This chapter considers Rushdie’s columns, essays, and criticism to investigate the wider social, cultural, and political landscape with which his works engage. A prolific essayist, Rushdie has commented on key moments and events. These range from his own position as a diasporic Indian living in Britain to subcontinental politics, such as the assassination of Indira Gandhi, violence in Kashmir, and new emergent forms of racism in Britain. The chapter focuses especially on the collections, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 and Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction, 1992–2002, and columns and pieces he has written subsequently, and considers Rushdie’s role in internationalizing British literature and academia and his contributions to debates on race in Britain.

Many writers publishing in the period prior to WW II were active in setting up and contributing to a number of formative networks. Some were editors, launching new magazines and newsletters, including The Keys (Marson), Indian Writing (Singh, Ali, Subramanian, Shelvankar), or Ceylonese Meary James Tambimuttu’s Poetry London. Poetry London was both crucible for the publication of new poetry and an organ to promote several up and coming visual artists. Other writers, like the Parsi barrister Cornelia Sorabji (India Calling) or public intellectual Mulk Raj Anand, made use of nuanced strategies to profile and represent their voices in the British media. Authoritative informants, translators, and interlocutors, these colonials aired their diverse perspectives in British newspapers, contributing to periodicals such as The Left Review, Life and Letters, or The New Statesman. While there has been little evidence of such contributions in British-published periodical and cultural history, this chapter illustrates the extent and means by which these writers used such platforms to engage with key literary and cultural debates whilst at the same time inscribing new imagined communities.

Few novels have had such an influence on world affairs, or engendered such divergent, interpretive communities and views that have continually changed. Gayatri Spivak identified the implied multi-levelled readers of Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses as the international, postcolonial migrant readerships:

Yet some of the contradictions of the term 'secular Muslim' emerged in the diverse responses to the publication of the novel, as we shall see. Those who interpret the novel as blasphemy object chiefly to two chapters in the book. One of the protagonists of the novel is the Indian actor Gibreel Farishta, who suffers schizophrenic dream-sequences in which God reveals his will to the Prophet. A scribe named Salman writes down God's commands as they come from the lips of Mohammed, and he decides to play a trick by changing some of the divine words.