The majority of Salman Rushdie’s works are deeply rooted in the history, culture and languages of the Indian subcontinent, where he was born in 1947, the year India became independent. Having become a British citizen as a teenager and then an American national in the 2000s, he remained very close to Indian literary circles. After the knife attack he suffered on August 12 in the United States, many Indian writers took up the pen to pay tribute to him.
A literary giant
Among them, the poet, essayist and writer Sophia Naz, who was with Salman Rushdie the day before his attack, is one of the few to mention, in the weekly Outlook, its political and literary significance for people of South Asian descent. Not only does Salman Rushdie claim to be influenced by The thousand and One Nightsthe fables of Panchatantra and the Hindu epics of Mahabharata a you Ramayanabut he knew how to dust off the English language.
“I can’t think of another writer whose work has had such a visceral influence on me,” writes Sophia Naz.
“I was 17 when The Midnight Children (1982) opened up a world to me without the straitjacket of so-called “good English”. Instead, there was lush polyphony that captured the way South Asians live, speak, and inhabit multiple linguistic realms at once. This, coupled with his incredible ability to invent new words (a skill he had already honed in his early days in advertising in the UK), is what continues to work wonders.”
This talent and Rushdie’s ever-reaffirmed desire to write on political and social issues contribute to making him one of the most outstanding personalities of our time, concludes Sophia Naz.
“No, Salman Rushdie is not privileged”
In Calcutta, in the columns of the daily The Telegraph, the historian, novelist and essayist Mukul Kesavan has chosen to defend Rushdie against those who see in him a privileged writer, by his nationality, by his celebrity, by his place of residence, by the police protection from which he benefited and from which many Others, like his Japanese translator who was murdered in 1991, did not enjoy it. Mukul Kesavan shows that this reasoning is absurd, because perpetrators can be persecuted wherever they are.
“Rushdie is no different from any Indian writer who has been attacked or murdered for his opinions. Think for a moment of Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, MM Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh. Intellectually, they were strongly rationalist, hostile to religious orthodoxy, and convinced that right-wing majoritarianism was the mortal enemy of republican democracy. Unlike Rushdie who lived his life as a writer in the West, they wrote in India. Unlike him, again, they chose to write not in English, but in their mother tongues: Dabholkar and Pansare wrote in Marathi, Kalburgi and Lankesh in Kannada. They appealed to a vernacular readership beyond the reach of English-language media in the country. Each of them was shot by men on motorcycles with homemade pistols who fled.”
It took Rushdie nearly dying from being stabbed for us to realize that “this vulnerability is a universal evil”.
A loss
The novelist Amit Chaudhuri confided his emotion to the Times of India. He knew Rushdie personally since 1997 and deplores the attacks to which many intellectuals of Muslim culture like Rushdie are subjected, sacrificed on the altar of politics and fundamentalism.
“What we have now almost completely lost – by ‘we’ I mean people of all cultures and religions – is an idea of the great secular histories and intellectual richness of Muslim countries, or families, or contexts which spawned writers and artists like Rushdie and others: think also of Kiarostami; of Mahfouz and Makhmalbaf. Neither Rushdie nor these others can be identified by religion alone, and the same goes for much of Muslim modernity whose memory and materiality have been destroyed by decades of politics and games to which liberal nations have also heavily involved […]
“We have forgotten what made possible the great modern Muslim intellectuals of the 20th century, just as we have forgotten the various sources of the secular heritage of the modern world. This oversight created a wound.”
Open letter to Rushdie’s abuser
In everyday life The Indian Express, journalist and novelist Amitava Kumar chose to write an open letter to Hadi Matar, Salman Rushdie’s attacker. Hadi Matar is 24 years old. At the same age, Amitava Kumar devoured the books of Salman Rushdie, struck by a fatwa the following year. So he urges this young man to read.
“Do you read ? I am not asking this question to put you down or humiliate you, but to invite you to do so. It hurt me terribly a few years ago to learn that the killer of an intellectual [la journaliste Gauri Lankesh, assassinée en 2017] in India had never read the woman he shot.”
“Like the man you tried to kill, I too am a writer. As my life has been devoted to reading and writing books, I cling to the belief that if we read widely and deeply, we will encounter people and places that are different from us. This sense of difference, its pleasures and its challenges, may lead us away from intolerance.”
Moreover, since the attack on Salman Rushdie on August 12, 2022, more and more new readers have discovered his books. “You have failed, writes Mukul Kesavan, – as any act of violence inevitably would, and under such circumstances – because you have only succeeded in bringing us back to Rushdie’s words”.