From Midnight’s Child to Clown Assassin

What happens to the postcolonial novelistic imaginary after 1989? What transformed Salman Rushdie from an exemplary author of the postcolonial novel to a vulnerable figure after 1989? These are some of the questions this chapter explores. Rushdie’s graphing of the necropolitical face of global Islam through his elegiac rendering of the Kashmir crisis in Shalimar the Clown is a significant literary intervention in the contemporary debates on the future of liberal and postliberal world-making in the twenty-first century.