The Satanic Verses | Summary and Analysis

The Satanic Verses | Summary and Analysis

Rushdie’s texts are based on ambivalence of migrancy and hybridity because he portrays the postcolonial nations of cultural conflict. It is not merely the seemingly random juxtaposition of different discourses; it is also a representation of ambivalence of migrant people because cultural encounter does not always entail merger or fusion, but may lead to partial adaptation or negotiation through a process of cultural borrowing. This happens when the respective cultures face each other on a more nearly equal or roughly comparable basis. Rushdie has pointed about migrancy in general and about South Asian immigrants to Britain in particular. One of the problems that attend any investigation of migrancy in Rushdie’s work is the almost limitless applicability of the concept, fostered not in considerably by the author’s own moves from India to Pakistan to England and now to New York.

The ambivalent ways in which migrancy recurs in Rushdie’s life and work as a concept he celebrates, yet one that has historically had undesired consequences for him. Negotiation is a process of interpretation and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments and attitudes of other persons and groups and by sharing their experience. Negotiation for migrant people is the process whereby individuals or groups once dissimilar becomes similar, share the same sentiments, values and goals and whereby attitudes of many persons are united and develop into a unified group. It results because of the functional relation of the diverse cultural elements. The context of class conflict among South Asian immigrants in Britain conflicts in Rushdie’s novel that provides different perspectives. Johnson presents Rutherford Calhoun as a writer and creator of fiction who narrates the whole events through monologue, which posses many truths. He presents the reality of freedom, slavery and contemporary stratus of African American people in the form of which collects the history of subaltern consciousness of slave the slaves. He has presented Allmuseri tribe to represent the endemic quality of inter subjective. A problematic situation here in the novel seems of the Allmuseri and exposes their lacks of ‘unity of being’ and complications of African-American experience.

Rushdie presents the simple dualism of bigotry versus free speech. While Rushdie has consistently written against racism and the need for political engagement against forces of the right, he has done so more in a position of solidarity with the mainstream Left in Britain than with the South Asian community. As far as most Muslims were concerned, affiliations of this nature paradoxically placed Rushdie within the establishment and thus aligned him with the enemy.Johnson’s fiction shows the homage to the picaresque about sea travel, human nature and self discovery in a riveting and thrilling way. This detailed, historically precise and phase of the trans-atlantics slave trade and on the adventures of ex-salve, is in an advertent. He also presents an unwilling participant in the enslaving of the Allmuseri tribe. He had given the fictional date of the year 1830; to make the fiction seems to be real. The story is presented through the protagonist of the novel Rutherford Calhoun, recently freed slave, who is in the voyage.

The novel is an attempt to write about migration, its stresses and transformations, from the pint of view of migrants from the Indian subcontinent to Britain. The migration is a category far removed from history, and a historical event. The point is to understand these shifting patterns of migration in relation to history as they appear in his work. While the strategy of disaffiliation that Rushdie performs may in part be attributable to a rhetorical line of defense necessitated by the attacks on his book, exactly what his concept of migration it and what his place in the migrant population is still remain to be examined.In the novel Allmuseri tribe has been presented as the subaltern group, marginalized group and is shown in the positive way. They didn’t eat meat and were easy to feed. They didn’t like property. They were so simple to wear cloth. They required no medicine. They seldom fight and steal things. They feel so sick if they wronged anyone. These all characteristic of Allmuseri have clearly proved that they were so simple and loving creature. But the reality and culture of Allmuseri have already been abducted and were taken to make slave of their master.

Rushdie brought to the fore class tensions that pre-existed in the Asian community in Britain, it served to highlight different aspects of immigrant life and migrancy, differences that had long been suppressed under the minorities, differences that have since been subsumed under readings of The Satanic Verses as a novel of migrancy. The uniformity of the immigrant experience, in other words, has been called into question. Whether the opening of these schisms is detrimental to any collective politics are another issue, and far more complex. This division certainly encourages us to conceive of a more nuanced politics of “minority” representation with in diaspora communities in Europe.The novel opens with Calhoun playing the role of the freeman being enslaved after being set free. Calhoun presented the time situation of June 14, 1830 upto August 20, 1830: as the time period of the novel starting and its ending. When the novel ends with Calhoun’s freedom, we can find the psychic consequences of slavery. From Calhoun’s role we can assume that neither of us are freeman nor can we get rid of it. Calhoun came from Illinois form in search of freedom at New Orleans but can’t get there and ran to the republic for new life of freedom by his own will. When the novel ends he seems to be free but is again in bond of marriage with Isadora and as a father of Baleka. But Calhoun is ready to establish his existence, struggling with the problems.

Rushdie invites his readers among tropes of migrancy, immigration, and exile as they traverse semantic, linguistic, and cultural fields. However, in the explicatory glosses through which Rushdie has sought to project the authorial meaning of his work, his use of the term migration robs it of a certain specificity of history and class. This is especially apparent in the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses. The class resentments that are simmering beneath the surface of an affair that has been seen in religious terms alone locating these class tensions not only serves to defuse the simplistic opposition between secularism and fundamentalism but also uncovers the fissured state of class relations within a community that both the British government and well-meaning liberals seek to portray in homogenizing terms. Rushdie’s claim that his text is written from the point of view of migrants from the Indian subcontnent is complicated by the controversial and politicized reception of the novel by some of these migrants.Johnson focuses on slavery, psychological notion and about the subaltern consciousness. During the course of middle passage, Rutherford Calhoun discovers several things about cultures and dignity, about disillusionment of himself and the other character.