Metaphors of the secular in the fiction of Salman Rushdie

Abstract

The secular is a significant and unstable trope in Salman Rushdie’s fiction. Rushdie’s use of metaphor may seem to preserve the distinction between the secular life of the postcolonial nation and the non-secular world evoked in Rushdie’s images of the otherworldly such as his parodies of Bombay cinema and in his engagement with The Arabian Nights. Yet it is precisely through metaphor that Rushdie interrogates the democratic claims of Nehruvian secularism. Beginning with a discussion of Rushdie’s figuration of Saleem Sinai’s body as a synecdoche for the Indian body politic in Midnight’s Children, this essay considers how the secular idea of India is placed under pressure by communal violence, neocolonialism, war and class politics. Saleem’s failure to represent the entire Indian population mirrors the false universality of Nehru’s nationalist rhetoric. And by staging this false universality, Rushdie imagines the possibility of a future secular nation to come. Such a critique of Nehruvian secularism is developed further in his novel The Moor’s Last Sigh, wherein Aurora Zogoiby’s surreal palimpsest paintings juxtapose the imaginary worlds of Moorish Spain and late-twentieth-century India to disclose the fault lines in postcolonial secularism, as I go on to argue. If the secular idea of India is lampooned in The Moor’s Last Sigh through the image of Nehru as a taxidermied dog, in Shalimar the Clown Rushdie suggests that secularism is bound up with the idea of an imaginary homeland. In the renaming of the female protagonist India as Kashmir in Shalimar, the essay concludes by suggesting that Rushdie returns to the utopian land of lost content that framed his diasporic vision of India in Midnight’s Children and Imaginary Homelands.