The complicated reciprocities between self and world, roots and routes, local and global that galvanize theorists and advocates of cosmopolitanism have been career-long preoccupations of Rushdie. Opposed to exclusionary identity politics, cosmopolitan inclusiveness values commonalities of belonging, mixed identities, and respect for others’ lives, values, and cultures. The novel as a genre promotes such principles, and a typical Rushdie novel, with its panoramic and kinetic narrative, large cast of characters, temporal and spatial expansiveness, exuberant fusion of realism and magic, otherworldly forays, and dizzying range of references and allusions, seems to aspire to such inclusiveness in its form and style. Midnight’s Children thematizes an inclusive vision of India (and Bombay as its microcosm) that becomes attenuated and threatened in later novels. Migrant characters and overseas cities dominate The Satanic Verses and the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels, but as Rushdie the privileged middle-class Indian migrant author becomes Rushdie the controversial celebrity and member of global elites, cosmopolitanism as an ideal comes under pressure both within his books and in critical discourses surrounding them. This chapter argues that cosmopolitanism, whether achieved or merely aspired to, whether associated with celebratory or limiting visions of rootlessness, remains tenacious in its hold on his and his characters’ imaginations.

In an article published in the Guardian in 2004, the West Indian-born, British-raised novelist Caryl Phillips remarked on the curious absence in 1950s British literature of a phenomenon that was visibly transforming the nation throughout that decade. Immigration from the far-flung possessions of an empire that had begun decolonising in earnest after the war burgeoned in the 1950s, with the West Indies and Africa especially supplying hundreds of thousands of new residents to Britain (and to London in particular). Yet despite what Phillips calls 'the daily presence of these new people on the streets, on the buses, and working in hospitals and factories all over the country' at the time, leading British-born writers such as Kingsley Amis and John Osborne displayed a general - and perhaps, Phillips suggests, even a wilful - blindness to the nation's emerging multiracial and multicultural reality. The key exception, he notes, was Colin MacInnes, who was born in London in 1914, grew up in Australia, eventually moved back to London, and, in the late 1950s, wrote three important novels that feature multiracial groups of protagonists and vividly depict a city in flux. Of the three, Phillips gives pride of place to MacInnes's first, City of Spades, published in 1957.