Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers (20 page)

Her publishing philosophy, Ms. Krishnan explains, is to produce educational materials that serve to remove prejudice and instill peace and understanding in young children — and to do so across the communal divide that some politicians have been so eager to foment. The series’ subjects will include material designed to enhance intercommunal relationships, the need to understand human differences, and related themes. The writers will be Indians of Hindu, Muslim, and Christian backgrounds, and the books will be designed to serve not only as textbooks but also as workbooks, so that children can learn for themselves, and process through their own minds, the values of peace, tolerance, and coexistence without which “national integration” will remain a hollow slogan.

I do not know either Thachom Poyil Rajeevan or Mini
Krishnan well, and I have no commercial or professional interest in the success of their ventures. But both seem to me to exemplify something of great value to the future of India. They represent the spirit of those who are not content to take the world as it is, who have ideas of how to improve the life they see around them, and who are untiring in their pursuit of these ideas. By choosing the far from lucrative field of publishing (literary publishing in Rajeevan's case, textbook publishing in Krishnan's) they have also sought to devote their creative energies to an activity that is beleaguered everywhere in the world and desperately in need of nurturing in India.

So more power to their pens (or, these days, to their keyboards). May Yeti's handsome volumes of poetry stir thousands of souls and make their idealistic publishers a profit, and may OUP's national integration series (still on the drawing boards) move millions of young minds toward integration and away from hatred. And (to remind well-heeled readers of my earlier appeal) may the
Indian Review of Books
be revived to review them both.

I
CAN SEE THE DOUBLE STANDARD HERE,”
the Indian actress, activist, and parliamentarian Shabana Azmi snapped. “Muslims say they are proud to be Muslim, Christians say they are proud to be Christian, Sikhs say they are proud to be Sikh, and Hindus say they are proud to be… secular.”

All right, Shabana Azmi didn't really say it. Not as Shabana Azmi: she was on stage in New York's New School University auditorium, reading lines I wrote in my novel
Riot,
which had been adapted for the occasion by the American director Michael Johnson-Chase. And she was playing the angry Hindu chauvinist Ram Charan Gupta, a character as far removed from Shabana Azmi's own perceptions of communal realities in India as it is possible to be.

But that was the whole point of the event. Its principal organizers, the Indo-American Arts Council, wanted to create a piece of literary theater in New York that went to the heart of the current communal divide in India. The reading gave voice to the different viewpoints articulated by the
characters in the book (who are caught up in a fictional riot on the same issues that underlay the recent carnage in the Indian state of Gujarat), in order to set the stage for a discussion with the audience of communal issues in India and the recent tragic violence in Gujarat in particular.

So the novel was adapted to a staged reading for four characters, whose contending views of the nature of Indian nationhood would play off each other dramatically. Shabana Azmi agreed to lend her considerable prestige to the event. So did the wonderful thespian and culinary celebrity Madhur Jaffrey and the pugnaciously articulate
Wall Street Journal
editorialist Tunku Varadarajan. I added my own voice to the list, reading the part of a hard-drinking, hard-swearing Sikh police officer whose family had suffered in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi but who still affirmed a vision for himself in building a pluralist India from which no group would feel excluded.

To share the experience with personalities of this caliber was a real privilege. And it was made more so by the antics of a fringe group of Hindu chauvinist agitators, calling themselves (a nice Orwellian touch, this) “Indian-Americans for Truth and Fairness in the Media,” which embarked on a hate campaign against Shabana Azmi and, incidentally, myself in the weeks leading up to the reading. But their attempts to stir up hostility to the event, by a hysterical and somewhat indiscriminate series of e-mails asking people to protest outside the hall (one of which I even received myself!) backfired; it simply prompted a number of secular Indians to organize a counterdemonstration. So while the four of us declaimed to a full house of five hundred, a noisier
scene took place outside the auditorium. The slogans of hate were drowned out by the chants of the anticommunal groups. Soon enough, the frustrated zealots stopped their sloganeering, and turned their backs on the counter-protestors.

It may seem odd that this little drama was enacted thousands of miles from the India with whose urgent realities it was concerned. But the passions of Indian expatriates acutely mirror the divisions in their homeland. The problem is precisely with those who would turn their backs on dialogue, and that is what the four-member cast stressed in the lively discussion with the (mostly Indian) audience that followed the reading. If we could all understand that — as my novel tries to show — the very pluralism of our arguments is a metaphor for the pluralism of India itself, we might again be able to find ways to live together as we have done for hundreds of years. That is why it was important that a Muslim secularist like Shabana Azmi should voice the impassioned rage of Ram Charan Gupta (which she did so well, I found myself remarking, that I was almost convinced myself!). Understanding the point of view of those with whom we profoundly disagree is, of course, the first step toward learning to create a society that manages such disagreement.

The family of a Muslim politician who had been murdered in the Gujarat riots drove for over two hours to New York in order to take part in the discussion after the reading, but arrived late and (unknown to the cast) was not allowed inside by security. So members of the family stood on the street and talked with the demonstrators. “What was
remarkable,” one of the protestors said, “was that they spoke without hatred and anger, only a great deal of sadness and grief.” That is the true measure of Indianness — not the hatred and anger of those who want to overturn the injustices of centuries past, but the grief and sadness of those who mourn the loss of justice and harmony in the present, and fear its absence in the future. It is an Indianness being tenuously kept alive by Indian expatriates in America, who hope that the same battle for tolerance will be fought on the more important stage back home.

I
WAS NOT PRESENT ON DECEMBER
11, 1991, when Salman Rushdie stunned an audience at New York's Columbia University with an unexpected speech about his predicament after nearly three years of hiding. His listeners at Columbia's famous School of Journalism that day had gathered to commemorate the U.S. Bill of Rights; there had been no public announcement of his presence. But as a videotape I have seen of the twenty-minute event reveals, Rushdie's appearance at the podium was electrifying. He emerged onto a dimly lit stage seemingly out of nowhere, as if conjured by one of his own narratorial sleights-of-hand, and not even the sight of the uneasy security guards flanking him inhibited the outbreak of spontaneous applause. The assembled glitterati rose to their feet, as they did again when he finished with the despairing words: “Ladies and gentlemen, the balloon is sinking into the abyss.”

It was an extraordinary performance, and a moving one. But in the outpouring of words that have been printed and
published in the United States about Rushdie, the writer who described himself to his American listeners as “a lonely Indian immigrant” had become an involuntary totem for a cultural crusade — one on which, had it concerned anyone else, he might have found himself on the other side.

For there was much about his own supporters that Rushdie must have found disturbing. That his problems should have given ammunition to the skinheads and yobs and gutter racists of his adopted country to hurl at other immigrant Muslims. That his defenders included many whose right-wing views on most political matters he would have found far from congenial. That the major piece carried by the august
New York Times
to mark the painful third anniversary of the fatwa was one by the American writer Paul Theroux excoriating Iran as a land of “disgusting” and “barbarous” fanatics with “fatuous laws.” Theroux wrote that, on his extensive (and extensively chronicled) travels, he had been confronting every Muslim he met, from taxi drivers to peasants, and “setting them straight” about their “ignorant sentiments.” So here we have Salman Rushdie, a writer who has done so much to reclaim the narratives of his own people from interpretations either imperial or imperious, being defended by a man who goes around picking smug quarrels with Muslims. Theroux urged the public to emulate him: if they did so, “I have no doubt that eventually the message will get through, and he will be free.” Whether such disingenuous advice was dangerous, insulting, or merely fatuous, Rushdie was ill served by much of this advocacy.

The Iranian-style collar of the shirt Rushdie wore at his Columbia appearance symbolized more than one irony. The
foremost British spokesman for the interests and perceptions of Indian Muslims had found himself assailed, persecuted, by his own constituency. And his cause had seen him being appropriated by the West in a clash of cultures that left no room for his own, that of the secular urban subcontinental. Perhaps it was for us, the English-speaking heirs to the same broad tradition, to reclaim Rushdie for ourselves. And certainly for the tribe he has led with such distinction, that of Indian writers in English.

For we were the ones who were deeply and personally diminished by Rushdie's imprisonment — and for all practical purposes, imprisonment is what it was. The irony was all the more intense because, for all of us today who write of Indian experience in the English language, he is the one who lifted the shackles. Not only did he widen our proverbial horizons; he expanded, in his own phrase, the realm of the possible. When I reviewed
Midnight's Children
for the
Singapore Straits Times,
I called it “The Great Indian Novel” (a title I have mischievously reused for less worthy reasons). But the enduring measure of its greatness will always be the number, and sometimes the quality, of those who rushed to follow Salman Rushdie through the wide doors that
Midnight's Children
opened out of the closed compound of “IndoAnglian” writing.

Before the fatwa, I had never met Salman Rushdie. But when I read
Imaginary Homelands
in 1991 on my way back from a holiday in India that he was no longer free to take, I was moved by the mind and the sensibility to which it testified, and by the enormity of the attempts to silence both. I had read many of Rushdie's essays when they first appeared,
including one with which I had vehemently disagreed at the time in print. But to reread them, and to reread them in one binding, was to rediscover Rushdie, as it were, whole; to understand again, only more fully, the values that had shaped him, the rhythms that had quickened his pulse. These were Indian values, the ones most of the readers of my own writings had also been brought up with. And he moved to a rhythm so many of us know intimately — in the words of his favorite lyrics, his
joota
(shoe) may have been Japani but his
dil
(heart) was indubitably Hindustani.

For this reason, Indians who have grown up in the same urban milieu — whatever their views on his specific transgressions — could not afford to distance themselves from Rushdie. The distorted debate over one book could not be allowed to obscure what Rushdie meant to us as a writer of other books. The monstrous injustice to which he has been subjected was an assault on all of us who legitimately take pride in him.

When I argued this case in the
Indian Express
in early 1992 I wrote, with defiant optimism, “It will, of course, be a while before Salman Rushdie can resume something approaching a normal life. But I do believe — and not just because I want to believe — that he will gradually be able to do so. One can see from the joyful affirmations of
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
that he is far from losing faith, and that he does not need strangers to shore his up. But it is vital to tell him that he has touched us, his truest compatriots; that we care, and that we are waiting for him to be restored to all of us, and to the world.”

In my first novel I paid Rushdie tribute as one who has
labeled a generation and revolutionized a literature. There were, I was convinced, even greater achievements ahead of him, and I called upon many more Indians to join me in looking forward with hope and anticipation to the works in which he would go forward to claim them. That these works have come, and that he is now free, free above all to return to his beloved — and no longer merely imagined — home-land, is a triumph not only over those who would have silenced him but over those who sought to shackle his genius to their prejudices.

I
T WAS THE FIRST TIME ANYBODY
had called me from his bathtub. At least, it was the first time anybody had told me he was calling from his bathtub, and it certainly got my attention.