Cadet Killian Buckley's Blog

 

Salman Rushdie was born in India on June 19, 1947 into a moderate Muslim family.  His birth was only two months before the independence of India from colonial rule under Britain.^[1]  In his boyhood, he went to Rugby, a British public school.  It was there where he became educated in the literature world of the West.^[2]  Salman Rushdie’s writings and novels are a creative mix of both Western and Eastern culture.  His culture and his experiences as an outsider in Western culture are a part of who he is and his being is reflected in his writing.

Early Life

Salman Rushdie was born into an “affluent” Indian family in June of 1947.  His family was a moderate Muslim family.  They were well-off Indians in the British controlled colony.  He grew up with a great deal of opportunity due to his wealth.  He was also in an interview with “The Outsiders”; he describes himself as being raised by the cook and his nanny. This experience gave him the opportunity to not only see his wealthy side of India, but also gave him early insight into the poverty of India.  He was granted access to, at an early age, how the majority of Indians lived in India; in poverty.  He said, in “The Outsiders” interview, that he used this to his advantage when it came to his writing.  He was able to access both memories of wealth and poverty into his stories.^[3]

 

Rushdie’s Relationship with His Father

Rushdie has described his father as a “great storyteller” who influenced and encouraged his imagination to grow.^[4] His father also played a large role in his decision to attend a British boarding school when he was young.  However, Rushdie’s relationship with his father was often painful.  In his interview with “The New Yorker”, Rushdie re-tells the story of how, upon arriving in Britain to drop him off for school, his father handed him his wallet and forced the young boy to be in-charge of the financial obligations of the trip.  While doing so, the father remained in an odd state of detachment during their trip.  Rushdie recalls this as a stressful and confusing memory. This event in his life led to a strange relationship with his father.^[5]  It is obviously an important memory to him and shaped who he became.

Education

Prior to attending the British Boarding School, he had a vast informal education.  He describes himself as a child “who loved to read”^[6].  He stated the importance that books played a key role in his childhood.  He was surrounded by Eastern tales of mysticism and fantastical novels.  These stories impacted his ideas about writing, imagination, and the type of writer he wanted to be.

Upon attending Rugby, be received an excellent formal education. He studied all of the required subjects that were necessary in order to be a Western educated man.  It was there where he learned about classic Western literature.  However, his experience at school was a painful one.  It was here where he learned how much of an outsider he truly was to this Western world.

In his novel, The Satanic Verses, Rushdie re-tells an event from his schoolboy days.  Early on during his time at Rugby, the British boarding school, he had difficulty eating a traditional British dish.  In his re-telling of this painful memory, he uses the memory as a metaphor for the struggle he had as an “outsider” adjusting to life in the West.  Rushdie wrote,

“Cut into it, and got a mouthful of tiny bones.  And after extracting them all, another mouthful, more bones.  It took him ninety minutes to eat the fish…England was a peculiar tasting smoked fish full of spikes and bones, and nobody would ever tell him how to eat it”.^[7]

After Rugby, he went to university at King’s College. After university, before becoming a novelist, he worked for an advertisement agency.[8]

Novels

Rushdie is most well – known for his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, which was published in 1988.  However, his first most popular novel was a 1981 novel with the title Midnight’s Children.  From this novel, he earned the Booker Prize.[9]  In this novel, he utilized a great deal of the history of the independence of India as a resource for his novel.  His novel, Shame, was published two years later and also dealt with the split between India and Pakistan after the end of British colonial rule in his homeland.   Through these novels, he gained a great deal of fame and popularity throughout the West.  However, his novels still reflected his cultural background and related back to his childhood in India.

Fatwa

On Valentine’s Day of 1989, Rushdie had a ‘fatwa’ put on him by the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini over his newest novel, The Satanic Verses.  The Ayatollah found the novel to be against the religion of Islam and he urged Muslims to destroy the book.  He also called for the death of Rushdie due to his novel.[10]  While the Ayatollah mostly had power mostly within the Shiite sect of Islam, which is most prominent in Iran, many Muslims throughout the world were offended by the content of the novel.  The ‘fatwa’ lasted nine years and, throughout those years, Rushdie went into hiding.  He required full, all day protection.[11]  This took a toll on a man who was once a famous author, enjoying the success that his literary skill had bestowed upon him. Therefore, this experience changed him as a man and influenced how other writers saw the world around him.  His experience ignited a conversation about free speech and what should be protected under free speech and what goes too far.

Overview

Rushdie’s Indian background and his Western education give him a unique outlook on the immigrant experience.  This experience is translated into his novels, as his novels usually reflect upon those individuals or groups of people that sit outside the norms of society.  Rushdie’s experiences, later in life, like fame in the Western world for his literary skills and the ‘fatwa’ against his infamous novel, The Satanic Verse.  These experiences, his life story, has shaped and developed him as a writer.  He is an example of an author whose life story is inseparable from the novels that he writes.