Asia Times: The Moor's sigh of relief


	May 02, 2000	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

The Moor's sigh of relief
By Faizal Khan

NEW DELHI - Salman Rushdie was finally back among Midnight's Children this month, setting foot in his homeland 12 years after it banned his ''Satanic Verses''.

The exile was long enough for the celebrations to drown out the straggling protestors but not long enough to dispense with the wall of security around a man over whom the late Ayatollah Khomeini's death fatwa still hangs.

But with the Commonwealth Writers' Prize dinner here lending incomparable ambience for an appearance, the wait may well have been worth it. ''My real prize is India,'' Rushdie said consoling himself on having to concede the main pan-Commonwealth award to ''Disgrace'' by South African writer J M Coetzee.

The indulgence extended to the handful of protestors on the streets who listlessly waved placards shouted ''Salman Rushdie Go Back'' and burned a limp effigy. ''I too come from an Indian Muslim family,'' was the expansive response. ''I am here to renew a broken friendship,'' the London-based author declared to a large gathering of national and international media at the venue of a function where he received the Eurasia region award for ''The Ground Beneath Her Feet.''

For the most part the riot police were idle and the protests confined to Delhi. Rushdie's absence had evidently weakened the zeal against a book few of the faithful had actually troubled themselves to read. Writers, publishers, filmmakers and social activists more than made up by effusively welcoming his arrival, and Rushdie responded by inviting some of them up to his hotel room for an impromptu group session.

''The protests do not represent the voice of the nation,'' remarked Shabnam Hashmi of Sahmat, a cultural organization which has been campaigning for Rushdie to get a visa and which photocopied and circulated ''The Moor's Last Sigh'' when Indian customs initially demurred.

There was irony in the fact that it was left to a pro-Hindu, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government which has depended on anti-Muslim sentiments for its political success to give him a five-year visa braving protests from Islamic fundmentalists. The imam (religious leader) of one of the oldest mosques in the Indian capital was unrelenting: ''Rushdie can't be tolerated at all. He can't be excused.''

Accompanied by his 20-year-old son Zafar, an event manager in London, Rushdie enjoyed every moment of his stay moving around the streets of ''Pink City'' Jaipur, Agra, Shimla and New Delhi. He used the opportunity to re-introduce India to his son, who last come here as a three-year-old. They went to their ancestral home in Solan, near Shimla in the North Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, that Rushdie had won after a protracted legal battle with the state government. ''My father gifted me that house on my 21st birthday. Zafar is going to be 21 soon,'' he explained.

But like the imam of the Fatehpuri mosque, who recalled the writer's ''sins'' during Friday prayers, Rushdie too had not forgotten the pain inflicted on him by his own country. ''I was shocked when my country became the first to ban 'The Satanic Verses - even before it had arrived here,'' he said referring to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's decision to ban the book to appease some Muslim politicians.

India's move set off a chain reaction which included the famous fatwa and the breaking of diplomatic ties by several western governments with Tehran. But the fatwa held and for a while it seemed there was no place on earth for Rushdie. ''Mandela was walking out to freedom. And that was happening to me,.'' Rushdie said, the hurt still showing.

The ban was not the first instance of Rushdie's trouble with an independent India which came into existence eight weeks after he was born. A family joke has it that Rushdie's arrival prompted the departure of the British.

''Midnight's Children'', an allegory about modern India which claimed the Booker prize, was almost banned in India for a different kind of iconoclasm - its references to Indira Gandhi, prime minister of India. Gandhi even went to a London court seeking damages forcing Rushdie to apologize and agree to delete defamatory references - though the hullabaloo increased the sales of the book and may have promoted the cause of Indo-Anglian writing.

A battle-weary Rushdie - once described by John Le Carre as a self-canonizing arrogant colonialist - was this time around willing to wear the attitude of Ormus Cama, the rockstar character in ''The Ground Beneath Her Feet.''

''It is not supposed to be this way, but you are not here to put it right,'' might have summed up the new Rushdie mien.

And once he was back to the fawning adulation of India's chattering classes, Rushdie knew exactly where he wanted to go. ''I want to come here more often.''

It was as if you could take Rushdie out of India but you could not take India out of Rushdie. But then this country was the very wellspring of an extraordinary literary genius.

(Inter Press Service)

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�1999 Asia Times Online Co., Ltd.

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