The Empire Knights Back? Reflections on Salman Rushdie's Knighthood
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ABSTRACT:
EXTRACT
On 16 June 2007, Queen Elizabeth II, the reigning monarch of Britain and head of the Commonwealth, named the recipients of her 80th birthday honours, and among them was – honoured for his ‘services to literature’ - Salman Rushdie, born in Bombay to Indian parents, today a resident of New York City and, by a twist of colonial history, a British citizen.
As the Times of India pointed out, the monarch also honoured a clutch of other non-resident Indians, but it is Rushdie’s that will prove the most controversial. Officially, he is now Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie, a Knight Bachelor, and his wife Padma is now Lady Rushdie.
Rushdie has had two waves of fame in his career, for two different novels and for totally different reasons in each case. In 1981, in the literary world, ‘Midnight’s Children’ catapulted him to prominence and instantly became a canonic work, enshrined as such by both general readers and postcolonial critics, of the wave of postcolonial literature that is often placed under the heading ‘The Empire writes back’ (indeed, that very phrase was coined by Rushdie himself). Seven years later, in the wider and non-literary world, ‘The Satanic Verses’ brought him a very different kind of fame, for the reasons that the whole world knows, or thinks it knows (including that part of it that doesn’t read literature).
Unusually so for even a controversial writer, Rushdie is the subject of polemic on both right and left. To some on the right, he is an ungrateful troublemaker who, by attacking Margaret Thatcher or institutional racism in Britain, has bitten the hand that fed him (notably with police protection). To some on the left, he is, with his acerbic comments on issues such as Islamic dress or press freedom in Denmark, a traitor to the new absolutes of cultural relativism and ‘respect for religion’. To others still, he has become an icon – if not THE icon - of secularism and free speech in the contemporary world.
The knighthood seems to mark an outbreak of peace between Rushdie and the British establishment, but some of those who admire ‘Midnight’s Children’ must surely be asking if it is really appropriate for a post-colonial, post-imperial writer to accept accolades from that establishment.
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