Transvestite Condition and Cosmopolitan Myth: A Study of Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House

Abstract

Transvestite condition is one of the major markers in Salman Rushdie’s “The Golden House” set in the City of New York. As a genuine hub of cosmopolitan culture, there is myth that the City accommodates easy living for people irrespective of where they hail from or what class and gender they belong to. People coming from different parts of the globe forming a mixed set up in the socio-cultural pattern seem to have greater assimilative and accommodative space in cosmopolitan culture. However, such naïve expectation meets a serious jolt as the members of the Golden family arrive at the city to undo their traumatic past experiences relating to the deadly 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, but in vain. The situation turns out worst as D Golden’s transvestite condition comes up. This paper strives to study the cosmopolitan myth of accommodative behaviourism and find out whether the cosmopolitan society is still languishing under gender stereotyping that Rushdie strives to deconstruct in the novel