| While reviewers now usually describe Salman Rushdie as a “citizen of the world” (Fraczkowski 10), my analysis draws upon new approaches to myth criticism in order to show how his fiction has grown from a singularly South Asian consciousness. We can see these Subcontinental conceptions at work most clearly in the ‘mythopoeic’ impulses that course through Rushdie's novels, thereby (re)creating “certain narratives which human beings take to be crucial to their understanding of their world” (Coupe 4); as should become apparent during this essay, Rushdie's mythic discourse corresponds to a remarkable degree with the precepts of two major currents in modern Indian thought: Subaltern Studies historiography and a critique of the babu/chamcha archetype. Not coincidentally, these influential intellectual movements generally rely upon the kind of “carnivalization and dialogicality” (Engblom 296) that characterizes the writing of Rushdie—producing, in both cases, what I call an ‘ecstasy of fulfilment.’... |
