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Business News/ Opinion / Online Views/  What blocked the way for The Satanic Verses?
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What blocked the way for The Satanic Verses?

Rushdie has long held that there was much more to the novel than what is talked about, and he is right

In his recently-published memoir, Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie recounts the events that led the Indian government to ban the import of his novel, The Satanic Verses, into India in late 1988. Photo: Paul Hackett/Reuters (Paul Hackett/Reuters)Premium
In his recently-published memoir, Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie recounts the events that led the Indian government to ban the import of his novel, The Satanic Verses, into India in late 1988. Photo: Paul Hackett/Reuters
(Paul Hackett/Reuters)

In his recently-published memoir, Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie recounts the events that led the Indian government to ban the import of his novel, The Satanic Verses, into India in 1988. He is angry with Rajiv Gandhi for capitulating before fundamentalist pressure, although he now thinks his open letter criticizing Gandhi sounded “arrogant" when read today. He ridicules former foreign service officer Syed Shahabuddin, who, as a Rajya Sabha member, complained loudly against the novel, after reading excerpts in India Today. And he is hurt and disappointed with India Today itself, for publishing an article that he thinks set the tone of reactions that followed.

India Today got the advance copy of the novel because a few weeks before the article appeared, Madhu Jain, who was then at India Today and knew Rushdie well, was on vacation in London. When they met at his home, she saw the novel, and asked if she could read it. He did and, like any journalist would, she wanted to be the first to write about it. Upon her return to India, her editors suggested she reviewed it. Rushdie agreed; Jain also did a telephone interview with Rushdie.

What appeared in the magazine in its issue of 15 September, 1988, however, wasn’t a straightforward review. Besides the interview, it also carried selected excerpts from the novel, some of which were bound to be controversial, if read in isolation, without the full context. In a recent issue of Open, Jain writes: “Unfortunately, the editor of the books pages of the magazine at the time, who later went on to edit a national daily, plucked some of the more volatile extracts from the novel—about the Prophet’s wives—and inserted them in the book review."

In the memoir, Rushdie quotes short passages from the article, which all but imply that an explosive reaction to the novel was inevitable. Rushdie writes: “For many years afterwards, he (Rushdie) thought of this publication as the match that lit the fire. And certainly the magazine highlighted what came to be seen as the book’s ‘controversial’ aspects, using the headline ‘An unequivocal attack on religious fundamentalism’, which was the first of innumerable inaccurate descriptions of the book’s contents (...) The last sentence of the article, ‘The Satanic Verses is bound to trigger an avalanche of protests..’ was an open invitation for those protests to begin." Shahabuddin was eager to take up the challenge.

At one level, the India Today article was spot on. Reflecting on the episode later, Rushdie wrote: “Rereading the India Today piece many years later, in a calmer time, he could concede that the piece was fairer than the magazine’s headline writer had made it look, more balanced than its last sentence. Those who wished to be offended would have been offended anyway."

India Today’s senior editorial team of the magazine at that time comprised of hardened political journalists—Inderjit Badhwar, Prabhu Chawla and Dilip Bobb were joined by Shekhar Gupta, who had returned to Delhi after years spent reporting insurgencies in Punjab and Assam. They had honed their skills by writing extensively about politics, and saw many stories in political terms, trying to figure out real motives and speculating outcomes. They saw Rushdie’s novel for the political impact they anticipated it would unleash, and not for its literary value.

Indeed, in the comments section below Jain’s piece in Open magazine, Bobb wrote: “I was a senior editorial member of India Today then and party to the discussion on the book; we all felt that Rushdie had deliberately set out to create a controversy with the book, had pushed the envelope and only behaved the way he subsequently did after realizing the consequences. Most reviews in other publications said the same thing, but since India Today was the first, he blamed Madhu and the magazine."

Bobb’s words are instructive—that all editors felt that Rushdie had “deliberately set out to create controversy… and behaved the way he subsequently did after realizing the consequences." That’s an opinion, and in an earlier time, an editor like Suman Dubey or T.N. Ninan would have sent the copy back, asking “says who?" so that the reporter would have to get an expert express such an opinion.

The magazine’s reporters were smart, young, and bright, but they weren’t psychoanalysts. The line between expressing opinion, interpreting events, and reporting facts is a fine one. American newspapers often get it right; British newspapers are notoriously bad at that. India Today aspired towards the American practice. Modelled after Time, with its desk rewrite team and fact-checking (though not as in-depth as the American model in its heyday), India Today invested in its copy desk, and its editors could reshape a story, often challenging a reporter’s assumptions. Most Indian publications at that time (and many even now) allow facts and opinion to get blurred. But in this particular case, India Today overreached in suggesting what was “bound to trigger," even if later events vindicate the magazine because, as Rushdie notes, those who were going to feel offended, would have felt offended anyway.

Jain, Bobb, and other editors involved with the decisions were my colleagues at that time. I was a senior correspondent at India Today, based in Bombay, as the city was then known. Senior correspondent sounds like a swell title, but within the magazine, it was the bottom of the food chain. Besides, I was at its Bombay bureau, away from the headquarters at F-14, Connaught Place, where all important decisions were taken, including the length that stories deserved.

The import was banned by early October, and in its issue of 15 November (which hit the stands on 31 October), I wrote an editorial comment titled ‘Hypersensitive Reactions’, which condemned the government for the panic-stricken way it had acted against the novel. I was to write about the issue one more time in India Today—on 14 February, Ayatollah Khomeini declared his fatwa, and I was part of the team of correspondents assembled to write the cover story.

I spoke to several Muslim leaders and intellectuals in Bombay—none except one had read the novel; all of them wanted it banned. They all concluded the novel was incendiary—ironically, in Bradford, Muslims were burning the book; the book didn’t set anything afire, humans did. The critics were confusing the characters’ thoughts with the author’s. Two days before the issue was to go to press, a procession on Mohammed Ali Road turned violent, the police had opened fire, and several demonstrators had died. I rushed there, reporting the riot. (That issue went on to win an Asian award).

Rushdie has long held that there was much more to the novel, and he is right. A year earlier, in 1987, when I was an assistant editor at The Indian Post, I had interviewed Rushdie with Dina Vakil, who was at that time the Post’s roving national correspondent. To us, he had said that angels and devils were becoming confused ideas, and his novel (which he was then still writing) was about “how it’s very difficult to establish ideas of morality in a world which has become so uncertain that it is difficult to even agree on what is happening. When one can’t agree on a description of reality, it is very hard to agree on whether that reality is good or evil, right or wrong. Angels and devils are becoming confused ideas…what is supposed to be angelic often has disastrous results, and what is supposed to be demonic is quite often something with which one must have sympathy. It (the novel) is an attempt to come to grips with a sense of the crumbling moral fabric or at least for the reconstruction of old simplicities. It is also about the attempt of somebody like myself, who is basically a person without a formal religion, to make some kind of accommodation with the renewed force of religion in the world; what it means, what the religious experience is."

The novel that my magazine had described bore little resemblance to what I was expecting to read after what Rushdie had told us in our earlier interview. By late November, I had managed to get my copy of The Satanic Verses that a friend travelling to India had brought me. In it I found a far more complex novel, encompassing the immigrant’s life, the conflicting pulls of the mother country and the adopted land, the transformation of a city, visible and unseen, the hybridity of our lives, the birth of a religion, and our confused state, with a protagonist losing his mind and in his hallucinatory state imagining himself to be at the centre of the birth of a religion. It was a critique of Thatcherite Britain, of religious fundamentalism in India and in Britain, and there was this man who thought he had heard the word of God, and realized that “being God’s postman is no fun, yaar."

How does one encapsulate that in a quick review? By recognizing that it was written by a novelist, not a politician.

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Published: 08 Oct 2012, 11:49 AM IST
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