On June 19, 1947, just two months before India’s independence and partition, (Ahmed) Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay, India. Like his father, Rushdie was well educated—first at Cathedral school in Bombay, then at his father’s alma mater, King’s College, Cambridge, in Great Britain. He earned a Master of History degree in 1968, focusing on Arabic and Islamic civilization, but aspired to be a writer like his hero, Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz. Upon graduation Rushdie moved to Karachi, Pakistan, where his family had relocated in 1964, intending to pursue a career in television writing. In 1969 he returned to London, frustrated by censorship in Pakistan, and for the next ten years made his living as an advertising copywriter, while devoting his off-hours to fiction. In 1975 his first novel, Grimus, was published to lessthan- critical acclaim but his subsequent novel, Midnight’s Children, won the Booker Prize, launching Rushdie’s career and introducing a new type of novel in Britain. The novel’s scathing attacks on political dynasties, corruption, and the legacy of British colonialism are tempered with abundant humor and self-deprecating jokes, yet it gave offense. Foreshadowing the political turmoil that would embroil his later career (the 1989 religious edict from Iran condemning him to death for his The Satanic Verses), India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sued Rushdie and his publisher for libel, forcing them to make a public apology.
