Salman Rushdie was 72 when he contracted Covid in March 2020. His age and asthma gave his family cause to worry. The virus, thankfully, never reached his lungs. Having recovered 17 days later, he, like so many others, missed his children. After Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against The Satanic Verses in 1989, calling for Rushdie’s death, the author was forced to move from one safe house to another. When New York went into lockdown, he was told, “This must be familiar to you.” Rushdie’s comeback, one he thought but never articulated, is as funny as it is unnerving: “A stone thrown at a man’s head in a village square is not the same as a lethal avalanche of boulders descending upon that village and destroying it.” There are, however, other reasons to enjoy his essay, ‘Pandemic’.
Rushdie, of course, didn’t buy Hulk Hogan’s theory—the coronavirus is divine retribution—but neither did he endorse Arundhati Roy’s view that it is “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next”. Rushdie’s takeaway is more ruthless in its objectivity: “Crisis shines a very bright light on human behaviour, leaves no shadows in which we can hide, and reveals, simultaneously, the worst of which we are capable and our better natures as well.” For those who have read Rushdie’s fiction and, more specifically, his two earlier collected volumes of non-fiction—Imaginary Homelands (1981-1991) and Step Across this Line (1992-2002)—this faith in “our better natures” may be recognisable.
Apart from ‘Pandemic’, Languages of Truth collects several other essays, speeches and criticism the author wrote between 2003 and 2020. Though they are disparate in tone—Rushdie likes moving from the avuncular to the jugular—they have one fact in common. They leave you buoyant. There is more joy here than despair. Like a song that winds back to its chorus, Rushdie often returns to three of his fondest themes: how stories illuminate, how fiction enlightens, and how truth redeems.
Over time, Rushdie has called three countries home—India, the UK and the US. In all three, he now sees falsehoods being presented as facts, credible information being dismissed as fake news. “The lunatics are running the asylum.” Making the case that “all citizens must feel free” in a truly free society, Rushdie routinely stops to mention the impact demagoguery has had on books: Penguin India pulping Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History, A.K. Ramanujan’s Three Hundred Ramayanas and Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey being removed from our university syllabi.
For there to be art, Rushdie tells us, one needs not only freedom but also the assumption of freedom. “If creative artists worry if they will still be free tomorrow, then they will not be free today.” He exhorts us to sign petitions and join protests. He wants writers to restore their readers’ faith in truth. “Art is not entertainment,” he says. “At its very best, it’s a revolution.” In our bickering about whether we prefer early or later Rushdie, if his sometimes-long sentences now leave us breathless instead of delighted, we forget that very few living writers have been as vilified, hounded or threatened as he was. Rushdie wasn’t just dismissed as subversive and rebellious. He was once thought of as heretical and dangerous.
Satanic Verses, Rushdie reminds us, was always more about migration than it was about religion. He thinks of migration as an “existential act”, one that strips “us of our defences, mercilessly exposing us to a world that understands us badly, if at all”. Rushdie deftly describes this inscrutability—years he spent in a British boarding school, for instance—but he is also, equally, mindful of migration’s benefits. He can look East and West. He can claim both the Mahabharata and Ulysses as his own.
Rushdie likes to call texts like the Mahabharata and One Thousand and One Nights “wonder tales”. He finds capacious their “so and not so” quality. Fiction, he says, descended from these tales and through that process, inherited the ability to arrive at truth through a set of made-up lies. For one who has taken such delight in invention and “irrealism”, the current fashion of autobiographical novels—championed by the likes of Karl Ove Knausgaard and Elena Ferrante—proves dispiriting. “Self-regard has never been so well regarded. Self-exposure has never been so popular, and the more self that is exposed the better. Amid such promiscuity of revelation, how can art compete?” he asks. For Rushdie, life can at times be stranger than fiction, yes, but fiction will always be stronger than “memoir-abilia”.
Languages of Truth helps us see that Rushdie wasn’t just making a point about authorship by writing Joseph Anton, his 2012 memoir, in the third person; he was also cracking a joke. Rushdie, we know, cracks a mean joke. The paradox of rapper Eminem, he writes, “is that he both is and is not the real Slim Shady”. Reading Huckleberry Finn as a boy, Rushdie asked, “Why, if the runaway slave Jim was trying to escape the world of slavery and get to the non-slave-owning North, did he get onto a raft on the Mississippi, which flows south?” The answer, Rushdie makes you feel, must be either truth or dare.
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