Shalimar the Clown

Shalimar the Clown is a novel by Salman Rushdie, first published on 6 September 2005 by Jonathan Cape. Rushdie worked on it for four years. Its title comes from the Shalimar Garden near Srinagar, one of the Mughal gardens laid out when the Mughals ruled the subcontinent, and it is also the name of one of its characters.

Kashmir is the novel's centre of gravity. Its opening is in Los Angeles, where Ophuls is killed, and the chapters that follow travel back to a town in Kashmir that is imagined but placed at a real point on the map not far from Srinagar. Shalimar is a villager there who performs a tightrope act for the amusement of his neighbours, and the man the novel returns to is not the one it first describes.

The central character is India, the illegitimate daughter of Max Ophuls, and the novel follows what her father's career and the violence in Kashmir have to do with one another. The book won the 2005 Vodafone Crossword Book Award and was among the finalists for the Whitbread awards of the same year.