Control and Empowerment through English in Salman Rushdie’s Writings
Control and Empowerment through English in Salman Rushdie’s Writings

Summary/Abstract: This article explores the double-edged power relationship between the English language,imposed and exercised as the language of the administration in the time of the BritishEmpire on the South-Asian subcontinent, and the way it has been appropriated and re-shaped creatively in postcolonial times by one of its best-known writers, SalmanRushdie. Rushdie fully believes in mastering English and gaining freedom through it,placing himself to some extent in opposition to other authors, such as Gandhi or theKenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Moreover, in his novels, English itself is a character and/ ora marker of class, gender, race, ethnicity, social group, while it differentiates thecharacters’ roles on the axis coloniser-colonised.

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