Bookless in Baghdad

by Shashi Tharoor

  To return, then, to Sonia Gandhi. Throughout its history the Congress Party has articulated and defended the idea that Indian nationalism is inclusive, tolerant, and pluralist, and that there are no acid tests of birth, religion, ethnicity, or even territory that disqualify one who wants to claim Indianness. As Ashutosh Varshney has pointed out, Sonia Gandhi “is an Indian — by her citizenship, by her act of living in India, and by the way she has adopted a new home. [A]n Indian is one who accepts the ethos of India.” Some, like the Samata Party spokeswoman, have claimed that Sonia “will never be able to fully understand the intricacies of our culture” because “cultural impulses are gained in the early stages of life.” This argument is preposterous, since some of the greatest experts on Indian culture, who have forgotten more than most Indians will ever know about Bharatiya Sanskriti — from A. L. Basham to Richard Lannoy to R. C. Zaehner — are foreigners. Mani Shankar Aiyar turns the absurd “cultural” argument on its head by pointing out that “it is a disrespect to the millennial traditions of India to question the credentials of a daughter-in-law.”

  Sonia Gandhi herself has made her own case: “Though born in a foreign land, I chose India as my country,” she points out. “I am Indian and shall remain so till my last breath. India is my motherland, dearer to me than my own life.” But Sonia Gandhi is not the issue. The real issue is whether we should let politicians decide who is qualified to be an authentic Indian.

  After the elections of 2004 Sonia Gandhi resolved the existential dilemma by winning election as the prime minister– designate of the ruling coalition and then renouncing the office in favor of another. The sight in May 2004 — in a country 82 percent Hindu — of a Roman Catholic leader (Sonia Gandhi) making way for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn in as prime minister by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam) caught the world's imagination and won its admiration. No strutting nationalist chauvinism could ever have accomplished for India's standing in the world what that one moment did — all the more so since it was not directed at the world. It was an affirmation of an ancient civilizational ethos in a new political era, a moment that could have been torn from Rushdie's pages.

  India has always proclaimed “unity in diversity,” the idea of one land embracing many. You can be fair-skinned, sari-wearing, and Italian-speaking, and you are not more foreign to my grandmother in Kerala than someone who is “wheatish-complexioned,” wears a salwar-kameez, and speaks Punjabi. Our nation absorbs both these types of people; both are equally “foreign” to some of us, equally Indian to us all. To start disqualifying Indian citizens from the privileges of Indianness is not just pernicious, it is an insult to the basic assumptions of Indian nationalism. An India that denies itself to some of us could end up being denied to all of us.

  So who is an Indian? Anyone who wants to be, and is qualified by residence, allegiance, or citizenship. My India, like Salman Rushdie's, has room enough for everyone. In The Moor's Last Sigh, Moor (Moraes Zogoiby, the novel's narrator), celebrating his Catholic mother and Jewish father (and so referring to himself as a “cathjew nut”), has a metaphorical role as a symbol of Rushdie's India, a “unifier of opposites, a standard-bearer of pluralism” who in his mother's last paintings descends into “a semi-allegorical figure of decay.” India is, as ever, not just a nation but a literary device, the intersection of the many strands of Rushdie's intellectual heritage — an eclectic palimpsest repeatedly painted over by history and myth, by colonial traders and settlers, by the English language, and by the tragic majesty of Islam, symbolized by the placing of the Alhambra on Bombay's Malabar Hill, the author's childhood address. The novel is suffused with nostalgia for an India much loved and, like King Boabdil's Granada, lost (at the time of its writing, it must have seemed irretrievably lost) to the exiled writer. The sultan in The Moor's Last Sigh weeps for the world he has given up, for the history he has betrayed, the tradition he has failed to defend; he sighs for a loss that is intensely personal and yet of far greater significance than his own person. In this novel Rushdie too, through his own moor, sighs upon his loss of the India he had known and loved and believed he might never be able to visit in safety again; but also for the greater loss of the secular, multireligious, pluriethnic India of which he has written with such passion and pride.

  That India, though, still exists; it has not yet fallen to the bombs and the bigotry of the chauvinists and corrupt opportunists this novel excoriates. We need not spend much time on them; as Rushdie wrote of a Bombay building populated by the nouveau riche: “Everest Vilas is twenty-nine stories high, but mercifully these are stories I do not need to tell.” The Indian idea — that people of every imaginable color, creed, caste, cuisine, and consonant can live and strive and triumph together in one gloriously mongrel nation — is more relevant than ever, and it has no abler advocate than Salman Rushdie. He has become, as much for his convictions as for his creativity, the finest English writer of India, and the most gifted reinventor of Indianness since Nehru. Perhaps, as Rushdie himself has written, “the only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame.”

  The “permeation of the real world by the fictional is a symptom of the moral decay of our post-millennial culture,” declaims the anonymous narrator of one of the stories in Rushdie's collection East, West. “There can be little doubt that a large majority of us opposes the free, unrestricted migration of imaginary beings into an already damaged reality, whose resources diminish by the day.” Rushdie's tongue is of course firmly in his cheek here, but it is the free, unrestricted migration of his imagination that can help heal the tragic damage done to the reality of Indianness — an Indianness that his writing so remarkably celebrates.

  III

  The Literary Life

  17

  Rushdie's Reappearance

  LITERARY FESTIVALS ARE RARELY NEWSWORTHY EVENTS; not real news, anyway. They are occasions for authors to get together, wallow in self-congratulation, and persuade themselves that they are performing a public service in the bargain. Writers come, confer, and consume, and literature serves only to provide a unifying purpose under the cover of which a good time is had by all. The emphasis is usually on conviviality, not controversy.

  A rare exception occurred, however, at the Sunday Times Hay-on-Wye Festival of Literature in 1992. Britain's premier literary event is actually more pleasant than most, a cheerful occasion set in the picturesque surroundings of the Welsh countryside. Hay-on-Wye nestles among rolling hills, a town of 5,000 which boasts a ruined castle, one first-class hotel — and thirty-four bookshops. And it was here that news was made when Salman Rushdie first emerged from hiding.

  I was there myself, to read from The Great Indian Novel and to participate in a panel discussion on Wodehouse and the English comic novel. On the afternoon in question the program announced a talk between Martin Amis, son of Kingsley (and reigning enfant terrible of British letters), and Israeli novelist David Grossman. The pairing was doubly intriguing, since Amis had attracted a great deal of criticism in Jewish circles for his last novel, Time's Arrow, a sort of deconstructionist view of the Holocaust whose narrative goes backward in time, like a film run the wrong way through the projector. The near-capacity crowd was thus looking forward to a literary exchange with sharp political overtones. They were to get one, but not quite in the way they expected.

  On the morning of the event, word went round the festival that the place was “crawling with Special Branch detectives.” Since Scotland Yard does not usually trouble itself with mere writers, speculation mounted. “I've heard the Israeli ambassador is coming,” one local announced authoritatively. Having been tipped off the previous day, it was all I could do to hold my tongue.

  At the appointed hour, Peter Florence, the young actor who runs the festival, stepped onto the stage. “I regret to announce,” he said, “that David Grossman cannot be with us today.” Murmurs of dismay filled the hall. “Martin Amis, however, is here. I wrote to him the other day to say that one could not ima
gine a British literary festival without him. The same is true, of course, of the author who is replacing David Grossman today — Salman Rushdie.”

  For one disbelieving moment there was an astonished silence. Rushdie had been in hiding for three years, with a price upon his head. Then, as Peter Florence's words sank in, a torrent of applause erupted. Rushdie and Amis walked onto the stage, clad — by bizarre coincidence — in identical khaki suits, intellectuals dressed for war. The audience gave them a standing ovation.

  The conversation that followed was enthralling for Rushdie's fans, though those who had kept close track of the Rushdie affair over the three years since a fatwa had taken his freedom away from him had heard or read much along the same lines. But there were still three things Rushdie said that were news to much of the audience, including me. First, he mentioned that a pirated Farsi translation of Shame had won a literary prize in Iran the year before Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa on The Satanic Verses. Second, Rushdie publicly recanted his Christmas 1990 reconversion to Islam in terms more explicit than I had heard before, saying it was his only regret, an insincere attempt to save his skin. Third, he moved away from the “I can't understand what the fuss is all about — this is only a novel” line that many Indians had seen as evidence of either disingenuousness or deracination. Instead, he admitted he had expected The Satanic Verses to provoke Muslims, to stimulate debate, even controversy; what he had not expected was the ultimate attempt to silence his apostasy, a sentence of death.

  This was a more credible line of defense than he has used in the past. “Shashi Tharoor knows,” he told his British audience, “that there are a couple of Muslim critics in India who'll attack me whatever I write. I expected that, and I expected to be able to respond to them, to engage in a public debate on their criticisms. I did not expect this.”

  Later, I asked Salman Rushdie whether the time had not come for Indians of his background — Indians, I dare say, like myself — to reclaim him for ourselves, to stop allowing him to be defined by his Western supporters. After all, he was preeminently the writer who had given voice to the sensibility of the secular urban subcontinental. What he stands for as the author of Midnight's Children alone should mean far more to us Indians than a couple of pages torn out of context from The Satanic Verses. How did he feel about the terms in which his supporters in the West have cast him — including as an excuse for bigoted attacks on Islam that, in happier times, he might have rejected? Had his feelings changed about his connection to the Indian constituency from which he had emerged?

  Rushdie answered the second question with a moving evocation of how much India, and Bombay in particular, meant to him and how much it hurt that he could not walk its streets again without fear of being lynched. In the process, he deftly sidestepped the first question. I thought it ungracious to insist upon an answer. A man in his position is grateful for his defenders; he cannot afford to be choosy about the terms of their defense.

  And so Salman Rushdie was whisked away by his police escort, a haunted symbol of Western literary freedom under assault from Oriental despotism, rather than the voice of the Muslim immigrant in the West that he had sought to be. Before he left, I shook his hand and wished him well. He thanked me for a letter of support I had sent him. I wanted to say I wished he would one day no longer need such support. But the words did not come. I hoped the day soon would.

  18

  Books and Botox

  AMERICANS, THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM HAS IT, don't read. At least not as much as they used to. Television, movies, computer games, the Internet — all have driven people away from books. And when they do read, it seems it's not literature they want. The best-seller lists are overflowing with diet books, books on self-improvement, books on how to play the dating game. The fiction lists seem to consist of nothing but steamy romances and formulaic thrillers. “Americans,” a British academic once growled to me, “don't know the difference between wanting to read a book and wanting a book to read.”

  So it was with decidedly mixed feelings that I found myself at what is billed as America's largest literary gathering, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, an annual event that overwhelms the University of California's UCLA campus on the last weekend in April. Could the home of Hollywood and Burbank, capital of the mass entertainment industry, better known for its trivial game shows and glittering but insubstantial soirées, truly celebrate something as solitary and unglamorous as reading?

  Apparently 400 authors and 250 exhibitors thought so. So did an astonishing 125,000 people who thronged the festival over the weekend to hear authors ranging from Salman Rushdie to Sharon Roan, author of Our Daughters’ Health. There were the usual readings and signings, including one tracing “The Evolution of a Book: From Inspiration to Publication.” There were discussions on topics from “Is Geography Fate? Reflections on the East,” featuring two British writers and your faithful correspondent, to “Do Books Have a Future?” (The answer was apparently a qualified yes.)

  But this being L.A., the truly Big Moment was an awards ceremony: the year's Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, from poetry to fiction. Entering from Sunset Boulevard, I couldn't help thinking of that other L.A. awards ceremony — the Oscars. But the invitation prosaically required “business attire,” and there wasn't a shimmering blond in sight. Instead of the collagen-enhanced, serenely Botoxed faces and figures that would be on hand to celebrate the silver screen, here we floated on a sea of wrinkles, furrowed brows, eyes narrowed from squinting at the page — or the computer monitor. Last year, author Frank McCourt had taken the mike to clamor for more cleavage at the event. It did not seem that he had got his way. Books and Botox, it seems, don't go together.

  Hollywood casts a long shadow, however: the director of the Book Prize turned out to be a film critic. A giant fake bookcase dominated the stage, framing a high-resolution television screen featuring the photos and book covers of short-listed nominees. As the prizes were announced, there was the inevitable fumbling with the envelope as tension mounted — then the sweet high of triumph. Gasps and shrieks rose from the audience, or at least that portion loyal to the winner, none louder than those greeting the winner of “Best Mystery / Thriller.” A spotlight plucked her from the applauding masses as she accepted embraces from family and friends, then strode briskly to the stage — our thrilled and mysterious laureate, a matronly figure in an unpretentious pantsuit.

  If that showed the limits of the Oscar parallel, the acceptance speeches were all too familiar. Fervent gratitude to editors, publishers, and publicists is, alas, no more exciting to hear than teary lists of thanks to producers, directors, and publicists. All hail the biography prizewinner whose entire remarks consisted of the sentence, “I will not start thanking people because I couldn't stop.” But then his book has a long list of acknowledgments.

  The book fair brought home a fact I'd long known but never fully appreciated. Americans are great at making occasions out of next to nothing; in literature as in life, presentation is as important as substance, and there's nothing worthwhile that couldn't be improved by better packaging. The great American tautology is probably, “You can't succeed if you're not promoted.” No writer is too eminent to need marketing, and no publicity is beneath a successful American writer. Serious novelists appear on the Today show to be quizzed about their lifestyles by interviewers who haven't cracked the covers of their books. The talk show hostess Oprah Winfrey can catapult an unknown into best-sellerdom with five minutes of breathless airtime. When the writer Jonathan Franzen was careless enough to express disdain for her taste, Oprah's decision to disinvite him became the major literary story of the month, eclipsing any headlines his actual appearance might have garnered.

  Perhaps that's the only way literature will survive in America. Amid the general atmosphere of celebration at the awards ceremony, Steve Wasserman of the Los Angeles Times, editor of what is perhaps the country's most cerebral book section, sounded a grim warning. The next day the San Francisco Chronicle wa
s to close its separate book review section, collapsing it into its entertainment section. The Boston Globe, despite appearing in a city famed for its fifty institutions of higher learning, was about to do the same. The San Jose Mercury, publishing in the heart of America's most prosperous area, Silicon Valley, had cut its book-review pages by a third. Even the venerable New York Times was to reduce the country's grandest and most widely read book review from thirty-six pages to thirty-two. And there was talk of making the New York Times Book Review more appealing to a general readership by requiring its editors to deign to notice popular fiction — the sort of books that regularly dominated the Book Review ’s best-seller lists but rarely commanded review space in its columns.