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The appearance of yet another collection of essays on Rushdie's work will no doubt seem odd to many people. Isn't there too much already written about Rushdie, for Rushdie, against Rushdie? Can't postcolonial critics talk about someone else for a change? Perhaps it is very fact of Rushdie's familiar presence on contemporary literary scene that makes this collection seem both redundant and necessary. For it might be equally odd if a journal devoted to twentieth-century literature did not, at end of that century, take a moment to dwell upon work of this man. At least for one brief moment, he became, in a sense, very symbol of literary for many people across globe. Of course writers have suffered persecution, exile, and even death for as long as anyone can remember, and we may be sure that among Rushdie's own contemporaries there are many--including those whose names we may never know--who have paid dearly for publishing their impressions and opinions. However, for various reasons (no doubt related more to political dynamics of 1980s than to Rushdie's own work) it was The Satanic Verses and storm around it that provoked more discussions, in more countries, about status of literary than perhaps any other work of our time. The 1993 French publication Pour Rushdie: Cent intellectuels arabes et musulmans pour la liberte d'expression (For Rushdie: Essays by Arab and Muslim Writers in Defence of Free Speech, 1994) (Anouar) gives us a sense of charge of such discussions. The polemical debates that ensued over The Satanic Verses forced many people--readers and writers of all kinds--to reflect seriously about effects and scope of literature, its responsibility and freedom. But it would be unfair to suggest that Rushdie's significance as a writer is entirely indebted to accident of fatwa. The appearance of Midnight's Children in 1981 was a remarkable event in its own right. For many English-speaking Indians, book was tremendously exciting: a sprawling, clever, and delightful English novel in which foreign words were not French or Italian but Hindustani, and in which they recognized familiar figures and events from their own history. The pleasures of reading book were certainly different from pleasures of reading R. K. Narayan or Anita Desai, and this had to do both with immensity of book's vision and with Rushdie's infectious enjoyment of language. It was almost as though Sterne had suddenly appeared in twentieth century as an expatriate Indian, for here was a narrator both firangi and desi (foreign and native)--a desi hidden in a firangi or vice versa. Two towering works about colonial India--Kipling's Kim and Tagore's Gora--had already dramatized for us this figure of non-Indian Indian, of hidden ancestry and deceptive appearances. Rushdie's Saleem gave it a new and provocative spin by dramatizing this dual descent not just thematically but stylistically as well. When Midnight's Children first appeared, we could not have foreseen how precisely this couple of firangi-desi would emerge to dominate various trends of Rushdie criticism. It has done so, not only in questions that have risen about Rushdie's relation to diasporic South Asian community in Britain, about relative appeal of his work in Asia and in the West, but also in debates about his authenticity as an Indian writer and about precise ways in which Indian names and words appear in his work. (1) Indeed, an uneasy suspicion of firangi-desi, of nature of his alliances and strength of his kinship, has put increasing pressure on concept of hybridity, which seeks to hold some of these tensions at bay. Like criticism of all canonical works, that of Rushdie's also reveals changing currents in academic world. While initial response to his work was more concerned with questions of literary representation and critique of metaphysical categories, recent criticism has been more attentive to Rushdie's own location within diasporic culture, to his class affiliations, and to explicit political ends of his work. …