The Colorful Life Of Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British-American novelist. His work often combines magical realism with historical fiction and is known for its humor and an effusive prose style. Enjoy The Colorful Life of Salman Rushdie.

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The Colorful Life of Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in June 1947. His father Anis Ahmed Rushdie was a successful businessman, and his mother Negin Bhatt, a teacher. Rushdie enjoyed an affluent upbringing in Bombay and was sent to the prestigious Rugby School in England.

Reflecting on his childhood, Rushdie said ‘When I was growing up, everyone around me was fond of fooling around with words. It was certainly common in my family, but I think it is typical of Bombay, and maybe of India, that there is a sense of play in the way people use language. Most people in India are multilingual, and if you listen to the urban speech patterns there you’ll find it’s quite characteristic that a sentence will begin in one language, go through a second language and end in a third. It’s the very playful, very natural result of juggling languages. You are always reaching for the most appropriate phrase.’

After school he enrolled at King’s College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history. In 1964, Rushdie, became a British citizen. After trying struggling for a while as actor in London’s fringe theatre, he then began working in journalism and advertising. Rushdie actually had quite a successful career in advertising before turning to writing full time.

Currently, Salman Rushdie is married to his fifth wife American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths who tied the knot in 2021. His four previous spouses are; Clarissa Luard (1976 to 1987), American Novelist Marian Wiggins (1988 to 1993), Elizabeth West (1997 to 2004), and Indian model, actress, cook-book author and Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi (2004 to 2007). He has two children, a son, Zafar born in 1979, with his first wife, Arts Council of England’s literature officer Clarissa and second son Milan, with his third wife, British editor and author, Elizabeth West.

The publication in 1988 of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, led to accusations of blasphemy against Islam and demonstrations by Islamist groups in India and Pakistan. The orthodox Iranian leadership issued a fatwa against Rushdie on 14 February 1989 – effectively a sentence of death – and he was forced into hiding under the protection of the British government and police. The book itself centres on the adventures of two Indian actors, Gibreel and Saladin, who fall to earth in Britain when their Air India jet explodes. It won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1988.

In 1991 he gave an address a Columbia University “Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say. In the West, some “friends” turned against me, calling me by yet another set of insulting names. Now I was spineless, pathetic, debased; I had betrayed myself, my Cause; above all, I had betrayed then”

On August 12, 2022, Rushdie was attacked and seriously injured as he prepared to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York. An assailant jumped onto the stage and stabbed him and another man.

Rushdie suffered three stab wounds to his neck, four to his stomach, puncture wounds to his right eye and chest. Rushdie was blinded in the eye and the attack also affected the use of one of his hands. Fortunately he has recovered enough to continue writing. Talking shortly after his recovery [his novel, Victory City, was about to be published.] “I’m hoping that to some degree it might change the subject. I’ve always thought that my books are more interesting than my life […] Unfortunately, the world appears to disagree”

Work

Rushdie’s debut novel Grimus, was published in 1975. Six years later, the acclaimed Midnight’s Children, was published in 1981. It won the Booker Prize for Fiction and in 1993 was judged to have been the ‘Booker of Bookers’, the best novel to have won the Booker Prize for Fiction in the award’s 25-year history. The novel narrates key events in the history of India through the story of pickle-factory worker Saleem Sinai, one of 1001 children born as India won independence from Britain in 1947.

Rushdie’s third novel, Shame (1983), many critics saw as an allegory of the political situation in Pakistan.

Post the controversy regarding The Satanic Verses and despite being in hiding, Salman Rushdie continued to write and publish books, including Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), a warning about the dangers of story-telling that won the Writers’ Guild Award (Best Children’s Book).

There followed a book of essays entitled Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 ; East, West (1994) and The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), the history of the wealthy Zogoiby family told through the story of Moraes Zogoiby, a young man from Bombay descended from Sultan Muhammad XI, the last Muslim ruler of Andalucía.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet, published in 1999, re-works the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in the context of modern popular music. His novel, Fury, set in New York at the beginning of the third millennium, was published in 2001.

Recent novels include Shalimar the Clown (2005), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award; The Enchantress of Florence (2008); Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015); and The Golden House (2017). His novel Quichotte (2019), a modern-day retelling of Don Quixote, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2023 he released Victory City, styled as a translation of an ancient epic. He is also the author of a travel narrative, The Jaguar Smile (1987), an account of a visit to Nicaragua in 1986.

Coming in April 2024 is Knife, a detailed account about the traumatic events of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie answers violence with art, and reminds us of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. Knife is a gripping, intimate, and ultimately life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art—and finding the strength to stand up again.