Contents: Preface. Acknowledgements. 1. Biographical highlights. 2. Autobiography as history: Saleem Sinai and India in Rushdie's Midnight's Children. 3. Handcuffed to history: Salman Rushdie's art. 4. "Lest he returning Chide": Saleem Sinai's inaction in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. 5. Salman Rushdie in Indo-English literature. 6. The perforated sheet: method as meaning in Midnight's Children. 7. New dimensions courtesy of the whirling demons: word-play in Grimus. 8. An analysis of Shame. 9. Salman Rushdie's Shame: an overview of a labyrinth. 10. Impressive women but the chains are no fictions: women in Rushdie's Shame. 11. Girl children in Rushdie's fiction. 12. Purdah in Salman Rushdie, Attia Hosain and Rama Mehta. 13. The we/they paradigm in Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. 14. A review of a text. 15. Dancing through the minefield called Salman Rushdie.

"This volume on Rushdie's early fiction consists of several introductory essays that give a lay reader a basic understanding of Rushdie's literary strategies, and several essays of complex analyses of themes and techniques in his first four novels. Most of the essays were published in various academic journals and/or given as plenary addresses at various conferences." (jacket)