In the midst of the rubble of the truth
Salman Rushdie’s essays show off the author’s formidable intellect
Reading Rushdie is like hurtling down the Alaknanda towards the confluence with the roiling Bhagirathi at Devprayag, just before you take the turn and find yourself in an entirely different river, the quiet, emerald Ganga. In Languages of Truth; Essays (2003-2020), his words rush out rapid and unstoppable on everything from Hans Christian Andersen and Shakespeare to hijras and Hitchens, from Amrita Sher-gil, Osama bin Laden, Harold Pinter, Heraclitus and Pythagoras to political courage, Carrie Fisher and Covid. As always, his linguistic virtuosity impresses: “In these pages,” he says in his introduction to The Paris Review Interviews Vol 4, “Jack Kerouac comes over exactly as he should, at once vivid and muddy, full of Kerouacity”.
Then there is his sense of humour: “Thank you, Philip (Roth). Taboos, he taught me, are there to be broken. This lesson has, on occasion, got me into trouble.” This deserves a helplessly laughing emoji in the margin.
The gleaming factoids that stud these essays reveal a Trivial Pursuit aficionado. In Cervantes and Shakespeare, he writes that when England switched to the Gregorian calendar from the Julian dating system in 1752, there were riots and “it’s said, mobs in the streets shouting, ‘Give us back our eleven days!’” In The Composite Artist: The Emperor Akbar and the Making of the Hamzanama one half his age. He is as old as Independent India: “I was a member of the first generation of free Indian children to be born in over two centuries infused with the spirit of new liberty but carrying with us also the knowledge of blood, of the great massacres of Muslims by Hindus and Hindus by Muslims that attended the moment of freedom,” he writes in Another Writer’s Beginnings.
This knowledge of blood continues to haunt us; it prompts fresh bouts of bloodletting, each incident creating new grudges that lead to the next, and has culminated in what now feels like the inevitable enthronement of Hindutva. It was a long time coming. Today, it is clear that the secular Bombay the author talks about didn’t really exist or if it did, it died around the time his parents left for Karachi in the 1970s. Rushdie simplifies things when he writes “… the city was strongly secular in spirit. That this is no longer the case, that the rise of Hindu nationalism has led to a sharp increase in sectarianism in what is now Mumbai, is a source of sadness for people of my generation.” It wasn’t Hindu nationalism that changed Bombay; nativist fascism did. To be sure, the late Bal Thackeray’s Shiv Sena made common cause with Hindu nationalism when it was convenient, but only then. It is the sort of granularity of detail that VS Naipaul (mentioned twice in this volume), that other celebrated writer with roots in the subcontinent (but perhaps greatly blessed by being a few generations removed), would have insisted on. Rushdie sees India Past like a lot of NRIS who left 50 years ago do, through rose tints. It took him a while to prise them off but the memory of their comforting glow persists.
Still, this is an interesting collection that shows off the author’s formidable intellect. He is brilliant in Wonder Tales, when he discusses the problematic nature of the term ‘magic realism’: “… because when it is used, most people equate it with the fantasy-fiction genre. And, as I’ve been trying to argue, the literature of the fantastic is not genre fiction but, in its own way, as realistic as naturalistic fiction; it just comes into the real through a different door... The truth is not arrived at by purely mimetic means… The literature of the fantastic – the wonder tale, the fable, the folk tale, the magic realist novel – has always embodied profound truths about human beings, their finest attributes and their deepest prejudices too…”
And here he is on social change in The Liberty Instinct: “For all the faults of this system, which one might call ‘democracy’ – and the biggest fault, as we are witnessing today, is that the argument can lead to movements in retrograde directions, not only in progressive ones – I still find it the best available method by which an ethical society can be created.”
At the end, though, it’s the essays he hasn’t written that the reader wonders about. If the pandemic made it to the collection, why hasn’t he taken on befuddling contemporary issues – new puritanism’s threat to freedom of expression, social media lynch mob justice, cancel culture, sexual harassment and Me Too, and the particular ways in which liberalism has come to mimic fascism? PEN, with which Rushdie is closely associated – the book includes five pieces written for PEN events – put out a statement when JK Rowling was trolled for her perceived Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist stance in June 2020 (“The ability to write or speak freely without harassment stands as much for trans writers defending their rights as it does for JK Rowling”) but there’s no mention of the battle against groupthink or enforced propriety of one or the other variety in the essays. He touches on it in The Liberty Instinct and comes closer in the Nova Southeastern University Commencement Address of 2006: “We live in a time of competing group thought, and our ideas of right and wrong, of what is permissible and what must not be permitted, are shaped by such thinking to a degree so alarming that it may have stopped being funny”. Sadly. it doesn’t merit a fuller exploration 15 years later.
Could the man who outran the Ayatollah in the 1990s be scared of the emasculating wrath of the politically correct? Perhaps that’s what held back Quichotte, his last novel – one review bizarrely mentioned his four marriages and labelled him “a bit of a horn dog” – that was dazzling in its ambition and enjoyable to read but lacked the fearlessness of his greatest books, Midnight’s Children, Shame (yes!), Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories.
I am being unfair. A writer of Rushdie’s calibre isn’t a hack bound to turn out reams about the latest scandal. Maybe he is saving some essays for his next collection.
I will wait.