‘The God of the Imagination’

Postcolonial Postsecularism and Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet

Abstract

Salman Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) invokes religion and mythology in its representation of miracles, wonder, sorcery, revelations, infernos, frontiers, metamorphoses, and other worlds as it narrates the lives—across the United States, India, and Europe—of celebrated rock singers Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara. This article analyzes how Rushdie represents elements of secularism and religion in order to gesture toward and search for inspirational, generative, and creative potentials. I argue how Rushdie’s literary representation of secularism and religion is an expression of postcolonial postsecularism, as an imaginative possibility emerging from the historical conditions and contexts—across India and western Europe—of philosophical and political secularism, religious thought and practice, and postcoloniality.