Saleem Sinai's stories from the sub-continent

JYOTI MALHOTRA
Gulf News, Dubai, June 2007


Midnight child Saleem Sinai, born on the cusp of independence and partition of the Indian sub-continent 60 years ago, is still writing his tryst with destiny. While Saleem’s biographer, Salman Rushdie, is back into our lives these days, the raging howls of protest in Pakistan and Iran against his British knighthood ringing in our ears.

In this recently scripted chapter by Tony Blair – who, having helped bomb Iraq back into the Stone Ages and appeased the Israeli appetite for swallowing up parts of Palestine, Jordan and Syria – felt, perhaps, that the knighting of Salman Rushdie could become, at once, the first line of atonement, as well as the declaration that free speech is alive and well, at least in the western world.

In Britain, where Rushdie announced he was ``thrilled and humbled to receive this great honour,’’ one part of the Muslim community, led notably by an earl of Mirpuri origin (from Pakistan), Lord Ahmed, reacted angrily. In Iran, where the original `fatwa’ had been issued by Khomeini himself in 1989, the knighthood for a man who had dared to blaspheme the Prophet and Islam in the `Satanic Verses,’ was denounced as a grave provocation.

It is in Pakistan, interestingly, that the protests have been loudest and shrillest. The religious affairs minister Mohammed Ejaz-ul Haq first declared it would provide new grist to the suicide bomber’s mill. But worse was to come. The Pakistan foreign office’s spokeswoman Tasneem Aslam has now said that Islamabad has taken up the matter with the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), an association of 56 Islamic countries which meets annually to discuss matters of importance to Muslims worldwide, including Kashmir.

Point is, in Salman Rushdie’s ``half-and-half’’ world, there has been more or less an equal but opposite reaction in the other half, that is in India. Apart from a lacklustre day-ban in Srinagar the other day, even the most extreme groupings on the Muslim religious right have largely left Rushdie alone.

Haji Yakub Qureshi, for instance, the BSP MLA who became a household word last year when he put a Rs 50 crore bounty on the head of the Danish cartoonists accused to have blasphemed Islam, has been totally quiet. Perhaps Qureshi’s realized that Mayawati’s politics – with whom he has merged his party – would not allow the trivialisation of such grave matters.

Qureshi, in fact, is the perfect Rushdie ``half and half’’ – he won from Meerut City in the recent UP elections and lost from… . Similarly, many Muslims say they have nothing against Salman Rushdie personally, and therefore his knighthood. However, `Satanic Verses’ had definitely offended their sensibilities. There was no need, for example, to have the women in the brothel (in the book) named after the Prophet’s wives.

Congress MP Salman Khurshid argues, however, that Indian Muslims have mostly moved on from 1989, when `Satanic Verses’ evoked large protests and import of the book was banned. Penguin India, which had already published a few thousand copies at the time was advised by Khushwant Singh not to distribute the book, for fear of offending Muslim sentiments. Penguin followed the advice.

Looking back at the Eighties, the public reaction to the `Satanic Verses’ was apiece with the temper of the times. Two years before in 1987, Rajiv Gandhi had succumbed to conservative Muslim wrath and sent the aging Shah Bano back to the Wakf Board, while exempting her husband from all responsibility after he divorced her. And when Martin Scorcese showed Jesus making love to Mary Magdalene in his `Last Temptation of Christ’ in 1988, India’s Christian community was successful in banning the film from India.

Those were the pre-Babri Masjid years, as Rajiv Gandhi declared a return of `ram rajya’, got the locks on the Masjid opened and conducted the `shilanyas’ or foundation stone-laying ceremony for a Ram temple in Ayodhya. Two days before the mosque was demolished on December 6, 1992, Mushirul Hasan, leading liberal intellectual and pro-vice-chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia, was badly assaulted inside his own university, for defending Salman Rushdie’s right to freedom of speech. After December 6, the BJP’s rise and rise to political stardom was unstoppable.

Former diplomat and currently chairman of the National Minorities Commission Hamid Ansari, feels the reason for the absence of protest in India today is because ``sense is beginning to dawn upon many Muslims that they need not take another person’s word for something they hold dear, that they should be and are more concerned about substantive things.’’

Sociologist Ashis Nandy, arguing that the protests even in 1989 were largely engineered, pointed out that ``you cant make the same soufflé rise again and again. Against all laws of soufflé-making, you have made it rise once or twice, but people are a little tired now.’’

Both Nandy and Salman Khurshid debunked the freedom of speech argument that the Tony Blairites in England seem to hold so dear. According to Khurshid, `Satanic Verses’ was never banned in 1989, merely its import was banned. However, nobody ever went to court protesting their freedoms had been violated by not being able to read the book.

Unlike the time when Indira Gandhi’s lawyers protested against Rushdie’s use of the phrase, ``the female black spider’’ in `Midnight’s Children,’ that was meant to have allegorically insulted her. Rushdie not only apologised and deleted the phrase, but even settled out of court with her.

``It was the discreet manner in which the government dealt with the protests,’’ said Khurshid, ``that ensured there is little bad blood today. It’s the typical Indian way, agreeing a little bit with one side and a little bit with the other.’’

Asked why Pakistan, the other midnight child, had reacted to the knighthood in such a perverse way, Nandy felt the protests were ``entirely political.’’ Khurshid put it succinctly : ``In Pakistan, there is a restlessness, a certain helplessness, for other reasons. Whether it is the matter of the Chief Justice or whether General Musharraf should shed his uniform, there seems to be a search for causes.’’

In India on the other hand, there has been gratitude and appreciation that Sir Salman has helped put Saleem Sinai and others of his great Indian family on the world literature map.

Perhaps India’s simply repaying the compliment from `The Ground Beneath Her Feet, where the protagonist says : ``…India, my terra firma, my maelstrom, my cornucopia, my crowd…my fable, my father and my first great truth. India, fount of my imagination, source of my savagery, breaker of my heart…’’

In Salman Rushdie’s India, there is no place for either anger or betrayal.

ENDS