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Midnight’s Diaspora: Encounters with Salman
Rushdie TWENTY years ago, as I left India to study literature at Cambridge, a fatwa was issued against an up-and-coming author that was to become an avid topic of dinner-time conversations for months to come. I was the new arrival from a country that had just banned Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and was forced to take positions at all such discussions between sub-continent sentiments and literary forthrightness. I remember having put up a Rushdie poster on my study wall at that time, and clearly, I must have upset somebody because late one evening, a snowball smashed into my window pane. I am still not sure whether it was a racist attack or a moment of sport.
Rushdie invites controversy. His every remark becomes fodder for the papparazzi not just as gossip or rumour but as significant political insight. His books, on their part, initiate mini revolutions owing to their author’s political boldness. When Rushdie, who had just won the Booker for Midnight’s Children, was invited to 10 Downing Street for a luncheon hosted for Indira Gandhi by Thatcher, he declined knowing fully well how Mrs Gandhi would react on seeing him when both she and her late son, Sanjay, were exposed in his novel for the roles they played during the Emergency. Ashutosh Varshney taps the "political Rushdie" by raising issues related to freedom of speech which, if interpreted through democratic principles, involves "the clash of violently differing opinions" that would, without doubt, offend. For Rushdie, what has changed, say, since Jane Austen, is the gap between the personal and the political, and so we are inclined to make interventions in the public domain more animatedly today. Gauri Viswanathan’s "conversation" with Rushdie—a turn of phrase which has become suddenly more fashionable than the orthodox "interview" and is a "must do" in virtually all English Department conferences—emphasises more the literariness of Rushdie and treads ground that has often been the subject of research papers and theses. While she works out his connections with literary ancestors like G`FCnter Grass and M`E1rquez, out comes the "terrible" confession of our much-admired author: "In the end I don’t think about the reader. This is a terrible, truthful, horrible admission. I don’t care." Perhaps Rushdie’s vehemence is linked to the reader’s reception of The Satanic Verses, a novel Rushdie continues to insist is about immigrants in England but which turned out, notwithstanding, to be best known as a novel about Islam. The responses to The Satanic Verses also revealed the political underbelly of Britain that bandied about phrases like "multiculturalism" and "hybridity" for the sake of its vast percentage of Muslim residents, but failed to honour its liberal-democratic principles in the face of racial tension. As Akeel Bilgrami writes in his well-nuanced essay: "[M]inority rights require that the Muslim demand for censorship is not dismissible by the liberal state." I approached the final essay by Shashi Tharoor with great interest but discovered that I had read big chunks of it already in his monthly columns in The Hindu. Among erudite generalisations, one sentence is striking. Referring to Deve Gowda who read out his Independence Day address to the nation in Hindi written in his native Kannada script, he writes: "Only in India could a country be ruled by a man who does not understand its ‘national language’; only in India . . . is there a ‘national language’ that half the population does not understand." Tharoor sees this enormous paradox as an "affirmation of Indian pluralism." Somewhere within his compilations of the plural nature of Hinduism which accepts even Sonia Gandhi’s Italian origins, he attempts to "fit" Rushdie which is easy enough given Rushdie’s own polyglot preoccupations, except that Tharoor replaces his celebrated concept of "chutnification" with is own "thali" (-fication). Who, then, are the
"Midnight’s Diaspora"? The Indians, the Pakistanis or the
British? Or is it Rushdie himself? After the publication of The
Satanic Verses, he was indeed turned into some kind of
"other", a virtual Islamic pariah. His very name, in fact,
turned "disaporic" as I was once told by an anti-Rushdie
Muslim friend that Rushdie’s actual name was Suleiman Rashid and his
later anglicizing of it was a means to move away from his real
identity. Perhaps Rushdie would be amused to know this.
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Taking
stock of the situation after two decades, I think that Rushdie has
emerged the more triumphant after the ordeal. Eight successful books
later, we are able to assess his celebrity status—not least because
of his notoriety in both hemispheres—in the course of two interviews
and several essays collected together in this volume by its editors.