Shalimar the Clown

Salman Rushdie’s 2005 novel Shalimar the Clown picks up some of the same themes that he has been working with throughout his critically acclaimed career. The novel explores the fall of Kashmir from a haven of tolerance and peace to a hotbed of extremism and fundamentalist violence through the smaller story of two people who grow up there, fall in love, and then are torn apart by circumstances that result in murder, bloodshed, and tragedy. Using the hyperverbal style for which he has become known, the magical realism load which enabled him to make mythical and historical connections that would otherwise remain hidden, Rushdie traces the roots of violence and the way its expression twists and ruins our world.

The book is divided into five parts, which are told through the eyes of the five main characters that we encounter.

The first section, set in present-day Los Angeles, revolves around the life of India Ophuls, a beautiful documentary maker and the daughter of Max Ophuls, a former American ambassador to India and later the US counterterrorism chief. India’s glamorous and sophisticated life consists of her work, of maintaining her appearance, and of trying to decide between a variety of imperfect suitors. Suddenly, this life is turned upside down when her father is assassinated by his former chauffeur, a Kashmiri man who calls himself Shalimar the Clown.



The second part of the novel takes us back in time to 1960s Kashmir, to a fictional village named Pachigam. Drawing on his own childhood memories, Rushdie presents this town as an idyllic retreat from the creeping chaos that followed the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan in 1947. In the middle of a glorious natural paradise, the town is a peaceful mix of Hindus and Muslims, a way of life the novel explores through the village’s ancient myths and legends. The community is so close-knit that when a Hindu girl named Boonyi Kaul and a Muslim boy — Shalimar, still a sweet romantic at this point — fall in love, the village elders unanimously agree that they should marry.

Everything seems fine for Shalimar and Boonyi for a while, but the seeds of trouble are there from the very beginning. For one thing, it’s probably not a great idea for two fourteen-year-olds to make such a commitment. The night of their wedding, Shalimar playfully tells his new wife that if she ever leaves him, he will track her down and kill her and any children she may have that are not his. Boonyi brushes this off, though she soon realizes that she wants more than a village life with a man who performs a tightrope act (this is why Shalimar is called the Clown). She gets her opportunity when Max, now the ambassador, travels through Kashmir and stops at the village where he sees Boonyi dancing. The two embark on an affair, and Max gets Boonyi an apartment in Delhi, where she lives until she has his child, a girl she names Kashmira. The illegitimate birth causes a scandal, and Max is recalled to the U.S. His cold and proper wife renames the baby India and takes her with them.

In the novel’s third section, we learn about Max. Born in the French city of Strasbourg to a Jewish family, Max ends up joining the French resistance during WWII after his parents are killed in a concentration camp. He is brave and develops a skill set as a spy that will eventually make him an excellent diplomat. After the war, he marries an aristocratic British woman, and together they move to the United States, where Max quickly rises through the ranks until he is appointed as an ambassador.



The next section brings us back to Pachigam, but now we are in the angry, brutal mind of Shalimar. Ever since Boonyi left him, his rage and resentment have built up to such a degree that whatever love, kindness, and fellow feeling he has ever had has been replaced with the murderous intent to kill everyone who has stood in the way of his happiness. Boonyi, forced to return to the village after losing her child, has been officially declared dead for breaking the marriage vow. It is clear that Shalimar will kill her, but is waiting because he has promised her father and his own to only do it after they are both dead.

Obsessed with raining down blood vengeance on those whom he thinks have wronged him, Shalimar goes for training to various jihadist and extremist groups; militant fundamentalists were more than happy to teach him how to kill. Assassination is now the only way he can feel pleasure — on his first assignment, he sets up to use a knife rather than a gun because he wants to feel first-hand what it is like to take someone else’s life. It turns out that Shalimar is an excellent assassin, helped along by his tightrope skills, and by the fact that he is only a hollow shell of a real human being. This section of the novel is particularly difficult, as Rushdie meticulously details the real-life atrocities committed in Kashmir by fundamentalist groups.

In the book’s last section, Shalimar has continued his training with insurgents in Afghanistan and then the Philippines. He now finally considers himself ready to go to the U.S. to install himself as Max’s driver as part of a long-range plan for revenge. After killing Max Shalimar, he escapes the authorities. The novel ends on an unresolved cliffhanger, with Shalimar making his way to India’s home, intent on fulfilling his promise to Boonyi that he would kill any children she had by another man.



Shalimar the Clown was longlisted for the Man Booker prize and has been praised by critics; John Updike called Rushdie “a bard of the grim one world we all, in a state of some dread, inhabit” in The New Yorker.