Salmon Rushdie’s Frontier Pedagogy: Notes on Two Episodes in “Step Across This Line"

In the Indian multilingual classrooms teachers often discover certain details about the political semantics of the English texts they teach. When that happens, the language means much more to non-English readers who happily realize that English grants them a little more freedom to convey meanings to them than it does a monolingual readership. My example here is Salman Rushdie’s Tanner Lectures in Human Values called “Step Across This Line.” While his immediate context is the 9/11 tragedy and the politically prudent ways the US might cope with its aftermath, he returns time and again to those who brave borders, face challenges at the frontiers, across the world. Freedom for those on the run, and freedom for those who chase them are not the same. Rushdie reflects on the conflicting and contradictory meanings of refuge(e) and freedom. This makes for a new understanding of these terms. In my experience, South Asian students instinctively recall what these words intuit in their own languages. Therefore, they see more into the lives of these words when, by hints and guesses, they negotiate Rushdie’s passages, both textual and physical. Rushdie’s nuances again draw upon a vast “translation zone” occupied formerly by such distinguished South Asian writers as Rabindranath Tagore and Faiz Ahmed Faiz. This article proposes that a robust peripheral pedagogy is at work in Rushdie’s essays when readers step across the strictly-drawn English lines. And when they do, they enter non-English semantic subterrains, cross linguistic borders, and close cultural gaps with aplomb.