ABSTRACT
While Midnight’s Children dealt with the dilemma of secularism and minority in the creation of the Indian nation-state, The Satanic Verses (1988), Rushdie’s later novel, deals with this issue in the cultural context of South Asian migration to the UK. A common concept emerges from the representation of the Muslim migrant in these two novels: namely an idea of ‘postcolonial citizenship’, which entails learning how to negotiate the complex and layered identities relating to gender, religion, caste, social class, language, in relationship to a modernizing concept of citizenship, both in India and in Britain. Whether it is a question of being Muslim in India, or a South Asian Muslim in Britain, alternative notions of belonging frequently enter into confl ict with state-backed versions of national identity.
