Salman Rushdie and Indian diaspora

Continuing on the series on diasporic literature, this week’s column’s focus is on Indian-born British novelist Salman Rushdie and how he represents Indian diaspora as V.S Naipaul represents diaspora in his writing.

As in the case of V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie’s life is also intrinsically tied up with the ups and downs of turbulent personal history which yielded rich literary harvest tackling the perennial issues of human interactions, constant disruptions and migration between the East and the West, often set against the history of turbulent events. The events which not only determine the fate of individuals who are involuntarily caught up in conflicts and also those of the ethnies and nations.

The author, among other things, vividly realised the history infested with turbulent events in the novel Midnight’s Children which won the Booker Prize in 1981 a rare event that established Salman Rushdie as a world-class author.

In a long introduction to the special 25th anniversary edition of Midnight’s Children, Rushidie writes about his hard –earned Indian tour and allied events which eventually led to the birth of Midnight’s Children: He writes: “In 1975, I published my first novel, Grimus, and decided to use the money the seven-hundred-pounds to travel India as cheaply as possible for as long as I could make the money last, and on that journey of fifteen-hour bus rides and humble hostelries Midnight’s Children was born. It was the year that India became a nuclear power and Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative Party and Sheik Mujib, the founder of Bangladesh, was murdered; when the Baader Meinhof Gang was on trial in Stuttgart and Bill Clinton married Hillary Rodham and the last American was evacuated from Saigon and Genera Franco died.

In Cambodia it was Khmer Rouge’s bloody Year Zero. E.L. Doctorow published Ragtime that year, David Mamet wrote American Buffalo, and Eugenio Montale won the Nobel Prize. And just after my return from India, Mrs. Indira Gandhi was convicted of election fraud, and one week after my twenty-eight birthday she declared a State of Emergency and assumed tyrannical powers. It was the beginning of a long period of darkness which would not end until 1977. I understood almost at once that Mrs. G. had somehow become central to my still-tentative literary plan.

I had wanted some time to write a novel of childhood, arising from my memories of my own childhood in Bombay. Now, having drunk deeply from the well of India, I conceived a more ambitious plan. I remembered a minor character named Saleem Sinai, born at the midnight moment of Indian independence, who had appeared in the abandoned draft of a still-born novel called The Antagonist. As I placed Saleem at the centre of my new scheme I understood that his time of birth would oblige me immensely to increase the size of my canvas.

If he and India were to be paired, I would need to tell the story of both twins. Then Saleem, ever a striver for meaning, suggested to me that the whole of modern Indian history happened as it did because of him; that history, the life of his nation-twin, was somehow all his fault. With that immodest proposal novel’s characteristic tone of voice, comically assertive, unrelentingly garrulous, and with, I hope, a growing pathos in its narrator’s increasingly tragic over-claiming, came into being. I even made the boy and the country identical twins. When the sadistic geography teacher Emil Zagallo, giving boy a lesson in ‘human geography’, compares Saleem’s nose to the Deccan peninsula, the cruelty of his joke, is , obviously, mine.

…The novel’s publication was delayed by a series of industrial strikes, but in the end it was published in London in early April 1981, and on April 6, my first wife Clarissa Luard and I threw a party at our friend Tony Stokes’s little art gallery in Langley Court , Convent Garden, to celebrate it….”

In the West people intended to read Midnight’s Children as a fantasy, while in India people thought of it as pretty realistic, almost a history book. (‘I could have written your book,’ one reader told me when I was lecturing in India in 1982. ‘I know all the stuff’). But it was wonderfully well linked almost everywhere, and changed its author’s life. One reader, who didn’t care for it, was Mrs. Indira Gandhi, and in 1984, three years after its publication-she was Prime Minister again by this time-she brought an action against it, claiming to have been defamed by one single sentence.

It appeared in the penultimate paragraph of chapter 28, ‘A wedding’, a paragraph in which Saleem provides a brief account of Mrs. Gandhi’s life. This was it: ‘ It has often been said that Mrs. Gandhi’s younger son Sanjay accused his mother of being responsible , through her neglect, for his father’s death; and that this gave him an unbreakable hold over her, so that she became incapable of denying him anything.’ …

Her willingness to make such an admission felt to me like an extraordinary validation of the novel’s portrait of those Emergency years. The reaction to the settlement in India was not favourable to the Prime Minister. A few short weeks later, stunningly, she was dead, assassinated on October 31st, 1984, by her Sikh bodyguards. ‘All of us who love India’ I wrote in a newspaper article, ‘are in mourning today’. In spite of our disagreement, I meant every word.”

How realistically the novel portrait India at the time it was written, was amply manifested by the fact that Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s admission to the true nature of the depiction of Emergency years in Midnight’s Children. The importance of Midnight’s Children as a major literary text representing through the eyes of the Indian diaspora among other things, lies in the character of Saleem whose life from the birth is intrinsically linked to the socio-economic evolution of modern India.