Shalimar the
Clown Salman Rushdie, in his first novel based in non-Mumbai India and Kashmir to be precise, has taken upon himself to dwell into the idea of frontier less
world and scratch the ground beneath new age’s volatile “current affairs”.
In a nutshell Shalimar Clown is the
story of two peaceful villages-Panchigm and Shrimal in Kashmir valley whose tranquility is destroyed by fanatics like Iron mullah Bulbul Fakh and from thereon starts the glib talk of jehad from inside. Indian state and army also finds representation in a tart narrative that zooms from Kashmir to LA to believable wartime situations. For good measure is thrown in the character of Maximilian ophuls with whose assassination the novel starts. Maximilan has a daughter named India from a married Kashmiri dancer Boonyi whose husband Shalimar, a clown turned Max’s driver in a foreign land, is out to seek revenge. Is the
revenge for loss of innocence of Kashmir or that of an hurt individual from a white man, who sub consciously might still be carrying the tag of “white man burden’? That’s for the reader to decide!
In the end only Kashmira, previously India as she hated that very name and didn’t want to be sub continental or
ancient or third world, survives and is able to
regain or refound Kashmir but only after losing her father and discovering her mother’s tragic fate. This make one wonder whether the
real Kashmir, not the fictional, will be regained and if yes than at what price or is there any price to regain Kashmiriyat (Kashmir’s culture).After about 400 pages of plots and subplots teeming with characters, like General Kachwaha and lady fortuneteller, and sailing through the elegiac mood of the book one is left with the view that while it had the makings of a grand tomb of fiction, something is amiss. However as the title suggest in this ‘griping international tale of love and revenge and the ancient and modern conflict from which they spring’ wrier has tried to gel real world complexities with fiction in great earnest in his honest desire to tell his story- story of his Kashmir.
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