Life of Rushdie and the controversies of his life Satanic Verses as Narrative

1. Batch 2021-2023
Presentations season 3
Code 22407 paper no.202
Indian English literature-
pre-independence
• Vachchhalata Joshi
• Roll no.20
• Vachchhalatajoshi.14@gmail.com
• Department of English
• Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji
Bhavnagar University.

2. Index
Life of Rushdie
Controversies of his life
Satanic verses as cinematic Narrative
Victim into Protagonist? Midnight’s children
Demonizing discourse in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verse

3. Salman Rushdie • Salman Rushdie is the author
of thirteen
novels: Grimus, Midnight’s
Children Shame, The Satanic
Verses, Haroun and the Sea of
Stories, The Moor’s Last
Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her
Feet, Fury, Shalimar the
Clown, The Enchantress of
Florence, Luka and the Fire of
Life, Two Years Eight Months
and Twenty-Eight
Nights, and The Golden
House. His fourteenth
novel, Quichotte, is forthcoming
from Random House in the Fall
of 2019.

5. Salman Rushdie
• Rushdie is also the author of a book of stories, East, West, and
four works of non-fiction – Joseph Anton – A Memoir, Imaginary
Homelands, The Jaguar Smile, and Step Across This Line. He is the
co-editor of Mirrorwork, an anthology of contemporary Indian
writing, and of the 2008 Best American Short Stories anthology.

6. Controversies over
Rushdie

8. The Satanic Verse
When Salman
Rushdie wrote his novel
The Satanic Verses in
September 1988, he
thought its many
references to Islam might
cause some ripples.
“I expected a few mullahs
would be offended, call
me names, and then I
could defend myself in
public,” Rushdie would
tell an interviewer much
later.
The Indian-born author
had come from a career as
an advertising copywriter,
confecting slogans such as
“naughty but nice” for
cream cakes, for example.
He had no idea of the
tsunami of outrage that
was to overshadow the
rest of his life, or that he
was about to become a
geopolitical booby trap.

9. The Satanic Verse
By October 1988, he already needed a
bodyguard in the face of a deluge of
death threats, cancelling trips and
hunkering down. One Muslim-
majority country after another banned
the book, and in December thousands
of Muslims demonstrated in Bolton,
Greater Manchester, and burned a pile
of the books. In Islamabad, six people
were killed in a mob attack on the US
cultural center in the Pakistani capital
to protest against the book. There were
riots in Srinagar and Kashmir.
The day after those riots, 14 February
1989, the supreme leader of Iran,
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a
religious decree, a fatwa, calling on all
Muslims to execute not just Rushdie
but everyone involved in the book’s
publication. The fatwa effectively
carved the death threat into stone,
making it impossible to erase. An
Iranian religious foundation offered a
$1m bounty, $3m if an Iranian carried
out the killing. Iran broke off relations
with Britain over the issue.

10. Satanic Verses as cinematic
Narrative
• Near the end of The Satanic Verses, the narrator
suggests that there are “places which the camera
cannot see.” This statement embodies one of the
novel’s focal concerns with the differences between
how an engaged, omniscient narrator apprehends the
novel’s events and how the camera eye apprehends
them. Rushdie juxtaposes a questioning, engaged
narrator who is preoccupied with the nature of good
and evil, justice and mercy, and revenge and
compassion, with a camera whose quest for truth is
severely restricted by economic and physical
constraints.

11. Victim into Protagonist? Midnight’s Children and the
Post-Rushdie National Narratives of the eighties
• The 1981 publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children was a watershed in the post-independence
development of the Indian English novel, so much so
that the term “post-Rushdie” has come to refer to the
decade or so afterward in which a wave of novels
appeared by established as well as by young writers
that were clearly influenced by Midnight’s Children.
Midnight’s Children neither denies nor seeks to
transcend polarities, but embraces them as artistic
methods, rejecting nothing, celebrating the resulting
chaotic multiplicity, even if it crushes the protagonist
himself into a billion pieces. What had been the
Indian English novel’s problems now suddenly
became its trademarks.

12. When Midnight’s Children was published in 1981,
winning that year’s prestigious Booker Prize , it was
hailed both in and out of India as a literary masterpiece.
In an early interview, Rushdie characterized MC as more a
political novel than a historical novel, and most of all, as a
novel about the nature of memory, “about one person’s passage
through history,” in which the individual’s version of the truth
was presented as at once coherent and suspect. This personal
view of history, Rushdie explained, allowed him to discuss and
explore the nature of “the relationship between the individual
and history, between private lives and public affairs.”

13. Demonizing Discourse in Salman
Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses
1988
Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is
one of the relatively few works of fiction
to have made a significant and permanent
impact outside the enclosed world of
literature.
1989
It made its author go into hiding from the
Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa of 1989,
where he has remained under government
protection ever since.

14. Freedom of
expression
• In effect Rushdie claims for
fictional discourse an imaginative
form of truth where freedom
reigns in place of institutional
control. Fiction, he maintains, can
flout the mundane facts and still
appeal to the world of the
imagination to claim that it
represents the “true” or authentic
transcription of human
experience.

15. Works Cited
• Bloom, Harold. Bloom's Modern Critical Views Salman Rushdie . Broomall, Chelsea House
Publishers, 2003.
• julian borger. Comment on "A tsunami of outrage: Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses ."
The Guardian, 12 Oct. 2022.
•
Ostling, Richard. "In Islamic tradition, what is a fatwa? Why the demands to kill novelist Salman
Rushdie?." Get Religion , 1 Oct. 2022.
•
"Salman Rushdie on ventilator support, may lose eye ." The Hindustan Times, 14 Aug. 2022.
• Hajjaj, Osama . CARTOON MOVEMENT . 14 Aug. 2022. http://cartoonmovement.com/cartoon/salman-
rushdie-1
Siers, Kevin . "Cartoonist's take :'Iran Hatches Attack on Salman Rushdie'." DAILY FREEMAN, 16 Aug.
2022.
.

16. Works cited
• Artigala, Awantha. CARTOON MOVEMENT . 14 Aug. 2022.
• Suprani, Rayma. “Salman Rushdie.” Salman Rushdie, 12 August 2022,
https://www.cagle.com/rayma-suprani/2022/08/salman-rushdie.
Accessed 3 October 2022.
•
.

17. Thank you