some people...

The case of Rushdie is one of inclusion; the process starts with a certain collusion of classes. I am suspicious of class-bias arguments against Rushdie; however, with Rushdie's recent work (I shall except Haroon and the Sea of Stories, whose wonderful flight into fancy is a compensatory withdrawal into the classless imagination) the following argument holds water. He is from middle-class India, and his joining the educated ranks of the West at Cambridge is more a bringing together of taste and class than the development of a contestatory literature. I realize that any attempt to connect his Satanic Verses with his class background (i.e. as an expression of its failure) can be read as a feeble gesture; but it is more often true than not that writers from his class have, as their central focus, their own career in view. At times, this careerist motivation is clothed in the garb of activism, just as it is expressed in pluralism. Yet their literature is not about the larger sphere of activism. There are, of course, exceptions to this essentially weak rule -- but Rushdie is not one of them.
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i guess i, as people of my class are presumably wont to do, missed something when my major interest in the book was the characters...