Salman Rushdie: A Biography
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay in 1947, just months before the Partition of British India. His father Ahmed was a businessman and his mother Negin was a teacher. He grew up loving the escape literature and film offered, and he wrote his first story when he was ten years old. He encountered some of his earliest influences at a young age, including The Wizard of Oz, Superman comics, and Bollywood movies.
He left India at the age of fourteen to attend Rugby School in England, while his family left India for Pakistan. Of his time at Rugby, he says: “I had three things wrong, I was foreign, I was clever and I was bad at games, and it seemed to me that I could have made any two of those mistakes and I’d have been alright. . . . If I’d been any two of those things I’d have got away with it—three was unforgivable.” He then studied history at King’s College, Cambridge, and after graduation, he earned a living working in advertising while writing his first novel Grimus.
The positive reception his second novel, Midnight’s Children, received allowed Rushdie became a full-time writer, crafting vivid novels about life in and out of modern India and Pakistan. The success of Midnight’s Children made Rushdie the voice of Indians writing in England, promoting fellow writers and editing the volume Indian Writing in English.
With the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988, Rushdie became the target of a fatwa, or a religious edict, supported by Iran’s religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini. Since the fatwa called for his death, Rushdie went into hiding in February 1989. Many bookstores in the U.K. and the United States received threats regarding his book. The Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses was stabbed to death, and both the Italian translator and the Norwegian publisher were attacked but survived. Protected by the Special Branch, Rushdie moved from one secure house to another, communicating this his friends and family via secure telephone line and fax. In 1999, the fatwa was finally lifted, and Rushdie was able to appear in public again.
In 2005, Salman Rushdie joined the faculty of Emory University as Distinguished Writer in Residence. He also placed his archive at Emory’s Woodruff Library, which will open to the public in Spring 2010.Midnight’s Children and The Booker Prize
Rushdie’s second novel, Midnight’s Children, depicts the condition of India through the voice and family of Saleem Sinai, a child born at the moment of India’s independence. His momentous birth endows he and 1001 other children born close to the stroke of midnight with special powers. Saleem believes his birth, marked by a letter from Prime Minister Nehru, determine that his fate is bound up with the nation’s.
Written in Saleem’s irreverent, humorous voice, Rushdie fictionalizes India’s recent political and social history. Through the device of a family saga, Saleem chronicles a military coup in Pakistan, the war between Pakistan and India, and Indira Gandhi’s Emergency.
Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize in 1981, the Booker of Bookers in 1993, and Best of the Booker in 2008. It has been adapted for the stage, and attempts have been made to adapt it for television but have failed. Currently, Rushdie is working with filmmaker Deepa Mehta to turn the novel into a film.Many themes in Rushdie’s writing weave themselves through his work, although history always plays an integral role in establishing the framework of his stories. According to Rushdie: “Literature revalues history by shifting the point of view, by demystifying, by seeing what was always there to be seen, what we would have seen if the conjurers of power had not been trying so hard to distract our attention.” History provides Rushdie with the backdrop to develop motifs exploring the complexities of identity, migration, politics, and love.
Major Works
Grimus (1975)
Midnight’s Children (1981)
Shame (1983)
The Jaguar Smile (1987)
The Riddle of Midnight (documentary film) (1987)
The Satanic Verses (1988)
Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)
Imaginary Homelands (1991)
The Wizard of Oz (1992)
East, West (1994)
The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995)
Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing (edited with Elizabeth West) (1997)
The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999)
Fury (2001)
Step Across this Line (2002)
Shalimar the Clown (2005)
The Enchantress of Florence (2008)
Related Links
Overview of Rushdie’s Life and Works
Rushdie on The Colbert Report
David Cronenberg Interviews Rushdie
Salon Magazine Interview of Rushdie
NY Times Featured Author: Salman Rushdie.
Salman Rushdie Archive at Emory University
Author: Kathleen Hanggi, August 2009
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