Vol. 5 No. 1 (2021)
Articles

Representation of History in Salman Rushdie’s Shame

Published 2022-04-22

Keywords

  • Corruption, History, Palimpsest, Politics, Tyranny.

Abstract

Salman Rushdie is one among the most acclaimed Indian writers in English. Rushdie is known for his complex themes and techniques. Rushdie’s writings focus on ‘double identity’, ‘fragmented vision of life’, ‘divided selves’ and ‘shadow figures’ which are often backed up by history or historical events. Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983) and Shalimar the Clown (2005) are some of his novels that are based on history. Shame explores the history of Pakistan’s Politics from a point of view, which disrupts the historical realism. Rushdie achieves this by intertwining time and memory in a way it represents the real as an eruption of fiction. Rushdie reconstructs the political history of Pakistan by clearly exposing the deep Socio-Economic and Political imbalances prevailed during the framing of this constitution in his novel Shame. Rushdie has also rejected the historical time and makes his characters to rely on the time recourse by memory, dream and fantasy. Rushdie delved deep into the hearts of the common people who are the victims of partition whose innermost senses of shame, shamelessness, hope, despair, ambition and anguish has been well exposed. Rushdie’s Shame includes historical material along with metafictional self-reflexivity with the purpose of subverting the Eurocentric history writing. In short Rushdie questions the imposed nationalism. In Shame, the decentralizing of history is achieved by exposing the recent political history of Pakistan with the simultaneous narration of stories of the victims of past. In Rushdie’s counter-narrative, the individual plays an active role whose voice is in conflict with the dominant leading to the monologue of history to face a multivocalized response.