This chapter discusses Rushdie’s work in the context of processes of migration, the crossing of borders, and the question of identity formation. These themes are central to Rushdie’s work, which reflects his own journeys. His novels have featured prominently national and transnational migrants. Indeed, Saleem Sinai’s journeys in Midnight’s Children traverse the entire subcontinent. Focusing specifically on Shalimar the Clown and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and with reference to The Satanic Verses, Shame, and a selection of short stories and essays from Imaginary Homelands, this chapter explores how Rushdie has approached the question of migration, identity formation, and the position of being in diaspora. The representations of community, home, and belonging and of the diaspora condition emerge in his works through border crossings, liminal spaces, and the sensory and somatic disorientation of the migrant.

This chapter explores the wider context of Salman Rushdie’s engagement with the process of writing history and how his novels respond to specific cultural and historical moments to reveal the complex public debates around the status of history into which Rushdie intervenes. Because Rushdie studied history at university, it is not surprising that his work is deeply embedded in discussing historical thinking and historiography. This is especially related to the history of colonialism and India’s struggle for independence, as well as notions and experiences of migration. In addition he challenges western conceptions of historiography and revisits the Mughal and medieval Islamicate world in ways that explicitly emphasize connections from Persian texts to European intellectual thought. And in many of his novels, including Midnight’s Children, Shalimar the Clown, and The Enchantress of Florence, he consciously plays with how history is produced.

Salman Rushdie’s work has exponentially engaged with questions of separatism, terror, and terrorism in an aesthetic mode that draws on certain Orientalist and neo-Orientalist tropes. Taking account of geopolitical and local contexts, this chapter focuses on how Rushdie in fiction and nonfiction has responded to separatism, terror, and terrorism at local, national, and global levels. At the core of this discussion is an analysis of Rushdie’s engagement with Kashmir, from Midnight’s Children to Shalimar the Clown and Joseph Anton. By bringing postcolonial critiques of Orientalism into conversation with recent developments in world-systems analysis, the chapter traces the ways in which Rushdie’s representation of the wider geopolitical consequences of terrorism and state-led terror helps to make sense of the war machine of empire in ways that are sometimes obfuscated by Rushdie’s self-fashioning as a secular hero of free speech.

This chapter considers the wider contexts of secularism in relation to Salman Rushdie’s novels. It delineates different conceptions of secularism with which Rushdie is preoccupied. Midnight’s Children, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Shalimar the Clown are especially concerned with the notion of the syncretic and secular ideal of the Indian nation, championed by Nehru and the Indian National Congress at independence. It is the concerted dismantling of this postcolonial settlement and the Nehruvian vision of the nation at independence, and the replacement of this founding myth with an exclusionist nationalist narrative, that Rushdie critiques in these novels. This chapter also delineates the wider contexts with which Rushdie engages to chart the decline of Indian secularism and the syncretic concept of the Indian nation. It furthermore considers debates of secularism in relation to western definitions and how these feature in novels such as Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. These intersections open up complex ideological debates around rationality, faith, and religion, central to much of Rushdie’s works.

I shadow two free clinics in London, using documentary film and cinema and Kashmir to frame the challenge of treating populations who are trapped in or displaced by perpetual war. The two initiatives include an intercultural therapy center and a gardening project, both in London, and each of these interventions is studied for method, techniques, and outcomes.

Analysis of terrorism in Pakistan has often suffered from simplifications, generalisations and stereotyping. Seen either as an extension of global Islamic extremism or worse a nursery that breeds this transnational threat, the country has regularly been ostracised and chastised by the international community. Since Islamic extremism has widely been regarded as a malevolent force that can only be perceived in apocalyptic terms, Pakistan therefore has attracted the attention of a number of alarmists and doomsday prophets. This negative attention has subsequently produced a discourse on one of the most dangerous countries in world that narrowly focuses on the security threat posed by Pakistan. Such superficial and shallow engagement with the problem is deeply unfair, as it selfishly presents terrorism in the country as a danger to the rest of the world and cruelly ignores its primary affectees – the people of Pakistan.

Jihad, a heavily loaded word in the post-9/11 discourse, has in fact many layers, in theological and historical terms. This chapter investigates how the anti-Soviet resistance to the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s turned this Central Asian country into a receptacle of religiously oriented ideologues and militants from all over the world. The social and political transformations of the 1960s and 70s, the conflation of local self-determination, radicalization of refugees, absorption of foreign militants, the charisma of a Palestinian Muslim Brother, and the wealth of a well-connected Saudi man all come together in shaping the Afghan jihad as a symbolic and imagined site of resistance to outside forces for the global umma. If in the 1980s jihad had carried a positive connotation of liberation, in the aftermath to the 9/11 attacks labeling a movement as “jihadist” has become a convenient way for governments to tackle unrest in Muslim areas, even where struggles had been taking place for decades without much connection to Islamist aspirations, as seen in the cases of Southern Philippines, Indonesia, Southern Thailand, Kashmir, and Western China.

I argue that the (often idiosyncratic) interventions of Pakistan’s diplomats and international lawyers in Kashmir, Jammu and Pashtunistan, as well as in Bandung and Havana, form a distinct legal and political trajectory, which is at odds with the arbitrary, yet ubiquitous, conceptual delineations between ‘cold’ and ‘warm’ wars. Far from being peripheral to global Cold War developments, Pakistan’s internal and international relations and troubles provide a rich source of strategies and ideas about the state, law and society in the Third World. They are, however, also a testament to the centrality of class struggle in a post-colony – a struggle, exemplified in the events of 1951, that no lawfare could bring to an end.

The dispute between India and Pakistan over the State of Jammu and Kashmir is the United Nations’ longest running and among its most intractable problems, beginning in 1947 and still continuing more than 70 years later. Australia was involved in trying to resolve this dispute for almost half this time. As a fellow member of the Commonwealth, Australia had an early interest in contributing to diplomatic negotiations, and an Australian, Owen Dixon, was the first UN mediator. Another Australian, Major General Robert Nimmo, was appointed Chief Military Observer in 1950 and remained in the job for a further 15 years. Meanwhile, Australian military observers served in Kashmir (as Jammu and Kashmir were often described) for some 35 years until the Australian Government withdrew them in 1985. Also, between 1975 and 1979, Australia provided an aircraft with crew to support the UN observer mission. This chapter describes the early diplomatic efforts; later chapters are devoted to the observer mission and the Air Force contribution.

On 3 December 1971, for the third time since the partition of British India in 1947, Pakistan and India went to war. In the words of the political scientist Sumit Ganguly, Pakistan’s pre-emptive air strikes on Indian air bases ‘failed miserably on all counts’. India retaliated with a combination of its own air strikes, naval bombardments, and land operations using tanks, artillery, paratroopers and six infantry divisions. The fighting, most of which took place in East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh), showcased India’s military superiority over its neighbour and continued until 17 December when the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered a ceasefire. Pakistan’s President, Yahya Khan, recognising the resounding defeat of his forces, accepted the ceasefire, and the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 ended.

Road transport in mountainous Kashmir was long and hazardous, and landslides and accidents could prevent movement between locations. The inefficiencies of this transport method, combined with the difficult terrain and the distances to be travelled, meant that an air transport element was necessary for the successful operation of the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (Unmogip). The UN military observers on both sides of Kashmir’s Line of Control were reliant on this UN air element for logistic purposes. Field observers and their supplies were delivered to airstrips near their field stations; personnel and their dependants were transported throughout the theatre and to places like Delhi or Lahore for leave; headquarters officers were flown around to attend meetings with officials in New Delhi, Srinagar and Rawalpindi; and, if required, the air element would perform emergency medical evacuations of mission personnel. The Royal Canadian Air Force had provided this service, by way of a DHC-4 Caribou and crew of eight, for Unmogip since 1964 (a Twin Otter replaced the Caribou in July 1971).

By mid-1951, diplomatic efforts to resolve the Kashmir problem had dissolved. It was now up to the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (Unmogip) to monitor the Cease Fire Line (CFL) in the hope that some further means of resolving the problem might eventuate. There was, however, no resolution, and the observers were still in place well into the twenty-first century. The Australians, who joined Unmogip in January 1952, were to play a major role in Kashmir until 1985, when the Australian Government withdrew its contingent.