Why the world won’t stop reading Salman Rushdie

Timely, relevant and important–apart from being literary masterpieces–Salman Rushdie’s works continue to reach out to a wide spectrum of readers

The Satanic Verses was published 10 years before Salman Rushdie’s 24-year-old attacker was born. That’s how long hate can last even when resisted vehemently. But as Rushdie’s acquaintances would remind you, the last thing he wants to talk about is the fatwa, having published many other books–including eight novels since The Satanic Verses, along with children’s books, short fiction and a memoir. The world won’t stop, shouldn’t stop reading more of him, because it’s a sublime body of work. Whether it’s the complexities and cultural collision of East, West; or the sensual, slow burn satire The Moor’s Last Sigh which was famously described as “a love song to a vanishing world, but also its last hurrah”; or his explosive and raging New York city novel, Fury, there’s always more to Rushdie than meets the eye.

A harbinger of change

Through his words, Rushdie has always tried to address the socio-political and cultural turbulence of the times for over four decades. As the world around us transforms into a far more fragmented and politically fraught version of its previous self, his voice has become even more relevant. Rushdie has never shied away from censuring fundamental extremism across religions and always highlighted the existential threats such practices pose on the liberal framework of any progressive society.

The private and the political

Some of Rushdie’s work, especially his collections of essays–Step Across This Line and Languages of Truth–may come across as indulgent and self-important. Rushdie, despite being enormously rewarding, is an acquired taste. But if one takes a little time and effort to peel away the layers and peer inside, they’ll find it’s reflective of some of the major concerns of the modern world, especially the interdependency of the personal and the political, the lines blurring with great immediacy. The biggest example of this is Rushdie’s own synonym–Joseph Anton–one he adopted when he fled to Britain after the fatwa was issued and took refuge there in 1989. He named himself after his two favourite writers–‘Joseph’ from Joseph Conrad and ‘Anton’ from Anton Chekhov. A writer’s literary heroes serving as camouflage against a world that won’t understand him.

Rebellion through existence

Albert Camus had famously written: “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” The fatwa tried to push Rushdie, and, in turn, other intellectuals and thinkers, towards a reality of narrowness and self-censorship. If Rushdie had stopped, it won’t be unreasonable to presume, many other writers might have checked themselves too. That Rushdie continued to write fearlessly, speaking up for vulnerable communities often, itself became an act of protest. Rushdie certainly isn’t the most disadvantaged artist in history and has enjoyed the benefits of both fame and privilege during his long career. But one cannot ignore that to spend decades as a writer with his critics commenting that he deliberately kicked the hornet’s nest by writing The Satanic Verses, and a section of the British media arguing whether the continued cost needed to protect his life was ever justified, and yet be able to produce books with his regularity, must have been a Sisyphean task. When the central character of his novel Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, Geronimo Manezes, suddenly starts levitating and invites the spite of strangers, he says: “Why do you imagine I consider my condition an improvement? Why, when it has ruined my life and I fear it may bring about my early death?”

Fiction as imagination

Rushdie is a storyteller who has never allowed political or theological forces to limit the originality of his thoughts. Long before Marvel Studios took over the imagination of the world, it was Rushdie’s universe–filled with jinns and mystical lands where anything was possible–that invited us to a kind of South Asian literature that perhaps no one had attempted before him in the English language successfully. This is most evident in 1990’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, easily his easiest book to like. It is a surreal children’s novel written for his son and a political commentary on unfair autocratic forces guiding the world at once.

The immigrant experience

In this communally unstable, post-truth, far-right age, many of us often wonder about the idea of home. Rushdie has frequently explored his roots, especially in his spectacular memoir Joseph Anton, which deals with his displacement in both fierce and moving ways. Despite his experiences, he has refused to live like a victim and spoken of all his homes where he found some ground beneath his feet, with great empathy. He had written somewhere, “new beginnings, no matter how exciting, also involve loss”. May he return to this changed world with equal excitement for another new beginning.

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