The Enchantress of Florence | Salman Rushdie | Talks at Google

hi everyone thanks for coming today we're pleased to welcome Salman Rushdie is part of the author's at Google program mr. Rushdie is here to talk about his latest novel The Enchantress of Florence he is the author of nine previous novels which have won many many awards including Midnight's Children which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981 notably in June 2007 mr. Rushdie was awarded a knighthood for his services to literature there are any number of superlatives we could go on and on about but we it's safe to say that mr. Rushdie is without question one of the most well-known and important novelists of our time and we're very very happy to have him visit Google today and while Google searching him earlier we noticed that tomorrow is actually his birthday so we have a very very large crowd today so we'll have time as always for questions towards the second half of the talk as a quick reminder we have a number of mics floating around so please feel free to use those so that people on YouTube can be sure to hear your questions and also in the remote offices and with that let's please give a warm welcome to Salman Rushdie to Google today hello thank you all for showing up that's a lot of you huh this is this is the latest stop on what I'm beginning to call my Google marathon you know it's my plan now to visit every single Google facility in the world and I was at a Google seminar in London and then I went to Google in New York and now I'm here and then I'm going to one in in Cambridge at the end of the tour and yeah and somebody was just telling me I have to go to Switzerland and try out the slides and the you know I always thought it looked like a playground but it's I guess it's kept becoming even more of a playground with slides and fireman's poles and things so yes this is this is me doing my Google tour I mean I I just would like to say that of course like everyone else these days I don't know exactly what we did before Google but it clearly wasn't worth doing and it's this time around I've really because I've been writing this book which has involved in an enormous amount of research I mean more than I've ever done before really and and it really has been invaluable to have to have this ability to use to use the to search and find the material on online instead of having to dig it out of of libraries I mean one example of this is that the part of this novel takes place in the court of the Emperor Akbar in India in the 16th century and I mean it's a it's a period which is very well recorded including by contemporaries so there are very big contemporary histories of the reign of acqua in Persian and so normally in the old world one would have had to go to some specialist library where there were translations of these texts and sit in some dusty book stock and for months and months and copy things out into notebooks and instead I was able to go to the extraordinary website called I've acknowledged actually in the at the end of the book which is called Persian texts in translation where they have full text translations of many of the classics of the literature of that period and so I was actually able to have my manuscript or my you know my file for the novel on one side of the screen and the original the original source material on the other side of the screen and I mean it saved me I don't know about six months of work maybe you know and and so this time around I mean it's the first time I've really come to appreciate that the depth that's now available electronically even on the on the Internet and I mean like everyone else I you know use Google 200 times a day so I don't know what one would do is I say without it but I guess it's a what I was talking to your colleagues in New York I said that it's it's sort of strange to come to a group so fixated on the future and talk to them about the past and to persuade them that there might be something interesting to discover in four hundred years ago rather than four seconds ago or four seconds in the future but it's son it was for me and a real voyage of discovery because one of the things I discovered is that actually when we look at the past what we see in many ways is ourselves and well that may be an aspect of the uncertainty principle you know that the person doing the looking sees what they need to find but even that is useful because it's a way of seeing ourselves in a in a very clear mirror of another age another time but very similar behavior patterns so if you want to understand something about tyranny you know that the sixteenth century as a fifteen sixteenth centuries have a lot to teach you and if you and if you wanted to learn something about I don't know what war torture not to mention genius and innovation the sixteenth century has a lot to tell you I mean this was also remember in age both in India and in Europe of colossal innovation of great artistic and cultural change and brilliance and it was also in many other ways it one of the ways in which it mirrors our time is that there is an enormous shift in people's perception of the universe in which they lived and that really had to do with the fact that if you were living in Western Europe at this time you Ju had just become aware of this new thing bubbling up on the western horizon which was which was the so-called new world and I you can only imagine what explosions it must have made in people's heads to realize that they didn't actually know they hadn't known the shape of the planet they lived on that the world was twice the size they thought it was and that in over there to the West there was this gigantic area whose whose existence they had not been aware of you know because 50 years before Columbus the view of the world that obtained was that if you sailed west from Europe across what was then called the ocean sea you would first your ship would first be eaten by gigantic monsters gigantic ship eating monsters lurking in the deep would simply eat you and if you could avoid the ship eating monsters which you couldn't but if you did which you wouldn't you you would reach a place where the ocean literally turned to mud and your ship would they'd be stuck in the mud and if you could get through the mud which you couldn't but if you did you're prize for getting past the ship eating monsters and the mud would be to fall off the end of the world and that was essentially what people thought the planet was like this had changed by the time Columbus made his voyage I mean Columbus and his sailors did not believe they were in danger of falling off the end of the world I mean they had a pretty good understanding that the world was probably round and indeed the reason why they made the trip was because was to find a new route to India essentially because the Portuguese and so on were dominating the normal way and they wanted to find another another route and actually Columbus lived and died believing that that's what he'd done Columbus never understood that he had found a new world Columbus believed he had reached the Indies and and was never disabused of that view and this is where it seems to me one needs to do a little bit to rehabilitate the pretty poor contemporary reputation of Amerigo Vespucci because although it's true that Vespucci was to some extent a fantasized I mean it's certainly the case that on did the first voyage where he claimed to have been the pilot of the voyage he almost certainly was not the pilot had occupied a much he probably was on the boat but he probably had a much lonelier lonely a position and there are people who think that the second voyage was completely fabricated however the thing that that Vespucci understood which Columbus did not is that this was not India that this was a whole new place and and if he wasn't the first person to come up with the phrase the phrase the new world mundos Novus he certainly was one of the first people who worked very hard to popularize the idea that this was a new world and for that reason I think well certainly his some of his contemporaries did think that that that that made him merit having his name on it and actually the first place where the word appears is is actually a moment in the novel when which relates to this where a monk in southern France called Martin Vail similar in a monastery in southern France was a remarkable cartographer created what is now called the vault similar map which is probably the best map ever made of the world certainly the best map ever made of the world until that point because it shows pretty accurately not only the east coast of the Americas but also the west coast of the Americas so it's it's the one in which it becomes clear that these are continents and not the beginning of some previously existing countenance and a top on the top of the map looking down on creation are the figures of Ptolemy and Amerigo Vespucci and and this is the map in which the word America is first used and interestingly it's not placed on on North America it appears on the sort of northwest quadrant of southern America of South America so kind of Brazil going over to Peru and there it is America and and in the accompanying book they'll say well it talks about that surely a man who has made such a great discovery merits having his name on a part of it now later on he changed his mind because all the suspicions about Amerigo Vespucci began to surface and and well similar decided that he didn't any longer believe Amerigo Vespucci stories and so he took his the in later editions of the map he took his name off it America disappears from the map and his replaced simply by the phrase mundos Novus the new world but it was too late the genie was out of the bottle I guess once you've named something America it's not that easy to unnamed it uh-huh but that's how it happened and I've just said tell the story because you know since we now live in a time of extraordinary transformation and change it just I encourage you to imagine what it must have felt like to live in that time when literally everything you thought you knew about the world you lived in turned out not to be true that the world was actually another world the planet you lived in was actually twice the size you thought it was that there were people in it whose existence who'd never even intuited that there were continents you'd whose existence you were unaware of and that you suddenly had to come to terms with this not just as a piece of geography but if you like is a kind of existential shift and so this is a time not only of enormous artistic musical architectural brilliance and advance but also a time of this remarkable existential shift and along with that there are great philosophical shifts going on for in since the high Renaissance is famously the period at which the idea of the individual self is first given value the idea of the sovereign individual self of us as being masters of our own destiny and creators of our own fate and responsible for ourselves that's to say a significant shift in the balance between the individual and the community you know and in in India as in Europe until this period the the value of the self had been seen primarily as a part of a community and at this point the Philosopher's of the Renaissance Pico della Mirandola and others began to articulate the idea of the sovereignty of the individual and out of that came what is now thought of as as humanism the humanist philosophy developed from that and so much in fact the way in which we now see and understand ourselves of the way in which we understand ourselves was just coming into being at that time and even in India a place not which it was very different from Renaissance Europe in many ways but even there in the court of the Emperor Akbar you had a kind of questioning of Orthodoxy also going on in Akbar although he was clearly a believing Muslim and I and unlike some of his contemporaries who thought that he had that his level of skepticism was so great that he had lost his religion I don't think in fact he ever did but he was a kind of old-fashioned org well he was actually rather modern for that time he was a pantheist who believed essentially all religions were the same religion and and and all ways of worshipping God were ways of worshipping the same entity and he actually tried to invent a religion he invented at what he called the DNA Allah he which means the religion of all the gods which was this kind of pantheist religion and he tried to make it the courts religion and the official religion of the Empire and it just goes to show how strong these things are because in spite of his enormous power he couldn't make it catch on it didn't really ever happen and certainly it didn't outlive him but in in their in his reign and in himself and in the in the many brilliant people he gathered around him there was this very interesting an extremely modern if you like ongoing argument about the nature of man's relation to God and what it was and what it should be in what it might be understood in future in ways that were very skeptical and radical and in that court that was permitted so this is this is a time in many ways not unlike our own a time of quite radical questioning of Orthodoxy and and the results of that are of course some of the most glorious things that we have in our heritage re the great the great painting of India in the sixteenth century is probably the pinnacle of the art of the end of the Classical period in India the great paintings of the Renaissance many people would say are the pinnacle of European art and the same is true of architecture and the other arts and so I wanted to enter this world and and explore it partly because I'm a historian by by background and I have always been fascinated by by this period and by these these two very different worlds which coexisted in time but not really in any other way they didn't really know each other it never for a long time he never really occurred to me that they would be in the same book but it then occurred to me that really if we're talking about a kind of east-west engagement and of course these days we are talking about that and and and and that engagement is very complicated and in in some ways it's very creative and fertile and beneficial as one can see by the number of Indian faces in this room for example last time I goes here in Mountain View I did a reading at the bookstore down the road and and the audience was so I mean like 99% Indian and I remember thinking we could do this in Hindi there'd be like three people here who wouldn't understand and the hell with them but we didn't but you know there's there's an example if you like of the kind of beneficial and creative consequences of this sort of engagement and then and and clearly there's there are other there are other parts of the world which are doesn't have to rehearse too much with which that engagement is seen to be much more disturbing and indeed alarming and frightening and it then struck me that this period the period about in which this novel is set from the late 15th century to the middle of the sixteenth century it's really the period at which the east and the west and certainly India and Europe first engaged with each other it was really the moment at which they first got to know each other at all you know Vasco da Gama arrived in South India to begin the spice trade at the end of the 15th century the Portuguese established their small colony in Goa at about the same sort of times and and in the in the reign of Akbar which is the whole set set the whole second half of the sixteenth century there were a certain number of travelers arriving in his court from from Western Europe but still the the level of knowledge the mutual level of knowledge was very very slight and as far as I could find out there wasn't a single instance that I could find of a journey in the opposite direction of somebody from moving from India across the world into the into Western Europe and the moment I realized that it had never happened I guess my novelistic perversity was tickled and I thought oh well now it can happen now you know we could make it happen so I decided that I would try and invent the journey that never happened the journey from the east into the West and then I thought well if it was a woman it would be even less likely that it happened in that period and so I should probably try and find a way of make a woman make the journey because if I could make it work that's more interesting so that was really the starting point for it and I actually abandoned two or three different narrative with storylines because I the more I learned about the world of that period the harder it was to make them work you know you have to imagine a world if you leave aside China and Japan which was so isolated at that time that they had almost no contact with anywhere else you have to imagine the world going from east to west in in in in these power blocks you have the the Mughal Empire in India you move west from that into what was then called Horace on leuctra now be called Afghanistan Uzbekistan Kyrgyzstan which then as now was a region of more or less barbarian warlords if you move west from that you had the beginnings of Shia Persia you had the beginnings of the Safavid Empire in Persia west from that you had again the early period of the Ottoman Empire because the Ottomans conquered Constantinople in 1453 and so the second half the 15th century onwards became the Ottoman Empire then west of the Ottomans you had Europe so that's the world and then in the in the water you have pirates basically the water you have Barbary Corsairs and and and Portuguese pirates that actually Ottoman Navy was not no slouch it at that either so anybody trying to negotiate that that journey has to go through some extremely difficult areas and again not that not that different then than it is now because I remember I mean I graduated from college in 1968 in a different universe and friend of mine and I got into a mini and drove from London to India a thing that I mean imagine trying to do it now but in those days you could drive out of Western Europe you could drive through you drive across Turkey you could go through Iran you could cross the Khyber Pass you could go through through Afghanistan you'd come into Pakistan and you could just drive across the world and you know in Afghanistan if you had the money the king of Afghanistan actually didn't have any money and so he ran his palace like a hotel and you could go stay in the palace and he'd come and have tea with you also of course Afghanistan that at that period was famous for the production of hashish legalized hashish which came in government government quality stamped blocks with the seals were gold silver and bronze depending on the quality of the of the hashish and this is where the been famous phrase Afghan gold came from it was basically high quality legal hashish from Afghanistan this is not something that's readily available in Afghanistan now and now it tends to be opium in heroin but back then it was a friendlier thing which of course we never used as President Clinton and I have this in common that we did not inhale anyway so this was you know that open world turned into the much more closed world we now have and again the closures of then are not unlike the closures that obtained now and so I had to would really work out how somebody would make that journey and it was very difficult to make it plausible but along the way I just discovered things that were more enjoyable than anything I could possibly have made up and many of the kind of most eccentric things in this novel about this woman making her way across the world which you will think are you know richly indulging in magic realism are actually in the historical record weed for example that the Ottomans at the Topkapi Palace in Kansai in Istanbul had a lot of gardeners and the gardeners were obliged to multitask and doubled up as executioner's so if you were going to be executed in the automotive world it would be the gardener's who would kill you if you were a woman the gardener's would sew you up in a sack when you were still alive the sack weighted down with stones and throw you into the boss for us and if you were a man a group of gardeners would converge upon you and perform an act of ritual strangulation so this is how you died he was strangled by the gardener there was one exception to this because if you were a nobleman and you were sentenced to death you were given a chance which is that at the moment that the sentence of death was pronounced you had to you had to run and and if you could run to a particular gate of the Topkapi complex which was called the fish house gate it was about half a mile from the courtroom if you could get there before you were caught by the head gardener who was also the chief executioner then you were allowed to live then your sentence would be commuted and you were allowed to go into exile but it was a trick because the the head gardener was always chosen for his running speed so actually you had no chance at all you just thought you had won anyway this stuff you see I mean I wouldn't have dared to make up you know a tribe of lethal gardeners and yet there they are and similarly there's a scene there's a part of the novel where the so called enchantress that had occurred the princess who is the title character has been captured by one of these rows back warlords and he's then defeated by the Shah of Persia who who she decides she likes and so they she goes off with him but he the shaft pusher kills obviously the other the warlord chops off his body sends bits of the body all over the Empire to prove that he's dead turns his skull sets his skull in gold and jewels it makes it a wine goblet and takes it home to drink out of I mean this makes Damien Hirst look like kindergarten anyway then he has a better idea he thinks instead of keeping this goblet he thinks I can send it to the Ottoman Sultan as a present so he did you know with a little note saying this is what I just did to my enemy on my eastern frontier and since you're on my western frontier I thought you might like to have a look and the result of this was the Ottomans took umbrage and said two gigantic army to fight him and defeated him so you know don't send people skulls as presents if you could possibly avoid it because it could backfire now again this stuff is completely not made of then there was another moment when I was writing about the moment when she has to get go through the the Ottoman world and I was reading up about it and realized that this was exactly the period at which the Ottomans had been fighting a war against Dracula the more I mean actual Dracula you know Vlad tepish Vlad the Impaler Vlad Dracul of the dragon and I just thought I'd gone to heaven but I really know when I realized I could have Dracula at my normal this wasn't supposed to be about Dracula but okay and of course there are certain things about Dracula which one needs to correct because of the falsifications of a previous book I mean Dracula was quite clearly not a vampire as there's absolutely no evidence of vampirism but he was so savage and bloodthirsty that a little vampirism would have come as like relief that was there's a there's a one there's one contemporary record that survives of the Ottoman war against Dracula which was actually written a diary written by a Serbian Janissary of a soldier in the in the Ottoman army and he describes it in such breathtaking detail that you can't sort of can't improve on it you know and there's a moment when it's a chilling moment when they think they've cornered him they think they've got him pinned down in this small town called Targoviste in eastern Romania and they think okay we go get him now so they send this very big army to to get him and when they get to this small town they discover that all around the town he has placed 20,000 sharpened stakes with a human being impaled on each one not because they'd done anything wrong just to scare the advancing Ottoman army and he describes it that the Janissary the soldier describes this so vividly that you could really understand why it in fact worked but you know when when the Ottoman army saw this sight they were so scared that they wouldn't attack they thought you know that guy's bad you're not big over there you know they retreated again if I had made up 20,000 people impaled on stakes you know just to scare off at other army nobody would have believed me but it's in the history books and so that became for me an extra pleasure of this book which was just to to discover that no matter how outrageous my invention it would look mild compared to the facts you know and that course gave me great Liberty to make up anything I wanted really anyway that's that's what the books about it's about this this this bringing together of the two worlds and at another time and just to finish before we before we talk about whatever you'd like it's clear to me as somebody who studied history and as the author of this book that one of the things one can take away from it is that actually human beings don't change that much that you know we're that if we imagine we live in a savage and brutal time I mean we don't understand savage and brutal until we check out what these guys were doing four hundred years ago we are exactly the same as our ancestors and so when we look at the past we can see something about ourselves which maybe it's actually clearer and easier to see when we look at ourselves through the through the veil of the passage of time because we see it more objectively perhaps and that's I don't like to write books which have messages exactly because I as a reader I don't I don't like to be told what to think I feel that that's my business and and but what I think is is valuable to offer to readers is is a world which makes them think you know which makes them to think about about violence and peace and good and evil and what what it what is latent within us that that our times can bring out and and and what if anything we can do about it and but these are questions I that I think really are for readers of the book to think about quietly and to come up with their own answers it's not for me to to lecture you I can just provide you with the arena in which the questions exist and and so that's what I hope I've done anyway that's that's that's what I would have to say no we can talk about anything you'd like to talk about it I think there's a standing mic over there and there's a roving mic over there and another one over there so if you would like to ask me anything now is your chance or else I'll just leave so much much like I guess the sixteenth century even today there's more knowledge about the West in India than about India in the West so when you're writing books based in India you put a lot of aberrant moves last I'll most lately and I found that there were a lot of very subtle cultural and day-to-day things that probably if you weren't Indian you would totally it would totally elude you so how so clearly since you're a writer not just for Indians but widely-read all around how do you expect people who are not Indians to appreciate these certain things about India and Indian culture I sort of don't care I mean I mean that's the honest truth I mean put it like this I read books from all sorts of parts of the world you know and and it's quite clear to me that if I read I mean let's say Gabrielle Garcia Marquez I've heard a lot from from Latin American readers something very similar to what you've just said that that that if you don't know that world intimately there's all kinds of allusions and references that you don't get you know and my view is I don't care because I'm getting enough you know what I'm getting from reading from reading 100/0 solitude is plenty you know and yes it may be that there are some local echoes that that I miss but you know it's not enough to make to impair my reading of the work I mean I you know there's a point in my life when I read a lot of Russian literature and I mean I don't know anything about Russia you know in fact the only thing I know about Russia is what I get from Russian literature and again I know that if you read some of these the classics if you read Bulgakov for example the Master and Margarita it's full of references to contemporary events in Moscow at the time you know and even certain cafes and certain well-known figures you know who were being satirized in lampooned and if you don't have that knowledge I guess you missed that but it it doesn't matter because what you get is what you need to have to enjoy the book you know and I think in the end that is the writers duty but that's what the writer has to care about you have to give people what they need to enjoy the book you know and and then as long as they have that because I mean you can't expect your readers to do research you know it's not it's not an exam you know nobody has to to do a course in order to read a book or at least if they don't they're not going to so so you have to inside the pages of the book there has to be everything required to have a satisfying reading experience then beyond that of course you know if you come from Bombay you're gonna know things about Bombay that people who don't come from Bombay don't know you know and that's just fine that's a little extra just for you you know but in general as I say I'm not bothered if people miss every single illusion as long as they enjoy what they're getting yes hi I was wondering what it was like living with the fatwa against you and did it affect your writing I mean do you are you still afraid now to this day well it wasn't nice no and no that's shall I say more no it was a it was a dreadful time and amongst the many dreadful aspects of it was the creation of false Me's that was sort of pushed out there into the media by a tribe but it was very difficult for me to supplant them with the real me if you like so I had this sense of all kinds of images of myself you know walking around the world with my name on them who I didn't recognize as myself that that was very disorienting and unpleasant and I think to an extent the legacy of that is still there I mean I still think there are there are people who don't know anything about my work you know who think they know something about me because of the the kind of phantom selves you know that were being propagated in that period and I also think it's had a kind of negative effect on what people think of my work because I mean I'm now talking about non readers of my work because I think if you read the book then you make up your own mind whether you like it or not that's easy but I think because the attack on my work was of a very particular kind that state was theological and it was was kind of arcane and it was medievalist and it certainly was not funny people somehow transposed those qualities to what they imagined my work must be like so you know because the attack was theological I must be a religious writer you know because the attack was so humorless I must be humorless and and so on and so there was this and I think the combined effect of all that was to make some many perhaps readers think I don't think those books are for me you know because they are too alien from me and I don't think I like the sound of that kind of book and that is something that I think I've you know had to overcome and I'm not even sure that I've tirely overcome it yet but I think all I could do is is go on so I mean that's a little bit of the answer pass thank you hi my name is anneka and that i just want to say this is a humongous honor for me I'm from Albania and there's a lot of people that don't understand Indian culture in Albania but they still love you so they're being said to questions about still Satanic Verses why I was just curious about what your inspiration was and second after I read it well throughout the book I thought I figured out who was the good guy who was the bad guy and then in the end I figured out I had no clue and I was just wondering creating those ambiguous kind of characters is purposeful so yeah of course I mean the whole point was to blur to blur that distinction between between right and the good guy and the bad guy I said you actually don't know which one is which and even at the end of the novel you can read it either way really I mean you can you can and maybe both of them is both of them are true both readings I mean you know that was absolutely you know part of the plan to have you know devilish angels and angelic demons I'm sounding like Dan Brown now you know which which I guess would be good for my bank balance but never bad for me in every other way so yeah anyway I did it first so yeah that that um that was very deliberate and and you know think the thing that I it's necessary to stress is that the inspiration for the Satanic Verses was not religion I mean it's not primarily a religious novel you know it's this is a novel about migrants coming from the Indian subcontinent to London and trying to make a life in London in in the in the 1980s in the Qatar Thatcherite period a much more hostile environment actually than there is now and and after all I did that too you know so in that sense it was a way of using my own experience of migration to write a novel about migration and what it does to people and one of the things that I thought was the consequence of an act of an active migration whether individual or mass you know either way is that much of what we have and I was talking about the self earlier you know much of what we consider to be the root of the self has to do with location you know that's to say that the the the self is rooted in place and in custom USA the place you live in the the the culture in which you live the language in which you that you speak all these things contribute to your selfhood you know your sense of self and and when you make it a large act of migration such as the one in the novel you actually lose all those roots you know suddenly you're suddenly you're in a place you don't know amongst people who don't understand you speaking a language which is not your language and perhaps with a belief system which is not yours you know so so really everything that was solid you know to use the great phrase of karma melts into air you know and and you have to reconstruct your sense of herself and that's a very radical act of self questioning and community questioning you know what do you keep what you discard what do you impart from imbibed from the community to which you've come how do you reconstruct a sense of selfhood in this new world you know and and that's the thing which you see every immigrant community everywhere the you know having to go through that period and it's it's actually a process which sometimes lasts several generations so and there can be great intergenerational conflict during during that process and so on so I thought well if that's what I think if I think that migration makes necessary this act of radical questioning then the novel itself should be that active radical questioning and that the novel should bring into question all these elements of the self you know whether it's whether its culture or belief or whatever it might be that the novel should give those things the third degree if you like you know just in order to see how things stand up once that's done that was where it started and so that the the the religion part of it which essentially you know is is 240 page chapters in a novel of six hundred and fifty pages was a part of that it was a part of that process of questioning and I guess there were people who didn't want it questioned you know and that's where the trouble came from but the purpose I say wasn't even primarily religious and then one of the reasons why the the section that section of the novel is constructed as a dream sequence is that you know that you know the religion isn't called Islam the Prophet isn't called Muhammad the city isn't called Makkah and etc it was to say that I'm not specifically just talking about one religion in one place I'm talking about the phenomenon of belief and what it does to human beings and what happens when that's questioned and and when that belief structure begins to fall apart what are the consequences of that because the character in the novel who has these dreams just lost his religion and that and that the novel tries to explore what are the consequences that on his life and actually the consequences he loses his mind I mean that's what happens so anyway it was it was it was psychological and if you like social the the motivation for the normal and the theological stuff was like 17th on the list and it's it's one of the things that's disappointing about what happened to the novel is that the reading of it was so skewed round by those events so that people began to see it as you know a novel about Islam which it's just well I mean it's sort of it's I'm not saying it isn't but it only is in a very secondary way and the primary you know most of the novel is about Indian people living in London that's what most of its about and you could almost not know that you know if you just read what was written about it and that's I mean that's it's changing now because one of the good things about being at this end of the story is that you know finally the book is being studied and read as a book you know not as part of some religious studies course or some political course or whatever but in in in a literature course or just by somebody picking it up in a bookstore and so it's finally beginning to have the ordinary life of a book you know where and some people like it some people don't like it you know some people like it a lot some people don't like it a bit that's all of that is fine that's what happens to books you know and for a very long time this book was denied that ordinary life no and and now twenty years later it finally seems as if it could have it and and I'm you know I'm happy about that so thanks for a great talk and giving us all a break from invents in the future which we'll get back to in a few minutes but my question is relates to your new book and I'm I'm fascinated why there wasn't a return journey from India to the west why were all these Europeans going east and fighting through all these empires why why wasn't return journey was it there was it the bad weather in Europe or did they try and fail I don't think anybody was that interested you know that's the thing that that Indian the Indian response to visitor was always very welcoming but slightly bemused about why they'd bothered to show up um and and actually in the in the novel there are these two kinds of character two kinds of character in the book there's one one kind of character which who feels defined by a journey you know in a way they discover themselves by a journey that they make my physical journey that they make travelers you know who really come to understand themselves in their world as a consequence of a journey and then there's another group of characters who feel the opposite way who think you know why would you leave home you know why would you leave the place where where which you love and where everybody knows you and where your life makes sense and why would you leave that and go somewhere where nobody knows who the hell you are nobody cares and your life is frankly absurd why would you do a dumb thing like that you know and and and I think that actually for a long time that was an underlying Indian attitude to people showing up you know okay well come you know come come in here speaking your weird language and let us feed you and talk to you but why did you leave home exactly because you know as far as we're concerned it's quite nice here at home why do we need to go anywhere and it's also there's another thing which is just the way in which the history of the world worked out that the the the India itself was filled up if you like it became a receptacle of a very large number of global migrations you know so that the the Indian the original Indian population the Dravidian ethnically Dravidian population was gradually forced towards the south first of all by the big Aryan migration which which splits as you know in one part of it came down into India the other part of it went west towards Europe and then these successive waves of invaders and colonizers you know came in so I guess the place was just filling up and there was enough there was enough tourism to do without leaving home because people kept showing up from all over the place you know no but I mean I do think there was something in there's something in the Nate of the of India at that time the people really didn't seem to be curious about foreign travel they were interested in trade I mean that's one of the exceptions that actually the in the Mahal court there was some very intrepid female entrepreneurs I mean for example the main queen of the Emperor Akbar who is called Mariam Zamani who is the mother of the Emperor Jahangir who followed she was greatly quite a substantial businesswoman I mean she had a fleet of merchant ships which used to trade as far as the Red Sea and in her own name you know I mean not not on behalf of her husband but and so there was some of that going on but I guess the level of knowledge of Europe was so slight that it didn't work on people's imaginations you know at this time the arrival of the Portuguese colony was the first real trace of regular contact and there's you know an Akbar it's it's it's it happens in the novel and it actually did happen Akbar who was very interested in theological and philosophical dispute sent a message to the Portuguese in Goa asking them to send him their two best arguers to come and argue with his guys and these two Jesuit priests showed up at the Mughal Court and stayed for 12 years I mean that's how much arguing there was to do and there's some evidence that because of the Jesuits that Akbar became aware of of some of Catholic Europe that he became aware that there was some contact it seems with with Philip of Spain who was after all the person who famously who launched the Armada against England there doesn't seem to have been any contact I mean in the novel there's a kind of comic section where he gets a letter from Elizabeth the first of England and that's just because I felt sad that they had not been any contact between these two great rulers who ruled at exactly the same time you know that's a Akbar came to the throne in India about two years before Elizabeth came to the throne in England and and lived about a year and a half longer but essentially the whole second half of the sixteenth century is Elizabeth in England and Akbar in India and yet as far as we know they never knew about each other and so I thought I should introduce them you know and maybe they could date you know I mean the Virgin Queen but in fest if there's this good-looking Indian guy you know maybe we could change that which is the novel idea that Akbar also forms so I mean this is made-up but I think it's really very largely to do with the fact that the the knowledge level was so low that it didn't interest people that much because there wasn't enough there to feed their imagination if you like you know you go 100 years later it's different you know it says this is the very very beginning and and I wanted to talk about the very beginning because when if you go if I had written about the period where it was commonplace for such interchange to take place it would have been much less interesting to write about you know because it would have been banal you know to write about when it didn't happen that was the interesting thing I am kind of wondering about the two last books that I read shame and the ground beneath her feet and a little bit less Midnight's Children I was wondering how come the love relationships and the love affairs had such a fatalistic nature to them hedonistic yeah they were fatalistic yeah sorry my accent sorry that's that's that's really different yeah I was just hoping you could shed some light on their relationship the girl had the love the ground beneath her feet and also the kind of destructive relationships on shame gosh well those books are written very long time apart so it's interesting that you connect them in that way I mean shame was written was published in 1983 and the ground beneath her feet I think came out in 1999 so there there was very little in common about the thinking between a I think the thing about the ground beneath our feet is that I wanted to write a love story about two people who essentially don't know how to be in love and who who constantly mess it up you know who are deeply in love with each other but all they seem to know how to do is to destroy it and I thought that that would be that would be interesting to write about you know a kind of a kind of self-destructive love and also I had this idea that that maybe when we talk about love we make a sort of mistake which is that we add to the idea of love all kinds of comfortable ideas about durability and fidelity and companionship and so on as if that were all part of or is it that all comes with the phenomenon of falling in love and it occurred to me that maybe that's a mistake maybe actually love is something much harsher less durable less companionable less faithful than we think it is we just want it to be like that you know but supposing it wasn't like that supposing you had two people who were in love who found it impossible to be faithful to each other who kept breaking up and who and who were not kind to each other but yet were undeniably passionately engaged with each other what would such a relationship be like you know and so the book came out of that I'm not sure it's fatalistic exactly I mean except that it begins at the end when the girl dies so in that sense it's more fatal than fatalistic um um and I don't know I mean I really I'm slightly stumped by your question because the thing in shame is that everybody gets on badly with everyone else you know I mean there aren't any good relationships in it I think there's no question that that is the darkest novel I ever wrote I mean the most I mean I think it is a comic novel but it's it's very very very black comedy and a part of that has to do with what I thought about what was happening in Pakistan at the time let's say this is the time of when Zilpha car Ali Bhutto Ben Aziz father was Prime Minister and then he was deposed by and then executed by his successor The Dictator as the al Haq and it was an extraordinary given you know this this event because there's something rather extraordinary about the man you choose as your Protege which is Zia was chosen by butcher as his protege who then becomes your executioner I felt that it was almost almost a Shakespearean subject know the kind of Othello Iago subject and yet it was quite clear to me that the people involved were not in some way they were not great enough to be tragic heroes and and I had this image of what would happen if you took a Shakespearean tragedy and dressed everybody up in circus clown outfits kept the lines exactly the same you know just said people out on stage with funny noses at big shoes and silly hats to speak the lines of tragedy though it would become clearly ridiculous but ridiculous in a very unsettling way and I thought that that's maybe that's what I felt about what was happening in Pakistan that this was high tragedy being performed by clowns and so so I thought let me write a book like that that everybody in the book is essentially a clown but what they're acting out is a high tragedy and the comedy and the tension of the book lies in that you know and then in the middle of that there's this figure of this girl who turns into a monster which was just the extra the extra thing I mean I'm the reason I'm not saying it more clearly than this is because the other truthful answer to your question is I don't remember because when I wrote that book I was 35 years old now well tomorrow I'm 61 and so it's a bit of a long time ago there's a very funny story like this I should tell you it's not about me but my great friend the English playwright Harold Pinter it's a story about him they did a revival of his play no man's land in London a few years ago in which Harold played the original production had had Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud playing the lead parts and Harold took one of the parts at another very good English actor called Paul Eddington who if you've ever seen that series Yes Minister he was the minister he played the other part and there's a moment and the play was directed by a friend of mine who told me the following story that there was one moment in rehearsals when Paul Eddington was a little puzzled by a scene and he so he turned to Harold he said Harold I'd I kind of don't get it this mitt and could you just tell me what I'm doing here and how the scene should go and Harold looked at the text and handed it back to him and said the author's intentions are not clear from the text later on I was I was having dinner with Harold I said I said Harold did you really do that you know because actually wouldn't it have been easier just to answer the question and he said you know I wrote that book twenty-foot that played 25 years ago how the hell do I know so that's my answer to use only it's more than 25 years ago yeah where it's a great honor to be asking you a question one thing which puzzled me about your books is your protagonists never well protagonists main character so to say never take a deliberate choice between a particular confession and in fact there is no presence of a pantheon or major religious establishment for instance I've been looking for presents of Judaism in your books and there's none why is that well I mean I'm not very interested in religion really I mean I I'm not a religious person and I guess I mean there are many religious characters in my books they just may not be the protagonists you say I mean there are plenty of characters in my books who are religious and many of them sympathetically portrayed as religious you know even in the Satanic Verses there are many sympathetically portrayed religious characters but I myself I'm not religious and I mean I don't know there are Jewish characters in my books actually I would I could I could no I'll point them out to you I'll send you a list uh-huh well actually the Moors last sigh for instance is a novel in which the whole central family is created out of an intermarriage between an Indian Jewish family and an Indian Catholic family so the the protagonist of that novel is certainly half Jewish but all the earlier generations were extensively written about in the novel are Jewish so that's that's one in Shalimar the clown the one of the major characters the character of the American ambassador max is he's a Jew you know and he's actually in in his earlier life in the resistance to Nazi occupation he's a you know very active in that and so yeah I got Jews I remember once being asked my rather crass English television producer who I was sitting next to it's you know at a friend's wedding Jewish friend's wedding right and I'm sitting next to him and he said to me so what do you think about Jews and I said what you mean all of them and he said yeah you know in general what do you think about Jews and I said well you know in general I'm forum and you know thinking but not saying but in your case I could make an exception well he was a wedding yeah if I may anyway yeah well oh could you stand up I think well it's me my turn oh yeah they're sorry yes your blood in the back I don't mean to cut anybody else off yeah okay yeah thank you very much for coming I have a quick comment in a question one of the I comment on a question that came was four or five questions ago asking you about you know how how your work can be accessible to people from who aren't from India well I speak as somebody who is not from India and having read your work some of your work and have read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's and not being from Colombia and Faulkner and not being from the American South and all these other things I want to say that I I have the same reaction that you described people in the Renaissance having to a new world I think in large respect you know it's it's it's sort of the opening of my eyes to something that I haven't seen before it makes me more interested thank you but that was my comment my question is what you talked about and you're talking I'm very much looking forward to reading your book but I haven't yet was the things that happened at the beginning of the Renaissance and one of the things that I always associate with the beginning of the Renaissance in addition to things like the default Byzantine Empire and things like that is also an explosion in technology and science and especially in media the invention of movable mechanical type and to some extent I think there's there's there's a lot of there's a lot of resonance for us here and now today because of the explosion of the internet but I'd very much like to see how you feel that came through it maybe in your book or or if you know yeah are there lessons for us or anything no that's great but you're both the comment and the question are really interesting because I think the thing that to answer your comment for like the thing that I've always felt that literature is able to do is to give you to give us access to worlds which are not our world and make us feel that they are you know I mean I know nothing about provincial France of Madame Bovary you know but if I read Madame Bovary I feel that I'm there you know I I really don't know anything about Jane Austen's world of of young women husband hunting in the north of England you know but but if I read her books that I feel I have an entry to that world you know so I think whether it's your your own culture or another I do think books always open the door to worlds you know and you're right about the American South I mean I remember reading Eudora Welty for the first time and and feeling I had access to a whole kind of experience that otherwise I would not have understood at all you know and your second question your question is also very interesting because of course the great revolution as you say is the book you know the revolution of this period is the book and people are able to read and it shapes their opinions because it could be disseminated or mass you know instead of the set of books being produced in copies of one or two or three you know and kept in the libraries of great man books were suddenly available for people to read and this had an enormous effect on shaping thought because suddenly thought itself was available to everyone and not just thought but also of course this was the birth of satire because this is the beginning of pamphleteering you know so which is kind of the blog of the 16th century the fact that anybody because I like the blog because almost always anonymous you know that the people could take on a name and sound off about whatever they felt like signing off about it printed a little four sheet thing and throw it around the city you know and then people would respond to it and and it became it's not unlike the present day phenomenon people's reputations could be made and destroyed in this way and often were so yeah it's a that you're right it's it's not that's what I'm saying it's it's another time of very radical change you know the and that for me was one of the attractions in a way of entering it to see how human beings react to a time of radical change you know what what does it do to us as people so there's that how's that alright I thank you well I'm glad that anyway I'm glad you like the stuff oh yeah that's the plan we have to fit in maybe one more quick question alright one more quick question yeah I um I just have finished a biography on the American President Teddy Roosevelt and one of the things that you know is interesting in that story was there was a American businessman who was kidnapped by these outlaw warlord in Morocco and so Teddy Roosevelt told the Moroccan King you have to get this businessman back and he said there's nothing I can do I don't really control the interior so he sent a battleship full of Marines to the coast of Morocco and the King quickly was able to get the American businessman out of captivity and back to the US so I'm kind of curious you know that was a hundred years ago what was the reaction of governments today in terms of how quickly did they come to your aid you know when you were when you were in trouble you know where people have governments yeah governments well well first of all it's is really extraordinary to hear about a successful American military intervention that's a short list you know your great Italian war heroes that's you remember that game about short books yeah yeah sorry what was your question guv it's coming to my help well it wasn't quick I mean that's to say the British government to their enormous credit immediately understood the the issues involved and and you know the issue involved essentially with state-sponsored terrorism and it was clearly not acceptable to anybody that British citizen living in Britain who had committed no crime in his own country should be executed by paid assassins sent over from another country and it was clear that Margaret Thatcher who was no fan of mine really understood that that was not acceptable and so they did an enormous amount in the way of making sure that it didn't happen I mean that's say that the security aspects of it you know they certainly understood right away and and successive British governments both conservative and Labour understood that and and were extremely good at making sure that that aspect of it was you know was taken care of so that their so that they're you know I'm happy to say that in my own case there wasn't really any time when anybody got close to carrying out the threat of course other people were not so lucky I mean there were there were attacks elsewhere you know the worst one was in Japan where the the Japanese translator of the Satanic Verses was actually murdered and then there was an attack on the Italian translator who fortunately survived and and then my Norwegian publisher was shot shot three times in the back and again survived largely because he was a former Olympic skiing skier for the Norwegian team and so he was a very fit man you know I think if he'd been anything less than as fit as he was he would not have survived anyway so you know it was a it was an appalling time but but what happened a lot was it behind the security issue there was not very much political will to actually face the problem and resolve it it's it's a I mean it's as if they felt okay we know we're gonna keep him alive but we're not going to go out of our way to distort the whole foreign policy of the country in order to try and sort this thing out and it was very interesting to me that during the earlier years when during the years of the Conservative government in England and the senior Bush presidency in this country there was very little political will to actually resolve the matter and the thing that changed it was essentially three things was the arrival in Iran of the Hitomi government which wanted better relationships to the west and as a result was open to pressure if you like and that happened at the same time as the around the same time as the Clinton administration here and the election of the Blair government in England and suddenly I found that there was the political will which they hadn't been before and from the moment of the Blair government taking office to the end of the problem was over only about a year you know and and it really was because of the the first foreign secretary of the Blair government Robin Cook sadly died prophet of an accident while climbing in the mountains after this but he was he had actually had known him over the years and we'd been involved in some political issues where we did on the same side like constitutional reform and things like that and and he was absolutely determined that he was going to get rid of this and and I think his determination and and the the you know the Prime Minister's willingness to support that and the support of the Clinton administration meant that it became very rapidly clear to the Iranians that they if they wanted those better relationships with the West they were going to have to do something about this and immediately they did I mean they're very pragmatic sometimes the ayatollahs you know if you showed them that it's not in their self-interest to act in a certain way they will they will very often begin to act in another way and I think basically that's what happened that these three changes of government created the shift which solved the problem and that was whatever it was nine and a half years ago so since then you know things got better so there we are anyway thank you very much

Channel: Talks at Google

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Keywords: talks at google, ted talks, inspirational talks, educational talks, the enchantress of florence, salman rushdie, author talks, writing books, novels, fiction, fantasy

Id: Ah9PyZNb4F8

Length: 69min 54sec (4194 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 19 2008