Author: Salman Rushdie
Year: 1999
Publisher: Albert Bonniers Förlag
Language: Swedish (translator Hans Berggren)
Not long
ago I found myself in a conversation with a friend on the subject of Salman
Rushdie. She confessed with the charming candour which is the privilege of the
truly well-read, that although she had cultivated a respectable level of
acquaintance with post-colonial literature, she had not as much as brushed against
a single page of Rushdie’s writing. My own first encounter with the author’s
name was in 1989 when ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, a bitter old fart with a singularly
unamused temperament, issued a fatwa, a vengeful prize on Rushdie’s head,
thinly veiled as a religious obligation.
I was then
thirteen years old and recall* that Sweden’s indignation, apart from condemning
the cleric’s barbarous decree, was triggered by the meek response by the
Swedish Academy, which is the college of intellectuals who, among other duties,
elect the yearly Nobel Prize laureate in Literature. Some years later, at the questionable
intellectual maturity expected from an Upper Secondary School student, I finally
came across the book that had vexed the ayatollah to the point where he reduced
himself to a petulant child: The Satanic Verses. I bought it, read it, and I
loved it.
Those acquainted
with my reading habits, will be aware that I am a most unfaithful reader. Even with
the authors I profess to adore, I rarely commit to more than one or two titles
before curiosity of new ideas and new minds fling me onto the hunting path for
the next name. Rushdie, however, is one of the rare exceptions of writers that
I gladly read again and again. After conversing with my friend on the subject, I
was overcome by a craving for Rushdie’s writing. I reached for “Marken under
hennes fötter” (“The Ground Beneath her Feet”) which had been collecting dust in
by bookcase long enough and merely a few pages in concluded, that it was bound
to meet with all of my expectations.
Rushdie is
one of the most erudite writers in the post-war era who comfortably commands
the particulars of philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, music,
literature, and art among many other fields. To imbibe his prose is to
experience that rare sensation of learning while one admires, and admiring while
one rejoices. Not merely a man of infinite knowledge, but equally importantly
of a magical ability to craft his characters and tell his story.
“Marken
under hennes fötter” dramatises the instability of identity in a postcolonial
world where the ground beneath the self is perpetually shifting. Through the
intertwined lives of the introvert artist Ormus Cama, the extrovert diva Vina
Apsara, and the melancholic observer Rai, the novel stages how colonial
histories and global cultural flows fracture, hybridise, and creolise personal
identities.
Ormus Cama embodies
the diasporic artist who cannot be contained by national or cultural
boundaries. Born in Bombay yet perpetually oriented toward elsewhere, he
channels songs from a parallel world, suggesting that his creativity itself is
transnational and borderless. His identity is never rooted in one cultural
context but always fluid and in motion, making him emblematic of the
postcolonial subject who finds both possibility and alienation in
cosmopolitanism.
Vina Apsara
is constructed as both a person and a mythic icon. Her fame and sexual charisma
transform her into a commodity of global culture, consumed through images and
stories. For her, identity is a performance staged across multiple audiences, from
India across Europe to the Americas, each demanding a different version of her.
She epitomises the postcolonial predicament of being seen not as a coherent
self but as a projection of the desires of others, whether they stem from
colonial fantasies, mythic archetypes, or pedestrian clickbait journalism.
Rai, the
narrator-photographer, wrestles with identity through mediation. As a Parsi in
India and later as an exile in the West, he experiences marginality and
unbelonging, which he manages by constructing narratives and images. His
photographs reveal that identity in the postcolonial context is always framed,
never raw, captured through lenses shaped by history, politics, and personal
longing, personalised, although not necessarily internalised.
Together,
these three figures show that in Rushdie’s postcolonial universe, identity is
not essence but fabrication: a shifting collage of myths, histories, and
performances, precariously balanced on unstable ground. Rushdie’s depiction of
fluid, fabricated identities resonates with Anthony Giddens’ account of
identity in late modernity. For Giddens, the self is no longer grounded in
tradition but must be “reflexively” constructed through ongoing choices,
narratives, and relationships. Similarly, Rushdie’s characters live without
essentialist anchors, improvising selves from fractured cultural inheritances
and unstable geographies. Where Giddens emphasizes the individual’s
responsibility to “keep a coherent story going,” Rushdie complicates this with
myth and tragedy, suggesting that personal identity, though fabricated, is also
subject to forces—earthquakes, media spectacles, colonial legacies—that resist
individual control.
By bowing
to Rushdie’s compelling argument and acknowledging the malleability of the
terrain wherein we so desperately try to set our roots and feign stability, we
must realise that the ground is moving not only under her feet, but also under our
own.
It is my
humble proposition, that the sole reason that the Nobel Prize in Literature has
not yet found its way into Salman Rushdie’s prize cabinet, which already
contains the Booker Prize, The PEN Golden Award, The Hans Christian Andersen
Literature Award, several honorary doctorates, and a knighthood, is the Swedish
Academy’s embarrassing history with the author. It is not unreasonable to
suspect, that bestowing this honour on him now would bring back to the
limelight the obeisance to the Iranian ayatollah as unbecoming to men of taste
as their silence was to men of wit. The Academy’s recent scandals surely reinforce
their hesitation. How much more splendid then, to seize the occasion to right an
unfortunate wrong and to save itself from the eternal disgrace of having
ignored one of the finest writers of our age.
* I furthermore
recall Margaret Thatcher saying in an interview that she did not even find the
book particularly well-written.
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