UNRAVELLING SHARAM AS A METAPHOR FOR MOHAJIR IDENTITY IN SALMAN RUSHDIE'S SHAME

UNRAVELLING SHARAM AS A METAPHOR FOR MOHAJIR

IDENTITY IN SALMAN RUSHDIE’S SHAME

Hima Raza

Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan

There is a genuine need for political fiction, for books that make new and better maps of reality, and make new languages with which we can understand the world…. to grapple with the problems created by the incorporation of political material, because politics is by turns farce and tragedy, and sometimes both at once. (Rushdie 1991: 100)

In his essay ‘Outside the Whale’ (ibid) Rushdie addresses some of the potential

crises faced by the writer who endeavours to produce political fiction from an

objective point of view and who soon realises that impartiality is impossible, even

undesirable in this process. In order to be true to his purpose of integrating

political concerns with fictional narrative, Rushdie not only engages with the

complexities inherent in what he seeks to represent, but also with the ambivalence

that marks his own doubly displaced, or multiply placed migrant position. The

political concerns in Rushdie’s fiction include the rise of religious nationalism in

the Subcontinent, the exodus of Muslim refugees to Pakistan following the

partition of India in 1947 and the subsequent emergence of a culturally displaced

mohajir community in this newly formed Islamic Republic. In Urdu, the term

mohajir explicitly refers to an emigrant or refugee whose decision to leave the

homeland is directly related to the preservation of his/her faith. The cultural

implications of this term are explained in detail at a later stage in this paper.

In Shame, which is perhaps the most politically rooted of all Rushdie’s

novels, he engages with varying ‘pathologies of power’ (Ahmad 2000: 139);

atrocities committed in the name of the nation, in this case Pakistan, during the

1970s and early 1980s, which lead Rushdie to view politics as both tragic and

farcical. My reading of Shame will demonstrate that the primary agenda of the

SOAS Literary Review Issue 4 (Spring 2005)

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author in this novel is to present a foreboding, allegorical ‘mohajir’s eye-view’ of

a nation from which Rushdie has been physically estranged but which he cannot

seem to shed at an intellectual or emotional level. I will argue that the ambivalence

and anxiety which emerges from Rushdie’s own culturally displaced position is

incorporated into the dualistic structuring of this narrative which vacillates

between shame and shamelessness, between the real and imagined home/nation,

presented as an ‘insufficiently imagined’ (Rushdie 1983a: 92)1, inherently

ruptured construct that teeters on the verge of implosion because of the mohajir’s

inability to reconcile himself to the shameful burden of history. However, it is

important to clarify at the very outset that the ‘mohajir’s eye view’ is primarily

employed as a reading strategy in this paper and offers an access point to the

theme of migration in Shame, a narrative that is culturally and politically rooted in

the South Asian context. While my examination of this novel attempts to

sequentially trace the explicit and implicit presence of the mohajir, it avoids

promoting this figure as the exclusive or fundamental representation of migrant

identity in Shame. This paper also evaluates the way in which Rushdie attempts to

subvert the essentialising fixity of nationalist discourse by unravelling the

culturally coded metaphor of sharam which connotes restraint, modesty, shame, as

well as honour. It is interesting to note that in Urdu sharam is a feminine noun and

in Shame it is most effectively personified through the novel’s female characters,

who act as both the keepers and destroyers of this centrifugal force in Rushdie’s

novel.

The Mohajir Question

In order to appreciate the significance of Rushdie’s identification with the term

mohajir, it is important to have an etymological understanding of the word itself

1 All future references to Shame in this article will be indicated parenthetically by page number only.


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since this provides the key to accessing the historical and cultural context of this

migrant figure in Pakistan, where the question of mohajir identity remains an

unresolved political issue. In Urdu, the noun mohajir is derived from the Arabic

word meaning ‘emigrant, evacuee, or refugee’ (Ferozsons Urdu-English

Dictionary, 1998: 50). A mohajir refers to one who has performed the act of

hijrat; this word also comes from Arabic and connotes ‘separation, migration,

flight, specifically the flight of the Prophet Mohammad from Mecca to Medina’

(ibid: 813). Thus hijrat is an exalted form of migration, one that is inspired by the

pursuit of great religious and moral ideals. It implies personal sacrifice on the

mohajir’s part – leaving behind country and kin for the sake of his faith – and not

only serves as the ultimate testament of an individual’s faith but also becomes the

defining characteristic of mohajir identity. While the term tark-e-watan, used to

describe the act of permanently leaving one’s native country for foreign lands, has

connotations of abandonment and desertion, hijrat is distinguished by the purity of

its motive, the promise of building a new homeland. However, this unique exilic-

migration comes at a heavy cost and the mohajir never quite recovers from the

physical uprooting and cultural estrangement which accompanies hijrat. I argue

that Rushdie’s understanding of the historical background and political

implications of mohajir identity in the specific context of a partitioned

subcontinent shapes his representation of an essentially ruptured, diasporic

identity in Shame. Moreover, his own experience of hijrat (Rushdie’s family came

as mohajirs to Pakistan) explains his personal affinity with the figure of the

mohajir and he uses this emotionally charged perspective to develop the theme of

migration in Shame, in a manner that transforms the writing of fiction into a

subversive, political act.

Rushdie’s complex portrayal of the insecurities of the mohajir community

in Pakistan and the ethnic fragmentation that continues to affect this country can

be truly appreciated by the reader who has an in-depth knowledge of the history of


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sectarian violence in this specific political context. During the period of partition,

nearly twelve million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs crossed the newly established

borders to join other Muslims in Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs in India. As

violence escalated more than one million people were slaughtered and maimed in

inter-ethnic violence. The West Punjab was flooded by nearly seven million

Muslim refugees from its eastern half, as well as mohajirs from various North

Indian states including the United Provinces, Delhi, the Central Provinces, and

Bihar. However, the majority of the urban middle class Indian Muslims who came

as mohajirs to Pakistan during and after 1947, settled in Karachi and Lahore, the

metropolitan centers of the Sindh and Punjab provinces. It is important to clarify

that the word mohajir is used exclusively to denote the figure of the Muslim

migrant/refugee/exile and is not applied to the Hindu and Sikh populations that

were also displaced during the Partition. More than fifty years after Partition the

mohajir community in Pakistan still sees itself as being displaced; this insecurity

is rooted in the perception of the mohajir as an outsider by the native population2

of the country. In turn the mohajir’s defiant adoption of the role of the ethnic

‘other’, specifically in the context of urban Sindh, led to the emergence of a

dangerous sub-nationalist political trend in the mid 1980s which not only

devastated the social fabric of this province for years to come but also almost

resulted in outright civil war in Karachi.

The origins of the mohajir conflict in Pakistan can be attributed to several

factors that led to a growing resentment and sense of distrust amongst opposing

ethnic groups, especially in the province of Sindh. The most important factor in

this instance was the issue of language supremacy, where the vernacular Sindhi

2 Not only are different languages spoken in Pakistan’s four provinces – Punjab, Sindh, North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan – but each state also has its own distinct blend of ancient tribal and feudal cultures. Native vernacular speakers in each of these four regions often use the term ‘Urdu speaking’ to describe mohajirs and more importantly to accentuate the link between ethnic identity and language.


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was pitted against Urdu, the national language that is also strongly associated with

the mohajir community. The rapid rise of the Mohajir Qaumi (National)

Movement first in Karachi and then other urban centres in Sindh, verified the

extent of the deep-rooted grievances of the mohajir community against the Sindhi

nationalists who used the element of linguistic differences between themselves

and the mohajirs to culturally marginalize the latter group, especially within the

context of urban Sindh. The issue of language continues to be a central factor in

the negotiation of ethnic identity for the mohajir as well as for the linguistically

diverse regional communities that are native to Pakistan’s four provinces. While

Urdu is the national language of the country, it is native only to the minority

mohajir population and is seen as the defining feature of this ‘othered’

community. Most of the first generation mohajirs who faced the task of

negotiating a Pakistani identity in this newborn country felt compelled to

somehow remain faithful to their native cultural heritage which had been left

behind in the course of this hijrat. Even as these mohajirs made a concerted effort

to be assimilated into their adopted homeland, they could not reconcile themselves

to the painful reality of being severed from a generation-old historical and social

context which had, thus far, determined their individual and political identities.

This burden of rootlessness and nostalgia for a past that cannot be regained is not

limited to the original mohajirs but is passed on to successive generations who,

despite being born Pakistani, at some level remain acutely aware of their origins

elsewhere which mark them as the progeny of Urdu speaking / ‘other’ peoples.

Rushdie’s Culturally Coded Mohajir Voice

Bearing in mind the above-mentioned role of language with respect to the

negotiation of mohajir identity, Rushdie’s choice of Shame as the title for a novel

that grapples with the question of cultural ‘otherness’, the ‘hand-luggage’ (35) of

migrancy, reflects his personal affinity with the ambivalence that pervades the


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socio-cultural predicament of the mohajir. Rushdie’s attempt to translate the

untranslatable connotations of the word sharam emphasises his position as an

Urdu-speaking diasporic writer who, while being forced to negotiate his identity in

English, remains acutely aware of the gaps that cannot be filled between his native

and adopted language.

This word: “shame.” No, I must write it in its original form, not in this peculiar language tainted by wrong concepts and the accumulated detritus of its owners’ unrepented past, this Angrezi in which I am forced to write, and so forever alter what is written…. Sharam, that’s the word. For which this paltry “shame” is a wholly inadequate translation. Three letters, shén ré mém (written, naturally, from right to left); plus zabar accents indicating the short vowel sounds. A short word, but one containing encyclopaedias of nuance. (34)

In this instance the narrator seems to privilege the mohajir who, like Omar

Khayyam, the novel’s ‘dizzy, peripheral’ hero, is culturally positioned at ‘the Rim

of Things’ (ibid: 15). His loyalties vacillate between origin and end, the choice of

shame and shamelessness, as he looks forward by always looking back. Rushdie’s

imaging of the mohajir reiterates the political scope of this narrative in which he

appropriates Angrezi (English) to convey his multiply displaced position, as well

as to express a literary sensibility that is greatly shaped by his native language,

Urdu. At this stage it is important to remember that Rushdie’s migrant subjectivity

is rooted in several cultures and his writing also draws heavily upon the European

literary tradition. In an interview with Ameena Meer he acknowledges the

influence of writers like Dickens, Gogol, Calvino, Kundera and Gunter Grass, on

his development as a novelist (Reder 2000: 111). However, my reading of

Rushdie’s diasporic fiction emphasises his unique hybridisation of English

through colloquialisms and metaphors that are directly translated from the Urdu.


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In turn this approach also interrogates the way in which metaphor operates as a

political device in Rushdie’s writing, through which he subverts the fixity of

nationalism and re-writes the history of the nation – Pakistan – from a migrant,

specifically mohajir perspective.

Metaphor and the Migrant Condition

In Imaginary Homelands (1991) Rushdie explains the link between metaphor and

the migrant condition which, in turn, shapes migrant literature. He begins by

saying that ‘the migrant is, perhaps, the central or defining figure of the twentieth

century’ (Rushdie 1991: 277) and that ‘migration offers us one of the richest

metaphors of our age’ (ibid: 278). The word metaphor is derived from the Greek

for ‘bearing across’ and connotes ‘a sort of migration, the migration of ideas into

images’ (ibid). This logic leads Rushdie to propose that ‘migrants are

metaphorical beings in their very essence’ and that metaphor simultaneously

enables the migrant writer to understand ‘the artificial nature of reality’ while

giving him the means to ‘imagine and re-imagine the world’ through fiction (ibid:

280). Diasporic reality is artificial because it is multiply displaced – this

artificiality is not in opposition to reality but an extension of it. Intellectually, the

migrant floats between several historical and cultural dimensions. Hence, his

reality must literally be created through the language of metaphor. In this context,

metaphor is no longer a literary device confined to a purely textual space but a

dynamic construct, appropriated by the migrant writer to express his reality in a

politically aware fashion. In order to understand the diasporic space in Rushdie’s

fiction we need to allow ourselves to be guided by metaphor in every sense, even

when the metaphor seems untranslatable.

Migrant literature also uses metaphor to re-present the construct that is the

modern nation to re-draw its borders from what Homi Bhabha has termed the

space of ‘the beyond’, which embodies the ambivalence of the diasporic condition.


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In The Location of Culture, Bhabha addresses those who live ‘border lives’, in

between nation/s, past and present, inclusion and exclusion, negotiating ‘liminal’,

hybridised cultural identities that subvert the idea of an essentialised subject

(Bhabha 1995: 1). Just as Rushdie feels that a mohajir’s reality is made from the

discontinuous scraps and fragmentary remains of his cultural inheritances, Bhabha

argues that the migrant positioned at the border is empowered to actively intervene

in the process of elucidating new strategies of selfhood. In the chapter

‘Dissemination: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, Bhabha

discusses the metaphoricity of diasporic communities in terms of ‘a doubleness in

writing’ (ibid: 141), a literary voice that reflects the culturally and temporally

ruptured reality of the migrant in the metropolis. In his view, the experience of

loss can best be expressed through the language of metaphor: ‘Metaphor, as the

etymology of the word suggests, transfers the meaning of home and belonging,

across the middle passage … across those distances, and cultural differences, that

span the imagined community of the nation people’ (ibid: 139). Bhabha’s

intention, in part, is to force a rethinking of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined

Communities (1983) which argues that nations come into being when diverse

people imagine a sense of shared community. Anderson’s idea of the nation is

unwritten through Bhabha’s contention that the nation can only be written at its

margins, in an interstitial space marked by loss and rupture, separated from the

mainstream by the experience of migration which ultimately rejects the premise of

belonging to any single national space, whether it be a distant point of departure –

the original homeland – or an immediate point of arrival – the adopted homeland.

The mixture of loss and personal empowerment which pervades Rushdie’s

fiction as he engages with the task of creating ‘imaginary homelands’ that free him

from the constraints and desire to belong exclusively to a nation or home can also

be compared to the work of several mohajir prose writers who have significantly

contributed to the development of modern Urdu literature. The negotiation of


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culturally displaced identities within the confines of a domestic space that mirrors

the volatile political climate of Pakistan and India as nations still scarred by a

ruthless partition operates as a recurring theme in the novels and short stories of

mohajir writers like Intizar Husain, Khadija Mastur, and Abdullah Hussein. The

most relevant examples in this case are Intizar Husain’s Basti (Community),

Mastur’s Aangan (Inner Courtyard) and Hussein’s Udaas Naslein (The Weary

Generations), all of which have been translated into English.

The mohajir’s literary voice also echoes one of the prevailing concerns of

Partition literature in Urdu, which is to unravel the damaging psychological

impact of separatist politics on ethnic communities that turned against each other

because of the trauma of coping with the division of India. The prose writings of

Krishan Chandar, Saadat Hassan Manto, Rajinder Singh Bedi and Ismat Chughtai

engage, at varying levels, with the rise of the anti-colonial movement in India and

the subsequent partition of the subcontinent. These writers were also part of the

Progressive Writers Movement which evolved in North India during the early

1930s. The Progressives’ agenda was to produce socially realist literature that

reflected the changing political climate of their time and aimed to raise the level of

social awareness among the Urdu readership.

While Partition literature portrays the dark side of nationalist zeal by

focusing on the horrific violence which affected millions of people in 1947,

mohajir literature is marked by the added loss and regret of having left behind a

native home. The mohajir’s latent unwillingness to sever his cultural ties with this

home remains long after the event of physical migration. This passive resentment

combined with the difficulties faced by the mohajir community in Pakistan with

respect to the task of socio-cultural assimilation in a country comprised of

discordant ethno-linguistic groups eventually led to the emergence of a dangerous

mohajir sub-nationalism that threatened to literally ‘re-write the nation’ (Bhabha

1995: 141) from its margins during the late 1980s.


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Even as Rushdie acknowledges the authority held by mohajirs in re-writing

the nation’s history in real political terms, he points out the ways in which this

community remains culturally unassimilated in its adopted home.

To build Pakistan it was necessary to cover up Indian history…who commandeered the job of rewriting history? The immigrants, the mohajirs. In what languages? Urdu and English, both imported tongues, although one travelled less distance than the other. The place was just insufficiently imagined, a picture full of irreconcilable elements, midriffbaring immigrant saris versus demure, indigenous Sindhi shalwar-jurtas, Urdu versus Punjabi, now versus then: a miracle that went wrong. (92)

The author’s tone here gives us an indication of his views on the mohajir’s

contribution to the task of nation building in a country which has not been able to

integrate its diverse ethnic populations. Just as Rushdie acknowledges the

resentment of the Sindhis and Punjabis towards the Urdu speaking immigrants

with their imported language, alien customs and overall attitude of cultural

superiority, he also subtly privileges the status of sari wearing women who, like

him, belong to the mohajir community. Rushdie’s re-presentation of Pakistan’s

troubled history can perhaps be attributed to his affiliation with and bias towards

the mohajir. This particular ethnic identity offers him a valuable ‘othered’

perspective which parallels the fragmented political state of the nation Rushdie

seeks to re-imagine through fiction and which enables him to conjoin the themes

of migration and nationalism in Shame.

Hence, for a Pakistani reader like myself, Rushdie’s seemingly innocuous

act of positioning himself as a mohajir in Shame, is rooted in a specific political

and historical context which explains his considered reluctance to assimilate in

adopted nations – Pakistan and England – and also reinforces the writer’s

subversive stance with respect to the possibility of a homogeneous nation state.


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I, too, know something of this immigrant business. I am an emigrant from one country (India) and a newcomer in two (England, where I live, and Pakistan, to which my family moved against my will). And I have a theory that the resentments we mohajirs engender have something to do with our conquest of the force of gravity…I am comparing gravity with belonging. (90)

Shame is a politically charged novel precisely because it presents ‘a mohajir’s eye

view’ of the way in which the migrant’s indignant adoption of un-belonging

challenges the fixity of nationalist discourse. Rushdie situates the diasporic

condition in a Pakistani context because it fictionally allows him to return to a

place where the consequences of a decade-old migration continue to shape the

socio-political fabric of this nation. The author’s pointed attempts to present the

narrative as a magic-realist tale –‘the country in this story is not Pakistan, or not

quite’ (ibid: 23), or ‘I may be such a person. Pakistan may be such a country (ibid:

91) – serve to dupe and ultimately marginalize the reader who is unfamiliar with

the implications of ‘belonging’ for a mohajir. For Rushdie the idea of belonging is

not equated with rootedness or fixity; in his world of perpetual displacement

routes replace roots. Rushdie sees himself as a migrant negotiating a state of

transit and he ultimately celebrates the mohajir’s ability to free himself of the need

for belonging to a specific place or being rooted in only one reality.

While discussing the formation of ‘diaspora identities’ the postcolonial

critic John McLeod cites Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) in which the

latter introduced the notion of roots versus routes within the Black diaspora in the

west, saying that he does not have roots which fix him in place, in a nation or an

ethnic group. Rather, he must continually plot itinerant cultural routes which take

him, imaginatively as well as physically, to many places and into contact with

many peoples: ‘This forges a relationship between past, present, and future, but

does not presume an even, continuous passage through time. The grounded


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certainties of roots are replaced with the transnational contingencies of routes’

(McLeod 2000: 215). The ‘mohajir’s eye view’ reflected in Rushdie’s fiction is

actively involved in re-imaging his past roots through routes that emerge from his

psychically split, culturally ruptured present and which shape his diasporic

identity. Thus for a migrant such as himself home will always exist elsewhere,

across the border, reflected upon in ‘broken mirrors… missing bits’ (71) and the

question of belonging remains as ambivalent as his displaced reality.

Imaging Sharam and the Nation

Rushdie’s goal of creating politically rooted fiction which conveys the

particularity of his predicament as a multiply-displaced writer is realised in

Shame, a novel which undermines the idea of exclusivity with respect to one

geographic or cultural belonging and also destabilizes the premise of the nation as

a homogenous or fixed construct. The mohajir, as a figure in whom elements of

the immigrant, exile and refugee merge to create a distinct symbol of displaced,

split subjectivity, operates as a pivotal example in this case. As he engages with

the task of re-writing the modern history of Pakistan and thereby dismantles the

hegemony exercised by the nation, Rushdie’s mohajir voice primarily relies upon

metaphor and allegory as tools of literary re-presentation and resistance.

Ironically, Rushdie’s corporeal estrangement from Pakistan leads him to

write a novel that confirms his sincere concern for the increasingly unstable

political climate of this country. The author takes full advantage of his diasporic

position to voice ‘unasked questions’ about the ‘mutually advantageous

relationship between the country’s establishment and its armed forces’ (21), the

meteoric rise in corruption and state censorship, even the military’s hawkish

surveillance of ordinary civilians like Rushdie’s fictional poet friend in Shame,

who is imprisoned and tortured because he is suspected of being a political threat

to the establishment.


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Throughout the course of this narrative Rushdie remains acutely aware of

his status as an ‘outsider’ and ‘trespasser’ who has ‘no right to this subject’, who

will be accused of speaking in a ‘foreign language…a forked tongue’, about a

nation to which he is ‘joined, if only by elastic bands’ (23). He defends his

position by asking if only those who live in Pakistan and are directly affected by

its volatile political climate have the right to judge it and claims that despite his

physical distancing from the reality of everyday life in that country, he is still

disturbed by the prevailing state of affairs in Pakistan. Rushdie predicts the way in

which the people he seeks to represent might receive this novel and guards himself

against critical attack by destabilising narrative authority within the text. The

narrator declares he is ‘only telling a sort of modern fairy tale’ (72), a story tilted

‘at a slight angle to reality’ (24), about ‘a palimpsest-country… with no name of

its own’ (92). The marked disparity between the critical reception of Shame in

Pakistan, India, and the West indicates that Rushdie is very conscious of the

diverse cultural and political positions of his readership and caters to this diversity

at many levels, by producing fiction which lends itself to being ‘translated across

borders’ within the context of South Asia as well as from the West to the East and

vice versa.

We should not be misled by the narrator’s seemingly irreverent attitude to

political history in Shame. A good example of Rushdie’s ironic representation of

the shameful secrets of a nation is seen in his description of the events that lead up

to the war of 1971 between India and Pakistan and which culminated in the

creation of Bangladesh. Rushdie’s scathing portrayal of this period of history is in

keeping with his intention of evoking a sense of unease and anxiety in the reader,

to make him/her feel the shame that is conveniently forgotten by those in power,

who are complicit in perpetuating the shame of the nation.


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The real trouble, however, started over there in the East Wing, that festering swamp. Perfidy of the East: proved by the Popular Front’s failure to win a single seat there, while the riff-raff of the People’s League, a regional party of bourgeois malcontents….gained so overwhelming a victory that they ended up with more Assembly seats than Harappa had won in the West. Give people democracy and look what they do with it. (195)

In Aijaz Ahmad’s view, one of the dangers in Rushdie’s depiction of history as

farce and in his burlesque representation of political figures is that the reader can

forget the injustice and oppression imposed by leaders like Zulfikar Ali Bhutto

and General Zia-ul-Haq on the people of Pakistan (Ahmad 1992:141). However,

Rushdie defends this mode of characterisation, saying that the individuals he

writes about in Shame do not deserve to be treated tragically since they are ‘very

low grade people, second-rate clowns playing out what are in fact tragic plots’

(Rushdie 1985: 15) and that this approach does not take away from the fact that

ultimately ‘Shame is a political novel and that behind the fantasized or the

mythologized country in the book is a real country’ (ibid). Rushdie’s comment

acknowledges the mimetic quality of Shame, which enables him to expose the

despotic whims of tyrants, specifically in the context of Pakistan, but which can

also be applied to the nature of power and corruption in politics in a global sense.

Perhaps it is in Rushdie’s use of language and his appropriation of what

could be called ‘the Master’s language’, English, that we find one of the most

interesting paradoxes in the novel. The author begins with an apology; he is

‘forced to write’ (34) in a foreign tongue, to tell his Pakistani story in English

terms and despite his artful blending of colloquial Urdu phraseology and

intonation with English he is aware that a language based upon ‘encyclopaedias of

nuance’ (35) can never be successfully translated. This is most evident in his self-

conscious explanation of the novel’s title, which, after a lengthy description, is

suddenly declared redundant by the narrator. In order to access Shame, the reader


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must know sharam ‘for which this paltry shame is a wholly inadequate

translation’ (34). Rushdie’s claim that the process of translation results in

something being lost as well as gained (24), on the one hand appears to assuage

his guilt for being estranged from his mother tongue, and on the other, misleads

the English speaking reader into thinking that s/he can access certain observations,

which are deliberately set up as being partially accessible to the non-Pakistani

reader. In Aruna Srivastava’s view such ‘acts of reader estrangement’ are used by

Rushdie to infect the reader/audience with the same sense of ‘cultural vertigo’ that

his immigrant/marginalized protagonists experience (Srivastava 1991: 67).

An example of this narrative ploy is seen in the author’s biting description

of Z.A. Bhutto’s election campaign of 1970, which brought the Pakistan Peoples

Party to power in the western wing of the country and ended the military rule of

General Yahya Khan. These elections also sparked the uprising in East Pakistan

after the Awami League party, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was prevented

from forming a government despite winning the majority of seats in the national

assembly. Rushdie explains Harappa / Bhutto’s charismatic yet contradictory

persona thus:

He toured the villages and promised every peasant one acre of land and a new water-well. He screamed in regional dialects about the rape of the country by fat cats and tilyars, and such was the power of his tongue…that nobody seemed to recall Isky’s own status as a landlord of a distinctly obese chunk of Sindh. (172)

While the irony of a feudal lord promising roti, kapra, aur makaan (food, clothing

and shelter) – this was the official slogan coined by Bhutto for the PPP – to his

largely rural, peasant electorate needs no explanation, Rushdie’s purposeful use of

the word tilyar requires some decoding. The literal meaning of the term in Urdu is

casually incorporated at an earlier stage in the narrative, when Isky refers to Raza


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as ‘our goddamn hero, the tilyar…which as you are possibly aware, is a skinny

little migrating bird good for nothing but shooting out of the sky’ (ibid: 113).

However, tilyar is also a derogatory term used in particularly in urban Sindh for

the Urdu speaking mohajir community. That Isky rants against tilyars in ‘regional

dialects’ is significant because it confirms his loyalty towards the native Sindhi

population to which he belongs. Hence the real irony here lies in the narrator’s

apparently casual explanation of an ethnic slur used against Urdu speaking

immigrants in Pakistan, to which Rushdie would be particularly sensitive because

of his own mohajir background. In this instance without any outward warning or

acknowledgement, Rushdie’s text quietly privileges the mohajir reader who can

immediately affiliate with the cultural and political nuances behind this remark.

Another example of this kind of ‘reader estrangement’ in Shame is seen

through the principal metaphor of sharam, operating at a metonymic level in the

novel to signify the themes of nationalism and nation building. These themes are

simultaneously embodied in several pairs of characters in the story, including Isky

and Raza, Omar and Sufiya, Bilquis and Rani, all of whom come to be associated

with the inherent dualism in sharam / shame. The narrator draws an important link

between shame and the nation that may appear to be obscure to the reader

unfamiliar with Pakistani politics but is perfectly clear to the Pakistani reader who

can relate these references to real-life examples of rigged elections and the role of

government officials in promoting drug trafficking in that country.

Imagine shame as a liquid…. stored in a vending machine. When shameful things are done: lies…failure to love one’s national flag, incorrect voting at elections…smuggling…what happens to all that unfelt shame? The button is pushed…and the fluid of shame spills…across the floor. (131)


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The shamelessness of tyrants like Isky Harappa and Raza Hyder is pitted against

the shame manifested through the female characters in the novel. Rani Harappa’s

intricately woven shawls tell the story of her husband’s shameful deeds, while

Sufiya Zinobia is born blushing, weighed down by the oppressive shame of her

family, her gender, and, above all, her nation. As ‘a miracle gone wrong’ (92) at

birth – Sufiya’s parents expected a boy – she embodies the ‘insufficiently

imagined’ (ibid) country of her origin; her split personality which alternates

between demure innocence and beastly violence, echoes the political hostilities

between the eastern and western wings of Pakistan which eventually result in civil

war and a permanent splitting of the nation. In an interview in The Herald Rushdie

describes the emergence of Sufiya Zinobia in Shame, saying, she ‘came about

because I wanted some kind of incarnation of the ideas the book dealt with … to

make the connection between shame and violence … I wanted to somehow

enclose that idea inside one person’ (Rushdie 1983b: 80).

Sufiya’s mother, Bilquis Kemal, can be seen as emblematic of the Muslim

nation during and soon after partition – ‘naked, holding her green dupatta of

modesty’ (63) – the dupatta (scarf) is another example of Rushdie’s use of

culturally coded symbols in the novel, which in this case signifies the modesty,

shame, and honour of women. The colour of the dupatta can be seen as a reference

to Pakistan’s national flag. This image of the petrified Bilquis also captures the

fearful mood of the mohajirs – Muslim refugees – at the time of partition. The

pernicious fertility that plagues Naveed Hyder and is eventually responsible for

her suicide can be linked to the population explosion in Pakistan and its disastrous

effects on the country’s economic development. That Rushdie forms such intricate

links between his female characters and the state of the nation is in keeping with

his observation in the novel of how the women have taken over his story, for they

best embody its central metaphor, which is in turn the moving force behind the

narration - ‘between shame and shamelessness lies the axis upon which we turn’


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(124). Rushdie’s imaging of women in Shame portrays them as the keepers of

sharam in a shameless society. Duniyazad Begum’s casual remark on the

barrenness of her cousin-in-law, Bilquis, shows the way in which sharam operates

as the organising principle in a narrative that aligns itself with the marginalized

subject, a position that, in Bilquis’ case, is defined by her gender as well as her

mohajir background. ‘Don’t you know that shame is collective? The shame of any

one of us sits on us all and bends our backs’ (88). Bilquis is distrusted, insulted,

and eventually ostracised from her husband’s family home because her in-laws

resent Bilquis’ superior attitude and unwillingness to adapt to their ways. The

matriarchal Bariamma voices this sentiment when she tells Raza to take his wife

away: ‘we know how you think yourself too good for us … you Billoo Begum,

begone. When you leave this house your shame leaves with you … come on,

mohajir! Immigrant! Pack up double-quick and be off to what gutter you choose’

(89).

Which Way is ‘Home’?

A common factor in Rushdie’s imaging of ‘home’ in his fiction is the sense of

timelessness which enshrouds this construct, even though the author’s reaction

towards it, fluctuates between wistfulness and exasperation. That the home/s in

most of his novels3 are eventually sold, reconstructed, or destroyed, parallels the

crumbling structure of Rushdie’s diasporic narratives. This in turn echoes the

predicament of the displaced migrant subject, an anxiety most aptly expressed by

Aijaz Ahmad in his study of Shame: ‘the will to leave is poised against the

impossibility of leave taking’ (Ahmad 1992: 135) and ‘this sense of being trapped

3 I refer specifically to the way in which Rushdie images the idea of home and the theme of homecoming in three diasporic novels – Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983), and The Satanic Verses (1988).


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permeates the whole book’ (ibid: 139). My discussion of dualism in Shame has

already revealed the ways in which Rushdie uses the tension created by binary

oppositions in this narrative to challenge the authority of the rigid discourse of

national history and cultural identity by privileging the ambivalence that emerges

from the diasporic condition. The idea of homecoming is a recurring theme in

Rushdie’s diasporic fiction but it eventually leads to un-resolvable conflict since

the migrant, in effect, has no home to which he can return4. Therefore, Rushdie’s

treatment of this theme creates a heightened sense of tension and ambivalence that

is pervasive in the bulk of his fictional writing but that is most predominant in

Shame. Here Rushdie positions himself as an immigrant and a self-exiled writer

which, according to Nasser Hussain ‘establishes his doubly cartographic

postcolonial authorial position’, determined by ‘a whole cartography of partition,

migration, return, and Rushdie himself draws on this cartographic mode to

develop an imaginative geography in which he can work out a new position of

belonging and not-belonging’ (Hussain 1989: 8). It is evident that Rushdie’s

interests lie in reconceptualizing the space of exile, in animating that space and

turning it into a place of empowerment. We as readers are, from the beginning,

aware that we cannot read Rushdie’s texts without reading him as well. In

Imaginary Homelands Rushdie declares that his identity is at once ‘plural and

partial’ and that he is both ‘insider and outsider’ in the society in which he lives

and in the societies he writes about (1991: 19); like the narrator of Shame, Rushdie

is a man straddling several cultures. His observation that ‘shame is not the

exclusive property of the east’ (23) shows Rushdie to be an insider equally in two

worlds – East and West – who is able to draw subtle parallels between the cultural

and political manifestations of shamelessness in his native and adopted home/s.

4 The impossibility of homecoming for the migrant is a view that has been expressed by a range of cultural theorists, including Stuart Hall in ‘Minimal Selves’ (1987) and Gayatri Spivak in


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Rushdie’s justification of his position as an author who has ‘a right’ to the

subject of re-presenting the history of one of his past homelands in Shame is seen

in the narrator’s rhetorical question, ‘is history to be considered the property of the

participants solely?’ (23). Rushdie feels at home writing about Pakistan because

he knows its language, its people, and its culture, despite being physically

estranged from the place itself. Rushdie wants Shame to be a novel of ‘leave-

taking’ (23), an effort that is performed from a distance but which ironically

serves to bridge the gaps created by physical distance between Rushdie as

author/narrator and sharam as the central trope of his narrative. Like Saleem Sinai,

the narrator of Midnight’s Children who acts as an agent of his nation’s history,

creating and controlling the events that unfold in his/story, the narrator of Shame

acknowledges: ‘I, too, like all migrants, am a fantasist. I build imaginary countries

and try to impose them on the ones that exist’ (92). As a mohajir writer Rushdie’s

imagination remains culturally rooted in forsaken places which, in turn, inspire

him to grapple with the task of re-writing the political history of nation/s he has

long since left behind.

Despite the limitations or difficulties involved in applying the mohajir’s

viewpoint to Rushdie’s fiction, I contend that the ‘mohajir’s eye view’ remains an

important reading strategy which embodies the ambivalence underlying Rushdie’s

imaging of migrant identity. Above all the mohajir figure encapsulates the

paradox which marks the Rushdiean migrant in Shame; in spite of choosing

displacement the diasporic subject is unable to emotionally or culturally cut

himself from his native home. In order to appreciate the usefulness of the

mohajir’s viewpoint as a reading strategy it is important to understand mohajir

identity as a layered construct that combines the past with the present and mixes

loss of home with the possibility of home. Thus mohajir identity remains in

process far beyond the space of narrative, as this figure remains caught between ‘Reading the Satanic Verses’ (1993).


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cultures, languages, his/stories and negotiates a perpetually fractured, yet

potentially empowering diasporic reality. His affiliation with the mohajir can also

be linked to Rushdie’s literary sensibility as a whole. His commitment to writing

fiction which merges the literary with the political, to producing narratives that re-

present history from an altered, displaced angle is akin to ‘the mohajir’s eye view’

which emanates from the space of ‘otherness’ and sensitizes us to the politics of

cultural and ethnic difference.

Fawzia Afzal-Khan’s interpretation of Rushdie’s narrative style as ‘a

mishmash of conflicting genres and modes … in which the Comic and the Tragic,

the Real, Surreal and the Mythic all defuse each other so no one genre can

predominate’ (Afzal-Khan 1993: 139), reflects his unique position in the canon of

postcolonial literature, as a figure who pioneered the trend to create fiction that

demands to be read at multiple levels. This multi-dimensional quality of Rushdie’s

writing bridges the gap between politics and literature – what is more it transforms

literature into ‘a politically symbolic act’ (Quayson 2000: 76). Thus Rushdie’s

narratives are definitely embedded ‘outside the whale’, and in Shame he skilfully

draws upon larger than life, often vulgar characters and grotesque situations, to

raise a ‘terrible, unquiet fuss’, to assert that the writer is ‘part of the crowd, part of

the ocean, part of the storm’ (Rushdie 1991: 100) which leaves him no option

other than to affirmatively engage with the ‘true dialectic of history’ (265). In this

scenario, inertia or complacency cannot be indulged and this is particularly

evident from the narrator’s treatment of Omar Khayyam in Shame, as a man

situated on ‘the Rim of Things … insomniac, inverted and dizzy’ (19) who is

generally indifferent towards others. Rushdie’s judgement on Khayyam for his

reluctance to assume responsibility for the events that shape his life and the

nation’s future - despite being situated, as it were, in the midst of the storm - can

also be seen as an indication of what he expects from his potential reader.


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Rushdie’s reader, whether he likes it or not, is involved in the creation of

Shame, especially since he is addressed directly by the narrator more than once

and is made to feel complicit in the literary process. In order to gauge the depth of

Rushdie’s narrative it is imperative that the reader lets himself be fully affected by

the anxieties that plague both narrator and author in telling Shame. In order to read

Rushdie incisively, it is clear that we must adopt an approach that is not

determined exclusively by critical bias or cultural affiliation since a restrictive

method can only result in a limited understanding of his extensive agenda; one

that seeks to dismantle established teleological patterns within the literary and

political paradigm. In order to appreciate Shame, we must first appreciate

Rushdie’s position as an expatriate/exilic writer and celebrate the way in which he

uses this perspective to present us with a kaleidoscopic view of complex political

realities through narrative. Rushdie comments on the empowering potential of

diasporic writing saying: ‘If literature is in the business of finding new angles at

which to enter reality, then once again our distance, our geographical perspective,

may provide us with such angles’ (Butcher 1983: 79). In Shame, he certainly

fulfils this promise.


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Works Cited

Afzal-Khan, Fawzia (1993) Culture and Imperialism and The Indo-English Novel, Philadelphia: Penn State University Press. Ahmad, Aijaz (1992) In Theory, London: Routledge.

Ahmad, Eqbal (2000) Confronting Empire, London: Pluto Press.

Bhabha, Homi (1995) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.

Butcher, Maggie (ed.) (1983) The Eye of the Beholder: Essays on Indian Writing, London: Commonwealth Institute. Ferozsons Urdu-English Dictionary (1988) Lahore: Ferozsons Ltd.

Gilroy, Paul (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London: Verso. Hall, Stuart (1987) “Minimal Selves” in Appignanesi, L. (ed.) Identity: ICA Documents 6, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts. Husain, Intizar (1983) Basti, Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications.

Hussain, Nasser (1989) “Hyphenated Identity: Nationalistic Discourse, History, and the Anxiety of Criticism in Salman Rushdie’s Shame” in Qui Parle: Literature, Philosophy, Visual Arts, History (QPAR) 3: 2, (pp.1-18). Hussein, Abdullah (1999) The Weary Generations, Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications. Mastur, Khadija (2001) Inner Courtyard (Aangan). New Delhi: Kali Press.

Quayson, Ato (2000) Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? Cambridge: Polity Press. Reder, Michael R. (ed.) (2000) Conversations with Salman Rushdie, Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Rushdie, Salman (1991) Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism. London: Granta.


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- - - (1985) “Midnight’s Children and Shame” in Kunapipi 7:1, (pp.1-19). - - - (1983a) Shame. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

- - - (1983b) “I Still Have Stories to Tell”, Interview in The Herald (May), (pp. 79-87). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1993) “Reading The Satanic Verses” in Outside in the Teaching Machine, London: Routledge. Srivastava, Aruna (1991) “The Empire Writes Back: Language and History in Shame and Midnight’s Children” in Adam, Ian & Tiffin, Helen (eds.), Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Postmodernsim, New York: Routledge.

UNRAVELLING SHARAM AS A METAPHOR FOR MOHAJIR IDENTITY IN SALMAN RUSHDIE'S SHAME

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