The experience of expatriation, which he shared with many writers of his generation who were born in the Third World, is an important theme in his work.
However, Rushdie's opus in particular expanded the meaning of the word "expatriate" to possibly its total linguistic limits. For instance, Midnight's Children (1981) is in part the story of a baby who was not only the result of an extramarital affair, but who was then switched at birth with a second illicit child. The hero of the novel is doubly removed from his true patrimony: His mother's husband is not his father, and the Englishman with whom his Indian mother slept--who his mother thinks is his father--is not his real father either. In addition, the hero is caught between the two great religions of Indian, Islam and Hinduism, neither of which he can claim as his own. Finally, he spends his life being shunted back and forth by circumstance between the Indian republic and its antithesis, Pakistan.
Rushdie unfailingly took the stance of a lifelong member of the diaspora, which may be the most consistently autobiographical aspect of his work.
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