[sacw] sacw dispatch #2 (21 April 00)

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch #2
21 April 2000
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The Praful Bidwai Column
(Appearing on the 24 April 2000)

Talking To Salman Rushdie Why freedom is indivisible

By Praful Bidwai

Salman Rushdie's visit to India, after a long, tense, aching gap of 12
years, was a landmark. The visit signifies a change in our intellectual
climate despite the rise to power of the BJP, itself a force of Hindutva
intolerance. There is today greater acceptance within the intelligentsia of
the importance of the freedom of expression, of which pluralism in thought
and literature is a part. There is also better appreciation of Rushdie's
merit as a writer, who can't be reduced to just two chapters in The Satanic
Verses, only one of his many novels. This proposition might seem to sit
ill with the recent spate of vicious attacks from the Hindu right on
secular films, paintings and books, on which this column has never failed
to comment. But each one these attacks has drawn a strong protest. They
have rarely received institutional endorsement or legitimacy from the
enlightened intelligentsia. There is, if you like, growing polarisation
between the communal parochialism and tub-thumping nationalism of
book-burning philistines, on the one hand, and the book-reading public and
the liberal intelligentsia, on the other, which is far more open today to
liberal and pluralist values. The significance of this constituency should
not be underestimated. A large number of journalists, commentators and
politicians who had called for a ban on the Verses in 1988 now want it
lifted. No less important is the growing secularisation of India's Muslim
community, and the decline in the weight of its "traditional" intellectual
and political leadership which emphasises separateness and plays the
politics of patronage and fear, rather than of secularism. This is related
to the spread of education and secular practices, especially among women,
the rise of a professional modern middle class, and the growing
constituency for liberalism among Muslims. There has been some serious
soul-searching and introspection within the Muslim intelligentsia. This
could not have ruled out strong, spirited, protest demonstrations against
Rushdie. There, indeed, were such protests. Those who felt enraged at what
they perceived as Rushdie's heresy in the Verses had every right to vent
their anger. But that was a relatively minor, marginal, phenomenon. At
another level, Rushdie's return to India marks a change in the world of
Islam, captured above all by what is happening in Iran. Once the site of
the world's most militant, anti-modern, anti-Western movement, led by
Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran is today making a rapid and emancipatory
transition to a modernist, plural, liberal society. The fatwa to kill
Rushdie could not have been issued in isolation from the Iranian Revolution
of 1977-79 and its agenda to establish the Rule of the Pure, in which
apostates could have no place. Under an Anglo-Iranian agreement, the fatwa
stands effectively nullified. Fundamentalist Islam is increasingly
isolated everywhere. For instance, Afghanistan's Taliban regime is
recognised by just three of the world's 180-plus states. Moderate liberal
Islam is in the ascendant. When the BJP-led government granted a visa to
Rushdie last year and publicised it, it was for some dishonourable motives.
This column then commented on the use of the visa as "a political weapon".
But if the BJP thought the move would give it a liberal and tolerant image,
and help it demonise Islam via Rushdie, it was mistaken. Rushdie did not
oblige it. He did not come on a high-profile, controversial, explicitly
"political" visit. His trip was largely personal and tied to a felicitously
literary Commonwealth event. Rushdie is no V.S. Naipaul. And the BJP,
wisely, didn't try to appropriate him. Now that Rushdie has finally
re-established contact, one can only hope we will see some serious,
sustained engagement between him and our intellectual and literary
communities. Rushdie should gradually fade out >from the news pages and
occupy space in the cultural and literary sections of the media-where he
belongs. It is time we viewed Rushdie first and foremost as a highly gifted
writer, as an extraordinary novelist, and not the embodiment of
controversy, nor even as person over whom hangs the sword of death. As
someone who has known Salman Rushdie-not too well, I confess-for almost two
decades, I am struck by the ease with which he today carries the burden of
that threat. He is a mellowed, relaxed, cool, man, at equilibrium with
himself, no longer concerned to make a strong point, although never aloof
or unconcerned. Rushdie remains as intense as ever. And just as passionate
as in the early 1980s when we spoke together at peace conferences in
Britain against the high-tech insanity of "Star Wars" compounding the
epochal stupidity of nuclear weapons. Rushdie drew brilliant parallels
between Reagan's "Evil Empire" (the USSR) and the movie's theme. When I
last met Rushdie in the US eight years ago, he was a famous but hunted man,
tense and anxious, living uncomfortably with his own shadow: there was
Salman, the private individual, and Rushdie, the public person. Today, he
is still hunted. But he is no longer tense. He has resolved the
private-public dichotomy-to the extent that it can be resolved. (I suppose
literary creation is itself therapeutic). Today, there is no confrontation
in Rushdie. He exudes conciliation, reason, the spirit of dialogue. He
relaxes you even as he persuades you. Rushdie is significant to us for
many reasons. He represents in a pioneering way the contemporary interface
between "Western" and "Eastern" (in particular South Asian) realities,
experiences, sensibilities. It is not that there was no such interaction in
the past. Of course, there was-from Derozio and Tagore, to Raja Rao and
R.K. Narayan. Modern literature in Indian languages owes much to this
interaction. The novel, as a literary form, for instance, was derived >from
it. But there is a specific contemporaneity about the genre to which
Rushdie belongs, which represents a new, intense, direct, involvement
between South Asia and the West, through migration, shared experiences and
exploration of global themes. Rushdie is perhaps the best known, and the
most widely acclaimed, of the line of writers which runs from Adil
Jussawalla and Vikram Seth, through Amitava Ghosh and Geeta Hariharan, or
A.K. Ramanujan and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, to Arundhati Roy and Jhumpa
Lahiri. One can add any number of names to this list, from Dom Moraes and
Kiran Desai to Mukul Kesavan and Vikram Chandra, depending on one's taste.
As the author of 11 books, Rushdie has explored a wide range of themes.
This range, as well as his inimitable style, is a tribute to the richness
of the new composite Anglophone culture now evolving in South Asia. It
won't do to pooh-pooh South Asian writing in English as something
derivative, as "Indo-Anglian", "alien", artificial, "inauthentic", and
unworthy of comparison with the no-doubt-remarkable work being done in
other Indian languages. South Asian or Indian writing in English is
authentic, solidly original and creative. English is an Indian or South
Asian language, which we have adopted, adapted, and transformed-just as we
took over and adapted cricket or shirts and trousers. Another remarkable
feature about Rushdie is that he deals with what might be called
world-historical issues. For instance, migration-one of the greatest
processes of our times, which involves hundreds of millions, and has
churned whole cultures inside out. The migrant's experience of loss of
place, language, community and culture is unique, as is her absorption of
the host culture. This is a continuing theme in Midnight's Children and the
Verses. Similarly, Rushdie tries to grapple with myths, as those of Orpheus
and Ulysses, as depictions of the inner recesses of our consciousness-about
life and death, and self and others... That puts him in the universal
category. Then there is Rushdie the iconoclast, who poses for us wrenching
dilemmas about freedom and its limits. To be fair, Rushdie does not see
himself as a heretic. He only brings an intensely skeptical modern
perspective to bear upon faith. The result is devastating for some. But it
is so largely in the imagination. The truth is that few of those who want
The Satanic Verses banned have read it. They go by mere hearsay. At any
rate, the world has had to choose between banning the book and allowing it
to be published, and opened to criticism, often harsh. It has by and large
taken the second option... Even a Muslim majority country like Syria
teaches courses based upon parts of the Verses. There is a lesson in this
for us. Even when free artistic expression hurts sentiments, we must defend
it to the point of permitting what may appear apostasy to some. Of course,
we must also defend their right to protest against blasphemy. In practice,
it is admittedly hard to draw the line between artistic expression and
outright calumny, or between eroticism and pornography. But in any
enlightened and discriminating judgment, we must give primacy to freedom,
and restrict it only in exceptional circumstances and with the utmost
reluctance. Ultimately, freedom is indivisible.-end-

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