Rushdie’s Sorcery with Language
Rushdie’s Sorcery with Language

Summary/Abstract: This article looks into how postcolonial writer Salman Rushdie does a work of “magic” with languages in order to find his own voice to tell his unrooted and hybrid stories. Hybridity and unrootedness are essential aspects of his writing. This study traces Rushdie’s experiments with languages from Midnight’s Children, the novel where he felt he found a voice of his own, and through to The Enchantress of Florence, a novel of linguistic and artistic refinement. From one novel to the next, Rushdie found new inflections of his voice in his narrators and characters, who “chutnified” English, “translated” their languages into their idioms, aestheticized and palimpsested their world, “disoriented” it, turned it into a “hypertext”, or seduced the readers with their stories.

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