Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a British writer of Indian origin, born in Mumbai, then called Bombay, in British India, on 19th June 1947. His schooling was initially in Cathedral and John Connon, Mumbai, and thereafter at Rugby School in the United Kingdom. Later he attended King’s College in Cambridge, where he majored in History.
Literary Output
Salman Rushdie is an author of fourteen novels and a short-story collection. He has also written five non-fiction books, and co-edited two anthologies. His career as a fiction-writer began with Grimus, followed by Midnight’s Children, the book that he is best known for. He won the Booker Prize (1981), the Booker of Bookers (1993), and the Best of the Booker (2008) for Midnight’s Children. He subsequently published Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, Luka and the Fire of Life, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, The Golden House and Quichotte, the last having made it to the Booker Prize shortlist in 2019.
East, West is his only short story collection. Joseph Anton: A Memoir, Imaginary Homelands, The Jaguar Smile, Step Across This Line, and Languages of Truth comprise his non-fiction writing; Mirrorwork, a collection of contemporary Indian writing, and 2008 Best American Short Stories were anthologies co-edited by him.
Other Genres
Midnight’s Children was made into a play as well as a film. Rushdie adapted it for the theatre, and the Royal Shakespeare Company performed the play in London and New York. In 2012, Deepa Mehta adapted this book into a film, and Rushdie had written the screenplay. Both Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and Shalimar the Clown had operas adapted from them. The Ground Beneath Her Feet was adapted into a song and Rushdie penned down the lyrics.
Awards
Booker Prizes aside, Salman Rushdie has received several honours and awards for his writing. The more significant of these are as follows: he is Fellow of the British Royal Society of Literature, and Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has been awarded the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel twice; the Writers Guild Award; the James Tait Black Prize; ‘Author of the Year’ prizes in Britain and Germany; the Crossword Book Award in India; the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature; the Premio Grinzane Cavour from Italy; Golden PEN Award; PEN Pinter Prize; Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award; and the James Joyce Award of University College, Dublin. This is more a representative than a comprehensive list.
Rushdie has also been conferred with doctorates and fellowships by a dozen universities, European as well as American, and an honorary Humanities Professorship in MIT. He was conferred knighthood in 2007 in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.
The Writer of Fiction
Salman Rushdie’s career as a world-renowned writer began curiously enough with a copy-writing job for Ogilvy and Mather; and it may not be a stretch to trace his ingenuity of language-use to his first job. He shot to fame with his novel Midnight’s Children (henceforth MC), which was published in 1981, and won the Booker prize in the same year. He had already published one novel prior to MC in 1975 called Grimus, which, in his own words, “bombed” (Imaginary Homelands, 1); but it is of historical interest in any biography of the author, since it displays the pivotal characteristics of his fiction like magic, myth-making, and allusions.
MC arguably remains the novel that he is best known for, especially after it went on to win the Booker of Bookers Prize in 1993, and the Best of the Booker in 2008. BBC listed it on the Big Read poll of the ‘best-loved novels’ of the United Kingdom.
MC was an ambitious essai for an aspiring creative writer. Aiming to tell the story of Indian nationalist history from about the time of the Jallianwala Bagh tragedy to beyond Independence in 1947; to the Emergency in 1975, it is a palimpsestic narrative teeming with multiple generic conventions, and remarkable linguistic inventiveness. Ranging from the epic to postmodern unreliability; from the cinematic idiom to the motif and metaphor of fragmentation; and from the discourses of rumour and gossip to spice the narrator’s fallible memory, it juggles these multiple trajectories to make one point with repeated emphasis: the value of pluralism.
Its postmodern element replaces a single unilateral historical record with multiple and subaltern versions of history, each as authentic as any of the others for the one who believes in it; it also introduces the element of farce into history, thereby bringing irreverence into traditional subjects of awe such as nationalism, patriotism and religion. These institutions are mercilessly debunked in particular in the portrayal of Pakistan, and in the India-Pakistan war.
Symbolism looms large over MC: its easy and effortless allegorical structure was to set the tone for many of his later novels.
This novel also established Rushdie firmly within the magical realist tradition, so that he became a raconteur of a uniquely Indian world-view in MC, much as Marquez had of Colombia in 1967, with One Hundred Years of Solitude. A characteristic of this world-view is that reality is a matter of belief, and belief is not curbed by reason or logic: the world envisaged in this way can easily accommodate fantasy.
Framed within such a context, fantasy has huge subversive potential. It gives shape to what is repressed and suppressed by disguising it as fiction. This technique of narration was something that he would go on to make his trademark style of writing historical/political fiction.
In MC, magic realism in the depiction of India is used to showcase an ideal democratic nation’s tolerance of multiple viewpoints, or what Rushdie would call multiple realities. India’s neighbour, Pakistan is presented with a stark contrast: “where the truth is what it is instructed to be” (453). This has been Rushdie’s constant ideological centre in his oeuvre: an endorsement of the value of democracy, characterised by a spirit of accommodating difference and otherness.
Shame was published in 1983, two years after MC. It was an incisive political allegory of Pakistan. Once again, the ‘story’ of Pakistan was narrated in a magical realist mode. Take the opening sentence of the novel:
“In the remote border town of Q., which when seen from the air resembles nothing so much as an ill-proportioned dumb-bell, there once lived three lovely, and loving sisters” (Shame 11, emphasis added). It bears comparison with the equally fairy-tale incipit of MC: “I was born in the city of Bombay…once upon a time” (MC 3, emphasis added).
Reading and Reception
Despite borrowing liberally from fantasy, Rushdie’s political fiction has often been read with disastrous literalness by readers and decision-makers. This has arguably been facilitated by his novels’ tendency to become provocative in their representation of public figures, whether in the reference to Indira Gandhi as the Widow in MC, or of Benazir Bhutto as Virgin Ironpants in Shame. In May 2015, Rushdie tweets characteristically about the latter: “[p]roof that the character was NOT based on Benazir Bhutto is that she was called the Virgin Ironpants”, which of course only reinforced, where his readers were concerned, that the character was Benazir Bhutto indeed. For Rushdie and his readers, the limits of fiction expanded to include even denial as a form of assertion.
MC in fact drew Rushdie into a lawsuit with the then Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, for a detail that amounted to but one sentence in the novel. She brought an action against the book in the British courts for defamation, and the matter was settled out of court with Rushdie agreeing to remove the sentence that caused offence.
Fatwa
Rushdie’s misfortune in courting controversy however reached life-threatening proportions with his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988). This novel was also set firmly within the genre that Rushdie had become a master of: magical realism. Yet this did not protect the novel from being subjected to literalist inferences. His depiction of the character Mahound in this novel was seen as a close resemblance of the Prophet Muhammad. The novel was judged as mocking the aspects of Islam.
It generated protests amongst the Muslim community from Britain all the way to Pakistan, causing the book to be banned in several Muslim countries. This collective outrage culminated in a fatwa (a judgement or ruling by a religious scholar) against Rushdie pronounced by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran, calling on ‘all brave Muslims’ to kill Rushdie as well as his publishers. This fatwa, declared in 1989, remained in force for about a decade until in, 1998, the government of Iran announced, in a temporising fashion, that it would neither ‘support nor hinder’ Rushdie’s assassination.
It speaks volumes for the compulsive passionate writer that Salman Rushdie has shown himself to be, that despite having had to go into hiding over the threat to his life, he continued to write during this period. Haroun and the Sea of Stories came out in 1990, a genre of fiction (sheer fantasy or magic) that he was to venture into for the first time, yet with consummate skill; so did Imaginary Homelands (1991), a collection of thought-provoking critical essays; East, West in 1994, a collection of short stories; and a novel in 1995 called The Moor’s Last Sigh.
Rushdie emerged unharmed by the fatwa, with protection afforded by Scotland Yard as well as his own measures in restricting his movements.
But the conflicts generated by the clashes between the religious fanatics and the supporters of free speech consumed many lives across the globe. The three notable events in this regard being the death of his Japanese translator from stabbing injuries, the critical wounding of his Italian translator, both in 1991; and the shooting of his Norwegian publisher in 1993. The most remarkable political fallout was the severing of diplomatic ties by Iran with Britain in 1989.
As a response to the fatwa, Rushdie offered an apology both to the Ayatollah and to Muslims around the world in 1990, but the protests and violence continued, and the fatwa remained. Years later Rushdie publicly regretted the apology.
In his article in The Guardian of 10 January 2019, “How one book ignited a culture war”, Andrew Anthony noted: “[t]hose sections that have caused the greatest controversy are contained within the dreams or nightmares of a character who is in the grip of psychosis. Which is to say that, even buried in the fevered subconscious of a disturbed character inside a work of fiction…there is no escape from literalist tyranny”.
It becomes educative, therefore, to see Rushdie’s career as contesting the frequent critical assertion that the novel is dead. The novel, if it did die, has risen like a phoenix out of its ashes in Rushdie’s hands. The popular belief that fiction has nothing to do with the ‘real’ world is challenged both by the narrative technique that Rushdie deploys again and again, as well as by the predominant responses and even reactions to his tales, which evince his readers’ imaginative ability to see connections between fantasy and the ‘real’, though mostly in ways that transcend the literal.
The fatwa dramatised the scenario by challenging Rushdie’s ideology of plural perspectives, even while endorsing the nightmare that Rushdie was satirising and cautioning against in his writing.
In his reading from Shalimar the Clown as part of the Queens College Evening Readings (available on C-SPAN. Org as a video), Rushdie speaks of the importance of freedom of speech, without which, in his opinion, there are no other freedoms. A spirit of generosity is necessary for this vision to survive, to believe, as he does, that moral choices are not black –and white.
Living with the experience of the fatwa generated a book, a memoir, written understandably enough in the third person, striving for distance, titled Joseph Anton, published in 2012. The eponymous title harks back to the name he had taken for himself while in hiding.
Haroun is a tale of pure fantasy. In Languages of Truth, Rushdie remarks: “]w]hen I finished my memoir, Joseph Anton, I felt a deep hunger for fiction. And not just any old fiction, but fiction as wildly fantastic as the memoir had been determinedly realistic” (15).
The Moor’s Last Sigh, called “phantasmagorical”, “fierce”, “sprawling” and “exuberant” by the New York Times, was also TIME Magazine’s Best Book of the Year. It traverses with equal ease a family saga on the one hand and a wide historical and geographical canvas on the other, whether the Portuguese colonial expansion or the spice trade between Europe and India, or closer home, the political events in India in the twentieth century. Reminiscent of MC is his return to the myth-making potential of the Indian imagination, as well as his nostalgic evoking of Bombay in this book. And his enduring ideological position, the value of pluralism also makes a comeback.
After the Fatwa
In 1999 came The Ground Beneath Her Feet. It retells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice from a postmodern narrative technique, with rock music substituted for Orpheus’ music. Expectably for such a theme, the novel is replete with intertextual references ranging from myth to music. It also found another avatar as a music piece whose lyrics were written by Rushdie.
Two years later came Fury, in 2001. John Sutherland, reviewing the book, noted echoes from MC, with autobiographical references to Bombay, its fictional Methwold’s Estate, and Warden Road. This novel was written at a time when Rushdie had decided to leave Britain, with which he had become disenchanted, for the United States, and reflects his own fury with the times by presenting a protagonist who is the same age as his author, and whose anger reflects the fury of the times. It is generally seen as one of Rushdie’s darkest novels.
Shalimar the Clown (2005) combines the political and the personal and is inspired by Kashmir. Inter-connectedness, a recurring theme in Rushdie’s writings, is evinced here in the insidious ways in which events in Kashmir can have consequences reaching all the way to far-off California. The inextricable connection between love and politics becomes an anchoring feature of Shalimar the Clown.
The Enchantress of Florence (2008) ventures into history and fable, and brings Akbar the Emperor and Niccolo Machiavelli to life, amidst enchanting women and the enchantress of the title. In the final analysis, though, this novel is about “story itself, the power of history and fable, and why it is that we can seldom be sure which is which” (Ursula Le Guin), a meta-point that is never far from Rushdie’s writing, at any time.
This novel was followed by a loose sequel or companion to Haroun, called Luka and the Fire of Life, in 2010. The earlier book was written for his older son, Zafar, and this for his younger, Milan. Interestingly enough, Rushdie has claimed that he was inspired by video games in his writing of this book of magical elements, where the gaming culture becomes a model for the quest, an age-old literary motif.
Rushdie’s return to the genre of fantasy continued with Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights in 2015, an exploration of magic and folklore, signaled by the title which is a rephrasing of a thousand and one nights, more popularly known as the Arabian Nights. The book is gigantic in its scope, containing a proliferation of stories and characters. It is not difficult to find resemblances between Rushdie and the fictional storyteller recounting tales under the threat of death, Scheherazade.
Rushdie’s writing has thus been uninterrupted: his most recent publications include The Golden House in 2017, and Quichotte, inspired by Don Quixote, in 2019. The former novel is not in his usual magical realist style, but is set in America, and fairly satiric in its representation. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2019.
Non fiction
Imaginary Homelands, the first of his two non-fiction compilations, raises issues that were to preoccupy him in his writings well into the future. “Censorship”, for instance, aptly points out, in what may well be the thesis statement of Rushdie’s professional life, that “the worst, most insidious effect of censorship is that, in the end, it can deaden the imagination of the people. Where there is no debate, it is hard to go on remembering, every day, that there is a suppressed side to every argument” (39). And this is why, as the essay of the title remarks, literature is valuable because it “can, and perhaps must, give the lie to official facts” (14). The essay also wonders about the role and responsibility of writers of the diaspora, of whom Rushdie has been, and continues to be, among the foremost. This book has essays on the authors whom Rushdie engages with, from Anita Desai, Rudyard Kipling, Nadine Gordimer and Graham Greene to Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa among others.
The value that Rushdie attaches to the genre of fantasy is eloquently articulated in “Wonder Tales”, the first essay in Languages of Truth (2001), where growing into adulthood entails regrettable disillusionment with stories. Expectably, Rushdie makes an ideological observation out of this. Children fall in love with stories, and their imagination helps them to inhabit the worlds of their loved stories, and then create some. But as children grow up, their relationship with stories gets strained, and eventually, non-existent. “I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are…the act of falling in love with a book or story changes us in some way, and the beloved tale becomes a part of our picture of the world, a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgements and choices in our daily lives” (4).
This profound insight may well be read as Rushdie’s manifesto of fiction. Stories are not apart from the lived world; they constitute the lived world. This collection also has essays on some of the other writers he admires, from Kurt Vonnegut to Philip Roth to Harold Pinter to Cervantes and Shakespeare. A piece on his personal engagement with the coronavirus pandemic brings the collection up-to-date.
Last word: Fiction
Fiction is valuable, especially “tales full of beautiful impossibility” (Languages of Truth 15), which perpetrated not lies, after the Platonic point-of-view, but told instead a profounder truth. This observation brings Rushdie in line with other great writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gunter Grass, and Jorge Luis Borges, all of whose influences are easy to detect in his writing, as well as with Neil Gaiman. Articulating his concern over the times, Rushdie makes a case for literature: “[i]t’s a beleaguered time for those of us who believe in the right of artists, intellectuals and ordinary, affronted citizens to push boundaries and take risks and so, at times, to change the way we see the world” (219).
References
Anthony, Andrew. “How one book ignited a culture war”. The Guardian. 11 Jan 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/11/salman-rushdie-satanic-verses
Kakutani, Michiko. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Rushdie On India: Serious, Crammed Yet Light”. The New York Times. Dec 28, 1995. https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/28/books/books-of-the-times-rushdie-on-india-serious-crammed-yet-light.html
Le Guin, Ursula K. “The real uses of enchantment”. The Guardian. 29 Mar 2008. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/mar/29/fiction.salmanrushdie
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. One Hundred Years of Solitude. 1967. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. Penguin, 1972.
Queens College Evening Readings Series, Nov 1, 2005. [Shalimar the Clown: A Novel] | C-SPAN.org https://www.c-span.org/video/?189891-1
Nair, Rukmini Bhaya. “Text and Pre-Text: History as Gossip in Rushdie’s Novels”. Economic and Political Weekly. Vol. 24, No.18, 1989, pp. 994-1000
Rushdie, Salman, and Elizabeth West. Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing, 1947-1997. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. 1981. London: Vintage Books, 2010.
—. Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020. Penguin, 2021.
—. Midnight’s Children. 1981. London: Vintage Books, 2013.
—. Shame. 1983. London: Vintage, 1995.
Sutherland, John. “The Sound and the Fury”. The Guardian. 25 Aug 2001. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/aug/25/fiction.salmanrushdie