No balls, no 'Shame'

Salman Rushdie came my way via novelist John Barth, one of my University teachers in the early 1980s.

I was one of his rare Indian students; the rest were busy being pre-meds. Mr Barth encouraged me to take writing (and reading) seriously, even though my father was encouraging me to take biochemistry seriously. (It was not a deliberate subversion. The other culpable gentleman was my high school English teacher, the late Frank McCourt.)

One afternoon after class Mr Barth asked me for help vis-a-vis a snail-mail stalker who threatened to sell off his property in India and buy a one-way ticket to America so that he could learn how to write novels at the feet of the foremost postmodernist of the day.

We Indians of course know how to fob off such nuisances, but Americans are charmingly earnest and easily spooked. I assured him that the Indian Students Association would intervene if the stalker actually made it to Baltimore. And then he asked me if I had read this exciting Indian novelist named Salman Rushdie.

Ashamed that I didn’t know an Indian (who was actually a Londoner at the time), I rushed to the University bookstore and found Rushdie’s new novel Shame. It had an attractive cover — a modernist painting of a veiled face, I think — and so I immediately bought it, went to my room and read it in one sitting, deep into the night. I loved it. That was partly because it was in the style of magic realism and I had recently been convinced by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude that medicine might not be my calling; and it was partly because even though it was set in Pakistan, it seemed intimately familiar in a way that no other Indian writing in English that I was exposed to had thus far seemed. (Anita Desai bored the pants off of me; RK Narayan, though highly appealing, was more quaint than familiar.) I returned to the bookshop the next afternoon after classes and picked up Midnight’s Children, which I also enjoyed though it did not have the same grip on me that Shame did. The narrative voice sounded uncannily like my own, in my own head admittedly. Perhaps much of the allegory of Midnight’s Children escaped me, and Shame seemed a much tighter, accomplished work (it remains my favourite Rushdie till date), but I had no doubt that this writer had already earned his place in the literary pantheon.

A few years later I was a reporter in Delhi and Syed Shahabuddin got Rajiv Gandhi to ban Rushdie’s latest, The Satanic Verses. One of my brother’s friends was visiting India, so she smuggled in a copy. It was a letdown. I got the idea that Rushdie had, and it seemed cool enough; but it left no impression. Of course, the novel was overtaken (or rather buried alive) by events, including Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa. I did not understand such a reaction until my colleague Zafar Agha, a heartland aristocrat who lived and breathed politics, asked me if I had read Verses. Did I find it offensive? A friend of his found it deeply offensive, he said when I shrugged. Zafar was no Ayatollah; so I knew that the reaction to Verses was not as overblown as some assumed. Perhaps Rushdie, after all, had gone too far.

In the years since, Rushdie’s writing has never recaptured the freshness, originality and engagement of the two early novels. Perhaps an unintended consequence of the fatwa and the years of hiding was its toll on his creativity. Or perhaps he was simply like many other British authors of his generation, such as Ian McEwan and Martin Amis, who started off wickedly inventive and then devolved into factory-type ordinariness. In recent years he’s been better known for his New York social life than for his writing, though his obituary essay on Christopher Hitchens was excellent.

The Jaipur Literary Festival (of which DNA is one of the official sponsors) is now one of the world’s top literary destinations. There is much publishing in India currently, and though people may quibble about its quality, the fact is that in the eyes of the rest of world it manifests a different kind of emergence for India: confidently engaged in humanity’s dialogue of ideas.

Though I have never been to the LitFest (too busy being a newspaper-bureaucrat) like many others I would have liked to have listened to Rushdie. His best books might be far behind him, but no one can doubt his sharp mind. He had been to Jaipur before; and had this controversy not been dragged out of a cob-webbed cupboard his presence might have occasioned a few interesting arguments as well as the inevitable bitching by a few lit-crit malcontents. Instead, India showed a face that it never seems to outgrow: of a society that is scared of obscurantism, scared of the internet, scared of its army chief, scared of the media, scared of the corrupt, scared of its neighbours, scared of its poor, scared of its indigenes, and most of all, scared of itself.

In effect, after many years Rushdie has, successfully if not deliberately, held a mirror up to us. We ought to cringe at what we see. Nearly three decades later, it is the return of Shame.

The writer is the
Editor-in-Chief, DNA,
based in Mumbai