political and historical context of emergence.

Although French was displacing Latin as the international language of choice, print increasingly relied on the vernacular of its intended readers. This allows the translation and transnational dissemination of texts to be mapped more precisely. Printing itself helped to standardise 'national' languages, but authors and translators also learned to gauge their vocabulary and style of writing to suit a wider audience. Theories of language were combined with detailed study of core languages and dialects, leading to a greater awareness of the principles and practices of translation. Dictionaries and other language tools had first emerged in connection with Bible translation, but from the late seventeenth century more imaginative reference works and encyclopedias allowed authors to adopt more sophisticated writing techniques to evade censorship. For historians aware of these processes of international transmission, printed texts of all kinds provide a vast resource not just for content analysis, but also for conceptual history.