No Title
Kumkum Sangari
Shame by Salman Rushdie Rupa & Co, Delhi, 1984, 287 pp., 30.00
Jan-Feb 1984, volume 8, No 4

If, as Salman Rushdie once said, to conquer English is to make ourselves free, then in Shame he has certainly shed all awkwardness, archaism and colonial constraint, and deser¬ves to inhabit the airy realm of freedom. Though it is witty, satirical, innovative, eminently readable, the novel is shackled by an inadequate political vision and brittle, insufficient fabulation that scarcely lives up to his own aspirations. For it would not be fair to ask it of Rushdie (how could we, in this age of dreary Indo-Anglian fiction) unless he seemed to be asking it of himself. However, to continue to be fair, the parti¬cular constellation Rushdie represents—some sense of political responsibility, the use of indigenous literary modes, the acceptance of internation¬alism (a legacy of modernism and cultural displacement) and the placing of himself in the ‘international’ tradition of the novel, the acknowledged status of emigre (which need not be taken too literally con¬sidering the half-understood westernization of Indo-Angli¬an writers), the attempt to make a positive value of cul¬tural hybridization—is of some importance, both in its successes and in its failures.

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