How we have all failed Salman Rushdie at some level after the fatwa

A few days ago, Salman Rushdie’s agent Andrew Wylie told Spanish newspaper El País that the celebrated author, who was attacked on stage during a literary event in western New York in August, had lost vision in one of his eyes, and the use of one hand. For the last couple of months, Rushdie‘s fans have been waiting with bated breath to hear news of his recovery. After it arrived, it has cloaked us in an impalpable sadness.

Rushdie has always been a vocal critic of all kinds of censorship and dogmatism. And no one can accuse him of being partial to or against any one country or religious identity. His phantasmagorical novel Midnight’s Children (1981) earned the ire of the then Congress government in India. Shame (1983) was a searing, fantastic and fantastical critique of the government in Pakistan and the terrible “hunger games” for the throne between different factions.

In the eye of the storm

Satanic Verses (1988) firmly placed him in the eye of the storm in the Muslim world, with the Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa and violent protests organised in England. Satanic Verses sent Rushdie into hiding and living under constant threat, scrutiny and security. Yet, he was at his prolific best. We were left dazzled by the length and breadth of his erudition, the fictional canvas he paints and works upon and his linguistic pyro techniques. And all this during a period when the fatwa was still very much in existence and in force.

The hatred of Rushdie cannot be always traced to a proper and logical understanding of his art. It is believed that Khomeini never read The Satanic Verses himself. Neither did Imran Khan, who refused to attend a gathering/ talk where Rushdie was a fellow invitee. The fatwa has been since lifted, but this assault only goes to show how hatred has no expiry date. The attack on free thinking and free speech is what Rushdie had almost prophesised in his Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990).

‘A hero of our times’

Rushdie has long transcended from being an author escaping the fatwa to a symbol — of hope, of an idea — a kind of an invisible hero in hiding, but never on the run, disseminating ideas and courage to people around the world who are constantly subjected to policing and surveillance from the watchdogs of religion and governments.

Also read:  What Bob Dylan’s biographies tell us about the man and his music

“Kalaakar mein, Kal ko akaar du/Yehi hain dharm meri, Dusri koi jaat na..(I am an artist, shaping tomorrows/This is my religion; I have no other caste)” goes the song by Spitfire in film Gully Boy. Rushdie, an artist, belongs to no one religion, no one country and yet he belongs to everyone. He is the prudent observer discussing the Kashmir problem in Shalimar the Clown (2005) and also the magician weaving patterns in air in The Enchantress of Florence (2008).

Academic and poet Abin Chakraborty calls Rushdie a “hero of our times” — a time when forces at the helm would want you to believe that there can only be one version of a story or history, Rushdie’s art will draw us to the nooks and corners of events and narratives to open up cracks and fissures and encourage us to take the plunge down the rabbit hole.
But, at some level, I think we have all failed Rushdie a little.

In recent times, literary meet organisers or festivals thought twice before inviting him for the fear of affronting the fringe groups that seem to be becoming a majority with each passing month. Calcutta, sometimes considered the cultural capital of India, denied entry to the author in January 2013. There have not been enough fertile forums for engaging with the author’s views and philosophy — sitting behind the computer screen and showing support on social media is one thing and actually creating a space in the literary and cultural world for an exchange or dialogue with such views is another.

There have not been enough attempts to disengage Rushdie from Satanic Verses. He has written far more powerful and more critical texts which somehow get lost in the hullaballoo of the history of the censorship and the fatwa. That, I believe, is doing injustice to a wonderful wordsmith and philosopher, someone who has been almost prophetic in the manner in which he has predicted and foreshadowed the emergence of certain bigoted forces and fundamentalist factions over the years. He could have stopped following the threats to his life, but he did not. And we owe it to him.

When Taslima Nasrin was forced to leave Calcutta

Where do artists go when no city or country wants them? We have been conditioned into believing the necessity of identity cards, voter IDs, social security numbers and address proofs for the concretisation of our belonging. How do we reconcile to the fact that there are cities and nations and homelands that do not want us, that we are to be the apocryphal wanderers in space, knocking on places on the map to take us in?

Rushdie’s episode took me back to the Calcutta of 2007. A student at the University of Calcutta then, I believed in the unlimited possibilities of the world beyond the four walls of the classroom. At that age, I believe one is forgiven for being naïve. The political atmosphere was charged and the skies felt as if they were made of egg-shells every alternate day. The Left- Front government was in its third decade of being in power but had seldom faced such widespread condemnation from the civil society following the violence in Nandigram in March earlier that year. And things went further northwards in November. A riot brought the entire city to a halt.

Taslima Nasrin had managed to ruffle certain sections of the Islamic society in West Bengal and the violent protests were all a manifestation of the anger that had been growing against her for some time. On that fateful day, parts of Central Calcutta were reduced to a theatre of macabre violence, with stone-pelting, glass bottles being thrown and property being damaged and some set on fire. I remember classes being interrupted with constant phone calls from concerned parents, some teachers arriving late and recounting how entire stretches of land were minefields of shattered glass. It was kind of ironic that all this was happening in the middle of our professor discussing Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines, a novel which deals with riots and the constructed and the constricted notion of identity formation in the Indian sub-continent. As a dear friend of mine put it, we were indeed living the nightmare that afternoon.

Also read: I have always thought of a novel as an intimate space: Kamila Shamsie

Taslima was forced to leave Calcutta. It was a matter of great disappointment for her and a great shame for most of us living in the city. A city which had prided itself on its secular fabric and a government which, one would imagine, be free from any religious bias or pressure, were coerced into submitting to the demands of forces of intolerance. The next couple of days were spent debating the decision and for most of us who were liberal left aligned in our class; there was no place to hide. But what rankled us was the question, what next for Taslima?

Alternate versions of narratives

Across age and time, free thinkers and artists and authors have borne the brunt of political power and religion. Violence has been unleashed (as against Victor Jara in Chile), fatwas issued (against Nasreen and Rushdie) and in recent years in India, voices stifled as in the case of Gauri Lankesh and M.M. Kalburgi.

Voices of the likes of Rushdie and Nasreen need to be heard and debated upon. Heard and challenged if there is a rational critique to it. But never silenced or threatened. We may not agree with their views, but we cannot be blind to the possibility of alternate versions of history and narratives, plural and fragmented in their nature, giving a voice to the marginalised and disenfranchised.

Or else, the day is not far, and many would argue that the ball has already started rolling towards it, that we will have to start giving primacy to the almost pre-civilised doctrine of “might is right”. The pen is mightier than the sword is what the elders used to say. And it is up to us to keep it that way.