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The return of the native

Premen Addy

UNLIKE Prince William and other members of the British Royal family, Salman Rushdie's privacy requires no protection from the prying lenses of the paparazzi. He is, after all, a novelist and a media celebrity. Not from him raging complaints to the Press Council of indecent exposure. Newspapers, radio and television hang on his every word, and his glitzy social life, as changeable as the English weather in its revolving displays of glamorous partners, keeps gossip columnists happy and content. Selling an author does help in selling his books.

The market-place is where even the most devoted socialist, ecologist, and others of the radical chic fraternity like to do business. Never mind the legend, they are hard taskmasters and skilled horse traders who usually think nothing of changing life-lon g agents for quick fixers, if it means an extra brass farthing in the pocket.

Salman Rushdie, ever since he became a public personality, has laid claim to India as his homeland. He has expressed hurt that the Indian literati and chattering classes were insufficiently appreciative of his work and has long maintained that the Indian ban on The Satanic Verses was a crime of censorship for which the government of Rajiv Gandhi alone was responsible.

There was no understanding of Rajiv Gandhi's dilemma, no awareness that the publication of his contentious novel had led to riots by Muslim demonstrators in Mumbai resulting in a number of deaths from police firing. In a highly charged situation, would i ntellectual freedom pertaining to a single book prevail over considerations of what could follow from massive social unrest spreading to every corner of the land? There was no easy answer at the time, but pragmatism prevailed over counsels of perfection.

Mr. Rushdie, in a display of pharoanic wrath, denounced Rajiv Gandhi in an open letter, which the writer John Le Carre remarked, would have put to shame the most rabid Victorian imperialist for its discourtesy and offensiveness. No matter, Mr. Rushdie's concentrated self-contemplation has rarely left space for a reasoned contemplation of India's complex reality. He intoned continuously about the tyranny of Hindu fundamentalism and its oppression of Muslims and Sikhs. He sought a piteous escape from Iran ian fatwa sentencing him to death by announcing publicly that he would henceforward devote himself to what he described as ``Muslim causes''.

Which meant a stream of articles in The Independent on Israeli inequities against the Palestinians and Indian wrongdoing in Kashmir. Alas, such atonement was unacceptable to the ayatollahs in Tehran and the fatwa still called upon the faithful to execute Mr. Rushdie for blasphemy. That tale has yet to run its course, but Mr. Rushdie recanted once more, recognising his error to embrace religion, and opted instead to breath freely as an agnostic. All the while disillusionment with the land of his birth wa s deepening. His love affair with India was over, Mr. Rushdie pronounced, a year or two ago, with the finality of a disappointed entertainer.

Property, said French philosopher Proudhon, is theft. Maybe. But it is also a restorative, an elixir of hope and fulfillment. It brings greenery to the fading branches of a family tree. Mr. Rushdie's rebirth as a lover of India followed in the wake of hi s successful claim to a family property in Solan, near Shimla. The state authorities were planning to take it over and Mr. Rushdie contested their right to do so in a seven-year struggle through the courts.

The ownership of the house and its land was rightfully his, was their final judgment. Accompanied by his son, Zafar, Salman Rusdhie returned recently to India in the style to which he has grown accustomed. The media dogged his footsteps, and the police a n unwelcome, if watchful eye to see that he came to no harm. The fatwa has never been officially withdrawn, whatever the private assurances of the Iranian regime. As a libertarian VIP Mr. Rushdie rebuked the police for their intrusiveness, no doubt a use ful talking point in the exalted salons of New York and London. Mr. Rushdie's Indian ``homecoming'' was recorded in diary form and published in three instalments by The Times.

There was some maudlin sentimentality about kissing the ground and the feel of India and its magic spell and much else besides; the lush vocabulary of which most Western Indophiles are broadly familiar. Mr. Rushdie paid a warm tribute to his lawyer Vijay Shankardass for fighting the good fight to right a wrong _ which was the government move to take possession of a property in the mistaken belief that its owners had migrated to Pakistan. It was, therefore, an evacuee holding that could be properly occup ied according to the law.

Indeed, the Bombay-based Rushdies had moved to Karachi in the mid-1950s when the celebrated Salman was in shorts, aged 8-9. Of this there was no mention in his entry; he merely noted indignantly that he was in possession of an Indian passport which he ex changed years later for a British one. He was, thus, being economical with the truth when revealing the whole truth would have reflected less poorly on the State government's motives in wishing to occupy his family estate.

Then followed this entry. ``A little ducking and swerving in the grounds to dodge the BJP-wallahs...Alas, I am not here as observer but also as observed, and I musn't fall into the trap of looking like the BJP's man. A handshake which would certainly be photographed is worth a little fancy footwork to avoid.''

How double-tongued and conceited. Mr. Rushdie thought nothing of defiling his moral purity when he accepted his Indian visa from the selfsame BJP government he affects to despise. Photocall opportunities with Mr. Rushdie are unlikely to further the BJP's hold on power. It is a delusion of surreal proportions to suppose that he matters at all to India's teeming millions, it is no different from the Tory tabloid press which once complained that the Queen by giving her traditional Christmas day address to the Commonwealth from the grounds of Rashtrapati Bhavan in Delhi was helping the dreaded Indira Gandhi to win a general election.

There are no limits to absurdity, no barriers of race or ethnicity or political correctness or heresy to block comedy performed as sacred theatre. Mr. Rushdie's conceit carries the same weight as Tory hubris redolent of the high noon of empire. A sizeabl e section of the Indian electorate voted the BJP to power in a free and fair election. Mr. Rushdie in his dramatic rediscovery of India would have recognised this, if his deepest instincts were democratic.

To accord a measure of respect to those with whom you disagree is surely a mark of civility without which there can be no rule of law and hence no civilised society. Mindless militancy and self-righteous posturing make as much sense as the sounds of an i nebriated drummer in a rock band. They numb the mind and offend the soul.

Mr. Rushdie in radical, anti-BJP mode requires some stopping. ``Unlike V. S. Naipaul (who is in India, I gather), I do not see the rise of Hindu nationalism as a great outpouring of India's creative spirit. I see it as a negation of the India I grew up i n, as the triumph of sectarianism over secularism, of hatred over love.''

This was a cheap shot. Mr. Naipaul's view of Indian developments has a clarity of vision and moral integrity befitting one of the greatest living writers in the English language. To vulgarise him, to suggest that he is sectarian and thus less enlightened than the pious, strutting Mr. Rushdie is beneath contempt. Do people read to encounter themselves, to be soothed by the familiar not to apprehend ways of seeing not their own? Is the imagination to be discredited and mistrusted? Is the profound to be su spected of inauthenticity, the trivial accepted for its verifiable banal mutuality? Is the easy to be embraced? Are linguistic tricks and gyrations to be perceived as badges of originality?

Mr. Naipaul does not deal in the simplicities of conclusions but in disentangled thought expressed in translucent prose. An English critic writes: ``No one of Indian extraction, living in the intensified emotional India of deracination in Trinidad, could set aside a clear understanding of the shadows. Equally, no one much, at any rate in English, could express this understanding until Naipaul.''

Salman Rushdie's boast of the India he grew up in lasted all of nine years. The critical growing up took place in Pakistan and in Britain. Nostalgia has been known to play tricks with memory. As for his condemnation ``of hatred over love,'' this would ha ve carried conviction if Mr. Rushdie has shown some respect to India's foremost apostle of Love, Mahatma Gandhi. He used Richard Attenborough's eponymous film to mount an attack on Gandhiji, claiming in a Times review in the early-1980s that he had been accorded too exalted a role in the Indian freedom struggle, that the director had traduced history in so doing. This performance was repeated a decade and more later in the American Time magazine.

In its mid-April 1997 issue on 100 of the twentieth 20th century's great figures, Time, in its wisdom, asked Salman Rushdie, as an Indian, to write about Gandhiji. What followed was a slighting, mocking piece which few Indians would regard as other than defamatory. No one expected or wished for a panegyric, but no one wanted mockery refracted through frivolity either. The other contributors were conspicuously successful in maintaining a just balance about their subjects. Unlike Salman Rushdie, they took their personalities seriously. They were not seen as figures of fun.

Shortly after the appearance of Midnight's Children, which won him the Booker Prize and transformed him into a literary prince charming, Salman Rushdie was interviewed on BBC Television by Joan Bakewell, who asked him to explain the origin of Urdu. Came the bright reply that it was a language originating in Persia and introduced to India by the Mughals! The more generous among us may interpret this as a form of ``magic realism'' for which the fulgent Mr. Rushdie is famous. I chose from that day to take my small pinch of Rushdie with a large dose of salt.

(The author, a visiting tutor in Modern History at Kellog College, is editor of the London-based India Weekly.)