Salman Rushdie and the Indian Literary Festival: the Saga Continues

‘He is a w**ker of the highest order. I am not at all sorry that the Indians have asked him to f**k off,’ the man delivered his verdict, chomping on the deep fried KFC chicken wings.

Let’s assume that the man was an Asian Muslim, liberal enough to masticate on non-halal meat at the KFC (powered down his gullet by the 400 calories of milkshake which goes by some silly name I can neither pronounce nor spell) but not liberal enough to feel even a smidgen of sympathy for the w**ker.

Let’s also assume that the man is of Pakistani descent, a country generally considered to be the arch enemy of India. If you think the Brits and the French dislike each other, that is nothing compared to the animosity between these two countries.

In usual circumstance a Pakistani can be trusted to tie a rock round his neck and lie down at the bottom of Thames than say anything that might have an outside chance of being construed as praise for his country’s giant neighbour.

But not on this occasion. The Pakistani (how I came to be sharing a table with him at the KFC is an interesting story, but not for this post) attacking  the KFC zinger meal with the gusto of a Taliban attacking a US post in Vaziristan approved wholeheartedly that the man addicted to solitary sexual pleasure was asked to find sex elsewhere by the Indians.

The w**ker is Salman Rushdie, who was supposed to appear at a literary festival in India, but in the end did not because the Muslims clerics  went apeshit over him speaking at the festival, and the organizers chickened out.

Actually, that is not true strictly speaking. The organizers—William Dalrymple and Sanjoy Roy—wanted Rushdie very much to attend. Indeed, at the first whiff of the trouble—when a cleric from a Muslim seminary in India went public demanding Rushdie not be invited—Dalrymple went into the kind of laudatory hyper-drive last heard when Barak Obama was elected as the US president (Yes we can!).

 I can’t help feeling that it was a strategy doomed to fail.

Look at it this way. Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses, and incurred the wrath of ‘tens of millions of Muslims’, according to the Muslim cleric in India (and that is just Indian Muslims). He announced that Rushdie (himself a Muslim by birth) had insulted Islam and the Muslims will never forgive him.

Do you see? The clue is in the adverb ‘never’. The cleric said the Muslims will not forgive Rushdie. Not now; not ever. They will not forgive him on any occasion. Absolutely not. Don’t even mention the word forgiveness: in no way the Muslims will forgive Rushdie. Absolutely not. Don’t bother, because we won’t bother. Don’t even mention it. We would rather swim naked in the Ganges with paper-cuts on our nipples than forgive Rushdie. We would rather eat our own snot than forgive Rushdie.

And what does Dalrymple do? He calls Rushdie one of the greatest Muslims to have come out of India who had contributed to humanity more than Gandhi. Therefore—so went Dalrymple’s argument—Muslims should welcome Rushdie with open arms and press him to their metaphorical armpits.

Not a clever thing to do, if you ask me.

Perhaps Dalrymple was hoping to appeal to the better nature of the Muslim cleric. Therein lay his second mistake: these guys don’t have one.

Since it was not Dalrymple’s intention to piss off the Muslim cleric who was already hopping mad that Rushdie was invited for the festival, I can only assume that the man is extraordinarily naive.  How did he think the cleric was going to respond to his heart-wrenching appeal? He (the cleric) was hardly going to say, ‘I am so sorry! What was I thinking? Of course! Salman Rushdie is one of the greatest Muslim figures to have emerged out of the Indian Muslim community.  And there I was; thinking the man is an infidel who has insulted our prophet and should be punished by stoning to death (followed by chopping of the hand that wrote the blasphemous novel). You have opened my eyes, sir! I can’t thank you enough! I shall immediately send a telegram of apology to Mr. Rushdie after which I shall start organizing a welcome party for him that will include my four wives and twelve children.’ Not very likely.

I have to sadly conclude that Dalrymple no more understand the minds of religious zealots than I understand the technicality of the surgery that created Eve from Adam’s ribs.

Anyway, Rushdie, to begin with, was pretty gung ho about it. He declared that he was going to attend the festival; he wasn’t banned from travelling to India; and travel to India he would. And the cleric of the Islamic seminary could put it in his hookah and smoke it.

Rushdie’s intrepid announcement had a number of consequences. 

Firstly the Muslim cleric upped his ante, and he was joined in his condemnation of Rushdie by other clerics (who probably wouldn't be able to pick out literature from an identity parade). 

Secondly, a number of politicians (mostly local) from the two major political parties in India—the Congress and the right-of-the-centre BJP— opened their gobs and came out in support of the Muslim cleric. They were not as loud (and ridiculous) as the cleric, but opined that it was ‘inappropriate’ for Rushdie to come to the festival in the circumstances.

What are the circumstances?

If you thought the circumstances are related to the ‘hurt Muslim sentiments’, you could not be further from truth.

The circumstances, reported in The Guardian and The Telegraph are that several states in the Indian federation are poised for key provincial elections; and in several constituencies, Muslims form significant minorities and can influence the outcome of the election if they choose to vote en mass for one or the other party. That is the reasons the politicians thought it was ‘inappropriate’ of Rushdie to visit India; because neither Congress nor BJP can afford to piss them off. What the politicians meant was that it was inconsiderate of Rushdie to make matters awkward for them.

In the past few years (again, according to reports in the Western newspapers) Rushdie, who is of Indian descent, has visited the country of his birth on many occasions. He has even visited Jaipur, the city where the literary festival was being held. Nobody cared then. We didn’t hear the Muslim cleric howling in protest then, nor did the Indian politicians weighed in with their ill-advised remarks.

There is, therefore, prima facie case to consider that the reason the Muslim cleric was confident his voice would be heard was because the elections are round the corner. That is democracy Indian style, I guess.

The politicians were no doubt further inconvenienced by Rushdie’s refusal to budge. India being an open, democratic etcetera etcetera country, they could not prevent Rushdie from travelling to India, and appearing at the festival if he so wished.

So the police stepped in. Rushdie was informed—either directly or indirectly—by the intelligence agencies that there was a threat to his life if he appeared at the festival; the agencies had obtained information that paid assassins from the Mumbai Muslim underworld would be boarding trains for Jaipur to kill him, if he turned up at the festival.

In a statement read out on Rushdie’s behalf, he announced that while he had some doubts as to the accuracy of the intelligence, he had decided to withdraw from the festival, as he thought it would be irresponsible of him to come to the festival in these circumstances.

Circumstances. They had changed. Again. But had they? Really? The rumours started floating in the festival venue that this was false intelligence; that the Mumbai underworld Dons had more  worthwhile hings to do (smuggle in gold, diamonds, Nepali prostitutes) than send assassins to kill an author who managed to survive Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa.

Salman Rushdie immediately smelt a rat; not just rat—he also smelt a chipmunk, a squirrel, a hamster, a jerboa and a whole raft of rodents. He figured out that there was no plot to kill him. It was an attempt, no doubt engineered by the cynical Indian politicians at whose beck and call the Indian police apparently are, to keep him away from the festival and avoid pissing of Muslims voters.

It was now Rushdie’s turn to feel pissed off. Julius Caesar probably felt less betrayed when Brutus plunged the kitchen-knife between his shoulder blades.

Rushdie announced on twitter, from America (this great figure from the Indian Muslim community whom the British taxpayers spent millions to protect after Khomeini’s fatwa, embraced American nationality a few years ago, citing that Britain was boring; he was right, but truth still hurts):

‘I have investigated and believe that I was indeed lied to. I am outraged and very angry.’

(I do not know what ‘investigation’ Rushdie carried out into the alleged Mumbai underworld plot to assassinate him, but he is a clever man. I am sure that he quickly figured out that the assassins, if they valued their own lives, would not have dared to travel on the Indian trains, as they would have been suffocated (or crushed) to death themselves before the train reached Jaipur. Rushdie must die, but not if they end up dying too.)

The fire-breathing Muslim clerics were not embarrassed that their country faced severe criticism in The Guardian and The Telegraph over the whole affair. They did not beat about the bush. They did not hide behind namby-pamby euphemisms we Brits are so good at. As one cleric told one of the Indian television channels, the matter was simple: Rushdie had written a book insulting Islam. (No, he had not read it; he would not pollute his eyes by reading the infidel’s book; also he couldn’t read English). The man had shown or expressed no remorse for his heinous crime. And the Muslims were not going to forgive him. He was happy that Rushdie was not coming to the festival. Allah be praised!

There were a couple of final twists to the story. The British novelist (of Indian descent) Hari Kunzru and another Indian novelist decided to read aloud excerpts from TheSatanic Verses in the festival (presumably to show solidarity to Rushdie). Kunzru is a good writer (his debut novel, The Impressionist, was very impressive, as was My Revolutions), but he really must desist from such stunts. In any case both the novelists were prevented from reading aloud from the novel by the organizers, which peeved Salman further and he demanded explanation. (The explanation was: The Satanic Verses remains banned in India and reading from the novel probably constitutes a crime in that country.) I think the organizers did Kunzru a favour. Spending a nice weekend in the air-conditioned comforts of the hotel in which the festival was held is one thing, but I don’t think Kunzru would have found the hospitality of Indian jails quite up to the same standards.

The organizers then arranged a video-link conference at the venue with Rushdie. That too had to be cancelled at the last minute. Once again, the Indian police were very canny. They knew that they could not stop the organizers from holding the video conference. So they prevailed upon the owner of the hotel to withdraw permission to the conference (telling him that there might be violence in the hotel and thousands might riot on the streets) which left William Dalrymple feeling ‘personally disgraced’.

What actually happened was about 50 youths (presumably Muslim) entered the venue and started intimidating people. The organizers could not explain how the men managed to breach the security code. The police said they let the men in because they had the requisite delegate passes. Make of that what you will.

The police chief of Jaipur was remarkably unabashed about it. ‘In view of the simmering resentment in the city [against Rushdie], I feared there would be problems in the festival and riots outside, so I advised the owner to cancel the video broadcast,’ he said.

What does all this mean for the world’s largest democracy? On the face of it, it is spectacularly cringeworthy. It is not an edifying spectacle when cynical politicians with eyes on the votes bow down to religious extremism. Rushdie wasted no time in castigating Indian politicians and  Muslim religious leaders. Said Rushdie:

‘Currently the people who claim to be speaking for India's Muslims are either not the true leaders, or they are certainly extremely bad leaders. And the fact that the political system plays with those leaders, wants to placate them, and curry favour with them, that of course is the fault of the political system.’

Rushdie probably has a point. This is no doubt sociological experts would call as the paradox of modern India. On the one hand the country is poised to become one of the economic giants in the coming decades, with a proportion of its citizens—certainly the educated and the well off classes—having the same sensibilities and values of Western civilizations; on the other hand are religious leaders (and, by the looks of it, some politicians) who are living in medieval times. 

That said Rushdie is a tad harsh on the country of his birth. Rushdie might have been born and lived in India when he was young, but it was not India but Britain that intellectually nourished him. In his thinking Rushdie is a Westerner, and (perhaps understandably) takes for granted certain values like freedom of speech in a supposedly open, democratic and secular country. The thing is (I know, I know; it is a cliché) India is at once an ancient civilization and a very young country. India as we know it today has existed for only sixty years, after the British left. What is happening is India trying to squeeze in sixty years what took centuries in Europe. Nobody promised the ride wouldn’t be bumpy.

Ultimately, I believe, the middle classes—the intellectual guardians of any culture—will determine which way India will go. There are almost 400 millions of them, and growing. Which suggests there is hope.

As for Rushdie, I think he should offer unhesitating apology to the Muslim world. He has to accept that there are parts of the world where folk are not as laid back about religion as some of us are in Britain. Where—even in democracies such as India— the Western concept of freedom to say offensive things is not readily appreciated. He might not have intended to cause offence, but cause offence he did. Why not accept with humility that you might have inadvertently offended a culture, and apologize with good grace? 

Salman Rushdie is a great writer, who has written many excellent novels. It would be a shame if he is forever linked with the controversy  surrounding one of the novels (which is also an excellent novel).

Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses and Hurt Muslim Sentiments

The Vice Chancellor of the Darul Uloom seminary in Deoband is annoyed. He (I am assuming the vice chancellor is a man) is cheesed off. He is about as happy as Gordon Brown was on the May 2010 election day.

Why is the vice chancellor of the Darul Uloom Seminary in Deoband peeved? What is making him more sore than bleeding haemorrhoids? What has caused him to be as comradely as a starving grizzly bear that can’t get to the bee-hive at the top of the branch?

I can clarify.

The vice chancellor of the Darul Uloom seminary is in a towering rage (and we are talking at least forty stories here) because the infidel is coming to town.

I think more clarification is in order at this stage.

The first question requiring an answer is: where in Allah’s name is Darul Uloom seminary? That is easy. The answer, given in the first line of this post, is: Deoband.

The next question: where in the name of Mohammad is Deoband? I can answer this, too. Deoband is a town (I am assuming it is a town seeing as it has a seminary which boasts of a vice chancellor, although calling a cleric in a seminary a vice-chancellor is a bit like a chiropractor calling himself a doctor) in India.

Where in India, I hear you asking, is Deoband? There you have got me. I don’t have a f**king clue. But wherever it is, the infidel would be well advised to steer clear of it. Because he is not welcome there.

The infidel in question is Salman Rushdie, the Booker Prize winning author of Midnight’s Children, who, in 1988, wrote a novel entitled The Satanic Verses, which incurred the wrath of the then supreme leader of the Islamic republic of Iran, the AyatollahRuhollah Khomeini. Khomeini, in his infinite wisdom, decreed that Rushdie had insulted the prophet and any punishment short of execution was too kind. And Khomeini was not in a mood to show mercy to the insulter of the prophet (and by extension Islam). He took out a fatwa against Rushdie which gave permission for the infidel to be killed wherever he (the infidel) was.

The densely written The Satanic Verses, which I doubt would otherwise have been heard of, let alone read, in the Muslim world, achieved instant notoriety following Khomeini’s fatwa. Rushdie went into hiding and had to stay hidden for several years (the British taxpayers’ money was well spent in protecting him).

The Satanic Verses was banned in many countries, most of them Islamic.

India was one of the first countries to ban The Satanic Verses. The book is still officially banned in India, although, according to an Indian friend of mine, for a while after Khomeini’s fatwa the novel was one book that was smuggled the most into the country (until the Indians realised that it was unreadable).

(As an aside, I read somewhere that The Satanic Verses has sold more copies than Midnight’s Children. It is Rushdie’s most commercially successful novel to-date, all thanks to Khomeini’s fatwa, although I doubt that that was Khomeini’s intention when he took out the fatwa.)

Salman Rushdie is of Indian descent (he was born and brought up in Mumbai, India), and he was said to be deeply hurt that the country of his origin banned the book even before it was banned in some of the Islamic countries.

India, of course, is not an Islamic country. It is a secular, democratic country. However, it has a sizeable Muslim population. Muslims form almost 14% of India’s population (more than 100 millions). One guesses that the Indian authorities were not overtly keen to piss off the already pissed off Muslim population by allowing the novel to become freely available.

In due course Rushdie came out of hiding. I am not exactly sure, but I think after Khomeini’s death (I hope he is enjoying the delights of the paradise after leading a life of piety) the Iranian government found some sort of face-saving formula, managing, in the process, the kind of intellectual contortions that would have British politicians nodding with approval; and essentially said that they were taking back Khomeini’s fatwa (and were happy to wait, instead, for the infidel to be struck by the full wrath of Allah).

India might have banned The Satanic Verses, but it has not banned Rushdie from travelling to India.

Rushdie is invited to attend a literary festival that will be held in Jaipur, Rajasthan later this month. It is this invitation that has raised the hackles of the vice-chancellor of the Darul Uloom seminary.

Rushdie is not the only prominent writer (in the Western hemisphere) who will be in attendance. Other prominent authors attending this literary festival include the Pulitzer Award winning American novelist, Annie Proloux; the 1991 Booker Winner Ben Okri (we shall ignore for the moment that Okri has written little of consequence since his Booker win twenty years ago); the British playwright David Hare; and Richard Dawkins. The last name is interesting. I have not read Richard Dawkins (he bores me with his constant anti-God, anti-religions hectoring), but I should hazard a guess that Dawkin’s views about all religions, God, and figures—historical and current that claimed to have had a special relationship with or an exclusive channel of communication with the Supreme being—are likely to be even more sceptical than those expressed in one section of The Satanic Verses.

(I should briefly clarify my position on God and religion, here. Having given the matter considerable thought over the years, I have decided to hedge my bets and have settled on a position of agnosticism. It is like this: if you spend all your life believing that God exists, that there is afterlife, and that you would be answerable for your deeds in this life after your death; and if God does not exist, if there is no afterlife, what have you got to lose? You die, and there is nothing after that. On the other hand, if you spend all your life bad-mouthing God, and if he does exist, then, upon your demise, you are going to meet a Supreme Being that is more f**ked off than the vice chancellor of the Darul Uloom seminary in Deoband, India.)

So, this is the situation. There is a literary festival in India, to which Salman Rushdie is invited. The vice chancellor of a Muslim seminary in India is upset about it. He does not think that the infidel who has insulted the great religion and its founder should be invited in any official capacity to India.

I have no reason to believe that the vice chancellor is an unwise man. I do not know whether he has actually read The Satanic Verses. If he has never left India, he would not—at any rate, should not—have read the offending novel, which is banned in that country. (May be he travelled to the UK with the specific aim of reading the novel and deciding for himself whether Rushdie offended the Muslim sentiments; or perhaps he was content to put his faith in the sound judgment of the late Ayatollah of Iran and considered The Satanic Verses blasphemous even if he has not read the novel himself. It does not matter. You have a right to feel offended about or have view against something you have no personal experience of. I am totally against greenhouse gases; I think it is bad news for the planet. I also believe that America, China, and India, in that order, are currently the worst offenders; and the politicians—power-makers in case of China—in their short-sightedness are making our planet a more dangerous place. Believe me, I hold very strong view on the matter; I have seriously considered going on marches (before rejecting it in favour of shouting abuses at the TV screen at the Ten o’clock BBC news). I could not explain to you, though, what exactly greenhouse gases are and in what way they are endangering the planet. But that does not stop me from having very strong views on the subject.) The point is: people can have very strong views on matters they know little about, or, in some cases, are even misinformed about. That is life. Therefore, while it is possible that a vast majority of the tens of millions in the Islamic world who feel deeply offended by the alleged anti-Islamic views of Rushdie in The Satanic Verses has not actually read the novel, that does not make the sentiments ersatz in my view. I would rather they read The Satanic Verses and decide for themselves whether or not Rushdie offended Islam. (May be some of them did and feel, after reading the novel that Rushdie insulted their religion. I have known a few educated Muslims over the years and with some of them, whom I became friendly with, I tried to discuss The Rushdie issue. Not a single one of them admitted to have read The Satanic Verses. None of them called Rushdie an infidel, either, I should point out; or wished him a horrible death. There was, if anything, a marked reluctance to discuss this on their part, which I suspected was because they did hold strong views on the matter. But that is my guess.) I could also go on the Net and find out more about it so that I can have an informed opinion on the matter; but I can’t be bothered.

So what is the vice chancellor of the Darul Uloom seminary in Deoband saying? According to the article in The Daily Telegraph, the vice chancellor, who goes by the impressive name of Maulana Abul Qasim Nomeni, is calling upon

‘the Muslim organizations of the country [India] to mount pressure on the centre to withdraw the visa and prevent him [Rushdie] visiting India where [tens of millions] community members still feel hurt owing to the anti-Islamic remarks in his writings The Muslims cannot pardon him at any cost.’

Abul Qasim Nomeni, it would be fair to say, is not feeling particularly benevolent towards Rushdie, which, one might say, is only to be expected of a man whose name rhymes with Khomeini. He is (or thinks he is) speaking on behalf of tens of millions of community members (Muslims), who, he assures us, are still hurt over the anti-Islamic remarks in Rushdie’s writings. (Interesting that Maulana does not actually mention The Satanic Verses; instead he uses the generic term ‘writings’. Does this mean that Rushdie has made remarks that can be construed as anti-Islamic in his other writings?—I have read half a dozen Rushdie novels and The Satanic Verses is the only one which can be viewed as anti-Islamic. Or is it the case that the pious Maulana can’t bring himself to even utter the name of the infidel’s novel?)

The headline under which The Daily Telegraph chose to publish the article is also interesting. The headline is:

Sir Salman Rushdie facing threat of Muslim reprisals over Jaipur Literature Festival appearance’.

Maybe I am missing something, or The Daily Telegraph has chosen to keep hidden a vital piece of information from its readers.

What Abul Qasim Nomeni is, according to the Telegraph’s own article, asking is: (a) the writer’s centre withdraw invitation to Rushdie, and / or (b) withdraw the visa to Rushdie so that he cannot travel to India. (The second calling is presumably to Indian authorities; I wouldn’t have thought that the writer’s centre that has organized the festival would have any say in the matter.)

That hardly qualifies as a threat of Muslim reprisal. The vice chancellor is not exhorting the ‘community members’ to tie explosive to their genitals and blow themselves up in the festival. He is encouraging the community members to put pressure on the Indian government to withdraw Rushdie’s visa. One might disagree with the vice chancellor; one might feel that his views are not adequately informed; but one can hardly take an issue with his methods.

In recent years, the UK has banned a number of organizations, books and pamphlets, which the government (read security agencies) feels is inimical to the fabric of the society; the government has also banned individuals from entering the country. The vice chancellor Nomeni wants a ban on Rushdie visiting his country. He is entitled to his views, however misguided we think they are, and, in a free country, he has every right to voice them. India is a country with free speech; it is not country with free visiting rights.

The worry, of course, is that while the learned vice chancellor of the Darul Uloom university might not be espousing violent methods to get the message across, his clarion call might just be the kind of encouragement some radical ‘community members’— who have come to the conclusion that the world does not change through somebody asking nicely and whose chief mode of communication, therefore, is hand-made bombs—do not need.

Let’s go back to India’s banning of The Satanic Verses. I don’t know why India banned the book, but I can guess. The Indian politicians probably concluded that (a) the Muslim sentiments were indeed hurt by the novel, and (b) publishing of the book might lead to law and order problems. And they decided that the best way to deal with the situation and prevent it from escalating further was to ban the book.

The Satanic Verses was not the first, and won’t be the last, book to be banned. The list of novels banned in the UK and America in the twentieth century, because they fell foul, in some way or the other, of the powers that be, is longer than a lemur’s tail.

That does not make the banning of The Satanic Verses right, mind, in my view; however, as the cliché goes, time is the best leveler, and decisions which either make perfect contextual sense or serve some or the other expediency (political, cultural etcetera), will look, with the passage of time, cynical, dishonest and wrong.

Is Abul Qasim Nomeni, the vice chancellor of Darul Uloom seminary, a fundamentalist Muslim? He might be, or he might not be. All I can say is Islam is not the only religion which generates fundamentalists. Christianity has its own brand of religious headcases. Like the organization in Russia which wants the Bhagvad Geeta (sacred book of Hindus) to be banned in Russia because it is anti-Christian, apparently. Or the American nutter who was going to burn the Koran. There is no dearth of Christian Evangelists who are bat-shit mental and go into proselytizing over-drive, spreading the true message of Christmas (and generally being a pain in the neck) every December. True, in recent years, the Christian fundamentalists have not been involved in acts of spectacular violence; but that might be because Christian lands have not been invaded by Muslim armies.

However, let’s get back to the Rushdie affair. In recent years, Rushdie is the second author that I know of who has invited disapprobation for his alleged anti-Islamic views. In 2010, V.S. Naipaul withdrew from giving the inaugural speech for the European Writers’ Parliament, in Turkey, after a slew of Turkish writers and journalists, criticized the decision to invite Naipaul, who, according to them, was anti-Islamic. (Commented on this blog.)

Rushdie—bless him!—has so far shown no inclination to withdraw. Instead he has given out a statement (bold or belligerent, take your pick) to the effect that he fully intends to attend the festival, and because he is of Indian origin he does not even need a visa to visit India.

Rushdie, in the words of William Darlymple, the organizer of the Jaipur Literary Festival, has made a major ‘contribution to multiculturalism, pluralism and co-existence.’ He is (Dalrymple, again) ‘one of the greatest artists India has created’. He is also (Dalrymple hasn’t finished yet) ‘one of the greatest figures to come out of Indian Muslim community.’

This is high praise indeed. I do not know about Rushdie’s contribution to all the isms Dalrymple is talking about; neither do I possess knowledge of great Muslim figures that have come out of the Indian Muslim community (I am happy to take Dalrymple’s word for it). What I do know (having read six of his novels) is Rushdie is a superb writer. Three cheers for Rushdie.

Rushdie, Midnght's Children and The Booker

I might as well declare at the outset that Salman Rushdie is one of my favourite authors writing in English. I have read all of his full-length novels except the first (Grimus) and the most recent (The Enchantress of Florence). In my list of all-time favourite novels (written in Original English) there will definitely be two of Rushdie: The Satanic Verses and Midnight’s Children; and I will be tempted to add a third one (Moore’s Last Sigh).

Rushdie has the amazing capacity to arouse extreme passions. As John Sutherland remarked, he either rocks or he sucks. He irritates you the same way a driver gets under your skin by stealing a parking space from right under your nose, which fills you with murderous rage wholly disproportionate to the crime. And what are Rushdie's crimes? Different groups seem to hate him for different reasons. There are those, usually Muslim fundamentalists, who are convinced he is Islamophobic: he is subjected to vituperative attacks on a number of Islamic web-sites, I am told; many of the attackers, needless to say, have not actually read The Satanic Verses. Some consider him to be a shameless self-promotionist and aggrandiser. Rushdie’s cameo appearance in Bridget Jones’s Diary is often cited by them as an incontrovertible evidence that there is no turpitude he will not sink to so long as he stays in limelight. (It has to be said, though, that the man does not exactly shy away from publicity. It may even be argued that sometimes he goes actively in search of it. Take, for example, his recent claim that he now holds the record of signing maximum number of books in an hour. Driven by the need to make this fact public Rushdie wrote a letter to The Guardian, helpfully pointing out that he had broken the previously held record of the wine critic Malcolm Gluck. ‘His record is toast,’ Rushdie crowed in the letter. Gluck chose to see the humour in the situation—perhaps Salman was tongue in cheek all along—and compared it (Rushdie’s boasting) to men’s boastings about the size of their equipments (he was probably not far off the mark; I can’t see many women writers going for this type of record)). Then there are those who are pissed off with him for no reason other than he seems to have little difficulty in hooking up with young, glamorous women (although, the cockles of their hearts must have, no doubt, been warmed by the news that his third—or is it fourth? Most recent, anyway—wife, an ex-model, has left him). If some or more of you are wondering quite what any of this has got to do with Rushdie’s auctorial capabilities, let me advise you that there are those who don’t think much of him as a writer. A proportion of these have heard from a friend who happened to have overheard a conversation in a party that Rushdie is unreadable. Some have tried to read some of Rushdie’s books and struggled to go beyond the first fifty pages, which, of course, means that Rushdie is dull, tiresome, boring, and tedious. Rushdie, according to these individuals, who may or may not have achieved an elementary level of ability in reading, is over-hyped and writes tripe. He is a load of tosh, baloney and hokum. You will be excused if News of the World is not the first publication you reach for for literary fiction reviews, in which case let me inform you that one Carole Malone, a regular columnist in this British tabloid, thinks that Rushdie’s knighthood (awarded by the British Government) for the service to literature is farcical because she has yet to meet anyone, ‘me included’ (just so that there is no room for misunderstanding), who has managed to get through anything he has written. Ms Malone, it would be fair to conclude, is in the ‘Rushdie sucks’ camp. Finally, there are those who accept, grudgingly, that Rushdie used to be good, but point out, gleefully, that he is now past his sell-by-date; he is surviving on past reputation. Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury are often given as examples of Rushdie’s declining prowess as a writer. (Martin Amis is another writer of Rushdie’s generation many seem to derive great pleasure in trashing).

It is difficult to say which amongst Rushdie’s ten full-length novels is his most famous. Many would plump for The Satanic Verses, which made Rushdie a household name in the non-English speaking world after Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s supreme religious leader when the novel was published, issued a Fatwah sentencing Rushdie publicly to death as he (Khomeini) deemed The Satanic Verses to be blaspheming Islam. (One doubts very much whether Khomeini, who couldn’t read English, had actually read the novel, but he probably did not have to; he was after all God’s mouthpiece. Also, it wasn’t immediately apparent to many at the time quite how Khomeini was going to bring about Rushdie’s death unless he was depending on the Umah (which, I have it on reliable information, is an Arebic word for 'Brotherhood of Islam'); Rushdie wasn’t an Iranian citizen, and, after the Fatwah, one would have assumed that Tehran was probably not on the top of his list of holiday destinations.) The Satanic Verses is probably Rushdie’s commercially most successful book, although Rushdie, who had to go into hiding after the Fatwah for several years—the British government spent millions of pounds on his security—, would probably have settled for less copies of the novel selling if it meant he could live as a free man. It might be argued that The Satanic Verses made Rushdie not so much famous as infamous. It was Midnight’s Children—a hypermanic, clamorous tale, full of wit and slapstick, tracing the story of India’s independence and the first thirty post-independent years, through the memories of its drip-nosed, telepathic protagonist— that propelled him, overnight, to the cutting edge of the literary world, and won for him many a laurel.

Midnight’s Children was Salman Rushdie’s second novel. His first was Grimus which had sold barely nine hundred copies and had to be remaindered. Midnight’s Children changed all that. It made Rushdie into a celebrity. Years later he recalled: ‘Before [Midnight’s Children] my career as a writer was completely obscure. Overnight it wasn’t. I gained confidence.’ Still later he put it differently (and provocatively): ‘I walked into literary London as a stranger and ran off with a cheque, which feels OK.’ Rushdie began writing the novel in 1976. He felt a ‘sense of exhilaration’ as the voice of Saleem Sanai, the garrulous, witty narrator of what was to become Midnight’s Children ‘came over’ him. It was with this novel Rushdie, by his own admission, really became a writer ‘after a decade of false starts’. It took him three years to complete the novel and, to Rushdie’s delight, the two top names in the publishing word on either side of the Atlantic—Jonathan Cape in London and Alfred Knoff in New York—accepted the book. The publication got delayed for all sorts of reasons, and, when Rushdie requested to see some alternatives to the livid salmon-pink dust jacket of the book—he was, understandably concerned about the salmon / salman joke that would plague him for years—he was told that he could not as that would delay the publication of the book even further (one guesses the publishers have, since, become more receptive to Rushdie’s concerns).

Upon its publication, Midnight’s Children won the 1981 Booker prize, awarded to writers from Britain, Ireland, South Africa and the Commonwealth countries, ahead of some worthy competitors: Muriel Spark (Loitering with Intent), Doris Lessing (The Sirian Experiment), Ian McEwan (The Comfort of Strangers), and Molly Keane (The Good Behaviour), the last one making a literary comeback after decades of silence. In 1993, it was awarded the ‘Booker of Booker’ to celebrate twenty-five years of the literary prize the British fondly believe to be the most prestigious literary award in the world. And this year, in 2008, it won ‘The Best of the Booker’ award, a special prize awarded in commemoration of the forty years of the Booker Prize, now known as the ‘Man Booker Prize'.

The process of selection was different on the two occasions. In 1993 the winner was chosen by a committee of three, chaired by the late Malcolm Bradbury. Bradbury was also the chair of the committee that awarded the Booker to Midnight’s Children in 1981, although in his personal capacity he had voted against it at the time, so make of that what you will. The runner up, the committee had announced, was William Golding’s Rites of Passage, the 1980 Booker winner. In 2008, a shortlist of six was chosen by the novelist Victoria Glendinning, the broadcaster Mariella Frostrup, and the professor of English (at University College London) John Mullan. The nominees were Disgrace (J.M. Coetzee), Siege of Krishnapur (J.G. Farrell), The Conversationist (Nadine Gordimer), Ghost Road (Pat Barker), Oscar and Lucinda (Peter Carey), and Midnight’s Children (Salman Rushdie). (The process of choosing the short-list of six was painful and disturbing, according to Glendinning; at least one book, personally significant to each one of the panel members, had to be axed, as the other two were not in sympathy. A particularly difficult category, apparently, was writers whom all the panel members admired unreservedly and who had won the Booker, ‘but for the wrong book’. The two novelists who came under this category were V.S. Naipaul (who won the 1971 Booker for In A Free State) and Margaret Atwood (who won the award in 2000 for The Blind Assassin)).

The winner of 'The Best of Booker' was chosen by public vote. Midnight’s Children won hands down with almost 40% voting for it. Disgrace was in second place.

In 1993, when he won the ‘Booker of Booker’, Rushdie was still living under the shadow of Khomeini's Fatwah. He was in hiding and was provided with tight security by the British government (at tax payers’ expense, of course). He attended the ceremony surrounded by bodyguards and police patrolling the streets with walki-talkies. Fifteen years down the line, circumstances were more felicitous, and the Fatwah had become a distant memory, although Rushdie could not receive the award in person as he was touring America, promoting his latest novel (which, it has been announced, is long-listed for the 2008 Booker. Should he win it—he probably won’t—he will become the third writer—after Coetzee and Carey—to win the award twice).

Midnight’s Children, Rushdie was to recall after many yeas, was an attempt by him, born and bred in Bombay (now Mumbai) to reclaim his Indian origins and heritage. He was particularly pleased that the book was very well received in the country of his birth (as much as English language books can be received; India is only a partially English speaking country, and it’s a lesser known fact in the West that authors writing in local languages, many of whom have never been translated into English, outsell the English-language books by a huge margin). The book was so widely pirated in India that he began receiving anonymous greeting cards and Thank You cards from the pirates. (It must have been painful for Rushdie when, six years later, India became the first (and probably the only) democratic and secular country to ban The Satanic Verses.)

A couple of years ago I attended a literary evening in which Rushdie was the main speaker (he was promoting Shalimar the Clown). In the ‘Question and Answers’ session, there were, inevitably, questions on Midnight’s Children. An Asian man commented that he had enjoyed the book thoroughly and found it to be hilarious in parts, however, at the end of it, he was left wondering what was the point of it all. There was a mild titter in the audience and Rushdie obviously felt the need to put the cheeky bloke in his place. He replied by saying that the very same question was asked by ‘a very pretty woman in a saree’ many years ago, in New Delhi. He then went on to caricature the Indian accent, replete with wild gesticulations (much to the merriment of the audience). Finally, he answered the question in a couple of sentences: he wrote the novel because he wanted to show that individual memories—of people who have lived through a particular epoch— can be at variance with the official version of history.

In a literary blog hosted by a broadsheet, there was a lively discussion after Midnight’s Children won the ‘Best of Bookers’. There were quite a few postings which stated that Midnight’s Children was not a worthy winner and compared it unfavourably to the novels of Marquez (which was strange seeing as Marquez, being a Latin American, non-English, writer, had never been short-listed for the Booker). Some others made the discovery that Midnight’s Children owed a lot to Grass’s Tin Drum. While the Tin Drum influence—and it is true that few seem to have noticed it—is probably there, in my view, Midnight’s Children is not at all derivative, and the influence—inspiration is the word I would prefer—detracts not a jot from its endlessly inventive resplendence. Let’s all hail Rushdie!