Rushdie's shattered utopia

I began reading the book with mixed feelings -- anticipation and trepidation in equal parts. Anticipation because reading Rushdie is like sailing on uncharted seas -- anything can, and usually does, happen. One can expect magical sometimes melodramatic lyricism accompanied by violent action not to mention whirlwind changes of locale and ambience.

Trepidation because Rushdie's books are demanding and perhaps Ramadan is not quite the right time to read anything demanding! The power of his language, though long-winded, is unparalleled, but one has to concentrate on his intricate narratives and keep up with the vivid imagery borrowed from many genres and even many languages. Then again, the novel had received mixed reviews -- some literary critics and reviewers warned readers that "this novel is an important book. The status of Salman Rushdie as a writer has hardly waned, despite the disappointments of his last two novels, and his status as a totemic figure for those who support freedom of expression in an increasingly divided world will never wane. This novel has been billed as his response to the threat of fundamentalism; it is hard to imagine a more imposing subject." Therefore suitably impressed and not a little nervous I took a deep breath and began to read.

The story appeared to be simple enough -- The first act is set in 1990s Los Angeles and is about India Ophuls and her father Max, who was once a French resistance fighter and later American ambassador to India. Both father and daughter have lives of glamour in the sensuous city which is a "shadowless lotus-land full of the obscenely young, this California whose body was its temple and whose ignorance was its bliss" where Max lives in a penthouse suite in one of the city's best hotels and India takes boxing lessons at a celebrity gym and is "a woman with whom men wanted to sleep," although her slumber is disturbed by longing for the Kashmiri mother she never knew.

Max is murdered by his chauffer Shalimar and the narrative moves to an elongated flashback because, as always with Rushdie, the story spans generations and continents, with back-stories and forward jumps, and of course history lessons as well as analyses of politics and culture. So Rushdie tells us about the history of Kashmir and gives his explanation for the violence that exists there; he recounts the stories of many different characters who have feature parts in this long narrative and he even takes us back to Germany and the French resistance during World War II. All this in page after page of complicated multiple-clause sentences! It is an experience guaranteed to either exhilarate one completely or send one into a sound sleep.

From among all the changes of time and place and multiple characters the reader has to disentangle the love story of Shalimar "the Clown" who is Muslim and Boonyi the daughter of a Hindu pandit. The young lovers, caught in "flagrante delicto," are allowed to marry by the liberated and liberal elders of their remote village in Kashmir. Rushdie would have it that this marriage serves as a symbol of Kashmir's religious tolerance and a taunt to the Indian military guards keeping watch over the town who disapprove of the inter-religious marriage and want Kashmir a strictly Hindu state.

The story takes an ominous turn when Boonyi, restless and capricious, starts an affair with the married Max. This betrayal transforms Shalimar from "the sweetest, gentlest and most open of any human being" in the village into a ruthless assassin and as he plans his revenge he takes up with the Islamist guerillas who are led by the "Iron Mullah." Boonyi suffers a tragic fate as Max is overcome with guilt and abandons her even though she is pregnant with the child we have already met in the opening chapters, the rather unimaginatively named, India. Finally the action shifts back to modern day USA and the narrative winds down into an expected but nevertheless brutal end.

The story itself is implausible enough to cast a cloud of doubt and misgiving for those of us who like to believe that we know and understand South Asia, but the setting is even more difficult to appreciate. As Rushdie tells it there existed an idyllic situation -- a secular Kashmiri society where the two religions coexisted peacefully and borrowed from one another; the Muslims adapting Hindu gods and superstitions, while the Hindus learnt to include meat in their daily cooking. Rushdie wants us to believe that there is an inherent "Kashmiriyat, Kashmiriness, the belief that at the heart of Kashmiri culture there was a common bond that transcended all other differences." "We are all brothers and sisters here," Shalimar's father says, "There is no Hindu-Muslim issue."

The implausibility of religious coexistence in the torn and fractious land of Kashmir is difficult to swallow especially because, as Rushdie himself writes, the communal violence that ravages Kashmir is unimaginably brutal: "When it burst out one was not murdered by strangers. It was your neighbours, the people with whom you had shared the high and low points of life, the people with whose children your own children had been playing just yesterday. These were the people in whom the fire of hatred would suddenly light up, who would hammer on your door in the middle of the night with burning torches in their hands." It is this brutality that is more believable than the liberality shown by the village elders in permitting the marriage to take place at all and I could not help but read on with a growing sense of disappointment because ultimately "Shalimar" is a story of loss, of downfall and of tragedy both personal and national and as such has to be "accepted" in order to be enjoyed.

As one reviewer wrote: "Salman Rushdie's literary landscapes are often shattered utopias -- idyllic worlds destroyed by the outside -- and real -- world's intrusion. Often, these lands' downfalls are the result of fervent nationalism, religious fanaticism, and imperialism. Here the utopian land is Kashmir, and its destruction is a result of all of these forces. Its inhabitants too -- for Rushdie's lands are metaphors for his characters -- are raped by Indian soldiers, abused by Muslim extremists, and taken advantage of by American ambassadors. They are tragic figures whose misfortunes take them to extreme -- and often ignoble -- measures."

Was Kashmir ever the Utopia that Rushdie passionately believes it was? My dabbling in South Asian history leads me to believe that "Kashmiriyat" is as much of a myth as the dreams of the viability of an Undivided Bengal; therefore I find it difficult to accept the scenario presented by Rushdie. No doubt, like "Midnight's Children" and "Shame," "Shalimar" is an important novel, especially because it tackles the complex and serious topic of religious and national unrest; but in South Asia, Kashmir features almost daily in the news, thus making our perceptions more factual and, in some cases, even first hand so that we are less willing to accept the author's point of view in its totality.

In fact, South Asia and its problems of communal, religious and national differences, particularly the problem of Kashmir, is a many-layered subject, difficult for any writer to portray realistically, therefore while on the level of fiction "Shalimar" succeeds to some extent -- credibility is quite another matter. But then perhaps I am overly critical where Rushdie is concerned.

Yasmeen Murshed is a full-time bookworm and a part-time educationist . She is also the founder of Scholastica School.