Hybrid Imaginaries: The Convergence of Myth, History, and Postmodern Narrative in Salman Rushdie's Fiction

Abstract

Salman Rushdie occupies a prominent place in the landscape of contemporary world literature. What we come across in his fiction is a free and self-conscious borrowing from Hindu mythology, Islamic theological tradition, and the Western canonical inheritance of modernism and postmodernism. Rushdie refuses to adhere to any linear progression in his narrative. Rushdie uses magical realism to challenge the epistemological authority of Western realism that shaped the way stories were told under the influence of colonial thinking. Palimpsest is another significant tool – both as structural principle and metaphor for postcolonial cultural identity – that Rushdie uses in his works. Besides deploying these postmodern narrative strategies, Rushdie also engages with the ancient Indian oral narrative tradition. For Rushdie, then, the act of storytelling is always already a hybrid act, one that brings into productive tension the oral and the written, the traditional and the experimental, the local and the global. The synthesis of personal, social and political history along with the religious and cultural mythology on one hand, and literary allusion and postmodern narrative experiment alongside ancient oral tradition and contemporary fictional form on the other hand – present Rushdie’s fiction as a fascinating site for critical engagement. This paper establishes that Rushdie’s fiction engages with constructs of history, myth, and storytelling traditions across many traditions. For Rushdie, myth and history are not opposite categories, they are rather mutually constitutive elements – each rewriting and recontextualising the other.