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---------------Replacing the Colonial Gaze Gender as Strategy in Salman Rushdie's Fiction Sukeshi Kamra The fictional author in Shame, in one of the many metatextual moments in the novel, asserts somewhat disingenuously that his "fairy tale" has escaped his control, that the women have taken over what was, he believed, a story primarily about males: I had thought, before I began, that what I had on my hands was an almost excessively masculine tale, a saga of sexual rivalry, ambition, power, patronage, betrayal, death, revenge. But the women seem to have taken over; they marched in from the peripheries of the story to demand the inclusion of their own tragedies, histories and comedies, obliging me to couch my narrative in all manner of sinuous complexities, to see my plot refracted , so to speak, through the prisms of its reverse and "female " side. It occurs to me that the women knew precisely what they were up to-that their stories explain, and even subsume the men's.l This crafted "unconscious slippage" into the female realm in an equally crafted metatextual moment is a metonymic expression of Rushdie's almost obsessive concern with the enclosed feminine space so eloquently troped in the zenana (harem) of subcontinental Muslim culture. The obsession, more specifically, is with giving voice to the suppressed history of women of the sub-continent and hence with dramatizing the challenge such recuperation poses to an entrenched, male symbolic order. Good intentions and isolated feminist passages aside, 238 Sukeshi Kamra Rushdie's fiction is problematically riddled with familiar patriarchal modes of containment such as fetishism, signaling more clearly than ever the absence of the very subject the texts are largely about, as the fictional author ofShame makes a point of pointing out. One might very well ask ofMidnight's Children, Shame, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories, "Is there a female in these texts?"2 Arun Mukherjee is one of the few readers of Rushdie's novels to have raised the issue ofhis seemingly unselfconscious reflection ofpatriarchal attitudes toward the female. Responding to Midnight's Children, she says: "Although I enjoyed and agreed with much ofRushdie's presentation and assessment, the narrative, despite its subversive intent, remains mired in patriarchy. Why, for example, use female genitalia to describe Sanjay? I didn't find it funny. Nor did I find Saleem's inability to have sexual intercourse with Padma funny because of the derogatory terms that are used to describe female genitalia."3 Unfortunately, Mukherjee chooses to gloss the matter rather than make it a mainstay of her reading of the text. For there is much more to be said about the matter-the matter, broadly defined, being the politics of gendered space and, more narrowly defined, the tactical splitting of the female and the feminine in Rushdie's novels. Much has been written about the difference, or identity, of the terms "feminine" and "female." For the purposes of this essay, I am adopting the most received understanding of these terms, as described by Toril Moi: "'feminine ' (and 'masculine') ... represent social constructs [patterns of sexuality and behaviour imposed by cultural and social norms]"; "female" and "male" are reserved for "the purely biological aspects of sexual difference."4 Since I believe, along with many others, that Rushdie's writings owe much to his obsession with colonial paradigms and practices, I place his inscription of the female specifically within the context of his project of recuperation, which, as Rushdie himselfpoints out, involves reiteration and parody ofcolonial tropes, among other practices.s Even a cursory glance at Orientalist practices, as described by Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Lisa Lowe, suffices to provide a rationale for Rushdie's very specific use of the categories offeminine and female, a use that otherwise (as attested by Mukerjee's article) evades comprehension except as a slippage.6 Approaching the Rushdie novel as a postcolonial response to colonial practices requires that we ask certain questions of his texts: Do they locate the postcolonial world in gender, as do colonial Jexts, identifying political with sexual? Does Rushdie engender the selfas exiled writer, as was the practice ofOrientalist texts? Is his splitting of the feminine and female related to the propensity ofOrientalists to locate subjectivity in the male and the neutral space associated with the male? And finally, is his reiterative and parodic practice conducive to a reclaiming of the highly fetishistic construction of the Oriental femalefnation in colonial writing, particularly that of the eighteenth, nineteenth, [3.135.198.49...

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