Salman Rushdie: Shalimar the Clown

Shalimar the Clown is a poem – a prose poem more epicurean in theme than epic in sweep. After Rushdie's East, West, he could well have titled this The Feast Wazwan.

The East and the feast is Boonyi, who tries to cross boundaries but is pushed back to where she came from. A modern day Anarkali whose husband turns anarchist. Boonyi deceives and is deceived. She underestimates Shalimar, her acrobat husband.

It is equally the story of the anarchist’s antithesis, Maximilian Ophuls, a hero of the French resistance who is rejected by the French but climbs the US establishment -- a scholar who becomes a power player, a steady flyer with a roving eye, a man of many talents who is at the core a weak man. Shalimar the Clown is the story of a Western man lusting for an Eastern woman, the encounter of a modern imperialist with an opportunistic Anarkali.

Shalimar is a single minded and a simple minded man. Whose sense of balance truly belongs only on the tight rope.

This is a story of climbers and of balancing and unbalancing acts – of the high brow Ophuls brought to earth by the low brow Shalimar in a bloody East West encounter.

And of Anarkali’s daughter, the lust-product of an earlier East West encounter, who finally takes down the anarchist. A daughter of Kashmir, she rejects India and becomes Kashmira.

The East and the feast is also Kashmir, a Kashmir before Freedom’s Midnight. The story ends with Kashmira’s midnight assertion of her mother’s power and the irony of a pure child of Kashmir felled by Kashmira in a foreign land. A story that draws the curtain on Midnight’s Children.

A story with no lessons but many insights, a film with more scenes than story, with the narcissism of the novelist playing on every page, of a magical and unrealistic nostalgia that can only come from the mind of a boarding school boy.

Reading List

Here is a list made about three years ago -- a selection from my then bookshelf. I hade picked authors and subjects that I had particularly enjoyed, and among these authors I chose the works that I liked the most. I had confined myself to books that have connections with the subcontinent – with the exception of J.M. Coetzee. As I reflect on the list, I see that many have themes of expatriation and exile. I look forward to comments from those who have read books on this list, as well as to similar recommendations.

This list needs to be updated, including in the Friends and Family category where some exceptional new books need to be added.

By V.S. Naipaul:
A House for Mr. Biswas. Intensely moving story, leavened by humanity and humor, of a man's quest for a house of his own and for independence.
Letters Between a Father and Son. Correspondence between the now proud author, when he was a relative innocent, and his father who was “the best man that he knew”.

By J.M.Coetzee:
Waiting for the Barbarians. A brilliant novel about colonialism and what it does to the ruler and the ruled. Among the most brutal and disturbing novels I have read.
Disgrace. Another disturbing novel by the South African novelist, probing an individual’s dignity and degradation.

By Michael Ondaatje:
The English Patient. A book to be savored like a painting, crafted stroke by stroke. I preferred the book to the film.
Anil’s Ghost. Haunting story of an expatriate’s return to Sri Lanka and her troubling encounters with its present and past.

By Geoffrey Moorhouse:
Calcutta. May appear somewhat dated now; was my introduction to that charming and paradoxical city.
India Brittanica. A history of the English expatriate in India.

Straddling the subcontinent and England:
Shadow Lines, by Amitav Ghosh. A novel in which Calcutta, Dacca and London are artfully woven together in space, time and imagination.
The Buddha of Suburbia, by Hanif Kureishi. Featuring strange and goofy characters who nevertheless evoke our sympathy and humanity. I found the book better than the four hour long made-for-television film.
Reef, by Romesh Gunasekera. An elegant and simple novel of two contrasting homelands, the sunlit Sri Lanka and cold and gray England.

Straddling the subcontinent and America:
The Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri. A collection of short stories, including some especially good ones, that won a Pulitzer.

Spirituality:
The Art of Living, by the Dalai Lama. Teaches us that a fine single malt can give us pleasure but not joy. I greatly admire the Dalai Lama.

Friends and Family:
India: From Midnight to the Millennium, by Shashi Tharoor. A highly readable overview of India's transformation over the first fifty years of its independence.
The Five Dollar Smile, by Shashi Tharoor. Short stories – the titled story is my favorite.
Padmavati the Harlot, by Kamala Das. A collection of short stories – I especially like The Coroner. I am the protagonist of one of the stories, not revealing which. Kamala Das’s home in Bombay was a literary salon in the seventies, and virtually a second home for me.
Arranged Marriage, by Chitra Divakaruni. A plug for my poetry teacher! I took a poetry writing class with her ten years ago. This is a collection of her short stories.
Hangman’s Journal, by Shashi Warrier. Almost true story of the last hangman of Travancore.
Ayodhya Cantos, by Rukmini Bhaya Nair. Superbly crafted poems, mostly intellectual, highly relevant to our times.

Repose