What did Rushdie mean and why?

Date: 17-08-1997 :: Pg: 33 :: Col: a

Salman Rushdie has taken a stand, this time as an editor of the Vintage Book of Indian Writing. Comparing across generations, he rejects some old writers "as not on par with the Indo-Anglian." But he goes on to attribute, that good writers may have been ill- served by the translators' inadequacies. It has nothing to do with quality; it has to do with historical placement and a host of other sensibilities, says RUKMINI BHAYA NAIR.

Webster was much possessed by death

And saw the skull beneath the skin

Breastless creatures underground

Lean backward with a lipless grin.

- T. S. Eliot, Whispers of Immortality

IN recent years as we know, Salman Rushdie has lived with death. Like Webster he confesses to a growing preoccupation with the skull beneath the skin. ``I have felt,'' he reports desolately, ``intimations of immortality. Three or four of my closest friends have died quite young at the age of fifty. It occurs to me that you don't need a fatwa to die. Cancer will do it.'' The Moor's Last Sigh,'' the fourth (and last?) of Rushdie's sub-continental tetralogy was written, self-avowedly, to record this `sense of an ending'

This is a novel in which many people do not live out the full span of their lives. What I tried to do was linguistically very bright. But it is true that underneath there is a darkness. How could one look at Ayodhya and the 1993 explosions in Mumbai, without a sense of tragedy? I have tried to understand the relation between people living together and such violence. It may be that civilisation, politeness, harmony - all that is surface and this violence is the essential truth about ourselves. We can't write Jane Austen novels anymore. It is because the world intrudes.

Yet, if the world intrudes upon us, some of us also have a knack of intruding upon the world. Rushdie has by now perfected this role of agent provocateur . Every now and then, he decides to take a Mephistophelean cat-walk among assorted communities of pigeons and watch the feathers fly. One such occasion is his recent appearance as editor of a Vintage collection of Indian Writing between 1947 and 1997. Rushdie's introduction to the Vintage volume, reproduced in The New Yorker, makes, on the face of it, the outrageous assertion that little written in the other languages of India post-Independence matches in literary merit the sudden glory of the `new' Indian English novel exemplified by Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh. Arundhati Roy et al.

Although Rushdie is careful to qualify the claim by admitting that his judgment could be skewed by the paucity of (good) translations, this is hardly enough of a sop. Ruffled feathers remain ruffled, bristles still bristle. And in all the rush of adrenalin, few stop to ask that simple question which the author of the offending Vintage piece tells us was put to him long ago by a student in Delhi after she'd read ``Midnight's Children.'' Mr. Rushdie, she asked, fundamentally, what's your point?

Fundamentally, what's your point, Mr. Rushdie? It is this query, suavely posed by Rushdie himself that I think we should be addressing, even as we swell with righteous indignation. What dark fears, what ``essential truths'' lurk beneath the ``linguistically bright veneer of provocation that the Vintage New Yorker essay offers? In the rest of this article, I shall try and develop a thesis concerning the stance that Salman Rushdie - always the coolest customer - has chosen to take towards what he calls the `vernacular' literatures of India in this symbolic fiftieth year of subcontinental freedom.

There are China watchers and bird watchers. I have been a Rushdie watcher ever since I first heard Rushdie read from ``Midnight's Children'' to a small audience in Cambridge nearly 15 years ago. At the time, I was struck by the contrast between the icy coldness of his personality and the wonderous ebullience of his prose. Rushdie was not so famous then and I was a fairly befuddled graduate student, but even then I grasped dimly that here was not just a writer with stupendous gifts but a man of vaulting Martovan ambition. Here was Faust. So when I read a few years later that one of Rushdie's publishers had said of him that were he to win the Nobel prize once, he would not be satisfied, he'd want to win it again, I was hardly surprised. If Rushdie were a cosmologist, I felt certain that he'd choose big bang theories of the origin of the universe over steady state ones.

It is against this background of years of awestruck Rushdie gazing that I analyse this latest explosion. We have so far read Rushdie as making a comparativist claim, namely that Indian English writers are better than writers in the other Indian languages. However, it is my belief that we might be guilty of some misprision here. In my opinion, Rushdie doesn't give a toss about how good or bad all that other `vernacular' writing is, While we may have concentrated our fishing in the troubled waters around this statement, I think it could well be a red herring.

What motivates Rushdie is a different anxiety altogether. Not comparison, but paternity is his suit. The critic Harold Bloom named this neuroses long ago. He called it ``the anxiety of influence.'' Beset in his fifties, by eroding thoughts of death - cancer will kill one if not a fatwa - an author seeks his literary heirs. He craves a secure place within `his tradition'. To achieve this, says Bloom in his heavy-handed Freudian fashion, a writer has to kill his father(s). I'd add that in this kinship paradigm of the Indian subcontinent, a writer has also to propitiate his mother(s) and be seen to gather his children around him in a grand familial gesture.

Let's begin with this last point The New Yorker issue carries a huge photograph of Rushdie dead centre with his young spawn gathered around. It is unmistakably a symbolic moment. To this lot Rushdie has, in that irksome bleeding hearts phrase, given voice. If Indian novelists in English now use the language with such Keatsian pleasure and chameleon ease, this is in no small measure due to the saurian wisdom with which Rushdie fashioned his own work in the early Eighties. No one in their right senses would deny this. So the Vintage anthology is in this sense a generational enterprise.

But surely Rushdie didn't have to ``silence'' the rest of the subcontinent in order to give voice to his own feelings of exhilaration at having produced so talented a brood? Yet, it is here precisely that we come to the slaughter of the fathers. Observe the sleight of hand that Rushdie performs in the Vintage essay. He names a host of possibles from P. V. Vijayan to Suryakand Tripathi to Suresh Joshi to Amrita Pritam and Ismat Chaugtai, but rejects them all as ``not on par with the Indo Anglian'' (Yes, I do realise that the last two on Rushdie's list are women, but doubt that it seriously affects my freudian thesis, since literary gender has never been isomorphic with sexual gender).

The problem is obvious, Rushdie is here comparing across generations, which constitutes very sloppy critical procedure indeed. Can Rushdie really expect father figures of Suryakant Tripathi vintage to compare with the post-modern cosmo-savvy of a Seth or a Ghosh? Naturally, these novelists are not `on par' in that odd golfing idiom chosen by Rushdie. It's nothing to do with quality - it's to do with historical placement, a range of concerns, a whole different sensibility. Rushdie is far too smart not to realise this. So what's his game? Well, it is that in one well-judged stroke, he gets rid of all older fathers, he speaks for all the subcontinent - and his audience ``out there'' in ``the West'' is too clueless on the whole, to care.

How about us on a travelling peninsula that is ever ramming into Asia and creating faultier and earthquakes? We care, but to us Rushdie explains his position with almost reasonableness. ``It is possible that good writers have been ill-served by their translators' inadequacies.'' Now, I don't buy this argument at all coming from Rushdie because it is shown up by the very next paragraph of his essay. ``Ironically'', Rushdie writes, ``the century before independence contains many vernacular-language writers who would merit a place in any anthology: besides Rabindranath Tagore, there are Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Dr. Muhammad Iqbal, etc., etc.'' Really? How did Rushdie fathom these writers would merit a place in any anthology?'' Hearsay?

It is common knowledge that Tagore's translations into English have been notoriously flawed and the same can be said of most other writers of that generation. They were certainly badly served by their translators' `inadequacies'. Try the original English translation of ``Gora'' rendered entirely by an anonymous translator. In translation ``Gora'' would probably come a poor second to ``The Legends of Khasak'', yet Rushdie lauds the earlier generation and dismisses O. V. Vijayan in favour of an unpublished Kiran Desai? For reasons of space, I here rest my case on Rushdie's patricidal intentions.As for mothers, the name ``Kiran Desai'' gives us a clue. Return to the family portrait in the New Yorker. There's only one person in it who belongs to a pre-Rushdie era, Anita Desai. And I ask quite seriously - would she have got in there if she had not produced a Rushdiesque daughter whose style, judging from the New Yorker extract, clearly owes more to him than to her? If we are to push the Oedipal thesis further, we could cite Rushdie's increasing awareness of the need to propitiate ``Mother India'. He wrote explicitly not so long ago.

In my view, the figure of the mother, both in Indian family life and the nature of the goddess in Hinduism ... form a very powerful nexus for all Indians, regardless of religion. The character in ``The Moor's Last Sigh'' who says, motherness is our biggest idea certainly speaks what I consider to be the truth. But I wanted a different sort of Mother India, different from a heroic peasant woman struggling against evil. I am a city boy. So I wanted my own sort of Mother India. This Mother India is metropolitan, sophisticated, noisy, angry and different.

Refashioning Mother India as a bitch-goddess is inspired. It creates exactly that ironic gap for post-Rushdie postcoloniality to manifest itself - the gap between the stodgy, unidimensional portrait of a traditional Mother India beloved of the early days of Nehruvian nationalism and the multivalent image of a mother whose wandering sons are as unpredictable and ambiguous as herself.

Guilt and more specifically the guilt of having exiled oneself from the motherland is obviously shared here. This is because the entire band of diasporic writers now become the errant sons of an equally errant mother. They do not need to be in her presence anymore - indeed cannot be, since she herself is fractured absence, unrecoverable as the palmsest portrait of the mother which appears as the central metaphor in The Moor. Oedipal postcolonials like Rushdie and his band of sassy children are therefore justified in reinventing Jocasta's image wherever they may wander through the metropolises of the world.

The imaging of the `creative' mother figure in Rushdie's work, particularly his last writings allows, I contend, a sort of exculpation of his positioning ``out of India''. It also provides evidence for my thesis that what Rushdie's New Yorker firecracker does is to defend strongly his own `outsider insider' contribution to the literary traditions of the subcontinent.

This is the main reason why he cannot tamely call his volume ``The Vintage Volume of Indian English Writings 1947-97,'' as some have suggested. What with Carribean English and Papua New Guinean English, Scottish English and dull old `English English' Rushdie would, I imagine, feel belittled if his novels were to be regarded as merely fashioning yet another rapidly mutating variety of the English language.

That would be equivalent to reducing it to a `vernacular' (in fact, it is precisely in this dialectal sense that for example, the ``Faber Book of Vernacular Verse'' uses the term). Rushdie regards himself, of course, in a much more spectacular light - and I have no hesitation in agreeing.

Rushdie is a truly great novelist - among the greatest this century has produced anywhere in the world. If he were to win the Nobel Prize twice he would probably deserve it. At the same time, he is ambitious, isolated and haunted by the spectre of his own death. It is in this perspective that his populist money- spinning, outreach Vintage production must be seen.

In itself, the Vintage edition is not much of a muchness. Rushdie may be a writer of genius but he lacks the self-effacing talent of an anthologist. Indeed, if one looks at Rushdie's list of Indian English writers (including the ones he mentions but rejects like Nirmal Verma for example) one may be forgiven for thinking that this anthology is as much a product of the labours of David Davidar and Penguin India during the past decade and perhaps a couple of other English language publishers - as of Rushdie's exertions. Its fiesty introduction apart, I'd say the Vintage book a la Salman smacks of sheer laziness.

Evidence of this laziness is found all over the place - particularly in the lapses of concentration that Rushdie suffers from. I've already mentioned some of these in connection with translation, the generation game and so forth.

Other contradictory positions have to do with Rushdie's heartfelt observations elsewhere and his cheerful overturning of them in this anthology. He declares, for instance, in the passage quoted at the beginning of this article that it has become impossible `to write Jane Austen novels anymore but includes Vikram Seth, whose ``Suitable Boy'' is arguably Jane Austenish in the extreme without qualm or explanation.

Or he mourns the coming of liberalisation with its concommitant political implications but fails to examine closely the uncomfortable allegation that the young Indian English writers whose works so delight him are direct and acquiescent beneficiaries of that same troubling globalisation.

Then, throughout the book, he equates writing more or less with prose, and then prose with the novel and finally the novel with the Indian English novel. These moves are, to say the least, disconcerting. They require far more explanation than Rushdie seems willing to provide, given that he's careless even about the political contours of `India' in the volume, including a token Sara Sulen from Pakistan but excluding Hanif Kureishi whose father was in fact `Indian'. One could go on.

Partly I guess, it's just a matter of pragmatics. The Vintage volume is something Rushdie has tossed off - his Comedy of Errors, not his Lear. Why then do we pay so much attention to this mere flutter of Rushdie's? It is not just its timing, although that famous enjambment of Rushdie's birth with freedom at midnight compels,

I suppose, some special attention this particular year. Nor is it that the fatwa against him still stirs us to pity and terror on Rushdie's behalf - we are too amnesiac and unforgiving a nation for that.Rather we have through a curious concatenation of circumstances, come to read this man's life as a text - whether as an anxiety-ridden Freudian text or a text of realpolitik or of mid-century middle-class ideology or what have you. Rushdie represents trouble in the collective literary unconscious of this nation. That is why we must value however much we disagree with it, his most recent polemic. For, our violent reactions to his opinion remind us that few, if any, celebrations are unproblematic in this year of fiftieth anniversary bashes.

Rushdie chooses to celebrate, in some far corner of the earth, the achievements of Indian English writing - what could be more innocuous - but immediately are summoned up feelings of ressentiment, rivalry, injustice, loss irritation and outrage.

This is obviously because we all implicitly believe that he revels in the cause of one group at the cost of the denigration of some other group(s). In his Vintage/New Yorker text Rushdie talks almost despite himself, such a language of oppositional interests. Trouble and belligerence are thereby signalled. Red danger signals flash, preternatural as blood.

Towards the beginning of this article, I quoted a long paragraph from Rushdie in which he says that one of his primary concerns is to understand the relation between people living together and the deadly violence they can exhibit towards each other. Read obliquely, the flashing provocative surface of the Vintage text conceals vital clues to the nature of this persisent self- reflexive violence that we practise - between generations, communities, languages. If, as Rushdie asserts this violence is indeed the essential truth about ourselves. To be discovered as our common national bond fifty years of Independence, then he has done us no disservice in bringing this terrfying fact once more to our, always distracted attention.