SATIRE AS POSTCOLONIAL COUNTER-DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE, IDENTITY, AND POWER IN SALMAN RUSHDIE’S SELECTED NOVELS

Abstract

Postcolonial satire is often treated as a comic mode directed at political or social targets. In Salman Rushdie’s fiction, however, satire performs a more consequential function: it unsettles the forms of language and representation through which political, historical, and cultural authority acquires legitimacy. This article examines satire as a form of postcolonial counter-discourse in Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983), and The Satanic Verses (1988). Drawing on Homi K. Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity and ambivalence, Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of carnival and the grotesque, and Michel Foucault’s analysis of discourse and power, the study argues that Rushdie’s satire does not replace one authoritative narrative with another. Instead, it exposes the instability of apparently settled categories such as nation, history, gender, religious authority, cultural authenticity, and linguistic legitimacy. Through comparative close reading, the article traces a widening movement in Rushdie’s satirical practice: from the problem of national history in Midnight’s Children, through authoritarianism, patriarchy, class, and political morality in Shame, to migration, religious authority, cultural displacement, and contested identity in The Satanic Verses. Particular attention is given to linguistic hybridity, since Rushdie’s transformation of English through South Asian idioms, lexical registers, cultural references, and syntactic play is inseparable from his critique of authority. The article contends that satire in these novels is not merely ornamental or oppositional. It is an epistemological practice that asks who may narrate history, whose language counts as legitimate, and how identities become authoritative through repetition and exclusion. Reading the three novels together therefore positions satire as a structural component of Rushdie’s postcolonial aesthetics and as a sustained method of interrogating the relationship among language, identity, and power.