BOOK REVIEW
The globalization of terror Shalimar the Clown by
Salman Rushdie
Reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia
Buy this book
"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.
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terrorism's interconnectedness - how
dots of violence, justice and revenge
link together across time and space into
blood-soaked lines. 
