Between imagination and reality
MITA KAPUR
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Salman Rushdie, in India for the Jaipur Literary Festival, took time off to talk about his books and writing in general.
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There is no such thing as a writer without influence. Those influences are very important; they help you define yourself, with them and against them. As you write more, the influences fall off. When I was younger, I thought of Kundera, Calvino, Marquez — great writers of that period. Now, when I try to find out how to write what I want to, I think only about what I don't want to do.
`A marathon runner, not a sprinter': Rushdie feels more drawn to the novel form.
"PLEASE impress upon them that I'm not coming to India to sound off on whatever political topic they think will be juiciest. If they would like to talk to me about my work then I will do it. If not, no. I have been ambushed too often and I don't want to help them make a `hot copy' headline." But he did and how! The maverick in him surfaced freely, wickedly tongue-in-cheek.
Salman Rushdie stepped across the lines drawn around him in the past, he was in Jaipur "to relax and enjoy the festival". "People come to literature festivals to meet writers, don't stop them, or they might as well sit in their homes and read my books."
Soaking up the winter sun, planning his session, "let's make it fun for the audience", in the same moment, he read his son's sms, `how is the festival?' He chuckled, eyes glinting merrily, "I'll tell him it's a piece of shit." Bursting into laughter, he patted my hand, "Don't worry, I'm having a lovely time."
A creative risk
Midnight's Children caused an explosion. "After Grimus flopped, I'm proud that instead of doing something small and safe, I took on an even bigger creative risk to write this huge weird novel, which was not about Western experiences of India but about Indian experiences of India. It was ridiculously ambitious; the danger of falling flat on my face was gigantic. I took five and a half years to get that book right, to feel, `I think it's good. If people don't think this is good, then probably I don't know what a good book is and I should stop writing.' It got good reviews, sold well, it confirmed to me that I could write books — a huge relief! I'm not an idiot, an advertising copywriter trying to be a novelist. I'm actually a novelist! What was most important was the way in which it was received in India."
"Prizes are fine but they aren't in the end, the point. The point is to feel that you've done something that people value, it touches their lives, how people still read it." Translated into 42 languages, sold billions of copies, including large and healthy pirated versions, "the pirates were sending me greeting cards wishing me Eid Mubarak and Happy New Year — the pirates."
The celebrity status
Today, a writer has a larger than life celebrity quotient; it may distance him from the world. Rushdie laughed, "What aura, what status? There are a few writers who become very grand. Most writers aren't like that. Writing a novel is a very vulgar form — from the Latin word vulgous, for people. The novel is about how real people's lives are really led, what moves, inspires, damages them, what they fall in love with. It's about people and the real world as it really is, outside this absurd palace" (gesturing at the grand surroundings of the Rambagh Palace). You can't write novels in palaces like this one."
No wonder then, he tucked into a plate of spicy pao bhaji outside the Birla Mandir and got bhel packed to eat in his room later. He said, "If you're a serious writer, you can't withhold yourself from the world, you've got plunge into it, to get into as many corners as you can and see what's it like, into lives that are very different from your own."
Like the way he spent time in Kashmir's villages with the phad players when he was writing Shalimar. "I wouldn't recommend the fatwa for anybody but because of that period, I had to visit so many political corridors that I do know now how they look and operate. In Max's character, I tried to create a character of power because I'd met a lot of them. I could think about that world, not as a world I'd completely invent from scratch. As a writer you have to go into every door that opens."
To place a writer within the tradition of writing and to find oneself as an individual writer, is to start with building a "scaffold to launch a rocket. When the rocket takes off, the scaffolding falls away." As a writer, you try to find out what kind of writer you are and "how not to be other writers". The easiest way for writers is to lean too heavily on other writers they admire. "Everybody does that. There is no such thing as a writer without influence. Those influences are very important; they help you define yourself, with them and against them. As you write more, the influences fall off. When I was younger, I thought of Kundera, Calvino, Marquez — great writers of that period. Now, when I try to find out how to write what I want to, I think only about what I don't want to do. In the last couple of novels, there is much less magic realism. In Fury, there is a sci-fiction narrative and moments that are surreal, the novel otherwise occupies a realistic space."
A criticism that's levelled at Indian writers and writers of Indian origin is that they write about urban life. "That is a feeling I had too. Almost everything I'd written about India (until Shalimar the Clown) was urban. There is sense in this criticism because so much in India happens outside the cities. In Shalimar, I wrote about villages; it's not an urban novel and I'm glad to have been able to do that, to get out of the city. I felt it was something that was missing and needed to be addressed. I'm trying to see what have I not done that I'd like to do more of."
Indian writing
Explaining why he said the bulk of good Indian literature since Partition has been written in English, "if you look at the last 50 years of the Raj, there's any amount of great writing in Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Kannada, Urdu and very little in English. It wasn't in any sense a big language for literature in India. In the 50 years since Independence, the great phenomenon has been the explosion of English writing. There are still great writers in other languages, like Nirmal Verma and Mahashweta Devi but you can't deny that the biggest explosion in Indian writing in English has been a major transformation in literature. Truthfully, many will agree that it hasn't been a great period in Hindi literature. The new energy in Indian literature has been in English. This can be good or bad, I'm not saying which, it's just the most noticeable fact. To attack other languages wasn't the intention."
Recalling an essay he wrote for the Time on Gandhi, while we spoke of Rajmohan Gandhi's new book, Rushdie was "worried about the way in which people use Gandhi iconically in ways which are quite alien to him really. The attempt was to use him as a spiritual figure, not just a political figure. My interest — and the interest of the others writing about him — is to say that behind all that is a real person. Gandhi didn't lead a movement that defeated the British because he was holier than them. He defeated them because he was craftier than the British. The idea of demystification and humanisation was a good thing to do. Today we can say he had a love affair, which almost broke his marriage. If it had been written about 30 years ago, there would have been a storm. In the long run, its beneficial to say `this is not a God', but a `human being of greatness'."
Going back further in history, Rushdie thinks with Baburnama came the invention of a "form, a personal memoir, a truthful biography. A strange combination of a savage warlord and a contemplative man of refinement, Babur wrote simply, factually, without using flowery court language. It's still quite contemporary. The one bit that's missing is about the building of the Babri Masjid, strangely since what made Babur come back to the centre of the story was Ayodhya. Yet those one and a half years is not there in the manuscript."
Children's literature
To be a good writer, you have to find a way of being able to colour things without preconceptions, even as an adult. He wrote Haroun and the Sea of Stories when his son was 11. "When I gave him the draft to read, he said it `didn't have the jump', to catch a child's interest. I added the `jumps' and he gave me the nod. I was right in giving it to a child to read, he gave me genuine critical comment."
"This is a very rich age for children's literature. Many children's books like Alice in Wonderland have great adult appeal. When I was writing Haroun, there was a whole range of movies like "Star Wars" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark", which had huge adult audiences as well. If you can do it with movies, then why not with books? For Haroun, the plot landed in my lap. I knew the whole story; the difficulty was to find how exactly to pitch it. I leaned heavily on the fable, using language simply to express things that aren't simple."
Caught between imagination and reality, each novel comes to him differently. "I have quite a few short story ideas in my head," but being a "marathon runner, not a sprinter", Rushdie feels more drawn to the novel form. Not wanting to get totally into the festival circuit, "every now and then is fine, depending on where I am in the book cycle" but "I love coming back to India."
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