Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie

Bombay-born novelist and biting critic of British imperialism

Salman Rushdie (1947- ) was born in Bombay. He achieved world fame though his Midnight’s Children, which won the Booker Prize in 1981; the novel is about the children born on the stroke of midnight as India gained its independence in 1947. Much of the rest of his work is set in South Asia too. In a Channel 4 broadcast in 1983 he laid out his view of the impact of British imperialism on British people’s racial attitudes: ‘If you want to understand British racism... it is impossible even to begin to grasp the nature of the beast unless you accept its historical roots; unless you see that 400 years of conquest and looting, centuries of being told that you are superior to the fuzzy-wuzzies and the wogs... leave their stain on you all; that such a stain seeps into every part of your culture, your language and your daily life; and that nothing much has been done to wash it out...’