This chapter focuses on the ways in which Salman Rushdie’s works have been adapted for stage, screen, and radio. Focusing on adaptations of Midnight’s Children for the RSC, Haroun and the Sea of Stories for the National Theatre, radio versions such as Midnight’s Children for BBC Radio Four, a proposed Netflix serialization of the novel, as well as its film adaptation, this chapter considers the pitfalls and strengths in the processes of adaptation, on which Rushdie has written himself on the occasion of his writing the screenplay for the novel for Deepa Mehta’s film adaptation. The chapter considers also the audiobook versions of major novels, such Art Malik’s reading of The Moor’s Last Sigh or Rushdie’s own reading of Haroun and the Sea of Stories and East, West, and some of the failed adaptions, such as Raul Ruiz’s attempt to produce a film of The Ground Beneath Her Feet. In so doing, the chapter considers the transposition of Rushdie’s work into other media and highlights how their unique originary artistic forms make them a difficult adaptive proposition.

This introduction to Salman Rushdie in Context focuses on the idea of storytelling so fundamental to Rushdie’s oeuvre. It delineates the manifold ways in which Rushdie animates the idea of the wonder tale in his works to open up the range of contexts covered in this volume. The introduction also offers a wider overview of Rushdie’s publishing career and his biography. It also considers the main themes with which his works engage, ranging from subcontinental politics, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and cosmopolitanism to popular culture and the wider themes of his works. It also delineates the structure of the book and highlights its thematic scope to delineate the different interpretative lenses with which this volume animates Rushdie’s works and his career as a writer.

Salman Rushdie has a long-standing relationship with cinema and cinematic storytelling. Foundational to many deliberations is the film version of The Wizard of Oz. His novels are deeply invested in an aesthetic that is shaped by European art-house cinema, including auteur filmmakers such as Fellini, Godard, and Buñuel. Increasingly his relationship with Indian popular cinema and Bollywood has been explored, but the cinematic imagination continues to preoccupy Rushdie, not least in his novel The Golden House, where the central narrator is a film scriptwriter who imagines large elements of the plot as a film script. This chapter considers the wider context of cinematic production in relation to Rushdie’s fictional work to uncover the contexts of his cinematic influences and to consider how a cinematic style of storytelling is reformulated throughout his career for an increasingly cine-literate reading public.

This chapter considers the wider contexts of secularism in relation to Salman Rushdie’s novels. It delineates different conceptions of secularism with which Rushdie is preoccupied. Midnight’s Children, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Shalimar the Clown are especially concerned with the notion of the syncretic and secular ideal of the Indian nation, championed by Nehru and the Indian National Congress at independence. It is the concerted dismantling of this postcolonial settlement and the Nehruvian vision of the nation at independence, and the replacement of this founding myth with an exclusionist nationalist narrative, that Rushdie critiques in these novels. This chapter also delineates the wider contexts with which Rushdie engages to chart the decline of Indian secularism and the syncretic concept of the Indian nation. It furthermore considers debates of secularism in relation to western definitions and how these feature in novels such as Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. These intersections open up complex ideological debates around rationality, faith, and religion, central to much of Rushdie’s works.

Drama, film, new media, and television play key roles in the representation of black and Asian British experiences. Linking back to a history of drama, film, and media production in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, this chapter considers how leading writers and their productions have taken Britain’s diverse cultures centre stage. The widespread success of works by black and Asian British writers, actors, directors, and producers in the late 1990s and early twenty-first century led some commentators to conclude that the way Britain conceives of itself as a nation has effectively been transformed. Circumstances are, however, more complex and by tracing long-standing barriers around processes of representation this chapter focuses on how these assertions are increasingly challenged. In so doing, it highlights ongoing debates around citizenship and access to representation, and argues that black and Asian British drama, film, new media, and television productions have become central to contemporary debates around Britishness. Ultimately they constitute important cultural markers in the way Britain confronts its colonial heritage and conceives of itself as a nation.