After establishing that our last book wasn't post-colonial literature, I've spent some time considering how Shalimar the Clown fits in the standard post-colonial realm, and more importantly, what it has to say about it.

In the post-colonial context, Shalimar the Clown demonstrates the widespread and continual effects colonization has, even half-a-century or so later. First we have the character of India, a young woman very much affected by a post-colonial world that she has been named after but never been too. According to the intial snapshot Rushdie gives us, her main feature is her hypersexuality (something we learn she has inherited from her mother and grandmother).
While we've discussed the symbolic role sex can have in a post-colonial work, what I find more interesting about the character of India is that she doesn't seem to have any real identity. In trying to describe her, I could give some biographical information and mention her sexual habits, but not much more. While it is true that most people around her age are still trying to figure things out, her identity confusion holds particular resonance in terms of post-coloniality.

When the British gave independence to India, as when any colonial power gives independence to its colony, they left a nation full of people with a complicated identity.
India (the character) literally doesn't know her mother, and thus was raised in the Western world by a Western father, but her identity is hardly exclusively Western. Her father has obviously been affected by the world of the "colonized," and despite not knowing her mother, India still feels some vague of a connection to her and her world (more than just her name.)

We saw something like this in Camara Laye, with the presence of the French, Indigeneous and Muslim influences, but by the end of The Dark Child it's apparant in Laye's disrespect for the workers he once respected that he was unable to completely reconcile his French-colonized mind with his native identity. This is what keeps the book from truly being a post-colonial narrative.

In Shalimar the Clown, however, we get to see the after-effects colonization can have on the colonized, and even generations removed from the colonization (as with India who is also physically removed). By setting the book in Kashmir, Rushdie is further highlighting the complications of a post-colonial identity, sinch Kashmir is a place co-habitated by Muslims and Hindus, and a place the British left with many problems to resolve.

I have a feeling that as we see Shalimar develop into an assasin and India learn the truth of her origins, the problems of post-colonial identity will only be further complicated.