Terror has a History : A Fretful Conceptualization of the Loss of Kashmiriyat in Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown

Abstract

The new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, over-lapping, disjunctive order, which cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models creating multiple scapes that are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic and political situatedness of different sorts of nation-states,multinational diasporic communities as well as subnational groupings and movements whether religious, political or economic. The global flow of people across and within nations and borders is generated by a variety of reasons: the reconfiguration of the global economy, displacement and dispossession of marginalized populations etc.The symbolic dimensions of territorial attachment experienced by residents of specific territories, the issues of border location or resource exploitation is only secondary to the unsettled feelings of "belonging" and rootedness within specific places and spaces. They are ready to defend their "homeland" territories to which they lay claim through historical priority, infrequently causing a major political instability, tension and conflict manifesting in the form of terrorism. Salman Rushdie's novel Shalimar the Clown(2005) deals with geographical and psychological displacement, transculturalism and the divide created due to violence and uprooting. The novel encaptures the idea of recovery of lost identities in a way which goes "from roots to routes."