Salman Rushdie: The Ambivalence of Migrancy

Abstract

In her essay on The Satanic Verses, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak temporarily brackets her discussion of Rushdie affair in order to impossible: a reading of The Satanic Verses as if nothing has happened since late 1988 (219). A short while later, she returns to cultural politics of controversy in order to reconnect book with its notorious context, debate between twin demonologies of and free speech and secularism. The attempt to separate book from its reception is interesting, not because it can't be done, or done well, but in way it raises issue of Rushdie text and its proper audience, its desired reading constituency. Within field of a text that is marked as high culture with respect to its literary antecedents--surrealism, magic realism, and European modernism--and its potential sphere of evaluation, Booker Prize--the interventions by South Asian Britons in Bradford, Birmingham, Bolton, and London, and by self-serving politicians i n India and Pakistan, along with their range of mis- or nonreadings, are clearly part of a debate that is not intended to be theirs. Yet The Satanic Verses, as Spivak and a number of other commentators, including Rushdie, have pointed out, is a novel about migrancy in general and about South Asian immigrants to Britain in particular. (1) One of problems that attends any investigation of migrancy in Rushdie's work is almost limitless applicability of concept, fostered not inconsiderably by author's own moves from India to Pakistan to England, and now to New York. In this essay I ambivalent ways in which migrancy recurs in Rushdie's life and work as a concept he celebrates, yet one that has historically had undesired consequences for him. Migrancy can be called reigning trope of twentieth century Writers such as Beckett, Joyce, and Rushdie have made it a determining feature of counterhegemonic literature and politics. Rushdie is not alone in being fascinated by liberatory and metaphysical connotations that attach themselves to concept. Migration refers not only to displacements of people in history but to a state of displacement that befalls humankind in general. In his essay on Gunter Grass, Rushdie proclaims, We all cross frontiers; in that sense, we are all migrant peoples (279). While that may be true on some abstract level, still we all cross them differently, and thus we are not all migrants in same way. That experiences of migration differ, I think, is one of crucial distinctions to be made in any discussion of subject. An attendant problem involves Rushdie's shifting claims about relationship between his novels and history While any straight correspondence between two would be facile, Rushdie's changing positions with regard to historicity of The Satanic Verses invites a questioning of reasons behind such claims and disclaimers. In his letter to Rajiv Gandhi, Rushdie insists that the book isn't about Islam, but about migration, metamorphoses, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay... How much further from history could one get? (Appignanesi 35-36). Later, however, in Observer, he claims that book is attempt to discuss growth of Islam as a historical phenomenon, as ideology born out of its time (Appignanesi 62). And in same essay, he explains novel as an attempt to write about migration, its stresses and transformations, from point of view of migrants from Indian subcontinent to Britain. In first case migration is a category far removed from history, and in second it is inextricably a historical event. The status of such statements as truth claims is hardly issue. The point, rather, is to understand these shifting patterns of migrancy's relation to history as they appear in his work. While strategy of disaffiliation that Rushdie performs may in part be attributable to a rhetorical line of defense necessitated by attacks on his book, exactly what his concept of migration is, and what his place in migrant population is, still remain to be examined. …