vividly describes the condition of Kashmir, and it also touches upon the issue of terrorist attacks. Published in 2005 and depicting an assassination conducted by a man related to the terrorist organization, the novel gains great attention from the public and inevitably reminds its readers of the September 11 attacks in the U.S. in 2001, even though the novel is actually not a post-9/11 fiction in terms of its setting.12 From the
11 Therefore, I will use India/Kashmira while talking about the Max’s daughter in Shalimar the Clown so as to distinguish the name of the character from that of the nation.
12 A post-9/11 fiction usually takes the September 11 terrorist attacks as its background, and there have been a great number of works trying to describe the world after the September 11 attacks. However, the year of Max’s assassination falls in 1991. Even so, many critics still regard Shalimar the Clown as a post-911 fiction. Jason Cowley points out that “a celebrant of post-colonial hybridity and diversity, of
Second World War to the terrorist attacks during the 2000s, from the smash of Kashmir to the disillusion of Los Angeles dream, the story of violence and betrayal and Rushdie’s portrayal of lost paradise have been situated in a broader transnational and global context. In reality, after the September 11 attacks, many governments start their wars on terrorism, including “the control of immigration, as well as the criminalization of Islam” (Morton 338). Gradually, there tends to be a binary opposition between terrorism and counter-terrorism, while Muslims or migrants are usually associated with the former. From a rather different point of view, Pei-Chen Liao finds “in representing familiar ambivalence between present and past, self-protection and self-destruction, and friend and enemy at both the political and personal levels, Rushdie deconstructs the dominant post-9/11 perception that terror comes solely from essentially evil terrorism and terrorists” (29). Instead of taking the novel as merely a story of terrorism versus anti-terrorism, Liao suggests that Shalimar
the Clown be anchored in a broader implication of 9/11 and what the novel
emphasizes is “the terrifying consequence of the existential distinction between friend and enemy and that of self-ignorance of strangers within” (77). The assassination does not result from essential differences among the characters. It is the extreme expression of love and hatred, intolerance and violence that leads to the murder and the destruction. To divide people into Muslims and non-Muslims, Americans and non-Americans can only make the country in an unending disturbing or even militancy situation. Prompted by the tension between terrorism and counter-terrorism that has been existing in many countries, Rushdie attempts to transform an American story of counter-terrorism into a Kashmiri story of intolerance, which unfolds what is
cultural fusion and mergings, Rushdie is here grappling imaginatively with the shock of 11 September 2001 and the wars that have followed.” In “The Political is Personal,” Peter Heinegg also states that Shalimar the Clown is an enthralling story in that the “sprawling story flashes back and forth from pre-World War II Strasbourg to present-day Los Angeles, touches at least fleetingly on every major world crisis from the Holocaust to 9/11.”
happening around the assassination besides the rigid impression of a terrorist attack.
The Kashmiri perspective will allow the author to stand away from those two extreme standing points and to blur the established boundaries between the two different political or religious groups.
Another important figure of the novel lies in the motif of migration. In Shalimar
the Clown, Rushdie offers a detailed portrait of destruction of an earthly Edenic place
and recounts an assassination in Los Angeles. Furthermore, while recounting the main characters’ life trajectories, the story reaches England, France, Philippine, and other places around the world. Global migration plays a vital role in the novel. Since most characters in the novel possess the experience of migration, Shao-ming Kung interprets Shalimar the Clown as “an invocative archive of migration and globalized production of modern terrorism, which articulates the present with counter-public, minor perspective of the 1947 Partition” (84). The story presents the issues related to migration with perspectives of those who cannot dominate the power and the right to speak in dominant discourses. To look at the story from other possible perspectives will provide us opportunities to reexamine and rethink the established facts. In an interview with Rushdie, Johann Hari proposes that
Rushdie sees his career as falling into three acts. In the first, he wrote about his lost homelands—India and Pakistan. Then he wrote about the transition from that world to Britain, the journey across water to the West. “And now I think that the third act is to say, ‘All right, all that happened,’” [Rushdie] explains. “The world has become this mixed up place, the age of mass migration has taken place and we live in its aftermath - now what?”
In Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie deliberates on the influence of migration and
globalization. “The crossing of borders, during the twentieth century, whatever the motives, origins, and destinations, has become an extremely significant issue since more and more people are affected by it” (Sanga 14). Shalimar the Clown unfolds an alternative perspective on it. The novel thus becomes a story connecting the previous two acts that Rushdie worked on before, moving beyond talking about lost homelands and new lives in the west respectively but focusing on the interrelating network in the age of migration and the common experience of losing paradises shared by the rural village and the metropolis. Rushdie indicates that “I have spent a lot of my life looking positively at the consequences of migration. Now I'm being forced to see that there's a nightmare as well as a dream" (Hari). Migration can provide possibilities, but it can also bring problems or challenges. Whether the consequences of migration are good or not, we all need to respond to them, as the influence is so prevailing that we cannot escape it. Shalimar the Clown reveals how residents respond to the upcoming insurgencies and how immigrants relate themselves to the outside world in a globalization of violence and migration. Migration allows migratory characters to bring their historical narratives to merge into the new lands. Their spatial representations will show us the changes of space as well. To read the production of space is to see the development of social relations. Focusing on Rushdie’s mapping of the territorial relations that are inscribed in spaces, Frederik Tygstrup argues that Rushdie exemplifies the change of our spatial practice in terms of “territorial order, deterritorializing tendencies, and reterritorializing practices” (199). According to Tygstrup, the transformation of our spatial practice is “a necessary outcome of migration and migratory characters” (204). Boonyi leaves her hometown to search for more freedom and possibilities in the new place. People move from their perished paradises to the new utopian visions. India/Kashmira visits Kashmir to retrieve the
traces of her mother and her untold stories. In their migration, they all try to find something that they think may exist in their destinations. On the other hand, their migration reconfigures spatial imagination of the residents and readers, bringing more possibilities and challenges to spatial production of their living space.
Spatial representations in the novel thus become an interesting topic. Gavin Keulks suggests that spaces in Shalimar the Clown are endowed with more significant intensions in Rushdie’s revaluation of post-modernism and postcolonialism.
According to Keulks, the fictitious village Pachigam is where “the magic didn’t work, the real world refused to be banished” (Rushdie, Shalimar 369) while Los Angeles has
“no mysteries here or depth” (Rushdie, Shalimar 5). It is an interesting comparison between Pachigam and Los Angeles in light of Keulks’ article. Perhaps the two paradises that Rushdie portrays in Shalimar the Clown look different in terms of their spatial practice, but both of them indicate the fact that the realities do not want to be banished or forgotten. Without knowing what actually happens around us, there will be no depth or meaning of space. Therefore, Rushdie’s description of Pachigam and Los Angeles can be seen as a call to urge his readers to pay attention to what is happening in Kashmir, in Los Angeles, and in our lives.
In John Updike’s review of Shalimar the Clown, he argues that the novel actually describes the ruination of two paradises: California and Kashmir:
. . . the former [California] by “human bloat” in the shape of trailer parks and “the new pleasantvilles being built in the firetrap canyons to house the middle-class arrivistes” and the “less pleasantvilles in the thick of the urban sprawl…the dirty underbelly of paradise,” and the latter [Kashmir] by Islamic uprising and the matched savagery of the insurgency’s attempted suppression by the government of India.
In Updike’s point of view, California and Kashmir represent different forms of paradise lost respectively in Shalimar the Clown. Kashmir is considered a pastoral paradise destroyed by the constant insurgency on the subcontinent due to political and military power struggle, while California embodies the disillusion of Pleasantville image of Los Angeles. Though they seem different in the beginning and do not receive the same attention from the world, readers will soon find similarities in the collapse of their paradisiacal images. Their memories keep getting into each other’s histories. Furthermore, both Pachigam and Los Angeles are endowed with people’s hope of retrieving something lost, such as the hope of regaining their harmonious multi-ethnic and multi-cultural village, the hope of living in a place with no fear of death. It is in how Rushdie intertwines his personal experience with the two paradises that we find the buried stories of those silenced.
Both Pachigam and Los Angeles are not merely settings or geographical terms of little importance in the novel. The spatial production of these two places represents our changing social relations. According to Geetha Ganapathy-Doré, “such paradises will have to become either virtual or portable images,” which encourages us to
“envision a new and better future by having intimations of transcendental beauty and bliss” (45). However, the author does not create a fantasy for his characters to rest upon. Instead of creating an alternative wonderful utopia in the novel, Rushdie reinvents the valley of Pachigam, a smashed paradise in militancy and a sad epitome of the lost Kashmir and Kashmiriyat. Some critics, such as Celia Wallhead, regard Kashmir as an emblem of “flawed Eden” (91). What happens in Pachigam will appear in Los Angeles as well. The two places look quite similar for some characters.
Through their perspectives, we see a different imagination of the village and the city.
The portrayal of intensifying agitation and conflicts in Pachigam unfolds the unending
disturbances in Kashmir, while India/Kashmira’s observation of the city poses a challenge against the Pleasantville vision of Los Angeles. They are no longer paradises. By paralleling the fictitious village Pachigam with Los Angeles, Rushdie is able to foreground the issue of intolerance and the loss of Kashmiriyat hidden behind the story of terror.
Anchoring my research in Henri Lefebvre’s triad of space, I read Rushdie’s parallelism of Pachigam and Los Angeles as an emblem of lost paradises and the disappearing space of tolerance. By examining representational spaces of inhabitants, I attempt to find out the elements that make both places irretrievable paradises and the relation between two different representations of paradises. In this way, we may have a clearer picture of what Rushdie actually tries to articulate in his portrayal of lost paradises. Therefore, my thesis will be divided into the following parts. In chapter two, I try to investigate into Lefebvre’s triad of space and his elaboration on resistance force from representational spaces. In chapter three, I will focus on spatial representations of the fictitious village in Kashmir, Pachigam, in order to examine its transformation from a harmonious village into a smashed paradise in terror and to tease out how people experience and memorize its destruction. In chapter four, I turn to its counterpart, Los Angeles, to see how migration brings alternate narratives into the city of angels and how India/Kashmira’s documentary project exemplifies her efforts to resist imposed knowledge and violence. In the final concluding chapter of the thesis, I would like to tease out the common features shared by the two places and examine Rushdie’s intention of writing lost paradises and his reflection on encountering violence in Shalimar the Clown.