Saleem Sinai, that child of the midnight hour, born of the prodigious imagination of Salman Rushdie, turns 75 this year, just as, in two days, India celebrates the 75th anniversary of its independence from the British. An anniversary on which some Indians ponder the nature of this independence and the new demands on citizens to prove their allegiance to the nation [for instance] by displaying the tricolor (no matter how badly printed).
I was 21 when Midnight’s Children was published, or rather, when it burst upon the literary scene and shouted to all of us would-be writers: own your voice, this tongue is yours, make it a tool to tell stories that you feel in the deepest fibres of your being, stories that are at once intensely personal and political, stories that proclaim the end of empire precisely because they turn the language of empire into your language.
Of course, those are not Rushdie’s words, but that’s the message I took from that first reading of the book that changed the way we thought about what a literary sensibility could sound like when it used an English that was so much more than the Queen’s.
Not that others had not turned the language to their ends before. Just that Rushdie seemed to open up a way of mashing up history, contemporary politics, magic, and the messiness of everyday life in ways that hadn’t been done before in this particular English. On one of the many news reports about the attack on Salman Rushdie on August 12 at a literary even near New York City, writer Arundhati Roy spoke of Midnight’s Children: “It was a book that unlocked gates and blockages and doorways for many people writing from this part of the world.”
The news this morning was grim; even as we heard that Rushdie was on a ventilator and had sustained serious injuries including the possible eye damage. One report said that after the attack, he was unable to speak. That felt like the ultimate irony. The author, who had consistently spoken truth to power, had been silenced (hopefully, temporarily) by an assailant who believed he had the sanction of religious authority.
That prompted me to scour the internet for the sound of Rushdie’s voice. There is, predictably, a lot of it online. Clips from appearances at literary and cultural festivals, television interviews, snippets of talks given at conclaves and conferences (one of the most recent is from the Edinburgh Book Festival, recorded on February 4, 2022). And of course, there are several podcast conversations, some with more experienced interlocutors than others. Rushdie is remarkably consistent across all of them, in his absolute defense of freedom of expression, and in his belief that only stories well told—both fiction and non-fiction--can challenge authoritarianism and tyranny. His observations, which find echoes in his fiction and essays, range from the experience of migration, multiple (and “Imaginary”) homelands, literature and cinema, the relationship of history to the present, and his own many journeys.
We all have intimate relationships with the words (and work) of authors who have influenced us, and possibly the attack on Salman Rushdie has touched something in those of us who have enjoyed, been stimulated by, or even puzzled by his storytelling. I remember reading Midnight’s Children just out of college, and devouring everything that came after until the Moor’s Last Sigh, after which I took a bit of a hiatus. I ordered Languages of Truth just last week, feeling the need to re-acquaint myself with Rushdie the essayist. I recall nights of reading Haroun and the Sea of Stories with my daughters, maybe kindling in them that same love of fabulous stories that tell us more about how to understand the world than prime time news (especially prime time news).
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Rushdie opened up the world to fiction from the subcontinent, and opened up the world for writers from the subcontinent. You can see traces of his fabulism and his melding of history and the contemporary in writers as far apart as Kamila Shamsie and Arundhati Roy.
I’m not sure what Rushdie would have made of the har-ghar tiranga campaign, but it’s not hard to spin a fabulist tale around this moment, when the flag is flown not so much in the spirit of independence as in compliance with an order, when millions of mass-produced polyester tricolors slowly erase the meaning of that original hopeful symbol of syncretism and tolerance that inspired that midnight birth of a nation.
As for Rushdie’s voice, even as we hope that he recovers it soon, here’s a nice selection of podcasts that he has appeared on or has been featured in: https://repod.io/topics/salman-rushdie