Salman Rushdie’s Upwardly Mobile, Globally Migrating Middle Classes

Abstract

This chapter examines the middle-class milieu and setting of much of Salman Rushdie’s work. Such an exploration of the upwardly mobile, increasingly affluent, and globally connected Indian bourgeoisie highlights their elaborate lifestyle and aspirations. Another common thread binding the characters in Rushdie’s novels is the city of Bombay/Mumbai. This is the city that his middle-class bourgeois characters share with the criminal classes and the entertainment industry. In Mumbai the lines between the legitimate and the criminal are very often blurred, and many of Rushdie’s protagonists find themselves teetering over the abyss of the underworld. Those of Rushdie’s characters that have moved into global spaces of power and affluence are still umbilically attached to their natal city, where they were born middle-class, but have achieved wealth through crime or the world of entertainment, and have either voluntarily left the island city or have had to flee it. Instead of an omnibus overview, this chapter offers an in-depth analysis of Rushdie’s upwardly mobile middle class as they move from Bombay to London and from there to the new world in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, and The Golden House.