ABSTRACT
In September 1988 in the UK Viking/Penguin published the novel The Satanic Verses (hereafter referred to as SV) by Salman Rushdie. Rushdie was already a renowned (although not at this point, notorious) novelist: he had won the Booker Prize in 1981 for Midnight’s Children, and was shortlisted for the same prize for his next novel, Shame. Rushdie was born in Bombay in 1947 to affluent Muslim parents, and completed his education in England at Rugby (an exclusive public school) and then Cambridge. While there Rushdie began an investigation of the historical roots of Islam which sowed the seeds for SV. Many of Rushdie’s novels explore the themes of conflicts of identities, the search for belonging, finding a home, the need for faith (or something like it), intertwined with and overlaid onto accounts of Indian history and the Partition; the recurrence of these themes can in part be seen as reflecting Rushdie’s own biography.
