Shalimar the Clown

Salman Rushdie, 2005

“Don’t leave me,” he said, rolling over onto his back and panting for joy. “Don’t you leave me now, or I’ll never forgive you, and I’ll have my revenge, I’ll kill you and if you have any children by another man I’ll kill the children also.”

Shalimar the Clown is Salman Rushdie’s eighth novel, a globe trotting romantic tragedy that reads like a thriller. ‘Shalimar’ comes from the old emperor's favourite garden retreat in Kashmir; the bloody and beautiful valley, perched amonghst the highest mountains in the world. As with many Rushdie stories,the characters embody themes at the heart of the novel, their lives are mirrors of the history in which they live in.

‘A plague on both your houses’ Rushdie amply foreshadows of both his work and the story of Kashmir. Kashmir. was not always mired by sectarian violence. Rushdie recalls the history of the valley and stories of its princes and folk heroes, invoking them to showcase the kinship of the many different peoples of Kashmir. The friendship of two village leaders blossoms into the love of their children for each other, and in a grand show of solidarity and acceptance the interfaith love of Hindu Boonyi and Muslim Shalimar is celebrated by the village-folk. It is torn apart by her ambition to leave the valley and rise above her peers into the greater world, resulting in her betrayal of her Shalimar. The plot is constructed on the fracturing of Boonyi and Shalimars relationship, representing the fracturing of the relationship between Kashmir’s Hindus and Muslims.

The centre of the story is India, a young woman who is the American ambassador’s daughter from his mistress, Booyni, a Kashmiri dancer from a quiet village who seduced the ambassador whilst performing as Anarkali. The play Anarkali is an apocryphal story set in medieval, in it the Emperor Akbar’s son is enamoured by the court dancer Anarkali and shuns his duties and wages war with his father in order to have her. Similarly, the ambassador and Boonyi shun their professional and personal duties to have each other, and in doing so change the course of their lives. The plot of the novel concerns India’s grieving of the murder of her father by the hands of his mysterious valet, a Kashmiri man who used to play the clown in the village troupe.

Rushdie adopts a strict anti-military and anti-militant stance, both the militants and military are portrayed as ideologically rotten, their presence and actions being the root of discord in the valley. At the beginning of the book, an Indian general is posted in Kashmir, hoping for quick glory and a better posting. Towards the end, his long tenure in the cold mountains has made him cruel, and his cruelty towards his enemies leaves him a shell of the man he had hoped to become, he meets his demise.

As usual Rushdie creates dazzingly memorable sentences and heavily uses fables, allegories, dream sequences, and allusions to enrich is storytelling. His vocabulary is complex and although not very dense it is not an easy read. An epic tale of romance and revenge spanning the vale of Kashmir to Vichy, France to all the way to Mullholland Drive in California, this is Rushdie at the height of his powers.