The works of the Indian author Salman Rushdie often focused on outrages of history and particularly of religions. His father was a businessman who had been educated at Cambridge University in England. Rushdie's childhood was happy and he was always surrounded by books.
Rushdie remembers wanting to be a writer at age five. He was sent to England at age fourteen to attend Rugby, a private school. His fellow students tormented him both because he was Indian and because he had no athletic ability. Rushdie later attended Cambridge, as his father had done, and his experience there was much more positive.
He received his master's degree in history in After a brief career as an actor he worked as a free-lance advertising copywriter in England from to The experience of expatriation living outside one's country of birth , which he shared with many writers of his generation who were born in the Third World, is an important theme in his work. Rushdie's first published book, Grimus , was classified as science fiction by many critics.
It is the story of Flapping Eagle, a Native American who is given the gift of immortality eternal life and goes on a journey to find the meaning of life. Although the book received positive reviews, it did not sell very well. Rushdie continued working as a part-time ad writer over the five years it took him to write Midnight's Children.
He quit his job after finishing the novel without even knowing if it would be published. Released first in the United States in , Midnight's Children is in part the story of a baby who was not only the result of an extramarital affair an affair between a married person and someone other than his or her spouse but who was then switched at birth with a second child from a similar situation.
The hero is also caught between the two great Indian religions, Islam and Hinduism. Finally, he spends his life moving back and forth between the Indian republic and Pakistan. His work often denotes the many ways that Eastern and Western cultures connect and overlap, while also exploring the vast differences and gulfs of understanding. His father, Anis Ahmed Rushdie, was a lawyer and businessman, and his mother, Negin Bhatt, was a teacher. His father was expelled from the Indian Civil Services over a controversy regarding his birth date, but went on to become a successful businessman, settling in Bombay.
Rushdie was one of four children, and the only son. As a child, he attended a private school in Bombay, and then attended The Rugby School, a boarding school located in Warwickshire, England. He earned an M.
His family had moved to Pakistan in , so Rushdie lived there for a short time, where he worked as a writer for television before moving back to England. In , Rushdie published his first work, Grimus , a science fiction novel about a man who drinks a magic potion and becomes immortal, and then spends the next years searching for his sister and trying on different lives and identities.
He eventually finds his way to an alternate world where immortals weary of life but not ready for death live under a rigid, sinister system. A magical realist story about a group of men and women born at exactly midnight on August 15, —the moment India became a sovereign nation—and are gifted with special powers as a result. The novel won the Booker Prize in , as well as the special award The Best of the Booker in and Using a similar style and approach, Rushdie explored the artificial division of culture and territory, setting his story in a country that is almost certainly meant to be Pakistan.
In , Rushdie published his most famous novel, The Satanic Verses. The novel was acclaimed by literary critics as a return to form. The novel tells the story of two Indian Muslim men, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, trapped on a hijacked airplane. Farishta is suffering from what appears to be schizophrenia.
When the plane explodes, both are miraculously saved and transformed—Farishta into the angel Gabriel, Chamcha into a devil. As the two men try to return to their lives and survive ordeals, they become antagonists, and Farishta experiences several vivid dreams or visions. As a result, the narrative of the two men serves as a frame story organizing these visions.
This depiction enraged Muslim communities, who viewed it as irreverent and blasphemous, and protests began to mount. In August , a man named Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh died when a bomb he was fashioning inside a book exploded prematurely.
An obscure terrorist group called the Organization of the Mujahidin of Islam claimed the bomb had been intended for Rushdie.
He published a children's book in , titled Haroun and the Sea of Stories. He next published a collection of essays, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism , and a collection of short stories, East, West Then came another novel, The Moor's Last Sigh , which used a family's history to explore the activities of right-wing Hindu terrorists, and the cultural connections between India and the Iberian peninsula. The Ground Beneath Her Feet was Rushdie's sixth novel, re-imagining the birth of modern rock music.
His latest novel Shalimar the Clown , published in ; it was a finalist for the Whitbread Book Awards. In , he published a memoir of his days in hiding, Joseph Anton. This upset many Muslims who previously regarded Rushdie as a strong figure in the Muslim community.
Combined with the unpopularity and assassination attempts that followed the publication of The Satanic Verses, Rushdie issued a statement in claiming that he had renewed his Muslim faith. He denounced the blasphemous ideas that he wrote in The Satanic Verses and said that he was committed to better understanding the religion and how it fit into the larger world narrative.
He also issued a request for the publisher to never again produce new copies of The Satanic Verses. However, in , he admitted the tactic was only a survival mechanism and that he still does not subscribe to any religious beliefs. The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has no intention, nor is going to take any action whatsoever to threaten the life of the author of the Satanic Verses, or anybody associated with that work, nor will it encourage or assist anybody to do so.
We need all of us, whatever our background, to constantly examine the stories inside which and with which we live. We all live in stories, so called grand narratives. Nation is a story.
Family is a story. Religion is a story. Community is a story. We all live within and with these narratives. And it seems to me that a definition of any living vibrant society is that you constantly question those stories. That you constantly argue about the stories. In fact the arguing never stops. The argument itself is freedom. And through that argument you change your mind sometimes. In an ideal world you could reunite the Pakistan-occupied part of Kashmir with the Indian-occupied part and restore the old borders.
You could have both India and Pakistan agreeing to guarantee those borders, demilitarise the area, and to invest in it economically.
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