Literature has paved the way for Rushdie to reevaluate our social relations so that he can push the boundaries as much as he can. Rushdie’s elegies of paradises lost become a long journey in which he describes the loss of Kashmiriyat and reexamines the collided worlds through the perspectives of those unknown and unseen in our contemporary realities. To directly address to the concerns that he has been dedicated to, it is inevitable that Rushdie returns to Kashmir and readdresses the issues of migration and violence. By linking the two places mentioned in the characters’
migration, Rushdie is able to talk about the paradise that he lost long time ago, even though the paradise here does not refer to paradise in general. In fact, the lost paradises in Shalimar the Clown refer to something more profound in the author’s mind and something embedded in the author’s representations of paradises. Based on the expression from the inhabitants’ perspectives, this thesis hopes to find out how representational spaces help us see the transformation of space and what makes Pachigam and Los Angeles connected in terms of lost paradises.
Migratory characters in Shalimar the Clown possess similar features: most of them come from smashed paradises like Pachigam and leave for a new life in Los Angeles. Even though Pachigam and Los Angeles are described in different ways, both of them exemplify the irretrievability of paradises. People in Pachigam and in Los Angeles are all looking for something, including India/Kashmira. They are looking for something that no longer exists, something that may transcend their differences in the community whether in Pachigam or in Los Angeles. They are looking for the space of tolerance. Therefore, the spatial representations of Pachigam and Los Angeles are actually an emblem of lost paradises, which is connected with
the loss of Kashmiriyat, the spirit of tolerance.
Rushdie does not restore the loss of paradises. His description of Pachigam and Los Angeles tries to represent something behind the destruction or the disillusion of paradises. For Rushdie, he has been encountered with the death threats since fatwa, and the alternate Islam that his grandfather taught him seems to be nowhere to be seen in our contemporary understanding of people’s discourses on terrorism. To resist the violence that has stopped him from proposing different ideas and to promote the idea he has learned from his grandfather and his Kashmiri background, Rushdie uses spatial representations of Pachigam and Los Angeles in Shalimar the Clown to exemplify what is actually disappearing in his life and our world: the loss of Kashmiriyat. What actually makes the village and the city look similar in the novel is the disappearing space of tolerance.
In Pachigam, the residents of the village reveal their panic of the after-partitioned world of Kashmir through different expressions, such as feelings of the new policy of art performance, prophecy of the impending trouble, and rumor about the invading troops. Rushdie does not depict the details of what happens on the day of the troops’
invasion; instead, he chooses to describe the days before and after the invasion.
Before the day of invasion, people has already sensed the disappearance of Kashmiriyat from their daily life. What bonds people in Kashmir together is lost.
Hatred and terror replace their love and tolerance. After the day, the landscape of Kashmir can no longer represent a harmonious community. The landscape not only refers to the material objects India/Kashmira observes but also the expressions of fear and the atmosphere of a dying community. Through the portrayal from inhabitants’
perspectives, Rushdie manifests both the material and spiritual transformation of Kashmir in the endless militancy: the harmonious imagery of Shalimar’s homeland
and the disappearance of the belief that makes people bond together.
In Los Angeles, it is through the immigrants’ perspectives that we see disillusion of a Pleasantville vision. A pleasantville is supposed to be somewhere that is full of happiness and hope. However, when immigrants from smashed paradises arrive in the city of angels, they find out the pleasantville image is mapped out by their false impression and cognition of the city. They project their loss of ideal community in the past and their expectation of retrieving that into their lived space of Los Angeles.
From their perspectives, we see a different landscape of Los Angeles which gradually becomes similar to that of Pachigam.
In both depictions of irretrievable paradises, there is a gap between inhabitants’
cognition and everyday experience of space. What occupies the interstices between conceived space and lived space, representations of space and representational spaces, is the process of representation and reinterpretation from different points of view that derive from users’ own memories and experience. It is through the interstices that resistance appears, not only the resistance against the existing system of knowledge but also the resistance against being forgotten. The past does not want to and will not be easily obliterated from our present histories. The unseen space and untold stories refuse to be forgotten.
Just like India/Kashmira’s filming project, Rushdie tries to turn a story of an American ambassador’s assassination into a relational thinking of people and places related to the incident, through which Rushdie suggests two more possible ways of interpreting the attack: one is the world politics and conflicts exemplified in the devastation of remote Pachigam and the other is the issue of immigration in the age of mass migration, both of which are representations of loss of tolerance and the impact of violence. This is the paradise that Rushdie tries to describe. He manages to portray
how each place is transformed from space of hope and tolerance to space of intolerance and violence. He wants to disclose the fact that what discourages or threatens him is also the thing that destroys Kashmir and Los Angeles. He wants to remind his readers that to resist violence is to resist the imposed boundaries. The existing political or cultural boundaries narrow how we look at ourselves and our worlds, which might spoil “conceptions of space that tend to form in dream, in imaginings, in utopias or in science fiction” (Lefebvre 357).
In the interview by John Preston, Rushdie indicates:
The truth, of course, is that we're not just one thing, or another; we're all these little clouds of contradictions. And if you can accept that, then not only are you being truthful about yourself, but you're also likely to find you have things in common with other people. Also, that gives you a way of constructing a society that on the whole works.
(“Provoking”)
Rushdie here is trying to deconstruct social boundaries and to emphasize there is always something that we can acquire from other places and something we will relate ourselves to, as we have shared more and more things with other communities and have been influenced by activities around the world. We need to rescale our world.
The limits of political and territorial boundaries are likely to be resolved or at least to be challenged through our representational spaces, from which we can reconfigure the space-time structure and representations of space. Though personal interpretation of the assassination may not be able to reconcile with the international politics and conflicts or change anything, at least it provides us possibilities of moving beyond the defined boundaries and the established knowledge. This is not a transcendental resolution of spatial and territorial conflicts; rather, it implies a rescaling of thinking
who we are and discloses the need to re-examine the overlooked spaces of our contemporary realities. For Rushdie, this will help him represent the alternate Islam and reassert the significance of Kashmiriyat. This is how he tries to resist violence and retrieve Kashmiriyat in Shalimar the Clown: to push against the defined boundaries between Pachigam and Los Angeles a little more.