Shalimar the Clown (Book Review)

I find it a slight problem to prepare my comments on any Salman Rushdie Novel as I grapple with the oft occurring issue of where to begin from and how to end what I have started. Presence of this issue acutely describes my ineffectiveness in conjuring apt words and phrases to encompass the entire essence/worlds/themes that Rushdie packages into a single story-line. Rushdie’s stories, (atleast in those ones that I have read so far), hop through continents and bring out a well trussed story of what otherwise could be parallel individual stories, never to intersect each other. One may think so of many such intersections, but then again Rushdie plants the intersections at important historical junctions, thus rallying his entire learnings as a student of history to full effect.

Shalimar the Clown, also does not escape from what has become the Rushdie Signature of allegorical interweaving of storylines placed within factual historical contexts. But while Midnight’s Children was tragically humane in its telling despite the vast swathes of Indian history on which it was pitched across, Shalimar the Clown gets overshadowed by the historical context against which it is placed, and in a manner that might perhaps lead one to assume Rushdie rushed forward to tell the story of Kashmir and sprinkled characters as an after-thought to not make the novel a dry political commentary. However, Rushdie’s prose has never had haters, except the ones who hate deconstructing metaphors and picking up dictionaries, and it emerges strongly in Shalimar as well. However, in Shalimar, his prose shines with a slightly lesser consistent intensity. Nevertheless, the effect of his metaphorical language never diminishes on the reader and like always, his allegories swarm around you invisibly, exerting their unfelt presence, picking their time and impact at a particular and relevant point in the story, to come out at you with full force of instantaneous and revelatory epiphanies and when they do so, one feels as if the story has been given a fresh coat of paint.

When the novel involves a story sensitive to most Indians, one might get lost in fishing for ideological positions to be presented and to be taken in the narrative, with respect to the issue, something which Rushdie tactfully avoids through well-constructed events in the lives of Pachigam, not without mentioning, that Kashmiri terrorism is fed with Pakistani assistance and the whetting up of violent sentiments due to Indian military atrocities. However, in concentrating on Pachigam, as a village of entertainers and cooks, and a village which was out of scope of incursions and intimidations, owing to its relative non-chalance with the issue of Islamic identity splitting Kashmir, Rushdie kept himself safe from being pulled into ideological compartments in the development of story. However, soon enough the bugles of violence do start to resonate in his cozy village of innocence, the telling of which becomes the most humane part of the story, as the reader is slowly led into a despairing sense of gloom created from the dissolution of a sense of “Kashmiriyat” in the residents of Pachigam and its eventual desolation from a once colourful, peaceful and charming locale of inter-mingling people. It is Kashmiriyat that is the winner in this Novel, which also was reflected, on one occassion, in Hindu and Muslims co-operating together to starve Gegroo Brothers inside a Mosque. People never let their religion to interfere with their experience of a shared culture and the residents of Pachigam were obstinate and reluctant to buy into the Islamic ideology being peddled by outsiders. 

However, after all that being said, the story exhausts itself of its charm a little after 3 quarters when the factual narrative comes out of the picture and the story is left to its two surviving main characters. From there on, without the backing of the force of real history, the two characters are left to fend for themselves in a dry denouement. It may lead one to think that the primary force of Rushdie’s stories might as well be the historical allegories that he places them in, because without the backing of such allegories, his stories suddenly seem like a wandering animal with no direction or perhaps, I have become too accustomed to expecting every passage of his to have a metaphorical connotation, because he does it so beautifully. It is quite telling of the side-stepping of the issue of self-determination of Kashmiris, i.e., Kashmir for the Kashmiris, Kashmir – "the ungrateful, shrewish mountain state where disloyalty was a badge of honour and insubordination a way of life", when the daughter of Max Ophuls is named, “India”, replacing the name, “Kashmira”. Rushdie never took ideological stances on what should/could have been and deftly places his Pachigami characters at the hands of destiny to tell the story of Kashmir as apolitically as ever. "Your character is not your destiny", says the Kashmiri Bombur Yambarzal, containing with it the tragic tale of a beautiful land which ought to have been in the hands of a beautiful and colourful fate. Bravo, Mr. Rushdie, Bravo!