Salman Rushdie and Aijaz Ahmad: Satire, Ideology and Shame

Aijaz Ahmad’s polemical critique of Salman Rushdie’s Shame (1983) in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992) remains one of the most provocative denunciations of Rushdie as a political thinker yet to be published. Despite a thriving industry of Rushdie-orientated criticism, however, literary critics have yet to assess the full significance of Ahmad’s arguments, or to offer a persuasive defence of Rushdie’s position. This is not for lack of commentary, affirmative or negative, on the various positions developed by Ahmad in In Theory. Critics have responded fulsomely to his condemnation of Rushdie’s representation of women in Shame and to his interrogation of the privileging of Rushdie’s works in metropolitan intellectual orthodoxies. Both these arguments, however, are, for Ahmad, rooted in more fundamental political objections to Shame that, whilst they are often rehearsed, have yet to receive a sustained response. In Jaina Sanga’s recent book on Rushdie, for instance – excellent as it is in many ways – Ahmad’s arguments are summarized, but no detailed reply is made to them; an omission that is surprising, given that Sanga’s own broadly poststructuralist view of Rushdie’s political significance as a writer would seem to demand a defence of Rushdie against Ahmad. For Sanga, Rushdie’s re-utilization of old colonial metaphors can be politically effective because it is a means of ‘‘problematizing entrenched versions of reality’’. For Ahmad, however, such an argument is flawed. Change is effected by transformations in economic relations and the only thing that can be helpful, in the context of ongoing neo-colonialism in the third world, is not a challenge to conceptions of ‘‘reality’’, but a global transformation in the ownership