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The hostile reaction of Muslims in many countries to the knighthood for Salman Rushdie, midnight’s favourite child, has shown that the 60-year-old author will never be able to put the fear of fatwa behind him. He will always have to be wary about being misunderstood and demonised. He will never be free like other men, says Pratik Kanjilal
Every year, more and more Asians figure on the honours lists in the UK. The honours are a harmless continuation of a medieval practice which once conferred political power. Now, they’re just nice gestures acknowledging the growing importance of Asians in the UK and are used by the Labour government to reassert its identity as the true founder of multicultural Britain. But this year, among the 26 persons of South Asian origin on the Queen’s birthday honours list was Sir Salman, Knight Blasphemous of the Realm of Chicken Tikka Masala. And all hell broke loose in the Muslim nations. It started with the Iranian government, which had cut a deal with the UK to put the fatwa on ice, accusing Britain of insulting Islamic values and threatening to turn the heat on again. The British were unimpressed. They’re already antagonistic to Iran. In Pakistan, Minister for Religion Mohammed Ijaz ul-Haq (secret identity: Zia-ul-Haq’s son) said that this insult would encourage terrorism: it would now be legit for anyone to strap on a bomb and go blow something up in sheer frustration. That put the sahibs in a tizzy. Pakistan is Britain’s ally in the so-called War on so-called Terror, and a Pakistani minister’s assurance of further terror in retaliation for an act of the UK government really queers the pitch. Meanwhile, the fire has spread to the Philippines. From Rushdie’s point of view, the unkindest cut was probably delivered by Kashmir, where his latest novel, Shalimar the Clown, is partly set. It is also where his literary career began with Midnight’s Children, as Dr Aadam Aziz knelt to pray to God the Merciful and the Valley rose up and punched him in the nose. The Muslims of Kashmir also denounced Rushdie’s knighthood. And the rest of us back in the former colonies? Middle class India has always been eager to lay claim to Rushdie, the world’s most celebrated Bombaywallah, though he has also been a Mohajir in Pakistan, spent the better part of his life as a South Asian immigrant in England and is now a resident of New York City, as distinct from the United States (the distinction is Rushdie’s own). But we still live in the aftermath of the colonial era and after the heady days of Midnight’s Children, there has always been some doubt. Is he us, or is he them? Is he a human coconut, brown on the outside, white on the inside? Indeed, he is deeply indebted to them, with the UK having spent about `A3 9 million on his security. And he was mortally hurt when India rushed to be the first country to ban The Satanic Verses. This knighthood from the former colonial power rekindles those doubts all over again. Has he been co-opted? Is he now really one of them? There are no easy answers to that question. As Saleem Sinai says in Midnight’s Children, "I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well." It is not easy to figure out how many identities Sinai’s maker has swallowed, and which has the upper hand. An imagination like his is protean, flitting effortlessly from camp to camp, taking on identities that are not really his. Perhaps the only halfway reliable answer is to be found in his work. Let’s look at his most recent fiction. Shalimar the Clown is a good, old-fashioned revenge tragedy except that, reflecting the deeply historicised and globalised world of today, it flits across eras and time zones. But its genesis is in the Valley of Kashmir. In the course of filming a documentary, The Riddle of Midnight (1988), Rushdie spent time with the bhands, the folk performers of Kashmir, and they provided some of the central characters of Shalimar the Clown. A good way to find out if Sir Salman is with us or with them is to ask: how does he paint these characters and their world? The answer is that they are like doomed, brain-damaged children, stick-figure residents of a toy town fated to be swept away by the tides of history. Their speech is juvenile, their concerns trivial, their activities absurd and their end satisfactorily sticky. It is a relief to see them go. They are wiped out in an Indian Army operation and it is there, in the description of the massacre on page 308 in a 398-page novel, that one first sees the hand of the master storyteller at work on Indian soil: ‘Who killed the children? Who whipped the parents? Who raped that lazy-eyed woman? Who raped that grey-haired lazy-eyed woman as she screamed about snake vengeance? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that dead woman? Who raped that dead woman again?’
The revenge tragedy begins in the US, has sequences set in Europe and returns to the US for the brilliantly written climax. Each of the sequences set in foreign climes is far more tangible, more real, more alive than anything set in the villages of Kashmir. There are mitigating circumstances, of course — this is the first time that Rushdie has attempted to portray villagers; his earlier books have been exclusively urban. But though the section set in Delhi feels considerably authentic than the parts set in Kashmir, the European and American settings are far, far more credible. The variation in quality does encourage the reader to wonder if Rushdie is growing a little distant from his native soil, which has powered his best work and remains a favourite location. In fact, his forthcoming book is partly set in Fatehpur Sikri. However, it is useful to bear in mind that in the Thatcher era, Rushdie had earned the ire of the UK conservatives by articulating Asian immigrant concerns about racism. In a very early Channel 4 documentary titled The New Empire Within Britain, he had spoken scathingly of Britain’s failure to accept the end of the ‘Great Pink Age’, when archetypal pink chaps fanned out over the globe, fortified by pink gins, in order to shoulder the Pink Man’s burden. He suggested that Britain had not really retreated from the colonies — rather, it had brought them home. And quite presciently, he said that race relations issues would one day define the culture of Britain. Today, multiculturalism is a central tenet of the British political system and it is only natural for prominent Asians to be honoured. If it hadn’t been for Rushdie’s knighthood, most people in Asia would not even have noticed. Chris Bayly, an influential historian of modern South Asia, was knighted along with Rushdie. Did we notice at all? Of course not, but a blasphemous writer — who is a sort of intellectual villain — is bound to be noticed. He has movie star status, even to people who have never read him. In an interview with David Cronenberg, Rushdie has confessed that Bridget Jones’s Diary was not his only film appearance. There’s this obscure Pakistani pot-boiler called International Gorillay (1990), which features a safari-suited villain called Salman Rushdie, who is the author of The Satanic Verses, is protected by the Israeli army and tortures good Islamic radicals. In the end, a flying Koran fries him with a bolt of lightning. While a deus ex machina may not be apprehended in real life, the reaction to the knighthood has shown that Rushdie, midnight’s favourite child, who turned 60 as the controversy broke, will never be able to put the dead Ayatollah’s fatwa behind him. He will always have to be wary about being misunderstood and demonised. He will never be free like other men. One can’t help but recall the closing sentence of Midnight’s Children, which now has the ring of prophecy: "`85the curse of midnight’s children [is] to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace." The writer is publisher
of The Little Magazine
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AT
the Jaipur Literature Festival this January, Salman Rushdie had
mourned the passing of the days when the book was out there while the
author stayed safely home. "The title page of Robinson Crusoe
has Robinson Crusoe in large type and ‘Daniel Defoe’ in
very small print," he said. "It’s the same with Gulliver’s
Travels: ‘Jonathan Swift’ in small print. Tristram Shandy:
Sterne’s name in small print." But ever since the infamous fatwa,
Rushdie’s name has been out there in very large print, threatening
to overshadow the impressive corpus of his work. In the new crusade
against Islam, his very person is a battleground. And now, he is
perhaps again ruing the fact that the contemporary author cannot stay
quietly home.
