I see myself
on the underworld side of that water,
the darkness coming in fast, saying
all the names I know for a lost land:
35 Ireland. Absence. Daughter.
1998
SALMAN RUSHDIE
b. 1947 The most influential novelist to have come from South Asia in the last fifty years is Ahmed Salman Rushdie, whose dynamic narratives?stories of magic, suffering, and the vitality of human beings in the grip of history?have helped generate the literary renaissance flowering in India today. 'I come from Bombay,' Rushdie has said, 'and from a Muslim family, too. 'My' India has always been based on ideas of multiplicity, pluralism, hybridity: ideas to which the ideologies of the communalists are diametrically opposed. To my mind, the defining image of India is the crowd, and a crowd is by its very nature superabundant, heterogeneous, many things at once.' Rushdie was educated at Cathedral School, Bombay (now Mumbai), and from the age of thirteen, at Rugby School, Warwickshire, and King's College, Cambridge. After living briefly in Pakistan, where his prosperous family had moved, Rushdie eventually settled in England, working as an actor and as a freelance advertising copywriter (1970 -80)!
His first novel, Grimus (1979), passed unnoticed, but his second, Midnight's Children (1981), announced the arrival of a major writer. Taking its title from those who were born?two months later than its author?around midnight on August 1 5, 1947, when the independent state of India was born, Midnight's Children is a work of prodigious prodigality, a cornucopia as richly fertile in character, incident, and language as the subcontinent that is its setting. The book's triumphant progress across the world culminated in its being judged 'the Booker of Bookers,' the best novel to have won Britain's premier fiction prize in its first twenty-five years. Rushdie has said
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that 'we're all radio-active with history,' and the books that have followed Midnight's Children have again shown a form of 'magical realism'?learned from Latin American writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez?deployed in the service of a powerful political-historical imagination.
In 1988 Rushdie found himself at the perilous center of a real, rather than a magical realist, political-historical storm. His novel The Satanic Verses provoked riots in India, Pakistan, and South Africa, and was judged by senior religious figures in Iran to have blasphemed the Prophet Muhammad (called by the offensive name 'Mahound' in the novel), founder of the Muslim faith, and a fatwa, or legal decree, calling for his death was pronounced. He was obliged to go into hiding, and for almost a decade lived under round-the-clock protection from British Secret Service agents, while governments argued for and against the lifting of the fatwa, and the author himself became symbolic of the vulnerability of the intellectual in the face of fundamentalism. The lifting of the fatwa in 1998 allowed Rushdie to reappear in public, but it is seen as irrevocable by some religious groups, and so his life remains under constant threat. He has defended his book in the essay 'In Good Faith' (1990), while defining the irreverently pluralistic vision behind his 'mongrel' aesthetic?a vision that has repeatedly resulted in the burning or banning of his books by political nationalists and religious purists in South Asia and other parts of the world:
If The Satanic Verses is anything, it is a migrant's-eye view of the world. It is written from the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis (slow or rapid, painful or pleasurable) that is the migrant condition, and from which, I believe, can be derived a metaphor for all humanity.
Standing at the centre of the novel is a group of characters most of whom are British Muslims, or not particularly religious persons of Muslim background, struggling with just the sort of great problems of hybridization and ghettoization, of reconciling the old and the new. Those who oppose the novel most vociferously today are of the opinion that intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own. I am of the opposite opinion. The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is haw newness enters the xvorld. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love-song to our mongrel selves.
An earlier story, published the same year as his groundbreaking Midnight's Children, had invoked the Prophet uncontroversially. Like Midnight's Children, the story 'The Prophet's Hair' buoyantly fuses Standard English with an exuberantly Indianized English, peppered with words of Hindi, Persian, Sanskrit, and Arabic origin? among the many languages that have been used in the extraordinarily polyglot Indian subcontinent. Like The Satanic Verses, 'The Prophet's Hair' risks playfulness, satire, caricature, and whimsy in its treatment of the religion of his youth (though Rushdie has indicated he was brought up not as a believer but within a relaxed Muslim climate, almost secularized by the variety of other religions surrounding it). The story is at once a moral fable in the tradition of The Thousand and One Nights and a magical realist extravaganza, packed with incident, poetic detail ('water to which the cold of the night had given the cloudy consistency of wild honey'), and humor, all brilliantly interwoven at breakneck speed.
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2854 / SALMAN RUSHDIE
The Prophet's1 Hair
Early in the year 19?, when Srinagar2 was under the spell of a winter so fierce it could crack men's bones as if they were glass, a young man upon whose cold-pinked skin there lay, like a frost, the unmistakable sheen of wealth was to be seen entering the most wretched and disreputable part of the city, where the houses of wood and corrugated iron seemed perpetually on the verge of losing their balance, and asking in low, grave tones where he might go to engage the services of a dependably professional burglar. The young man's name was Atta, and the rogues in that part of town directed him gleefully into ever darker and less public alleys, until in a yard wet with the blood of a slaughtered chicken he was set upon by two men whose faces he never saw, robbed of the substantial bank-roll which he had insanely brought on his solitary excursion, and beaten within an inch of his life.
Night fell. His body was carried by anonymous hands to the edge of the lake, whence it was transported by shikara3 across the water and deposited, torn and bleeding, on the deserted embankment of the canal which led to the gardens of Shalimar. At dawn the next morning a flower-vendor was rowing his boat through water to which the cold of the night had given the cloudy consistency of wild honey when he saw the prone form of young Atta, who was just beginning to stir and moan, and on whose now deathly pale skin the sheen of wealth could still be made out dimly beneath an actual layer of frost.
