Speaking Volumes: The fatwa against reading

(Published in the Business Standard on February 14, 2012)

Among the many things forgotten about the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini on Valentine’s Day 1989 is that it did not stop at naming Salman Rushdie for writing the Satanic Verses. The author was condemned to death “along with all the editors and publishers aware of its contents”.

In retrospect, this was a fascinating inclusion. There was the minor matter that by including Rushdie’s editors and publishers, the Ayatollah had effectively declared war against the publishing industry in general—the typesetters who laid the book out, the printers and proofreaders, all the innocent footsoldiers caught in a battle that they had not chosen. He had also declared war against those not of the faith—if Rushdie was guilty of the crime of blasphemy, then arguing that one was not of the same religion and did not share the same beliefs was no longer a defence.

More crucially, the Ayatollah’s argument was both a curiously modern and a vengefully medieval one. His recognition that awareness itself of the contents of a potentially blasphemous work was a crime was both an acknowledgement that knowledge is dangerous, and stands as an indictment of readers along with writers.

This understanding of reading as an act of will, just as potentially subversive as anything actively written or imagined by a writer, goes back centuries. It is typically, either the state or organized religion that has been the policeman at the borders of reading. If in ancient China, the knowledge of the existence of certain texts was at one time enough to constitute a crime, British India had a milder form of this view of reading as subversive, which influenced the laws of the state.

The most subversive book in the country for years was the Bhagavad Gita, which kept strange company in the minds of British officials. The report of the “sedition committee”, led by Justice Rowlett, published in 1918-1919, states: “The conspirators [against the British government] designed a special syllabus for the people indoctrinated in the same belief. It included the Bhagwat Gita, the writings of Vivekananda, the life history of Mazzini and Garibaldi.” These books, the report continues, were used by “scheming and artful people” to influence the “weakhearted” to indulge in crimes against the state.

To be a writer in those years was to live on intimate terms with censorship, internal and external. The British established a long chain of guilt between printer, press, distributor, writer and reader—all were held responsible for crimes that ranged from sedition to disaffection, just as the Ayatollah would hold publishers and editors responsible for the perceived crime of blasphemy, many decades later.

Bankimchandra’s revised editions of the incendiary Anandamath are an interesting case study of what it meant to try to live within the system while being critical of it. Bankim was also a government servant, and his revisions and amendments to Anandamath are particularly revealing. Anandamath was widely received as a revolutionary text, and became something of a revolutionary manifesto. The first edition came out in 1882; the second edition changed key lines to soften the call to revolutionary defiance.

The third edition made the most sweeping changes—by now, Bankim had been transferred elsewhere by the British government and was trying to ensure that the book was not banned. In the third edition, he deleted many anti-British passages; in the fifth, he added a caveat to the unflattering portrayal of a British officer. “The British officials posted in India in those days were not men of unblemished moral character—quite unlike their counterparts today.”

Perhaps the changes had their intended effect; the book was not banned, Bankimchandra managed to return from the wilderness in his professional capacity as a servant of the British government. Despite all his attempts to soften Anandamath, the edition that circulated most widely in all of its fiery glory was the second edition, modeled closely on the first, defiant, uncensored one printed in the magazine Bangadarshan.

Khomeini and the British differ sharply in many respects, and a major one is that the Ayatollah did not need to be seen as just or fair. In the 23 years since the fatwa on Satanic Verses was first pronounced, much has been written about the responsibility of writers—most of it a veiled justification of censorship—or about Rushdie’s plight. But the Ayatollah’s fatwa cut out the possibility of engaged criticism by the faithful—disallowing them an expression of dissent or offence--just as surely as the Hindu rightwing succeeded in shutting down any kind of intelligent discussion on either Shivaji or the multiplicity of Ramayanas some years ago.

The only difference is that the Ayatollah shut down the discussion with an axe rather than a fist. And that what he indicted 23 years ago was not just the act of writing, but the crime of reading.

I’m at twitter.com/nilanjanaroy

Speaking Volumes: Listening To Rushdie

(Published in the Business Standard, January 17, 2012)

In all the claims made for Chetan Bhagat, tireless father of the Indian bestseller, this is one you will never hear: he disturbs the peace. In all the arguments made against Salman Rushdie’s attendance at the Jaipur Literature Festival this week, the gist of them is just this: he disturbs the peace.

Bhagat’s Revolution 2020 (‘Love. Corruption. Ambition.’) is, like his four previous novels, reassuringly familiar and comfortably accurate in its reflection of contemporary Indian concerns. The obsession with success, the difficulties of modern relationships, small town heroes battling a corrupt system—every one of his blockbuster novels articulates the concerns of the civic-minded Indian with absolute fidelity, and not one offers anything in the nature of a revolutionary or subversive idea.

Chetan Bhagat is the most visible face of the unchallenging new Indian bestseller, comfortable in its certainties, mildly anti-intellectual. Most of the criticism of this school of writing has focused on its lack of grammar and style. This is less obvious in Bhagat’s own writing—pedestrian to a fault, but positively literate when compared to the bestsellers from Shrishti Books.

Srishti’s line of books might be summarized as the revenge of the inarticulate on the literate, and have eloquent titles: ‘Sum Thing of a Mocktale: At JNU Where Kurta Fell In Love With Jeans’, ‘Ouch! That Hearts!’ These books conceal a secret contempt for the reader, assuming that s/he is no longer deserving of even the basic courtesies of grammar and fluency.

From Bhagat to fantasy writer Amish Tripathi to the Srishti authors, none of these writers have built their careers by challenging the accepted wisdom of their times. The argument for welcoming Rushdie to Jaipur is a simple one. His early works, which include Midnight’s Children, Shame and The Satanic Verses, are unsettling and uncomfortable, and we need that discomfort much more in 2012 than we need the safe formulas of the new bestsellers.

The opposition to Rushdie’s attendance at the Jaipur Festival comes from theologians at the Darul Uloom Deoband who have in all probability not read his books, and who would probably be made very uncomfortable if they did. Midnight’s Children tears up the textbook version of Indian Independence; one of the ways to counter, for instance, the hagiography of the Gandhi family, those full-page ads featuring Indira and her progeny is to read Rushdie’s portrait of the Widow and what she did during the Emergency.

But in these times, there are other writers who continue to write against the grain of the official histories—the more official, the less likely to be true. Amitav Ghosh’s Opium War series swings the perspective around to the Indian view, Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim stands (as Rushdie’s Shame did some two decades ago) as a reproach to those who would deny the bloody history of Bangladesh.

There are fewer writers who write against the grain of religion. Tahmima Anam is one of them, and The Good Muslim is a mercilessly accurate exploration of two kinds of tyranny—the tyranny of the righteously faithful, and the twinned tyranny of the righteous liberal who stands against the excesses of faith. In many ways, Anam writes against the backdrop of the question Rushdie asked many years ago, when he wrote Satanic Verses.

Question: What is the opposite of faith?

Not disbelief. Too final, certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief.

Doubt.

This brief meditation lies at the heart of the controversy over the Satanic Verses, which has extended into the present and ridiculous debate over whether Rushdie should be “allowed” to attend Jaipur. The real question is why the Deobandis, who rarely come to literary festivals, should want to stop others from listening to Rushdie’s views.

When the Satanic Verses comes up in debate, it is rarely the book that is discussed. As with many other kinds of forgotten history, the version of the Verses we talk about is moth-eaten, fragmentary, the complexity of a novel about migration, magic, angels and devils, the certainties of religion and madness reduced to the simplistic idea that this is a blasphemous book.

In the two decades since the Satanic Verses were banned, it has become increasingly hard to discuss the idea Rushdie puts forward in his work, which is the idea that doubt is necessary and valuable. But in that time, India has also moved closer to accepting, blindly and without much fuss, a worryingly widespread belief. This is the belief that at worst, questioning any faith or religion is in itself a kind of blasphemy—and at best, it’s an esoteric activity that the majority can safely ignore.

In 2007, Rushdie spoke at Jaipur, to a packed audience. He touched upon the silences in the official histories of Kashmir, on meeting some of the men responsible for the Gujarat riots, on growing up among “extremely practicing but incredibly open-minded Muslims” in his family. He spoke about authors and books, writing and reading, and all the other things you hope to hear from writers.

In 2012, I don’t know what he would want to speak about: literature, free speech, fables, memoir writing, perhaps. But I do know that, like so many other readers, I want to hear what he has to say, and it would be a great loss if the manufactured controversy around his visit silenced his voice, yet again.

Email: nilanjanasroy@gmail.com

The BS column: Rohinton and the Rat Pack

(Published in the Business Standard, October 17, 2010. This was written before The Buck Stops Here show on Rohinton Mistry and the withdrawal of his book from the Mumbai university syllabus.)













“That you say you are offended, insults me mortally. And if you insult one Rat mortally, you offend all Rats gravely. And a grave offence to all Rats is a funeral crime, a crime punishable by –” Salman Rushdie, Luka and the Fire of Life.





In the city of Mumbai, once upon a time, there lived many storytellers. Some came from the slums, and wrote angry, anguished, beautiful poetry about their lives. Some collected memories of Mumbai with loving care, and set down tales that featured the stories of the real Marathi Manoos, the ones who were Hindu but also Anglo-Indian or had names like Sinai and Pereira.

Some wrote of Firozesha Baag, chronicling the dying world of the Parsis, of ordinary men like Gustad Noble, stumbling from the tribulations of his quiet life into a larger conspiracy involving the corruption of the state, the venality and violence of its political parties. It must be remembered that at this time, Mumbai was also known as Bombay, and Bombay was a city that welcomed kahanis, opening its arms to stories and to story-tellers. Some of the best found an ocean of seas of stories here: a young man who worked in advertising called Salman Rushdie, two men who knew the slums intimately, Kiran Nagarkar and Namdeo Dhasal, a banker called Rohinton Mistry who returned to literature in Toronto, remembering and etching the Bombay he had loved so much.

Salman Rushdie spent years in darkness, at the hands of a villain much like the Khattam-Shud he wrote about in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. There were many other Khattam-Shuds in India, men who preferred “chup” to “gup”, and since Rushdie had been unwise enough to write about religion, Islam and the Koran in a book called Satanic Verses, they placed his book under a seal of the blackest silence for 23 years.
Many argued that religion should not be beyond question, and that the point of a novel was that it was made up, and that perhaps those who didn’t want to read Rushdie’s ideas might want to stop buying and burning copies of the book and just tell all their friends not to read it. But a ban hung like a shroud over Satanic Verses, and in a very strange coincidence, few great novels about controversial religious matters have come out of India in the last 23 years. This is, of course, just a coincidence, brought about by the P2C2E described in Haroun and the Sea of Stories—a Process Too Complicated To Explain.

Meanwhile, Mumbai was changing too, and becoming a city of Rats, fearsome creatures with whiskers that sniffed out the merest hint of offence, and great sharp teeth called censorship laws, and the thing about Rats is that they were very good about calling up bands of fellow Rats at need. The Rats felt strongly about the Marathi Manoos, a mythical and apparently endangered species that was threatened in Mumbai by anything that was neither pure Maharashtrian nor a Rat. The Rats felt strongly about anything that was against the spirit of their ancient culture, which is to say anything that criticized Rattery in general and Ratty politics in particular. The Rats felt very, very strongly about books that were freely available, in bookshops or in local universities, that caused offence to Rattishness.

The second thing about Rats is that they are very slow readers. Someone needs to bring a King Rat, or a Crown Prince Rat, a book worthy of burning before he will turn its pages, and the vision of Rats is such that they can only see what offends them. And so, twenty years after Mistry first set down the tale of Gustad Noble, and after it had been not just acclaimed by critics, but loved by non-Rats everywhere, a young Rat read the book. And he was shocked to discover that it offended his sensibilities, by casting aspersions on Rattish behaviour (such as corruption and mob violence and other forms of Rattery), and that it offended particular political parties. It happened to be his political party, but he explained that Political Parties, like Rats, needed to stand together against anything that might be Offensive, such as books that made people question the conduct of Political Parties known for their tendency to rule by thuggery. (Or Thuggeries, since there were three of them, a big Thuggery, a medium Thuggery and a little Thuggerish.)

It caused the Rats the greatest offence of all to discover that Such a Long Journey was being taught in Mumbai University—which, however, had a fellow Rat at its helm. It was the easiest thing in the world to organize a book-burning session followed by a book-banning session, and the niceties observed, the Rats went back to their holes.
They left us with a question, though, as Rohinton Mistry becomes the latest in a long line of authors to experience Rat censure and censorship. If Bombay turns into Rattistan, what will happen to its story-tellers? Will they leave, hustled out of the city by Rat stormtroopers? Will they end up with books written in Rattish, a new language for books that contain only blank pages, and three words: “Don’t cause offence.”

Speaking Volumes: In Midnight's Shadow

(Blog neglect plus backed-up posts= blogger overload. At some stage I'll get around to posting the old stuff, but I figured I'd start archiving the more recent work.)

(Published in the Business Standard, July 2008)

There wasn’t much surprise when Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children won the Best of Bookers—for the second time—last week. The shortlist included works by Nadine Gordimer, Pat Barker, J G Farrell, Peter Carey and J M Coetzee.

Those who voted in the public poll did so with a slight sense of déjà vu, for Rushdie had won the first Booker of Bookers for the same book in 1993; it’s a bit like handing out the same gong twice, or like presenting a re-Nobel Prize.

What the second Booker of Bookers really accomplished was to shed some light on the process of how a book becomes an enduring classic. In 1981, when Midnight’s Children won the Booker—this would be the plain vanilla version of the prize—Rushdie was seen as a fierce young talent with a pile of unpublished books in his drawer and a work of equivocal merit behind him.

Grimus, his first published work, hadn’t done that well and remains a literary curiosity—though this early, science fiction-influenced work, still has its admirers and was a pointer to the sometimes alarming erudition that Rushdie would summon throughout his literary career.

But Midnight’s Children, though it drew puzzled reviews in the UK, captured the imagination of Indians and some of the more attentive reviewers in the US fairly soon. Rushdie’s central conceit was the perfect metaphor for a nation still looking back at Independence and Partition. His protagonist, Saleem Sinai, is born (like Rushdie himself) in 1947, and along with those born on or close to midnight on August 15 of that year, possesses certain talents. Saleem is a telepath; the boy with whom he’s accidentally switched at birth, Shiva, possesses extraordinary fighting skills. Saleem’s fortunes mirror those of a changing India, and he and midnight’s other children are threatened by the figure of the Widow, whom most readers had no difficulty recognizing as the figure of Indira Gandhi in the Emergency years.

It’s just as hard to assess the impact that Midnight’s Children has had on Indian writers as it is to imagine Indian literature without this book. The novel has its detractors: Amit Chaudhuri attacked the “loose, baggy monsters” that it spawned in its wake. It also has its imitators, those who have, with varying degrees of success, attempted to carry off Rushdie’s swashbuckling brand of magical realism or to create equally large, “holdall” novels where everything of importance about India can be crammed.

For my generation of readers, Midnight’s Children gave us a voice that had been either constrained or limited previously. From the publication of the first Indian novel in English—Bankimchandra’s Rajmohan’s Wife—writers had struggled with what might be called the “salad” problem. Struggling to find the words to describe the dish created by a Bengali housewife from vegetables plucked in her garden, Bankimchandra came up with the term “garden salad”, though the very English image that conjures up is nowhere near the reality of the Indian dish it describes.

A few writers—R K Narayan, Raja Rao—had found a way out, deploying simple, almost artless language that allowed them to duck the problems of depicting accent and cadence. A good eight years after the publication of Midnight’s Children, a writer like Shashi Tharoor would feel free to employ his very Stephenian English to rework the Mahabharata into his The Great Indian Novel. But Rushdie’s English in Midnight’s Children was deliberately, exuberantly over-the-top. Saleem ‘Piece-of-the-Moon’ Sinai, “handcuffed to history”, switched back and forth from Indianisms to lyrical flights of almost classicist English—in exactly the same way that most Indians do when we speak.

Some have suggested that Midnight’s Children has survived because of Rushdie’s personal, and growing, fame, his second life as a celebrity. But that’s a facile interpretation. The difference between Midnight’s Children and a worthy, but now little-remembered work like Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea (Booker winner, 1978) is that the former continues to generate new readers. Each generation reads Rushdie very differently, perhaps; but none can bypass him, can ignore this blaring, audacious and triumphant early novel.

If this remains true in another 20 years, I suppose we’ll have to put our hands together for Rushdie and Saleem Sinai yet again in 2028, presuming they win some future Absolutely The Best of the Bookers. To paraphrase Rushdie, sometimes the legend really does outstrip reality.