Best of Bookers

Excerpts from my speech at the event "Your Favourite British Author", The British Council Library.
Mumbai 2005

I was born in the city of Bombay…once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more… On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world…. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate - at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn't even wipe my own nose at the time.”


This was just a sneak-peek or to be more precise the beginning of a monumental novel by a prodigious novelist called Salman Rushdie. A name, which hardly needs any introduction, the recipient of the Booker Prize and now the Best of the Bookers for his brilliant second novel Midnights Children, Rushdie, stepped into the literary world with his first published novel Grimus, which Mel Tilden recognized as “one of the those novels too good to be science fiction, even though it contains other universes, dimensional doorways, alien creatures and more than one madman”.

The novel was assessed as “an ambitious, strikingly confident first novel”. But the novel that shot him to instant and everlasting fame and handed him the key to the hearts and minds of millions of readers across the world was Midnight’s Children(MC). The success of the novel can be measured by the fact that it alone assured Rushdie, a permanent place among the favourite British authors.

In MC, Rushdie construes the history of the nation (India) from his childhood memories and intertwines it with the history of his narrator and protagonist Saleem Sinai. As “time and migration placed a double filter” between the writer and his subject, when he tries to narrate the past he ends up creating a ‘story’, a piece of fiction, or a version of India for he connects his broken memories with a cache of colourful stories and fantasy.

Rushdie’s universal appeal ( except in US perhaps) lies in his sensibility as a writer to confront reality of exposing shams and more importantly by making the readers think about and not just take his words for granted. He flips back and forth from past to present ,from ‘real’ to ‘unreal’, from ‘fact’ to ‘fiction’ at such a lightning speed that the reader is completely boggled trying to make head or tail of the entire situation. Then slowly the purpose of the whole exercise dawns upon us. The dominant discourse of history has been hammered into us through the popular media in such a way that we have started believing it to be the “truth”. Anything else makes no sense, sounds gibberish, absurd and an insult to our “historical correctness”.

A postmodern text like Rushdie’s makes the reader recognize the stories as stories - history as his story. He champions the cause of counterrealism through his character Vasco in The Moors Last Sigh who says “Forget those damnful realists! The real is always hidden – isn’t it? – inside a miraculously burning bush! Life is fantastic! Paint that”. Rushdie refuses to separate the individual (Saleem) from the context. As Saleem Sinai in MC declares “I am a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you will have to swallow the lot as well”.

The narration is at times highly cinematic but when a movie lasts for just some hours, Rushdie’s narration stays with us well beyond the last page of his novel. It keeps us tuned into the things happening around us. There is no “happily ever after”. His fairytale has no ending, no victory, no peace “because it is the privilege and curse of midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their own times, to forsake privacy and to be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes and to be unable to live or die in peace” Bleak and apocalyptic as it sounds , it is a call for awakening , a yearning for the multitudes to confront the reality that they live in, on ‘real” terms, not to dream in a myth called ‘India’ but to live in a reality that is India. He represents the voice that Anita Desai describes as the “voice that everyone present recognized instantly as being the voice of the new age; strong, original, and demanding of attention”.

It is because of this subjectivity and the proximity of his subject to our subcontinent that Rushdie stands apart from great writers like Marquez, Milan Kundera & Gunter Grass. His hybrid sensibility best brought forward in the song sung by Gibreel Farishta as he tumbles from the heaven at the beginning of his earlier creation The Satanic Verses,

“Oh, my shoes are Japanese
These trousers English, if you please
On my head, red Russian hat –
My heart’s Indian for all that.”

Another striking aspect of his writing is that we should not expect a ‘story’ from him. It is not the ‘story’ which keeps the readers glued to the novel’s progression, but the style in which they are written. The narrative technique he uses is similar to that of the “traditional clown –narrator ‘Vidhushka’ in the ancient Indian performance art of Kuttiyatam” (The Empire Writes Back). The oral narrative maintains the illusion of story-telling and takes us forward but the language, wordplay and other linguistics and stylistic calisthenics offers a deeper insight into things being said and implied.

Salman Rushdie is definitely not a novelist to be taken at the face value, his writings are meant to be chewed upon, something to be dissected, inviting the readers to an extravaganza of facts, fictions, histories, stories, fantasies, movie stars, snake charmers, soothsayers, sadhus, pop-singers, magicians, millionaire playboys, war heroes with knocking knees, silver spittoons, and a narrator with a “huge cucumber of a nose”.

Anu