Chapter 22 - The Anthropocene and Ecological Limits in the Works of Salman Rushdie

Summary

This chapter discusses Rushdie’s work in the context of ecocritical considerations, which have increasingly preoccupied critics in the age of the Anthropocene. The representations of Rushdie’s urban and rural environments directly intersect with issues around environmental toxification, droughts, and famines. This is explored through urban planning and the spectre of postcolonial developmental policies, through, for example, the building of hydroelectric dams. Yet Rushdie brings to these considerations a further dimension in his novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, where these issues take most prominence. The metaphors of ground splitting, earthquakes, and environmental disaster are here closely intertwined. Shalimar the Clown engages with the toxification of the Kashmir valley through military hardware, and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, featuring a gardener as its central character, also considers the post-apocalyptic world of New York, when the known world is altered after New York is hit by a storm. This little explored aspect of Rushdie’s work opens up a new critical conceptual dimension and illuminates important environmental concerns of his later novels.