ABSTRACT
Salman Rushdie was born in June 1947 in Bombay, India, the only son of four children. His family had come originally from Kashmir (as had Khomeini's), so Urdu-Hindi was its first language, not Marathi, the main language of Bombay. The shock of transition to English school life and the difficulty of adjusting was very great, and it apparently colored all his subsequent experiences in Great Britain. Although Rushdie had lived in Great Britain since childhood and had become a British citizen, he hardly embraced his adopted home. Here is an everyday experience encountered by a Jewish woman. That Rushdie came to be seen by radical fundamentalist Muslims as a stand-in for the United States is deeply ironic, for he espouses the classic anti-Americanism of third-worldists. Rushdie is a disaffected intellectual who criticizes or makes fun of nearly everything.
