This chapter explores the wider contexts of how Salman Rushdie deploys myths and mythologies and critiques them in his novels. Rushdie’s work has in many ways been influenced by the secular mythology that emerges in Nehru’s seminal book, The Discovery of India. This mythology links Rushdie to ideas of ‘unity in diversity’ and a distinctively Indian form of secularism that produces equal respect for the range of religious communities that inhabit this geopolitical entity. That said, Rushdie engages with a wide range of myths and mythologies, drawn from Islamic traditions, especially Sufism, but also Buddhism, Hinduism, Greek mythology, and Christianity. Rushdie also considers new myths and mythologies, especially in his engagement with popular culture, rock music, and the cult of celebrity, as well as the emergence of consumer culture and capitalism.

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.

Rushdie’s work is intertwined with a range of urban landscapes and needs to be contextualized in relation to urban planning, infrastructures, and the complex way his characters navigate these. Bombay/Mumbai remains a central focal point for his writing, from Midnight’s Children to The Ground Beneath Her Feet. The Satanic Verses is closely wedded to an exploration of 1980s London, but increasingly his focus is on New York, which provides the setting for Fury, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, and The Golden House. The chapter explores the wider context of the cityscapes with which Rushdie engages and how the urban environment shapes and structures his narratives, and reveals the darker undersides of crime and corruption with which these cities have become associated. It suggests that Rushdie’s formal techniques and linguistic innovativeness cannot be adequately understood without reference to the cities that have always played such an important role in his writing. Almost all of his main concerns as a writer emerge naturally, and can be examined most productively, in the space of the metropolis.

This chapter engages with new ways in which Salman Rushdie’s works can be re-contextualized through his archival papers, deposited in the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University, Atlanta. A mixed archive – part physical, containing some 215 boxes of material, and part digital, with Rushdie’s hard drives and computers and emulated environments in which these can be searched – the Rushdie archive reveals new contextual frames of reference through which to read Rushdie’s work and the author’s own public identity. This chapter considers the ways in which researchers who have engaged previously in textual criticism of Rushdie need to reconfigure the writer’s oeuvre through unpublished materials, including novels and drafts, and consider the repository as a source that enables the tracing of the genesis of his works in both digital and non-digital formats.

Scheherazade is the central trope that governs Salman Rushdie’s depictions of women. For Rushdie, who was raised on The Arabian Nights, she was the strong woman figure whom he admired the most. Most of his women characters are made in her image and are strong, wily survivors. They are storytellers who, by their wit and wisdom, manage to save themselves, their cultures, and countries through extremely difficult times. Rushdie’s women are drawn admiringly as strong women: Padma the writer’s muse, Amina Sinai the matriarch, and Indira Gandhi the politician in Midnight’s Children; Omar Khayyam’s fawning mothers in Shame; and all the strong women in The Satanic Verses – the Prophet’s wife, Khadija, and the Sufayan sisters, Aurora Zogoiby, and Qara Köz. For Rushdie, Scheherazade herself is the strongest, most admired woman, as we can see in his most recent collection of essays.