Book review: Shalimar the Clown

(Written for The Indian Express; the link to the paper's website is here.)


Shalimar the Clown

Salman Rushdie

Jonathan Cape

POUNDS 17.99, 398 pages

"My memory keeps getting in the way of your history," the late Agha Shahid Ali wrote in a poem for Kashmir that was simultaneously love letter and requiem. As Salman Rushdie exports an old, old tale of star-crossed lovers to the country without a post office, it is only appropriate that Shahid should provide one of the two epigraphs for Shalimar the Clown.

Many years ago, Rushdie wrote a tale of poisoned stories darkening a lake he called Dull, in a place menaced by silence, where only pages in a constantly shuffled history formed a thin barrier against destruction. In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Khattam-shud was conquered, the Ocean of Seas of Stories was cleaned up, and along with poets, writers and dreamers everywhere, Kashmir, too, found its voice.

Shalimar the Clown is no fable, and besides, it's set in a darker time. A happy ending is a luxury that no one who writes of Kashmir, or America, can afford any longer. Rushdie's story is a complex, tangled tale that stretches from Strasbourg during World War Two to the Resistance in France, the Kashmir Valley in a time of simmering discontent, and contemporary America paying the price for its empire-building. In order to get his arms round the story, Rushdie employs black farce, slapstick comedy and melodrama, almost defiantly. Layered with legend, snarled in the roots of history, silenced and misinterpreted, Kashmir is a parable for our times. Telling it straight is not an option.

Shalimar the Clown is an actor in a village of bhands, a man who specializes in walking tightropes ("lines of gathered air"). The love of his life, the woman who will betray him and return to accept a savage judgement, is named after the chinar trees of Kashmir—Boonyi, a dancer so talented that she can embrace Anarkali's role, and, to an extent, her fate.

In this overripe soap opera, with multiple, interlocking episodes set against Grand Guignol sets, strewn with outrageous plot twists, inevitably the village dancer seeks an escape. Boonyi's temporary passport to a wider world is Maximilian Ophuls, expert forger, flier, fighter, fornicator, larger-than-life WWII hero who survived the Holocaust in which his parents died. Now Max is an ambassador for the US, a trader in the futures market that governs the history of nations. The most visible result of his ambassadorial dalliance is a daughter, a blend between Last Action Heroine and Tarantino's Bride. In search of her past, India Ophuls hates her name: "'India' still felt wrong to her, it felt exoticist, colonial, suggesting the appropriation of a reality that was not hers to own…"

The over-the-top exaggeration and exuberance of Shalimar the Clown is trying, though much more coherent than Fury. Rushdie's characters rattle around in the cages of symbol and metaphor; his style has all the subtlety of a smalltown marching band, making this novel a devastatingly easy target for parody.

But Pachigam, the village of actors, comes into slow focus through its small disputes over weddings, the living presence of dead soothsayers, the "pot war" over the smoothest gushtabas, the finest lotus stem curries that they wage with the village nearby. The performers could have come out of Midnight's Children, as though Parvati the Witch and her band of acrobats, jugglers and players had finally found a home.

All this is ripped apart when the jaws of history snap shut on Kashmir. The Indian military is seen first as unwilling combatants in an unacknowledged war, then as bitter oppressors driven into paranoia by the weight of intolerable, ineradicable memories. And there are the iron mullahs: "The Indian army had poured military hardware of all kinds into the valley, and scrap metal junkyards sprang up everywhere, scarring the valley's pristine beauty… The men who were miraculously born from these rusting war metals, who went out into the valley to preach resistance and revenge, were saints of an entirely new kind. They were the iron mullahs. It was said that if you dared to knock on their bodies you would hear a hollow metallic ring."


Shalimar and Boonyi's story dies, as one by one, the players are slaughtered, Max Ophuls trades suavely in distant death, India finds a new identity in combat, Pachigam loses the battles against a bitter army and an even more corrosive invasion of faith. Rushdie's prose fragments under the weight of his rage, in a passage remarkable for the naked breakdown of the writer, faced with an injustice that magic realism can no longer encompass:

"Who lit that fire? Who burned that orchard? Who shot those brothers who laughed their whole lives long? Who killed the sarpanch? Who broke his hands? Who broke his arms? Who broke his ancient neck? Who shackled those men? Who made those men disappear? Who shot those boys? Who shot those girls? Who smashed that house? Who smashed that house?....
Who raped that grey-haired lazy-eyed grandmother as she screamed about snake vengeance? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that dead woman? Who raped that dead woman again?"

The naïve reader will see banality, in the denouement that leads Shalimar to assassinate the US ambassador: could this really explain terrorism, 9/11, this tired cliché of a cuckold seeking revenge on his wife's lover? It's an obtuse reader, though, who's got this far but cannot see beyond to the metaphor of an apparently noble nation assaulted by the people it has seduced, nurtured, discarded and betrayed.

This is not, please the God in which Rushdie has ceased to believe, the finest work of the man who has been engaged, before and after the fatwa, in the rewriting and reexamination of history. It's a deeply angry, sometimes clownish, often rough novel that marks just a return to form, not a return to the peak of that form. Shalimar the Clown is a tightrope walk by a highwire virtuoso who's not above stumbling; but it's a powerful parable, a reminder that neither East nor West can sow the seeds of intolerance, hatred and division without reaping the whirlwind.