(Re)Narrating the History through Ambiguous Gender Discourse: A Study of Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown

Abstract

Salman Rushdie’s depiction of women is an area of much contention as critics down the ages have observed a strange ambiguous attitude that is central to his portrayal of women characters in his novels which makes Gayatri Spivak to observe that Rushdie’s “anxiety” to construct women in the history is an “honourable failure.” Although he portrays strong female characters, however, they are all peripheral to the plot and their actions have hardly any influence over the principal male characters of his novels. The present paper strives to analyze Rushdie’s attitude to the woman question with special reference to Shalimar the Clown as he revolts against the conventional phallocentric construction of gender as well as the religious fundamentalism that considers woman as the evil incarnate. His creation of unflinching and uncompromising women like Bhoomi/Boonyi Kaul, India/Kashmira, Firdaus Noman who defied the societal constrictions in achieving their own demands is intertwined with his aim of postcolonial historiography in construction of the history of the small village of Pachigam. A saga of rivalry and revenge over the sexual possession of a beautiful woman is interwoven with the territorial dispute of Kashmir, Rushdie’s cherished homeland. The loss of geographical paradise (Kashmir) is symbolically blended with women’s loss of autonomy and freedom. The paper aims at interrogating Rushdie’s (proto) feminist stance as on the one hand his sharp ironic tone undermines the prevalent gender discourse and on the other there is a strain of quiet submission to it.