Even With a Price on His Head, Author Salman Rushdie Thrives on Being at the Center of Change--Be It Literary or Historic

“India is my kid sister,” says Salman Rushdie, who was born on June 19, 1947, in Bombay, explaining that his birthday happens to fall eight weeks before the date of Indian independence at midnight, Aug. 14, 1947. This is vintage Rushdie, a man who has a gift for placing himself in the whirling vortex of history. And how did he celebrate the 50th anniversary? A David Byrne concert at Roseland. “Rock ‘n’ roll was a kid when I was a kid,” he chortles, “now we’re both middle-aged!”

It’s hard to imagine Rushdie out and about, much less at Roseland. On Feb. 14, 1989, just after the publication of “The Satanic Verses,” the Iranian government, under the Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, placed a price of $1 million on Ahmed Salman Rushdie’s head. Khomeini died four months later. Rushdie, meantime, is alive and well and has just edited an anthology of Indian writing, “Mirrorwork: 50 years of Indian Writing, 1947-1997,” with his second wife, British editor Elizabeth West. He has an 11-week-old son and is writing a new novel, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” which he says we can expect to read next year. Another ayatollah, Sheikh Hassan Sanei, earlier this year raised the price to $2.5 million--which the writer refers to as a “cost of living increase.”

Life may have gotten a little easier, but the author is still vulnerable and, worst of all, unable by government edict to go home to see his kid sister, India. The Indian government, which had finally granted permission to the BBC to film Rushdie’s breakthrough novel, “Midnight’s Children,” had just days before our meeting in the offices of Rushdie’s New York publisher, Henry Holt, withdrawn that permission. (The BBC then started scouting locations in Sri Lanka.) In his loose heavy blue linen jacket, with his Indian grin and his British body language, Rushdie looks like he’s been punched in the stomach when this is mentioned. One eyelid droops severely.

“I’m very disappointed, very sad about it. ‘Midnight’s Children’ has been very popular in India. This feels like a great rejection. I guess I’ll get ‘round to being angry, but for the moment I feel, well, not valued. It’s the sign of a weak government. I’m slightly baffled and trying to let the BBC handle it--I just can’t get on the roller coaster every day.” “Mirrorwork” was, in fact, the one service Rushdie felt he could perform to celebrate Indian independence.

A June issue of the New Yorker was dedicated entirely to Indian independence and literature. The kick-off piece, written by Rushdie’s old friend Bill Buford, describes a photograph in the center of the issue of several of the writers in the anthology, including Anita Desai, Rohinton Mistry, Amit Chaudhuri, Vikram Chandra, Arundhati Roy and others. Buford claims that they look uncomfortable to be thrown together, and posits that this moment may be the birth of a post-independence Indian literature. Perhaps, he thinks, this is a club no one really wanted to belong to. V.S. Naipaul, for one, refused to be in the anthology, claiming through his agent that he didn’t like ethnic labels, like “Indian writer.”

Of course, Rushdie, who stands at the center of the photo, felt more camaraderie than tension at the photo shoot in London. “We had the obligatory quarrel, without which no gathering of Indians would be complete,” he says, “but it didn’t involve me.” A quarrel that doesn’t involve Rushdie! This was between Chaudhuri, who, in reviewing a book by Mistry, apparently painted a portrait of the Parsees that Ardashir Vakil took exception to. The group divided and the quarrel was put aside by lunchtime, although Chaudhuri left in a huff.

“Still,” Rushdie says, “it was better than if we’d all sat around smiling cheesily at each other.”

One of the real issues that has emerged in both the New Yorker and since the publication of the anthology just this week, is the controversy over Rushdie’s assertion that the best Indian writing since independence has been done in English. One of the group’s youngest writers, Roy, a Kerelan who is one of the few authors who actually lives in India, has called this assertion cruel.

“Cruelty is not a literary value,” Rushdie responds. “Arundhati is a nice girl and we get on very well, but she has recently come very close to accusing me of cultural imperialism. All I can say,” shrugs the man who spent the first years of his writing career empire-bashing, “is it’s very odd getting old.

“You see,” he goes on, “Arundhati is anxious to insist on the ordinariness of India, that it’s just another place. But I think it’s not like anywhere else.

“Human beings, you see, do absolutely two primary things.” I slide obediently back into my chair, while Rushdie stares benevolently over 18th Street. “We see like and unlike. Like becomes, in literature, simile and metaphor. Unlike becomes uniqueness and difference, from which I believe, the novel is born. I’ve always felt that India was a country with no middle register, this country where the light is so bright that it throws everything into stark relief, this country with no shades of gray, unlike England, which is nothing but shades of gray. Roy, you see, thinks in pastel shades.”

Rushdie, who sees himself as a human catalyst for change, has an endearing way of taking credit for shifting currents in history and culture. The group he has drawn together in “Mirrorwork” falls into two categories--not pre- and post-independence, but pre- and post-Rushdie.

“When I wrote ‘Midnight’s Children,’ ” in 1980, he says, “I felt that all Indian writing in English up to that point used a received, classical English--the cool, English style. The last thing India is is classical and cool! It’s Dionysian and hot! I wanted to let the noise into Indian literature, to try to find another music in the language--loud--not the quietness of air-conditioning but the street heat of India, the vulgarity.

“That’s what my India was like--big city India. I’m very much a big city boy. So when I wrote ‘Midnight’s Children,’ I thought that maybe English would not survive as a literary language in India. I thought that the book might be the end of something and not the beginning.”

Rushdie, with all due humility, claims that exactly the opposite happened--that many writers emerged because “Midnight’s Children” not only unleased a voice but also made Indian literature commercially attractive at home and abroad. After leaving India for Cambridge, he returned yearly--until the problems over “The Satanic Verses.”

But the writing in “Mirrorwork” seems very gentle--the stories feel like fables. Where is the rage that fueled the editor’s own work--the noise and eroticism?

“There’s not much sex at all in Indian literature,” he says. “And this, the country of the Kama Sutra! The country with the most erotic temple carvings in the world! By the time I wrote ‘The Moor’s Last Sigh,’ I realized I hadn’t every actually written a sex scene. I made myself solve the problem in several ways--indirectly, comically and directly--full frontal if you will.”

Rushdie takes credit for a trick in Indian cinema called “the indirect kiss”--whereby a lover kisses a teacup or a piece of fruit (furious giggling as the author describes this) and passes it to his girlfriend. The prurience seems British, the hilarity Indian.

“The thing about turning 50,” he says, “is that you find yourself anxious to use the time well.” With a new baby and a son about to go to university in England, Rushdie is very much in proud father mode. He can’t help noting that the year he turned 50, he had a new baby and Zafar, his son with American writer Marianne Wiggins, who left him shortly after he went into hiding (or he left her--both stories exist), turned 18.

Here he confides proudly that he is in fact the only child in his immediate family (three sisters and a brother) who has “managed to produce a male child.”

“I’ve been all my life surrounded by hordes of women,” he says. “They make most of the noise in my writing and are the most powerful characters. The boys just skulk in the corners.”

Besides being a proud father, Rushdie is deep into “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” which has a background of rock ‘n’ roll music.

“There was no TV when I was growing up in Bombay, and only one radio station, Radio Ceylon, played Western music. That was how I first heard Elvis. Radios of course were huge pieces of furniture, under parental control, so we had to sneak around and see whose parents were out.” (Rushdie’s Muslim parents weren’t terribly strict, but his mother preferred Pat Boone to Elvis.) To buy records, Rushdie and his friends went to the morally questionable Rhythm Center, a shop whose name, spelled in the American, not the Empire way, was already “very sexy.”

“My first Western record was ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ Word would go out by some mysterious bush telegraph that a new record had arrived at the Rhythm Center and we’d all rush down.”

He is drawn to the ways that rock ‘n’ roll so easily crosses cultural and geographic frontiers. “Paul Anka,” he says by way of example, “seemed to live next door!

“I think this novel will contain my last writing about India. It’s a novel about leaving India, crossing frontiers endlessly. I feel I can’t go there, and the thing I would hate most would be to sound ignorant and out of touch--the rate of change is so huge. The history of writing about exile is long and distinguished but it’s not my temperament. It’s not sad at all--I’d just rather be writing about where I am.”