Web Exclusive: Salman Rushdie, booking the Booker again

THE RUSH WON'T DIE: The writer has almost become a caricature of his own self.

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It was a halcyon afternoon with sunny, azure skies, the kind of day made to celebrate when I first met Salman Rushdie. The year, 1983. Eager eyed, fresh from my reading of the tour de force, the magnum opus that I had been two years too late in discovering, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

But, when the book came into my 'readerly' life in 1982, just when I had joined an MA in English at University of Delhi, I was--despite my three years of training at the BA English Honours, or possibly because of it—totally unprepared for it.

Having been trained to see English literature as one deriving only from Britain where the writers were all Anglo-Saxon, white, very often Londoners, or, at a pinch, ancient Greek and Roman, writers of epics and high tragedy, I knew “English” literature only that. And then I dove into the first page of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and like millions of awe-stricken readers across the blue planet, I was transfixed, transformed, transposed.

I had never read anything like it: robust, fecund, with an unmatched linguistic dexterity.

For the first fifty pages, I still recall, I read it in a state of bemused unbelief, unable to quite grasp what was the manner of this beast that I was suddenly wrestling with and then came that moment in which I knew that I had encountered a master storyteller, a man with a vast imagination who had crafted an utterly original novel.

To follow that came the meeting with him a year later, when on the aforementioned golden December day, hailed as a warrior who took on the might of the British intellectual empire, he came in to read and chat with some of us students in a dingy, damp room at the Faculty of Arts, Delhi University.

He was urbane, unfailingly courteous, and kind in responding to our enthusiastic but oft misguided queries about his life and his work. He also had us spellbound as he wove the magic of a short story set in Kashmir, a story I much later understood to be the heart of one of his most magical novels—Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

It is very difficult today when Rushdie is now seen as a fallen giant or a lesser writer to recall the colossus that he was for much of the 1980s and even the early 1990s, a pre-fatwa Rushdie so to say.

Today with reams of newsprint, soundbytes and a slew of images of Rushdie and his latest amour, the writer has almost become a caricature of his own self. The same media that made him the new star in the firmament now often sees him as a gigantic black hole. Unfortunately, a task made much easier by Rushdie himself contributing hugely to making a mockery of his own capacities.

Having said that, however, there is no taking away from him the fact that he will always remain the defining voice for a generation of readers and writers in the twentieth century. There can only be an era called After Midnight’s Children. The booker of Bookers is a perfect testament to it.

(The author, Dr Anjana Sharma, is a Reader in Department of English, Delhi University.)