Salman Rushdie achieved the status of the most prominent novelist of today through the novelty of his literary works as well
as by the controversies caused by them.He uses magic realist techniques in his novels to emphasise the political dangers of realism in depicting historical events and characters. Shame was Rushdie’s third novel and deals with repression of many kinds- political, religious, social and domestic.The novel depicts both
private and public shame. It depicts the corruption of the rulers-both army and civilian, Islamic fundamentalism and its negative effects upon the women. The narrative voice has also to be considered as the representative of the repressed . ‘Shame’, according to Rushdie’s narrator is “a short word, but one containing encyclopaedias of nuance”(R, 39). The narrator says that in order to feel the gravity of the word it must be written not in the English language. Instead he uses ‘sharam’, “for which this paltry ‘shame’ is a wholly inadequate translation”(R, 39). Shame means also “embarrassment, discomfiture, decency, modesty, shyness, the sense of having an ordained place in the world, and other dialects of emotion for which English has no counterparts". Rushdie combined together instances of the emotion shame at work in societies at
different levels from private to public. The novel celebrates this concept of shame as a central experience of life. At the beginning of the book the unwedlocked conception of the three sisters is a source of shame to them. Later different variations of the same theme are built by the writer. The shame of public and private dishonour is not limited to that particular society but has universal significance. The immediate subject of the novel may be Pakistan but Rushdie’s concerns are larger and they stand for all the repressed countries. Thus the major theme of Shame is repression.