Arguing with the world
Ambitious, bloody-minded, but resolutely cheerful. Lily Hall talks with Salman Rushdie about his distinguished yet turbulent career as a novelist and tries to uncover the passion and outlook on life that has created his literary masterpieces
“Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody minded. Argue with the world.’’
It is this attitude that has landed Bombay born author, Salman Rushdie, with, on one hand, a death sentence from an Iranian spiritual leader, and on the other, with several of the most prestigious literary awards available to writers today. And, as a natural corollary perhaps, a cameo role in Bridget Jones’s Diary. Evidently, he is not a man who is prepared to blend in with the dull grey background of social convention (or literary convention for that matter), and, whatever your opinion of him, his latest release, Shalimar the Clown, hints that he will be gracing the bookshelves for a while to come.
Rushdie was educated at Rugby School and then read History at Kings College, Cambridge. He was heavily involved in the amateur dramatics society, Footlights, something which is evident in the theatricality of much of his work. After graduating he moved to Pakistan where he worked in television, before returning to England to begin work as a copywriter. This connection with both Pakistan and India, two nations in constant conflict, has shaped much of Rusdie’s writing. His first novel, Grimus, was published in 1974.
Few people had heard of Rushdie before Midnight’s Children, the second novel of his career, won the Booker Prize in 1981. Dubbed the ‘Booker of Bookers’, the book is set around the period of India’s struggle for independence, and its hero is born at the stroke of midnight on August 14th, 1947 - the moment of the country’s formal separation from Britain: “At the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled into the crowds…thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history chained to those of my country. For the next three decades there was to be no escape.” His life has become a metaphor for the new nation; a subtle image that demonstrates the skill that put Rushdie in the literary elite so early on in his career. Rushdie, Tim Supple and Simon Reade later adapted this epic piece of magical realism into a three hour stage production, performed both here and across the Atlantic, firmly establishing Rushdie’s position at the forefront of the British artistic world.
In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie made a passionate plea for the novelist of today to slice open this relationship between individuals and the society in which they live, to lay bare the political and private spheres which are so inextricably intertwined in the modern world. At the heart of Rushdie’s most recent novel, Shalimar the Clown, is the story of Kashmir, a place where these sorts of connections are of great importance. He explains, as if there’s a bitter taste lingering in his mouth, that Kashir is a place “of great physical beauty but also a place where the closest thing to a harmonious culture was created and then destroyed.”
The love story between Boonyi and Shalimar takes place against that background. Shalimar is a tightrope walker from a family of folk literature performers, actors, gymnasts and magicians, whose place in Kashmir as entertainers has been slowly eclipsed by modern forms of entertainment. “Kashmir”, says Rushdie, “is caught between what one might call the rock of India and the hard place of Pakistan. These two countries have both been fighting over it with little concern for what the people of Kashmir themselves ever said they wanted. What they have said consistently over the past sixty years is ‘would you both please fuck off!’ and that’s the option of course that nobody considers.”
Having spent his childhood summers in this mountainous north-Indian state, Rushdie tells us “Kashmir was India’s playground – it’s where people went on holiday in the hot season to see such magic realist things as ‘snow’ and ‘cold’. For me it was an enchanted childhood space.” In Shalimar the Clown, it becomes a paradise lost to the modern world. This new novel is not alone in its Kashmiri setting. Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Rushdie’s children’s book, is a manifestation of his childhood fascination with the place. In this too, however, the sadness of a place so beautiful and yet so ravaged is present. An example of the contrast of physical magnificance and political quagmire is the Dull Lake, a pun on the actual Lake Dal, whose name is so mismatched with its reality. It is a lake full of mystery and stories, landed with an inappropriate name by outside forces. A lot of the book is about regaining fascination and wonder at the world, not being strangled by bureaucracy.
In a re-engagement with the sentiments of Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Rushdie says thoughtfully, “I do think we live in an age beyond innocence. It is hard to have a wide-eyed view of the world as beautiful any more. These things that we thought were beautiful have in many senses been spoiled. And not just places, ideas too. It is very difficult therefore not to write about this moment in the history of the world as a tragedy.”
Alongside this sense of tragedy, however, comedy is never far away in Rushdie’s writing. Talking slightly indignantly about the violent responses he received to his fourth and arguably most controversial novel Satanic Verses (1988), he explained, “it’s one of the things I think people forget to say about it…there is a very strong comic strain. It made me feel that comedy is what gets up people’s noses further than anything else. Maybe if the book hadn’t been so funny I’d have been all right.” On the 14th February, 1989, Rushdie was put under sentence of death by the Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeini – “an extreme form of literary criticism”, remarked the novelist V.S Naipaul.
For ten years he lived in fear of his life an assassin lurked behind every car and down every dark street. This dramatic experience had a great impact on Rushdie. He has become an ardent defender of the right to freedom of expression, speaking out against the shutting down of the Birmingham Rep’s production of Behzti last year. He is also a voice of clarity in race relations, rejecting reductive political correctness and addressing the need for honest debate between communities. Finally, in 1999, the Iranian government announced it would not try to put the fatwa into effect.
Yet the threat has not disappeared entirely: at a recent lecture at UEA, the University still felt it necessary to provide Rushdie with several of their best beer bellied but immensely cheerful security guards. When asked what they might do if an armed Muslim fundamentalist arrived on the scene, one replied with a laugh, “I’ll run!”
So as Rushdie lets us in on one of his most prized literary devices, we begin to realise quite how deeply the events of the past two decades since Satanic Verses have cut: “There is always a moment in my novels when tragedy bursts out of the comedy as if the book is saying to you ‘ok, it’s not funny any more’. I hope what that does is to increase the shock of that moment.” He continues, “If you’ve been living in a world full of horrible things but they’re described as a comedy then that’s palatable. If at a certain point the smile is wiped off your face then it becomes stark – I hope that that increases the shock”.
Although Rushdie has been rewarded by the English literary establishment, he loathes to be categorised, to be put in a box, as certain critics seem to have been so intent on doing. The label ‘commonwealth writer’ is one to which he’s particularly averse. In his opinion, the English language “ceased to be the sole possession of the English some time ago. Perhaps,” he goads, “commonwealth literature was invented to delay the day when we rough beasts actually slouch into Bethlehem. In which case, it is time to admit that the centre cannot hold.” It is a “false category”, and prevents the rise of a new sort of English Literature, one that “has very little to do with the English themselves”. Ambitious but bloody minded, argumentative but resolutely cheerful, you can’t help but admire the man who is clearly very much a driving force behind this new sort of English Literature.
The Highlights of Rushdie’s work
Midnight’s Children
This won Rushdie the Booker Prize in 1981 and has since been dubbed the ‘Booker of Bookers’. It is set in the years following partition in India.
Satanic Verses
Ayatollah Khomeini famously issued a fatwa against Rushdie for this ‘blasphemous’ novel. It was inspired, in part, by the life of Muhammad.
Shalimar the Clown
This is Rushdie’s most recent work and is set in the tumultuous region of Kashmir. Dissection of terrorism in multicultural communities
