Digital Object Identifierhttps://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.21
The maternal body is a space where something soothingly familiar collapses into something terribly alien or unfamiliar. As an entity that is divisible and uncontrollable, the maternal body often evokes a particular fear. While framed within the narrative of the nation, motherhood and maternal bodies are revered in Indian culture. However, outside the bounds of marriage, the maternal body becomes a symbol of threat and disruption. Often seen either as a disease or a condition to be controlled, the discourse surrounding the maternal body has long been an area of discussion and debate. In Shalimar the Clown, Boonyi’s motherhood and her maternal body are seen as monstrous, hideous and disgusting. Her body becomes a constant reminder of the loss of Kashmiriyat. It is her return to the village of Pachigam that further complicates her identity. As a fallen woman who has been declared dead by the community, she occupies a liminal space between the living and the non-living. This paper makes an attempt to understand how Rushdie’s representation of Boonyi’s maternal body, read through the lens of the uncanny, further contributes to exploring violence and resistance in the narrative. It goes beyond the representation of the female body as a site for constructing national allegory. The paper argues that Boonyi’s concealed pregnancy, her monstrous transformation, and the final return to Pachigam as a socially dead figure unsettle the boundaries between self and other, belonging and exclusion, and victimhood and agency.
Goswami, Juriti. “The Uncanny Maternal Body in Shalimar the Clown: Exploring Violence and Resistance.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 5, Oct. 2026, pp. 367-82, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.21.
© 2026 The Author(s). Published by the Research Centre for English Language and Literature (RCELL) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
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