In The Satanic Verses Rushdie constructs identities for the post-Independent India and the previous colonizer Britain.  This article attempts a reading of The Satanic Verses to interrogate its construction of an `Indian’ identity through its representation of India and the immigrant community in Britain. One of the striking differences in Rushdie’s portrayal of India and Britain is the distinct narrative techniques he uses to construct these two spaces. The sections of the novel set in India, especially those dealing with social, political and economic issues, are written mostly in the mode of social realism, and narrative technique of magic realism that is now termed `Rushdiesque’ is employed to great effect in the portrayal of Britain. The dynamism of Rushdie’s magic realism in comparison with his use of social realism is seen most clearly in the way that he treats the subject of hybridity in the different spaces of the metropolitan center and as compared to the use of social realism to portray post-colonial India. The Satanic Verses embodies many of the characteristics considered emblematic of post-colonial fiction in its narrative of displacement, hybridity, crisis of identity and feelings of alienation and angst. The sections of the novel that are set in Britain portray powerfully the continuation of the oppression of previously colonized peoples by the racist ideology of the dominant culture and the enduring power of the white race to construct its superiority of Self through the debasement of the Other. The novel also eloquently represents the disruption of the western center by the invasion of the previously marginalized, and the affirming hybridity that accompanies this post-colonial phenomenon. But at the same time The Satanic Verses also constructs a national identity for India that shares in many of these characteristics, even though he does not make the structural connections between its pluralistic nature and the violence that ensues from it which he decries.