Abstract
This chapter examines food and identity in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor’s Last Sigh—with a glance at Shalimar the Clown—reading these novels in relation to the work of Homi Bhabha, Sharmila Sen, Parama Roy, Lizzie Collingham, K.T. Achaya, and Rebecca Walkowitz. Also discussed are the novels Beach Boy by Ardashir Vakil and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, in relation to Graham Huggan’s concept of the ‘postcolonial exotic’ and to Rushdie’s work. Key themes in this chapter include migration, hybridity, and the ways in which contemporary fiction anticipates and engages with a heterogeneous global readership. The chapter also examines the Satanic Verses affair and Rushdie’s definitions of the novel as a form.
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Notes
- 1.
Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005), pp.48, 307. All subsequent page references are to this edition.
- 2.
See Supriya Nair, ‘The Meaning of India’s “Beef Lynchings”’, Atlantic, 24 July 2017, <https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/07/india-modi-beef-lynching-muslim-partition/533739/>, [accessed 20/3/2018].
- 3.
Salman Rushdie, Shame (London: Vintage, 1995), p.85. Rushdie’s background and early life have been described repeatedly, by himself and others. See Ian Hamilton’s ‘The First Life of Salman Rushdie’, New Yorker, 25 December 1995, pp.90–113; Michael Reder’s ‘Introduction’ to Conversations with Salman Rushdie (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), pp.vi–viii; Caryl Phillips’s ‘A Talk with Salman Rushdie’, Brick, 52 (Fall 1995), 15–21; and ‘Salman Rushdie’ by John Haffenden, in Novelists in Interview (London/New York: Methuen, 1985), pp.231–61. Rushdie discusses his childhood in ‘“Errata”: Or, Unreliable Narration in Midnight’s Children’ (pp.22–5) and ‘The Riddle of Midnight: India, August 1987’ (pp.26–33) in Imaginary Homelands : Essays and Criticism 1981–91, rev edn (London: Granta Books/Penguin, 1992). All subsequent page references are to this edition.
- 4.
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Vintage, 1998), p.44.
- 5.
Rushdie’s own extended account of the ‘Rushdie Affair’ can be found in Joseph Anton: A Memoir (London: Cape, 2012), which covers the period 1989–2001.
- 6.
Ayatollah Khomeini, quoted in Malise Ruthven, A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Rage of Islam (London: Chatto and Windus, 1990), p.112.
- 7.
Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Vintage, 1998), p.114. All subsequent page references are to this edition.
- 8.
Rushdie has explained the origins of the story of the ‘satanic verses’ in ‘In Good Faith’, in Imaginary Homelands , pp.393–414, and ‘From an Address Given in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, on the morning of Sunday 14th February 1993’, in Step Across This Line : Collected Non-Fiction 1992–2002 (London: Vintage, 2003), pp.249–52. All subsequent page references are to this edition. Malise Ruthven notes that The Satanic Verses ‘is a good deal less subversive of Islamic orthodoxy than other more scholarly works published in Britain’, including John Wansbrough’s Quranic Studies and Hagarism by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook. Ruthven, in discussion at a conference on the Satanic Verses controversy, held at the ICA, 19 March 1989, quoted in Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland, eds., The Rushdie File (London: Fourth Estate, 1989), pp.203–8 (p.204).
- 9.
Rushdie, ‘From an Address Delivered in King’s College Chapel’, p.250.
- 10.
Daniel Pipes, The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, The Ayatollah and the West (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1990), notes that the phrase probably comes from Sir William Muir’s The Life of Muhammad (1861), while Muslim chroniclers refer to it as the ‘gharaniq’ (‘birds’) incident, referring to the supposed description of the goddesses as ‘exalted birds’ (p.115).
- 11.
Ruthven, A Satanic Affair, p.108.
- 12.
Rushdie, ‘In Good Faith’, p.410.
- 13.
‘In Good Faith’, p.410.
- 14.
Rushdie discusses the suit in interview with David Sheff, ‘Playboy Interview: Salman Rushdie’, in Conversations with Salman Rushdie, pp.175–98 (p.196). Rushdie is careful to make clear that his narrator mentions ‘something that was often repeated about her’ [196].
- 15.
Rushdie, quoted in Sheff, both p.195.
- 16.
Kumkum Sangari, ‘The Politics of the Possible: or the Perils of Reclassification’, in Politics of the Possible: Essays on Gender, History, Narrative, Colonial English (New Delhi: Tulika, 1999), pp.1−28 (p.19).
- 17.
S. Nomanul Haq, ‘A Moslem Tells Salman Rushdie What he Did Wrong’, in Appignanesi and Maitland, eds., The Rushdie File, p.223 (p.233).
- 18.
S. Nomanul Haq, p.233.
- 19.
Anuradha Dingwaney Needham discusses this divided audience in the context of the ‘politics of identity’ in Rushdie’s novels, arguing that as well as the English-speaking audience overseas ‘the Indo-Anglian work also draws its readers from the urban middle-class of the subcontinent’ and ‘must negotiate different cultural terrains and audiences’. Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, ‘The Politics of Post-Colonial Identity in Salman Rushdie’, in Reading Rushdie, ed. M.D. Fletcher (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994), pp.145–57 (p.149).
- 20.
Quoted in Sean French’s interview with Rushdie, The Rushdie File, p.9.
- 21.
Rushdie in Jean W. Ross, ‘Contemporary Authors Interview: Salman Rushdie’, in Conversations with Salman Rushdie, ed. Michael Reder, pp.1–7 (p.2).
- 22.
Bishnupriya Ghosh, When Borne Across : Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004), p.119.
- 23.
Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated, pp.20, 21.
- 24.
Walkowitz, Born Translated, p.6.
- 25.
Walkowitz, Born Translated, p.200.
- 26.
Maria Tymoczko, ‘Post-Colonial Writing and Literary Translation’, in Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, ed. Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (London: Routledge, 1999), pp.19–40 (p.21).
- 27.
Maria Tymoczko, ‘Post-Colonial Writing and Literary Translation’, p.25.
- 28.
The politics of translation with regard to the naming of foods is also a topic addressed (primarily from the perspective of Translation Studies) in several excellent essays in a recent number of the Journal of Multicultural Discourses. ‘Translation and Food: the case of mestizo writers’ by Ma Carmen África Vidal Claramonte and Pamela Faber draws upon the Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a ‘minor’ language and Derrida’s concept of ‘relevant’ translation, as well as Homi Bhabha’s idea of the ‘third space’ and Spivak’s of the ‘in-between’ in their discussion of fiction by mestizo writers including Gloria Anzaldúa, Esmeralda Santiago, Chimamanda Adichie, Najat El Hachmi, which argues that an ‘ethical translation’ of the novels of these ‘hyphenated’ writers should refuse to translate food-related words in order to achieve ‘a translation that reflects on the multiplicity of languages and the impurity of human life; a translation that challenges monolingualism and understands language as a political instrument’. In a response essay entitled ‘On the “not translated”: rethinking translation and food in cross-cultural contexts: a response to “Translation and food: The case of mestizo writers” by Ma Carmen Africa Vidal Claramonte and Pamela Faber’, to which I shall be returning later in this chapter, Sarah Lawson Welsh explores the relevance of such an approach to Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses in order to investigate ‘how thinking theoretically about categories of the interstitial or ‘in-between’, across different disciplinary boundaries (here Food Studies, Translation Studies, and Postcolonial Studies) can led to new conceptualizations of cultural identity and translation’. In a complementary reflection upon Claramonte and Faber’s article, which draws upon the work of Roman Jakobson and reflects on her own experiences as compiler of an Italian-English-Chinese dictionary of food and nutrition, ‘Food, Language Culture and Translation’ by Giuliana Garzone examines the seemingly ‘very difficult, perhaps even unsurmountable’ technical and theoretical ‘problems’ raised by the need to translate ‘food and food-related words’ and observes, quoting Renée Desjardins in The Translator, that ‘to talk about food, and to study food and the terms and languages used to describe it ‘is to inevitably also talk about history, identity, power relations, art, policy, [and] the environment’. What all three pieces share is a valiant commitment both to addressing broad questions of the relationship between language, power, food, and identity while retaining a scrupulous sensitivity to the particular cultural, linguistic, economic, and political contexts in which the specific texts they discuss are located—a commitment also visible in the work of Bishnupriya Ghosh and which my own work hopes to emulate (although as shall be seen I do differ somewhat from Welsh in my reading of the significance the figure of Hind Sufyan in The Satanic Verses ). See Ma Carmen África Vidal Claramonte and Pamela Faber, ‘Translation and Food: The Case of Mestizo Writers’, Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 12.3 (2017), 189–204 (pp.189, 199); Sarah Lawson Welsh, ‘On the Not Translated’: Rethinking Translation and Food in Cross-Cultural Contexts: A Response to ‘Translation and Food: The Case of Mestizo Writers’ by Ma Carmen África Vidal Claramonte and Pamela Faber’, Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 12.3 (2017), 205–13 (p.206); Giuliana Garzone, ‘Food, Language, Culture and Translation’, Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 12.3 (2017), 214–21 (p.216); Renée Desjardins, ‘Food and Translation on the Table’, The Translator, 21.3 (2015), 257–70.
- 29.
Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated , pp.34, 33. She is translating and paraphrasing Barbara Cassin’s Vocabulaire européen des philosophies (2004) and reflecting upon Emily Apter’s Against World Literature : On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013).
- 30.
Salman Rushdie, ‘Imaginary Homelands’, Imaginary Homelands, pp.9–21 (p.14).
- 31.
Rushdie, ‘Is Nothing Sacred ’, in Imaginary Homelands, pp.415–29 (p.429).
- 32.
Rushdie, ‘Is Nothing Sacred ?’, pp.395, 421. The quotation comes from Fuentes’ defence of Rushdie, ‘Words Apart’, Guardian, 24 February 1989, p.245 (p, 245).
- 33.
Carlos Fuentes, ‘Words Apart’, p.245.
- 34.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics , ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, int. Wayne C. Booth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p.5.
- 35.
Rushdie, ‘Imaginary Homelands’, p.19. ‘Whole Sight’ is a reference to the opening sentence of John Fowles’s novel Daniel Martin: ‘Whole Sight; or all the rest is desolation’. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), p.7.
- 36.
Sara Suleri explores the difficulty of establishing what she calls a ‘“what happened?” interpretation’ of The Satanic Verses in ‘Salman Rushdie: Embodiments of Blasphemy, Censorships of Shame’ in The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp.174–206 (p.196).
- 37.
Saleem’s, and India’s, story can only be told by looking further back, however: the narrative begins in 1915.
- 38.
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Vintage, 1995), p.9. All subsequent page references are to this edition.
- 39.
David Lipscomb, ‘Caught in a Strange Middle Ground: Contesting History in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children’, Diaspora, 1.2 (1991), 163–89. Wolpert lists a number of passages with close similarities from Midnight’s Children and the first edition of Stanley Wolpert’s A New History of India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), (see Lipscomb, pp.183–6).
- 40.
The Bostan, named after one of the gardens of Paradise. The explosion that opens the novel seems to be based, in part, on the 1987 bomb, planted by Sikh terrorists in Canada, that destroyed an Air India Boeing 747 off South-West Ireland (see Malise Ruthven, A Satanic Affair, p.17).
- 41.
The episodes in which Gibreel appears to Ayesha in Titlipur are again based on real events which took place in Hawkes Bay in Pakistan, in February 1983, when 38 Shi’a Muslims entered the sea in the belief that it would open and allow them to continue their pilgrimage on foot to the Shi’a holy city of Kerbala in Iraq (see Malise Ruthven, A Satanic Affair, p.45).
- 42.
Quoted in David Sheff, ‘Playboy Interview: Salman Rushdie’, p.193.
- 43.
Quoted in Ameena Meer, ‘Salman Rushdie’, in Conversations with Salman Rushdie, pp.110–22 (p.114).
- 44.
Rushdie, ‘In Good Faith’, p.403.
- 45.
Rushdie, ‘In Good Faith’, p.394.
- 46.
Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (London: Vintage, 1996), pp.226, 230. All subsequent page references are to this edition.
- 47.
Salman Rushdie, The Golden House (London: Cape, 2017), p.39.
- 48.
‘Saag’ means ‘[l]eafy Greens including Spinach’ according to Joyce P. Westrip’s An ABC of Indian Food (Totnes, Devon: Prospect Books, 1996), p.62. ‘Masala’: ‘Mixed Spices’ (Westrip, p.45). ‘Masala films’ refers, in India, to popular movies made in Mumbai, characterized by the melodrama and exuberance that Moraes also detects in his own story. It is also a pun, since Moraes’s spicy story is also the story of a family that has amassed their wealth through trading in spices. The second of the four parts or sections into which The Moor’s Last Sigh is divided is entitled ‘Malabar Masala’, in tribute to Mumbai’s Malabar Hill (the upmarket neighbourhood to which the narrator’s family and the novel’s action now moves) and to the narrative’s celebration of ‘Bombay’ as a place where (in Moraes’ mouth-watering metaphors) the ‘hottest tales’ and the ‘juiciest-bitchiest yarns’ jostle for attention, the events which take place on Malabar Hill in this second section of the novel offering a ‘yet-more-fabulous counterpart’ to the ‘pepper’n’spices goings-on’ on the Malabar Coast recounted in the first section of the novel [all quotations 128].
- 49.
To echo Catherine Gallagher in ‘The Potato in the Materialist Imagination’, p.112.
- 50.
Rushdie, ‘Errata’, pp.22–5.
- 51.
Rushdie, ‘Errata’, p.25.
- 52.
See Kumkum Sangari, ‘The Politics of the Possible’, pp.11–2. M.D. Fletcher, ‘The Politics of Salman Rushdie’s Fiction’, in Reading Rushdie, ed. M.D. Fletcher, pp.1–22 (p.13). David W. Price, ‘Salman Rushdie’s “Use and Abuse of History” in Midnight’s Children’, Ariel, 25.2 (1994), 91–107. Those critics who have examined the role of food and eating in Midnight’s Children in detail include Parama Roy, who offers in Alimentary Tracts : Appetites, Aversions and the Postcolonial a reading of the novel which reflects suggestively on the relationship between olfaction and ingestion (pp.154–6).
- 53.
K.T. Achaya, The Food Industries of British India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), p.162.
- 54.
K.T. Achaya, The Food Industries of British India, p.161.
- 55.
K.T. Achaya, The Food Industries of British India, p.161.
- 56.
‘Garam’ means ‘hot’. Westrip, p.29, 45.
- 57.
Parama Roy, Alimentary Tracts, p.156.
- 58.
Saleem claims his Aunt Alia also has this ability, ‘raised to the level of an art-form’ but that both are ‘outdone’ by ‘Saleem Sinai, pickler-in-chief at the Braganza Pickle works’ [all 330].
- 59.
Address delivered 6 December 1985, published as ‘My Brother’s Tragic Sense’, in The Spectator, 24 January 1987, pp.22–3 (p.22).
- 60.
V.S. Naipaul, ‘My Brother’s Tragic Sense’, p.22. Naipaul’s assertion that ‘corruption’ issues solely from ‘degraded’ (and implicitly non-Western) countries is, of course, problematic.
- 61.
Michael Gorra, After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p.148.
- 62.
Aires also likes kedgeree, that typical dish of Anglo-India (p.54). For the history of kedgeree, see David Burton, The Raj at Table (London/Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993), pp.83–4.
- 63.
Sharmila Sen, ‘Eating India: Literary and Cultural Consumptions of the Subcontinent’, (unpublished doctoral thesis, Yale, 2000), p.91.
- 64.
Sen, pp.91, 133. Sen notes but does not discuss similar ‘internalizations’ in Fawzia Afzal-Khan’s Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 1993), p.157; Catherine Cundy’s Salman Rushdie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp.27–8; Jean-Pierre Durix’s The Writer Written: The Artist and Creation in New Literatures in English (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), p.117; and the example discussed earlier from Michael Gorra’s After Empire. The quotation from Aijaz Ahmad can be found in In Theory: Classes , Nations, Literatures (London/New York: Verso, 1992), p.128. That from Aruna Srivastava comes from ‘“The Empire Writes Back”: Language and History in Shame and Midnight’s Children’, in Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, ed. Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1991), pp.65–78 (p.77).
- 65.
Rustom Bharucha, ‘Rushdie’s Whale’, in Reading Rushdie, pp.159–71 (p.160). David Birch, ‘Postmodernist Chutneys’, Textual Practice, 5.1 (Spring 1991), l−7.
- 66.
Anita Mannur, Culinary Fictions, p.3. Sen , pp.4, 2. Sen’s other texts are George Francklin Atkinson’s Curry and Rice on Forty Plates (1859), David Dabydeen’s The Counting House (1996) and Anita Desai’s In Custody (1984).
- 67.
Sen, pp.2, 134.
- 68.
Indeed, Saleem never actually claims to have done this. While Sen detects Rushdie’s metaphors being internalized by his critics, her argument itself seems to draw this claim from the criticism surrounding Rushdie, rather than the novel or its narrator.
- 69.
Anita Mannur, Culinary Fictions, p.112.
- 70.
Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, p.55.
- 71.
The same is true to a lesser extent of Sen’s discussion of this topic, which drawing upon Jack Goody’s Cooking, Cuisine and Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) uses the history of Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce in Britain to illustrate the transformations that chutneys undergo over time—becoming corrupted but tastier—but which primarily focuses on the relationship between Rushdie’s novel and other literary texts. Sen, pp.110–1.
- 72.
Larousse Gastronomique, p.301. Larousse also distinguishes between the cooked and preserved chutneys of the type Saleem makes—‘A savoury preserve made of fruits or vegetables (or a mixture of the two) cooked in vinegar with sugar and spices until it has the consistency of jam’—and fresh chutneys, made primarily as appetizers to accompany particular dishes in Indian cooking (p.301).
- 73.
Collingham, Curry: A Biography, p.147.
- 74.
David Burton, The Raj at Table, p.218.
- 75.
McNair, All about Pickling, p.3.
- 76.
Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Biography, pp.147–8.
- 77.
K.T. Achaya, The Food Industries of British India, p.158, 161–2. Achaya defines and distinguishes chutneys, murabbas, and pickles on pp.161–2.
- 78.
In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Bombay is described as ‘the bastard child of a Portuguese-English wedding, and yet the most Indian of Indian Cities’ (p.350).
- 79.
Nigel Hanklyn, Hanklyn-Janklyn (New Delhi: Banyan Books, 1997), p.169.
- 80.
F.A. Steel and G. Gardiner , The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook , p.55. Having originally been used in a Mughal context, the term furthermore alludes to or invokes a palimpsest of imperial histories.
- 81.
Sen notes this in the section of her dissertation on George Francklin Atkinson but does not relate it to her argument about Rushdie (Sen, p.84).
- 82.
Rushdie, ‘Outside the Whale’, p.88.
- 83.
Rushdie, ‘Outside the Whale’, p.90.
- 84.
Burton, p.94.
- 85.
Rupert Croft-Cooke, English Cooking : A New Approach (London: W.H. Allen, 1960), p.75. This extract also appears in Burton , pp.94–5. On the history of mulligatawny soup, see also Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Biography, p.120.
- 86.
Rushdie notes that The Raj Quartet and The Far Pavilions are both based on ‘what, to be polite, one must call borrowing’. Rushdie, ‘Outside the Whale’, p.89.
- 87.
Rushdie, ‘Outside the Whale’, p.101.
- 88.
Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, p.82.
- 89.
Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp.5, 15, 1.
- 90.
Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic , p.60. Having quoted six separate passages discussing food from Beach Boy—which he describes as ‘a long ode to boyish hunger’—Updike asks: ‘Is India trying to fill with delicacies the void in our young hero, whom a confusingly hybrid culture has left unconsoled and bewildered, or is the author, as he envisions tropical fruit in gray London, trying to fill himself?’. John Updike, ‘Mother Tongues’, New Yorker (24 June 1997), 156–61 (pp.160, 161).
- 91.
Ardashir Vakil, Beach Boy (London: Penguin, 1998), pp.60, 75, 147, 68, 131. All subsequent page references are to this edition.
- 92.
I borrow the terms ‘cultural’ and ‘linguistic competency’ from Rebecca Walkowitz’s discussion of the fiction of Jamaica Kincaid in Born Translated, p.185.
- 93.
Rebecca Walkowitz, Born Translated, p.185.
- 94.
A helpful guide to the restaurant culture of Mumbai is offered in Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004), which explains that ‘Iranis came to Bombay around the turn of the twentieth century’, ‘Zoroastrians from the smaller villages of Persia’ who ‘began as dealers in provisions and branched out into bakeries and eateries’. Irani restaurants, Mehta notes, serve ‘the simplest of menus: tea, coffee, bread and butter (always Polson), salted biscuits, cakes, hard bread, buttered buns, hard-boiled eggs, buns with mincemeat, berry pilaf and mutton biryani. […] They are a whole world away, in price and atmosphere, from the Punjabi and Chinese restaurants that are now all the rage among the middle class.’ Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (London: Review, 2005), pp.285, 285–6. On the history of Chinese food in India and its typical dishes (including those Cyrus craves), see also Sharanya Deepak, ‘Inside the Birthplace of Indian-Chinese Cuisine’, Vice, 17 April 2017, <https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/mgykeb/inside-the-birthplace-of-indian-chinese-cuisine> [accessed 26 March 2018]. Aadam Braganza in Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh includes both kinds of restaurant in the lengthy itemization he offers in that novel of Mumbai dining options for the prosperous and in-the-know: ‘A quick businesslike in-and-out at an Irani joint—Bombay Al or Pyrke’s at Flora Fountain? No, we need less noise, and to talk properly one must be able to linger. Chinese, then? Yes, but impossible to choose between the Nanking and the Kamling’ [353]. The socio-economic resonances of Adam’s name-dropping and of his self-conscious gastronomic knowingness are explored by Bishnupriya Ghosh in When Borne Across , p.89.
- 95.
Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, p.77.
- 96.
Both Huggan and Jusdanis are quoted and discussed by Neil Lazarus in The Postcolonial Unconscious , who warns that the position of both critics has a tendency in his view to ‘dissolve the difference between Roy’s novel and the exoticized image of it projected’ by its ‘cosmopolitan’ global readership. G. Jusdanis, ‘World Literature: The Unbearable Lightness of Thinking Globally’, Diaspora, 12.1 (2003), 103–30 (p.118). Lazarus , The Postcolonial Exotic , p.211. For a fuller discussion of these issues Lazarus directs his own readers to Sarah Brouillette’s Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace . Brouillette observes that there has ‘recently been a burgeoning of interest in the interconnected symbolic and material economies that arise given emerging global markets for cultural goods’, and not two studies as ‘particularly compelling attempts to encourage conversation about the relevance of this topic to literary study’: James English’s The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and The Circulation of Literary Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Pascale Casanova’s The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), first published in French as Le Republique mondiale des lettres in 1999. We might add to this list Rebecca Walkowitz’s Born Translated .
- 97.
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (London: Flamingo, 1997), pp.104, 167, 168. All subsequent page references are to this edition.
- 98.
Consistent with this reading is Bishnupriya Ghosh’s observation that ‘On several occasions following her Booker triumph, Roy studiously unlinked herself from Rushdie’s celebrity by highlighting her physical location in India’ and suggesting that ‘India is an everyday experience for her, not the extraordinary, hyperbolic and fantastic India vibrant in Rushdie’s writing’. Bishnupriya Ghosh, When Borne Across , p.64. For a specific instance of this, see Jason Cowley, ‘Why We Chose Arundhati’, India Today (27 October 1997), p.27. Rushdie’s response to such comments can be found in Joseph Anton: A Memoir, p.523.
- 99.
Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things : Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p.158.
- 100.
Rushdie responds to the charge that he prefers this anglicized version of his name in his essay ‘In Good Faith’, pp.405–6.
- 101.
Anon., ‘“Simon Rushton” aka Salman Rushdie’, Impact International, 28 October 1988, p.15.
- 102.
Quoted in David Sheff, p.192. ‘“The flesh of the swine” was not eaten in the Rushdie household’, Rushdie confirms in Joseph Anton: A Memoir, ‘nor would you find on their dining table the similarly proscribed “scavengers of the earth and the sea”; no Goan prawn curry on this dining table’ (p.26).
- 103.
Rushdie’s own experience of eating pork for the first time as a schoolboy at Rugby is described in very similar terms in Joseph Anton : A Memoir, in which Rushdie consistently refers to himself in the third person: ‘By the end of the Latin lesson he was a hard-line atheist and to prove it, he marched determinedly into the school tuckshop during break and bought himself a ham sandwich. The flesh of the swine passed his lips for the first time that day, and the failure of the Almighty to strike him dead with a thunderbolt proved to him what he had long suspected: that there was nobody up there with thunderbolts to hurl’ (p.32).
- 104.
Salman Rushdie, ‘The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance’, Times, 3 July 1982, p.8 (p.8).
- 105.
Other Chamchas appear in Midnight’s Children , where Saleem’s aunt is driven ‘certifiably insane by a life’ of ‘being a chamcha’ to her husband’s superiors in the Indian government (p.391). In pre-Independence India, in The Moor’s Last Sigh , Aurora Zogoiby accuses the Congress of ‘acting like chamchas, toadies’ (p.133), for calling off a strike of Naval personnel.
- 106.
Ian Hamilton, ‘The First Life of Salman Rushdie’, p.94. This is confirmed by Rushdie in Joseph Anton : A Memoir, which records that ‘At night Anis got drunk and in the small hours would shake his son awake to shout at him in language so filthy that it didn’t seem possible to the boy that his father could even know such words’ (p.21).
- 107.
Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, p.21.
- 108.
Naipaul’s novel was published in 1987. Rushdie’s review appears as ‘V.S. Naipaul’ in Imaginary Homelands, pp.148–51. The two novels are also compared by Susheila Nasta in Home Truths. Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp.155–170, and by Michael Wood in ‘Enigmas and Homelands’, in On Modern British Fiction, ed. Zachary Leader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp.77–92.
- 109.
Rushdie, ‘V.S. Naipaul’, p.148.
- 110.
Rushdie, ‘V.S. Naipaul’, p.151.
- 111.
Rushdie, quoted in W.L. Webb, ‘Salman Rushdie: Satanic Verses’, Conversations with Salman Rushdie, pp.87–100 (p.92).
- 112.
V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (London: Penguin, 1987), p.105. All subsequent page references are to this edition.
- 113.
J.R. Ackerley, Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal (London: Penguin, 1983). The quotation comes from the introductory ‘explanation’.
- 114.
Rushdie, ‘V.S. Naipaul’, p.148.
- 115.
The bananas also echo those taken by Biswas from the Pundit Jairam, in A House for Mr Biswas, and which cause him so much grief.
- 116.
Quoted in Ian Hamilton, p.94.
- 117.
Rushdie, ‘In Good Faith’, p.394.
- 118.
‘Gulab Jaman’: ‘Deep-Fried Milk-Powder Dough Balls Steeped in Rose-Scented Syrup’ (Westrip, p.30) ‘Chaat’: ‘Teatime Fruit or Vegetable Snack’ (Westrip, p.21). ‘Shaandaar’: ‘Outstanding, Brilliant, Delicious’ (The Satanic Verses, p.248).
- 119.
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, I.670–1.
- 120.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, XV.170–4.
- 121.
His nose the Deccan Peninsula, his birthmarks the two wings of Pakistan [231–2]
- 122.
Homi Bhabha , ‘How Newness Enters the World: Postmodern Space, Postcolonial Times, and the Trials of Cultural Translation’, in The Location of Culture (London/New York: Routledge, 1994), pp.212–35 (p.224). Verene E. Shepherd and Glen L. Richards, in their ‘Introduction’ to Questioning Creole: Creolization Discourses in Caribbean Culture, suggest another possible source of inspiration for Bhabha in his formulation of the concept of hybridity in the work of Kamau Brathwaite, whose influential use and development of the term creolization was discussed in my chapter “‘Our Little Bastard World’: Food, History, and Identity in the Novels of V.S. Naipaul”. ‘Bhabha’s concept of “hybridity”’, they note, ‘seems to share in the spirit and poetic expression of Brathwaite’s work when he writes that if ‘the “effect of colonial power is seen to be the production of hybridisation rather than the noisy command of colonialist authority or the silent repression of native traditions, then an important change of perspective occurs”’. See Verene A. Shepherd and Glen L. Richards, ‘Introduction’, in Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture, pp.xi–xxvii (pp.xiv–xv) and Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and authority under a tree outside Delhi, May 1817’ in the Location of Culture (London/New York: Routledge, 1994), pp.102–22. Marika Preziuso has warned, however, in an article entitled ‘Mapping the Lived-Imagined Caribbean: Postcolonial Geographies in the Literature of the “Diasporic” Caribbean’, of assuming that the historically specific experiences of the peoples of the Caribbean can be used straightforwardly to provide ‘the ideal symbolic referents for today’s globalization of cultures and peoples’ and argues that ‘Caribbeanness is not a condition that can be translated wholesale from one cultural landscape to another’ without ‘slippages of meanings’—a timely reminder that we should remain attentive to what may be lost or overlooked when we attempt to generalize or theorize globally from historically and culturally specific experiences, and perhaps also when we attempt to align too neatly a culturally specific concept like Brathwaite’s use of the term ‘creolization’ with a concept which is much more widely roaming and less grounded in a specific set of historical circumstances, like Bhabha’s ‘hybridity’. Marika Preziuso, ‘Mapping the Lived-Imagined Caribbean: Postcolonial Geographies in the Literature of the “Diasporic” Caribbean’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 31.2 (2010), 145–60. See also William Ghosh’s article ‘The Formalist Genesis of “Postcolonial Reading”: Brathwaite, Bhabha and A House for Mr Biswas’ , which examines Brathwaite’s reading of A House for Mr Biswas in relation to Bhabha’s reading of the same novel, contextualizing Brathwaite’s use of the term creolization and Bhabha’s use of the term hybridity suggestively in relation to their broader respective political, intellectual, and historical moments and to each other. William Ghosh, ‘The Formalist Genesis of “Postcolonial Reading”: Brathwaite, Bhabha and A House for Mr Biswas’, ELH, 84.3 (2017), 765–89.
- 123.
Sarah Lawson Welsh, ‘On the Not Translated’, pp.206, 205.
- 124.
Rushdie, ‘An Unimportant Fire’, in Imaginary Homelands, pp.139–42 (all p.139) First published as ‘The Council Housing the Kills’, Guardian, 3 December 1984, p.12.
- 125.
The Moor’s Last Sigh enjoins us to ‘[r]emember: Cochin, Travancore, Mysore, Hyderabad were technically not part of British India; they were Indian States, with their own princes’—although the novel also warns us not to ‘confuse […] appearance with reality’ or forget who were the ‘true rulers’ in charge of such states. Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, pp.17, 18.
- 126.
Rushdie, quoted in Caryl Phillips’s ‘A Talk with Salman Rushdie’, Brick, 52 (Fall 1995), 20–1.
- 127.
The Moor’s Last Sigh criticizes ‘Sir V. Naipaul’ for his response to the destruction of the Babri Masjid. He called it an ‘awakening to history’ (p.363).
- 128.
Rushdie makes this point explicitly to Phillips, p.21.
- 129.
Quoted in Phillips, p.20.
- 130.
Burton, The Raj at Table, p.1.
- 131.
Stanley Wolpert, A New History of India, 3rd edn (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p.135.
- 132.
Wolpert, p.135.
- 133.
Miranda returns from market ‘bearing immense claw-clacking baskets of shellfish and finny-toothed packets of shark’ [156]. On the impact of the Portuguese presence in Goa on Indian cuisine, see Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Biography, pp.46–79.
- 134.
Ato Quayson, Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process?, p.83.
- 135.
V.S. Naipaul, India: A Million Mutinies Now (London: Vintage, 1998), pp.15–28. In India: A Wounded Civilization, Naipaul refers to the Shiv Sena’s ‘positive regenerating effects’. V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization (London: Penguin, 1979), p.114. By supporting the destruction of the mosque in Ayodhya, and failing to denounce extremism, Rushdie states outright in his essay ‘March 2002: God in Gujarat’, ‘V.S. Naipaul makes himself a fellow-traveller of fascism and disgraces the Nobel award’, in Step Across This Line, pp.401–3 (p.403). Rushdie is referring to spoken comments made by Naipaul in India prior to the riots.
- 136.
Parama Roy, Alimentary Tracts, pp.156–7. Her other key example is Mira Nair’s film Mississippi Masala (1991).
- 137.
Meenakshi Mukherjee, The Perishable Empire : Essays on Indian Writing in English (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), p.200. Other spice-inspired chapter titles in Divakuruni’s novel include ‘Asafoetida’, ‘Ginger’, ‘Cinnamon’, ‘Neem’, ‘Red Chilli’, and ‘Fennel’—and the narrator herself is named Tilo—‘short for Tilottama, for I am named after the sun-burnished sesame seed, spice of nourishment’. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices (London: Doubleday, 1997), p.5. All subsequent page references are to this edition.
- 138.
Mukherjee, The Perishable Empire, pp.200–1.
- 139.
Anita Mannur, Culinary Fictions, p.95.
- 140.
Anita Mannur, Culinary Fictions, p.111.
- 141.
Lizzie Collingham, The Hungry Empire , p.xv. Something similar might also be said of the Portuguese and their empire, the impact of which on the spice trade in the Indian Ocean and beyond was violently disruptive and transformative and of which the lasting legacies in Cochin includes the novel’s Da Gama family themselves. It was also, as Lizzie Collingham records, ‘by means of the Portuguese that the chilli pepper found its way to India [from the Americas]’. ‘It is not known exactly when chillies arrived on the Malabar coast’, she notes, ‘but thirty years after Vasco da Gama first set foot on Indian soil [in 1498] there were at least three different types of chilli plant growing around Goa’—a fact which adds another layer of historical resonances to the literal and metaphorical references to heat as a signature aspect of Indian cuisine (at least in the global imagination) already noted in The Moor’s Last Sigh. Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Biography , pp.52–3. Likewise when Moraes describes himself as a ‘cathjew nut’ [104], he is not only punning on the fact that he is the descendant both of Jews and of Catholics but also on the cashew nut’s history as an ingredient now fully integrated into Indian cooking but first introduced to India by the Portuguese. Collingham (like The Moor’s Last Sigh, which describes Quilon (now Kollam in Kerala) as ‘cashewtown’ [36]) observes that cashew trees ‘still grow around Goa and further south along the Keralan coast’. (Collingham , Curry, p.71).
- 142.
Lizzie Collingham, The Hungry Empire, pp.81–2.
- 143.
Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, p.37.
- 144.
Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, p.38.
- 145.
Salman Rushdie, ‘Hobson-Jobson’, in Imaginary Homelands, pp.81–3 (p.83).
- 146.
Henry Yule and A.C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary (Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1996), p.476.
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Vlitos, P. (2018). The Chutnification of History and the Limits of Gastronomic Pluralism: Food, Identity, and the Commodification of Culture in the Novels of Salman Rushdie. In: Eating and Identity in Postcolonial Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96442-3_5
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