Suppressed histories of the female characters in Salman Rushdie’s Shame

Abstract

The novel Shame belongs to a hybrid cultural/textual form called the Indo-Anglian novel. There are moments in Shame where Rushdie plays deliberately and self-consciously with the hybrid status of both his fiction and his identity as a postcolonial expatriate. Shame is significant because its narrator, an expatriate like Rushdie (and who, in fact, virtually stands in for Rushdie), mediates overtly and at length on his expatriate, postcolonial status and this foregrounds some of the elements about Rushdie’s construction of postcolonial conceptualisation of history. This paper will examine how the narrator uncovers and includes the ‘suppressed’ histories of women, which are then imbricated with his construction of postcolonial identity. This paper argues that Rushdie’s narrative, though admittedly fragmented, fails to account for the very useful and powerful practices of opposition which are occurring in Pakistan today, practices which have been part of the history of women in both Pakistan and India. The only reference in the novel to women in organised opposition comes in the mention of the women who marched ‘against God’ after the death of Harappa. When Raza Hyder investigates these marches, he finds that they are organised by a woman named Noor Begum. He immediately puts her in jail. Organised opposition by women is introduced and dismissed within the space of a paragraph.