Joseph Anton and India

this program is brought to you by Emory University good afternoon welcome i'm deepika Bari in the English department and I'm very pleased to say that this is my colleague in the department professor salman rushdie and it's a pleasure to have him back in our midst for this conversation thank you so much for coming back come on it's getting to be a habit apparently it's a good one and we'd like to continue it oh we are here today to talk about various things we here to talk about in part the film version of Midnight's Children we're here to talk about Salman Rushdie in India and we're also here to talk about Joseph Anton which is his memoir about a period in his life that we should describe is what slightly challenging or right I don't know the technical I think the technical term is one hell of a jam I know you've been on tour you've spoken to us before about Joseph Anton but apparently the reason for the memoir in the occasion for our being here is the fact that there's some trouble with the truth as you've said yourself the trouble with the truth is that people don't like it and that's what happened after Joseph after the Satanic Verses would you tell us a little bit about what the trouble was and how you got yourself in a pickle and a jam oh that jam well of course one of the difficulties about this was then and and and still is that many of the people who declared themselves to be upset did so without needing to read the book in question and and work and there was at the campaigning the book was actually very well organized through mosques and elsewhere and people were circulated like single sheets of paper with kind of the dirty bits on you know and and that's what they were supposed to be offended by and the actual question of looking at those things in context in the context of fictional characters having opinions rather than the author and so on nobody bothered to do that and and for a time I used to get upset about the fact that people were not bothering to read the book you know and and and then it occurred to me that if you look at the history of the big attacks on works of literature it's almost always the case that the people don't read the book you know Pete the people who accused Nabokov of being a pedophile because of Lolita were clearly had not looked at this kind of deeply moral a humane book the people who accused James Joyce of pornography for Ulysses had obviously not read the book because while James Joyce has many qualities arousing sexual feelings it's probably not one of them so I didn't want to disappoint because it's really logbook and if you if you're looking for the dirty bits they're sort of well they are there at the end nothing there right right right right at the very end but you know it struck me then that it seems to be almost normal when there are these kinds of let's say Philistine episodes that people don't feel the need to inform themselves you know so that was a difficulty but and I think it still is I think there's a lot of people have pictures in their mind about what might or might not be in the Satanic Verses and I've had several occasions I've had actually young Muslim men coming up to me admitting that they had been part of the demonstrations against the book and then saying but you know then I read your book and I couldn't see what the fuss was about and they have been the ones making the fuss you know so as I pointed out to them so that's you know that's strange but I think if you look at it of course there were some people who did read the book who didn't like it you know and I think the kind of serious argument insofar as there was one has to do with who has the right to tell a story and and and who has the right to decide in what terms that story can be told and and I mean these stories these so-called grand narratives you know of which religion clearly is one are the stories that we all whether we're religious or not you know these stories are part of our our heritage and you know my view would be that they belong to all of us and all of us have the right to tell the story and all of us have the right to tell the story in any way we choose you know respectfully disrespectfully comically satirically reverentially you know depending on our cast of mind and you could argue that one of the definitions of living in a free society is that we're able to argue about the grand narratives which nation nation nation family religion you know these are the these are the so-called grand narratives that we all live within you know and with and in any open society there's a constant argument about that what is the nation you know what should a family be what should our ethical systems or our belief systems be and over time that argument changes the grand narrative no there was that there was a point where the grand narrative of the United States included slavery as a kind of acceptable thing and clearly that changed you know there was a time when the grand narrative of the United States excluded women from the and and then that changed because there was because society is an is an evolving thing it's a it's a continuing argument so it seems to me what happened with this was that somebody decided to say that in the question of religion it was not open to people to discuss that that's that people in authority would determine the meaning of the grand narrative and the terms in which it could be discussed yeah and if you didn't do and if you didn't toed the line basically they would come after you you know and and this is not by any means only happening to me you know I mean in in the years following the attack on the Satanic Verses they were attacks or a very large number of writers across the Muslim world many of whom were actually killed in the dome at the Nobel laureate Najib mahfooz in Egypt was in his 80s was stabbed in the neck and I mean somehow survived the attack but but still another Egyptian for lost secular philosopher Farraj Fodor was murdered by Islamic radicals one of the leading secular journalists in Turkey Luger mu was murdered by Islamic radicals one of the leading algerian novelists tahajud was murdered by islamic radicals and and in many many cases the the allegations made against these individuals were exactly the same as the allegations made against the Satanic Verses that's to say blasphemy heresy apostasy these sort of medieval crimes being pursued with modern weaponry so so that's I mean that's a short answer the longer answer is 650 pages and you said the fatwa was an extreme case of censorship well there's VS Naipaul said no that was V s Naipaul V s Naipaul said it was an extreme case of literary criticism but I think he was making a joke with with V s Naipaul you can't always tell but no no I think he meant it as a light-hearted way of talking about something serious but of course the you know the Ayatollah Khomeini never saw a copy of the book I mean he was already very unwell at the time that the book came out he was already on his deathbed and seeing almost nobody and certainly not reading 600-page the three novels in English so so the the fatwa was you know was issued basically on what he was told by his close advisers and in fact there is some doubt whether it whether it actually ever happened because you know I mean in in Iran a fatwa is not just a something that somebody idly says it's a it's a legal document and it's supposed to be written out as a legal document and given on the seal and signed and witnessed and so on no no no but there is a physical object you know the the it whereas and as far as I know nobody has ever produced the physical object I mean all that happened was that as I say the Imam was in his room in his bedroom you know dying and his one of the very few people who was able to have access to him was his son Armel Khomeini and an arm at Khomeini went on that day to the television station or the radio station I forget which with a typed piece of paper saying this is the father of the Imam you must read it wasn't signed by Khomeini and but you know basically they did what they were told that's another story so there's a question about you know where is it the fatwa nobody's ever seen it so the consequences Valentine's Day 1989 you receive rather pernicious love letter yeah it's a spoilt Valentine's Day for a really long time because for a long time I mean you you wouldn't think that religious fanatics were so interested in the massacre and the martyrdom of said Valentine but they appeared to they appear to remember the anniversary every year and for a long time it was a moment at which they were kind of renewals of threats and so on and it took a long time for that to fade away so yes I mean I wasn't really enjoying the 14th of February for a long time and then several years later took you a long time to go back to those years to be able to talk about them in memoir that you titled Joseph Anton Joseph Anton who he well he's made up from Conrad and Chekhov basically the first names of Conrad and Chekhov and I mean partly it's just because it sounded like it might be a name you know they're they're they're writers names that you put together which don't sound like they could exist you know I tried out some of those vladimir joyce probably not so but joseph i thought i thought that could be a person in fact it is a person yes but he's got an extra name as well it's anyway i also we also didn't just invent a name we invented a backstory for him he was he was a international publisher and had traveled a great deal you've traveled a great deal which meant he was very often absent from the house he was supposed to be living in and there were people who managed the house for him and so on you know so we had a whole narrative but the reason for the name was from my point of view was that i came to feel that in a very odd way i had fallen into the very different worlds of Conrad and Chekov you know the Chekhov particularly in his plays is a great writer of alienation loneliness you know people wanting to be somewhere that they're not three sisters yearning for Moscow stuck in the middle of nowhere and I thought yeah I know what that feels like you know and and Conrad partly because you know Conrad actually wrote quite a lot about this kind of underworld intrigue you know secret agents spies etc not to mention journeys into the hearts of darkness but but also in particular I had remembered when a conversation I'd had with Edward Sayid professor I would say he'd great Lebanese intellectual he was an old friend of mine who was fighting cancer at the time and and he was also a great Conrad scholar no he's not often known that that he really was one of the great scholars of Conrad and and he said that there was this line in in Conrad's novel the of the narcissus which had become a motto for him well this is the moment at which the you know that the sailor James wait who was on this ship the narcissus and he's sadly dying of TB and is stuck in a in a cabin somewhere and the other members of the crew is slightly resent him for being there and being so sickened and one of the one of them called goes up and talks to him through the window and says you know why do you get on the ship you must have known you were sick you must have known you were sick with Igor the ship why don't you just stay home why do you get on the ship and he says um it's a famous line of Conrad's he says I must live until I die last night and and Edward said that mine I must live until I die became for him like a motto that he he wanted to go on being Edward say that he did with great courage he went on traveling and lecturing and writing and teaching and so on and you know he lived until he died and I thought you know I could take that on from him really so that was the other reason but for the reason for doing it the police well I didn't I had no interest in having a pseudonym the police wanted it for partly because you know we had to have all these houses that were not supposed to be mine and you needed a name to use but also because they wanted to train themselves to not use my name by accident when they were like round the corner in the supermarket you know that they didn't want to say Oh someone asked us to pick up some cereal and then everybody would that the cover would be blown you know so they had to learn a different name and so they said choose a name that we can use and so that was really what motivated it and I understand they and you know if somebody said to me read the book he said what's the difference why do you hate it but it's Joe and not Joseph they're both not your name you know why you know why is one more awful than the other which I mean it's not it's not logical is it but it was actually so that I hated the diminutive and I was very very happy when I could kill him because you've said some times that literature is a place that I come from Joseph Anton clearly comes from literature and you've also said that I who make up literary can invent literary characters for a living and for a living a big invented character myself yeah not just by me either you know one of the things that was happening in those days was that there were all kinds of versions of me kind of floating around I mean some of them hostile some of them supportive I mean some of them let's say demonizing some of them idealizing you know and and I felt about all these you know I remember there's this great short story that Boris wrote called Boris and I in which in which he he makes a distinction between the public person and the private person you know and a number of writers that I know have had that feeling the Graham Greene actually had a double who used to pretend to be him and travel around the world renting hotel rooms and so on and at behaving like Graham Greene and Greene used to tried track him down never quite met him but he said he said he got within 24 hours of him once that he's arrived at a hotel where the other Graham Greene had checked out that that morning so he wrote very amusing ly about this this other Graham Greene good to grass used to say that he sometimes had the feeling that there were two people there was a person called Gunther who all his friends knew what his family knew his children knew and was one kind of person and then there was this person called grass who was this public figure and controversial and argumentative and lots of people disliked and he said sometimes I feel I could send him out to do the work and I could stay home with my family and friends you know so I think that sense of splitting between a public self or the private self you know is a it is not unusual I think especially in these very kind of celebrity haunted days I think it's it's probably quite normal for a lot of people to whom it happens but happened to me in this weird way because I felt that well I clearly didn't feel like the demonized version of me but I sort of also didn't feel like the idealized version of me you know there was this attempt to invent me as a kind of Statue of Liberty you know and I thought I don't feel like the Statue of Liberty you know yeah and for a start wrong gender but but I just thought I'm you know I'm not either of these images of myself you know and one of the things that I wanted to try and do in the book is to sort of say that between these two imaginary cells you know there's a there's an actual self there's sort of human being doing his best sometimes getting it wrong sometimes maybe not you know but that was it was very odd to be as it were written by other people you know to be to be invented narrated by other people yes very dead yes dead as a doornail I killed him with great pleasure slowly and with pain no no dead gone stake through the heart yeah no no like vampire disappears into a should you know and and the reason is that I never wanted to be you know I remember say to me in those days why don't you go and live in Australia and you know have a pseudonym and and and get on with your life and I thought you know that's worse than death I don't want like somebody else's life I want my life you know and what would I do never write again never see my children never see my friends what is that you know that's that that's so that was the point was to get back to be able to be myself in an ordinary way and and I think one of the things that most interested me about the end of the story when I was able to do that is how easy it was to resume everyday life like when all this apparatus of protection and security and so on disappeared you would think and it went on for 12 years you would think that after 12 years of that it would take a period of adjustment you know back to normal life but I mean it just was like that just I think it made me feel was that human beings desire for the ordinary desire for the everyday is so profound that when you're often it Mac you just grab it yes please don't have that yeah I started enjoying waiting on mine just started waiting at the checkout counter at the supermarket what fun this is you know all these things have you know people don't like I was really enjoying did I say that yeah well that's because I was pretending I wasn't going to movies which in fact I was no I see here's one of the things I've this is no there's a there's a serious point one of the things that happened that I learned in all the some time now quite an expert on this this security world and and one of the things that's interesting to me is that there's a distinction to be made between what is called threat and what's called risk let's say so threat is the general level of danger that a given person is believed to be in that's the threat against that person risk is whether is how dangerous is it is to do a particular thing you know so there can be a high level of threat but a very low level of risk attached to a given so yes there's a high level of threat but if there's a movie theater and you go in five minutes after it gets dark and you leave five minutes before that before the lights come up the level of risk attached to that is very small you know because nobody knows you're going to do it anyway you know so so so it's actually possible once you learn these distinctions to begin to reconstruct parts of life and that's one of the things I used to do yes the police used to take me to the movies they didn't always like the movies that yeah yeah my favorite miniatures red-white what's invited me to the Opera to a performance of Rigoletto and there I was in a box you know and therefore relatively sheltered and there's a couple of police officers that he'd fronted me who had literally had never been to the Opera before ever and so and so when we came out I said to the board you think you know what do you think of the show and one of them said said yeah he said bad night for the hunchback which came to be came to seem like a wonderful alternative title for Rigoletto Rigoletto or a bad night for the Hunchback I mean apart from fulfilling our curiosity but what happened is how much humor there is well I often said you know my friends and I we'd me talked about this we would say about a lot of things that happen we say that you know if it weren't for the fact that this isn't funny at all it would be quite funny and I mean there's a gay talking about the police there was this incident when they took my then quite I mean suffer as now as you know he's 33 but he was only 10 or 11 at this time and they took us to a you know a funfair kind of weekend shooting with Galera shooting arcades and so on and he saw what are these shooting galleries and there was a particular soft toys stuffed toy or the top shelf which meant you had to be a really good shot that he decided he said what that won't dad and I thought you know I know these things the rifle sights are all bent and so on it's kind of impossible to do this so I was explaining this to him and then one of the police officers with us who in the book I give the name of fat jack fat Jack came up and he said what's he what sir let's say we see that one of they said oh just leave it with me I think where this will put down his power and he was given one of these rifles and he went there's the pork product in the carny there was gay never seen anybody shoot like that and I did knock them all down and then he said I think we like that one so I mean so it became quite affectionate part of it you know the relationship with a lot of these police officers I mean who would have thought that I would end up having all these friends in the secret police this was not part of what I thought would happen in my life I do sometime know I'd when actually when the book came out in England we had a launch event and I invited quite a lot of them and quite a lot of them came yeah drank a lot too I found Joseph Anton impossible to put down and I have any number of friends who have said the same thing to me it's it's it's learned it's textured it's funny when I wasn't expecting this to be any kind of a laughing matter and it's about one of the things I think that you never have turned your back on which is love hmm your your devotion to the idea of love and I don't just mean personal relationships and there's that too but just the idea of love the idea of loving relationships love children books literature community well it's one of the things you know when you become the target of an act of hatred you have to find the opposite in yourself and in and around you as a way of dealing with it you know and and I think you know for instance the the group of my close friends just closed ranks around me in the most extraordinary way and helped me now there's no question that the reason I'm here in kind of reasonably okay shape and not not in an asylum somewhere has to do with the fact that there was this love of my friends really and I mean it's in the book but there's a moment where one of them said to me at the height of the trouble you know the really dangerous time he said you know what what your friends are going to do is we're going to form an iron circle around you and you're going to be able to live inside it and and that's what they did that's what they did and what is extraordinary this is remember the world of books this is the leakiest gossip es worst at keeping secrets back star being malicious the most like that of all little worlds that there is and yet for 12 years nobody ever leaked anything you know for 12 years there wasn't a single secret that came out not a single person was indiscreet nobody you know and I mean there was quite a long time appeared there where you know things got more settled in I did have a place to live and gradually my friends you know the police began to trust my friends because they saw that these people were actually very reliable at serious people and so gradually people were allowed to know where I was staying and would come and visit me and so on just making life a bit more normal and easy nobody ever leaked and and and it was as if people thought you know this is really serious don't screw up you know and and nobody didn't that's if you talk about love there's a demonstration of it you know an incredible collective act of solidarity talk about a different kind of love and this devil want to turn to lifelong love and I'm talking about India Oh or Bombay I mean this is a you call it the City my city of cities the city that still makes my heart leap every time I look out the window of an airplane or a train still makes you Hartley's um there are difficult question that because you know is it is the place in India that I feel most deeply connected to yes that's true but I think this is and it's not just a problem of Bombay or Mumbai it's that something has really changed in India you know I think I think it's it's really not the place that it used to be it's become a much more problematic place particularly in this area of culture you know the the attacks on cultural artifacts and their makers in India have now become so frequent it's like almost every week somebody or other is targeted by this or that group and and there's no defense against it because the the authorities don't stand up for those people when they are attacked you'd quite often blame them for having in some way being responsible for the attack against them no no look what's happening you look at India now you've got four major states with kind of with ultra authoritarian regimes you've got mamta Banerjee in West Bengal you Virgina Lita and Tamilnadu you have Narendra Modi and Gujarat and you have the Shiv Sena and Bombay you have you have four of the biggest most powerful states in India being run by ultra authoritarian regimes and and and it's quite possible I mean I die myself I'm not entirely sure that Narendra Modi will be the BJP candidate for Prime Minister I'm not entirely sure that that will happen he may be seen as I mean I think he'll be a very big figure in the election campaign no question whether he's actually will be the prime ministerial candidate that they put up I'm not sure about that I've heard a lot of people in India saying that they think he maybe in the end won't be you know because of his very divisive you know qualities but nevertheless he's a giant figure now at the BJP and you know that the risk of that authoritarianism that's already present at the state level moving to the center you know is is is very real and so on top of that you have as I say this this targeting of culture you know I mean in the I was just there for two weeks in India and in in the or ten days in the ten days or so that I was there they were attacks on four different kinds of work you know there's Kamal Hasan's movie in in Tamilnadu that was that was attacked there was you know Ashish nandi's speech at the Jaipur festival which which led to you know criminal charges against him and etc it just seemed like every day somebody or some whether it was a scholar or a movie or a book you know somebody was being attacked and in all those cases the authorities were not on the side of free speech they were not they were on the other side in some ways if you put that up against the emergency but you don't know well when I was there I actually used this term which people I said it was a cultural emergency I said that this was a this was a cultural equivalent in our time of what happened in the mid 70s you know and and one of the things that's depressing about it is that people really don't seem to care there's an enormous degree of the the public at large is is pretty apathetic about this nobody seems to have got the idea that when the freedoms of artists and intellectuals are compromised so are the freedoms of the people who see those things and listen to those you know see those films read those books are taught by those professors you know whatever it's not just the freedom of writers to write it's also the freedom of readers to read it's it's the freedom of audiences to watch films it's the freedom of scholars of students to listen to scholars all these freedoms are being compromised in India now and and really nobody seems to care except a small group of people like me who are involved in the you know in in that world as practitioners but other than that not really and that really is shocking to me people do when around the time there Joseph Anton Kim came out you'd written a letter to independent booksellers saying yeah you know long before politicians government stepped up to the plate was ordinary people who were working to protect freedom of speech well you feel that you know that it is really in the hands of ordinary people because it certainly will not happen because politicians decide to do something that's not gonna happen I mean I think for instance in the horrifying case of the gang rape in Delhi it was very much the fact that ordinary people expressed their outrage you know and you know visibly expressed their outrage by assembling in substantial numbers that has propelled what will probably be quite serious changes in legislation and so on you know to expedite the trials and also to offer you know to make this sentencing much harsher and you know to create disincentives let's say but there's a lot that remains to be done you know for instance even now again the police attitude in India is really horrifying you know that that I saw a statement by very senior policemen in Delhi saying that if young people was seen gathering in what we call isolated places that they would be charged with an offence they would be charged with if you like inciting the rape against them know so you know young people want to be somewhere quiet to you know hold hands or embrace or whatever they become potentially criminalized and that's that's what the police say so so instead of saying this terrible thing has happened we need to protect young people instead of that there's an attempt to criminalize young people for being young you know and and the answer to that has to come from public outrage it's the only place it'll come from and I hope it I hope it will you know I mean I felt very shocking that India not a lot you're not allowed to say the girl's name you know I mean her father gave an interview to an English newspaper in which he said he wanted her name to be known and he actually would like it if the legislation that's being passed would bear her name you know as a way of honoring her her name is Jo teasing Pandey but in India you can't say this you can't say it it's forbidden information and and not to say her name is a way of forgetting her you know it's a way of it's a way of marginalizing and minimizing you know if somebody has a name you remit you can remember them if somebody is nameless they very rapidly become forgotten you know so so that I think is you know I mean I can say that if I were to just say that if I had been in India and said her name's I would be possibly charged with an offense and and that's this is what's happening in India and it's I think important I speak as somebody who deeply loves India you know it's the country where I was born and raised you know I've written about it all my life I speak the languages I you know I love it but I do not love what's happening there and it's I think really important to say so that might be the kind of love we need I've got a lot of other questions for you but I'm acutely aware that we've only got about 15 minutes to go and I'm going to ask the audience has questions doesn't time fly when you're having fun so if you're interested in asking Professor Rushdie a question now would be the time to queue up those mics why that's going very good excuse me sir could you go to the microphone thank you this is very naive I haven't yet but what is the aftermath of mmm the demise of Joseph Anton I mean oh well this this this is the aftermath public reaction or repercussions okay well you know I one of the things that I feel happy about is that now that the temperature is down you know now that that kind of period of danger and scandal and furo is that now that that's over people are finally able to read The Satanic Verses as a novel you know instead of reading it as some kind of hot potato trying to find out where the dirty bits are you know and and it's finally you know it's now get it's getting studied a lot and read a lot in universities and people have you know some people love it some people don't like it some people quite like it some people think it's boring some people think it's funny I mean in other words that's the normal life of a book you know and and it's finally allowed to have that life you know it's it's finally allowed just to find its way as a book amongst other books you know and I think well I mean I think that you know call me self-centered but I think that was worth fighting for Adriana castle from Mexico and I have a question for you about now that you're in the world stage and people listen to you what obligation do you think you have in changing the narrative what's the region impact you think you have and what's the ultimate message you would like to set in the narrative or change about our current narrative nobody listens to me they just pretend they just know they just you know you think I've changed their minds well I mean what we've been talking about here is an example of that you know there the one of the I think one of the great dangers of having some kind of a public voice is that you're expected to have an opinion about everything you know and I don't want to be that person I don't want to be a kind of renter quote you know every time something happens what's your view you know I often don't have a view you know or I don't feel that my view is any more informed than anyone else's you know I mean I read the newspapers too and I have an opinion you know Oscar Pistorius I have a point of view you know but it's no point expressing it because it's not informed you know so I'm very careful in trying to not sound off about stuff that I feel I don't know anything about you know but but if I do know something about it then I do see above sometimes sound off you know but I actually feel there's a danger for a creative artist in being sucked too much into that into that world if people begin to see you more as somebody who express his opinions than down is somebody who makes work it can actually shift the way in which they look at the work you make you know they begin to look at it to see what's political or argumentative in it and quite often when you're writing a novel or a story that it has nothing to do with your intention you know so so so I have quite a lot I've been much more than say 10 years ago try to back away from that you know and try and kind of reclaim the space of the imagination you know and and try and which was the reason I'm the reason I became a writer wasn't to have political opinions you know it was to make things up and and I'm trying to get back to just focusing on that more in Midnight's Children um selim is motivated to write because he feels his body disintegrating he feels his time coming to an end yeah do you share a similar motivation to write you know a sense of urgency if not then I chase the very first question it's a very good question and the answer is yes I think one of the things that you know actually at the time that I wrote Midnight's Children I really didn't know what that meant you know I was I was a kid you know and I started writing Midnight's Children I was 27 years old what do you know about death when you're 27 years old nothing you know death is a fantasy that happens to other people I mean there's a famous story of Woody Allen being asked by a reporter if he liked the idea that he would always live on in his work and he said no I would prefer to live on in my apartment and you know when you're 27 you can have the illusion that that's what you're going to do when you're 65 you don't have that illusion you know you do you do have a sense of especially if you're a slow writer you know I mean it's Midnight's Children took me five years to write The Satanic Verses took me five years to write know the ground beneath your feet took me five years to write and some of the others took four or three or something you know so I'm slow which which means that the number of books that is lies ahead of me is smaller than the number of books that lie behind you know and you become very very aware of that and what it does is something I think which is beneficial it makes you first of all it makes you feel very strongly don't waste your time you know if time is finite don't mess around and and and the second thing is if the number of books you're going to write is now finite you better damn well make them the books you really want to write know and and so it it focuses your attention in a way that I think is a good thing you spoke about being deified by some people and then being demonized by other people if people actually read your work how would that reveal you well well one of the things I think I hope it would reveal is that is that the books are quite funny you know is one of the things that people don't say about the Satanic Verses is that in many places it's it's comic you know and I think one of the worst if you like kind of shadows that was cast over my work by the fatwa and so on is it because the attack on my work was completely humorless and dark and kind of arcane and incomprehensible to many people people thought that my work must be like that - that my work must be humorless and dark and arcane and incomprehensible to many people so somehow the characteristics of the attack on my work were assumed to be the characteristics of my work as well no and I think if you actually read the books I hope you discover that that's not the case you know my friend Martin Amos had wonderful phrase he said that what you hope as a writer what you hope to do as a writer is to leave behind a shelf of books you know you want you have to be able to say you know from here to here it's me you know if your Dickens is from here to here if your seamen all you need more room than there is on the table but if your Joyce Carol Oates you need most of the whole but that's what you hope that you just need and then you know that one of the interesting things that happens to writers who are no longer alive is that the chronology of their work ceases to matter you know I mean when you're alive people are judged by your most recent book or whatever you know if you look at the writers of the past you don't care you know you don't you don't think about David Copperfield and Little Dorrit you don't care what order they come in you know and and so somehow these books become released from chronology you know and they just exist as themselves and and that's you know if you're my kind of writer you have writing books that you hope are built to last you know and and you hope that generations that succeed you will still find them interesting you know and I mean I would be around to see it that I hope it happens as someone with a very personal connection to India but also having a very unique perspective as an outsider and more importantly with the opinion that the public seeks what is your opinion about the reaction to the gang rape in India because rapes have happened before and they have been happening since and it seems to me personally that this particular rape incident is almost a hypocritical reaction by the youth of India because it happened to somebody who wasn't a kid in a village wasn't three girls in a village in Maharashtra who got killed and raped yesterday and were killed in a well it's somebody like me like them who went to Life of Pi and came back so oh my god it could happen to us what is your opinion about I wouldn't call it hypocritical I mean I would you know it I think it's not on I mean it's human nature that if you see something happening to somebody like you it strikes you you know I mean there's you're quite right that there have been this this question of gang rapes has been a very big problem for a very long time and not just I mean one of the things that I thought was very wrong in the reaction was the politicians of the right who said that this had that this was a thing that happened as they said it happened in India it didn't happen in Parratt you know the idea that that this was some kind of a problem of the Anglophone urban middle class and was not a problem of the villagers you know not not Anglophone not middle class which is a complete lie I mean it's a profound and important line that the as you rightly say these things have been happening in Indian villages every day every day and very often happening inside families you know it's not it's not um in the case of what happened in Delhi this is a rape by strangers you know but but very often what's happening in villages is in sight is intra-family rape rape rape my father's my uncle's my grandparents my my brothers etc and completely going unpunished or in some cases village panchayats declaring pathetic sums of compensation 50 rupees 500 rupees you know to compensate for this life-changing event and so one of the things that I really got annoyed about was this attempt by the conservative politicians in India to somehow to marginalize this event by saying it only happened to the urban middle class you know which it quite clearly does not I mean I think there is a problem in Delhi I think you know that it seems to be happening more in Delhi than elsewhere but it's happening everywhere else too in fact since the the the famous rape the do teasing found a rape there is another gang rape in in the northwest of India which was hardly reported at all you know yeah hardly reported at all and so it's clearly a societal problem you know I mean yes it's true that this one case seemed to capture the imagination or the attention in a way that the others didn't and you could say that you know that that's wrong but I mean I'm just glad that something brought this subject to the fore you know and what you need now is yes you need the legislation yes you need the case to be tried with all of that you know but what you really need is a dialogue about of the whole society you need a dialogue about gender attitudes you know and and I don't see that happening I don't see that happening because I don't see anybody any public figure having the courage to lead such a dialogue you know and to lead it in a kind of progressive way instead you have a lot of people saying don't let your daughters go out why do you let your daughter go out late at nights why do they wear blue jeans and miniskirts what do they expect you know that the ancient language of criminalizing women for the attacks on them by men and and that really needs to change and unfortunately and it's one of the things I saying about feeling sad about what's happening in India I don't see that dialog beginning you know yes it's there that is true it's there in the urban middle class it's there in the newspapers in the English language the newspapers and magazines that are published in English in India I don't see it as a the public there's no political party that's taking it up you know where is Rahul Gandhi you know he's so talking about wanting to change the country he's supposed to be a member of this young generation in which this attack took place why isn't it his cause why isn't it the cause of any other of the younger generation of Indian politicians you know that's very worrying you know but it's a and I'm there are being people in India who have said and I think it's right that rape is not just an Indian problem you know it's a global problem these things happen in this country too maybe not in quite the same way but there are plenty of rapes you know in this country I think what happened in the case of Jo teasing found is that the the the level of brutality was so extraordinary that it horrified people I mean I know somebody who knew one of the doctors who treated her when she was taken to hospital in Delhi and he said I really hope she doesn't survive because the the the the scale of the damage to her body is so great that she will never be able to really live a real life I mean there were metal rods thrust up inside her you know it was it was just stunningly barbaric what happened to her and then you ask yourself here's this bus in Delhi circling going round and round and round for hours why did no police officer stop that bus oh they said the windows were too high for us to see in you know I mean it's sweet it's a shocking shocking thing that happened and it's right that people were angry about it but you are right that the anger is should be much larger this is really similar to what she was saying but what would how would you explain the contradiction in India about on one hand gender inequality and then on the other hand that India has had a female Prime Minister which is something that the u.s. hasn't seen that it's very technologically and economically developing how do you explain that contradiction you know India's contradictory some of it has to do with dynastic ism you know but not all of it I mean you know whatever you think of bump-ty Banerjee and generally they don't come from political dynasties you know they very much rose to power by their own efforts I don't know there is I mean you you know I I have no general theory of this I mean people have people have tried to say that it corresponds to the myth of Mother India you know that the idea of parrot Martha you can you can you can you can imagine the state as being embodied in a woman you know because because of this kind of mythology you know maybe maybe they just tougher and nastier than the men you know I mean I think that sometimes the case that was certainly the case with Margaret Thatcher I mean it was probably the case with Golda Meir I think you wouldn't want to mess with her I think and I think it's pretty much the case with mom that Mataji Anjana Rita you wouldn't want to mess with them at all you know if possible you back out of the room quickly if they answer I mean they're you know they're terrifying so I think you know maybe it's just that maybe it's just that there is a rising force of women in politics but it's not you know it's not that many you know there are these these there are these individual figures who have become very powerful but if you look at how many women are there in the looks about you know how many women are there in regional governments it's it's not that many you know so so I think it's more like a freak the fever thank you have two last questions go ahead you talked a lot about free speech both in Joseph Anton and right now and since the Satanic Verses were written there has been a large movement for free speech especially by students younger people but there's also been a movement for political correctness yeah how do you think those two balanced out would you say that now there's much more free speech that than there was when you wrote the book or do you think there's been kind of an anti free speech movement that's cancelled it out well I mean you're right that they've been both movements you know and I'm not very good at political correctness you know it's not not one of my talents and I I worry about it because sometimes it means that people for what appear to be virtuous reasons will espouse the cause of censorship you know that you you and this is out it's a it's a difficult question to answer briefly because different even in the Western societies different Western countries have different ideas about this you know so that for example in England there's a thing called the Race Relations Act which makes it criminal to make racist remarks to make sort of racist hate speech and I lived in England a long time and I thought you know what's wrong with that fine the United States because of the enormous power of the First Amendment has a different attitude which will actually permit racist speech hate speech you know believing if you like that freedom is indivisible if you want to protect the freedom of people that you agree with you have to protect the freedom of people you don't agree with you know and as I say so there's an argument if you if you put a British jurist up against an American First Amendment lawyer they would have very radically different positions and both positions would be serious positions you know it's not that one is right the others wrong you know I mean I've come to believe that the first amendment position is a more valuable position because it seems to me that reprehensible ideas unpleasant ideas racist ideas do not disappear if you forbid their expression no they they they're still there and in sometimes they're actually their force is increased by adding the power of taboo you know that what forbidden opinion is sometimes more powerful than opinion which is not forbidden you know and and you sweep this stuff under the carpet it can actually become bigger under the carpet that it would out in the light of day and and so I've come to the field to feel while I understand the position of people who would ban hate speech and so on no I've come to feel that it's a better out than in I bet I'd rather know who thinks that and be able to argue against them and point to them for what they are rather than have them doing it and kind of hole in the corner way you know underground which I think potentially can be more dangerous to a society you know but no I mean my view is I'm not I mean your questions about PC and I'm the wrong person to ask about that so you've you've repeatedly expressed your happiness that Josaphat on his dead and buried but was there period of time during your exile that you had genuine concerns about this going on till the end of your life you never managed him to break through that cycle and how did you reconcile that um well yeah I mean I did you know and there was a long time when I didn't see what either didn't seem that it was gonna end or it didn't seem there was gonna end well no I mean I there's some somebody showed me a clip of an old news interview that I did back in those days and and somebody asked me if I would ever write about it you know and and I said well I did I don't know how to write about it because I don't know the last chapter and and for a long time it seemed that the last chapter might not be very pleasant one you know and in which case it might not have been I who would have had to write the book and then there was the other problem it's the one you say which is just the kind of unending Ness you know just might just go on all the time you know and and yeah I mean it was that was some of the hardest stuff but I think what happened is that I just decided to try and make sure that wasn't gonna happen I mean I just tried to fight back against it as hard I could and once I began with the help of many other people to to have this got a political campaign against against the fatwa and we began to be able to meet with government leaders and try and you know gather support so on I mean that felt better it feels better when you're fighting back then when you're sitting passively in a corner hoping that you know the bomb doesn't drop on you so that helps I mean just being active in the matter you know helped and and then eventually I mean I think one of the great things about it's also one of the worst things about the age we live in is that you know it's a didi you know subject changes very quickly you know that no matter how heated the subject is there's a moment when the heat goes out of it you know and people have other fish to fry and and I think that's part of the reason why in the end it was solved you know just I think everybody concerned including the Iranians you know ended up having other fish to fry and just wanted to get this out of the way you felt like ancient history and that made a political settlement possible you know just because there's a change in the mood you know the it certainly was I was helped a great deal by the election of sympathetic governments both in the United States and England that's to say the Clinton administration here and and the Blair government in England who both became much more proactive in this matter then then was the case when there was that the first was the senior Bush administration and the Thatcher and then major governments in in England they were not nearly so active in the matter so yeah I mean in the end there was a political settlement you know but took 12 years and I remember when it began everybody thought it would take like 12 days you know nobody thought it was going to go on for a long time it seemed so outrageous you know that the head of one country should order the murder of the citizens of another country who was living in his own country and had committed no crime in that country you know how can this happen it's impossible you know it's going to get fixed leave it to the diplomats leave it to the politicians there's going to be conversations it'll be fixed that that's what everybody thought and took 12 years my question is actually about innovation you know that's a term that you use almost apply to every field these days so I would like to know your views on is there a discussion that happens you know especially in the field of writing imagination and storytelling at large and really what does innovation mean you know and do you see that happening in the future but general discussion around it well yeah I mean I think there are writers for whom it's not a big subject you know there are writers who are very content with the form as it exists you know and are able to use it to great effect but I think for me the interesting work both in terms of what I want to read and what I want to write it's stuff which does try to push boundaries and that it seems to me is the real risk of a work of art you know you go to the edge and push and if you look at the history of literature the greatest writers have been the ones who tried to do that they tried in fact one of the big recurring themes of The Satanic Verses a sentence that recurs throughout the novel is how does new how does newness enter the world you know and it doesn't always enter the world just because somebody has an idea that nobody else has had so in much more characteristically certainly in the world of literature a newness is to do with a combination of things it's to do with finding things in the past adding something and the combination of those things makes a third thing that is new and yeah I think that's a very for me as a writer that it's very important to try and find a way you know the word novel means new and and you want to be able to do new things because otherwise you know there are already enough books you know if if all of us who write were to stop writing today there would be too many books and and none of us would ever read in a lifetime all the great books that already exist to be read so so if you want to add to that mountain you know maybe you should have something new to say otherwise it's been said five thousand times before and probably better than you could so I'm interested very interested in the question of innovation in literature yeah it's not compulsory you know there's some of the most beautiful writing that exists is also very conventional but so in the end it is temperamental there are writers who are as I say content with the conventions and forms as they exist and there are others who are not content you know and but it's that latter school that tends to move it forward you know and many of the great literary movements that we conceive the last hundred years starting with the modernist movement going through you know surrealism post-modernism magic realism you know what was it America called fabulous 'm you know many of these movements have been at the writers at the front of them have been the very best writers around and and there they be driven to find a new way of saying something because to put it simply the world changes you know the world changes the world changes now at a rate that it's never changed before and maybe the old ways are not the ways that fit anymore so you have to find a way of telling stories that can respond to the changes in the world no thank you thank you so much so much I can see I can't wait for a never knew ever new novel from Salman Rushdie so will be lined up for that and next week there's panel discussion with Professor Rushdie on Midnight's Children 2.0 which is the film version of the novel that has won the Booker the Booker of Booker's and continues to be read and celebrated we hope you'll see you there and deeper will be here Deepa Beth I'll be here and I should also say because she won't that Deepika is little bit involved in this film because we had to translate the dialogue into a number of Indian languages and and here's our translator the preceding program is copyrighted by Emory University

Channel: Emory University

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Id: _O35z41p2zk

Length: 68min 23sec (4103 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2013