by Peter Watson
Not so in the stories of Salman Rushdie. There is nothing small about either his characters or his plots. His two best-known books, Midnight’s Children, 1981, and The Satanic Verses, 1988, are written in an exuberant, overflowing style, the images and metaphors and jokes billowing forth like the mushroom clouds of an atomic bomb.24 Rushdie’s relationship to his native India, and to the English language, is complex. His stories tell us that there are many Indias, enough of them grim, failing, divided. English at least offers the chance of overcoming the chronic divisions, without which failure cannot be conquered, and only by embarking on a fabulous journey of improbable fantasies can he hope to have what are in fact very direct messages swallowed. Midnight’s Children tells the story of Saleem Sinai, born at midnight on the day India achieved independence in 1947, one of 1,001 other children to be born at the same time. By virtue of this, all of them are given some magical property, and the closer their birth to midnight, when ‘the clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting,’ the stronger their magical power. Saleem has a very large nose, which grants him the ability to see ‘into the hearts and minds of men.’ His chief rival, Shiva, has bloated knees, meaning he has the power of war. The book is written mainly in the form of Saleem’s memoirs, but there is little in the way of traditional characterisation. Instead Rushdie gives us a teeming, tumbling narrative, juxtaposing day-to-day politics and private obsessions (one figure works on a documentary about life in a pickle factory), all intertwined with ever more fabulous metaphors and jokes and language constructions. The best and most terrible joke comes in the central scene where the two main characters discover that they have been swapped as babies. Rushdie is challenging the meaning of the most basic ideas – innocence, enchantment, nation, self, community. And, in so doing, independence. All this is done with an ‘elephantiasis’ of style that emulates the Indian oral storytellers of old, yet is as modern as it is reminiscent of Günther Grass and Gabriel García Márquez. Midnight’s Children is neither eastern nor western. That is the point, and the measure of its success.25
The theme of The Satanic Verses is migration, emigration, and the loss of faith it often brings about in the emigrant/immigrant.26 Faith, its loss, and the relation of faith to the secular life, the hole – the ‘God-shaped hole’ – at the centre of the once-faithful person, is the issue that, Rushdie has admitted, underpins the book.27 He deals with the issue also in a fabulous way. The book begins when two Indian actors, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, formerly Salahuddin Chamchawal, fall to earth after an Air India jumbo jet explodes 30,000 feet above the English Channel. This naturally evokes the memory of an actual explosion, of an Air India Boeing 747 off Ireland in 1985, blown up, it is believed, by Sikh terrorists in Canada.28 Farishta is the star of several Bombay ‘theological’ films and is so popular that for many an Indian he is divine. Saladin, on the other hand, is an Anglophile who has rejected India and lives in Britain doing voiceovers for television commercials, ‘impersonating packets of crisps, frozen peas, Ketchup bottles.’29 These two fall to earth in the company of airplane seats, drink carts, headsets, but land safely enough on a British beach. From then on, the book follows a series of interwoven plots, each more fantastic than the last. These episodes are never out of control, however, and Rushdie’s references make the book very rich for those who can decipher them. For example, Gibreel Farishta, in Urdu, means Gabriel Angel, making him in effect the archangel whom Islamic tradition regards as ‘“bringing down” the Qur’an from God to Muhammad.’ Saladin was also the great defender of mediaeval Islam against the Crusaders, who restored Sunni Islam to Egypt. Gibreel, learning Islam from his mother, encounters the notion of the Satanic Verses, in which the devil is understood to have inserted a sentence in the Qur’an, later withdrawn, but which nonetheless insinuates a sliver of religious doubt. Religious doubt, then, is at the very heart of Rushdie’s book. One may even say that it plays with the very idea of the devil, of the secular being the devil, certainly so far as the faithful are concerned. Essentially, throughout the interlocking narratives, Saladin is a sort of Iago to Gibreel’s Othello, ‘using the thousand and one voices of his advertising days.’ Under this onslaught, Gibreel is led astray, notably to a brothel, the ‘anti-Mosque’ in Malise Ruthven’s apt phrase, falling among people who blaspheme, not just in swear-words but in their criticisms of the Prophet’s actual behaviour (for example, Muhammad had more wives than strict Islamic law allowed). At every opportunity, therefore, The Satanic Verses skirts danger. It is certainly a challenging book. But can a book that explores blasphemy actually pursue that theme without being blasphemous? In exploring faith, Rushdie knew he had to deliberately provoke the faithful. At one point in the book, the Prophet issues a fatwa against an impious poet.30
Perhaps it was this above all which provoked the Islamic authorities. On 14 February 1989, Ruhollah Al-Musavi Al-Khomeini – better known as Ayatollah Khomeini, of Iran – issued a fatwa against the ‘apostasian’ book Satanic Verses: ‘In the name of God Almighty; there is only one God, to whom we shall all return; I would like to inform all the intrepid Muslims in the world that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses which has been compiled, printed and published against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, as well as those publishers who were aware of its contents, have been sentenced to death. I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, wherever they find them, so that no one will dare to insult the Islamic sanctions. Whoever is killed on this path will be regarded as a martyr, God willing. In addition, anyone who has access to the author of the book, but does not possess the power to execute him, should refer him to the people so that he may be punished for his actions. May God’s blessing be on you all.’31
Inside forty-eight hours, Rushdie and his wife had gone into hiding, where he would remain except for brief forays into the limelight, for nearly ten years. In subsequent months, the ‘Rushdie affair’ claimed many headlines. Muslims in Britain and elsewhere staged public burnings of the tide; ten thousand demonstrated against the book in Iran, and in Rushdie’s native Bombay ten people were killed when police opened fire on demonstrators.32 In all, twenty-one people died over The Satanic Verses, nineteen on the Indian subcontinent, two in Belgium.33
Like Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul’s novels – his later novels especially – generally concern people living outside their native context. He himself was born in Trinidad, a second-generation Indian, moved to England to attend Oxford, and has remained there ever since, except to research a remarkable series of travel books.
Naipaul is less concerned with faith than Rushdie, and has more in common with Anita Desai’s fascination with modernisation and technological change, though he uses this to reflect his preoccupation with the nature of freedom. A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) ostensibly follows the building of a house. At the same time Naipaul deconstructs Mr. Biswas himself.34 His facility for sign writing leads him out of the prison of poverty and into a marriage where he is trapped, but in a different way. Sign writing leads to other forms of writing, letters to his son mainly. As he discovers language, like a writer discovers language, so Biswas discovers another layer of freedom. But total freedom, Naipaul infers, is not only impossible but undesirable. Fulfilment comes from loving and being loved, a status Biswas achieves, but it is not freedom. In The Mimic Men (1968), the scene has shifted to England, not the dream England that a poor Trinidadian might conceive of but the drab, suburban England of the immigrant, with the endless fresh attempts to get going on a career, the chronic tiredness, and the poor sense of self that comprise modern city life.35 Again, freedom boils down to one struggle replacing another. The later books – In a Free State (1971), which won the Booker Prize, Guerrillas (1975), and A Bend in the River (1979) – are more nakedly political, juxtaposing political and private freedom in deliberately jarring ways.36 In the 1971 book, two white people, Linda and Bobby, drive back to their expats’ compound through a black African state laid low by civil war. Their politics differ
– Bobby is a liberal homosexual, Linda a bombastic right-winger. Naipaul is asking how they can enjoy so many freedoms at home when they can’t agree on anything. In the car, there is civil war between them.
In his films, Satyajit Ray (1921–1992) embodied a bit of Desai, a part of Narayan, and aspects of Rushdie and Naipul, and this is because he was more than a filmmaker. He was a commercial artist, a book designer, an author of children’s books and science fiction, and a celebrated musician. He began as a filmmaker when, in 1945, he was asked to illustrate a children’s version of a popular novel, Pather Panchali.37 Ray had the idea instead of turning the novel into a film; he set about it with no experience of filmmaking, trying his hand at weekends (it never had a proper script).38 The project took ten years and was only finished after Ray several times ran out of money, when the Bengali government stepped in with funds.39 Despite its unpropitious beginnings, the film was a triumph and became the first in a trilogy of trilogies, for which Ray became famous: the Apu Trilogy (Aparajito, 1956, with music by Ravi Shankar, and The World of Apu, 1960), the Awakening Woman trilogy (including, most notably, Charulata, ‘The Lonely Wife,’ 1964, still very popular), and a trilogy of ‘city’ films, which included The Middleman (1975).40 Ray’s films have also been described as a mixture of Henry James and Anton Chekhov, though they are marked by an emotional generosity that James, certainly, rarely showed. But the strength of Ray lies in his telling of ordinary stories (of a family trying to survive, in Pather; of an affair between a woman and her husband’s young cousin, in Charulata; of a businessman expected to provide a client with a woman in The Middleman) in extraordinary detail, lovingly observed. His biographer has pointed out that there are few, if any, villains in Ray’s world because he sees everyone’s point of view. Ray was just as aware of India’s failings as the other writers, but he seems to have been more comfortable with the contradictions.41
The award of the 1986 Nobel Prize for Literature to the Nigerian writer and dramatist Wole Soyinka, and then to the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, in 1991, the same year that Ben Okri, another Nigerian, won the Booker Prize, shows that African writing has at last been recognised by what we may call the Western literary ‘establishment.’ At the same time, contemporary African literature has nothing like the same following, worldwide, as does Indian or South American literature. In his Myth, Literature and the African World (1976), Soyinka, who had studied in Britain and read plays for the Royal Court Theatre, did his best to make many fellow writers more visible in a Western context.42
Soyinka was trying to do for literature what Basil Davidson had done for African archaeology, not just in the book referred to but in his own poetry and plays. In fact, it was Soyinka’s choice of literature – in particular theatre – that finally won the Nobel Prize for him, rather than for Chinua Achebe. (Achebe’s novel Anthills of the Savannah was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1987.) Soyinka was part of the generation of brilliant writers who studied at Ibadan University College in the period before independence, together with Cyprian Ekwensi, Christopher Okigbo, and John Pepper Clark, some of whose works he covered in Myth, Literature and the African World. In that book, his secondary aim, after rendering these writers visible to an international audience, was to do two things: first, to show black African literature as its own thing, having themes in common with other great literatures, and just as rich, complex and intelligent. At the same time, Soyinka, in discussing such entities as Duro Ladipo’s Yoruba plays, or Obotunde Ijimere’s Imprisonment of Obatala, or Ousmane Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood, stressed the particular strengths of African literature, the ways in which it differs from its Western counterparts.43 Here, he stresses the collective experience of ritual, the way the individualism of the West is alien to African experience. In the African social contract, community life comes first, and Soyinka explains the impact of ritual by analogy at one point, in order to bring home how vivid it is: ‘Let us say he [the protagonist in a story] is a tragic character: at the first sign of a check in the momentum of a tragic declamation, his audience becomes nervous for him, wondering – has he forgotten his line? Has he blacked out? Characters undertake acts on behalf of the community, and the welfare of the protagonist is inseparable from that of the total community.’44 Soyinka’s point is that whatever story is set out in African literature, the experience is different.
Soyinka is both a creative writer and a critic. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, literary and cultural criticism has been both exceptionally fertile and exceptionally controversial. This is particularly true of three areas, all related: postcolonial criticism, postmodern criticism, and the development of the discipline known as cultural studies.
In postcolonial criticism two figures stand out: Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. Across several works, but especially in Orientalism (1978), Covering Islam (1981), and ‘Orientalism Reconsidered’, (1986), Said, writing as a Palestinian academic on the faculty of Columbia University in New York, explored the way the Orient’ has been conceived in the West, especially since the beginning of ‘Oriental studies’ early in the nineteenth century.45 He examined the writings of scholars, politicians, novelists, and even painters, from Silvestre de Sacy, whose Chrestomathie arabe was published in 1806, through Gustave Flaubert, Arthur James Balfour, and T. E. Lawrence, right up to academic books published in the 1960s and 1970s. The jacket of his title shows a young boy, naked except for a large snake wrapped around him, standing on a carpet and entertaining a group of men, dark-skinned Arabs festooned in rifles and swords, lounging against a wall of tiles decorated with arabesques and Arabic script. A detail from Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Snake Charmer (1870), it illustrates Said’s argument exactly. For this is an imaginary Orient, a stereotypical Orient full of caricature and oversimplification. Said’s argument is that the intellectual history of Oriental studies, as practised in the West, has been corrupted by political power, that the very notion of ‘the Orient’ as a single entity is absurd and belittling of a huge region that contains many cultures, many religions, many ethnic groupings. In this way the world comes to be made up of two unequal halves, shaped by the unequal exchange rooted in political (imperial) power. There is, he says, an imaginative demonology of ‘the mysterious Orient’ in which the ‘Orientals’ are invariably lazy, deceitful, and irrational. Said shows that de Sacy was trying to put ‘Oriental studies’ on a par with Latin and Hellenistic studies, which helped produce the idea that the Orient was as homogeneous as classical Greece or Rome. In Madame Bovary, Emma pines for what, in her drab and harried bourgeois life, she does not have – ‘Oriental clichés: harems, princesses, princes, slaves, veils, dancing girls and boys, sherbets, ointments, and so on.’46 In Joseph Conrad’s Victory, he makes the heroine, Alma, irresistibly attractive to men – by the mid-nineteenth century, the name evoked dancers who were also prostitutes. But, Said reminds us, Alemah in Arabic means ‘learned woman’; it was the name used in Egyptian society for women who were accomplished reciters of poetry. Even in recent times, says Said, especially since the Arab-Israeli wars, the situation has hardly improved. He quotes a 1972 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry in which an essay entitled ‘The Arab World’ was published by a retired member of the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Intelligence. In four pages, the author provides a psychological portrait of more than 100 million people, across 1,300 years, using exactly four sources: two books, and two newspaper articles.47 Said stresses the sheer preposterousness of such an exercise, calls for a greater understanding of ‘Oriental’ literatures (which he shows to be sadly lacking in Oriental departments in Western universities) and allies himself with Clifford Geertz’s approach to anthropology and international study, in particular his notion of ‘thick description.’48 As with the views of Martin Bernal on the African origins of classical civilisation discussed in the next chapter, Said’s arguments have been fiercely contested by distinguished orientalists such as Albert Hourani.
As a critic, an Indian, and a woman,
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has become one of the more prominent postcolonial writers, perhaps most influential as one of the editors of the celebrated journal Subaltern Studies. This word, subaltern, neatly ironical, refers to that low rank of the army, especially the Imperial Army of Britain, which was subordinate to the officer class – so low, in fact, that if a subaltern wanted to speak, he (always a he) had to ask permission. Subaltern studies is a variety of historiography that is frankly revisionist, seeking to provide an alternative history of India, a new voice somewhat analogous to the British Marxist historians, retelling the story ‘from the bottom up.’ Gayatri Spivak, who like Rushdie, Desai, and so many other Indian intellectuals, divides her time between India and the West, combines an essentially feminist view of the world with neo-Marxist flavouring derived from Derrida and Foucault.49 The chief achievement of this group has been, first, gaining access to the raw material of the Raj, without which no revision would have been possible, and second, confronting what many have regarded as the failure of Indian culture to hitherto produce a rival system to the British one.50 In historiography, for example, subaltern scholars have revisited a number of so-called mutinies against the British when, according to the imperial accounts, ‘bands’ of ‘fanatics’ rose up and were defeated.51 These are now explained in terms of contemporaneous religious beliefs, marriage/sexual practices, and the economic needs of empire. Five volumes of Subaltern Studies were published in the 1980s, to great acclaim among scholars, providing an alternative historiography to what is now called colonialist knowledge.52