BOOK REVIEW The globalization of terror Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie
Reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia
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"Everywhere was now a part of everywhere else."
Salman Rushdie stands out in the universe of English fiction for politically
charged writing. As a storyteller of the highest class, his trademark tendency
is to take on sensitive themes from history or current affairs without pulling
punches. His characterization, plotting and language flow are not ends in
themselves but means to burnish grand topics that affect the lives of millions.
In Shalimar the Clown, he plunges into the viscera of
terrorism's interconnectedness - how dots of violence, justice and revenge link
together across time and space into blood-soaked lines.
India Ophuls is a disoriented young woman in Los Angeles, daughter of
Maximilian Ophuls, America's former ambassador to India. Fond of sports such as
archery and boxing, she longs for the hidden truth about her lost Kashmiri
mother, of whom it is forbidden to speak. "The ambassador had entombed her
memory under a pyramid of silence." (p 18) Max hires a Kashmiri chauffeur,
Shalimar, and suddenly chooses to break his self-imposed reticence and denounce
the destruction of Kashmir on television. He raves eloquent about fanaticism,
bombs, the tragedy of the pandits (Brahman scholars or learned men), rapes of
young girls and fathers set alight. Shortly after, Shalimar, "the loyal
traitor, the protector turned assassin", slashes Max's throat with a kitchen
knife outside India's apartment.
The story enters flashback mode from this point to the Kashmir Valley of the
early 1960s, when Shalimar is an acrobatic clown in the village of traveling
actors, Pachigam. He is in love with a pandit's daughter, Boonyi, in a period
when Kashmiris are connected by deeper ties than blood or faith. Before the
partition of the Indian subcontinent, Pachigam has a "pot war" with the
neighboring village of Shirmal over crummy motives that would, in hindsight,
seem innocuous little quarrels. In this supposed golden age before the advent
of terror, Kashmiris pander to sorcery, protective charms and prophetesses -
hallmarks of Sufi tolerance. Shalimar's birth, for instance, scares his mother,
who has a premonition that the boy "would have much to do with lost treasures,
fear and death". (p 75)
Boonyi's bewitching looks enthrall a colonel in the Indian army camp near
Pachigam, but she turns him down with scorn. Indian military presence in the
Valley is unpopular, but voicing dissent is illegal and dangerous. Shalimar's
brother Anees joins a fledgling local liberation front, in whose pursuit an
intelligence agent comes to the village. The agent of state gets mysteriously
murdered. An "iron mullah", preaching resistance and revenge against infidels
and idol worshippers, rises to fame in Shirmal. During the 1965 India-Pakistan
war, the maulana (master) proclaims a revolt against Indian troops and
the pandits, but is foiled by a chef's comic grotesque act.
Shalimar marries Boonyi with the village's consent, but the happily-ever-after
script is shattered by the visit of former ambassador Max to Kashmir. Boonyi, a
restless and ambitious girl, senses opportunity and dances into the dignitary's
heart. Max's unhappy marriage with an eccentric anti-Nazi, resistance-era wife
gets "shipwrecked on the rock of the gold-digging Kashmiri beauty". (p 187) By
the time Boonyi ceases to be attractive to Max, she is pregnant and the news
gets leaked to the Indian media. Max's alleged oppression of Boonyi becomes "a
sort of allegory of Vietnam" and he quits the country and diplomacy in
disgrace. Boonyi's illegitimate child, Kashmira, is renamed "India" by Max's
ex-wife and taken away to the United States for a troubled upbringing.
Betrayal by his beloved instills a murderous rage in Shalimar. The village
declares Boonyi dead to bring his ferocity under control, but he is not ready
to forget or forgive. Meanwhile, rising communal hostility of majority Muslims
against the pandits leads to a reassessment that the syncretistic Kashmiriyat
was an illusion underneath which forced conversions, temple-smashing,
persecution and genocide were the norms.
About the end of the 1971 Bangladesh war, Shalimar resolves to seek and
assassinate Max. "The invisible enemy in the invisible room in the foreign
country far away: that's the one I want to face." (p 249) He vanishes from
Pachigam for 15 years, joining his brother Anees' front, threatening and
extorting businesspeople for "liberation".
Gradually, Shalimar attains perfection in merciless slaying. "In the hot coals
of his fury, honor ranked above everything else, above decency, above culture,
above life itself." (p 258) He crosses the Himalayas to receive sophisticated
training from "our Pak allies", and rediscovers the "iron mullah", who is
brainwashing hundreds of jihadi recruits that "at the root of religion is this
desire, the desire the crush the infidel". (p 262) The camps run by the
Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence emphasize that for a true warrior,
"economics was not primary, ideology was". (p 265) Shalimar graduates from
Pakistan to terrorize "godless people" in Tajikistan, Algeria, Egypt and
Palestine.
Back in the Kashmir Valley, the Lashkar-e-Pak (LeP) imposes "Islamic decencies"
on women, beheading the recalcitrant. In 1989, as the popular insurrection
peaks, LeP bars Hindus of Shirmal from watching television with the Muslims and
rakes up anti-pandit violence. The Indian army's harsh crackdown on village
after village does not spare Pachigam's once-thriving populace. This is
paralleled by Muslim fundamentalist attacks on pandits, their properties and
temples. Forgotten victims of ethnic cleansing, displaced Hindu minorities are
"left to rot in their slum camps to dream of return, to die while dreaming of
return, to die after the dream of return died". (p 297)
Shalimar returns to the now-destroyed Pachigam and slaughters Boonyi, who had
been atoning in the wilderness since her ruined affair. He moves to the
Philippines and, after a gory spree with the Abu Sayyaf, he is smuggled into
the US. He ingratiates himself to Max as a driver and Man Friday before
terminating him with maximum force. India, the forlorn daughter of the
ambassador, begins to hear the fugitive Shalimar's demented screams inside her
head and goes to Kashmir to unearth the fate of her unknown mother. At Boonyi's
grave, an antidote force gets into her mind that "made her capable of
anything". (p 366)
Upon India's return to the US, Shalimar is arrested and sentenced in Los
Angeles. She crafts a psychological torture for her parents' killer through an
avalanche of hostile accusatory letters. "A female demon was occupying his
head, jabbing hot shafts into his brain." (p 375) Alive for six years on death
row, Shalimar escapes prison in a jailbreak and heads straight to slake his
thirst for India's blood. In the final frame of the drama, India, reincarnated
with her mother's given name Kashmira, shoots Shalimar down with an arrow from
her golden bow before he can plunge yet another knife into another quarry.
How did an innocent and demure rope-walking clown transform into an
international terrorist? Rushdie is suggesting that personal motives are never
too far behind in the generation of a killing machine. Shalimar is an imperfect
Islamist who is convinced of the necessity of objective jihad but cannot let go
of his personal vendettas. The fact that Max recovers from his scandalous past
and goes on to become "US counter-terrorism chief" is secondary to the fact
that he had ensnared Shalimar's wife. The fact that Max is "part arms dealer,
part kingmaker, part terrorist himself, dealing in the future, which was the
only currency that mattered more than the dollar" (p 336) matters less than his
inglorious past misdeed, which catches up in the macabre form of a possessed
assassin.
Rushdie is not playing down contexts of warfare or Islamism in the mass
manufacture of programmed jihadi robots, but is asking probing psychological
questions about the subjective rationales that breed cruelty and turn
milquetoasts into marauders. He seems to be asking if the germ of hate is not
inherent in individuals, a seed that is nourished to fruition in the requisite
soil of opportunity.
Shalimar the Clown has the usual Rushdie punch lines, unexpected
inflections, punned names, wildly funny situations and almost normal craziness,
alternating with truly brilliant passages on the nature of power, the emptiness
of urban existence and the loss of a dream-like Kashmir. It is above all a tale
of how the construction of the enemy can spiral into a global enterprise with
global fatalities.
Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie, Random House, New York, 2005.
ISBN: 0-679-46335-6. Price: US$25.95, 398 pages.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
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terrorism's interconnectedness - how dots of violence, justice and revenge link
together across time and space into blood-soaked lines.
