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‘Power Smashes into Private Lives’Violence, Globalization and Cosmopolitanism in Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the ClownDr Yumna Siddiqi is an Associate Professor of English in the English Department at Middlebury College, and works on colonial and postcolonial literature. English Department, Middlebury College, Munroe Hall, Middlebury, VT 05753, USA. [e-mail:ysiddiqi{at}middlebury.edu] In Shalimar the Clown, Salman Rushdie fashions a novel of global proportions, tracing the interlacing fortunes of characters from a small Kashmiri village and from the metropolises of North America and Europe. Against the backdrop of international networks of diplomacy, capital and Islamic terrorism, and the repressive forces of the Indian state, Rushdie explores both vernacular and global articulations of cosmopolitanism. The essay argues mainly that Rushdie draws in this novel on the ideal of Kashmiriyat to imagine possibilities of conviviality across religious differences. Ultimately, he projects this ideal of a reconstituted Kashmiriyat, characterized as a vernacular form of cosmopolitanism, onto a global screen. Appealing as such a projected ideal might be, it is problematic in that it advances an elite vision of cosmopolitanism.
Key Words: cosmopolitanism • geopolitics • globalization • Kashmiriyat • pluralism • Salman Rushdie
South Asia Research, Vol. 27, No. 3,
293-309 (2007) |
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