How India Lost a Great Indian Writer

Sometime in midsummer, 1988, I was sent the manuscript of “The Satanic Verses” to read as consultant-editor of Penguin-India, a subsidiary of Viking, which was to publish the book in the United States and Britain. I plodded through it--Salman Rushdie is not easy to read--and came to the conclusion that some passages of the novel would offend Muslim susceptibilities. I consulted my two Indian colleagues, one a Christian and the other a Muslim, and decided to turn down Viking’s offer to let us co-produce the book in India. Our principals in England and the United States were understandably upset as they had paid a large sum in advance royalties and hoped to recover some of it through our sales in India. I was rung up by the chairman of our company in London and asked to read the manuscript a second time and communicate my decision a week later.

I did so. I repeated our determination not to publish the book in India. I was asked to put down my reasons in writing. I telexed back saying that some of the material in the novel was lethal, and I had not the slightest doubt that it would be banned by the Indian Government. We would lose a lot of money and perhaps be exposed to violence. I further added that if they went ahead with its publication in England and the United States, we of Penguin-India would publicly distance ourselves from the venture. I also warned them of trouble they might have from the Muslim community in England.

My decision to turn down the book was in no way meant to cast aspersions on its literary merits. Though the plot was utterly bizarre and the narrative disjointed, there were flashes of brilliance in Rushdie’s portrayal of characters as well as compelling narration in episodes like that of the Bangladeshi family running Cafe Shandar, which is wrecked by white hoodlums, or that of the rich Muslim industrialist of Bombay who, when widowed, takes his servant’s wife as mistress while retaining the servant’s loyalty. What I knew would upset the Muslims was the portrayal of Mahound (clearly Muhammad) as a false prophet willing to fiddle with the revelations sent to him by Allah and toy with the idea of compromise with idol-worship by allowing idols already installed in the Kaaba to remain.

And then there was the matter of the use of the names of the Prophet’s wives by inmates of a Meccan bordello. Muslims can tolerate unfavorable references to the Kaaba. A large part of Arabic, Persian and Urdu poetry does indeed revolve round the tavern (see adjoining poem) as a better place than the Kaaba for seekers of truth and the daughter of a grape a better companion than learned Shaikhs and Maulvis (Islamic jurists). But a very clear distinction is drawn: No aspersions can be cast on the authenticity of the Qur’an, and not a word may be said or written impugning the character of Prophet Muhammad or members of his family. This is summed up in a Persian adage:

Ba Khuda Diwana bashad.

Ba Mohammed hoshiar!

(Say anything crazy you like about God.

But of Muhammad, beware!)

Rushdie crossed this clear line many times. He should have known his countrymen and co-religionists better. Fifty years ago a Hindu, Mahashey Rajpal of Lahore, published a book entitled Rangeela Rasool , “The Colorful Prophet,” portraying Muhammad as a lecher. Rajpal was murdered. His murderer, after he was hanged, was proclaimed shaheed , “martyr.” When J. K. Galbraith was U.S. ambassador to India, he named his cat Ahmed, one of the names of the Prophet. There was instant uproar. Galbraith apologized and changed his cat’s name. Three years ago, The Deccan Herald of Bangalore published a short story about a lowdown guttersnipe. It had merely used the name Muhammad for its chief character. A Muslim mob burnt down the office of The Deccan Herald.

It would be unfair to single out the Muslims for being intolerant about criticism of their religion. Although Hindus pride themselves for being able to tell dirty stories about their deities, they can be as intolerant as the Muslims when it comes to putting the stories in print. Among books banned in India because they hurt Hindu religious sentiment were Aubrey Menen’s “Rama Retold,” Arthur Koestler’s “The Lotus and the Robot,” Stanley Wolpert’s “Nine Hours to Rama” and Agahananda Bharati’s “The Ochre Robe.” The Sikhs can be even more aggressive than the Muslims. Some years ago a proclamation was issued from the Golden Temple’s Akal Takht ostracizing a breakaway sect called the Niramkaris and demanding a ban on their two sacred texts. The books were not banned. The Sikhs murdered the Niramkari guru as well as the proprietor/editor of the largest circulating chain of papers, the Hind Samachar, who had supported the Niramkaris. A year later they also killed the editor’s son. In India, the margin of tolerance about matters concerning religion is very thin.

A week before “The Satanic Verses” was published in England on Sept. 20, 1988, India Today, the most prestigious and widely read fortnightly in India, which had acquired an advance copy of the novel, carried extracts along with an interview with Rushdie. A week later the Indian Government imposed a ban on the book. Immediately thereafter pirated copies of “The Satanic Verses” printed in Delhi were available under the counter in local bookstores. The Indian ban was followed by bans in all the 45 Muslim countries of the world. Rushdie’s reaction was characteristically petulant: “Frankly I wish I had written a more critical book. Prophet Muhammad would have approved of it. . . . I am not going to give in.”

Despite India’s being the first government to ban “The Satanic Verses,” there was widespread agitation in different parts of the country. In Bombay a mammoth procession of Muslims was stopped from attacking the offices of the British deputy high commissioner. It was dispersed by the police after it had set fire to many buses and buildings. Many people were killed. There was similar violence in Srinagar (Kashmir) and other cities of northern India.

When the late Imam Khomeini detonated the Islamic bomb by issuing a fatwa (decree) on Feb. 14, 1989, sentencing Rushdie to death, there was yet another round of Muslim agitations. But this time opinion was divided. While Imam Bokhari of Delhi’s Jama Masjid (the main mosque of Delhi) supported Khomeini and condemned Rushdie as “the bastard son of Satan,” several Muslim intellectuals protested that the sentence was un-Islamic and that it gave the Muslims a bad name as bigots and fanatics.

It was after Rushdie first shot into fame with the publication of “Midnight’s Children” and “Shame” that Indians got to know some of his background. He was born in Kashmir but spent part of his childhood in Aligarh and Bombay. The family were affluent and liberal in their religious outlook. He was educated at Rugby and Kings College, Cambridge. It was his experience of racism in England--all said and done, he was a “wog” (Westernized Oriental Gentleman) in that country--which made him want to rediscover his Islamic roots. For his thesis he chose the early years of the founding of the faith by Prophet Muhammad and the first three Caliphs. The thesis was entitled “Mohammed, Islam and the Rise of the Caliphs.”

In many ways “Midnight’s Children” and “The Satanic Verses” are autobiographical. The first novel is largely set based on Bombay, his Indian school days and the film-obsessed atmosphere of the city. “The Satanic Verses” is based on his school and college experiences in England and his desperate search for a rationale for the religion of his birth. Having been exposed to the liberal skepticism of present-day Western society, he could not accept the dogmatic assertions of mullahs and maulvis but tried to put himself in the frame of mind of people who were first confronted by the Prophet proclaiming himself Allah’s messenger and the recipient of His words, which would later become the Qur’an and the basis of the Shariat Law (the basic law of Islam). Many Meccans at the time questioned Muhammad’s bona fides ; Rushdie had the audacity to do so in our own day in “The Satanic Verses.” With the questioning of the fundamentals of the Islamic faith, Rushdie threw in the problems of adjusting himself as a colored man in Britain’s less absorbent society.

Despite having married an English woman and sired a son through her and despite having been married a second time, to the American novelist Marianne Wiggins, Rushdie had apparently decided not to live in the West. He has had an Indian, a Pakistani and a British passport. Pakistani nationality was virtually forced on him as he happened to be in Karachi in the winter of 1971 when the Indian navy an air force bombed the city in the war of the liberation of Bangladesh. After publication of “Shame,” in which he lampooned both General Zia ul-Haq and the Bhutto family (the two major contenders for power in Pakistan), there was little chance of his being accepted in that country. His only alternative to Britain was India. He admitted this in an interview with a British journalist after his return from India where he had been lionized wherever he went. He said: “As one reaches middle age, one needs to cement the connection. It is a country I still feel very close to.” That choice has now been closed to him. He will not be allowed to set foot on Indian soil. A thousand pities because in years to come Indians will acclaim him as a great Indian writer.