In the Name of Religion: Sexuality and Taboo in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown

This paper examines socio-cultural and political interpretations of rape, love and sex in Shalimar the Clown to assess whether taboos on these practices in Kashmir are based on cultural and religious laws or are attempts by fundamentalists to re-colonize existing cultural and religious jurisprudences. I interrogate the orchestration of sexual violence through extremist Islamic doctrines like ‘Sharia,’ ‘Hudood’ and ‘Zina’ Ordinances, and ‘Honour Killing’ arguing that religious criminality transcends geopolitical and philosophical spaces. Through taboos on rape, love and sex, Rushdie satirizes the byzantine passion governing the quest for ecstasy in men, and its resultant effects of frigidity in women. Furthermore, the novel valorizes female sexual virility, because fundamentalist superstructures ironically groom sexually weak men, thereby impeding social conviviality. By satirizing taboos on domestic and social metamorphoses, Rushdie interrogates the place of fundamentalist ideology within contemporary world geopolitics. His valorisation of love and sex, suggest that they constitute immutable foundations on which societies should be founded.