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Essay about Marginalization of Women by Salman Ahmed Rushdie

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Salman Ahmed Rushdie is an eminent postcolonial diasporic writer of Indian origin. He was born in a Muslim family in 1947, the year India became free from the clutches of the colonial rule. The novelist and essayist of international repute, Rushdie, started his writing with the fictional work Grimus (1975). His second novel Midnights’ Children (1981) won the Booker’s Prize. The text focuses on the simultaneous independence and partition of the two nations. He came into thick of controversies because of his novel, The Satanic Verses. (1988). The Muslims considered the novel to be blasphemous. The publication of the novel led to a wide range of demonstrations and protests worldwide. The publication of the text became dearer for him as the …show more content…

Rushdie gives the description the first imaginary country in which the old man Shakeel lives along with his three daughters named Chunee, Munee and Bunee in a mansion. The house located in a town called Q was “positioned beside an open maiden, and it was equidistant from the bazaar and the Cantt.” (12) The Old Shakil keeps his daughters alienated from the rest of the world in the old mansion so as to keep them away from the influence of the white men (colonizers). He closed the mansion to avoid any interaction with the outside world of colonizers. After the death of their father, the daughters continue to remain alienated from the world, but as time passes they get rid off their parental subjugation and get fascinated by the colonizers. They organize a party in which they invite the members of the white community and the few “non-white guests-local zamindars and their wives.”(16). But the non white guests abandoned “the sisters to the colonial authorities.”(ibid) The invitation extended by the Shakil sisters can be termed as sudden infatuation of the three sisters towards the outside colourful world. Rushdie through the above description has tried to depict the culture of the Pakistani society which wants the women of Pakistan to be confined to four walls of the house. Rushdie shows how one of the Shakil sisters becomes pregnant because a sexual act with one of the white guests invited in the party. The pregnancy of the

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