Profaning the Sacred: Salman Rushdie

Ever since Salman Rushdie published his epoch making Midnight's Children, which was lapped up by his western reviewers and admirers as a kind of metafictional historiography of the Indian sub-continent validating even its several moral/ideological effronteries to Indian people, things have never been the same for an Indian fabulator in English. Under the explicit guise of 'Nativising the colonial idiom and narrative technique, Rushdie's mode of narration was hailed as parallel to that of the 'Panchtantra'. The present book encompasses how Rushdie was subtly representing the sub-continental reality through an angular and arcane narrativity which obviously derives from western masters and their collaborators. That's why he cared a fig for the moral, religious traditions of the represented communities of India and Pakistan, as he only slanders the social cultural realities of the Indian sub continent.
The Indian intellectuals have shown its almost parasitic dependence on the western critical canon by accepting or rejecting the works of different writers. Even, in the post colonial situation the Indian critics are eager to join the post-modernist bandwagon.
Rushdie's works are self-reflexive in a sense, as they reflect the culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia and promiscuous superficiality in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, meaning, originality and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amidst the swirl of empty signals. The book probes the writer's self conscious details wrapped up in postmodernistic techniques like metafiction, fabulation, intertextuality, parody, Pastiche, self-reflexivity and magical realism, which are provocative enough for the reader as it disturbs the set social-political cultural mode.

Dr Randeep Rana teaches English Literature at University College, M.D. University, Rohtak. He has numerous critical papers to his credit. which have been published in eminent academic journals. Presently, he is working on the 'Relevance of Panchatantra and Aesop's Fables in the Post-modern World'.