All three fatefully intersected with the publication of The Satanic Verses. What happened to him after that doesn’t need repetition
Nobody deserved to be stabbed in the macabre manner as Salman Rushdie was. Not at any age. Certainly not when you are 75. The sword of the dead Khomeini’s fatwa permanently hanging over Rushdie’s head ultimately materialised in the form of a knife on a public platform in the US of all places. What didn’t happen in Londonistan happened in its cousin’s lair across the Atlantic. Without doubt, Rushdie deserves our sympathy while a familiar lesson reasserts itself.
There are three parts to Salman Rushdie: the novelist, the public intellectual and the apostate. All three fatefully intersected with the publication of The Satanic Verses. What happened to him after that doesn’t need repetition.
But what also needs re-examination is his record on the count of his self-declared commitment to absolute free speech; in his own courageous phraseology, “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.”
One could begin anywhere but in recent memory, the Jaipur Literature Festival circa 2012 is a good place. Back then, the festival had touched its zenith, greased by rivers of Congress and the Global Left’s patronage. Then its organisers invited Salman Rushdie.
Don’t get me wrong. I am one of the admirers of Rushdie’s prose, which he crafts with a finesse that’s hard to achieve. I also have a healthy regard for his storytelling technique. In fact, his brilliant historical short story, Shelter of the World is funny, enchanting and ironical. His dream run, Midnight’s Children, which earned him superstardom in 20th century (colonial) English literature continues to endure. But then, the Booker that it fetched him was an awakening of sorts.
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Overall, Salman Rushdie is an experience, episode, a phenomenon and a lesson. In that order. Few can match the delicious precision of Richard Crasta, who captures the Rushdie phenomenon so accurately:
“Indian writers, both the true originals and the … hopeful…have to revert to their old condition of neglect and poverty…unless they are sanctified by inclusion in Il Papa Rushdie’s anthologies of Indian writing–Salman Rushdie in his benighted old age and pashahood being Her Majesty’s new Gurkha or gatekeeper or headmistress of Indian writing…keeping out the bad boys and admitting only the well-behaved.”
Until the “social justice warriors” — and now, the wokes — ambushed the last vestiges of semi-decent literary writing, Rushdie remained a huge crowd-puller for precisely the same reason. He was the first Indian writer in English to dazzle the nostalgic British imperial racists in their own land with his prowess in their own language and was therefore extolled by them thus setting a template for other deracinated Indian hopefuls to emulate.
On its part, the British literary establishment lionised Rushdie for nostalgic reasons of Empire. Here was a nice brown Indian writing in exquisite English about what an awful place India had become after we left! It also helped Rushdie that there was no dearth of India-ignorant Western reviewers who waxed lavishly about Midnight’s Children for example, in The New York Times:
“The literary map of India is about to be redrawn… it would be a disservice to Salman Rushdie’s very original genius to dwell on literary analogues and ancestors. This is…an author to welcome into world company.”
There’s just no polite way of saying this: Rushdie inaugurated the phenomenon of what can only be called Sepoy Literature. Every Indian writer in English who won the Booker Prize after him pretty much mimicked him.
Now on to Rushdie’s record as a champion of free speech. But to put things in perspective, over the last three decades, his Satanic Verses has remained famous only for inviting the fatwa. Yet, we need to be thankful to Rushdie for writing it because it was the resounding slap that awoke the comfortably-numb Western world to the dangers of creeping Jihadism, still relatively dormant then. The Satanic Verses became an international issue, even a “civilisational fault line (sic)” because of Rushdie’s fame as a tremendously successful English writer of global renown. Had he been an obscure and undiscovered Indian writing in English living in India, one of these things would have happened: the novel would’ve never been published or if it was published, it would’ve been banned or worse, a fanatic would’ve murdered him like say, Theo Van Gogh, the Dutch painter.
And when we read his aforementioned quote on freedom of expression in this backdrop, we are also reminded of his other pronouncement much later. He “profoundly regret[ted] the distress the publication [“The Satanic Verses”] has occasioned to the sincere followers of Islam. Living as we do in a world of many faiths, this experience has served to remind us that we must all be conscious of the sensibilities of others.”
Rushdie is also the same free speech absolutist who deleted a sentence in Midnight’s Children as part of an out-of-the-court settlement because an incensed Indira Gandhi had sued him. Had he practiced what he himself preached about free speech, he would’ve fought Indira Gandhi in court, he would’ve doggedly stuck to his stand instead of issuing an apology to the perpetually offended Islamic clerics.
There’s a related side to this. It is no secret that Rushdie nurtures an inveterate aversion to the RSS, the BJP, and Narendra Modi. When Atal Bihari Vajpayee lifted the Congress-imposed travel ban on Rushdie to India, he wasted no time in heaping slurs against him in the perfumed environs of Lutyens’ Delhi. And in a recent short story titled, The Little King, he has an NRI Hindu businessman who “disapproves” American Hindu support for Modi. This is the “good” Hindu who also donates to mosques.
It is intriguing that Rushdie, the Indian who gave up his Indian passport to enjoy celebrityhood in the West failed to grasp the fundamentals of his mother-country: That it is only Hindu Dharma, the bedrock of India, which gave him the licence to not only abuse its proponents but did not attack him even once. One Satanic Verses, and look what happened.
This brings us to Rushdie, the permanent apostate. Clearly, his apology has not helped and we don’t need to dwell on this point any further. This well-argued piece analyses this aspect quite well.
All of this might sound heartless coming as it does at a time when Rushdie is injured and suffering but there is no “right” time to tell the truth. Especially to one who professed commitment to free expression, which is a subset of truth. I genuinely wish him well.
Perhaps Salman Rushdie could have emulated his more illustrious counterpart, the late VS Naipaul. The journey of Naipaul from India: A Wounded Civilisation to his genuine rediscovery of India around the time of the Rama Janmabhoomi movement is also a journey of his cultural self-discovery. It is also a profound lesson. It is okay to be misled, it is okay to be swayed by the mass of competing ideologies but if truth is your value and if you tell it to yourself, it will reveal itself to you. And then, the rest won’t matter.
Like I said, I genuinely wish Salman Rushdie a speedy recovery.
The author is founder and chief editor, ‘The Dharma Dispatch’. Views expressed are personal.
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