Salman Rushdie: "Shalimar the Clown"

Salman Rushdie has been the most outstanding writer associated with the Indian subcontinent ever since he received the Booker Prize for Midnight Children in 1981. In 2008 the Booker of Bookers went again to this novel. However, Rushdie became a celebrity and entered the popular imagination not because so many people read his book but because Ayatollah Khomeini called for his death in response to the 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. It seems that any novel that Rushdie writes is bound to succeed with critics - his latest Enchantress of Florence was longlisted for the 2008 Booker Prize (didn't get on the Man Booker Prize short list, though). Instead of reaching for this novel, I read Shalimar the Clown, which also did very well in the run up to the 2005 Whitbread (Costa) Book Awards.

The novel (the Polish edition is 485 pages long) starts in Los Angeles, where a very popular ambassador Ophuls is killed by his driver, the titular Shalimar the Clown. The ambassador is introduced as a father to India aka Kashmira, and it is from her perspective that the reader enters this, well, crime story. The subsequent chapters are set in the past - in Kashmir, where the love story of India's mother Boonyi and Shalimar the Clown unravels. It is later in the novel that the reader finds out the motives for the original crime, which is perceived first as a terrorist act of political character and later turns out to be a revenge of a lover spurned.

Rushdie's novel seems to be a pean to the paradisiacal past of the troubled region of Kashmir, where Indian and Pakistani ambitions were bound to enter into conflict. Shalimar the Clown and Boonyi's love story seals the peaceful coexistence of the two communities, Hindu and Muslim, living as neighbors in Kashmir. And then an American ambassador arrives and the woman successfully tempts him with her dance and finally lands with him in America as his, well, call it: misstress. Shalimar the Clown, her husband, is left behind, dishonored and vengeful. Rushdie deftly combines here an individual lost-love tragedy with the subject of Islamic radicalism - the titular hero joins a Jihadist training camp and becomes a famous terrorist because of the desire for personal vendetta. Thanks to this the novelist seems to have given a face and a life and even a tragic story to the figure of a terrorist, usually perceived as anonymous and veiled.

The novel is not an easy read - it devotes a lot of space to the portrayal of the complex situation in Kashmir, contains frequent historical references (for example, the 1965 India-Pakistan war and the acts of cruelty perpetrated on the Kashmiri people) and delves in the issue of religious fanaticism and causes of terrorism. However, Rushdie is a wonderful storyteller, craftily combining the historical-political content with a gripping story of love, betrayal and revenge. It took me a few days to read the book, including 14 hours on the train to Cracow and back, and it was definitely time well spent.