ABSTRACT
At the centre of this chapter is the Indian middle-class quest for masculinity and its entanglements with the ideologies of the British Raj. From around the 1830s, the British domination of India contributed to how gender was conceived and constructed by degrading Indian masculinities as inadequate. The self-fashioning of the Indian middle class, a social group which initially emerged as the cultural progeny of the British colonial rule, was uniquely shaped by this discourse of masculine inadequacy. Right from the nineteenth century we can therefore find examples of Indian middle-class men engaged in fantasies of an aggressive masculinity as part of their defence of their self-image in the face of the colonisers. This chapter explores the vicissitudes of this quest for aggressive manhood through an exploration of the Saladin Chamcha narrative in Salman Rushdie’s classic novel The Satanic Verses. Through a reading of the oedipal drama between Saladin and his father and the patterns of postcolonial migration that it spawns, the chapter unpacks some of the futile efforts that Indian middle-class men invest in to escape feelings of colonial humiliation.
