Mother, Truth-Teller, Emasculator, and Beast: The Feminist Voice in
Salman Rushdie’s Shame
Eileen Long
411 E Furness Rd.
Michigan City, IN 46360
Telephone: 219-363-8423
E-mail: long137@pnc.edu
diva614@comcast.net
Purdue University North Central
1401 S. U.S. 421
Westville, IN 46391
Dr. Heather Fielding
Department of English and Modern Languages
In the novel Shame, Salman Rushdie explores the boundaries between countries, political
systems, and gender roles. Through his position as both author and narrator, he examines the role
of women against the patriarchal nationalism of Pakistan in the 1980’s. But the questions often
asked within critical conversation are whether Rushdie can or should speak for the women of
Pakistan. Can Rushdie, as a post-colonial male, be a representative for the feminist voice?
Throughout Shame we see women oppressed by the masculine hegemony of the real Pakistan, as
well as the fictional country within which so much of the action of Rushdie’s characters takes
place. What Rushdie shows the reader through the actions of Bilquis and Rani, as well as their
daughters Sufiya and Arjumand, are the ways in which women cope, live, succeed, and die
within that masculine context. Highlighted against the backdrop of the real and fantastical,
Rushdie writes a viable story that acts as a voice for the women of the subaltern. In this essay I
will show that the feminist voice rings loud and clear against the patriarchal setting of the novel
Shame.
There are many scholars who would argue against the idea of Rushdie as the voice for
subaltern women. Gayatri Spivak, in her essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak” suggests that the
plight of the subaltern is in their inability to speak for themselves. They are silenced,
marginalized, and their message is untranslatable. On the one hand, Spivak believes that first
world intellectuals are unable to comprehend with any accuracy the views of a third world
society. However, she also believes that if the first world does not speak for the third world, then
they will not be heard at all.
What Spivak questions are issues of representation, which she frames through her
discussion of theories presented by Foucault and Deleuze. She questions their theory that the
subalterns can speak for themselves if only given a platform to do so. Spivak contends that it is
not as simple as that, because when the subaltern does speak via a platform given to them by first
world intellectuals, the first world ultimately subjugates the true voice of the subaltern. However,
she argues that if the subaltern does not speak for himself or herself, then there is no voice for the
first world to subjugate.
Spivak contends that in order to successfully speak for or about the subaltern, we must
recognize that there are two concepts of representation at work – proxy and portrait – that while
different, work in tandem. She states that, “Two senses of representation are being run together:
representation as ‘speaking for,’ as in politics, and representation as ‘re-presentation,’ as in art or
philosophy” (Spivak 28). One concept, the political, operates from a place of power. This is the
voice of the first world speaking for the subaltern, which Spivak refers to as the “proxy.” This
means the first world stands in for the subaltern to represent them – to act for them in their best
interests. Re-presentation or “portrait” is when the first world allows the subaltern to speak for
him or her self. However, the first world views that “portrait” through their own distorted vision
of what they believe the subaltern is representing. Spivak makes it clear that the contradictions
between these concepts should not stop the first world from continuing to attempt to understand
and speak for the subaltern.
Spivak is not the only scholar questioning the accuracy of the subaltern voice. Taking an
opposing view to Spivak, Inderpal Grewal questions the validity of the novel as a feminist
narrative. Through her analysis of the text she argues that Shame fails to speak for the women of
Pakistan. Grewal makes it clear that Rushdie’s male voice, despite the emphasis in the novel
addressing women’s marginality, exclusion, and silence cannot speak for women, and therefore
fails as a feminist narrative. She states, “…he suggests that literature attempts, like history, to
influence the course of events in the future by suggesting lessons from the past. Such an agenda,
for Rushdie, implies an absence of value-neutrality that is common to all verbal artifacts”
(Grewal 24). It appears that Grewal believes Rushdie cannot be unbiased or neutral regarding
women, not only because of his gender but also because of his personal beliefs regarding the
influence of literature and history. Her argument would hold that Rushdie should not speak for
the feminist voice, because he is unable to understand the women of Pakistan. What Grewal
offers is an alternative narrative to Shame where the focus is on women’s struggle in Pakistan
instead of their subjugation.
Within the novel Grewal identifies various “coalitions” that Rushdie attempts to connect
with in the context of Shame. The fact that Rushdie places himself within the novel as the
narrator makes the possibility of a coalition or alliance possible. Grewal states “Rushdie suggests
that just by their presence and within the course of their own, supposedly separate, hidden,
“purdah” lives, women do affect events. Therefore their voices cannot be suppressed” (Grewal
25). But, as she points out, Rushdie fails to uphold the coalition with the women in Shame.
Grewal believes that the women in Shame cannot move to the center from the margins because
Rushdie writes them in the typical “traditional” role: “Rushdie’s novel thus reinscribes the
patriarchal role of women as passive, ineffectual, or mediators of male power” (Grewal 30). For
this reason, in Grewal’s opinion, Rushdie ultimately fails in creating a coalition between himself
and the women in Shame.
Grewal also points out that while Shame addresses the necessity of coalitions, Rushdie
fails to address the concept of coalitions between women. Instead, the women and men of Shame
are grouped together in a coalition that is marginalized by a dominant culture. However, within
that coalition, the men further marginalize the women within their own group. It becomes a twotier level of oppression and marginalization. In addition, Rushdie links the characters of Sufiya
and Omar together in an analogy of shame vs. shamelessness, believing that they are two sides of
the same coin. But this cannot work because Omar, being a man, can move to the center from the
margins (and back again), but Sufiya is locked into the margins because she is a woman. She
does not have the same opportunities and freedoms that Omar enjoys in making choices
regarding her own life.
Rushdie means to show Sufiya’s violence as a way of women rising up against the
patriarch. He manifests her marginalization with violence against the forces that have silenced
her. However, Grewal believes that this idea backfires, since Sufiya’s violent behavior only
serves to highlight patriarchal fear of women as vengeful, destructive and dangerous. Ultimately,
Sufiya acting in a patriarchal (violent) way negates her chances of being accepted as an equal
voice within her coalition. She remains forever silenced and marginalized regardless of the
carnage that she wields.
Grewal suggests that organizations, such as the Women’s Action Forum, highlight that
Pakistani women have a voice. She points out that there is a middle ground between passivity
and violence in dealing with a political system that is heavily “Islamized” and therefore
patriarchal. She concludes that Rushdie fails to acknowledge with any degree of depth that other
options are available to his female characters. Once again, he fails to speak for these women.
Grewal believes that the novel could only work as an agent of change had Rushdie drawn upon
the history of women’s struggles in Pakistan instead of their subjugation. His inability to imagine
a world without patriarchal rule fails him in the end.
Based upon these theories one might ask, how can Rushdie be the voice of subaltern
women and their plight in a patriarchal society? Male, born in India and educated in England,
Rushdie would seem to be the product of the colonial education system; in other words,
“…Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, opinions, in morals, and in intellect” (Spivak
31). This is a man who seems to be the antithesis of a qualified spokesperson for the subaltern.
However, as Samir Dayal has argued, Rushdie dramatizes the limitations of the post-colonial
subaltern. As Rushdie himself is “between” lands – born in India, educated in England, now
living in New York City – his voice accurately, and some may say, self-consciously, “dismantles
conventional definitions and boundaries of nation-ness and belonging, deconstructs simple
divisions of masculine and feminine, and thematizes subjectivity as enigma” (Dayal 40).
Rushdie informs the reader early on in the novel when discussing the fictional country and the
city of Q that, “My story, my fictional country exist, like myself, at a slight angle to reality”
(Rushdie 22). Regardless of Rushdie’s gender, upbringing, or education, his “between-ness” is
locked within his DNA and he experiences being the other, a person who does not belong within
the context of a specific society – an otherness that he shares with the women in Shame.
At first glance, the roles of the women in the novel appear to have traditional feminine
traits – domestic, silenced, and bound by the traditions of a culture that espouses the primacy of
the male. However, Rushdie presents the reader with four strong women – mothers and
daughters who, while moving and surviving within a patriarchal society, still have a voice.
Bilquis, Rani, Sufiya, and Arjumand are enigmas. Looking at each of these characters, I will
argue that Rushdie successfully gives voice to women in ways both conventional and
unconventional.
Rushdie successfully brings to life the duality of these women. Each of them works
within the parameters of a patriarchal society, however these women change or subvert the rules
of the game in that society. Using any means necessary, either through their domesticity or
silence, the denial of their physical beauty and gender, or ultimately through violence, these
women are the voice of feminist Pakistan. Bilquis and Rani use domestic arts in order to “speak”
or act as agents of change – Bilquis by silently sewing burkas to bring about an escape plan for
Raza, Omar, and herself – and Rani, exiled to Mohenjo, by telling the history of the society
through her embroidery of shawls. Arjumand is a great beauty that loathes her gender, worships
her father and despises her mother, and yearns for power within the political world inhabited by
her father. A beauty with many suitors, Arjumand turns her back on what is expected of her
within society in order to advance her father’s political career (and her own) through
manipulation. Finally, there is Sufiya. Sufiya is the culmination of the other. The expectations of
a patriarchal society that she should be born a boy, led to her role as the repository of shame for
an entire gender. Female, silenced, marginalized as an “idiot,” she is the Other with a capital O.
Rushdie brilliantly gives voice to the one woman who is the epitome of voiceless-ness in a way
that can best be understood by a patriarchal society, through violence.
The lives of Bilquis and Sufiya share very similar trajectories. They are silenced by the
shame of a mother unable to bear a son, and the daughter who fails to be born a male. Both
mother and daughter share a mental instability brought about by their shame.
When we first encounter Bilquis, she is vivacious and independent as she navigates life in
New Delhi. However, Rushdie give the reader an inkling of her future when he describes her “As
a woman unclothed by change, but who wrapped herself in certainties; or as a girl who became a
queen, but lost the ability possessed by every beggar-woman, that is, the power of bearing
sons… ” (Rushdie 64). As the novel progresses Bilquis turns further and further inward, wrapped
in a black burka, wandering the house and muttering to herself. Her loss and shame manifests
itself in a shadow of black fabric, which she silently sews into shrouds. It is as if Bilquis moves
from being a woman who initially “speaks,” to a woman who is silenced due to her subjugation
and insanity. It is only in the end of the novel that there is a glimmer of the old Bilquis. She is the
one who manifests an escape route for Raza and Omar by dressing them in the burkas that she
has sewn. Bilquis is the one who stands up to the men on the bus, shaming them for their
behavior when it seems that they will soon discover the real identities of the men. Rushdie may
write Bilquis within a traditional female context, but it is her actions that bring about real change
in the novel – actions that change her destiny, as well as that of Raza, Omar, and Sufiya.
Sufiya moves in the same trajectory as her mother, but only in reverse. From her infancy
Sufiya is silenced. Rushdie writes of Sufiya’s silence as well as her ability to take in what is
going on around her “And now it was the baby, its very essence in doubt, who fell silent and
began to muse” (Rushdie 89). The disappointment surrounding her gender from the moment of
her birth silences and shames her. If Sufiya is the sponge that absorbs the shame of her gender,
then she also absorbs the knowledge of how a patriarchal society works. Moments after her birth
she knows her place within society and the shame manifests in her blushing, “Then, even then,
she was too easily shamed” (Rushdie 89).
As Sufiya ages, the reader sees her drastic attempts to “speak.” Labeled an “idiot” after
she contracts brain fever, Sufiya moves from silence to speaking in the only way she knows that
she will be heard, and that is through violence. Rushdie writes, “… that the power of the Beast of
shame cannot be held for long within any one frame of flesh and blood, because it grows, it feeds
and swells, until the vessel bursts.” (Rushdie 305) It is as if Rushdie is describing an entire
society of women living under patriarchal rule. Yes, the vehicle Sufiya uses to be heard is one of
violence, which Grewal believes only fuels patriarchal fear of destructive, vengeful women.
However, Sufiya can never join a Women’s Action Forum in order to create change. She is
unable to engage in a dialogue to discuss the issues of her marginalization. Therefore, Rushdie
gives Sufiya a voice that shocks and terrifies – a voice that demands to be heard. After absorbing
the shame of an entire society of marginalized women, Sufiya fights fire with fire, speaking to
the patriarch in a language they can understand. Sufiya’s struggle through acts of violence is the
only way for her to speak against the subjugation of women.
Rushdie presents Rani and Arjumand in a very different mother/daughter dynamic. Early
in the novel, Rani appears very much like her friend Bilquis. She has an outspoken quality about
her and shares with Bilquis her “malicious ruminations on the subject of the household sleeping
arrangements” (Rushdie 70). At eighteen years old, and having lived all her life in the house in
Karachi, Rani delights in sharing her scandalous opinions on the family and their history with
Bilquis. This is a woman who speaks her mind, and she becomes a confidant and friend to
Bilquis. However, after marrying the prize catch, Iskander Harappa, she is shuttled away to the
family estate of Mohenjo where she lives the rest of her life, at times in exile and other times
under house arrest. Abandoned and humiliated by her husband’s excesses, despised by her only
daughter Arjumand, mocked by the domestic help at the estate – Rani, much like Bilquis, turns
inward and silent. During the six-year period of her house arrest with Arjumand, Rani writes
their history through the embroidery of eighteen shawls. This work is her voice, her memory, “an
epitaph of wool” and Rushdie writes of the shawls, “Locked in their trunk, they said unspeakable
things which nobody wanted to hear” (Rushdie 201). When Rani sends the shawls to Arjumand,
it is her last act of defiance, a last act of speaking the truth about all she has observed within the
patriarchal society that has silenced and shamed her. Before sending the trunk of shawls to her
daughter, she enclosed a piece of paper “On this piece of paper she would write her chosen title:
‘The Shamelessness of Iskander the Great.’ And she would add a surprising signature: Rani
Humayun. Her own name, retrieved from the mothballs of the past” (Rushdie 201). In that one
action, Rani warns her daughter of what her future holds if she continues to embrace the
patriarchal mindset, and most importantly, she takes back her name. She is no longer the
property of a patriarchal society. This is the glimmer of the young Rani coming back to speak for
herself and for all of the women held in exile within their own home or country.
Shame is manifested in a completely different way with Rani’s daughter. Rushdie
explains “the matter of daughters-who-should-have-been-born-sons” in relation to Arjumand
when he writes, “Arjumand, the famous ‘virgin Ironpants’, regretted her female sex for wholly
non-parental reasons. ‘This woman’s body,’ she told her father on the day she became a grown
woman, ‘it brings a person nothing but babies, pinches, and shame’” (Rushdie 107). Arjumand
understands the shame of being a woman in Pakistan. Where Rani and Bilquis cope and survive
their shame with sewing and silence, Arjumand rebels against her gender, cutting herself off
from everything it means to be a woman and seeking power through political means. In her own
way she is a beast, just like Sufiya. Rushdie has already shown the correlation between the two
of them as the “daughters-who-should-have-been-born-sons.” The only difference is Arjumand
has tapped into the logical, reasoning side of herself, while Sufiya is pure emotion and fury.
Arjumand has a fury within her, but it is controlled and calculated as when she taunts the young
Captain Ijazz. Arjumand uses everything she hates about being a woman to taunt and eventually
imprison and torture him. She takes her revenge upon all men by doing “…what she had never
done in her life, that is, she dressed to kill. The virgin Ironpants swung her hips and wiggled her
behind and flashed her eyes at all the soldiers, but most of all at the peach-faced Captain Ijazz”
(Rushdie 199). Arjumand, unlike Sufiya who uses the violence of the patriarchy to speak, uses
her sex to speak and gain power over men.
Rushdie has given the reader four different and diverse women: the Mother, the Truth
Teller, the Emasculator, and the Beast. Each of these women must survive in a world ruled by
men, using whatever means available to be heard. In their way, they form a coalition against the
shame that has been imposed upon them. Bilquis, Sufiya, Rani, and Arjumand all successfully
speak against the patriarchal society that they inhabit. Rushdie shows that even a man “…Indian
in blood and colour, but English in taste, opinions, in morals, and in intellect” can speak for the
subaltern woman in a responsible way.
Works Cited
Dayal, Samir. “The Liminalities of Nation and Gender: Salman Rushdie’s Shame.” The Journal
of the Midwest Modern Language Association 31.2 (1998): 39-62. Print.
Grewal, Inderpal. “Salman Rushdie: Marginality, Women, and Shame.” Genders 3 (1988):
24-42. Print.
Rushdie, Salman. Shame. New York: Random House. 2008. Print.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader.
New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.