Creation of Pakistan and Omar Khayyam: Intertextuality and Cultural Contradictions in Shame Dhriti Shankar College

Rushdie’s text immures the reader in its vortex of referential layers. Like him, his meanings exist “at an angle to reality”, and often, in their profusion, produce beguiling multiplicities of deliberately and carefully crafted connections. Following up from where Midnight’s Children had left off, we characteristically enter the narrative heralded by techniques of “oral narrative” (Midnight's Children and Shame 7), myths, gossips, rumours, and skepticisms: this time delving into Pakistani politics instead of Indian, giving the text a claustrophobic, cagey structure in order to highlight the former’s censoring authoritarian state-policy contrasted with the latter’s “teeming” diversity. Particularly relevant in the context of Shame is how hardly ever a sentence is written that is not ironical, double-edged, or complicating, until storytelling itself becomes a practiced process in constantly making insidious links and suggestions. These narrative links resonate with neurological pathways: “the labyrinths of . . . unconscious self [,] the hidden path that links sharam to violence” (139). The intrusive narrator keeps providing hints, connections, helping the reader interpret the story’s typological, ethical and political grids....