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Spring 5-1-2013

The Uncertainty of National and Cultural Identity in Salman

Rushdie’s East, West and Midnight’s Children
Tress Klassen
Syracuse University

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 The Uncertainty of National and Cultural Identity in
Salman Rushdie’s East, West and Midnight’s Children

A Capstone Project Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements of the Renée Crown University Honors
Program at
Syracuse University

Tress Klassen
Candidate for B.A. Degree
and Renée Crown University Honors
May 2013

Honors Capstone Project in English and Textual Studies

Capstone Project Advisor: _______________________

Professor Manan Desai

Capstone Project Reader: _______________________

Professor Chris Forster

Honors Director: _______________________

Stephen Kuusisto, Director

Date: April 12, 2013

 Abstract

This project involves the examination of two works by Salman Rushdie: a

short story collection, East, West and a novel, Midnight’s Children.
Looking at these texts through a postcolonial lens, I analyze Rushdie’s
writing in terms of its relationship to the academic debates of the period
and the historical context that grounds the works. Throughout the paper, I
analyze Rushdie’s portrayal of the relationship between culture,
nationhood, and identity, while also focusing on different aspects of the
works in the project’s two chapters. In the first, I examine the relationship
between postcolonialism and magical realism in East, West, and argue that
Rushdie uses a unique hybrid of magical realism, satire, and intertextuality
to complicate the portrayal of culture in his stories, as he brings into
question the use of the East/West binary that dominated scholarly
discourse at the time of these texts’ publication. In the project’s second
chapter I discuss the relationship between Midnight’s Children and East,
West, examining on the portrayal of post-independence India and
Rushdie’s critiques of the Indian government at the time. While in the
project’s first chapter, stylistic decisions serve as the primary focus of my
analysis, in this second part, the relationship between technology and
national identity becomes the driving question. Using textual and
historical evidence, I demonstrate the extent to which these two texts serve
as a statement on the nature of cultural and national identity in the
postcolonial era, providing no certain answers but instead raising more
questions and illuminating the complexities of global interactions.
 Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Postcolonialism, Magical Realism, and Intertextuality

in Rushdie’s East, West. 6
Postcolonial Debates in the 1990s 8
Postcolonialism and Magical Realism 14
Rushdie’s Magical Realism 17
The Exoticized West 24
Science (fictions) 33

Chapter 2: Radio as an Object of Force and Consent in Midnight’s

Children and “The Free Radio” 41
Radio and National Identity 42
The Development of All India Radio 49
Radios, Imagined and Real 52
The Threat of the Widow 58
Sterilization as a Force of Coercion and Destruction 66

Conclusion 72

Works Cited 76

Summary of Capstone Project 78

 1

Introduction

In an interview shortly after the publication of his short story

collection East, West (1994), Rushdie revealed that the book’s title was

inspired by his personal connection to its subject matter, saying “I said to

most people when I started thinking of calling the stories East, West that

the most important part of the title was the comma. Because it seems to

me that I am that comma—or at least I live in the comma...I don’t feel like

a slash. I feel like a comma.”1 Rushdie inserts himself, and to an extent, all

other migrants, into this title by using his own experiences as the reason

for his stylistic choice. He presents an intriguing contrast—the possibility

that the space between East and West could be either a (metaphorical)

physical position or a state of being. By using a comma, which connects

the two words rather than divides them, Rushdie demonstrates that what

connects East and West are the people who occupy both, who are either

living in that hybrid space, or who are the embodiment of that hybrid

space. The comma that separates the East from the West plays a key role

in the meaning of the phrase. Rather than adhering to the norms of

punctuation for the binary phrase and using a slash, Rushdie chooses to

show a less abrupt division between the two words, and the two worlds.
1
Rushdie, Salman, “Homeless is Where the Art Is,” 163.
 2

The choice of punctuation is critical verbally and visually: using a comma

bridges the two words, allowing a physical space, but no real barrier to

exist between “East” and “West.” The comma suggests a connection in the

sense that it implies a relationship of similarity, rather than difference,

which a slash denotes. Using a slash would cause the title to be interpreted

as “East or West,” rather than “East and West,” physically separating the

words in the title.

The complex nature of separation, or more specifically

fragmentation, is a theme common among Rushdie’s works, as it appears

in not only East, West but in Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children (1981)

as well. Arguably his most well-known, and certainly his most lauded

work, Midnight’s Children portrays the formation and fragmentation of

India as a newly independent nation state. In East, West, Rushdie

addresses the dichotomization of the world into East and West with

characters whose lives extend across this separation, like elderly Mary,

who lives in England but longs for India so strongly that her heart begins

to fail, or Indian intelligence agents Chekov and Zulu who turn their lives

into a continuous Star Trek episode despite never watching the show.

While East, West focuses on this fragmentation from a transnational

perspective, Rushdie uses Midnight’s Children, to examine the internal

fractures within India, as its wildly diverse collection of citizens struggle

to define their relationship to a nation that is suddenly and undeniably

their own. In his epic novel which interweaves the protagonist’s life story
 3

and major events in India’s post-independence history, including the

linguistic reorganization of states and Pakistan’s bid for independence,

Rushdie brings into question the meaning of nationhood. Just as in East,

West Rushdie refuses to accept the simplicity of a world divided into the

opposing spheres of East and West, in Midnight’s Children he

demonstrates that a nation is defined by far more than its borders.

In these two texts, Rushdie addresses the fluid and uncertain nature

of cultural and national identity. In East, West he complicates the status of

culture in a postcolonial setting, playing with Oriental stereotypes and

manipulating Western classics in his stories which portray characters,

many of whom embark on migratory journeys that raise questions about

the relationship between home and identity, and the results of the loss

thereof. What is lost in East, West seems to be gained in Midnight’s

Children, as the story revolves around the experience of India’s newfound

independence after England withdraws its colonial regime from the nation.

But just as East, West addresses the struggles of the loss of cultural

identity, Midnight’s Children demonstrates that the creation of national

identity is equally challenging. In one text homes and freedoms are

woefully abandoned and in the other they are triumphantly obtained but

both works reveal the uncertainty that accompanies the fallout of colonial

and postcolonial relationships.

This fallout comes to a head in both texts, and is especially

pertinent to East, West’s “The Free Radio,” a story set during the same
 4

historical event which instigates the climax of Midnight’s Children.

Ramani, the protagonist in “The Free Radio,” and Saleem, Midnight’s

Children’s narrator and hero, both face a formidable opponent in the

Indian government and Indira Gandhi during the Indian Emergency.2 In

the two texts, radios play a central role as Ramani so longs for a transistor

radio of his own that he mimics the broadcasts of All India Radio, and

Saleem, instilled since birth with telepathic abilities, acts as a transmitter

himself. Given the stories’ interests in identity, and the relationship

between East and West, these radios carry symbolic weight, as they serve

as agents central to the development of national identity, broadcasting

information that is consumed by the public and controlled by the

government. As the state attempts to recover from the influence of

Western powers, the radio becomes an increasingly important device, a

technology of coercion and revolution which has come into play not only

in Rushdie’s texts, but in a multitude of historical conflicts between the

colonized and colonizer; between East and West.

Somehow, it all comes back to those same two words, separated by

a comma and containing within them a host of allusions and thematic

references. “East, West” suggests a well-known phrases that relate to the

content of the text. The saying “East, West, Home’s Best” could have

been part of the inspiration for this book’s title, and it carries with it

2
The Indian Emergency was a period of 21 months in which Indira Gandhi, the prime
minister of India at the time, declared a state of emergency which resulted in the
restriction of civil liberties, censorship, and most relevantly here, a program of population
control involving sometimes coerced vasectomies (Malhotra).
 5

several meanings. Damian Grant, a Rushdie biographer, writes that the

proverb can be interpreted in several ways. There is a “nineteenth-century

imperialist, xenophobic reading [‘Whether you travel to the east or the

west, home (back in England) is the best’]” or the “twentieth-century,

post-colonial, culturally pluralistic reading [‘Whether you live in the east

or the west, your home there is the best place to be’].” (Grant 100). It is

unlikely that Rushdie would agree with either of these interpretations. In a

collection of his nonfiction he describes the phrase as “sickly sweet,”3

comparing it to the trite aphorism of “there’s no place like home” from

The Wizard of Oz.4 While East, West is certainly a testament to the power

of cultural pluralism, the idea that home is “the best place to be” stands in

opposition with Rushdie’s views on migration and exploration. Both East,

West and Midnight’s Children, with their discussion of cultural and

national identity make it clear: neither nation nor culture are fixed entities,

and instead, as the stories reveal, their statuses are as uncertain as they are

important. Perhaps that is why Rushdie finds the story of migrancy so

appealing; migration, as Rushdie portrays it, allows for not only

acceptance, but also appreciation, of the uncertainty of identity and the

endless evolution of cultural and national interactions. As Rushdie stated,

in his discussion of the significance of “Over the Rainbow,” “It is a

3
Rushdie, Salman, Step Across This Line
4
A film that Rushdie has not only analyzed extensively but also included in East, West as
the inspiration for “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers.” The film’s villain, the Wicked
Witch is featured extensively in “The Free Radio” and Midnight’s Children, in a thinly
veiled reference to Indira Gandhi.
 6

celebration of Escape, a grand paean to the uprooted self, a hymn—the

hymn—to Elsewhere.”5

Chapter 1: Postcolonialism, Magical Realism, and Intertextuality in

Rushdie’s East, West

In the concluding lines of the final story in East, West, the narrator

proclaims, “I too, have ropes around my neck, I have them to this day,

pulling me this way and that, East and West, the nooses tightening,

commanding, choose, choose...Ropes, I do not choose between you...I

choose neither of you, and both.”6 Just as the narrator of this story, entitled

“The Courter,” ultimately rejects the pressure to choose between worlds,

Rushdie expresses a similar distaste for simplicity and separation

throughout East, West. In both content and style, Rushdie’s desire to

remain in an undefined, ambivalent space is clear in his stories, as he

allows his characters to live in both East and West and maintains a writing

style that cannot be constrained within a singular genre. The text’s

political and social stakes, as the stories focus on issues of migration and

cultural relations, are expressed and enhanced by the aesthetics of East,

West. This relationship between Rushdie’s magical realist style and his

expression of the complexities surrounding the East/West binary is a

critical aspect of East, West.

5
Rushdie, Salman, Step Across This Line.
6
Rushdie, Salman, East, West, 211.
 7

Divided into three geographic categories (“East,” “West,” and

“East, West”) East, West’s stories, which are set primarily in England and

India, deal with issues of cultural difference and themes of migration and

homelessness. The organization of the distinct sections of East, West is

also of interest, with the more realistic preoccupations that dominate the

first section (East) contrasting with the more dreamlike and almost absurd

tone of the second section (West). Though this contrast is purposely

undermined by the last story in the first section, which takes on the

qualities that readers would expect from a classic, exotic fable, Rushdie

plays with his readers’ expectations as he applies the stereotyped tropes of

Orientalist writings to his stories about the West, and uses a more realistic,

rational, “Western” tone in the text’s “East” section. The categorization of

stories in this collection is particularly significant in terms of Rushdie’s

manipulation of the East/West binary that is central to postcolonial

literature. This text examines the oppositions between East and West (in

terms of both the sections of the text and the cultural regions) as well as

immigrants and natives, colonizers and colonized—oppositions that by no

means remain simple or completely separate. For Rushdie, categories and

the boundaries between them do not hold true, both in terms of the

division of his book’s sections, and in terms of the construction and

perception of the migrant communities.

In East, West Rushdie utilizes a unique hybrid of magical realism

and satire to complicate the status of “culture” itself in the postcolonial

 8

era, as his stories work against the dominant colonial discourse that

positions East and West as wholly distinct entities. Rushdie’s presentation

of this argument, a vital aspect of East, West’s political meaning, is

reinforced by his personal migratory experiences, which place him in a

space that he describes as the comma in East, West’s title—a hybrid space

in which East, West’s characters are positioned. Rushdie complicates the

construction of the East/West binary; instead of placing East and West in

opposition, he merges them through elements of intertextuality and

interconnection among the varying stories. He allows for the erosion of

boundaries in the East/West binary and portrays a hybrid space in their

place.

Postcolonial Debates in the 1990s

In order to define the extent to which East, West differs from the

conventional portrayals of cultural difference, it is first necessary to define

these conventions. East, West was published in the mid-90s, a period in

which John McLeod, author of Beginning Postcolonialism, claims

“postcolonialism [had] become increasingly busy and academically

fashionable.”7 The critical activity at the time, he reports, “attended more

closely to the cultural and historical specifics of literature from particular

locations...there [was] the risk that a more comparative approach to

postcolonial literatures [was] lost.”8 Rushdie avoids a location-specific

perspective by creating sections for the East and West in order to include

7
McLeod, John, Beginning Postcolonialism, 29.
8
Ibid, 31.
 9

stories that range in setting. By writing stories for the “East, West” section

which specifically takes a comparative approach, he does not confine his

stories regionally within those sections. “Good Advice is Rarer Than

Rubies,” for example, is in the “East” section, but takes place in England.

Rushdie uses the separation that is created by the collection’s categories to

indicate that due to the growing global interconnectedness that results

from processes of colonialism, migration, and globalization, cultures and

characters are too complex to be contained within straightforward

boundaries, be it the constraints of the three sections in East, West or the

restraints of a simple East/West binary.

A critical concept to postcolonial theory, and the key binary that

Rushdie deconstructs in his stories, is this East/West opposition. This

binary played a major role in imperialistic discourse, usually taking the

form of racism in discussion of the inferiority of “Eastern” cultures. Its

relevance remained apparent as imperialistic discourse gave way to

postcolonial studies and imperialism came to an end, with European

empires falling and independent nation-states emerging in their place.

While the idea of Western cultural superiority over Eastern inferiority is

now recognized as prejudiced and uninformed, the dominance of the West

over the East in terms of imperialist regimes and in academic discourse is

undeniable. Edward Said explains in Orientalism that, “The Orient was

Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be ‘Oriental’ but also

 10

because it could be—that is, submitted to being—made Oriental.”9

Orientalists in the nineteenth century were able to speak for the Orient.

Said uses the example of French author Gustave Flaubert’s writings about

an “Oriental woman,” saying that there were “historical facts of

domination that allowed him...to speak for her and tell his readers in what

way she was ‘typically Oriental’... [this] stands for the pattern of relative

strength between East and West and the discourse about the Orient that it

enabled.10 Currently there is a far wider range of postcolonial writers who

address colonization and its effects from the East’s perspective, but the

East/West binary is steeped in a history of inequality.

In 1993, a few years prior to the publication of East, West, Samuel

Huntington released his seminal article, “The Clash of Civilizations?” in

Foreign Affairs. When Huntington coined the phrase, “clash of

civilizations,” he described seven or eight cultural entities that would

inevitably lead to conflict, as he reexamined cultural relations in the post

Cold War era. He wrote, “It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source

of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily

economic… [it] will be cultural.”11 While Huntington’s theory was and

still is influential for scholars and policymakers alike, and garnered more

attention in the wake of the attacks on September 11, his ideas were

extremely polarizing. To some extent, his paper supported the ideology

behind “the West versus the rest,” with statements like, “[The West]

9
Said, Edward, Orientalism, 75.
10
Ibid.
11
Huntington, Samuel, The Clash of Civilizations?, 1.
 11

confronts non-Wests that increasingly have the desire, the will and the

resources to shape the world in non-Western ways12 contributing to its

controversial position and creating a threatening image of the non-West as

a homogenized, undifferentiated culture that is vastly different from the

West. For Huntington, and for Rushdie, culture is ultimately the point of

contestation, as they hold vastly divergent perspectives on the effects of

cultural differences between East and West.

The relationship between the Western and non-Western spheres

was a dominant concept during this period (and it continues to be today),

as globalization gained speed in the post-Cold War era. Benjamin R.

Barber argues in his 1992 article “Jihad vs. McWorld,”13 that globalization

is “pressing nations into one commercially homogenous global

network.”14 While not a response to Huntington, Barber poses an alternate

hypothesis, claiming that instead of producing separate civilizations that

would ultimately clash with each other, the powers of globalization will

homogenize cultures.15 Said also posed alternative ideas to Huntington’s,

in his argument against the theory of the clash of civilization. His article,

“The Clash of Ignorance,” was published years after Rushdie wrote East,

West but it is nonetheless a useful summation of the problematic nature of

Huntington’s ideas—ideas which Rushdie implicitly contests, and ideas

that were certainly a dominant part of postcolonial discourse at the time of

12
Ibid, 3.
13
Jihad vs. McWorld” was published in The Atlantic a year before Huntington’s thesis.
14
Barder, Benjamin, “Jihad vs. McWorld.”
15
Rushdie contests this idea in East, West, and also challenges Huntington’s ideas about
the oppositional positioning of East and West.
 12

East, West’s publication. Said writes, “The basic paradigm of West versus

the rest (the cold war opposition reformulated) remained untouched...At

some level, for instance, primitive passions and sophisticated know-how

converge in ways that give the lie to a fortified boundary” (The Clash of

Ignorance). It was in this context that East, West was published.16 These

debates about East and West are relevant in terms of East, West, as well as

Rushdie’s life. The parallels between Rushdie’s own experiences and

experiences of East, West’s characters are revealed in his interviews, as he

discusses the motivation behind his work.

Rushdie recounts his experiences with migration, as he travelled

from India to England in his childhood and later to America, saying his

writing “[has] to do with where [he] came from, and trying to lay claim to

it and to understand it in a new way.17 East, West addresses the

experiences of the migrant, who Rushdie claims “is the defining image of

the 20th century…so many people in the human race have ended up in

places in which they did not begin.”18 While Huntington saw the world’s

civilizations as discrete entities, Rushdie’s perspective is grounded in

integration:

Bombay, where I grew up, was a city in which the West

was totally mixed up with the East…my life [has] given me

16
While some of the stories were written earlier, in the eighties, the majority of the
stories were written in the late eighties and early nineties, while this debate was at its
peak. “Free Radio,” “The Prophet’s Hair,” and “Yorick,” were published in the early
eighties; “Good Advice is Rarer Than Rubies” in 1987; and “At the Auction of the Ruby
Slippers” and “Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain Consummate Their
Relationship, Santa Fe, January, 1492” were published in 1991.
17
Rushdie, Salman, “Homeless is Where the Art Is.”
18
Rushdie, Salman, “Interview at San Francisco State University, the Poetry Center.”
 13

the ability to make stories in which different parts of the

world are brought together, sometimes harmoniously,
sometimes in conflict.19
Rushdie recognizes both the historical and contemporary conflicts

between Europe and the non-Occidental world, a conflict spanning

centuries back to the medieval era’s wars between Jews, Christians and

Muslims and continuing on today as the effects of the West’s imperialistic

ventures in the East are still felt throughout the globe. But he also sees the

shared characteristics in these areas, an interrelatedness that scholars like

Huntington don’t seem willing to recognize. This phrase “mixed up” is

critical in terms of Rushdie’s own experiences, and his perspective on

postcolonial cultures. In an interview, he discussed the shared “ex-

colonial” status held by India and the U.S., saying, “They’re both cultures

made up of mixtures…made up of people who come from

elsewhere…They’re both mixed up people.”20 This perspective, of the

blending of cultures creating people who are “mixed up,” is a key point in

“The Courter,” which features a character whose name is simplified from

a complex foreign name with “invisible accents” from “some Iron Curtain

language” to the much more pronounceable “Mixed-Up.”21

Rushdie’s collection of stories responds to the changing

worldviews in the post-Cold War era, as he complicates the simple

opposition that Huntington supports, with stories that reflect the

19
Livings, Jack, “Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No. 186, Salman Rushdie.”
20
Rose, Charlie, “Conversations with Salman Rushdie.”
21
Rushdie, Salman, East, West, 179.
 14

interactive nature of culture in the postcolonial world. The intertextual

nature of East, West allows Rushdie to clearly communicate his ideas

without confining his points within the boundaries of a single story, and to

expose his readers to the power of globalization, using technology and

science fiction as symbols of Western influence. He reimagines the

boundaries of the world’s geographies as he positions the West as an

exotic “other,” and manipulates the style of magical realism in order to

take apart the classic constructions of East and West.

Postcolonialism and Magical Realism

In “The Question of the Other: Cultural Critiques of Magical

Realism,” Wendy Faris points out that magical realism creates two

opposing systems—the fantastic and the real. That opposition is critical to

the narrative itself, which becomes a hybrid formed from the sustained

opposition between the two systems. Magical realism, Faris argues, offers

an alternative to the more conventional European realism and allows

writers to resist the West’s conventions of rationalism. Since one of the

primary issues that postcolonial writers have to address is the necessity of

writing in English, the language of the colonial regime, magical realism

can provide a level of liberation from the colonizer’s language. Faris

states, “The fact that realism purports to give an accurate picture of the

world, based in fidelity to empirical evidence, and that it is a European

import, have led to its being experienced by writers in colonized

 15

societies...as the language of the colonizer.”22 Magical realism offers an

escape from that, allowing postcolonial writers to deny or challenge the

influence of the colonizing culture.

Despite the genre’s popularity, magical realism remains subject to

debate in terms of its position in the postcolonial canon. While a vast array

of well-known postcolonial writers, from Rushdie to Alejo Carpentier to

Ben Okri, use magical realism in their texts, scholarly disagreement about

the impact of the style on the postcolonial genre still exists. Faris

summarizes both sides of the argument:

The status of magical realism, its widespread popularity,

and the critical use of the term are the subject of debate
because at the same time that it is acknowledged by some
as a significant decolonizing style, permitting new voices
and traditions to be heard within the mainstream, it is
denigrated...as a commodifying kind of primitivism that,
like the Orientalism analyzed by Edward Said and his
successors, relegates colonies and their traditions to the role
of cute, exotic psychological fantasies.23
Rushdie avoids this issue with East, West by writing a collection of short

stories that involves characters on both sides of the postcolonial binary. By

using magical realism in a variety of settings that span from the first world

to the third world, Rushdie challenges the division between East and West,

supporting the ideas put forward several decades earlier by Edward Said in

Orientalism. Said states, “The Orient is not an inert fact of nature...Such

22
Faris, Wendy, “The Question of the Other: Cultural Critiques of Magical Realism,”
103.
23
Ibid, 101.
 16

locales, regions, geographical sectors as ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ are man-

made...The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect

each other.”24 By complicating the relationship beyond the simple

East/West, colonized/colonizer binaries, Rushdie creates an image of the

postcolonial world that is both interconnected and confusing—a mixed up

world that doesn’t fit into neat binaries and geographical boundaries.

This interconnectedness is expressed through the intertextual

relationships East, West’s stories. The relationship between “At the

Auction of the Ruby Slippers” (herein referred to as “Ruby Slippers”)

(West) and “The Prophet’s Hair” (East) serves an example of this

intertextuality, two very different stories that both comment on the same

issue of fetishization.25 That Rushdie uses magical realism in vastly

different ways in the two stories, setting one in the exotic locale of the

East and the other in a dystopian future in the West, reveals the extent to

which he manipulates the conventions of magical realism, as he uses

magical realism in varying ways, and he doesn’t use it consistently.

Instead of employing one style throughout the book, Rushdie does not

employ the features of magical realism in all of his stories. The

collection’s formal qualities parallel the point that Rushdie makes with the

content of the text itself, as the stories’ varied styles and tones make the

24
Said, Edward, Orientalism, 17.
25
Throughout this paper, various stories in East, West will be paired for analysis. By
doing so, the similar (and dissimilar) attributes between stories can be emphasized, as
another example of the interconnected nature of the text. Though the pairings may seem
somewhat arbitrary, the stories that are compared each share key elements (i.e.
fetishization in these two stories).
 17

text one that does not adhere to the norms of a single specific genre. This

stylistic complexity mirrors the complexities of the Orient/Occident

relationship, and reinforces the idea that relationship between East and

West extends beyond a simple oppositional binary.

Rushdie’s Magical Realism

In order to argue effectively that East, West demonstrates the

power of magical realism as a technique in postcolonial literature, it is first

necessary to explain why East, West can be defined as a magical realist

text. Faris describes key elements in the genre;

Most essential among my criteria for inclusion in the mode

of magical realism is the existence of an ‘irreducible
element’ that is unexplainable according to the laws of the
universe as they have been formulated by modern, post-
enlightenment empiricism…In other words, magical
realism is a combination of realism and the fantastic in
which the former predominates.26
Throughout East, West, Rushdie uses elements of magical realism, but in a

variety of ways that extends beyond Faris’s definition of combined fantasy

and realism. Though this is certainly one aspect of the style that Rushdie

employs, he takes the style further towards the absurd. His use of well-

known Western stories in the “West” section serves as a key example of

the text’s absurdity. In “Yorick,” Rushdie irreverently takes on

Shakespeare, retelling Hamlet from the perspective of a descendant of

Hamlet’s court jester Yorick, whom the narrator claims was Ophelia’s

26
Faris, Wendy, “The Question of the Other: Cultural Critiques of Magical Realism,”
102.
 18

wife, and whom Hamlet convinced to kill the king. In a final disruption of

Shakespeare’s tale, the narrator ends by saying “Yorick’s child

survives…wanders the world, sowing his seed in far-off lands, from west

to east and back again; and multicoloured generations follow…”27 In

terms of both content and style (“Yorick” is filled with exclamation points,

interjections, capitalized phrases, etc.), the story is unusual to say the least,

and it lacks realism to such an extent that Faris’s requirement that realism

predominates over the fantastic may not be fulfilled here, except for the

fact that “Yorick” is modeled after a Shakespearean story (one which

contains its own elements of fantasy, as it includes ghosts, visions, and

madness), supplying the story with a different form of conformity to

literary conventions. In this sense, Rushdie manages to adhere to magical

realist conventions in unconventional ways.

Rushdie’s unique use of magical realism can also be seen in “The

Harmony of the Spheres,” one of the stories in the text’s “East, West”

section. One of the story’s main characters, Eliot Crane,28 has

schizophrenia, and as Khan, the story’s narrator, describes Eliot’s illness,

27
Salman, Rushdie, East, West, 83.
28
The name “Eliot Crane” references T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) and Hart Crane (1899-
1932), two famous Modernist poets, whose lives share many similarities with aspects of
“The Harmony of the Spheres.” Crane struggled with alcohol abuse and committed
suicide relatively early in life (age 32), as did Eliot Crane. He was inspired by Eliot’s
poetry and strived to write a work as epic and influential as Eliot’s “The Wasteland” (The
Poetry Foundation). Eliot, who was born in America but moved to the United Kingdom
and became a naturalized citizen at age 39, was one of the foremost poets of his time, and
is well-known for his 434-line poem, “The Wasteland,” which is considered to be the
single most important poetic work of the 20th century. This poem describes the human
soul’s search for redemption, and is known for “its radical departure from traditional
poetic style and structure, incorporating historical and literary allusions as well as
unconventional use of language” (Bartleby), elements that parallel themes of “The
Harmony of the Spheres” and the stylistic aspects of East, West as a whole.
 19

his portrayal of the delusions which afflict Eliot take on a fantastic tone

with elements that are reminiscent of science fiction:

Eliot had elaborated a conspiracy theory in which most of

his friends were revealed to be agents of hostile powers,
both Earthly and extra-terrestrial. I was an invader from
Mars, one of many such dangerous beings who had sneaked
into Britain when certain essential forms of vigilance had
been relaxed. Martians had great gifts of mimicry…29
Rushdie tackles several issues in this passage, as he combines a discussion

of Eliot’s mental instability while also alluding to Khan’s experiences as

an Indian immigrant in England. In this sense, Rushdie uses a manipulated

form of magical realism, as he uses Eliot’s (literally) insane perspective to

describe the problems that accompany Khan’s real-life situations,

changing the recounting of Eliot’s paranoid delusions significantly when

the narrator switches from third to first person. The first statement

describes Eliot’s fantasies, and because Khan labels them as “conspiracy

[theories],” it is clear that there is a separation of reality and delusion.

Since Khan uses the third person in this description, he distances himself

from not only the statement he makes, but also from Eliot’s conspiracies.

But in the next sentence, Khan changes to the first person, saying “I was

an invader from Mars…” so that it reads like fact, not fantasy. This is

partially because it is fact, figuratively speaking. In Eliot’s fantasies, Khan

is an alien who managed to sneak into the country, a successful mimic of

English culture, while in reality Khan actually is an alien, in terms of

29
Salman, Rushdie, East, West, 127.
 20

immigration (His wife, Mala is from Mauritius—she is one vowel away

from being a true “Martian.”). The “spheres” (to use Eliot’s word) of

insanity and sanity, fantastic and real, are blended here, as Eliot’s

delusions are partially accurate. As Khan describes it, when he discovers

the truth behind more of Eliot’s “delusions” (the stories of Mala and

Eliot’s affair that Khan discovers turn out to be true), “So, here it came.

The collapse of harmony, the demolition of my heart.”30

East, West grapples with the cultural questions that result from

migratory experiences, and uses realistic characters as vehicles to

communicate these ideas. This realism is blended with moments of fantasy

and absurd situations, as in “Ruby Slippers.” Rushdie explores themes of

identity and homelessness, as well as discussing the power and danger of

fictions in this story which is set in a dystopian future and based upon the

1990 auction of the ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in the film version

of The Wizard of Oz31—one of the most beloved fantasies in American

cinema. The unidentified narrator informs readers of this auction’s

intensity, as “units of obstetricians and helmeted police SWAT teams wait

out of sight in side alleys in case the excitement leads to unexpected births

or deaths.”32 Rushdie’s matter-of-fact tone is consistent throughout this

story, contrasting with the extremely problematic environment and

exaggerated public woes that dominate the text.

30
Salman, Rushdie, East, West, 146.
31
A film which makes appearances throughout Midnight’s Children as well
32
Salman, Rushdie, East, West, 87.
 21

The departure from realism into fantasy and hyperbole is apparent

immediately, as the narrator describes the celebrities attending the auction,

explaining how “movie star auras, developed in collaboration with masters

of Applied Physics, are platinum, golden, silver, bronze. Certain genre

actors specialising in villainous roles are surrounded by auras of evil.”33

With this image, Rushdie introduces one of the key themes in the story:

the yearning for identity and the fetishization of material goods (in this

case the ruby slippers) as a means of fulfilling that need. Though the story

is set in the future, and is filled with unrealistic, fantastic elements, it still

offers a serious critique of Western society’s materialism and consumer-

driven nature. While the prophet’s hair in an earlier story in the “East”

section serves as a symbol for the problematic nature of religious

extremism, the ruby slippers in this story stand as an icon for consumer

culture. “Ruby Slippers” explores the continuation of this commodity-

based society, examining the consequences of allowing material desires to

overpower all other aspects of life.

This fixation on the material is dangerous, as it leads the public to

believe in the false security and comfort of consumer culture. As the

narrator demonstrates, there is already erosion of separation between the

fictional and the real in this story’s society. Rushdie describes “the

presence of imaginary beings” at the auction: “Children from nineteenth-

century Australian paintings are here...on a television monitor, I notice the

33
Ibid, 88.
 22

frail figure of an alien creature with an illuminated fingertip.”34 Rushdie

references classic markers of Western culture, from art of past centuries to

the more modern popular culture of cinema, with an allusion to E.T. (a

fitting choice, given E.T.’s fixation on returning to his home). Without

identities of their own, lacking the celebrity status to gain custom-

designed, “movie star auras,”35 the public brings the fictional world into

the real world in order to create a sense of self. With his reference to

auras, Rushdie makes a subtle nod to Walter Benjamin, who developed the

idea of aura in his seminal text, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproducibility. Though Benjamin’s theory was originally about art, his

idea of auras, as applied by Rushdie, relates to absolute uniqueness and

irreproducibility—art can be reproduced but an aura cannot. As Benjamin

states, “Uniqueness and permanence are as closely linked in the latter

[original art] as are transitoriness and reproducibility in the former

[reproduced art].”36 By taking on this concept and suggesting that in this

alternate reality, auras themselves are reproducible, Rushdie makes it clear

that nothing is sacred and everything is commodified—even the human

soul. The narrator of “Ruby Slippers” notes,

This permeation of the real world by the fictional is a

symptom of the moral decay of our post-millennial
culture...There can be little doubt that a large majority of us
opposes the free, unrestricted migration of imaginary

34
Ibid, 94.
35
Ibid, 88.
36
Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility.”
 23

beings into an already damaged reality, whose resources

diminish day by day.37
Taking on the language of current immigration debates, Rushdie ironically

combines a fantastic element of his story with actual issues in today’s

society, reminding his readers that this story is about ideas that are

grounded in reality, not fantasy. He also alludes to the role of fiction here,

as the “migration of imaginary beings into an already damaged reality”

can also refer to the idea of a text like East, West being created and read.

This ironic tone, blended with elements of magical realism, is

apparent throughout the stories in East, West. “The Prophet’s Hair,” the

final story in the text’s “East” section, plays into Orientalist stereotypes

(i.e. superstitious beliefs, a ritualized representation of religion). As

Madalena Gonzalez explains in Fiction After the Fatwa, the story “seems

to have come straight out of The Arabian Nights and reinstates the fantasy

world of Orientalism.”38 “The Prophet’s Hair,” which grapples with the

problematic nature of religious extremism, is filled with references to

miracles and superstitions (such as the blood of sacrificed chickens, relic

worship, and djinn [spirits with supernatural powers in Muslim legends])

fantastic elements that Rushdie still grounds in realism. When several

characters who suffered from physical disabilities and made their living as

beggars on the streets are miraculously healed, “They were, all four of

them, very properly furious, because the miracle had reduced their earning

power by 75 per cent, at the most conservative estimate; so they were

37
Salman, Rushdie, East, West, 94.
38
Gonzalez, Madelena, “Fiction After the Fatwa,” 17.
 24

ruined men.”39 Combining the fantastic with reality, Rushdie not only

utilizes magical realism exactly as Faris defines the style, but he also

juxtaposes the elements to create an ironic conclusion to an otherwise

stereotypical “Orientalist” story, reminding readers of the clichéd nature of

that genre. A key aspect of Orientalist discourse is the concept that part of

the non-West’s supposed backwardness stems from the belief in magic

and miracles, which is infused in everyday life in the East. “The Prophet’s

Hair” offers a critique of the extent to which religious superstition

becomes commodified, as material objects are believed to possess magical

properties. But Rushdie responds to this story with his parallel critique of

the West’s capitalistic society in “Ruby Slippers.” In both stories the use

of magical realism is a clear example of the style as Faris describes it, and

an example of Rushdie’s ability to manipulate the style to serve his

purpose and make his point about the interconnected nature of the

East/West relationship.

The Exoticized West

The relationship between “Good Advice is Rarer Than Rubies”

(herein referred to as “Good Advice”) and “Christopher Columbus and

Queen Isabella of Spain Consummate their Relationship (Santa Fé, AD

1492)” (herein referred to as “Christopher Columbus”) serves as an

example of Rushdie’s manipulation of East, West’s organization and

consequently, of the roles of East and West in their typically oppositional

positions. “Good Advice” is the first story in the book, and though it is
39
Rushdie, Salman, East, West 78.
 25

placed in the text’s “East” section, the story’s setting cannot be

categorized so simply. Though the events take place in India, they occur at

the British Consulate, as Miss Rehana attempts to secure passage to

England. As a result, the story is set in and around a hybrid space, since

the British Consulate, despite its location in India, is technically British

soil—it is an area in India in which the British government still has

authority. Thus, from the very start of East, West, Rushdie complicates the

idea of geographical boundaries. He also immediately introduces the idea

of migration as a critical theme of the text, with this story centering around

an Indian woman’s planned move to England from India, as she is

preparing to marry an Indian man in England, fulfilling a union her

parents planned for her when she was a child. But despite her intentions to

travel, she ultimately decides to remain in India, so the only travelling she

undertakes is the journey from Lahore to the Consulate, on a bus which

ferries “Tuesday women,” women who are attempting to leave India for

England. The story begins with the bus, as it arrives at the Consulate with

Rehana aboard, and ends with the bus’s departure, as Rehana returns to

Lahore. This journey serves a microcosm of the migratory experience

Rehana had planned, as she ends up visiting a representation of the West

rather than the actual place. As a result, England remains an elusive

concept rather than a concrete image, since the country is discussed but

never described. In a book about the experience of migration and the

relationship between East and West, Rushdie begins with a story that is
 26

rooted in the East, in a space where the West can’t extend beyond a single

building, and a distant idea.

In “Good Advice,” Rushdie uses Rehana’s independence to make

it clear that the experiences of women in areas like India, who are

generally assumed by the first world to live in conditions which are less

“civilized” than in the West, are not necessarily worse off than they would

be in first world nations like England. This is communicated through

Rushdie’s physical descriptions of Rehana, as he explains that “the

Consulate was already full of Tuesday women, some veiled, a few

barefaced like Miss Rehana.”40 Set apart from the majority of the other

women, who wear veils, Rehana’s characterization as an independent

woman stands in contrast with her apparent willingness to leave her home

and take part in an arranged marriage, with a man she does not know. It is

a relief, then, when Rehana purposefully answers the immigration

officials’ questions incorrectly. She tells Ali what happened, saying “‘Old

man…why have you already packed me up and posted me off to

England?’…‘I got all their questions wrong’… ‘Now I will go back to

Lahore and my job.41’” The language here demonstrates Rehana’s agency,

and her determination to decide the course of her life for herself, as she

defies Said’s example of Oriental submission, in which Flaubert’s

“Oriental woman” lacked agency or individualism. Instead, she controls

her own fate, and she rebukes Ali for his assumption that she would do as

40
Ibid, 6.
41
Ibid, 15.
 27

he expected. With this interaction, Rushdie reveals that it is possible to

lead a desirable life without migrating from the East. In India, Rehana is

independent, with a good job, while in England, her future is unknown—

she knows only that she would be married to a man thirty years her senior.

Rushdie suggests that for Rehana, the conditions of the third world have

yet to affect her in India, but she may very well experience less

independence, and more gender and/or racial discrimination in England. In

this story, it is the “East” that is safe, while Rehana, and the readers, know

little more about England than they do about Rehana’s rejected spouse.

Despite the placement of “Christopher Columbus” in the “West”

section of this text, the story serves a similar purpose as “Good Advice,”

as it portrays America as a mythical, undiscovered land. The pairing of

these stories reveals the complicated nature of the East/West relationship,

as this story, set in Spain, addresses the relationship between Europe and

America, which are united as the West when placed in opposition with

India and neighboring countries. But in this story, America is as exotic,

desirable and enticingly unknown, as the East was to Orientalists, a

parallel that serves as a reminder that binary positions are not necessarily

permanent, since America was once on the “other” side of the colonial

binary. The date, which is brought to readers’ attention in the title, is 1492,

making it clear that Rushdie wants the connection between this story and

Columbus’s famous “discovery” of America to be recognized. However,

just as Rushdie plays with classic Western tales with his manipulation of
 28

Hamlet in “Yorick” and The Wizard of Oz in “Ruby Slippers,” he also uses

reverence for Christopher Columbus, seen as both an intrepid explorer and

a figure of colonial repression, as another opportunity for the manipulation

of the West’s classic tales. The reference to the date ensures that readers

are aware of the theme of conquest, and Rushdie makes this impossible to

miss as he uses the simplistic saying of schoolchildren. He writes,

“[Columbus] has hopes…of, in fourteen hundred ninety two, sailing

across the ocean blue,”42 a rhyme which serves as a reminder of the

societal admiration for Columbus despite his misdeeds, but which in the

context of Rushdie’s stories, also demonstrates the simplicity of such a

viewpoint. Rushdie associates Columbus’s desire to explore the New

World with his desire to have sex with Queen Isabella, so that the

conquest of a continent is likened to the conquest of a queen. This notion

of the duality of exploration is also noticeable in the story’s title, as the

setting is “Santa Fe,” a region in Spain and a city in the United States.

Rushdie chooses to use an area of the United States that is associated with

the Wild West, introducing the idea of conquest and exploration even

though the story is about a different type of conquest entirely.

Rushdie refutes Huntington’s division of the world into the “West

versus the rest,” by demonstrating that the spaces of the world cannot be

so cleanly defined and reminds readers of the relative, fluid nature of the

term “foreigner.” Throughout the story Columbus is characterized as an

outsider, and mocked for his status as a foreigner. Confined to a pig sty,
42
Ibid, 107.
 29

Columbus is ridiculed by the Queen’s heralds, who overtly state one of the

key points in the story when they say, “[Foreigners] are, moreover, a

warning against complacency, their existence in our midst reminding us

that there are quarters in which (hard as it is to accept) we ourselves would

be considered foreign too.”43 The language here is an example of the

thinking that Rushdie opposes: the concept of a world that can be neatly

divided into quarters. This idea suggests a level of organization and

simplicity surrounding the relationship between differing areas and

cultures, but East, West reveals this relationship to be far more complex.

Queen Isabella forces Columbus to wait for her decision about patronage,

toying with him as she agrees to fulfill his wishes one day and banishes

him the next. This constant back-and-forth tension dominates the story, as

Columbus is pulled in different directions. He is in the East but longs for

the West, and at the story’s end, the contradiction of his internal debate is

revealed even further when, after hearing that Queen Isabella has

summoned him and agreed to fund his voyage, “[Columbus] opens his

mouth, and what spills out is the bitter refusal: no. ‘Yes,’ he tells the

heralds. Yes. I’ll come.”44 Rushdie emphasizes the contradiction by

placing “no” and “yes” in direct, immediate opposition, and blurring

Columbus’s introspection with the narration of the action, so Columbus’s

internal decision to say “no” seems to really occur. Even a yes or no

43
Ibid, 108.
44
Ibid, 119.
 30

question can’t remain simple in East, West, as Rushdie uses Columbus’s

indecision in a manner not unlike Rehana’s uncertainty in “Good Advice.”

Just as there is much more to a yes or no question than the answer

that is spoken, there is more to migration than the idea of India versus

England or Spain versus America. Rushdie complicates the issue beyond

the simplicity of here versus there. In this story, America is the unknown

exotic land (and in “Good Advice” it is England). The concept of America

as foreign mirrors the image as Columbus as a foreigner, except that while

Columbus is denigrated for his status, America is exoticized. It is elusive

and exciting, and will be, as readers know, extremely profitable. Rushdie

achieves a reversal of the positions of East and West in this story, but he

can’t portray a complete switch of the binary because of the readers’

unavoidable knowledge of America’s current status. In the story, the

Queen’s heralds deride Columbus, describing him as “the drunkard, his

huge shaggy head filled with nonsenses! A fool with a glittering eye

dreaming of a golden paradise beyond the Western Edge of Things.”45

This statement, though it mocks Columbus’s idealism, creates an image of

the West as a perfect, untouched land, and the term “Western Edge of

Things,” with its officious capital letters, contributes to the idea that

nothing, or at least nothing meaningful, exists beyond the “edge” of the

civilized world. But the readers (and Rushdie) knows that this isn’t true.

With this unusual take on Columbus, Rushdie communicates the idea that

45
Ibid, 109.
 31

foreignness is a relative idea, and that even revered figures can be pushed

to the fringes of society by circumstance.

There is no certainty, and no permanence in East, West, as figures

of Western culture that seem so dependable, like Shakespeare and

Columbus, are taken apart in the text, and the readers’ uncertainty is

increased by the lack of magical realist elements in either “Christopher

Columbus” or “Good Advice.” In contrast with “The Prophet’s Hair” and

“Ruby Slippers,” which contain classic magical realist aspects and more

manipulated, satiric elements, these two stories lack an obvious

“irreducible element.” In “Good Advice,” Rushdie flirts with fantastic

elements but his descriptions are ambiguous, as the power of Rehana’s

eyes hovers between fantasy and hyperbole. He describes Rehana, saying

“Miss Rehana’s eyes were large and black and bright enough not to need

to the help of antimony, and when the advice expert Muhammad Ali saw

them he felt himself becoming young again…The lala, usually so rude to

the Consulate’s Tuesday women, answered Miss Rehana with something

like courtesy” (East, West 5). Throughout the story, there are references

to Rehana’s eyes, as they do “bad things to [Ali’s] digestive tract.”46 and

Ali imagines “British sahibs…drowning in her eyes.”47 These scenes are

ambiguous, as Rushdie could simply be describing the effect of a beautiful

woman on a man in an exaggerated style. But in the context of Rushdie’s

other stories, in which there are more overtly fantastic elements, it is

46
Ibid, 6.
47
Ibid, 13.
 32

possible that he means these images to be interpreted literally, that

Rehana’s beauty is actually physically affecting Ali, and that she can use

her appearance to change people’s personalities to benefit her.

“Christopher Columbus” is similarly ambiguous. While it contains

a multitude of stylistic elements reflective of Rushdie’s writing throughout

East, West, with shifting narrators, capitalized phrases, and offhand

allusions to historical events, the magical realist elements are much harder

to clearly identify. The story as a whole feels removed from reality, given

its departure from historical facts, but within the framework of that

narrative, there is a fairly consistent level of realism. This shifts at the end

of the story, however, with Columbus and Isabella’s shared dream.

Rushdie describes how Columbus “walks beyond fatigue…somewhere

along this path he loses his balance, he falls off the edge of his sanity, and

out here beyond his mind’s rim he sees, for the first and only time in his

life, a vision.”48 Rushdie guides the readers here, as Columbus’s fall from

a state of wakefulness and sanity mirrors the story’s departure from

realism, in a manner similar to Rushdie’s portrayal of Eliot’s

schizophrenia in “The Harmony of the Spheres,” though this story leaves

behind the realistic world entirely, rather than locating that departure

within one character’s mind. Because the events that follow Columbus’s

fall into sleep are prefaced with the fact that we are “beyond [Columbus’s]

mind’s rim,” the fantastic nature of shared visions and prophetic dreams

seem more realistically grounded. Rushdie writes that, “It is a dream of a

48
Ibid, 115.
 33

dream…[Isabella] is staring into a large stone bowl held aloft by lions.

The bowl is filled with blood, and in it she sees – that is, Columbus

dreams her seeing – a vision of her own.”49 The narration of Columbus’s

dream also describes actual events, as Isabella actually experiences the

vision that that Columbus sees her having in his dream. As Columbus

dreams of Isabella sending her heralds after him, he wakes to find those

heralds asking him to return, saying “[Isabella] saw a vision, and it scared

her. All her dreams are prophecies.”50 At this point, Rushdie has

introduced an irreducible element into the story, as the dream has ended,

Columbus has awakened, and yet the effects of events that supposedly

didn’t occur are still occurring in a world in which Columbus is awake and

sane. This shift from realism to magic comes at the end of the story, as

Isabella finally decides to allow Columbus to venture into the Unknown,

and go to the West. But readers don’t know if Columbus is leaving his

exile to go to America, or to consummate his relationship with Isabella (or

both—Columbus’s statement, “Yes, I’ll come,” is fairly ambiguous).

Aligning Columbus’s decision with the stylistic change serves to imbue

America with fantasy, as it is in this world of magic, not of realism—a

world in which Columbus says words he does not mean, and a world in

which Columbus will go West.

Science (fictions)

49
Ibid, 116.
50
Ibid, 118.
 34

America, and the West as a whole, retains its influential position in

“The Free Radio” and “Chekov and Zulu,” as Rushdie uses examples of

technology and science fiction to serve as symbols of Western values’

influence in the East. In both of these stories, the elements that are central

to the characterizations of the protagonists are unreal. The radio in “The

Free Radio” is a figment of Ramani’s optimism, and though Chekov and

Zulu are obsessed with Star Trek, neither of them have actually seen the

show. This idea about the powers of fiction, which is evident throughout

East, West, is critical to these stories, as the characters’ beliefs in the

unreal coincide with real-life consequences. Rushdie demonstrates that

just as he uses both magical and realist elements in East, West, the

merging of fact and fiction is also emblematic of the status of the

relationship between East and West. These characters’ perceptions of

Western influence differ dramatically from the reality of the West’s

intentions, a difference that can be seen in the contrast between Ramani’s

naivety and the calculating nature of the Indian government and in the

transformation of culture in its migration from West to East in “Chekov

and Zulu,”

“Chekov and Zulu,” revolves around seemingly innocent Star Trek

fandom, as the story follows two Indian men who work for the Indian

Government’s intelligence division in London. The two men are

opposites—Zulu is a Sikh, a “shy, burly giant,” while Chekov, who is

 35

“small, slim, [and] dapper”51 is most likely a Muslim (while never overtly

stated, it is a likely attribute, given the oppositional positions held by

Chekov and Zulu and the conflict between Sikhs and Muslims that serves

as an underlying aspect of this story). While the plotline, which is told

through flashbacks, revolves around the 1984 assassination of Indira

Gandhi, stylistically, the story borrows the language and terminology of

the Star Trek series. But just as Ramani’s radio doesn’t exist, Chekov and

Zulu’s connection to Star Trek is false as well, as Chekov recounts his

childhood with Zulu in India, “‘We never saw one episode of the TV

series…The whole thing was just a legend wafting its way from the US to

the UK to our lovely hill-station of Dehra Dun. After a while we got a

couple of cheap paperback novelizations…”52 Rushdie demonstrates the

extent to which popular culture can become transformed in the process of

its move from West to East, but with this story, he also shows that this

process can occur in the reverse as well.

Just as Rushdie manipulates Hamlet and “The Wizard of Oz” in

the “West” section of the text, he depicts the evolution of another classic

aspect Western culture in this story, as Chekov and Zulu adapt the

television show situationally and linguistically. In terms of language,

Rushdie blends Star Trek terminology with dialectal speech, manipulating

the West’s phrases. Zulu’s name serves as an example. The character in

Star Trek is actually named “Sulu,” but the characters misunderstand the

51
Ibid, 154.
52
Ibid, 165.
 36

pronunciation, and Sulu becomes Zulu, reinforcing the pair’s connection

to the third world. The blending of languages is seen throughout Chekov

and Zulu’s interactions, as Punjabi, “Hinglish” and Star-Trek terminology

blend together.53 Elements of the characters’ dialogue are nearly

unintelligible as they converse, saying:

“‘What-ho, Zools! Years, yaar, years,’ Chekov said…

‘Hullo, ji,’ Zulu greeted him cautiously. ‘So then it is OK

to utilize the olds modes of address?’

‘Utilise away! Wouldn’t hear of anything else,’ Chekov

said…‘Spirit of the Enterprise and all that jazz.’”54

The blending of varying forms of language occurs here to such an extent

that the conversation feels foreign to the readers, even as the characters

reference Star Trek. Instead of the first world influencing the third world,

this time, the roles are reversed.

This role reversal is also evident as Rushdie uses allusions to Star

Trek to describe the fallout of the assassination of Indira Gandhi, as Zulu

goes undercover to investigate Sikh assassins. This moment in the plot is

revealed in the form of a memo to James T. Kirk, commanding officer of

the Enterprise, the ship that is the focus of the television series. This

memo signifies a complete immersion into the Star Trek fantasy, as the

person who is represented by Kirk is never revealed—the readers know

only that it must be some sort of leader, ranked higher than Chekov. The

53
Gonzalez, Madelena, “Fiction After the Fatwa,” 88.
54
Salman, Rushdie, East, West, 165.
 37

memo continues this fantasy, as it reads, “To send a Federation employee

of Klingon origin into a Klingon cell to spy is the crudest form of loyalty

test…Unless [the grievances and aspirations of the Klingon people] are

dealt with fair and square there cannot be a lasting peace.”55 Representing

the Sikh population with Klingons, and referring to Zulu’s status as a Sikh

government employee in those terms, this memo reflects a moment of

overt hybridity in the text, as Rushdie conflates not just two cultures, but

two incredibly important aspects of those cultures, elements which are

significant in vastly different ways—one in terms of politics and ethnic

relations, the other in terms of popular culture and entertainment—but

major cultural markers nonetheless.

The fusion of these two separate elements reveals a shared moral

ideal, however, as Chekov’s plea for a different approach demonstrates.

While in “The Free Radio,” Ramani’s unwavering belief is a sign of

naivety that eventually leads to his sterilization, the influence of Western

culture in this story is far less negative. Used as an escapist fantasy, Star

Trek helps Chekov and Zulu face dangerous and stressful situations, and

while the role of the government and the West is an intrusion in the idyllic

village life in “The Free Radio,” in this story West and East merge, as

Chekov and Zulu embrace Star Trek and mold it to fit their own lives and

cultures. “Chekov and Zulu” serves as a clear refutation of Barber’s theory

of globalization as a homogenizing force, as Rushdie shows these

characters adapting and changing the elements of Western culture to

55
Ibid, 160.
 38

which they are exposed, an example of the extent to which globalization

does not necessarily have to condense cultures into one capitalist

community, but instead can bring about the manipulation and

appropriation of cultural norms.

A story that addresses manipulation of a different sort, “The Free

Radio” discusses Indira Gandhi’s presence and the collision of not two

cultures but of government and citizen. The story relies on the contrast of

characters just as heavily as “Chekov and Zulu,” as Ramani’s

wholehearted belief in his radio is portrayed in a manner that contributes

to his characterization as a young, attractive rickshaw driver who is naïve

but likeable, a portrayal that serves as a foil to the portrayal of the Indian

government. The story is set during the infamous Indian Emergency.

Members of the Youth Movement, a deceptively-named group that

actually serves as an arm of the government, grow close with Ramani, as

they “flattered him with dreams…so now Ramani’s head became filled

with these movie dreams, because there was nothing else inside to take up

any space.”56 Again, the power of fiction comes into play, in terms of both

Ramani’s belief in the Youth Movement’s falsities, and with the reference

to the cinema, as Ramani’s impressionable nature is juxtaposed against the

manipulative powers of the government. Ramani is promised a “highly

special and personalized gift from the Central Government in Delhi

itself”—a “brand-new, first class, battery operated transistor radio.”57

56
Ibid, 22
57
Ibid, 25.
 39

Rushdie ensures that his readers understand how fictitious this is, as he

hyperbolizes the description of the gift. This image is contrasted with

foreboding references to the “big white caravan” brought in by the local

health officer, and into which “every night men were taken…for a while

and things were done to them.”58 It’s clear that these men are being

sterilized, but Rushdie’s elusive writing contributes to the narrator’s

anxiety about this van, and make it clear that while Ramani is thus far

undamaged and whole, this cannot last.

Ramani continues to believe in the radio (though the charade now

takes more effort on his part), and this endearing but dangerous belief is

described by the narrator, who says “When I saw him now, there was a

new thing on his face, a strained thing, as if he were having to make a

phenomenal effort.”59 This effort is eventually mitigated, when Ramani

finally consents to sterilization and afterwards is thrown out of the white

caravan, his hand no longer holding up his imaginary radio. But Rushdie

shows that there is no end to his fantasies, as Ramani soon leaves for

Bombay to become a film star. Instead of addressing reality, Ramani

engages in a continuous postponement of truth. The narrator, despite his

affection for the young man, disagrees with Ramani’s decisions, in an

opposition that is critical to the story’s portrayal of the ideological

opposition between old and new. The narrator, whose “ideas are wrinkled

58
Ibid, 24.
59
Ibid.
 40

with age,”60 represents the values of Old India, while Ramani, whose

youth and innocence is a critical aspect of his character, reflects the

younger generations in India, who are far more accepting of Western

science and technology.61 Since this conflict is framed in terms of

advancing technology and contemporary political turmoil, readers are

reminded of the current stakes in the conflict between Ramani’s

generation and the narrator’s. Ramani’s interest in the cinema, and his

consumption of “no-questions-asked alcohol”62 serve as examples of his

more youthful interests, and the narrator’s choice of words in describing

said alcohol reveals his more antiquated stance. The spatial positioning of

the narrator and Ramani is also representative of their symbolic functions,

as the narrator takes on an observational role, remaining on the street with

the banyan tree in view. His narrative is limited to firsthand reportage of

what he sees, and the recounting of what others tell him (he does not, for

example, attend Ramani’s wedding and depends on others’ accounts to

learn about the event, and he interacts with characters only when they

come onto the street where he is located). In contrast, Ramani is constantly

on the move, usually on his rickshaw, and not only does he come in and

out of the town, but he eventually moves much farther, when he leaves for

60
Ibid, 30.
61
This relationship between the narrator and Ramani serves a similar purpose to
characters in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. In this book, which follows India’s violent
transformation from a colonial space to a postcolonial state, the characters of Aadam, a
young man who has recently returned to Kashmir after studying medicine in Germany,
and Tai, an old boatman from Kashmir find themselves in conflict after many years of
friendship. As in “The Free Radio,” the source of conflict between the young Aadam and
old Tai stems from Aadam’s acceptance of the values from Abroad, which Tai views as a
betrayal.
62
Salman, Rushdie, East, West, 22.
 41

Bombay. This juxtaposition of the narrator’s stasis with Ramani’s more

migratory lifestyle is representative of the narrator’s resistance to change

and Ramani’s acceptance of the West—a contrast that is encapsulated by

the titular free radio.

Chapter 2: Radio as an Object of Force and Consent in Midnight’s

Children and “The Free Radio”

“‘Yé Akashvani hai,’” Ramani announces to the streets as he

mimics radio broadcasts for his local listeners’ pleasure.63 Saleem Sinai,

Midnight’s Children’s protagonist, hears the same phrase as he tells his

story with only a cheap transistor radio for company.64 The expression,

which translates to “Here is the voice from the sky,” serves as the tagline

for the nationwide All India Radio.65 A fitting a slogan for the radio

station, Yé Akashvani hai similarly exemplifies the role of the radio in

both of these texts. “The Free Radio” explores the technology of the radio

as a device of governmental coercion, a force which contributes to the

establishment of the country’s new post-independent government as a

source of unrivaled authority. The idea of “the voice from the sky,” an

almost god-like source of information and authority, is a position which

the government and Indira Gandhi strive to emulate in both “The Free

Radio” and Midnight’s Children. This voice from the sky is heard by all,

63
Rushdie, Salman, “The Free Radio,” 27
64
Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children, 190
65
“Samples from Domestic Broadcasting Survey 14.”
 42

just as the radio in India became an especially useful device as a result of

its ubiquity in even the most rural areas. This same sense of an all-

knowing being is apparent in Midnight’s Children, as the telepathic

Saleem uses his abilities to inhabit the minds of Indians across the nation,

witnessing the vast range of experience and opinion among a technically

united country firsthand. In both texts, the radio acts as an agent of

authority and information that simultaneously propagates and denies the

force of nationalism, as Rushdie explores the role of this technology in a

newly independent nation at a moment of tumult.

Radio and National Identity

The radio’s ability to transform from an instrument of colonialism

to a tool of national independence is central to Rushdie’s portrayal of the

role of the radio in post-independence India, which he examines in the

short story “The Free Radio” and his novel Midnight’s Children. In both

Rushdie portrays the radio as a mode of communication whose content

can be manipulated by authority and absorbed and mimicked by listeners.

Although little scholarly attention has been devoted to this element of

Rushdie’s work, this concept of the radio as an agent of colonialism and

nationalism is not limited to India. Rather, the radio has functioned as a

device of rebellion and submission in both colonizing and colonized

nations. The evolving nature of the radio’s purpose in Algeria and France

reflects its unstable position in India which Rushdie portrays in both texts.
 43

In “This is the Voice of Algeria” Franz Fanon discusses the

significance of this same phenomenon. During the French regime in

Algeria, the distribution of radio listeners paralleled that of the radio’s

audience in colonial India. Before 1945, 95 percent of the radio audience

in Algeria was composed of Europeans, with the remaining 5 percent

composed largely of the “developed bourgeoisie” among the Algerians.66

The radio acted as an assurance of civilization and French identity to the

Europeans living in the “backward” society of Algeria. In rural colonial

settlements run by the French government and located in Algeria’s

hinterland, Radio-Alger was, according to the settler's expression, “‘the

only way to still feel like a civilized man.’ On the farms, the radio

remind[ed] the settler of the reality of colonial power and, by its very

existence, dispense[d] safety, serenity…Radio-Alger, for the settler, [was]

a daily invitation not to ‘go native,’ not to forget the rightfulness of his

culture.”67 The radio in colonial Algeria operated with a purpose similar to

that of the Indian Broadcasting Company, serving as a source of national

identity for the colonizers away from their homeland, and a reminder of

the importance of the colonial project. Soon, however, the radio’s role in

Algeria became far more revolutionary. In the 1950s, Algerians began to

rebel against the French presence in Algeria and in 1956 the

announcement of a new station, The Voice of Free Algeria, which

supplied broadcasts from the perspective of Algerian rebels brought forth

66
Fanon, Franz, This is the Voice of Algeria.
67
Ibid.
 44

an enormous rise in the popularity of radio among Algerians. Fanon

explains,

Since 1956 the purchase of a radio in Algeria has meant, not the

adoption of a modern technique for getting news, but the obtaining

of access to the only means of entering into communication with

the Revolution, of living with it….Listening to the Voice of

Fighting Algeria was motivated not just by eagerness to hear the

news, but more particularly by the inner need to be at one with the

nation in its struggle, to recapture and to assume the new national

formulation, to listen to and to repeat the grandeur of the epic

being accomplished up there among the rocks and on the djebels.68

The history of the radio in Algeria stands as the most extreme, exciting

example of the radio as an object of national unification, as it transformed

from an instrument of colonialism to a tpp; of revolution. The radio in

India, rather, remained under the influence of the government, as control

was transferred from the colonial government to the Indian administration,

prohibiting the development of an independent station not affiliated with

governmental forces, and preventing the radio from serving as a conduit

for Indians dissatisfied by their country’s new leadership. The

consequences of this authoritarian influence on the radio will become

apparent later in this chapter, as the radio’s role in the coerced

sterilizations of the Indian population is discussed.

68
Ibid.
 45

The relationship between the radio and national identity in

postcolonial nations, or nations in general, has not generated much

scholarly attention. While the role that print media and television play in

the development and preservation of national and cultural identity has

been the object of an extensive amount of scholarship, the radio is often

overlooked in these discussions. A few scholars have recently published

works on the topic, including Joelle Neulander, who examines the role of

radio programming in encouraging socially conservative family values in

France and the portrayal of colonial nations which radio shows offered to

France’s audiences. Radio plays and songs broadcast in France which

depicted the exotic space of colonized nations focused “not on satisfaction

and happiness outside France, but rather on the danger that lurked beyond

the national borders.” 69 Radio programming ensured that France’s

colonial territories seemed primitive and frightening, suggesting not just

superiority of the French lifestyle but also the altruism of the French

government’s actions, as they risked their citizens’ lives in their attempts

to assist their colonial subjects. After all, Neulander notes, “colonial

subjects did not reflect back the image of bourgeois patriarchal morality

that radio producers saw as their ideal.”70 The dissatisfaction and

resistance expressed by France’s colonial subjects, such as the djebel

forces in Algeria, did not align with the illustration of the French colonial

project that the radio programs portrayed. While radio programming

69
Neulander, Joelle, Programming National Identity, 160.
70
Ibid, 160.
 46

needed to support France’s African empire, which included French

Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and the Ivory Coast, the portrayal of colonized

nations generally served as a reminder of the superiority and safety of the

French lifestyle which radio shows encouraged. As Neulander states, “The

empire was a necessary evil, to be maintained at a distance, then exploited

by radio playwrights and composers and enjoyed by French families as an

evening’s exotic entertainment.”71 The radio broadcasted a specific

position on colonization while also ensuring that listeners would be

exposed to the cultural practices which were viewed as ideal at the time,

portraying the dangers of avoiding marriage while promoting stable

patriarchal family structures that placed women in the home and men in

the workplace.

The radio’s role in India echoes elements of its position in Algeria

and France, as a device of simultaneity and as an object available for

manipulation. Both “The Free Radio” and Midnight’s Children address

this element of Indian culture, as the texts’ protagonists engage with All-

India Radio and create their own versions of radios. Rushdie portrays

Saleem and Ramani’s unwavering belief in their radios’ efficacy as he

aligns their faith in the radio with their belief in the national project

(Saleem stakes his ambitions in his personal parliament and Ramani

accepts the government’s promises without question). With the

introduction of the powerful, destructive Widow, Rushdie also

demonstrates that the radio’s serves as a device which can not only
71
Ibid, 184.
 47

propagate nationalism but also meet the coercive needs of the state. In this

section of my project, I examine the intertextual relationship between

Rushdie’s novel and short story, which manifests largely in the role of the

radio in both Midnight’s Children and “The Free Radio,” as Rushdie

fictionalizes the concept of radio as an instrument which encourages and

disseminates a shared national identity. The manipulation of this device at

the hands of the government is presented in both texts, located in the

moments of the Indian Emergency. Rushdie pits the individual protagonist

who embodies elements of the nation against Indira Gandhi, a character

who appears as a hyperbolized villain of mythical proportions, but who

also, like Saleem, embodies the nation. In both texts, the characters’ naïve

optimism and eventual failure of their imagined radios is contrasted with

the violent power of Indira Gandhi. The radios in both stories reflect their

position as objects which are central to the development of national

identity, but their cultural influence is mitigated and manipulated by the

political machinations of the postcolonial state.

Both texts display the ongoing tension that exists between the use

of the radio by the Indian audience versus the Indian authorities. The radio

serves as an object of nationhood, encouraging in its listeners a sense of

simultaneity. Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities writes about

the newspaper as an object of national identity and simultaneity, writing

that as people across a nation consume the morning and evening editions

of the newspaper, “Each communicant is simultaneously aware that the

 48

ceremony he performs is being replicated by thousands (or millions) of

others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not

the slightest notion.”72 The radio takes on the same role as the newspaper,

uniting its listeners across the nation. The radio interpellates its audience

as members of independent India, just as The Voice of Free Algeria

helped to transform the Algerian public into participants of the colonial

rebellion. In Rushdie’s texts, however, Saleem and Ramani represent

opposing sides of the process of interpellation. Saleem, who literally

becomes his own radio hails the members of his Conference to participate

in his nationalistic ambitions. Ramani, on the other hand, represents those

who are successfully interpellated by the radio. Both Saleem and Ramani

ultimately participate in the government’s sterilization scheme, but

Ramani does so willingly, effectively wooed by the radio, while Saleem is

taken by force. The divergent nature of these protagonists’ fates reflects

the duality of the radio, one which embodies the Gramscian idea of the

dual perspective of force and consent. In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci

discusses Machiavelli’s centaur as a symbol of the revolutionary’s party

need to hold together in a dialectical unity the two levels “of force and of

consent, authority and hegemony, violence and civilisation, of agitation

and of propaganda, of tactics and of strategy.”73 The radio in India is a

device which unifies these binaries, as is seen in Rushdie’s depictions of

the radio’s role in manipulating Indian citizens into willing participants in

72
Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities, 35.
73
Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 315.
 49

governmental projects like sterilization, while also inciting violence and

trauma. Saleem and Ramani reflect this opposition—Saleem is ultimately

defeated by force, authority, violence, agitation and tactics, while

Ramani’s experience can be defined by the opposing terms.

The Development of All India Radio

The history of All India Radio is one which reflects the

government’s ongoing interest in radio broadcasts as a tool with which

they could inform and influence the Indian population. Radio broadcasting

originated in the 1920s when India was still under England’s colonial

regime. Lord Irwin, the viceroy of India began a commercial broadcasting

service in 1927, after negotiating an agreement with two independent

radio clubs in Bombay and Calcutta (now Mumbai and Kolkata). Then

called the Indian Broadcasting Company, the station’s broadcasts were

intended for Europeans in India and the “thin upper crust of English-

speaking Indians.”74 In 1930 the colonial government took control of the

service at the insistence of license holders and equipment dealers who

complained of mismanagement under Irwin. By 1932, as the prospect of

independence loomed, the English government decided to use broadcasts

to reduce public support of Indian freedom fighters. In 1936 the company

was renamed All India Radio, and as Asha Kasbekar states, “Its objective

was clear: to inform, educate, and entertain the masses in a manner that

the authorities thought appropriate.”75 All India Radio installed a network

74
Kasbekar, Asha, Pop Culture India, 130.
75
Ibid, 132.
 50

of six broadcasting centers across India, and from its very beginnings the

radio served as an instrument which the government used to disseminate

the information they chose, as news bulletins and even styles of music

which were broadcast was determined by government officials. The

colonial authority’s implementation of the radio as a source of control and

influence would later be imitated by the administration under Indira

Gandhi during the Emergency. The independent government which the

colonial regime attempted to obstruct partly via the radio ultimately used

the same tools as their former oppressors in their own acts of subjugation.

The propagandistic purposes of the radio continued during World War II

as All India Radio increased their centralized news bulletins, which were

broadcast daily in twenty seven Indian languages.

When India gained independence the control of All India Radio

transferred to the new Indian government (the transfer of power was

broadcast live on radio, including Nehru’s famous “tryst with destiny”

speech). With independence came an increased listening audience, as

Deputy Prime Minister Vallabhbhai Patel placed the states’ radio stations

under government control and drew up a plan to vastly extend the radio’s

coverage to a wider variety of linguistic and geographic regions.76 By

1950, 25 broadcasting centers across India reached 21 percent of the

population, and debates over the nature of content began to grow heated.

By this time, as Priyamvada Gopal notes, the technologies of the radio and

the cinema had quickly become ingrained in the public sphere. Like
76
Ibid, 132.
 51

Anderson’s newspaper, the radio became a ritual for the Indian public, and

as the radio’s popularity expanded so did its influence, making the

technology increasingly important to the government as a mode of

communication and control. But despite the government’s interest in

broadcasting classical music and “rescu[ing] the general public from the

vulgarities of Indian film songs,”77 the listening public managed to

circumvent the government’s discontinuation of the broadcast of film

music by listening to Radio Ceylon, a station based in what is now Sri

Lanka. After a survey in 1957 revealed that nine out of ten stations were

tuned to Radio Ceylon, with each tenth set being broken, the Indian

government relented in the hopes that listeners would tune to the

broadcasts whose contents they could control when necessary. Such

necessity arose during the government’s population control campaign (to

be discussed at length later in this paper), and to an even greater extent

during the Emergency, during which the government “blatantly used the

radio to promote its agenda. There was a clamp down on all dissenting

voices.”78 During this period, the minister for Information and

Broadcasting, V.C. Shukla informed station directors that All India Radio

existed to “made people ‘understand’ government policies….All India

Radio was soon dubbed ‘All Indi(r)a Radio’ by the listening public,”79 a

term which echoes the slogan which Saleem describes Gandhi adopting

77
Kasbekar, Asha, Pop Culture India, 133.
78
Ibid, 134.
79
Ibid, 135.
 52

during the Emergency, that “India is Indira and Indira is India.”80 And yet,

despite the awareness of the government’s influence, the radio continued

to attract listeners and effectively disseminate the information that

authorities wanted to be heard (i.e. the advertisements for birth control

methods). Radio and authority become one, and “All Indi(r)a Radio”

serves as a technological example of the Machiavellian centaur as Gramsci

describes it.

Radios, Imagined and Real

The radios in Midnight’s Children and “The Free Radio” act as

modes of imitation and production, as both texts’ protagonists become

broadcasters in their own right. In Midnight’s Children, the 1,001 children

born during the first hour of India’s independence are endowed with

miraculous powers. Saleem is granted telepathic abilities and as he

initially begins to understand and develop his telepathy, he becomes “a

sort of radio,”81 beginning his transformation from one who is

interpellated to one who interpellates. His initial listening experience

mirrors that of a radio listener, as he observes the thoughts of celebrities

and politicians, engaging in the consumption of popular culture which the

radio encourages for people across India, creating a shared knowledge

base and sense of national identity. But as Saleem soon realizes that his

powers extend beyond that of the average radio audience, it becomes

apparent that his abilities allow him to obtain a degree of shared

80
Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children, 483.
81
Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children, 189.
 53

experience not possible within the realm of realism as he learns the most

intimate details of individuals across the nation, and eventually allows

others to communicate at a similar level of intimacy.

Saleem can not only listen to the many voices of the Indian

population, but also embody their experiences, seeing, hearing, and feeling

what people all over India are doing. Saleem recounts, “At one time I was

a landlord in Uttar Pradesh, my belly rolling over my pajama-cord as I

ordered serfs to set my surplus grain on fire…at another moment I was

starving to death in Orissa, where there was a food shortage as usual.”82

As the allegorical embodiment of the nation, Saleem attains the ability to

become every person who makes up its population. His experience with

telepathy serves as an extreme illustration of the capabilities of the radio

as an object of national identity. As Saleem listens to the thoughts of

India’s “teeming millions, masses and classes alike,” whose voices

“babbled in everything from Malayalam to Naga dialects, from the purity

of Lucknow Urdu to the southern slurrings of Tamil…language faded

away and was replaced by universally intelligible thought-forms which far

transcended words.”83 Even as language riots break out and erupt into

violence, Saleem can surpass India’s divisive language barriers, accessing

the experiences of a culturally diverse population and uniting them as only

he can, within himself. While Saleem’s telepathic radio allows him to

understand and appreciate India in its fragmented, complex entirety, the

82
Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children, 198.
83
Ibid., 192.
 54

miraculous nature of this ability suggests the intangibility of such a

complete, easy unification in real life. The limitations of this technology’s

ability to unify are apparent in Midnight’s Children, as the portrayal of the

radio complicates Anderson’s discussion of the newspaper as a device of

simultaneity. In India, it seems that the radio most dramatically enacts

change in the hands of authority, rather than in the mind of a single

citizen.

Saleem’s inability to effectively “broadcast” his (admittedly

vague) agenda becomes increasingly apparent with the failure of his

Midnight’s Children Conference. As he grows aware of the presence of

other children with whom he can communicate telepathically, he senses

“The unconscious beacons of the children of midnight, signaling nothing

more than their existence, transmitting simply: ‘I.” From far to the North,

‘I.’ And the South East West: ‘I.’ ‘I.’ ‘And I.’”84 From the earliest origins

of the Midnight’s Children’s Conference, Saleem imagines the children as

a unified, single entity. His optimism is soon undermined by the reality of

the Conference, which is emblematic of India as a whole in its chaotic

expression of widely varying political views stemming from vastly

different socioeconomic and cultural situations. Saleem can “act as a sort

of national network, so that by opening my transformed mind to all the

children I could turn it into a forum in which they could talk to each other

through me.”85 The children assemble in the “lok sabha or parliament” of

84
Ibid., 192.
85
Ibid., 259.
 55

Saleem’s mind each night, as the Midnight’s Children’s Conference is

initiated. Saleem’s nationalistic aims have grown more ambitious as his

abilities have expanded, allowing him to abandon the passive act of

listening and watching, and take on a more active role as host and leader

of the Conference. Saleem has lofty visions for the conference, which he

falteringly explains to Shiva, saying “‘I had in mind something more like

a, you know, sort of loose federation of equals, all points of view given

free expression.”86 However, he is soon disappointed by the conference’s

disorganized, chaotic state. Saleem explains that, “There were declarations

of women’s rights and pleas for the improvement of the lot of

untouchables; landless children dreamed of land and tribals from the hills,

of Jeeps; and there were, also, fantasies of power.”87 Saleem uses his

telepathy in the hopes of discovering a national entity, but fails to discover

or create any sense of unity. However, while he can’t mediate agreement

among his fellow midnight’s children, he is able to create a sense of

simultaneity, allowing children across the nation to experience the same

situation at the same time despite their physical distance and divergent

lives.

This simultaneity is apparent in both Midnight’s Children and

“The Free Radio,” as both protagonists produce, in their own way, a mode

of communication and expression with their imagined radios. In both texts

the radio, real and imagined, acts as a unifying instrument, one which

86
Ibid., 252.
87
Ibid., 261.
 56

addresses a nation in its entirety (India is located in one time zone), as a

single voice speaks to its audience “from the sky,” ensuring that people

across India are engaged in a shared activity, receiving the same

information and hearing the same music. Ramani in “The Free Radio”

reflects the popularity of radio broadcasts as he excitedly discusses the

radio promised to him by the government; a “highly special and

personalized gift from the Central Government in Delhi itself…a “brand-

new, first class, battery operated transistor radio.”88 As he awaits his new

radio, which unbeknownst to him is a bribe offered by the government in

exchange for undergoing voluntary sterilization, Ramani enthusiastically

performs radio broadcasts as he drives his rickshaw around the village,

announcing:

‘This is All-India Radio. Here is the news. A Government

spokesman today announced that Ramani rickshaw-
wallah’s radio was on its way and would be delivered at
any moment. And now some playback music.’ After which
he would sing songs by Asha Bhonsle or Lata Mangeshkar
in a high, ridiculous falsetto.89
Through his mimetic engagement with the broadcasts, Ramani occupies,

ironically, the position which Macaulay famously described in his 1835

Minute on Education, when he stated, “We must at present do our best to

form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom

we govern…[We may] render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying

88
Rushdie, Salman, East, West, 25.
89
Ibid., 27.
 57

knowledge to the great mass of the population.”90 The radio, and in this

case Ramani, takes on that role, acting as a vehicle of knowledge for

Indira’s administration, as Ramani remains simultaneously occupies his

position as an Indian citizen in a rural village while also serving as a

conduit for Indian propaganda about sterilization, serving as one of

Macaulay’s “interpreters.”

Just as Saleem becomes a “national network,” a role which he

takes on in the fabulous, fantastic realm that Rushdie’s creates in

Midnight’s Children, Ramani takes on the role of the radio, sharing All-

India Radio’s broadcasts with his village in a story which remains rooted

in historical reality, one which lacks the magical realism of Midnight’s

Children. As a rickshaw driver, he is constantly in motion, and thus his

performance, rather than originating in a single location and travelling to a

large audience simultaneously, reaches his listeners at different times, as

the radio that is Ramani travels by rickshaw rather than through radio

waves. The image of the radio as an instrument of simultaneity is further

complicated in the story, as unlike Midnight’s Children, in which Rushdie

explicitly addresses the complication of India’s varying languages, in “The

Free Radio,” the language which the people in Ramani’s village speak is

never identified and their access to radio broadcasts in a language which

they understand is taken for granted. While Saleem’s telepathic radio

surpasses the issue of translation by avoiding actual language altogether,

90
Babington Macaulay, Thomas, “Minute on Education.”
 58

Ramani’s radio operates in a more realistic setting, one in which the issue

of translation is not avoided by Rushdie’s devices of magical realism.

All India Radio developed its External Services Division shortly

after the nation gained independence, in 1948. As part of the government’s

program to expand radio’s reach to as many Indians as possible, the

availability of broadcasts in multiple languages became the responsibility

of the External Services Division. Though All India Radio continued

adding broadcasts in more languages through the nineties, by the time of

the Indian Emergency, broadcasts were available in Bengali, Gujarati,

Hindi, Nepali, Punjabi, Sindhi, and Urdu.91 While Gandhi and her

administration utilized the radio as a tool for national communication, the

radio broadcasts occurring throughout India were not completely unified.

While the language that Ramani uses in his broadcasts is unknown, the

variance in the language of radio broadcasts across India complicate the

status of the radio as an object of unification, though the similarity in

content (i.e. the centralized news bulletins mentioned earlier) mitigates to

an extent this difference.

The Threat of the Widow

Even after a year has passed, Ramani still believes in his promised

radio and continues to pretend to carry it through the streets on his

rickshaw, though the charade now takes more effort on his part. The

narrator explains, “When I saw him now, there was a new thing on his

face, a strained thing, as if he were having to make a phenomenal

91
All India Radio.
 59

effort...as if all of the energy of his young body was being poured into the

fictional space between his ear and his hand.”92 This fictional space, in

both “The Free Radio” and Midnight’s Children gives Ramani and Saleem

the freedom to optimistically create modes of expression and

communication; Ramani with his unwavering belief in his forthcoming

radio and the resolute continuation of his own broadcasts, and Saleem with

his miraculous telepathy which he uses to channel his nationalistic

ambitions through the Midnight’s Children’s Conference. But these

fictional spaces are destroyed by the primary menace of both stories:

Indira Gandhi, the Widow, who not only ends both characters’ ambitions,

but also eliminates their ability to reproduce, fulfilling for Ramani as well

as Saleem the prophecy put forth by Ramram the seer in Midnight’s

Children: “he will have sons without having sons.”93

The element of Gandhi’s politics which Rushdie addresses in “The

Free Radio,” and which is a central element to her characterization in

Midnight’s Children is her role in India’s methods of population control.

When Gandhi became Prime Minister in 1966, elected by Parliament to

replace Prime Minister Lal Badahur Shastri after he died of a heart attack,

she immediately expressed an interest in family planning and population

control to combat the problem of famine in India.94 Historian Matthew

Connelly notes that, “As information minister, [Gandhi] had pressed for a

plan to distribute hundreds of thousands of radios across rural India to

92
Ibid., 28.
93
Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children, 94.
94
The last major famine, at this point, had occurred in 1943 and left three million dead.
 60

transmit family planning information. And Gandhi…was also among

those who had been pressuring Nayar [India’s Union Health Minister] to

pay women to accept IUD insertion.”95 Despite offering incentives to the

public, by 1967 India was falling behind in its attempts at population

control, causing public health officials to “devise a scheme that would

come to signify everything wrong with population control in India.”96

Instead of offering higher incentive payments for sterilization, the

Ministry began giving people transistor radios, as they thought “It would

make manifest what had only been a promise: the idea that family

planning, by itself, could make people modern.”97 The radio also served as

an effective mouthpiece for the government, allowing propaganda about

the benefits of birth control to be shared with rural communities which had

posed a challenge to governmental forces trying to disseminate

information to the Indian population.

With increasing quotas and a growing disregard for the public’s

well-being, the sterilization program quickly disintegrated into a coercive

machine. Promises of higher incentives, free supplies, and land grants

were made and broken, vasectomies were performed on the elderly,

disabled, and mentally ill, and as physicians operated without proper

training, more than half of the population who received vasectomies or

95
Connelly, Matthew. Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population.
224.
96
Ibid 228
97
Ibid 228
 61

IUD insertions complained of postoperative complications.98 The

problems which plagued the family planning program only grew worse

during the Emergency (1975-1977).99 Ultimately, the campaign exceeded

its target of 7.5 million vasectomies, but the program’s incompetency and

coercion left contributed to the Indian population’s disdain for both Indira

Gandhi and the idea of population control as a governmental

responsibility. As Robert Hardgrave notes in India: Government and

Politics in a Developing Nation:

Allegations of compulsory sterilization because a major

issue in Indira Gandhi’s 1977 electoral defeat. The fear
generated by the vasectomy campaign…posed a serious
setback for birth control in India…Since 1977 no political
party has called for control of population nor has any
election manifesto mentioned it.100
Rushdie sets the climactic final scenes of Midnight’s Children

during the Indian Emergency, and uses the government’s campaign of

coerced vasectomies as the premise of “The Free Radio.” In both stories,

Gandhi, represented as the Widow,101 appears as the villainous, controlling

force behind the program. “The Free Radio,” with its title referencing the

government’s use of transistor radios as incentives for consenting to a

vasectomy, contrasts the naivety of Ramani with the Widow’s

98
Ibid 227
100
Hardgrave, Robert. India: Government and Politics in a Developing Nation, 5-6.
101
It is worth noting that in Midnight’s Children, “the Widow” is always capitalized
while in “The Free Radio,” she is just “the widow,” or “the thief’s widow.” She is
explicitly identified as Indira Gandhi in Midnight’s Children but not “The Free Radio,”
and in the short story she remains merely a character rather than a historical figure. To
avoid confusion, I am consistently capitalizing her name throughout this paper.
 62

machinations. The narrator begins the story, saying, “We all knew nothing

good would happen to him while the thief’s widow had her claws dug into

his flesh, but the boy was an innocent, a real donkey’s child, you can’t

teach such people.”102 Immediately Ramani becomes more than a single

character, and instead stands as the embodiment of the innocent, the

people who can’t be taught, but who can be manipulated. A story about

coercion and manipulation, “The Free Radio” uses Ramani as a symbol of

all the hapless victims so easily wooed by the incentive of a free radio and

the reassurances that, as Ramani explains, sterilization “does not stop

love-making or anything…it stops babies only, and my woman did not

want children anymore so now all is hundred per cent OK. Also it is in the

national interest…and soon the free radio will arrive.”103 Just as Ramani

mimics the broadcast of All-India Radio, he repeats the information fed to

him about sterilization, fulfilling Gandhi’s proposition that radios be

distributed to rural areas in order to transmit family planning information.

His understanding of the national interest which he describes reflects the

interest only of the government rather than the population, as the influence

of the Widow and the members of the Youth Movement have effectively

altered his perception of the nation in favor of the authority in place. He

engages with the government’s strategy voluntarily, fulfilling the

government’s coercive needs without resistance or knowledge of his

102
Rushdie, Salman, East, West, 19.
103
Ibid., 26.
 63

actions’ significance, as he falls under the influence of not just the promise

of the radio, but of the Widow herself.

“The Free Radio” portrays the evolving relationship between the

Widow and Ramani, as they meet and eventually marry. The union

between the pair appears as a calculated move on the part of the Widow,

readily accepted by the gullible Ramani. From the start, the narrator

explains that she is the wrong woman for Ramani, ten years older than him

and a mother to five children. The Widow meets Ramani when she buys a

rickshaw ride from him, as the narrator describes,

It was an investment for her, because must-be she had

decided already to put her hooks into Ramani. So they all
poured into the rickshaw and he took her away, and with
the five kiddies as well as the widow there was quite a
weight…and I though, careful, my son, or you will have
this burden to pull for all of your life.104
The warning of permanency is especially relevant in the context of the

story’s message about infertility. By allowing the Widow to “put her

hooks” into him, Ramani moves closer to his eventual vasectomy, and

Rushdie uses this moment to speak about the lifelong burden of infertility

faced by the millions of men who agreed to vasectomies under India’s

sterilization campaigns. The blame here is directed squarely at Gandhi, as

Rushdie uses this story as not only a warning against naïve belief in

authority but also a critique of the coercive nature of the authority

discussed. The manipulative nature of government and the Widow is

104
Ibid., 21.
 64

apparent even in brief moments like this passage, in which the action is

controlled entirely by the Widow, as she makes the decision to ride in the

rickshaw and in doing so, pursue Ramani. In the act of pulling the

rickshaw Ramani occupies an contradictory position, as he controls the

cart with the Widow and her children as his passengers but at the same

time remains under order of the Widow, working to receive money from

her and driving her to wherever she chooses. His agency is superseded by

that of the Widow, an element of their relationship which remains true

throughout the story. The decisions Ramani makes, from choosing to be

sterilized to travelling to Bombay all stem from the Widow’s suggestions

and desires, and he remains an object of manipulation, unaware and

nonresistant.

Just as the radio reflects the dual perspective of force and consent,

the Widow’s contrasting relationships with Saleem and Ramani can be

viewed in those terms as well, as Ramani willingly engages in marriage

with her while Saleem grows up in fear of the Widow. Saleem encounters

the Widow for only a brief period of the novel. She appears in his dreams

as a child and plays a critical role in Book Three, as Saleem’s life and

India’s political turmoil collide. While Saleem’s encounters with the

Widow are much briefer, her destructive abilities are just as potent. Both

texts address the Widow in a similar manner, as Saleem and the elderly

narrator in “The Free Radio” imbue their story with their opinions,

narrating in a biased, personal style that reflects the strong animosity they
 65

feel towards the Widow. In “The Free Radio” the narrator admits that

despite her “rotten” mentality the Widow is attractive but in a “hard,

vicious way.” Several times in the story he refers to her hands as “claws”

or “hooks” describing them digging into Ramani’s flesh. With minimal

information about her appearance besides these details provided by the

narrator, the image created is one defined entirely by her predatory

characteristics, one that is fitting given her destructive purpose in the

story. A similar, though more dramatic image is created in Midnight’s

Children, as Saleem’s first vision of the Widow comes to him in a fever-

induced childhood dream:

The Widow’s arm is long as death its skin is green the

fingernails are long and sharp and black…the Widow’s arm

comes snaking down the snake is green the children scream

the fingernails are black they scratch the Widow’s arm is

hunting see the children run and scream.105

The witch-like, green and black villainous figure parallels one of the most
famous evil characters in cinema, the wicked witch of the East in The
Wizard of Oz. A movie which Rushdie viewed as a young child (at the
Metro Cub Club, as mentioned in an earlier footnote) and parodied in
another short story in East, West (“At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers),
The Wizard of Oz makes its appearance in Midnight’s Children as an
accident of the subconscious, according to Rushdie (The Widow is also
described as “the witch” in “The Free Radio.”). In an essay he wrote about
the film, he explains that he unknowingly infused the wicked witch
imagery in Saleem’s dream without an awareness of their source. Rushdie
writes that in “the stream-of-consciousness dream-sequence…the
nightmare of Indira Gandhi is fused with the equally nightmarish figure of
Margaret Hamilton [who played the wicked witch of the West in the film]:
a coming-together of the Wicked Witches of the East and of the West.” 106

105
Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children, 238.
106
Rushdie, Salman, The Wizard of Oz, 33.
 66

The witch-like figure of the Widow brings a cinematic element to these

stories already infused with characters and narrative styles rooted in the
film industry, fusing entertainment, hyperbole, and history together as the
stories present the violent sterilization regime that Gandhi and the Indian
government enacted. The protagonists, their radios, and their interactions
with the Widow form a relationship central to both texts and which
ultimately serves to reflect the domination of force over consent as forms
of authority in these stories.
Sterilization as a Force of Coercion and Destruction
In both texts, the governmental sterilization campaign is tied to not
only the Widow’s characterization as the primary force of evil, but also
the destruction of Ramani’s and Saleem’s radios, and correspondingly,
their contribution to the national project of India. In “The Free Radio,”
Ramani’s violent encounter in the health officer’s van brings about the end
of his imaginative, optimistic belief in his radio. Alluded to earlier in the
story in ambiguous terms, when the narrator described that “The local
health officer had brought a big white caravan into the street…and every
night men were taken into this van for a while and things were done to
them,”107 these mobile vasectomy camps which Rushdie portrays serve as
an accurate representation of one of the government’s methods that
allowed their sterilization campaign to reach rural areas.108 Just as radios
transported the idea of vasectomies to Indian villages, these vans brought
the instruments, physicians, and space needed to perform them. A year
after his marriage to the Widow, one of these white caravans returns to the
village and the narrator “knew there was nothing to be done, because Ram
would certainly come to get his gift.”109 Radio and vasectomy are
conflated here in the ambiguous description of the “gift,” as Rushdie
portrays the ease with which the transistor radio bribe functioned as a
distraction from the severity and permanence of sterilization. Saleem, in
Midnight’s Children comments on the tactic, saying that the transistor
radio “will never cease, in our part of the world, to symbolize
impotence…ever since the notorious free-transistor sterilization bribe.”110
And in “The Free Radio,” the bribe works for Ramani just as the
government imagined, as he enters the caravan confidently and without
anxiety:
Ringing his bicycle-bell and imitating weather forecasts,
ear cupped as usual…Ram went into the caravan gaily,
waving at the arm-banded cronies After a short time there
were sounds of disagreement inside the caravan, and then
louder noises still, and finally the youths in armbands went

107
Rushdie, Salman, East, West, 24.
108
Hardgrave, Robert. India: Government and Politics in a Developing Nation, 5.
109
Rushdie, Salman, East, West, 28.
110
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children, 190.
 67

in to see what was becoming, and soon after that Ram was
frogmarched out by his drinking-chums, and his hair-grease
was smudged on his face and there was blood coming from
his mouth. His hand was no longer cupped by his ear.111
The moments after Ramani’s vasectomy reveal the loss of much of what

has defined his character throughout the story. His “drinking-chums”

physically restrain him, demonstrating their extent of their allegiance to

the government, his attractive appearance is blemished with his hair-

grease on his face and blood coming from his mouth, and most critically,

“his hand was no longer cupped by his ear,” as Ramani has given up his

attempts to recreate radio broadcasts. With the loss of his reproductive

abilities comes the loss of his willingness to imagine, and to engage in the

government’s dissemination of information. When force at last replaces

consent in Ramani’s story, the change in his character is dramatic, and his

story comes to an end shortly after.

Ultimately, Ramani never receives the radio he had been promised,

and he doesn’t mimic broadcasts again, as he sells his rickshaw and leaves

for Bombay shortly after the procedure. He receives a vasectomy to

appease his wife and to please the government, though he doesn’t seem to

grasp the details of the procedure until it’s already underway, as Rushdie

pits the naivety of Ramani against the Widow’s schemes and the

government’s coercive powers in his critique of India’s sterilization

campaign. Ramani’s gullibility, despite the problems it causes him, is

consistently portrayed in nostalgic, affectionate terms, as the narrator

111
Rushdie, Salman, East, West, 31.
 68

explains that “Ramani always had the rare quality of total belief in his

dreams, and there were times when his faith in the imaginary radio almost

took us in.”112 There is a wistfulness to the narrator’s tone here, as he

recounts a scene which he knows cannot be replicated. Ramani’s future is

unknown to the reader, and although the story ends with the narrator’s

recounting of confident letters from Ramani as he seeks success in

Bombay, this upbeat portrayal of his future is tempered by the narrator’s

closing reflection on “the expression which came over his face in the days

just before he learned the truth about his radio, and the huge made energy

which he poured into the act of conjuring reality…”113 Ramani’s vaunted

ability to “conjure reality,” to create, or procreate, has been eliminated by

the Widow and the government, and the story ends not with a nod to

Ramani’s future but with a reminder of all that he has lost.

While Ramani’s sterilization is an isolated incident of violence, in

Midnight’s Children, Saleem’s vasectomy is one of multiple procedures

occurring as the government sterilizes all of the midnight’s children.

Rushdie portrays a scene of violence and chaos in the magician’s ghetto,

as Sanjay Gandhi and military troops raze the magician’s ghetto,

demolishing the buildings and dragging people “by the hair towards the

waiting yawning vans” to perform sterilization procedures.114 It is amid

this chaotic scene that Saleem is captured and locked in a palace in

Benares, where he unwittingly reveals the location of the other children.

112
Ibid, 27.
113
Ibid, 32.
114
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children, 494.
 69

During his incarceration he communicates with the midnight’s children,

his optimism returning as he says, “Maybe we should form, I don’t know,

a new political party, yes, the Midnight Party, what chance do politics

have against people who can multiply fishes and turn base metals into

gold?”115 But Saleem’s undying belief in the power of the Midnight’s

Children wanes at the hands of the government:

Test- and hysterectomized, the children of midnight were

denied the possibility of reproducing themselves…but that
was only a side-effect because they were truly
extraordinary doctors, and they drained more than that:
hope, too, was excised…for all those who had come to the
palace of the wailing windows with their magical gifts
intact, the awakening from anesthesia was cruel indeed.116
By taking away not just the midnight’s children’s powers, but also their

belief in the possibility of change, the sterilization procedure not only

prevents the children from reproducing, but also from resisting. The

fervent belief in the power to create change which Saleem had earlier

professed is eliminated as the government wields its power. The threat

which the children pose to the government is apparent, as it is only the

“extraordinary” doctors who are trusted with the task of disabling the

children’s powers; Saleem’s confidence in the children’ abilities is not

entirely unfounded. The midnight’s children were endowed with their

powers because they were born as the country of India became an

independent nation, and now, under the heavy-handed authority of the

115
Ibid, 502.
116
Ibid, 505.
 70

Widow during the Indian Emergency, independence, and all that it was

expected to bring forth, no longer seems within the population’s grasp.

Just as Ramani in “The Free Radio” loses that “rare quality of total belief,”

the sterilization of the midnight’s children ensures that the “one-thousand-

and-one marvelous promises of a numinous midnight” are gone forever.117

Despite their vasectomies, both Saleem and Ramani both have

children. Saleem’s wife, Parvati gave birth to Aadam, whose biological

father is Shiva, and Ramani becomes the father of the Widow’s children

when he marries her. Both men are linked to children sired by the stories’

enemies, and in these texts where consumption and creation are constantly

at play, these children defy both processes. Little is said about the children

in “The Free Radio,” who essentially serve as nameless burdens, but

Aadam in Midnight’s Children is a part of a second generation of magical

children who Saleem imagines “would grow up far tougher than the first,

not looking for their fate in prophecy or the stars, but forging it in the

implacable furnaces of their wills.”118 Aadam is the newest vehicle for

Saleem’s optimism, and while his future remains ambiguous, this new

generation serves as a reminder that India’s development as a nation will

continue, as the Emergency ends and the Widow’s reign collapses. While

the stories both portray the violence of the government as a force more

powerful than the coercive strategy employed by the radio, the long-term

results of the government’s actions complicate the idea that force triumphs

117
Ibid, 505.
118
Ibid, 515.
 71

over consent. The characters’ stories remain inconclusive, as Ramani

heads off to Bombay to become a part of the film-making machine and

Saleem prepares for his impending death, but the state of the nation, at the

very least, with the post-Emergency election and ensuing shake-up of

power, seems promising. By the stories’ ends, both Ramani and Saleem

have lost their ability to procreate and their belief in their dreams of

radios, but the promise and vision of a future for the Indian population, be

it as trivial as Ramani’s or as epic as Saleem’s, stands as a reassuring

certainty.

Conclusion: Rushdie Today

Midnight’s Children and East, West exemplify Rushdie’s writing

during his early career, as Midnight’s Children became Rushdie’s first

major success and the assorted stories from East, West were written

throughout the early 1980s to mid 1990s. These two texts grapple with

issues that were highly relevant at the time of their publication, as Rushdie

addresses India’s development as an independent nation, the relationship

between and the perception of the East and the West, and the positions of

postcolonial scholars at the time. Several decades later, these texts are

relics of an earlier era, as more than 60 years have passed since India

gained its independence, and scholarly discussion of the binary of East and

West has been replaced with talk of the global North and South. Despite

the constantly changing landscape that serves as the backdrop to

postcolonial studies, many of the same themes which dominate Rushdie’s

 72

early works, including the experiences of newly-independent nations and

the challenges of migration and cultural alienation, continue to capture the

interest of scholars and everyday readers alike.

The timelessness of Rushdie’s early works is complemented by the

continued popularity of his more recent publications, including The

Enchantress of Florence (2008) and Joseph Anton, (2012), which focuses

on Rushdie’s ten years of hiding while under the fatwa declared by

Ayatollah Khomeini. His popularity as an author has transformed Rushdie

from a well-known writer to a cultural commodity. A willing interview

subject, Rushdie often offers his opinions to the media, and his name

consistently appears in stories by The Washington Post and The Guardian,

and on the television screen during his interviews with the BBC and The

Today Show.119 He serves as a go-to source for opinions about major

events like the Arab Spring, and more recently, the violence in the Middle

East that followed the release of the inflammatory video, The Innocence of

Muslims. Controversy often follows the author, as his opinions tend to

incite anger in his impassioned opponents. Most recently, and perhaps

most dramatically, Iran's Ayatollah Hassan Sanei reissued the infamous

fatwa against Rushdie, in response to the author’s recent remarks

denouncing Muslim attacks on U.S. embassies.120 Though clearly Rushdie

has not been the victim of any violence as a result of Sanei’s declaration,

119
Denyer, Simon. “Rushdie Cancels India Visit after Death Threat,” Mishra, Pankaj.
“Why Salman Rushdie Should Pause before Condemning Mo Yan on Censorship.”
Meeting Salman Rushdie.” BBC News,” TODAY.com. “Salman Rushdie: Film That
Sparked Mideast Unrest ‘Disgraceful.’”
120
Tait, Robert. “Iran Resurrects Salman Rushdie Threat.”
 73

the reissuing of the fatwa meant that, once again, Rushdie made the

headlines on newspapers worldwide. The continued animosity against

Rushdie remains, illuminated by not just the reimplementation of the

fatwa, but also recent developments such as the video game released in

Iran, which allows gamers to assassinate the author.121 The game “The

Stressful Life of Salman Rushdie and the Implementation of his Verdict”

reflects the extent to which Rushdie remains a target still apparently

worthy of attention. The negativity surrounding Rushdie isn’t limited to

Iran, as throughout the past year he faced boycotts at the Jaipur Literature

Festival,122 and recent death threats have forced him to cancel speaking

events.123

Most recently, Rushdie has dealt with the repercussions of his

controversial reputation as movie distributors in India shied away from the

cinematic adaptation of Midnight’s Children. The movie, like the novel,

criticizes Indira Gandhi, and with Gandhi’s daughter-in-law now leading

the ruling Congress party, making the likelihood film’s release seem

uncertain at best.124 However, the film was released in India in February

2013, and its U.S. release is still forthcoming. Though the movie hasn’t

reached American audiences yet, its attachment to Rushdie has piqued the

media’s interest and his name is once again in the news and on the

public’s mind. What makes Rushdie controversial and even threatening in

121
Baldauf, Scott. “Salman Rushdie, Now the Target of an Iranian Video Game.”
122
http://www.onislam.net/english/news/asia-pacific/456252-rushdie-on-india-visit-
politicians-boycott.html
123
Denyer, Simon. “Rushdie Cancels India Visit after Death Threat.”
124
Lakshmi, Rama. “Salman Rushdie’s Movie Scares Film Distributors in India.”
 74

India makes him an intriguing figure in the U.S. As movie producer and

distributor Sunil Bohra explained, “The producers of the movie must think

if it makes sense to attach Rushdie’s name to the movie in India. It worked

around the world, but may not here.”125 Years ago, when Rushdie wrote

Midnight’s Children and the stories collected in East, West, it is doubtful

that his name attracted much attention beyond its association with the

writing he produced. But now, Rushdie’s fame has exceeded his reputation

as an author, and while he still may address similar dilemmas about the

relationships between areas of the world which tend to be fraught with

uncertainty and hostility, he does so on a stage that is widely seen, easily

accessible, and more dangerous than the pages of his novels.

125
Ibid.
 75

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Summary of Capstone Project

In my Capstone project, I analyze East, West and Midnight’s

Children, two works by Salman Rushdie, a British Indian novelist and

essayist. A prolific writer, he’s published nine novels, three short story

collections, and multiple essays and non-fiction works during the course

of his writing career, which began with his publication of Grimus in 1975.

Much of his work is concerned with the relations between East and West,

and he is well known for fusing historical stories with magical realism.

This hybrid style is one of the aspects of Rushdie’s write which I discuss

in this paper, as it plays a major role in Midnight’s Children and East,

West.

East, West (1994) is an anthology of nine short stories which

address the experience of physical and cultural migration. The text is

divided into three sections, entitled “East,” “West,” and “East, West.” In

each of these sections, the stories relate to the geographical area and reveal

the complex relationship between the characters and their location.

Throughout the text Rushdie manipulates tropes of Eastern and Western

culture, bringing into question the reader’s assumptions about each area.

The mutual influence that East and West share with each other is apparent,

as Rushdie complicates the idea of a world divided by borders and cultural

differences. In my analysis of the stories, I place the discussion in context

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with the postcolonial discourse taking place at the time of the stories’

publication, as well as including scholarly considerations on the

relationship between postcolonialism and magical realism. Midnight’s

Children displays a similar use of magical realism, which Rushdie applies

throughout the novel. The text corresponds with the history of India, as it

follows India from its transition from British colonial rule to independence

and the turmoil that follows. Told through the perspective of Saleem Sinai,

who is born on the day of India’s independence, the story follows Saleem

from birth to death and reveals the correlation between major events in his

life to occurrences in India’s history.

More than thirty years after its publication, Rushdie’s Midnight’s

Children remains a hallmark of postcolonial literature and Rushdie

himself a popular figure in the public eye. After earning the Booker Prize

in 1981, Midnight’s Children was named the Best of the Booker in 1993,

and continues today to generate extensive scholarly analysis of the novel’s

statements on identity and nation, and its use of allegory and magical

realism. With a film adaptation currently in the works, it’s clear that

Midnight’s Children still stands firmly in the public sphere, along with

many of Rushdie’s well-known novels, such as the infamous Satanic

Verses, which after its publication in 1988 so offended members of the

Muslim community that riots and book burning broke out, and Rushdie

was forced into hiding with a fatwa on his head. Rushdie’s short stories

are less popular, but like his novels, often address common themes, as he
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discusses nationhood, migration, and identity in many of his works. There

is a distinct lack in academic writing surrounding East, West, Rushdie’s

collection of nine short stories, six of which had been released

independently in other publications prior to their placement in this book.

Published in 1994, East, West’s release coincided with the rising

popularity of postcolonial studies, as scholarly thought moved from

comparative postcolonial studies to location-specific examinations, in a

shift against which Rushdie’s novel stands in opposition. The construction

of East and West as separate, opposing sides of a binary was certainly not

new to postcolonial studies in the nineties, but the idea was powerfully

reinforced by Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilization theory in 1993,

and the complexities of the East/West binary were emphasized by the

forces of globalization, making East, West relevant to the discourse

surrounding the postcolonial topics of the time period.

Both Midnight’s Children and East, West reflect Rushdie’s early

examinations of some of the most central tenets of colonial discourse, as

in his short stories he explores and complicates the positions of and

relationships between what he portrays as the not-so distinct entities of

East and West. While the stories of East, West largely address postcolonial

relations through the lens of characters’ perspectives, in Midnight’s

Children the state itself becomes a central figure as Rushdie takes on the

issue of nationhood, examining the transformation of India from a colonial

possession to an independent nation. These two texts are united not only
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by their thematic elements but also by Rushdie’s unique application of

magical realism, the evolution of which is visible in the differences

between Rushdie’s stylistic decisions in Midnight’s Children versus East,

West. Separated by more than a decade, the texts reflect Rushdie’s

changing perspective as a writer but also demonstrate Rushdie’s driving

interests which remained dominant in his earlier years of writing.