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The New Yorker 06/23/97 Life and Letters: Damme, This Is the Oriental Scene for You! Salman Rushdie
What follows is an excerpt from "Damme, This Is the Oriental Scene for You!," by Salman Rushdie. It appears in the June 23 and June 30, 1997, issue of The New Yorker.
Copyright 1997 All Rights Reserved.
Life and Letters
I once gave a reading to a gathering of university students in Delhi, and when I'd finished a young woman put up her hand. "Mr. Rushdie, I read through your novel 'Midnight's Children,' " she said. "It is a very long book, but never mind, I read it through. And the question I want to ask you is this: Fundamentally, what's your point?" Before I could attempt an answer, she spoke again: "Oh, I know what you're going to say. You're going to say that the whole effort, from cover to cover--that is the point of the exercise. Isn't that what you were going to say?" "Something like that, perhaps," I got out. She snorted. "It won't do." "Please," I begged. "Do I have to have just one point?" "Fundamentally," she said, with impressive firmness, "yes." Contemporary Indian literature remains largely unknown in the United States, in spite of its considerable present-day energy and diversity. The few writers who have made an impression (R. K. Narayan, Vikram Seth) are inevitably read in a kind of literary isolation: texts without context. Some writers of Indian descent, such as V. S. Naipaul and Bharati Mukherjee, reject the ethnic label "Indian writers," perhaps in an effort to place themselves in other, better-understood literary contexts. Mukherjee sees herself nowadays as an American writer, while Naipaul would perhaps prefer to be read as an artist from nowhere and everywhere. Indians--and, following the partition of the subcontinent almost fifty years ago, one should also say Pakistanis--have long been migrants, seeking their fortunes in Africa, Australia, Britain, the Caribbean, and America, and this diaspora has produced many writers who lay claim to an excess of roots: writers like the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali, whose verses look toward Srinagar from Amherst, Massachusetts, by way of other catastrophes. He writes: what else besides God disappears at the altar? O Kashmir, Armenia once vanished. Words are nothing, just rumors--like roses--to embellish a slaughter. How, then, is one to make any simple, summarizing statement--"Fundamentally, what's your point?"--about so multiform a literature, hailing from that huge crowd of a country (close to a billion people at the last count), that vast, metamorphic, continent-size culture, which feels, both to Indians and to visitors, like a non-stop assault on the senses, the emotions, the imagination, and the spirit? Put the Indian subcontinent in the Atlantic Ocean and it would reach from Europe to America; put it together with China and you've got almost half the population of the world. These days, new Indian writers seem to emerge every few weeks. Their work is as polymorphous as the place. The approaching fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence is a useful pretext for a survey of half a century of postliberation writing. For many months now, I have been reading my way through this literature, and my Delhi interrogator may be pleased to hear that the experience has indeed led me to a single--unexpected and profoundly ironic--conclusion.
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