Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy 9781350094390, 9781350094420, 9781350094406

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SALMAN RUSHDIE AND THE GENESIS OF SECRECY

Also published by Bloomsbury A Mirror for Our Times: ‘The Rushdie Affair’ and the Future of Multiculturalism, Paul Weller Salman Rushdie: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. Robert Eaglestone and Martin McQuillan Salman Rushdie’s Cities: Reconfigurational Politics and the Contemporary Urban Imagination, Vassilena Parashkevova Salman Rushdie and Translation, Jenni Ramone

SALMAN RUSHDIE AND THE GENESIS OF SECRECY

Vijay Mishra

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition first published 2021 Copyright © Vijay Mishra, 2019 Vijay Mishra has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover illustration © Alice Marwick All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-9439-0 PB: 978-1-3502-1144-5 ePDF: 978-1-3500-9440-6 eBook: 978-1-3500-9441-3 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Three Generations My wife Nalini Our children Rohan and Paras Our grandchildren Anjali, Tara, Percy and Vivian How time has ticked a heaven round the stars – Dylan Thomas

CONTENTS Preface Acknowledgements PROLOGUE: ‘AND WHAT SO TEDIOUS AS A TWICE-TOLD TALE’

viii xii 1

Chapter 1 ARCHIVE FEVER: THE ‘BIOGRAFIEND’ AND THE GENESIS OF SECRECY

29

Chapter 2 MANUSCRIPTS IN THE ARCHIVE

53

Chapter 3 THE RIDDLE OF MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN: UNRAVELLING A TEXT

81

Chapter 4 THE AFFECTIVE TURN AND SALMAN RUSHDIE

121

Chapter 5 SALMAN RUSHDIE CINEMA AND BOLLYWOOD

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Chapter 6 ARCHIVAL MODERNISM

175

EPILOGUE: SALMAN RUSHDIE HUMANISM AND WORLD LITERATURE

201

Notes Bibliography Index

225 234 244

PREFACE There is much in postcolonial criticism that celebrates Rushdie’s hybridity, his use of a radically new style of English and his familiarity with the generic registers of Indian, Arabic and Persian literary forms. But Rushdie is most familiar with the grand narratives of the West and their pervasive power in the world literary imaginary. Beyond that, his corpus manifests, uneasily, what may be called a late modern orientalism – an orientalism drawn from a range of sources, both scholarly and popular. ‘The wisdom of the East is nonsense, but it went down well with girls’ we discover in incidental notes in the Emory Rushdie Archive. Except for his use of the Qur’ān and the Muslim commentarial traditions in The Satanic Verses, the tale of the Simurg (after Attar) in Grimus and the Ibn Rushd and Al Ghazali humanist debates in Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, the use of non-Western literary forms by Rushdie is more like a great Western writer’s selective and creative use of material in the non-realist tradition of the European novel. As seen in his eminently ‘prescriptive’ novel The Golden House, he is very much an English writer who understands the great Irish writers Joyce, Beckett and Sterne as well as the Spanish picaresque writers and their later Latin American and European adherents, especially Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass and Italo Calvino, and he is also fascinated by avant-garde European cinema. A good English public school education had also given him Shakespeare, and, later in life, he spent long hours reading all the great works of literature, because, as a history major at Cambridge, he had missed out on a rigorous training in the traditional Cambridge English curriculum – in those days commonly understood as ‘From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf ’. This is not an uncommon reading as Rushdie’s ‘anxieties of influence’ are openly admitted. In the notes in the Rushdie Emory Archive (62/31, p. 25), we read: [Mikhail] Bulgakov [The Master and Margarita] became my guide to The Satanic Verses, Rilke’s work on the Orpheus myth helped me with The Ground Beneath Her Feet while for Fury, to help me place Professor Solanka in New York, at a precise moment and in a precise social milieu, I read Balzac’s Eugenie Grandet, to see how he did the same thing for his eponymous heroine in another time and place.

In his autobiography (in the third person), Joseph Anton (2012), a long passage from Bulgakov is quoted as the epigraph to Part II ‘Manuscripts Don’t Burn’ (96), which is a line spoken by the Devil Woland in The Master and Margarita. Fury, of course, is not in the same league as Balzac’s masterpiece and Rushdie’s heroine never displays the same prolonged desire that one finds in Balzac’s heroine

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Eugénie for her cousin Charles, but the point about Rushdie’s Western leanings is nevertheless self-evident. This book addresses and answers (through carefully argued examples) Rushdie’s location within an essentially English–European sensibility and a contradictory orientalism which in the end, especially in his reading of Islam, also connects Rushdie with earlier European colonial and orientalist writers. The book begins with a Prologue which introduces Rushdie by reading him in his own archive. The Emory Rushdie Archive, however, is not simply a trove of self-aggrandizing or self-congratulatory material as Rushdie kept critical commentaries on himself as well. The narrative offered in the Prologue is aimed at problematizing ‘Salman Rushdie’ and shifting him away from celebratory ‘badging’: Rushdie as the exemplary postcolonial, multicultural, postmodern, magical realist writer. He may be all these, but the tradition within which he writes, the ideological views he holds and his mindset nonetheless, is thoroughly English-European, even where the spectres of the Latin American magic realists are most marked. As noted in the Prologue, this point is made by, unarguably, one of the finest readers of Rushdie, J. M. Coetzee – a writer lesser than Rushdie but possibly greater – in his very close reading of The Moor’s Last Sigh. Taking up Freud’s method of ‘anamnestic inquiry’, a method which takes us beyond the visible, beyond the manifest to uncover ‘what is buried’, Chapter 1 enters into the genesis of secrecy in Rushdie in the context of his engagement with the ‘satanic verses’. Joseph Anton provides one version of the genesis; this chapter explores the genesis with reference to what remains hidden by examining symptoms in the Archive that tell a slightly different tale. In this critical engagement the methodology captures something of the latent content of the material and enables the ‘biografiend’ to thematize the genesis of secrecy in ways different from how the author himself has constructed it. Important areas covered include the history of blasphemy (both Christian and Islamic), the Islamic sense of the mysterium tremendum, Rushdie’s ‘anxiety of influence’ with reference to Milton, Defoe, Blake and Voltaire, his ‘problematic’ orientalism and, more forthrightly, as the chapter argues, his conscious attempt to deconstruct the Qur’ān itself and the Islamic tradition much like Stephen’s retrospective history of the rewriting of the Abrahamic-Mosaic codes through the figure of Christ in the Acts of the Apostles. Historians speak of archival fidelity but the chapter argues that the latter is not a matter only of transcription – fidelity, that is, in the literal sense – but a matter also of the Freudian signature, the hidden lacuna which surfaces in the uncensored space of an archive. Chapter 2 opens with a straightforward but difficult question: How to theorize an author’s unpublished fair copies, and what is their literary standing? In textual criticism an ideal text (that is a critical edition) is one that replicates as ‘closely as the extant material allows’ (McKerrow 1939: 6) a fair copy made by the author. In this critical procedure, the existence of a fair copy in manuscript implies that it is the text by which the author wanted himself to be remembered. The typescripts of unpublished material by Salman Rushdie, which form the crux of this chapter, by contrast, are fair copies with no corresponding published texts. It follows that

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the primary use of manuscript material – that is, the construction of a critical edition by which the author wants himself to be remembered – is inoperative as there are no published versions which may be (re)edited in light of a fair copy in the Archive. One, therefore, turns to the second use of manuscript material in an author’s apprentice phase: unpublished (and perhaps even unpublishable) manuscripts that show the paths taken by a writer on the road to success. In the case of Salman Rushdie, that success came in 1981 with the publication of Midnight’s Children, unarguably one of the great novels in English in the second half of the long twentieth century. Three unpublished novels and two screenplays in the Archive form the substance of this chapter. The chapter examines their latent meanings and poses the question, ‘What is there in an archive which a “careful concealer” wants to keep secret?’ Chapter 3 examines the texts of Midnight’s Children as found in the Emory Rushdie Archive. In the Archive there are many more drafts and associated marginalia on Midnight’s Children than on any other work by the author. This chapter examines the early drafts of the novel, especially the transformation of the novel originally titled ‘Sinai’ and ‘Saleem’s Story’ into Midnight’s Children, the narrative forms Rushdie experiments with, the struggle to locate an internal reader/listener (‘Padma’) and his early flirtation with another intratextual reader, the woman Valmika. Echoing Scheherazade, the chapter makes the case that for Rushdie, too, to tell a story is to find meaning; to transform aesthetics into ideology makes art triumphant in its own right. That sense of triumphalism becomes a magnificent obsession in Rushdie as he continues to transform this, his seminal novel, into other genres. The chapter acknowledges the heterogeneous nature of this text, in fact, Rushdie’s fascination with it, through its stage and cinematic adaptations as well. Chapter 4 reads a feature that has been a foundational characteristic of the Rushdie aesthetic: the fact that language and its most complex instantiation, the literary work of art, are always aware of both the interdependence of intentional actions and motor or body movements and their incommensurability. Rushdie’s use of language certainly provides us with dramatic evidence of this insight embedded in language itself. The strong position of affect theorists is that affect and cognition are now dissociable when once they were not; the body itself is a meaning-making system. Rushdie’s conception of the work of art, as argued in this chapter, however, does not endorse totally this dissociation because, as we find in our Rushdie proof texts, the relationship between affect and object is reciprocal. Even as visceral intensities and the language of the body and emotion pervade the Rushdie text, intentionality is not totally dispensed with. It is as if intentional consciousness, the ideological, is somehow harnessed alongside the affective – an ‘immanent realism’ taken on as an alternative to phenomenological notions of intentionality, making consciousness a ‘more modest power’. Chapter 5 turns to Rushdie and Cinema. Film has been one of the great art forms for Rushdie – an art form to which he has returned in almost all of his works. It is also an art form that drew him to the more specialized art of screenplay writing and finally, in The Golden House, to novelistic representation as a shooting script

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where the subtext is principally European avant-garde cinema because the narrator is a budding filmmaker. When it comes to Indian cinema, he turns primarily to Bollywood or Hindi popular cinema. His interest in Bollywood has been discussed by a number of critics, but what has not been explained is the nature of the young Rushdie’s own connection with Indian Cinema – a form whose beginnings in India in 1913 with Dadasaheb Phalke’s silent film Raja Harishchandra is almost congruent with Dr Aziz’s return from Heidelberg in Midnight’s Children. Nor has any account been given on the impact of Bollywood cinema in his novelsin-manuscript. This chapter fills that gap through a careful reading of a fanzine (Filmfare) Rushdie would have read during his childhood in Bombay before leaving for England in 1961. The chapter therefore offers a schematic account of Filmfare (1952–61) because many of the references to Bollywood in his works may be traced back to films (and advertisements) in Filmfare. Chapter 6 of the book offers a close reading of The Ground Beneath Her Feet as an exercise in ‘archival modernism’. This reading empowers us to engage with Rushdie’s sense of modernity in a more global and transhistorical fashion. Years ago, in a Paris Review interview, Ezra Pound had spoken about the aesthetic design of The Cantos. His primary difficulty, he felt, was packaging six centuries of material that wasn’t in Divina Commedia. ‘The problem’, he continued, ‘was to build up a circle of reference – taking the modern mind to be the medieval mind with wash after wash of classical culture poured over it since the Renaissance.’ Building up a circle of reference necessitated understanding (if not mastering) of the glossatory techniques of the medieval moralizers. Taking up texts of the Orpheus tale, this chapter examines how Rushdie turns to a classic tale to read a moment in contemporary popular culture where a foundational myth of Death and Love functions both as a structural principle and as a recurring motif. Having explored Rushdie’s genesis of secrecy in all its forms, the Epilogue poses the following question: How can we theorize Rushdie as a great writer of world literature? Two strategies are employed. The first is an evaluation of Rushdie’s humanism in the context of Edward Said’s essay on humanism and democratic criticism. The second is a reading of Rushdie against the reflections on world literature by Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch and Franco Moretti. The proof texts with which I round off Rushdie’s European and Anglo-American lineages and theorize Rushdie within world literature are Fury, The Enchantress of Florence, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights and The Golden House. Throughout the book, the Emory Rushdie Archive provides supporting data. For ease of reference, the materials in the Archive are cited with reference to their box and folder numbers with descriptions of the folder and page numbers given only where necessary. Citations from the paper archive are therefore given as 163/15 (box number and folder number), redacted material, TS (typescript) and so on. The Digital Archive is spelt out in full.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work is an act of labour as well as an extension of studies in postcolonial and diaspora theory I have undertaken these past twenty years. This book would not have been possible without the very generous award of an Australia Research Council Professorial Fellowship. The generosity of the ARC has been overwhelming, and not necessarily deserved, because there are many better-qualified literary scholars who, given the chance, could have undertaken this project with better scholarly understanding of bibliography and textual criticism, especially of archival work. Support from two other quarters must be acknowledged too. The renowned Perth cardiologist Dr Krishna Somers endowed a Post-Doctoral Fellowship and, subsequently, a Lectureship in English and Postcolonial Literatures to cover my undergraduate teaching. Murdoch University has provided me with an exceptional environment for research and I wish to thank the dean and staff of the School of Arts for their care and generosity. Since the study has necessitated a complete and thorough reading of all available material in the Rushdie Emory Archive, without the help of the librarians of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library of Emory University and especially Kathy Shoemaker, this work would not have been possible. For permission to quote from the Emory Rushdie Archive I wish to thank Salman Rushdie. In writing this book, Salman Rushdie himself has been very helpful, both as a sounding board of my ideas and as a source of factual data. I have, however, used private discussions discreetly and only when they have helped our critical understanding of his works. A work that has taken so long to write (the original version was a very large book, parts of which have been published as a separate volume (Mishra 2018)) also required emotional support as well as academic encouragement. A number of my present and past colleagues have shown both faith in and respect of the work undertaken. Among them are Horst Ruthrof, Bob Hodge, Toby Miller, John Frow, Jenny de Reuck and Deborah Robertson. I have also had the good fortune to get the support of Sneja Gunew, Stephen Slemon, Steven C. Caton, Ana Mendes, Russell West-Pavlov, Makarand Paranjape, Harish Trivedi, Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn, Sudesh Mishra, Brij Lal, Ien Ang, Claire Chambers, Rachael Gimour, Neil Ten Kortenaar, John Cartner, Brett Nicholls, Vijay Devadas, David Wright, Kylie Mishra and David Meates. I thank Helen Gibson, humanities librarian of Murdoch University, who has invariably supported my requests for book acquisition and Jayne Horler, academic support officer in the School of Arts, for her help in formatting the typed chapters. I wish to thank, in particular, Jasmine Dean, whose work offered invaluable insights into Bollywood cinema of the fifties and early sixties and who has followed, critically, the development of this book from its inception. Memories of friendships that began in my youth have

Acknowledgements

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always reminded me of my humble origins as the grandson of late nineteenthcentury indentured labourers. In this context I wish to name Krishna Datt, Sachi Reddy, Som Prakash, Subramani, Aye Nu and my brother Hirday Mishra who have all inspired me in other ways. My sister Shiro Shankar died as I wrote the middle sections of this book. Her haunting presence affected the style of some of the personal memories that made their way into the book. Behind my brother and sister are the spectres of my parents Hari K and Lila W. Mishra who gave me the gift of fluency in Hindi/Urdu and its related dialects. I thank Russell West-Pavlov for inviting me to Tübingen, and the Master and Fellows of St Catherine’s College, Oxford, for the award of the Visiting Christensen Professorial Fellowship which enabled me to return to my alma mater and discuss my work with academics of the college. I would also like to thank the librarian of the Pune TV and Film Archive for access to back issues of film fanzines, notably Filmfare. I thank Dipesh Chakrabarty for his faith in my work. Celia Wallhead of the University of Granada and Deepika Bahri of Emory University provided me with invaluable material on Salman Rushdie. In addition, I wish to thank Deepika Bahri for facilitating my visits to Emory University. Parts of the book were delivered as lectures at Oxford, Manchester, Leeds, Northampton, Kingston (London), Emory, Lisbon, Tübingen, Frankfurt, Vienna, Wellington, Sydney, the Australian National University, the University of Technology, Sydney, the University of Western Sydney, the University of New South Wales, the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Mohanlal Sukhadia University, Murdoch University, Macquarie University, the University of the South Pacific, and La Trobe University. I want to thank Rajinder Dudrah, Andrew Teverson, Ana Mendes, Janet Wilson, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Graham Huggan, Elleke Boehmer, John Frow, Mridula Chakraborty, Makarand Paranjape, Pradeep Trikha, Christa Knellwolf, Frank Schulze-Engler, Douglas McNeill, Russell West-Pavlov, Devleena Ghosh, Sudesh Mishra, Debjani Ganguly, Deepika Bahri, James Donald and Anne Brewster for inviting me to deliver lectures on Salman Rushdie at the institutions noted above. I thank especially the former commissioning editor at Bloomsbury, Clara Herberg, the current editors David Avital and Lucy Brown, the copy editors and the three anonymous readers for their support and critical commentaries. I regret that in one instance I was not able to address all the criticisms of a reviewer because of our very different understanding of the use of archives and Rushdie’s literary antecedents. Disagreements, however, are in the nature of serious scholarship and have to be both addressed and acknowledged. In spite of the helpful advice of the readers of the manuscript and of the many friends and colleagues, there are bound to be errors and oversights in this book. For these I am solely responsible. Over the years fragments made their way into chapters in books edited by Abdulrazak Gurnah (Cambridge UP), Ulka Anjaria (Cambridge UP), Russell West-Pavlov (Cambridge UP), James Acheson (Edinburgh UP) and Scott Cowdell, Chris Fleming and Joel Hodge (Continuum). Sections have also appeared in Thesis 11, Textual Practice and The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. I thank the editors of these books and journals.

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The strength wanes, the eyes dim and one is uncertain of one’s powers – uncertain if indeed another difficult book can be written in one’s life time. This book is therefore dedicated to three generations: my wife Nalini, for her unwavering support, my children Rohan and Paras, who learnt to live with the monkish habits of their father, and my grandchildren Anjali, Tara, Percy and Vivian, who I hope will remember their Aja/Nana through his books. In the foundational epic of world literature, the Mahābhārata, an unusual claim is made: ‘yad iha asti tad anyatra/yad na iha asti na tat kvacit’ (‘whatever is here is found elsewhere, but what is not here is nowhere’) (I. 56. 34). This book on Rushdie would love to make that claim but can’t. I hope, though, that readers will see it as a good book, perhaps even a valuable and challenging study. Vijay Mishra Murdoch University August 2018

PROLOGUE: ‘AND WHAT SO TEDIOUS AS A TWICE-TOLD TALE’

At the end of Book XII of Homer’s Odyssey in Alexander Pope’s translation we find Ulysses telling King Alcinous, ‘Enough: in misery can words avail? / And what so tedious as a twice-told tale’. It is not that Ulysses is exasperated and does not wish to acknowledge King Alcinous’s hospitality; he is simply exhausted, tired and wishes to return to his beloved wife Penelope. He has retold his story at length – in fact in full five books to the king – and Ulysses’s surmise at the end of Book XII of the epic makes a valuable point: re-telling well-known life tales can be tedious. It is a cautionary and telling remark, which is why I turn to Salman Rushdie in his own Archive to write this Prologue.

Salman Rushdie in his Archive Salman Rushdie (born 19 June 1947) is both a great writer and an influential public intellectual. He has also been the centre of one of the more culturally sensitive, if not unnerving and divisive, debates about censorship, blasphemy and the relative autonomy of the work of art in the long twentieth century. In drama it was the play within a play; in scholarship it is the archive wherein one catches the conscience of the king. The Salman Rushdie papers and digital material were bought by Emory University, which in 2003 had bought the Ted Hughes papers for a reported $600,000, for an undisclosed sum in 2006.1 The British were, quite naturally, miffed and the British Library, while showing its approval that the Rushdie papers had been deposited in a publicly accessible institution, complained that they were not given the opportunity to discuss its acquisition. Additionally, some felt that although born in India Rushdie was a British writer, under British protection during the fatwa years (1989–98) at considerable cost to the tax payer, who achieved fame because of the Booker Prize for Midnight’s Children. Clearly, even in the case of Rushdie, money did come into the picture since he is on record as saying, ‘I don’t see why I should give them away … . It seemed to me quite reasonable that one should be paid’ (Cole 2006). During the final months of negotiation, James W. Wagner, the president of Emory University, offered Rushdie a five-year position as Distinguished Writer in Residence which involved a short six-week teaching stint in the spring term of each academic year. Salman Rushdie completed his initial five-year tenure as writer in residence in 2011.

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Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy

Once the deal was completed, it took Emory University archivists, librarians, editors and information technology experts over three years to order, classify and catalogue material in the 200 boxes and old computers which lay in a New York warehouse. When the Archive was officially installed on Thursday, 25 February 2010, Rushdie reflected briefly on the relationship between an author and his archive.2 Rushdie declared at the outset that he was never ‘archivally’ minded as he had thrown his working papers and peripheral material indiscriminately into boxes without any thought of returning to them. He noted that when the boxes were opened, he was alarmed to see his material, some of which ‘he couldn’t remember writing’, and he wasn’t too sure how much he could bear to look at his work being ‘exhumed, brought back to life’, although he added proper cataloguing has meant that writing an autobiography would be so much easier now, which is true as Joseph Anton, his autobiography as a third-person memoir, appeared in 2012. To Rushdie, though, an archive tells a reader what a writer did ‘on the way to other work … a means of getting from here to there’. Rushdie confessed, ‘To me the book at the end’ is the important thing, ‘the process is not very interesting’. In lectures and talks at Emory University he anecdotally noted the lack of interest in the processes of composition on the part of none other than Shakespeare himself, who left behind no autograph versions of his plays, let alone handwritten notes about their genesis. The Archive which was opened for public use on 26 February 2010, that is, a day after the installation, is housed in the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) of Emory University’s Robert W. Woodruff Library. In MARBL the ‘Salman Rushdie papers 1947–2008’ carry the manuscript collection number of 1,000. The hardcopies are described as ‘102.25 linear ft. (215 boxes) and 55 oversized papers (OP)’ and the overall Archive is divided into eleven collections or series with, where required, subseries within each series. The stemma, in reverse, may be reconstructed as folder→box→subseries→series→arch ive, with the folder being a kind of sub-arterial entry point for the selection of documents. Each box has a number of folders (or files) ranging from twenty-six (for boxes 42 and 44, for instance) to no more than six or seven depending upon the size and bulk of the material contained therein. Box 22, which deals with the author’s drafts and final near-proof copies of The Satanic Verses, for instance, is part of four boxes (21–24) in subseries 2.1 (‘Fiction, 1973–2006’, boxes 15–45). The number of files and their thematic unity is not a pregiven as the size of each box defines the number of folders in them so that the author’s copy typescript of the novel begins in folder 11 of box 21 and finishes in folder 3 of box 22. Such carryover is not uncommon in other jurisdictions too. Series 1: Series 2: Subseries 2.1: Subseries 2.2: Subseries 2.3: Subseries 2.4: Series 3:

Journals, appointment books, and notebooks, 1974–2003 Writings by Rushdie, 1964–2006 Fiction, 1973–2006 Non-fiction, 1981–2002 Scripts, 1984–2002 Other writings, 1964–2002 Writing by others, 1983–2005

Prologue Subseries 3.1: Subseries 3.2: Series 4: Series 5: Subseries 5.1: Subseries 5.2: Subseries 5.3: Subseries 5.4: Series 6: Series 7: Subseries 7.1: Subseries 7.2: Subseries 7.3: Subseries 7.4: Series 8: Subseries 8.1: Subseries 8.2: Subseries 8.3: Series 9: Series 10: Subseries 10.1: Subseries 10.2: Series 11:

3

Writings about Rushdie, 1983–2004 Other Writings, 1983–2005 Correspondence, 1974–2006 Personal papers, 1964–2005 Financial records, 1974–2005 Legal papers, 1976–2004 Other personal papers, 1964–2005 Family papers, 1984–2004 Subject files, 1976–2006 Photographs, circa 1947–2006 Salman Rushdie, circa 1960–2006 Other people and places, circa 1980–2000 Slides and negatives, 1972–1996 Family photographs, circa 1947–circa 2000 Printed material, 1980–2008 Printed material by Rushdie, 1980–2005 Printed material about Rushdie, 1975–2008 General printed material, 1982–2005 Memorabilia, 1982–1999 Audiovisual, 1981–2008 Audio recordings, 1986–2005 Video recordings, 1981–2008 Computer and related devices

Not all the series are open to researchers as restrictions apply. Complete restriction: Series 4: Subseries 5.1: Subseries 5.4: Subseries 7.4:

Correspondence, 1974–2006 Financial records, 1974–2005 Family papers, 1984–2004 Family photographs, circa 1947–circa 2000

Partial restriction: Series 1: Subseries 5.2: Subseries 5.3: Subseries 7.3:

Journals, appointment books, and notebooks, 1974–2003 Legal papers, 1976–2004 Other personal papers, 1964–2005 Slides and negatives, 1972–1996

At first sight the catalogue description points towards an old-fashioned archive classified along traditional generic or chronological principles until we come to Series 10 and 11. The presence of the latter two introduces a new element in the ‘consignation’ of the Archive and a researcher’s own capacity to engage with it. The Rushdie archive as it reached Emory was therefore a hybrid, meaning that Emory’s [Stuart A. Rose] Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) received not only one hundred linear feet of his paper material, including diaries, notebooks, library books, first-edition novels, notes scribbled on napkins, but also forty thousand files and eighteen gigabytes of data on a Mac desktop, three Mac laptops, and an external hard drive. (Loftus 2010: 23)

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Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy

The archiving of digital material marks a shift in cataloguing methodologies. Writers are now ‘born-digital’ in the sense that their literary life is preserved not on paper but on computers. Modern technology has made it possible for material in Series 11 (Computer and related devices) to be viewed as Rushdie himself viewed and worked on them. At Emory, Rushdie’s Apple computers were simulated into a PC so that even as they are located in another system, they function as if they were in their original habitat. Since turning digital on an early Mac (around 1990), much of Rushdie’s archival material – not only emails and notes but also first drafts of novels – no longer exists on paper. ‘Born-digital archives’ have, quite naturally, transformed not only the manner in which archives are catalogued and preserved but also how they are accessed, shared and exhibited, the way in which one engages with an interactive apparatus, and how a wholly new area of intellectual property and privacy may be addressed. As one of the archivists at Emory, Naomi Nelson, observed, ‘our challenge is how to bring all these records to life’ as institutions now bid not only for first editions but also for PCs and zip drives, the new depository of the copy-text and its variants. A tradition built around paper archives, the kind historically understood as the British–Continental tradition, is now undergoing a massive epistemic shift as an author’s digital archive places different demands on the scholar-critic. Where once variant readings in manuscripts and early editions required training in palaeography, water marks, the concept of a fair copy and the like, the challenge now is how to decipher e-manuscripts in early model computers, unreadable disks and outmoded programmes. With reference to a soiled Rushdie laptop, an archivist noted, ‘Rushdie’s archives include a laptop he had spilled soda on that didn’t appear to work anymore; the library’s experts were able to extract the information from it without even turning it on’ (Loftus 24). The reference here to information technology experts reminds us of the interdependency of the scholar and a skilled computer technocrat. Unlike the old scholar-critic whose scholarly repertoire included all the necessary skills (from languages to palaeography), the new scholar working with the born-digital is dependent on programmers and computer security experts. In the process of extracting data from Rushdie’s hard drives, the Emory computer engineers emulated Rushdie’s ‘working environment, creating a perfect duplicate that researchers could explore while safeguarding the original [because] … the imprint of the writer’s personality … lies within his computer’ (Loftus 25).3 The Rushdie Archive, however, is primarily a paper archive and to read it necessitates an understanding of the principles that shape the composition of the traditional archive. In his short but productive book Archive Fever (1996a), Derrida points to the Greek etymology of the word ‘archive’, ‘arkhē’, where it means both a beginning (where things commence) and the place of a command. The archive, then, is a law, a command, a directive, a control, a legislative requirement (which comes from a principal owner such as an archivist or librarian) as well as a place of the origin of knowledge, the normative definition of a repository. The archive is thus guarded as if under an ‘interdiction’ – to interpret, one has to abide by the law of the interpreters – and exists under something akin to a permanent ‘house arrest’,

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where the passage from the private to the public (‘which does not always mean from the secret to the nonsecret’ (3)) is in a sense institutionalized. At Emory three aspects of the archive – that the archive should be deposited somewhere, that it should be classified according to established generic and/or historical principles and that there should be a unity, system or synchrony governing an archive – come together as a normative principle of archive ‘consignation’. By and large the Emory archivists do not veer from these parameters even if the environment, the ecosystem or ‘biostructure’ of the archive, is now paper as well as digital.4 A degree of interdiction is always necessary because an archive begins as an autobiography. It is a body of material which a person has collected. He or she has made a selection over the years, trashing parts that should never be seen by others, and keeping those which may add to a writer’s standing in history. An archive thus is not like the Jewish Geniza5 where nothing ever was destroyed. An archive is selective both with respect to an author and an archivist or librarian. It is really an ‘autobiography’ from which we create a biography and in doing so attend to questions of intentionality, in the phenomenological sense, because here we keep in mind not simply conscious choice (I intend to expose such and such material) but a will or a volition, an intentional act which constructs the meaning of an intentional object. An archive establishes this singularity and quite often the subject of the archive himself returns to it to write his own autobiography, to turn the archive into an intentional object on which meaning is imposed. Such indeed is the case of Rushdie who was writing his biography from material not available to a reader even as I was writing this biographical fragment at Emory. The restrictions imposed on what may be read in the Rushdie Archive are linked to this: the author as the authorized biographer of himself has first access to all the material which even though was in his possession all along required archiving before any order could be imposed on it and before it could become accessible as a coherent and unified body of material.

Archival Memory To construct the man from the archival evidence – to tell, like Ulysses, the ‘tedious tale’ – necessitates a close reading of all available material in the archive. The Rushdie Archive is complex since, apart from unpublished manuscripts and a large body of material on Rushdie’s fatwa years, Rushdie himself has placed in it items such as photos, honorary degree certificates, cards, life memberships (one from the University of Liverpool Guild of Students (208/2)), theses (box 75) as well as a pair of large, brown-framed spectacles (208/1), the latter with one lens missing but with the case intact, which he wore while receiving the Booker Prize for Midnight’s Children. There is a linen marking kit with the initials ‘SR’ (208/3), a necklace with ‘Salman’ written on a grain of rice inside a liquid-filled bulb (208/4), a set of tarot cards (209/3), a watch with a leather strap, with no date dial or seconds hand (209/4), and a Salman Rushdie puzzle (208/5). There are also a number of newspaper clippings and reviews (such as that of Harrison Birtwistle’s

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Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy

opus The Mask of Orpheus (203/2)) primarily from English, American and Indian newspapers (203/5, 203/7). This kind of material – ephemera in scholarly terminology, perhaps even akin to ‘accidentals’ in a related critical discourse – reminds us that an archive remains alive: it has a body within it and any attempt to excavate meaning from it cannot dispense with this body as it flits in and out of both paper and digital archive. Throughout Rushdie sees himself as a chameleon, a word whose first syllable ‘cham’ also echoes the Urdu ‘śām’, meaning evening, but which in English means pretence (‘sham’). In 45/11 there are three sheets with the title, ‘The Expression of Migration and its Effects on a Sense of Self ’. In notes written for a lecture at a conference, he speaks about the use of the personal ‘I’ in his writings. The use, as he notes in the margins of the first of three sheets, emphasizes a ‘plural self ’ that he explores in his writings. ‘My identity crisis began late in life,’ he notes, ‘when young I never thought about it.’ Although the meaning of the split ‘I’ begins with Midnight’s Children, it was in Shame that the narrator becomes more ‘highly conscious of dislocation in the self ’: ‘I often think of the migrant sensibility as a heightened form of modernism,’ he writes. The migrant condition gives him a ‘triple heritage’ as he praises ‘hybridization’ even as ‘normals have a way of trying to wipe us out’. A different definition of home grows out of this experience. In 22/7 on a single sheet after acknowledging the role of Marianne Wiggins, his second wife, in helping to give The Satanic Verses a happy ending, Rushdie turns to Saladin’s ‘self-pitying cry about the loss of home home home’. He adds, Home doesn’t have to be some deep and abstract notion. It’s where you hang your hat; or, better, it’s where the bed of love is to be found.

Clearly the trauma of Indian partition lingered on. In a three-page typescript (48/7) titled ‘After Midnight: 40 years of Partition’ he reflects on the affects on him of his parents’ departure for Pakistan in 1964. At seventeen and studying in England, he did not want them to go. His parents had stayed on in India after the Partition. They had strong Kashmiri and Delhi roots going back centuries and in spite of the burning of his father’s warehouse in Delhi by extremist Hindu rioters (an episode captured in Midnight’s Children) his father had stayed on. And then in 1964, somewhat dramatically, his family had left their homeland. Traumatized as Rushdie was – the Partition he felt was ‘a grave mistake’ and may have been avoided had Gandhi toned down his ‘Hindu symbology and rhetoric’ – the move did give him ‘a gift’: I became one of the very few people of my generation with close personal knowledge of both countries. The gift was also, of course, a problem, it accentuated the divisions in myself. The idea of home has always, for me, been a complex one.

There was thus a constant tussle within him between his ‘Pakistani-ness’ (which effectively meant his ‘fondness of Muslim culture’) and his ‘Indian-ness’, which implied the acceptance of ‘a sort of plurality of self, a conglomerate self … of an

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Indian city boy’. There is, however, a conversation with John Haffenden (178/6; Literary Review, September 1983: 26–31) where his Pakistani experience is more generously expounded, My family migrated to Pakistan in 1964, when I was seventeen. I had come to School in 1961, but I went back for most of the holidays. … I was a complete Bombayite until I was seventeen. Karachi, I gradually got used to over many years; I have come to know it better and to feel more connected to it as a place … and there is the problem [in Karachi] of sexual segregation. (26)

But there is a failure, the failing of the city boy who, as noted in the one-page fragment ‘The Answer lies in the Soil’ (48/8), does ‘not understand the language of the soil, of the land except for marl and loam in preparation of cricket wickets and their effect on medium-quick seamers’. Failure to understand the soil has a positive turn because Rushdie can then critique the jus soli, the Law of the Soil, which in the Enoch Powell version of nationalism linked races to the soil on which they were born. And racism, Rushdie notes in another fragment (‘Ethnic Records’ 48/24), is as much a feature of language, itself born from and of the soil. The English language, whether in Prov. Brit. [Provincial Britain] or not, has long been suspected of containing an unfair bias against melanin, the pigment which, in high concentration, is at the bottom of that unsightly disorder of the skin known (coll.[ectively]) as blackness; it is almost superfluous to point out an equal and opposite – and therefore balancing – soft spot in the language for the pure, melanin-free white.

Photographs (most under an embargo and unused even in the writer’s own memoir) provide another entry point. The earliest available to all researchers in the Emory Archive is one of young Salman reading to his two younger sisters. He has the skin of a Kashmiri with eyes which, even then, looked a little on the lazy side. The boy Salman is nine or ten, the year probably 1956 or 1957. He is reading a children’s book with a mischievous gnomic dancer on the cover to his two sisters. In ‘The Courter’ (see Chapter 2) the photograph is described as follows: ‘a boy lying on a bed, flanked by his two small sisters, reading to them from “Peter Pan”’. The sisters, one Sameen, with hair carefully combed and tied with a ribbon, the other, the younger Nevid, with bushy eyebrows and dishevelled hair (yet to be dried, it seems, by their ayah Mary Menezes), are totally engrossed. (A third sister Nabeelah or Guljun arrives, in 1962, after Rushdie leaves for England.) The photo says a lot about the children’s upbringing: early familiarity with the English language, Western dress as well as looks and an air of excitement for the book being read in a bedroom of the Rushdie household, Windsor Villa, bought by Anis Ahmed Rushdie when they moved to Bombay from Delhi in the mid-forties. The villa was one of four whose names captured an imperial legacy: Windsor, Glamis, Sandringham and Balmoral (renamed in Midnight’s Children as Buckingham, Sans Souci, Escorial and Versailles).

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Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy

There are other photographs in the Archive open to a reader: the young Salman in suit and tie with his father taken in the early 1950s, Rushdie with Günter Grass and Nadine Gordimer (163/15), with Faye Dunaway (164/2), with Padma Lakshmi (163/25), and with Bhupen Khakar (165/19) whose portrait of Rushdie is now in the National Portrait Gallery (1995). But the most moving photo is a black-and-white photo of a frail Goanese woman in a black overcoat clutching a black purse. The woman’s name is Mary Menezes and the address given at the back is c/- Mrs F. D’Melo, Hussaina Mansions, Block 2, Ground Floor, C.S.T. Road, Kurla, Bombay, India. The photo is undated but is clearly sent to Salman Rushdie sometime after the success of Midnight’s Children. Mary Menezes, Salman’s ayah or nanny, is fondly remembered by Rushdie as ‘my second mother, who … always called me her son … [but] she was illiterate, even though she spoke seven or eight languages’ (Rushdie 2006: xiii). On his birthday (19 June 1990), a year after the fatwa, he received a birthday card from Mary Menezes, who sent it to him perhaps unaware of his dire circumstance, and clearly written by someone else. 19/6/1990 My dearest Sal How are you? I remembered your birthday on 19th June and so I am sending you this card. How is your health now? I have been continuously praying for you, for your well being. Now I am 86 years old. Please write to me sometimes and if possible send me some money, for which I will be very greatful [sic] to you. May God bless you and keep you happy. Your loving aya Mary C-21 Gee See Apts Vidyanagri Marg Kalina Bombay 400 098

The young boy in the photograph reading to his two sisters attends the prestigious Cathedral and John Connon Boys’ High School in the Fort district of Bombay run under the auspices of the Anglo-Scottish Education Society, a fact mentioned in the unpublished ‘Madame Rama’ (revised text 1976, 44/13–14, p. 16). He has been a student there since 1954. He sits for the Rugby entrance examination, passes it and gains entry to this exclusive English school in 1961 at the age of thirteen. In the school annual magazine, The Borderers (December 1961: 13), the principal Mr B. Gunnery notes in his annual principal’s report: Salmon [sic] Rushdie from the Boys’ School passed third into Rugby School in the November Common entrance. This in its way is as good a feat, as Rugby

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undoubtedly is one of the half dozen English schools hardest to get into and Rushdie would have been up against many carefully coached and clever boys.

His school days will be remembered in Midnight’s Children and recalled in essays and fragments in the Archive. It seems he wrote his first short story at school in Bombay but it is now lost. There is a note dated ‘March 26, 1992’ (48/14) in which he says that he wrote his ‘first story at the age of ten; its title was “Over the Rainbow”’. He adds, It amounted to a dozen or so pages … typed … lost … shortly before his death in 1987 my father claimed to have found … a copy … but he … never produced it. (Ellipses in the text)

What is not lost is his limerick in the school annual magazine, The Borderers (December 1959: 72) – his first published work. He is in Class VIII-A, the ‘A’ indicating that this is the superior Class 8 (the final primary year) in the old colonial educational system used in India to this day. To a very wise man was once said, ‘I bet you can’t stand on your head.’ When he said, ‘Yes, I can!’ They said, ‘Prove it, man!’ So he did it and promptly fell dead!

When not at school the young Salman played with his friends, went to Saturday afternoon matinees to escape the Bombay afternoon heat, overheard discussions with cinema moguls and stars, perhaps even saw one Sisodia ‘known to his friends as “Whisky Sisodia”’ who indeed had a ‘slight stammer’ (22/7) and who is best remembered as the name of a character in The Satanic Verses. Most of the other information about his childhood has to be read ‘out of ’ Midnight’s Children. In redacted material (212/4; 04–29) we are told that his ‘mother’s relationship with her impotent ex-husband’ was never spoken of. Looking back, the older Rushdie notes that ‘she kept herself indoors knowing that if she went out her feet wd. [would] lead her to him’. His name was never spoken, and unlike Saleem’s mother, she never received a phone call from him. Rushdie also takes personal interest in the dhabawallas (the lunch box or tiffin carriers of Bombay) with their idiosyncratic black, red, yellow and white dots as a language in its own right. The Rugby years passed easily enough and he escaped bullying, although he was not good at sport, was a wog (an acronym for ‘Worthy Oriental Gentleman’ but in fact a racist descriptor) and rather smart (all three were great qualifications for being a target for bullies). In July 1962, he passes O levels in English Language, History, Latin, French, Elementary Maths, Advanced Maths and Physics, and two years later passes A level French, History and General Paper with an A2, A2 and an A respectively (147/7). Then came his father’s Cambridge College, King’s, where he fails to get a First, as his father thought he should or would, followed by a brief

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Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy

and unsatisfying return to Pakistan in the late sixties for less than a year; a very unpleasant place it was to live in as he confessed to Caryl Phillips in an interview in 1995 (61/42). By the end of that decade he is back in England and gets his first job ‘in advertising at Sharpes’, moves to Ogilvy and Mather and then joins Ayer Baker towards the end of 1977. As advertising copywriter his greatest achievements were slogans such as the bubble-words ‘Aero: the bubbliest milk chocolate you can buy’, and ‘naughty but nice’. There were other ‘bubble’ words too: adorabubble, delectabubble, irresisitbubble. He worked ‘3 days a week: 4 days to write books and three days to write commercials’ (185/1). The final product of these ‘4 days to write a book’, Midnight’s Children (1981), freed him from these chores, although, like V. S. Naipaul, he had given ‘Writer’ as his profession as far back as 1974 on his British passport. He embraced ‘Englishness’ in other ways too, notably by marrying two English women, Clarissa Luard in 1976 and Elizabeth West in 1997, mothers, respectively, of his two sons Zafar and Milan. Although he will marry other women – Marianne Wiggins, an American, in 1988, and Padma Lakshmi, an Indian, in 2004 –, he would declare in a Playboy interview (183/2: 59): ‘The most allconsuming love affair I ever had was not with a woman I’ve married.’ The woman in question was Robyn Davison, the Australian he had met in 1985 in Sydney and with whom he had travelled the outback on camels. In an interview with Anna Krien for the magazine Dumbo Feather (www.dumbofeather.com/robyn-davison -is-a-nomad) Davison said ‘that relationship [with Salman Rushdie] was a clap of thunder. It was volcanic, as many said.’ Such was the chemistry between them that Robyn gets transformed from ‘desert walker into mountaineer and from Christian into Jew’ as Alleluia Cohen in The Satanic Verses (Rushdie 2012: 71). In India his family was conservative and class-conscious, with the customary Indian ‘disdain for the poor’ (212/8; redacted 09–141). He ‘even kicked a servant once’. It was in the West, in England, that he gradually lost his conservatism. Not quite a Western radical because he loved his comforts (as of 14 January 2000 he remained a minor shareholder of the exclusive The Groucho Marx Club in London and continued to receive dividends (184/4)), he did support the underprivileged and wrote also because his vision captured the other side of the cartoon-like dream of England that he had inherited. He keeps a copy of the Camden Committee for Community Relations Report dated 14 October 1977 on file and very likely attended a performance of the anti-racist play Resistance at the University of London Union on Saturday, 12 November 1977. By this stage his novel-inmanuscript ‘The Antagonist’ (43/1–4) is undergoing transformation in his mind as a tale principally of the character Saleem Sinai. After the phenomenal success of Midnight’s Children and the speedy completion of Shame, Salman Rushdie became well known. According to a notebook entry dated 24 May 1983 (redacted 06–19), consigned to a University College, London, hospital bed suffering from ‘atypical pneumonia’, the hospital pharmacist tells him, ‘You have the same name as someone who writes books.’ By then he had finished Shame (1983) and had visited India yet again – his second major visit after the 1974 trip with Clarissa Luard made possible through an advance from the publisher of Grimus (1975).

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In redacted copies of his journals we read that on Tuesday, 22 February 1983, he is in Cochin visiting the Mattencheri Palace from where he goes to the Jewish synagogue with its blue tiles, all individually crafted, imported from China. There is a brass pulpit and Belgian lights. The caretaker is Jackie Cohen who explains that in the synagogue the ladies went to the gallery upstairs and men sat below. Numbers are down, he complains, and it is difficult to get the required ten people for a service. There is a parchment copy of the Old Testament in the synagogue. The next day (Wednesday, 23 February) he continues to talk to Jackie Cohen. The Cochin Jews, he is informed, are dying out. The community began in 72 CE with the arrival of some 10,000 Jews from Palestine escaping from Roman persecution. They traded in spice, rapeseed oil and varieties of nuts, especially cashews. In the synagogue are copper plates which show King Ravi Varma granting the Jews, in 379, ‘the kingdom of the village Anjurannam near Cranganore’. Cohen recounted the well-known story about the Jews helping the king in battle, which had to be postponed because the Jews would not fight on Saturday, the Sabbath day (Shabbat). Later the Muslim rulers sacked the synagogue in Cranganore in 1524. When Israel was founded in 1948 there were around 3,000 Jews in Cochin. Now there are barely fifty, primarily orthodox Sephardic Jews. In another ten to fifteen years, notes Cohen, there will be none left. The last marriage in the synagogue took place five years ago, and the couple went to Israel; the last birth, a girl, happened four years ago. All that would remain are Hebrew letters on tombstones. In Cochin he purchases Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, a novel he could use as an artistic parallel much as Naipaul used R. K. Narayan in India: A Wounded Civilization for the novel about Jews and Moors he has been thinking about. For the moment he has other thoughts because after Shame a novel about an incident in the Qur’ān where, it was suggested, Muhammad was momentarily tempted, is creating ideas for which the necessary objective correlative is hard to find. After the visit to India, Rushdie’s views on India become a little more complex. The country is the source of many of his narratives, not only anecdotal and primary but also a source of pain since, as he sees it, the Nehruvian vision of secularism which he remembers from his childhood is now lost. Rushdie had returned to India in 1974 to absorb the nation yet again, to get the country’s chaotic rhythm under his skin, to discover a new idiom with which to describe his experience. His own immersion in Indian culture, however, is that of a radical or even a postmodern orientalist for whom comic book versions of the Indian epics are just as valuable items for the creative imagination as the various recensions of the Mahābhārata in the Poona Critical edition of the great epic.6 In spite of this, or perhaps because of this, the novel he wrote, Midnight’s Children, remained very much a child’s vision, its best parts those dealing with Saleem Sinai’s Bombay childhood. As we have seen he returned to India in 1983. When he returns yet again, this time to uncover the nation’s forty years of independence in 1987 for a Channel 4 documentary (The Riddle of Midnight), he finds an India lacking in optimism with Nehru’s grand vision of his ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour’ speech now replaced by social discord, confusion, danger and disharmony. In the cacophony of sounds where there is no narrative of ends, even the definition of what is a real Indian is lost.

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Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy

And he has to offer what to others may even sound meaningless: ‘it’s the lack of definition that unites you’. India, then, is precisely the version that he had offered in his novel, a fiction, a mirage that comes into being only through the act of writing. Whether this reading of India – as a desire, a creation, even an aesthetic – is true is not the question. What is true is that a writer’s ambition ‘even if crafted as heroic or epic is also comical because their capacity to capture the world is in the end illusory’. There is a strong streak of ‘creative megalomania’ in a writer, a point he would make in notes to an idea of a film (‘The Napoleon Polka: An idea for a film’) he had in mind on Feliks Topolski (1907–89), the Polish expressionist painter who worked primarily in Britain and was commissioned as a war artist (58/13). The confession becomes more straightforward in these notes when he declares, ‘A witness is not an emperor; but when he sets to be one, we have the subject matter for comic panorama, for mock-epic’ (58/13). In 1986 Rushdie travels to Nicaragua at the invitation of the Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers. The following year he published The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987). In 46/6 there are notes which formed the basis of the Introduction to the 1997 edition of the book. It was his first non-fiction book and he regrets the oversights and misreadings in it for which he has been heavily criticized. In his defence he feels that, perhaps, being a non-Marxist, some of the Sandinista hardliners, people like Humberto Ortega and Tomás Borge, were kept away from him. He also corrects factual errors in the original edition (that Tijerino is not dead, that the lure of celebrity poisoned many, that the Miskito Indians were mistreated, and that there was considerable public dislike for the president’s compañera Rosario Murillo) but adds: These are the failings of a book written quickly, and in the heat of passion. But even with ten years’ hindsight, I stand by the fundamental judgments and attitudes of The Jaguar Smile, and feel, if I may say so, proud of my younger self for taking these ‘snapshots’ of that beautiful, benighted land; for getting more things half-right than half-wrong. (5)

The Archive (46/9) carries the dust jacket of the Spanish translation of the work (La sonrisa del jaguar) which has the dark face of the Hindu goddess Kali with her long red tongue. None of the published versions carry this dust jacket although for the Spanish translation of The Satanic Verses (Los Versos Satánicos) the iconic Hindu image of Shiva (that too in the archive) is kept. In an interview with Andrew Harvey in 1987 (179/1–Normal: A Quarterly of Arts and Ideas, 2 (Summer 1987): 6–13), Rushdie had spoken about a new book on the expunged verses in the Qur’ān. These verses, he explains, were about goddesses as opposed to male angels (12). He says that the appearances of Muhammad in the book are really quite few as the book is about Archangel Gabriel (13). In these comments we get the kinds of serious engagement that marks out the stance of a Western-trained student of Islamic history and culture. And so the two themes in his book (‘one is religion, and the other is migration’) are grounded in a reading of Islam as an essentially ‘desert religion’, the essence of which is a nomadic

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ethic. Nomads and migrants are opposites he suggests since ‘migration is to go somewhere, whereas in nomadism, going is the place’. Understanding Islam was an important project for him and, after René Girard, for a novelistic representation of Islam to find form or to take shape, the mediator, in this case the Prophet himself as the origin and bearer of absolute knowledge, must be ‘repudiated’ (Mishra 2012: 130ff ). ‘When I’ve finished The Satanic Verses,’ Rushdie continues in the interview, ‘I will have completed that processes of definition. And then I can do something else.’ The process of definition is the arrival of the novelistic vision. This vision is what may resurrect Islam from its enemies, ‘those who wish the culture frozen in time’ (176/10; letter to the Guardian, 28 November 1997). Come 14 February 1989 and the world changes for Rushdie. Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa7 upon the publication of The Satanic Verses in many ways compromised his politics as Rushdie could no longer speak on behalf of minorities. Earlier, on a sheet of paper titled ‘OPINIONS/13’ and dated November 1982 he had made his views on multiculturalism very clear. And until you, the whites, see that the issue isn’t integration, or harmony, or multiculturalism, or immigration, but simply the business of facing up to eradicating the prejudices within almost all of you, the citizens of your new, and last, Empire will be obliged to struggle against you. We are required to embark, you might say, on a new freedom movement. And it is interesting to remember that when Mahatma Gandhi, the father of an earlier freedom movement, came to England and was asked what he thought of English civilisation, he replied: ‘I think it would be a good idea’.

Even when confined and unable to act as a public intellectual he could still make a case for the cultural Muslim. In the draft of ‘1000 Days in a Balloon’ (48/6) he wrote about the secular Muslim: And I said, Salman, you have argued all your life in favour of the idea of a ‘secular Muslim’, in favour of the validity of saying that you accept the culture but not the theology. (11)

That The Satanic Verses as a challenge to an essentially dogmatic religion produced sacrilegious outrage is unquestionable, but the outrage was also, and primarily, an articulation of racist denigration suffered by migrants in a postcolonial world order. The British Muslim leader Dr Kalim Siddiqui (184/7) was actually in Tehran at the time of the fatwa. The reaction caught Rushdie unawares as his own anti-racist credentials were impeccable. That Rushdie, himself so critical of British politics of ethnic marginalization (Norman Tebitt, senior member of the conservative Thatcher government had called Rushdie ‘an unwelcome, impertinent, whining guest … forever bitching at this country from which he had grasped benefits’), should have been recast as the voice of tyranny is one of the more intriguing features of the literary history of the long twentieth century. What Rushdie failed to grasp was the idea of belief: when a religion is only a Book and a Prophet,

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Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy

then any real or perceived challenge to either would forever disrupt the age-old equilibrium. The period of Rushdie’s ‘isolation’ under the eyes of the British Secret Service was to last almost ten years – years that form the core of his own autobiography in the third person, Joseph Anton (2012). There were defenders as well as detractors. The voice of support is best captured in a short piece on Rushdie’s persecution (182/4) by the great scholar of English Romanticism M. H. Abrams who wrote, ‘We oppose it [the fatwa] also because we have learned from history one irrefutable universal condition for any full human life: to be able to speak without being killed for speaking.’ That kind of rhetoric also came from the US Senate on 28 February 1989 in a motion moved by the Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan with bipartisan support from the Republican Robert Dole. In an extraordinary gesture, he was even asked to be a candidate of the Italian Republican Party for the 18 June 1989 European Parliamentary elections (155/5). There were the detractors too and some notable writers such as Roald Dahl and John le Carré were partial to Germaine Greer’s characterization of him as a ‘megalomaniac, and Englishman with a dark skin’ (182/2). Sadly, the saga of ‘The Satanic Verses Affair’ damaged Rushdie for life. The condemnation (one Sayed Abdul Quddus, a British Pakistani, was willing to ‘sacrifice [his] own life and that of [his] children to carry out the Ayatollah’s wishes should the opportunity arise’ (155/13)) was such that along with the ‘man’ the writer’s works were collectively deemed to be demonic. Universities in Muslim countries stopped reading his books; they were no longer prescribed in Muslim (and in some non-Muslim) countries, and even when the shadow of the fatwa had disappeared Rushdie found it hard to persuade India to allow the filming of his masterpiece Midnight’s Children. Although Rushdie managed to attend conferences, participate in discussions, and even receive awards in New York, in Copenhagen, in Boulder, Colorado, and elsewhere, the strain took its toll. At the peak of the crisis, in 1990, he ‘reconverts’ to Islam and declares his adherence to its five principles. The ‘reconversion’ is clearly aimed at appeasing his critics and getting the fatwa lifted, although he would note later that as a Sunni Muslim the Shia Khomeini had no jurisdiction over him and, at any rate, he did not live in the ‘House of Islam’ and was therefore outside of its jurisdiction. The attempt to gain his freedom was read by many as pathetic and certainly totally unheroic. It reinforced something his second wife Marianne Wiggins (who at one stage had even begun to learn Urdu (100/13)) said about him: ‘[I] wish the man had been as great as the event. … He is not the bravest of man in the world, but will do anything to save his life’ (183/6). In an interview with David Cronenberg in 1995 (182/6) Rushdie said: Five years ago there was a moment when I made a very stupid mistake … in support for the faith … I said very stupid things for a couple of weeks. … Basically I was offered a deal: It became rapidly clear it was a mistake … I am totally without religion.

The declaration of faith was included in the first edition of Imaginary Homelands (1991) under the title ‘Why I have embraced Islam’ but was subsequently removed

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from all later editions. It is a moment that worries him as we read in the Archive and he refers often enough to this moment of weakness. What is less clear is the counterfactual scenario: ‘What if the return to the faith had been immediately accepted?’ Would Rushdie have remained the same kind of writer? A year into the fatwa he publishes the sensitively written children’s fantasy Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). Another four years on, in 1994, he publishes his collection of short stories, East, West, a work outwardly engaging and cheerful but inwardly marked by a profound unease. It is a difficult time for him. He writes the pros and cons for an epigraph from Bob Dylan for the new book – ‘They say everything can be replaced/ … I shall be released’ – and a reader of the Digital Archive senses panic. On another sheet (182/5) there is further helplessness: ‘The most important part of the title is the comma [the comma in the title of the collection East, West] because it seems to me that I am that comma.’ There is the less charitable account captured in Amir Taheri’s ‘Reflections on an Invalid Fatwa’ (181/2): ‘[Rushdie] writes and speaks exclusively about himself and his work … he has failed to have anything resembling a serious dialogue with at least mainstream Muslim intellectuals. He seems to prefer to address the London glitterati, a milieu in which he might feel more comfortable.’ The judgement may be harsh but there is some truth in it. For whatever reason, Rushdie does not write a foreword for Reza Ghaffari’s prison memoirs ‘Weeping Tulips’ (published as A State of Fear in 2012) dealing with the period 1981–91 when he was a political prisoner in Iran (82/9).

Rushdie and the Spectres of Western Modernity In 58/12 (‘Mr Kipling and the Bandar-Log: A Treatment for a Television’) there is a sheet in the folder which is unnamed and without a title. The date of writing is not self-evident, but the reference to his desire to impress his views on others and an explanation of why he writes places the account in a post-Midnight’s Children period. He writes, he says, ‘about India as of a receding memory’ and primarily as a ‘remembrance of childhood’: Our home, Windsor Villa (my father’s name is still in the Bombay phone book, the address still Windsor Villa, Warden Road, Bombay-26, the number still 70561); bicycles down the slopes; the tree from which I fell; Beverley Burns, the Jaeggis, the Martins, the Tayabalis, the Talyarkhans, Balasubramaniam Sundareshan; Willingdon Club … Breach Candy, the map-shaped pool; Miss Harrison’s piano … Walsingham House School; Kamla Nehru Park; Cathedral School … dreams of England. Books: Bunter, Biggles, Blackshirt. Comics: Superman, Batman, Aquaman, Justice League of America … Flash, Green Arrow, Wonder Woman. Movies: MGM windows, now showing, next attraction, coming soon … Hatim Tai; Mughal-e-Azam at the new Maratha Mandir; Eid prayers and clothes; the Nanavati affair; Kashmir … being chased by clouds in Gulmarg … Babajan and Ammaji in Aligarh …

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Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy

The confessions in this sheet of paper are open and revealing and get to the heart of what is clearly an understanding of literary forms that is principally Western. Although he understands that his family life was Indian Muslim, the attraction of all things Western (here English) meant that ‘from the beginning’ he was ‘brought up as a cartoon of the West’. (The photo of the boy reading from ‘Peter Pan’ was revealing.) The cartoon became the real thing, the veneer more ‘attractive … than the thing beneath’. He never knew his Muslim prayers and quickly lost fluency in his mother tongue (although later he regains fluency in Hindi and Urdu with remarkable ease). The attraction of what Derrida called the power of the ‘monolingualism of the other’ (1998) is evident. Rushdie was not the first, nor the last, for whom English and with it a denial of one’s own language defined their modernity. From the Hindu modernist revivalists Ram Mohan Roy and Vivekananda to Jinnah and Nehru, the acquisition of the Other’s language was always presented as somewhat meritorious. Ram Mohan Roy, the Hindu reformist, had made it to England and in fact died in Bristol in 1833. Roy’s Hinduism was deeply affected by Christian values but he never wanted to be English; Rushdie did. To be an Englishman had been his simple project, he writes in his holograph (22/7). In spite of embracing England through marriage, he soon realizes that it was ‘seriously fouled up’ because ‘the bastards would not let [him] be one’. ‘Maybe’, he continues, ‘I sh[oul]d have got the message back at school but I always loved what I could not have.’ There was another difference between him and Ram Mohan Roy (whose works on the Brahmo Samaj he had read). Rushdie wanted to come to England in his imagination, as he noted on another page (17/8) but also, more importantly, he wanted to enter this world as a writer. But I have never been, am not now, content to enter cap in hand. I must seize it, shake it, make it mine. I must in my imagination forge a present for this place.

The moment of seizing the nation, however, also implies, after Adorno, a degree of antagonism or hatred of its hegemonic principles. Using Naipaul as his example (in itself a rare support of the later Naipaul) Rushdie refers to the ‘deliberately uprooted intellectual’ who alone can ‘view the world as only a free intelligence can, going where the action is and offering reports’ (174/6). As Rushdie himself had noted, he was more English than Indian when he left Bombay for Rugby, and his world view – and especially his engagement with contemporary culture – was primarily Anglo-American and European. In 48/29 Rushdie says that the three most important novels since the war are: Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude; Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum and Italo Calvino’s trilogy Our Ancestors (The Cloven Viscount, Baron in the Trees, The Nonexistent Knight). These texts are his immediate literary antecedents, but they are essentially ‘European’. From their ‘distant’ encyclopaedic readings, he gathered his skills and his epistemological know-how. He had transcended all labels: at once postcolonial and magic realist, a writer of note as well as a voice of the ‘Paddies and Pakis’ of the new Britain. In the Digital Archive his response to the January 1996

Prologue

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‘The Proust Questionnaire’ is, therefore, not so much revealing or surprising as a statement about the European modernist that he is: Who is your favourite hero in fiction? Leopold Bloom, Gregor Samsa, Bartleby, the Scrivener Who are your heroes in real life? Tennis players, film directors, rock stars What are your favourite names? André, Monica, Satyajit, Akira, Elvis, Van Which talent would you most like to have? The ability to sing What do you consider the most over-rated virtue? Faith If you could choose what to come back as, what would it be? A city

The debts are clear, and except for references to Satyajit [Ray] and Akira [Kurosawa], both great avant-garde and neo-realist non-Western auteurs, there is a strong English/European modernist flavour to his selections. The reference to his desire to be reincarnated as a city takes us to the point he has made all along: he is a city boy with decidedly urban tastes. There is more: a city has its own life as neo-Gothic writers such as urban fantasists Emma Bull, Charles de List, Laurell K. Hamilton and Mercedes Lackey, among others, have pointed out in their novels. But what of his own theory of narrative composition? On two sheets in 45/11 (generally a very useful folder for information on Rushdie’s narrative technique), we find notes on readers reading his novels as if they were autobiographies of sorts. In these notes he specifically examines the attitude of readers in India to Midnight’s Children. These readers invariably confused Saleem Sinai with Rushdie, although the former ‘is deaf in one ear and has a colossal nose’. About Saleem, Rushdie continues, When he began to talk, however, I was quickly made aware that a coup had been staged. Saleem had no intention of shutting up. He simply took over the novel, and 500 pages later did me the favour of falling silent at last. It was a very odd experience … there were moments when he and I did not see eye to eye. And I realised that there was simply no way of communicating to the reader that the narrator’s views were not also those of the author. … My impotence in the face of his overwhelming presence was the price I had to pay for all the benefits that [his] presence provided. … But once I had done with him I became determined not to allow another fictional character to take over the book the next time. Once bitten, twice shy.

This is a fascinating confession, its date not too clear as the sheets do not carry watermarks. The danger here is that the confession seems to indicate that after Midnight’s Children the author exercised greater control over his narrator, from which it follows that author ideology and narrator ideology began to coalesce, and the relative autonomy of the narratorial voice now becomes questionable. He writes on a single page in capitals, ‘IS SALADIN CHAMCH MY “I”?’ In the same box and folder there is a single yellow page with Rushdie’s then address (19 Raveley Street, London NW5 2HX) in which he writes about the difficulties he had in finding an appropriate narrative technique for Shame. He toyed with multiple

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Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy

narrators, a chain of voices, but he confesses he ‘had not heard of the [André] Brink book [A Chain of Voices, 1982]’ but in the end ‘I narrated the book myself ’. Rushdie continues: There are deliberate connections between Shame [sic] and Midnight’s Children [sic]. But I now see Shame separately at last … one day, however, it may be possible to see the two books as a kind of statement about origins. They are both, in very different ways, much concerned about birth; but in Shame I have managed, I hope, to move on a bit, for instance, to a discussion of the nature and the effects of cultural displacement, which I think of as one of my natural subjects; and I have actually managed, at the very end, to move the action geographically into England. This may seem minor to any reader, but it is somehow very significant to me. The book is a kind of valediction; but it is not a washing of hands.

The idea of the relative autonomy of art, and art as its own justification or at least the source of the justification, surfaces when he notes, recalling Socratic dialogue, that The Satanic Verses is its own defence: ‘Like most writers I believed the book itself, a text carefully worked and fashioned over a five-year period, was its own best defence’ (45/11). Islam as the religion of reason, as a culture capable of generating a powerful aesthetic order, a history of a people within time, finds its great exemplary symbol in Alhambra, that last bastion of Moorish Spain in Granada. The Alhambra alerts Rushdie to its mosaic spatial form corresponding to his idea of narrative as a ‘mosaic compendium of stories/novellas’, the form that, he thinks, may be ‘unique to me’ (212/8; 09–174) and which he uses in The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995a). He writes that he has ‘a rendezvous with Granada … the moment will come’. His ‘appointment’ with Granada is pivotal as he returns to the Alhambra often enough. Alhambra with the memorable rebuke to Boabdil, the last Sultan, from his mother (‘You may as well weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man’), will haunt him throughout his life. The mosaic form from its architecture will govern his writings, but so would the metaphor of the ‘Moor’, the absolute other of medieval Europe.8 It would take him to Shakespeare’s great play The Moor of Venice, Othello which he thinks he may rewrite as ‘Othello, Or The Moor’s Last Sigh’ after the weeping Boabdil upon relinquishing Alhambra. As Rushdie himself concedes – and a point to which he will return often – no tale of the Moor can exist without the shadow of world literature’s greatest tale of a Moor. There is a single cancelled sheet (30/1) where the connection is made explicit: Othello OR The Moor’s Last Sigh A Play

On another page (30/3) Rushdie gives a long list of quotations from Othello which carry the name ‘Moor’ – ‘To love the Moor’, ‘Your daughter and the Moor are

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making the beast with two backs’ – and adds, ‘I am beginning to think that just plain MOOR may be a better title than “The Moor’s Last Sigh”’. One of the more valuable documents that tells us much about Rushdie’s writing process and his engagement with cultural Islam is in 29/4 of the Archive. Entitled ‘The Moor’s Last Sigh, Early notes, jottings, experiments [including early outline of the novel]’ the surviving notes tell us much about the composition of The Moor’s Last Sigh. The inspiration for the novel came from Alhambra (‘al-hamra’, the red one), the last great Moorish palace and fort of Granada. ‘I visited Granada and the Alhambra in 1965, aged 18’, writes Rushdie, ‘and have been going back there ever since. Throughout my writing life I have known that there was something for me in that palace’ (1). After the controversy over The Satanic Verses and his own retreat from the Muslim faith, he feels that suddenly the ease with which both East and West had co-existed in his life and thought was ‘no longer true’ (2). ‘I have suffered my own rupture, my own version of Granada –’92 [Granada fell January 1492],’ he continues and adds, as an afterthought, ‘time, perhaps, for my own “last sigh!”’ He turns to Luis Buñuel. The old surrealist master, Luis Buñuel – always my favourite film-maker, he now seems more than ever a kindred spirit, … named his autobiography Mon Dernier Soupir, which was unfortunately translated into English as ‘My Last Breath’. I’m convinced he was alluding to Boabdil’s [Abu Abdallah’s] exit as he prepared his own. (2)

What Rushdie never wanted to do in his own fictional rewriting of the Alhambra story was simply write a historical romance based on the fall of Granada. Before he settled on the Moor Zogoiby as the chief protagonist, he toyed with the name Musa Alnasser (and also Murad Nasser (30/1)), known as the ‘Moor’ which, in this instance, would not be a reference to the Euro-Arabic Moor but his boyhood nickname ‘mor’, in Hindi, a peacock (3). There were not going to be magical noses (as in Midnight’s Children), cloven hooves (as in The Satanic Verses) or beasts of shame (as in Shame). This time, Rushdie says, ‘human beings are going to be enough’ (8). The lesson that he learnt after writing the scene where Chamcha sits at his dying father’s bedside (in The Satanic Verses) is that faced with love and death one enters the ‘world of the real’. What Rushdie now wants to do is ‘develop the language of the earlier books, to increase its voltage, so to speak, without having to resort to the supernatural. The supernatural and I no longer have much to say to one another. Give me the tangible world’ (8). In these early notes he had hoped to place Musa Alnasser in the tangible world of London and New York with ‘Greta Bergman’ as the novel’s chief character (12). But he had also imagined other titles: ‘Moor’s Complete Sighs’, ‘Moor’s Last Breath’, ‘Moor’s Breath’, ‘Women and the Moor’ (30/1). By 29 March 1995 The Moor’s Last Sigh had undergone its near-final corrections (29/1), and, of course, Musa is no longer there (he has been replaced by Zogoiby) nor is Greta Bergman who has been replaced by the painter Aurora. The supernatural (or at any rate the marvellous) is not completely dispensed with as the Moor Zogoiby grows at twice the normal rate.

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Although he had stated that he now wanted the tangible world, he concedes that to fully capture the world as one sees all around, one has to use ‘techniques which are not at all naturalistic’ (29/6, p. 21). This was especially true of his depiction of the insane rantings of the Bombay fascist chief Bal Thackeray who is the absolute counterpoint to the Nehru of Midnight’s Children, the man who symbolized the ‘last great transforming moment in the history of India’ (34). Thackeray’s world views are so unreal; but ‘you could not [simply] make this stuff up’. All you can do is write it down and, indeed, I have always said that my novels are not ‘magic realism’, which I believe not to exist outside a group of South American writers. They are in fact understatements of truth, they are ways of making palatable what is too bizarre to write down. These are watered down versions of reality because real intensity of the world is too great to put into a novel. (24)

Immediately after its publication, this book too was banned in India (29/5; note written 31 October 1995) once again confirming that the name ‘Rushdie’ was more potent than the contents of the book itself! For there was another subtext to The Moor’s Last Sigh, and this subtext is the loss of the liberal ethos of Bombay/ Mumbai at the hands of fundamentalists, both Hindu and Muslim. In an earlier note (30/3) the novel is defined as a story about ‘a man’s descent into the inferno’. The inferno in this case was the 12 March 1993 Mumbai explosions where some twelve coordinated bomb blasts took place within a period of a couple of hours. For Rushdie the Moor Zogoiby’s trauma parallels that of Boabdil when Christian ‘barbarians’ began to dismantle what Rushdie reads as a period of Islamic Enlightenment on the Iberian Peninsula. The point of the parallel between the fall of Granada and this story is that the city, Bombay, is also about to fall – the Barbarians [religious extremists, corrupt public life, bombs] are at the gates as of Granada’s; and like Granada it was the beloved glory of its hour. The Moor, leaving, unable to defend it, utters his last sigh.

Still condemned by the never-ending fatwa (which of course meant that he could not openly dedicate The Moor’s Last Sigh to his third wife Elizabeth Ann West: ‘To the true heroine of my life’s story, who must make do with these three initials’ he had noted in 29/12) in ‘Notes towards a Novel’ (30/11), dated 23 August 1996, he begins to think through the basic organizational patterns of his next novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999a). He wishes to write about a ‘brown Orpheus’, locating him, fictionally, in Ormus Cama from a Bombay Parsi family. Like the Greek Orpheus whose disembodied head continued to sing, this brown Orpheus would have the ‘head’ of John Lennon, Freddie Mercury, himself a Parsi, and Bob Marley who too continued singing after their deaths (13).9 In Hindu mythology and religion there was of course the figure of Sita who is finally ‘lost to the underworld’ (14). The theme of the underworld, Rushdie felt, was also a haunting image for the migrant.

Prologue

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I have been haunted for many years by the image of the ground beneath our feet. Which ‘rooted’ peoples taken [sic] for granted, but upon which new arrivals must tread warily, lest it give way. The migrant must reinvent, not only himself, but also the soil on which he stands. … And if the ground beneath our feet should become uncertain, then there is nothing of which we can be sure. … And beneath our feet, after all, lie the secrets that make our cities work: the pipelines, the wiring conduits, the trains. (16–17)

On a single sheet of paper (34/4), he refers to the novel as a ‘novel and a half, … a book like no other’. It is the kind of work one would associate with a writer’s mature phase since ‘narrative mastery’, ‘linguistic genius’ and raw emotion should all be present. Its aim, he writes, should be to stun, shock, move, provoke, overwhelm and enthral. The entry on this single page ends with ‘A seismic event, an earthquake of a novel, an eruption along the fault-lines of the culture’. On two pages elsewhere in the same folder we find the following comments on the novel he is writing: … fifty pages of the most overt erotic writing of my life … make it the greatest piece of erotic prose, and the most intellectual, since Molly Bloom’s soliloquy which was its antecedent, was a thing of which I was hugely proud. ‘I am your secret,’ she said. ‘I am the secret that gives you your freedom.’ And she has.

As he writes the novel we get dated entries collected in the same folder. Two entries dated ‘Sun 30 Nov 1997’ give valuable insights into the compositional features of the novel. He begins to see that in spite of the vigour of the narrative, the novel is actually ‘about profound loss and deep grief ’ as beneath it all is ‘the author’s own pain’, his ‘loss of India’, which is then ‘transformed into great art’. And yet, he continues, on another sheet with the same date, ‘the genius of the novel is still rooted in Rushdie’s love affair with Bombay’. He adds, ‘The tumble of Bombay characters – Piloo Janab Doodhwala, Persis Kalamanja, etc. – mingles joyously with the rock ’n’ roll world – ’. And then there is the ‘natural polytheist, me’, he continues. Rushdie’s own confession that a polytheistic monism is the source of literary creativity is pivotal to his aesthetic. As we enter the deeper recesses of the Archive in search of Rushdie’s literary antecedents, his real passions, his real as opposed to surface mastery of traditions, we confront (from the postcolonial and celebratory perspective) a simple fact: what he works with are Western intellectual and cultural traditions, the Orient providing him with Orientalist discourses which he openly uses but with a degree of self-consciousness about its usage. Unsurprisingly we find that Shakespeare is everywhere and is pivotal to Rushdie’s art. In 50/21 (‘“Proteus” Typescript Ellmann Lectures at Emory University [with notes and fragments]’) Rushdie notes that he has a Shakespeare bust on his study door (‘a door-knocker’) to remind him that he’s ‘entering not my own domain but his, Shakespeare’s, whom no door knocker can limit or contain, who leaps off the door knocker and takes possession of the room behind the door, ruling it as he rules all the rooms in literature’s poor, rich

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Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy

house’.10 The Allie–Gibreel relationship in The Satanic Verses is shadowed by the Othello/Iago/Desdemona triangle (45/11) and elsewhere too he reads Othello as a Europeanized Moor who carries a disguised Arabic name. He is an Arabic Moor who sees the killing of Desdemona as a sacrificial honour killing (45/4). In another redacted section from the notebook, Rushdie comments on T. S. Eliot’s (mistakenly spelled as ‘Elliott’) reading of Othello. Rushdie says that Eliot had put pride at Othello’s centre. ‘Perhaps “my” Othello’, he writes, ‘could be defined by his lack of pride – his personal & intellectual humility, or, if you like [if people who are his enemies like] weakness.’ He notes that Eliot felt that Othello was ‘cheering himself up’ in his last great speech (‘Soft you; a word or two before you go’). Eliot had said that he had ‘never read a more terrible exposure of human weakness – of universal human weakness’ (Eliot 1969: 130). The Western lineage and, indeed, homage that one detects, is present in the choice of the title of Rushdie’s Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature (3–5 October 2004). The lectures were given under the general title ‘The Other Great Tradition’. Although ‘Scheherazade’ is the title of the third lecture (the first two are ‘Proteus’ and ‘Heraclitus’, respectively), the lectures implicitly place Rushdie himself in the alternative great tradition of Laurence Sterne (still the gold medallist in the literature of delay) and thematically as well as stylistically defer to Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988). In the second lecture (‘Proteus’), however, Rushdie refers to the spread of the Arabian Nights westward and its influence on Cervantes who made ‘the ostensible narrator of the Quixote an Arab, the redoubtable Cide Hamete Benengeli’. He is the fictional Moorish author created by Cervantes and listed as the chronicler of the adventures of Don Quixote. Cide is a title like ‘Sir’, which means ‘My Lord’; ‘Hamete’ is the Spanish version of the Arabic name ‘Hameed’, which means ‘he who praises’; and ‘Benengeli’ is a comical invention of Cervantes that suggests ‘aubergine-eater’ via the Spanish ‘berenjena’ or aubergine, popularly considered to be the favourite food of the people of Toledo at the time of the novel (50/21). In Kundera’s defence of Salman Rushdie during the fatwa years (68/25; typescript, 6 November 1991) he had recast Rushdie precisely in this tradition: the tradition of a novelist’s capacity to ambiguate and relativize going back to Rabelais and Cervantes, the genre’s incompatibility with ‘the theological spirit’. About Western literature, he is in total command. Joyce remains unimpeachable in every way because he had created ‘an English that was not the property of the English’ (62/31, p. 21) and he ‘took the ownership of the English language away from the English forever, incorporating the rhythms and vocabularies of Ireland and Europe, of the streets and whorehouses as well as the philosophers and poets and confessions of Christians and Jews’ (Digital Archive). His lines were magnificent (45/8 Rushdie quotes from Ulysses, ‘Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls’) and he despairs as a writer whenever he reads Ulysses. In an interview with Kusum Sangari he says (61/16, p. 1) ‘I’ve just been re-reading Ulysses, and it’s very depressing: it really is the best novel of the twentieth century!’11

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If Joyce looms large as the great intertext, Calvino’s presence is that of the genius who delights and entertains, who is light and comic. In one passage (redacted 05–011) Rushdie writes that Calvino is ‘more pleasure giving than any other writer’ and in a self-reflexive move asks if Shame was ‘a Calvino play/story?’ In a notebook with the beginning date given as 29 December 1980, there are redacted material on Calvino (1923–85). The material carries notes for an introductory lecture on Calvino who is introduced via another play: In N F Simpson’s [1919–2011] play ONE WAY PENDULUM, which may be the only good absurdist comedy ever written in England, a policeman is asked in a surreal courtroom to state where the accused was on a certain day. He replies, ‘My Lord, he was not in this world’. The judge asks, ‘Which world was he then?’ And the policeman says, ‘Well, sir, I believe he has one of his own’. Italo Calvino, whom it is my privilege to introduce to you, appears to have this capacity for world-ownership, in spades.

Years after this introductory note he turns to Calvino’s Six Memos for the Millennium (1993) written as the Harvard Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1985–6. Sadly Calvino died before the lectures were delivered but the near copy-texts of the lectures were translated and published by Harvard University Press in 1988. In the published version there were only five lectures, the sixth on ‘Consistency’ Calvino was to write while at Harvard in fall 1985. The turn to Calvino’s thoughts on the craft of writing is in his preliminary notes on The Enchantress of Florence (2008a). In these notes (Digital Archive) Rushdie says that the novel will capture the six qualities mentioned by Calvino: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, consistency. He adds, ‘Although its underlying theme is a serious one – the birth of new civilisations in the East and the West, and their imaginary encounter in the moment of that new beginning – the manner is to be light and comic throughout, and the telling will be swift’ (2). In his 1996 essay titled ‘Palimpsest Regained’ (the New York Review of Books, 21 March) J. M. Coetzee undertakes a very close reading of The Moor’s Last Sigh so as to engage with the problematic of Rushdie’s English–European leanings. As we have seen, it is a novel about which Rushdie has a special fondness, especially inasmuch as it captures what he considers is Islam’s glorious period in the Iberian Peninsula, a period ending in the banishment, in 1492, of Muhammad XII, the last Sultan of Andulasia, better known as Boabdil. Even as the Moor is despatched from his beloved Alhambra by Ferdinand and Isabella, another new world is about to be opened as Boabdil’s conquerors finance Columbus’s journey to the New World. Columbus, of course, would end up confusing real Indians with ‘Red Indians’ but in doing so would also collapse the identity of all man, a conceit later developed towards the end of The Enchantress of Florence. Another conceit is also at play since the lineage of Boabdil (Abu-Abd-Allah, Muhammad XII) also ends up in Cochin as Moraes (Zogoiby), now part Jew and Christian who would also see himself as Dante as well as Martin Luther. There are many characters in this novel, many given ‘short shrift’ by Rushdie once their ‘usefulness has ended’.

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In the case of the Japanese picture restorer character named Aoi Uë (‘her name all vowels, as the Moor’s, in Arabic, is all consonants’) she is introduced without any notice right at the end of the novel and then killed. Coetzee makes all these points and summarizes the novel with exquisite elegance. However, of value is his note about the ‘palimpsestic’ nature of the writing where ekphrasis, ‘the conduct of narration through the description of imaginary works of art’ (Achilles’s shield in Homer, Keats’s Grecian Urn), also dominates: the tiles in the Cochin synagogue both tell the story of the Jews in Cochin and ‘foretell the atom bomb’ while Aurora’s paintings would encompass another narrative of India. Against Rushdie’s own presumptive claim that the Alhambra is a testament to the power of a boundary-less universe founded on reason, goodness and civility, Coetzee notes that the palimpsesting of Moraes over Boabdil supports a less trite, more provocative thesis: that the Arab penetration of Iberia, like the later Iberian penetration of India, led to a creative mingling of peoples and cultures; that the victory of Christian intolerance in Spain was a tragic turn in history; and that Hindu intolerance in India bodes as ill for the world as did the sixteenth-century Inquisition in Spain. (Fleshing out the thesis in this way depends, one must concede, on ignoring the fact that the historical Boabdil was a timorous and indecisive man, dominated by his mother and duped by King Ferdinand of Spain.) Rushdie pursues palimpsesting with considerable vigor in The Moor’s Last Sigh, as a novelistic, historiographical, and autobiographical device. Thus Granada, Boabdil’s lost capital, is also Bombay, ‘inexhaustible Bombay of excess’, the sighed-for home of Moraes as well as of the author over whose person he is written. Both are cities from which a regenerative cross-fertilization of cultures might have taken place, but for ethnic and religious intolerance. (https//ww w.nybooks.com/articles/1996/03/21/palimpsest-regained/)

The trouble with the novel – and a trouble that Rushdie’s own theory of writing is conscious of – is the relapse from the classical style of the novel (where all elements are interwoven towards a stylistic and thematic unity) into an inventiveness that the novel itself is unable to carry. At this juncture, Coetzee’s qualification is illuminating: To complaints of this kind – which have been voiced with regard to the earlier books as well – defenders of Rushdie have responded by arguing that he works, and should therefore be read, within two narrative traditions: of the Western novel (with its subgenre, the anti-novel à la Tristram Shandy), and of Eastern story-cycles like the Panchatantra, with their chainlike linking of self-contained, shorter narratives. To such critics, Rushdie is a multicultural writer not merely in the weak sense of having roots in more than one culture but in the strong sense of using one literary tradition to renew another. (Accessed online)

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It is not easy to counter this defence, Coetzee concedes, but does one need a defence at all if Rushdie’s own aesthetic, his conscious leanings as adumbrated above would quite naturally lead to this kind of writing? It would be impossible to claim, as some may, that traditional Indian models of writing explain Rushdie’s narrative form. The short answer is, they do not. And, at any rate, as Coetzee himself says, ‘multiculturalism’ should not ‘become a card that trumps all other critical cards’. And for Rushdie there are universals in a storyteller’s art, and these universals capture the entire tradition of the European novel, and certainly from Cervantes on, as is so patently clear in The Golden House (2017). The realist turn is important as in all his works he remains faithful to the broad outlines of historical facts except in the ‘reverse futuristic’ form of Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights where contemporary history undergoes counterfactual scenarios as alternative and equally legitimate (but in the end fictional) truisms. Of course, a writer’s craft necessitates the embedding of fictional characters into historical worlds, be they by way of descent (Boabdil to Zogoiby; Babur to Mogor dell’ Amore) or original intervention into the available history.12 There is the familiar celebration of hybridity, newness and mongrelization that one finds throughout the Archive.13 In the Rushdie aesthetic these terms provide useful tags – platforms on which to build the essential mobility of the global world. They do not, of themselves, create art forms that dramatically break away from the norms of Western prose fiction. To reprise the outcome of critically reading archival material, the Rushdie intertexts are self-evidently Western or texts already mediated through an Orientalist discourse. The archival evidence endorses this. Salman Rushdie wears the influential intertexts, their ‘anxieties of influence’, on his sleeves and gives short shrift to accusation of plagiarism unless it is an obvious imitation (in which case the literary work ceases to be art). In the Digital Archive he declares that when writing Shame he reread Suetonius’s great study of the Twelve Caesars, for The Satanic Verses, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and for The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Virgil’s Georgics. His fascination with Niccolò Machiavelli is evident. He notes, ‘The demonization of Machiavelli strikes me as one of the most successful acts of slander in European history.’ The 400 or so references to him in Elizabethan literature are not favourable, he adds, as the Elizabethans knew him only through the French text ‘Anti-Machiavel’. He continues, ‘I felt it may soon be time to revaluate the maligned Florentine’, which he does in The Enchantress of Florence. As one gives shape to the Archive, in time Salman Rushdie becomes very much an English cultural icon. His cultural iconicity is captured in the English humour of Professor Chris Bigsby who introduced him for the award of an honorary DLitt degree from the University of East Anglia (73/7; typescript, 7 June 1999): ‘At Cambridge he was in the Footlights, but mercifully not with Rowan Atkinson or else he wouldn’t be saying a word today!’ As a modern cultural icon, he has made a cameo appearance in Bridget Jones’ Diary; in the nineteenth (fourth season) episode of Seinfeld, Kramer tells Elaine and Jerry that he met Salman Rushdie disguised as Sal Bass (‘instead of salmon he went with the bass’) at the health club; and as recently as 2014 he was seen in the first episode of the BBC TV comedy series W1A, arm wrestling with Alan Yentob (creative director at the

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BBC) in a BBC office. Earlier he had sent a fax to President Clinton pointing out the sanctimonious actions of Judge Starr and his ‘extremist allies’ in their attempts to impeach him over the Lewinsky scandal (Digital Archive 1998) and a little after to Barack Obama when he was a senator expressing his concerns on the fitness of Judge Alberto Gonzales as attorney general of the United States (Digital Archive letter dated 2/2/2005). Most dramatically he appeared on stage with Bono and U2 during their London concert on 11 August 1993. The Archive carries both a transcript of the dialogue between Bono (Mephisto) and Rushdie and his U2 ticket – ‘U2 ticket Zooropa 193 Wednesday 11 August Royal Box’ (52/10). This is 1993, and four and a half years have passed since the fatwa. Rushdie is in the Royal Box seat and receives a prearranged phone call from Bono on stage after the song ‘Those were the days my friend, I thought they’d never end’ (a song popularized by Mary Hopkin in 1968 with Paul McCartney’s help) had been played. Before calling Rushdie, Bono says to the spectators, ‘I love that one. Those were the days … and no talking back from Paddies and Pakis … like that Salman Rushdie fellow – he can’t be English.’ Acting out the role of Mephisto (Bono is dressed with a pair of horns), Bono phones him and after a brief conversation Rushdie walks on stage as the crowd enthusiastically acknowledges his presence. He says to Bono, ‘I’m not afraid and I’m not afraid of you. Real devils do not wear horns. Bono off with the horns and on with the show.’ He takes Bono’s horns and together they exit the stage. The performance is a parody of Khomeini’s fatwa, which for many expressed the will of God, as it is Mephisto who has sent him into exile for taking his name in vain. And Satan has done this because unlike the older Pakis and Paddies he did not know his place. A joke emerged: ‘What do you call a man wearing a blonde wig and red high heels? Salman Rushdie!’ (52/10). The appearance with Bono at a time when he was under the British special security police guard (and the fact that he made it on stage in front of a crowd of 70,000) says more than words about Rushdie’s own passion for rock music – a passion found throughout his work, but reaching its zenith in The Ground Beneath Her Feet. It is that music which he knows best. At the age of sixteen in September 1963 he saw the Rolling Stones and was hooked on them for life. More a fan of the Stones than the Beatles he did, however, make the insightful observation in the Observer (Sunday, 27 November 1988, Review) that the Beatles breakup was readily evident in the production of Sgt Pepper which was Paul’s baby and from that moment on the band ceased to be John’s (176/16). He once asked Václav Havel, the Czech leader, about his admiration of the American rock idol Lou Reed. Havel replied, ‘It was impossible to overstate the importance of rock music for the Czech resistance during the years of darkness between the Prague Spring and the collapse of Communism.’ And Havel then asks, ‘Why … do you think we called it the Velvet Revolution?’ and replies, ‘The sound of the Velvet Underground playing “Waiting for the Man”, “I’ll be your Mirror”’ (50/26). For many the foregoing must indeed be a ‘twice-told tale’, exhausting the patience of a modern reader who is not King Alcinous; but a turn to the Archive (even when some of the material may be accessed from other sources) confirms Rushdie’s

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complete mastery of Western culture, past and present, and its tradition of ironic play. The story told here requires a closer understanding of the Rushdie aesthetic – his world view and his grounding in an essentialist orientalist understanding of the East. The nation, he had noted on a single sheet in the Digital Archive (‘Notes on Writing and the Nation’) ‘either co-opts its greatest writers (Shakespeare, Goethe, Camoens, Tagore), or else seeks to destroy them (Ovid’s exile, Soyinka’s exile). Both fates are problematic.’ The declaration here, self-reflexively, points to Rushdie’s own unease: ‘I am not the exemplary postcolonial, migrant or Indian diasporic writer, I am deeply marred by the conditions of history and my own lifelong engagement with the West.’ To do justice to Rushdie requires understanding his location in the great traditions of Western literature. He had come to the West, as he says, to enter it in his art, not cap in hand but to seize it, shake it and make it his: ‘I must in my imagination forge a present for this place. There is none at the moment’ (17/8).14 And this makes an enquiry into Salman Rushdie’s genesis of secrecy all the more important. Frank Kermode tells us in a book from which I have borrowed the phrase ‘the genesis of secrecy’ that the patron of interpreters is Hermes, a god who is in the habit of holding the secret of oracles which at the moment of their ‘announcement may seem trivial or irrelevant, the secret sense declaring itself only after long delay, and in circumstances not originally foreseeable’ (Kermode 1980: 1). The intent of an oracle may therefore be delayed for generations because what the god Hermes guards is the principle of the ‘superiority of latent over manifest sense’ (2). When an archive has two guardian divinities – the goddess of art Sarasvati or Athena and the god of interpretation Hermes – judgements about it are about sense and the sensible, reflective as well as determinative. These are the judgements that will frame our reading of the Salman Rushdie corpus, both archival and published.

Chapter 1 ARCHIVE FEVER: THE ‘BIOGRAFIEND’ AND THE GENESIS OF SECRECY

Life, he himself said once, (his biografiend, in fact, kills him verysoon, if yet not, after) is a wake, livit or krikit, and on the bunk of our breadwinning lies the cropse of our seedfather, a phrase which the establisher of the world by law might pretinately write across the chestfront of all manorwombanborn. — James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (55) ‘Life’, wrote the great novelist, ‘is a wake’ and no matter what you do, it is the wake written on the ‘chestfront of all manorwombanborn’ that defines our lives. A ‘biografiend’ kills his subject for the wake because the wake is the moment from which one can look back. Salman Rushdie is not dead, but a reader of the Archive – for the Archive is a wake – kills him ‘verysoon’ in his search for a revisionist historiography. The ‘biografiend’ therefore enters the archive, and enter he does with the aim of critically reading it, knowing full well that any scholarly engagement with the archive must keep the two sides of the Greek arkhē or arkheion firmly in the foreground. Archives being what they are, an understanding of the power by which an archive is authorized and the principles which govern its implementation, its classification and the like is a precondition. These protocols are always in place whenever an analyst turns to ‘anamnesis’, the art of recollection, of constructing a case study. Derrida had subtitled his monograph Archive Fever (1996a) ‘A Freudian Impression’ (referred to elsewhere in the book as a ‘Freudian signature’) because an archive as a repository of unpublished works, autographs, marginalia and other paraphernalia will always carry marks of concealed offence, repression or, to stretch it a bit, its dark side. In his essay ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’, Freud suggests a method of anamnestic inquiry that would lead beyond the visible, beyond the manifest, to uncover ‘what is buried’. He gives the analogy of the archaeologist who with picks, shovels and spades clears away the rubbish and ‘starting from the visible remains … bring(s) to light what is buried’ (Freud 1971: 185). If the method is successful, the ‘discoveries explain themselves’, the symptoms tell the tale of the subject, provided they, the symptoms, have both what Freud called ‘determining quality’ and ‘traumatic power’ (186). The methodology captures something of the latent force of a writer and enables the writing of a biography different from what the author himself would have and has created. But this is not to say that like some of Freud’s own

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unstable texts, Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’, Moses and Monotheism, The ‘Uncanny’, to name a few, Rushdie’s texts are simply tissues of repressed spectres which may be uncovered or which haunt the Archive. What I seek to do, even as I acknowledge the nomological imperative which governs an archive (the laws of classification, the place of consignation, the rules of reading and so on), is to flesh out diverging narratives that throw light on the other archive, the already edited and therefore already censored archive which constitutes the writer’s published corpus.

An Anamnestic Enquiry: The Genesis of Secrecy Archives are held under an interdiction because they hold secrets. These secrets may be many, some inconsequential, a number of them significant to a textual critic. Among the latter a few must remain under an embargo and are therefore in a sense under ‘erasure’, awaiting a more propitious time for their release. The Rushdie Archive is no exception as it too holds secrets which are closed to researchers other than the author himself. One secret, surprisingly, which is not under a total embargo, is the writer’s engagement with a genesis of secrecy in Islam at the heart of the novel that changed the author’s life. The novel, quite obviously, is The Satanic Verses (Rushdie 1988). What does the Archive say about this work and its religious intertext? As we have noted Rushdie himself has written a memoir dealing with the fatwa years. The memoir was published in September 2012 with the benefit of the complete Archive at his disposal, something not available to researchers. I therefore turn to the partially available Archive on the subject to examine, fiendishly, the genesis of the decisive text of the fatwa. When did Rushdie’s interest in ‘the genesis of secrecy’ in Islam begin? Was there a conscious plan to deconstruct the Qur’ān itself? And was he aware of the consequences of such an undertaking? There is much in the Rushdie Archive at Emory University that shows Rushdie’s fascination with blasphemy,1 religion, God and the Qur’ān as the unedited word of God: nothing out of place, the words as recited by Muhammad upon the instigation of Angel Gabriel. It is like the śruti texts of the Vedas, unauthored, unmediated, in need of no amanuensis, although no Muslim would condone this connection with the texts of a polytheistic religion. What is there in the Archive which Rushdie, like every ‘careful concealer’, meant to keep secret? Should we, like Norbert Hanold, the archaeologist (or the annotator) in Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva, bring back to life these traces which may or may not be concealed? The literary biographer (the ‘biografiend’ as Joyce called him) tries to uncover the repressed, concealed texts and nothing delights him or her more than the discovery of a fragment which completes a literary jigsaw puzzle. Fascinating as the enterprise is, my task in this chapter is limited, as my aim is, to explore Rushdie’s interest in a Qur’ānic genesis of secrecy and its relationship to The Satanic Verses.2 Like Stephen in the Acts of the Apostles was he inviting blasphemy? And like Stephen, again, who in his defence retraced God’s gift of a covenant from Abraham to Jesus, did he mean to offer another, synoptic, narrative

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of a holy book? Did he blaspheme? After all, Stephen’s speech, whose subtext is the failure of the Jews to uphold the austere monotheistic covenant between God and Abraham, reads very much like a synopsis of the Qur’ān with the difference that in Islam the covenant gets qualified via Muhammad or Ishmael and not Christ or Isaac. The archive fever that Derrida (after Freud) had spoken about – a fever linked to the ‘desire and the disorder of the archive’ (1996a: 81), a fever quintessentially of the death drive which makes us run after the archive ‘even if there’s too much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself ’ (91) – compulsively drags us into the darkening heart of the archive. We are moving too fast; we need to pause; theoretical self-consciousness is getting in the way; an interlude or an excursus is necessary here. Chapters six and seven of Acts (the entire book is addressed to one Theophilus) are devoted to Stephen. Chapter five had already introduced us to the Council of Jewish elders who, concerned with the proselytizing methods of the apostles, wanted them killed. They are saved by a Pharisee named Gamaliel who basically argued that the apostles should be left alone. If what they preached came from men, their ideas would disappear; if indeed they came from God, then we have no choice but to listen to them, ‘lest haply ye be found even to fight against God’ (5.39). These are the early years of the Christian Church (we may want to recall even now that the intertext of The Satanic Verses too are the early years of the Islamic Church) and we get, along with theology, a schematic sociology of the foundational moments of the Christian Church. Stephen comes into the picture literally out of nowhere because the apostles require someone to look after their finances and the material well-being of their members. There is some strife between converts especially in respect of the treatment of widows and it is the latter’s material needs which require special redressing. Clearly Stephen is a brilliant accountant, a great debater as well as a miracle worker. Such a combination in a man can be dangerous, and often it is those who have recently acquired freedom who find such a person threatening. So, recently freed Jewish slaves (by the Romans) foment strife. They bribe their own kind, who now declare, ‘We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses, and against God’ (6.11). Stephen is caught in a bind: witnesses have declared that he has blasphemed. How does he get out of it? His case is doomed even as he mounts a theological defence in which he retraces God’s covenant from Abraham down to Jesus. And yet he makes no critical reappraisal of the Mosaic ‘law’ of blasphemy under which he has been condemned. The synopsis has considerable rhetorical power and is even novelistic in its design but its very ingenuity triggers memory of the Old Testament God’s own treatment of blasphemy. In Lev. 24.10-16 we get the incident of the Egyptian-Israelite man who during a quarrel with an Israelite ‘blasphemed the name of the Lord, and cursed’ (24.11). He is taken to Moses for judgement and Moses in turn waits for God to tell him what punishment should be meted out to him. And God replies, Bring forth him that hath cursed … and let all that heard him lay their hands upon his head [to testify that he is guilty], and let all the congregation stone him. And thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel, saying, Whosoever curseth his

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Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy God shall bear his sin. And he that blasphemeth the name of the LORD, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger, as he that is born in the land [the foreigner as well as the Israelite], when he blasphemeth the name of the LORD, shall be put to death. (24.14-16)

This is the law as we find it when we turn to the full text of Stephen’s defence that follows the accusation. The witnesses (including jurists) testify, one presumes falsely, before the Council of Jewish elders that ‘we have heard him say, that this Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy this place, and shall change the customs which Moses delivered us’ (6.14). Witnesses declare that he has blasphemed; God had earlier declared that this is acceptable testimony. The defendant’s penalty is death by stoning. As Acts presents it, the charge is of course trumped up. The constructed crime, quite conveniently, is: he had spoken against God and his prophet Moses. And it seems that under the Mosaic code this is as blasphemous as you can get. Stephen’s speech, which takes up all but two or three verses of chapter seven, rehearses Jewish resistance to the ‘Holy Spirit’, their failure to observe God’s law and acknowledge the coming of the ‘Just One’, the promised Saviour, who was in fact murdered by them. The speech, in terms of the failure of the Jews to uphold the austere monotheistic covenant between God and Abraham, reads very much like a synopsis of the Qur’ān. Stephen’s defence, however, is too much for the jury and witnesses stone him to death as Saul is seen ‘consenting unto his death’ (8.1). Acts begins to read like a novel as we know that this Saul, as Paul, will soon become the ethical voice of Christianity through the letters he will write to the foundational Christian churches and their key players. In the case of Stephen, blasphemy is a useful excuse for punishment. We do not know what was the other crime of the part-Israelite in Leviticus but we may suspect that witnesses there too found blasphemy a very convenient excuse for killing off troublesome people. This is not to say that blasphemy has no historical power or that it has a purely ideological function; rather it co-exists with religion, belief, God and society, which is why laws against blasphemy exist in so many countries. Whereas the Biblical definition of the word is precise and clear-cut – it is a crime punishable by death – its semantic trajectory in English is anything but straightforward. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) informs the reader that the word comes from the Greek ‘βλασφημία’ via Latin ‘blasphēmia’, meaning slander, blasphemy. The first meaning is given as ‘Profane speaking of God or sacred things; impious irreverence’ and supported by an early Middle English (1225) citation: ‘Þe seoueđe hweolp is Blasphemie’ (‘that seventh offspring is Blasphemy’). Caxton (1488) defines blasphemy as speaking ‘unhonestly of god’ and Milton (1659) refers to blasphemy as ‘evil speaking against God maliciously’. The word also has a more common figurative and general meaning. In figurative use, we find Bacon (1605) writing about blasphemy ‘against learning’ for which one is punished. The general meaning – slander, evil speaking, defamation, now obsolete – is captured in the 1656 citation: ‘To speak evil of any man is blasphemy.’ It is only by 1768 (Blackstone) that we get a meaning which touches more directly on our subject

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matter: ‘Blasphemy against the almighty, by denying his being or providence.’ Except for the 1768 quote most of the other meanings are not particularly helpful in laying down the parameters of blasphemy. How does one define ‘unhonestly’ (Caxton), or ‘maliciously’ (Milton)? Only Blackstone is clear: blasphemy involves denying God’s being and his role as the guardian of his creation. The OED does not help us when it comes to telling us the consequences of blasphemy. There is no citation from Leviticus or from Acts. When does one cross the line? To what extent can one rewrite or challenge religiously sanctioned and culturally endorsed representations of God? The questions posed here become a matter not of epistemology but of law and of legal interpretation which is governed by the social mores of the time. Given our subject matter, we need to turn to blasphemy in Islam. In Islam, blasphemy, although more marked, is far less doctrinal, and textual support from the Qur’ān is not readily forthcoming. ‘Blasphemy’ in Arabic has two words: ‘tajdīf’, a more religiously specific term, and ‘sabb’, a more general word for irreverent attitudes. The first does not occur in the Qur’ān, while the second does but without a religious meaning. ‘Sabb’, meaning ‘revile’, occurs in an ambiguous passage in the Qur’ān where God seems to be condoning heresy (ilhād) and unbelief (kufr) which, along with polytheism (shirk), are unpardonable sins in Islam. Do not revile the idols which they invoke besides God, lest in their ignorance they revile God with rancour. (6.108)3

Arabic scholars, however, have pointed out that even if the two common words for blasphemy do not make their way into the Qur’ān in any strict sense, it does not follow that the ‘intent’ of that word (as we understand it in Judaeo-Christianity) is non-existent. They point to sura 7.180 where the verb ‘alhada’ carries this meaning of the word (Netton 1996: 3): God has the Most Excellent Names. Call on Him by His Names and keep away from those that pervert them. They shall receive their due for their misdeeds.

Here ‘pervert’ is a clear injunction against profanity. However, it is not a matter of a single word being offensive (as is the case with blasphemy in the Bible) but rather the totality of relations across a number of words found in the Qur’ān which becomes important. Thus blasphemy is not simply reviling God through language but is a Muslim’s total attitude towards kufr (unbelief), ilhād (heresy) and shirk (polytheism) that must be kept in mind. But above and beyond all this is the figure of Islam’s prophet Muhammad. Indeed, such is his extraordinary reverence among believers that, in many ways, it is a lesser crime to ‘blaspheme’ against God than to doubt Muhammad’s role as the ultimate and final prophet before the Day of Judgement. Although he never claimed to be anything other than mortal, Islam stands and falls on the inviolability of his personage. There is a telling Persian adage which makes this clear: ‘bā khudā diwānā basad, bā Muhammad hoshiyār’ (‘You may take as many liberties as you like with Allah, but beware of transgressing

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Muhammad’). This is echoed in Rushdie’s interview with Valerie Grove (The Sunday Times, Sunday, 22 January 1989) some three weeks before the fatwa: Objective information about him [Muhammad] is forbidden to fundamentalists. Muhammad himself always insisted that he was no more than a human being. But there’s a saying: ‘You say what you like about God, but be careful with Muhammad.’ It is the Islamic world’s new assertiveness that makes this book [The Satanic Verses] an act of reckless courage. (45/11)

As we have already noted, Rushdie has declared on a number of occasions his passion, indeed his love, of Islamic culture. Coming from an anglicized (and even anglophilic) liberal Bombay Muslim family, the implicit distinction between Islamic culture and Islamic religion is important to him. Muslim rituals were observed in his Bombay home, but these were limited to the forty-day fast and the feasts and new clothes that followed. There were occasional Friday prayers in the mosque where recitations were more likely to have been made in Urdu than in Arabic. How then was the holy book, the Qur’ān, remembered by the young Rushdie? There are many instances of the Wordsworthian spot of time and memory of place in Rushdie and the Archive is replete with them. Qur’ānic verses do not figure in these moments of recall too often, but when they do, the mediated text, it seems, is not the Arabic original but the Urdu translation. What was this text in Urdu like? One of the most influential was the early 1790 translation of this extraordinary work into Urdu by one Shaikh Abdul Qadir Ibn ī Shah Walī Ullah. It rendered the Urdu translation in the roman script for use by missionaries with an introduction by Rev. T. P. Hughes and an Urdu Index by Rev. E. M. Wherry (1876).4 If a copy of this book existed in the Rushdie household (as one imagines it should have, given Anis Ahmed Rushdie’s own interest in the composition of the Qur’ān and his likely agreement with Hughes’s comment that ‘to fully realize the gradual growth of Muhammad’s religious system one needs to read the Qur’ān in the order in which it was revealed’ (xii)), the family and the prodigious young Salman would have known that the word ‘Qur’ān’, as explained by Hughes, is derived from the Arabic ‘qara’ and comes from the same root as the Hebrew ‘kara’ (‘to read’ or ‘to recite’) found in Jeremiah XXXVI. It occurs at the commencement of sura 96 (Al-‘Alaq): ‘Recite in the name of your Lord who created – created man from clots of blood.’ The various epithets of the Qur’ān (the Glorious, the Noble and so on) would have been known to Rushdie as well as the holy book’s inspired recitation and its medium of the inspiration (the Archangel Gabriel (Gibreel)) who is less conspicuous in the Holy Book itself as he is mentioned only twice. Later in life the young Salman would encounter a copy of this book in the Cambridge University Library and read Hughes’s explanation that except for the poetic parts, which he thought were probably original, ‘Islam is largely Talmudic Judaism adapted to Arabia, plus the [apostolic work] of Jesus and Muhammad. Jesus talks like a good Muslim from his birth’ (xiv). The commentarial tradition generally accepts that certain passages of the Qur’ān are ‘Mansukh’ or abrogated by verses afterwards, and these verses are notably sura 4.89 and sura 9.5 on the killing of infidels. In an

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instance of mid-Victorian rhetorical flourish Hughes writes, ‘[The Qur’ān] pulls down what it professes to build up, it destroys what it professes to confirm’ (xxi). Although Rushdie grew up in an environment where English gradually supplanted Hindi–Urdu, it is reasonable to assume that the opening words of the Urdu Qur’ān – which is in fact a translation of sura 96, logically the opening statement of the Holy Book – would have been forever lodged in his mind. paḍh apne rab ke nām se, jis ne banāyā Recite in the name of your Lord who created banāyā ādmī lahū kī phuṭkī se – created man from clots of blood. paḍh aur terā rab baḍā karīm hai Recite! Your Lord is the Most Bountiful One, jis ne ilm sikhāyā kalām se who by the pen taught sikhāyā ādmī ko jo na jāntā thā [taught] man what he did not know.

The N. J. Dawood (1999) translation given after each line captures the repetitive nature of the poetic composition, but only in the first two lines with the word ‘created’ (in Urdu ‘banāyā’). The English translation does not capture the second repetition of the word ‘taught’ (in Urdu ‘sikhāyā’). Upon leaving Bombay for Rugby in 1961, for a while there would be no reason why he should have read the Qur’ān or indeed defined himself with reference to his ancestral religion. But this amnesia would not last long as upon entering Cambridge the spectres of readings from the Qur’ān would invade his consciousness. The admission is made in a journal entry (a redacted copy), which we may date November 1987: ‘I’ve been waiting 20 yrs to write about the incident of the satanic verses.’ If we go back in time, ‘20 yrs’ places Rushdie more or less in his final year at Cambridge University (1967–8). In that year, as a history student, Rushdie read a paper on Islam which, apparently, he took with a tutor, the medieval historian Arthur Hibbert, as an independent study contract because there were no other takers of this unit. We read in the notes prepared for a talk: When I was an undergraduate at this College [King’s, Cambridge] between 1965 and 1968 … while in my final year of reading history at Cambridge … I came across the story of the so-called ‘satanic verses’ or temptation of the Prophet Muhammad, and of his rejection of the temptation. That year, I had chosen as one of my special subjects a paper on Muhammad, the Rise of Islam and the Caliphate. So few students chose the option that the lectures were cancelled. … However, I was anxious to continue, and one of the King’s history dons agreed

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Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy to supervise me. So as it happened I was, I think, the only student in Cambridge who took the paper. The next year, I’m told, it was not offered again. (45/11)

When Rushdie read about the incident of the satanic verses at Cambridge he was taken by the remarkable nature of the story (2012: 38–45). It had great potential for a novelist, something he didn’t know then. He filed it away in one part of his brain without, it seems, reflecting on the degree to which any overt reference to the rejected verses is considered to be blasphemous in Islam. ‘Twenty years later he would find out exactly how good a story it was’ (45), as a novelistic problematic where it would be necessary to blast open the mediated nature of the transmission of this narrative fragment. I turn to Rushdie’s own admission that it had taken him twenty years ‘to write about the incident of the satanic verses’ to retrace Rushdie’s engagement with the Islamic genesis of secrecy as it surfaces in the Archive. Written, it seems, sometime before the author’s copy of the novel dated 17 February 1988, probably in November 1987, the notes indicate that to Rushdie the ‘historical source’ of the verses is of special significance: first, it raises questions about ‘how newness enters the world: how one deals with weakness, how with strength’ and, second, how difficult it is ‘to tell angels from devils … [which] old theology mixed them up anyway’. On this second point, Rushdie makes the additional remark that the ‘devil is an aspect of God … “Good” and “evil” are confused these days’ and it is ‘hard enough to say what is, let alone what is right’. Later he would acknowledge his indebtedness to William Blake, especially to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (22/7). In the unpublished novels-in-manuscript (see Chapter 2) Rushdie’s interest in the ‘Islamic genesis of secrecy’ is again evident. In his first attempt at a novel – ‘The Book of the Peer’, written soon after his brief but disastrous stay in Karachi (1969– 70) after Cambridge – Rushdie came upon what he said was a ‘good idea, an idea that even looks a little prescient today’ (43/6–7, p. 26). One of the four epigraphs of this novel is the opening lines of the sura 96 of the Qur’ān: ‘Recite, in the name of the Lord,/thy Creator,/who created Man from clots of blood.’ Although this and the other epigraphs are from the collator–translator (a mode of authorial distancing employed by Rushdie), it is clear that Rushdie’s first completed novel pays homage to one of the signature verses of the Qur’ān.5 To us a number of things about the novel suggest his near-obsessive interest in a sanctified text’s genesis of secrecy and how it should be handled. Dreams, for one, are ‘often used in an attempt to clarify the dreamer’s thought’. The Manichean view too is not new as the Qur’ānic world keeps this binary between God and Satan. As offered in ‘The Book of the Peer’, the latter view is less subtly presented since ‘God’ is described as the ‘obstacular’ (20) – the real obstacle to a fuller understanding of desire and the sensual nature of the world. Although this is not a critique or a commentary on the Qur’ān or any other religious text, ‘The Book of the Peer’ has the aura of a gospel inasmuch as it is presented as a teaching. In Section Two, Part II, we get a more direct statement on Muhammad, who remains unnamed. Here the ‘inset’ author shows a book about the Prophet to the poet Shujauddin (a Marxist who leaves for the Soviet Union and who, radically transformed, surfaces as Bilal in The Satanic Verses).

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I recall the first time I read a book about the Prophet – not Peer, the one they follow now – other than the Book [the Qur’ān] itself. I can remember no book that I fought so hard against: every sentence held a blasphemy, every fact was a diminution. Sociology and religion do not mix easily … The book said: the Prophet lifted many of his main doctrines direct from the Jews and Nestorian Christians whom he met on camel-trips. I said: He had his revelation straight from God. And so on, through the question of the Satanic Verses, the connection between the decimation in battle of the Faithful men, and the injunction to take four wives (wives took their husband’s religion and it was a means to prevent the numbers of the Faithful diminishing even more), the view of the faith as an attempt, a political and social attempt, to inculcate the nomadic virtues into an urban community: the Prophet had been an orphan himself, and greatly approved of the nomadic respect for the rights and privileges of orphans and widows. Shuja explained patiently how the Prophet was a historical figure, in which he was unlike all other prophets, and how it was only right to consider him as living within that known historical context. After all, he always said how human he was. ‘But if this book says he didn’t receive his Book from the angel of God’ I blurted ‘it’s calling him a fraud!’ Shuja [Shujauddin, the poet] told me a lot of medical facts about how hypertension, asceticism, anchoritism and isolated places can create illusions, hallucinations. He had to repeat it several times in different words before I stopped shaking head and listened. But I did listen, and it shook my faith. Although that was not destroyed fully until later, when we unearthed the wickedness of the priests. After that my first impetuous plan was for Shuja and I to go crying the news of the Prophet’s lack of revelation; but after Shuja’s trouble, I realized that we would probably be stoned to death. (66–7)

Here is Rushdie, barely twenty-three, living for a year in a fanatically religious Pakistan (to which his parents had migrated in 1964), already interested in an Islamic genesis of secrecy and showing a preference, it seems, for a polytheistic monism of the ‘post-religious west’ (148).6 Rushdie recognizes early on the dangers inherent in turning to the genesis of secrecy against the advice of the patron of interpreters, Hermes. Such declarations were forbidden and their consequences, unpredictable, perhaps even prophetic, as is evident from references to the inversion of the Faustian pact mentioned a number of times in the Archive. ‘A book’, we find typed on a quarto sheet, ‘is the product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract. Faust sacrificed eternity for the joys to be gained in life. The writer agrees to a ruined life, and gains, if he is fortunate, perhaps not eternity, but, at least, posterity. In either case, it is the devil who wins’ (22/17). Clearly there is considerable unease, even disquiet at his textual discoveries, as in the memoir Rushdie, also, recalls this note: Throughout the writing of the book [The Satanic Verses] he had kept a note to himself pinned to the wall above his desk. ‘To write a book is to make a Faustian

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Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy contract in reverse,’ it said. ‘To gain immortality, or at least posterity, you lose, or at least ruin, your actual daily life.’ (2012: 91)

Tracing the ‘Satanic Verses’ The first reference to the ‘satanic verses’ as a title of a book appears in a journal entry (redacted copy, because the journal itself is not open to readers) of around the mid-seventies where there is an illustration of the title page of a novel, ‘The Satanic Comedy’, the title itself a little too cleverly invoking Dante. Salman Rushdie’s name is beneath it followed by ‘author of Grimus, Madame Rama, The Antagonist, Holinshed’s Chronicle, Alpha-Zygote, The Slapstick Scenes from a Place in the Crowd, Clarissa, etc.’. (‘The Book of the Peer’ is not mentioned.) It is important to note that there was another novel with Saladin Chamcha as the chief protagonist in the making in which a key subtext of The Satanic Verses – the theme of migration and change, of newness – was to take centre space. In one of the later notes on this proposed novel, now called ‘The West’, he had written ‘WHERE IS the myth of migration? Not Ulysses. That is of voyaging and return. Where is the one-way legend? It seems that I must write it’ (45/8). There were other false starts: ‘Rivers of Blood: Or, The Adventures of Saladin Chamcha’, where the title echoed Enoch Powell’s anti-immigration speech; ‘The Renaissance Chronicles’ which would have examined ‘the renaissance of Saladin Chamcha’ (45/6). In the notes for the latter, Saladin Chamcha was designed as a friend of Saleem who, after the discovery of the Braganza Pickle Shop at the end of Midnight’s Children, now wishes to go to Britain to make his business global. Rushdie imagines a chapter in ‘The Renaissance Chronicles’ in which Saleem, Padma and their son Aadam together make their way to Britain where they meet Saladin, someone called Ibrahim Segal and also Ayesha Muhammad and her daughter Anna who has a boyfriend tentatively called ‘Editor’ (45/6). And, of course, Saleem is also in England to discover his ‘true father, William Methwold’. The note on Saleem reaching England to find his father may be cited in full: Why am I in England to find my true father, William Methwold, who by now may be anywhere, a banker, a juggler, a murderer (at times I see his hand in everything). I cannot shake him off: he colours my life. The books he read which were left in our house, some of them dated many years later than they could have been. The letters in which he discussed past and future as the same thing. (45/6)

Methwold remains a haunting presence in Rushdie’s creative imagination as he would reappear in The Ground Beneath Her Feet as the collaborator with Sir Darius Xerxes Cama on a work on Indo-European mythology and then would marry Darius’s wife Lady Spenta upon Sir Darius’s death. ‘The Renaissance Chronicles’ is not mentioned again but ‘Rivers of Blood’ continues to grip his ‘brain firmly’ (45/6). All the characters – Ayesha, Anna Muhammad, Ibrahim Segal, Saladin Chamcha, the boy Editor – are ‘firmly fixed

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in [his] mind’. The novel will be set in a time in the world ‘when things haven’t quite happened yet, a betweentime, a time of change and foreboding’. The problem he encounters is how to ‘let the twentieth century in’. He had planned to call his opening chapter ‘Vilayet’ where the narrator will speak to the reader directly and describe the place called Vilayet (literally, a kingdom, a province, but generically referred to Britain). This country, the country called Vilayet, is no more than a ‘rumour, a theory, or – worst of all! – an idea’. It seems to have somehow lodged itself within another body politic, another nation state, but it is no more than ‘an invisible parasite … no country at all!’ He thinks perhaps ‘The West’ may be another title of the novel because Saladin Chamcha may be the person around whom ‘a dream literature of migration’ may be created, especially if one ‘sees migration itself as a country’. He thinks of the traveller Ibn Battuta and places him in conversation with Saladin Chamcha. The twosome ‘Battuta and Chamcha, the translated men, must be given time to slowly take shape’. They come off the same plane but whereas Battuta, the earlier Gibreel, wishes to remain unchanged, Saladin is the compulsive traveller. And so the urge to write the ultimate novel on the myth of migration grabs Rushdie. It seems he toyed with the idea of travel that would have a science-fiction element: ‘cosmos-galaxy-earth-europe-england’ (45/11). In the end he opts for ambiguity and a structure of Gibreel’s two dreaming journeys: the first, which is in time, to Muhammad; the second, which is space, ‘to the village of Mirza S & the prophetess’ (212/8; 09–195 redacted). The apocryphal (‘satanic’) verses continue to haunt Rushdie even as the themes of migration and change are constantly present. A Faustian spectral presence invades the marginalia as he toys with the possible title of his new work in progress. In 22/7 there are six handwritten quarto pages on the genesis of the novel. Rushdie jots down ideas as they come to him. At this stage in the autograph there are four protagonists – ‘Gibril, Muhammad, Imam and the “Kahin” [the girl]’– who must have ‘secular antagonists’. Rushdie suggests ‘the landowner, etc.’ as part of the narrative but does not mention anyone else by name. ‘Gibril, Muhammad, the Kahin [the butterfly girl in the final version]’ and the landowner make their way into the finished novel, but the Imam (one suspects modelled on Khomeini) disappears as one of the chief characters. Rushdie is already aware, at this early stage, of the ideological possibilities available to him in any exploration of an Islamic theme. In the next note Rushdie writes, ‘But I also need to show that Muslims can be both “light” about religion rather than “heavy”, and not evil. So I need all sorts of Muslim in the book’ (Rushdie’s emphasis). To do this it seems the idea of ‘dreaming’ is important. Gibril, says Rushdie, is a ‘serial-dreamer’ who can ‘after all visit anyone [he] want[s] to. Gaddafi, why not?’ The novel, after all, is ‘about dreamers, men & women who dream’. The dreaming would obviously require a fantasy structure of some sort so that the ‘aeroplane to England’ is transformed into a ‘birth canal’ like ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’. I return to Rushdie’s own admission that it had taken him twenty years ‘to write about the incident of the satanic verses’ to retrace how the discovery of this genesis of secrecy evolves in his thinking, especially as that evolution makes its way into the writing of his novel on the subject. ‘The Parting of the Arabian Sea’,

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dated 29 December 1983 (23/1), remains the working title (with earlier titles given as ‘The Parting’ and ‘The Parting of the Seas’) for some time (quite possibly for the period 1983–4) as there is a sheet (212/8) in which Rushdie draws the cover of the proposed book and gives it this title underneath his name. The notes on the novel with this title begin to emphasize theological issues: ‘The Parting must include the Mahound/Satanic Verses material. It must be a complete engagement with the ideas of God, revelation, transcendence’ (212/8; 09–116 redacted). Other issues begin to invade the theological concerns, issues such as migration, diaspora, travel: ‘Why do people move across the planet?’ asks Rushdie, and ‘How am I to write such a book? It is impossible. It can have no story, no shape, nothing but a mass of unconnected material.’ He answers, ‘But I must write it. The book of change, of motion … i am an unpossessed possession, i want to be owned. I am a Chameleon … Saladin Chamcha … Sham, the evening [in Urdu] also pretense in another language [English]’ (44/25). ‘The secret lies in having to take the risk,’ he notes on a separate half-sheet (23/1). The language of the marginalia has the quality of a panic-ridden magnificent obsession which spills over into agitated prose. What can one make of a writer, ‘an unpossessed possession’, who must write the ‘book of change’? There is something of St Stephen’s apostolic self-assurance here; the will to correct a grand narrative, to inflect it in such a manner that its textual stability will be forever in doubt. Rushdie becomes a truly great writer only after he had written The Satanic Verses, his theological–cosmopolitan text after the ‘national’ ones (Midnight’s Children and Shame). In the available Archive he can only anticipate greatness, although he senses that the achievement would come at a great cost to him. ‘Why publish so naked a thing? Because truth can only be communicated through risk,’ he had written (09–196 redacted). The novel here is seen as more than fiction; it is a medium of imparting truth which would otherwise be censored. As a writer, though, the struggle is with the right correspondence between language and sensibility in a work which is turning out to be a ‘trilogy’. Almost exactly a year after the first dated reference to ‘The Parting of the Arabian Sea’, on a sheet dated ‘16/12/84’ (23/1) one senses greater self-assurance – the writer reading himself as a non-messianic messiah. The emphasis shifts quite radically as Rushdie notes: Maybe the novel should be called The Satanic Verses: because it is, after all, about forms of temptation: sexuality, solitude, solipsism, transcendence: and, in its 2 central strands, Muhammad’s is a temptation away from God towards secularity, … whereas the girl prophet’s is a temptation towards God. Yes. Maybe. Think about it. (Rushdie’s emphases)

By 21 December, that is a week later, he draws a cover of the book with ‘Satanic Verses’ (without the definite article) as the title. Underneath he writes, ‘Yes: this must be the title of the new book’ (212/8). So by the end of 1984 the focus begins to move away from ‘parting of the sea’ to the ‘satanic verses’. But on another sheet Rushdie feels that the ‘The Parting of the Arabian Sea’ could be ‘a section heading:

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because the idea of parting/opening up/partition/division is also central to the book’. ‘This connects’, Rushdie continues, ‘of course to my migration concerns – that act, too, is a parting, a separation in the self. Or can be. My new ideas on migration to be developed here’ (212/8). The full import of the shift begins to dawn on him as ‘God’ enters his jottings. ‘Yes: I’m playing God, I suppose. But on the whole it’s more dangerous when God plays man … and I am not playing God for money, but for my life’ (212/8). There is a qualification on a subsequent sheet: ‘“playing God” both in the sense of “acting God” and “playing against God”’. This is followed by a confession about the place of the ‘I’ which, he says, ‘appears, in both the others, as the archangel Gabriel’. The Manichean principle gets re-stated on another page with the difference that God and the Devil are seen to be one: ‘So the point is: the satanic verses came from God, too. God is the devil. That is if the Divine Being is ourselves written in macrocosm, It must be simultaneously good & evil. The two in One, as they are in all of us. Why shd. God be different?’(212/8; Rushdie’s emphasis).7 And at the end of this folder we get a reminder note for Rushdie himself: ‘Remember Salman the Persian’. The latter, properly known as Salman al-Farisi, is referred to as ‘some sort of bum from Persia’ in The Satanic Verses (101) but was in fact an early Persian convert to Islam (Netton 1996: 28). The Satanic Verses occupies two temporal orders: the here and now and the past and the future. The former is more or less realist; the latter created as a dream. In the first, the now section, Saladin and Gibreel are the chief players. Their sex partners are Pamela and Zeeny for Saladin; Rekha and Allie for Gibreel. In the second, the dream temporal order, the chief characters are Mahound and Ayesha. Their love objects or adversaries are Ayesha and Al-Lat for Mahound and Osman and Mirza for Ayesha. The two Ayeshas operate at two different levels of the past. Beyond the overriding narrative structure of a dreamer who can dream anything and enter into the lives of others, we already sense a political and epistemological imperative in Rushdie’s larger design of the novel as we continue to read 22/7. It would be necessary for him to question absolutism of any kind and see truth as a matter to be fought over rather than as a pregiven. Here an ideological understanding of history where, after Marx, ‘men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura’ (Williams 1977: 58), seems to be the driving force. Would the novel then correct as the eye does the inverted objects in the retina? On a single typed page with additional handwritten notes, we read, ‘I am his [Mahound’s] dream, I speak what he says. The angel and the devil are the same. Gibreel and Shaitan, two sides of the coin’ (22/7). This seems to be the deep structure or kernel of the narrative, a novel which would, in a Manichean manner, plant the necessity of Satan in religious thought and, like Milton, give Satan the best lines (‘The devil (has all the best) tunes’, we read in the notes on the novel and in the published work too (SV 10)). But if the satanic core of the novel can be readily established from the Archive, there are other matters which are of concern to Rushdie. The ‘birth canal’ analogy has an autobiographical and ethnographic edge because his concerns are also ‘migration and Islam … autobiography, temptation, corruption, and the whole great clash of the East and the West’. The characters who enter the country through this birth canal – Saladin (who is now introduced) and

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Gibreel (with the new spelling) – find that Ellowen Deeowen (L-O-N-D-O-N) extracts a penance from them (an idea borrowed from Joyce as we read in the notes) which they are not able to fully pay. The city itself is dislocated but so are they as they face the ‘end of the old (Saladin’s marriage) and the beginnings of the new (Gibreel’s affair with Ali the mountaineer)’. Their fates, including that of Ally (Ali) Barber, are sealed: Gibreel although possessed with his ‘angelness’ is denied God and takes his own life, Saladin (Chamcha) returns to a changed Bombay, and Ally Barber attempts a solo climb of Everest and never returns. A number of these essential items of plot, with names slightly changed, make their way into the novel. At this point the Archive takes us to Rushdie’s catholic and canonical intertextual lineage. Originally there were two epigraphs to The Satanic Verses: from Daniel Defoe’s The History of the Devil (which we find in the published version) and from the French avant-garde filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard which is given on a single sheet of paper in 22/6: ‘We live in the void of metamorphosis … are we near to our conscience, or far from it? – from Alphaville, a film by Jean-Luc Godard.’ Daniel Defoe’s (1660–1731) starting point is Milton’s dramatic suggestion, as Defoe interprets it, that the Devil’s failed rebellion leads to his permanent confinement. Against this, Defoe makes the case that the Devil is always present in our world, lives alongside us and at every opportunity tempts us into dismantling God’s divine project. This reading is affirmed in Eph. 2.2, I Pet. 5.8 and Job I.7. In Job, Satan tells God that he is forever wandering the earth, ‘walking up and down in it’. Islam, by and large, accepts Defoe’s reading of the pervasive presence of Satan in our lives, which is why submission to Allah is a categorical imperative. Rushdie’s interest in Defoe’s reading of the Devil is obvious as, in terms of this argument, no one, not even a prophet, is immune from temptation by the Devil. Defoe also provides Rushdie with a repertoire of images which he strategically deploys in his novel. As for the title of the novel, Robert Southey, to whom Byron dedicated his Don Juan, referred to Byron as belonging to a ‘Satanic School’, and somewhere else Robert Southey is reputed to have said to a friend that Byron’s Don Juan should have been called The Satanic Verses, so the term did not necessarily relate only to Muhammad’s rebuttal of these verses.8 Rushdie’s passion for the undecidable, the in-between, the item beneath the outer show, the unheimlich, therefore, has its grounding in a larger comparative literature from which it follows that Defoe, Dante and Blake are just as important as the Islamic commentators on religion. The Archive makes this quite evident. Blake, author of the singularly English ‘Preface’ to his poem Milton, a hymnal sung like an anthem (‘Till we have built Jerusalem/In England’s green & pleasant Land’), was also the deeply disturbed visionary poet whose cryptic line ‘without Contraries is no progression’ (Blake 1972: 149) and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as a whole powerfully inform Chapter Five (‘A City Visible but Unseen’) of the published novel and are present in many notes in the Archive.9 As novelists from Cervantes to Dostoevsky discovered, there can be no novel if there is absolute submission to either the mediator or to the object. In considering this insight (which is René Girard’s (1988)) Rushdie turns to the orgiastic or the Dionysian principle which Islam’s sense of austere submission occludes. In this

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context, what better figure to go to than Satan whose role in the Qur’ān itself is more prominent than in the Bible. In the Hadith (sayings of the Prophet) and Qisas al-Anbiyā’ (stories of the prophets) commentaries on the Islamic version of the covenant, Satan plays a part in trying to dissuade Abraham, and then Hagar and finally Ishmael from submitting to God. Milton, of course, had made Satan the great anti-hero of the epic to whom he had given his best lines and whom God had left ‘at large to his own dark designs, / That with reiterated crimes he might / Heap on himself damnation, while he sought/Evil to others …’ (Paradise Lost I. 13–16). The Qur’ān has a similar fascination with Satan. Accounts of his expulsion from Paradise are given fully at least four times (suras 7, 15, 17 and 38) and Iblis or Satan’s crime is explained as overbearing hubris on the grounds that, since, as Satan claimed, he was created out of ‘smokeless fire’ but Adam out of clay, he was the superior being. Condemned by God for his ego, he makes his design on humankind plain as we read in sura 7.16-17: ‘Because You have led me into sin,’ he declared, ‘I will waylay Your servants as they walk on Your straight path, then spring upon them from the front and from the rear, from their right and from their left. Then You will find the greater part of them ungrateful.’

Although the role of Satan in tempting Adam is narrated in the Qur’ān and Satan’s role admonished on a number of occasions, notably in commentaries on the sacrifice of Ishmael, only once is there an insinuation in the Qur’ān that he may have tampered with the holy book itself. For the believer the insinuation is an instance of takfīr (a declaration of unbelief) and hence of itself heretical, which is why it does not exist in the received text. Referred to as the ‘story of the cranes’ (qissat al-gharānīq) in the Islamic tradition but ‘satanic verses’ by Western scholars, the erasure of the suggestive apostasy raises questions about the likelihood of Satan actually tempting Muhammad. The early commentators during the first two centuries of Islam had, however, raised the issue especially in their hagiographical and prophetic biographies (the sīra-maghāzī) where the incident is thought to have occurred during the fifth year of Muhammad’s mission.10 Muhammad had received the revelation of the Sūrat al-Najm (‘The Star’) which he recites to the Quraysh leaders of Mecca with whom he wished to arrive at a reconciliation as to the rights of his followers. In the early Qur’ānic exegesis, it is stated that when Muhammad reached verses 19-20 of sura 53 of the revealed Book (‘Have you thought upon Lat and Uzza, and Manat, the third, the other’ (SV 114)) Satan inserts two verses in the revelation which Muhammad, quite possibly for the moment inattentive, accepted as divine (‘They are the exalted birds, and their intercession is desired indeed’ (114)). At this the Quraysh leaders were happy and prostrated themselves alongside the believers (Qur’ān sura 53. 62). Later Muhammad returns to Angel Gibreel (Gabriel) and recants the satanic verses which disappear from the holy book forever. The satanic verses are replaced by the admonition that Allah had vested no powers in these Meccan goddesses. It is important to note that Islamic tafsīr (religious exegesis) stressed this incident in the first few centuries of the

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spread of the religion and the writings of al-Tabari (d. 913) certainly make this point. It was only later – and as late as the fourth century of the Islamic calendar – that commentators like al-‘Arabī (d. 1148) and al-Yahsubī (d. 1149) rejected the historicity of the incident of the satanic verses outright on the grounds that this was contrary to the ‘doctrine of ‘ismat al-Anbiyā’ or ‘the divine protection of prophets from sin and error’. To believe otherwise meant committing the cardinal sin of shirk and had to be denounced as kufr (unbelief). And since there were no recorded eye witnesses to the incident (essential in Islamic hermeneutic traditions for legitimate historical transmission), it was rejected outright by later Muslim scholars but found support, much later, in the works of a number of European orientalists such as William Muir, D. Margoliouth, W. Montgomery Watt, Maxime Rodinson, E. H. Palmer and F. E. Peters.11 The criticism made about Rushdie is that in reopening the historicity of the incident he too has taken sides with these orientalists. The point being made here is that Satan tampers with a prophet’s wishes which in the case of Muhammad meant making him act in accordance with political expediency and not uncompromising belief. Rushdie, of course, takes the act of political expediency as a sign of the power of compromise and the presence in any belief system of earlier polytheistic residues. He therefore rephrases the words in Palmer’s translation of the Qur’ān (1960) (‘they are the two high-soaring cranes, and, verily, their intercession may be hoped for’) to read ‘“They are the exalted birds, and their intercession is desired indeed”’ (SV 114) and in doing so constructs an alternative, secret narrative of Islam. The alternative narrative, however, is seen by believers as pure fabrication, although this is not the point of Rushdie’s fictionalized account of the Prophet and this incident. To Rushdie, the issue is not so much about the historicity of the event but about confronting the great mysterium tremendum, the grand secret, of Islamic revelation. It is no coincidence that Gibreel Farishta’s birth name is Ismail Najmuddin, ‘Ismail after the child involved in the sacrifice of Ibrahim, and Najmuddin, star of the faith’ (SV 17), bringing together both the narrative of the gift and sura 53, the Sūrat al-Najm (‘The Star’). The connection between the Islamic covenant via Ismail (Ishmael), son of Hagar, against the Jewish Isaac, is consciously made but even as he dreams his original and defining name, his visionary self sliding ‘heavylidded towards visions of his angeling’ he recalls his mother’s moniker for him: ‘Shaitan’ – Arabic for Satan or Iblis, the absent personality of sura 53. Gibreel ‘sees beginnings, Shaitan cast down from the sky … [as he sings] from hellbelow his soft seductive verses’ (SV 91). He reveals the sacred text to the businessman, to the ‘medieval baby-frightener, the Devil’s synonym: Mahound’ (SV 93) in ‘a bhaenchud nightmare’ (109, ‘a sister fucking nightmare’), the latter a truly creative, indeed exceptional, use of linguistic cross-coding. But he also knows, in spite of the dream-like utterances, that the ‘archangel is actually inside the Prophet’ (SV 110). It was through Shaitan, masquerading as an angel, that Mahound receives the verses which he must now repudiate. ‘It was the Devil,’ he says aloud to the empty air, making it true by giving it voice. ‘The last time, it was Shaitan.’ This is what he has heard in his listening, that

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he has been tricked, that the Devil came to him in the guise of the archangel, so that the verses he memorized, the ones he recited in the poetry tent, were not the real thing but its diabolic opposite, not godly, but satanic. He returns to the city as quickly as he can, to expunge the foul verses that reek of brimstone and sulphur, to strike them from the record for ever and ever, so that they will survive in just one or two unreliable collections of old traditions and orthodox interpreters will try and unwrite their story, but Gibreel, hovering-watching from his highest camera angle, knows one small detail, just one tiny thing that’s a bit of a problem here, namely that it was me both times, baba, me first and second also me. From my mouth, both the statement and the repudiation, verses and converses, universes and reverses, the whole thing, and we all know how my mouth got worked. (SV 123)

Orthodox interpreters certainly ‘unwrote’ the narrative by excluding Shaitan from the narrative and presenting the mysterium tremendum as the message of an absent God, frightening and vengeful, who has to be transformed into the merciful through an allegory which leads to self-transcendence. The satanic verses, however, posit the underbelly of belief, the voice of Satan from the crypt which spells out the demonic against the spiritual. Although the exegetical texts of Islam show the resilience of the key earthly players, Satan’s persistence, the iterative force of his tempting words, noted in the temptation of Abraham, Hagar and Ishmael, reverberate throughout the tradition. For Rushdie, religion, as a marker of a ‘sign’ within us which moves us towards a sense of ethical responsibility and which challenges orthodox assumptions in the realm of both metaphysics (that is belief) and social practice (that is justice), has to part company from a mediated monotheistic absolutism, precisely the absolutism which hides the mystery of the satanic verses and makes one tremble. To do this – to tremble and part company – Rushdie returns to the first Platonic ‘tremor’, to a ‘demonic ethics’ based on a reading where the Abrahamic narrative is universal and not a struggle of ownership, through a reactive theology, within the three monotheistic faiths. It requires, to use a phrase used by Jill Robbins in her reading of Levinas’s commentary on the Talmud, ‘an alternative intelligibility that is antitotalizing’ (1995: 23). For in this rewriting, the message is not from a spirit outside of us, a presence which infuses in us a sense of ethical responsibility, but being multi-centred, it is from within the subject himself. ‘It is perhaps necessary’, Derrida had noted, ‘ … to think of God and of the name of God … [as] the name of the possibility I have of keeping a secret that is visible from the interior but nor from the exterior’ (Derrida 1996b: 108). The religion – and Muhammad’s austere message – excludes its orgiastic, satanic defenders of demonic sacralization and indeed represses these in favour of an absolute God (and text) through whom alone can one receive the legislative requirements of ethical responsibility. Before ethical responsibility, Satan has to be silenced and yet, it seems, this heresy (of the satanic verses) is precisely what is needed to blast open a religion’s hidden power, its capacity to face its own genesis and rethink the terror of its foundational moment, a moment which, finally, may have an aporetic side, a non-closure which necessitates constant self-reflection and

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re-thinking of its textual traditions. To the orthodoxy, however, to think of God as ‘the name of a possibility’ (Derrida 108), a non-onto-theological proposition and an understanding of the Dasein which is ‘not responsible to any determined being who looks at it or speaks to it’ (Derrida 32) is inadmissible. Like Derrida, for Rushdie too there is a universal logic of a religion without religion, of a religion without an identifiable messiah, a messianic religion without a determinate messianism as James K. A. Smith (1998) has put it. The religious sublime becomes, in a sense, sensuous, ‘tribal’, transformative, available through a via negativa and not simply salvation seeking. In his novelistic engagement with this idea, Rushdie must therefore part company, repudiate or overcome the mediation of Muhammad’s Islamic absolutist version of responsibility arising from the primal sacrifice and think of ethical responsibility through those systems which emphasize plurality-with-unity where, to recall Rushdie’s own words used with reference to the game of Snakes and Ladders in Midnight’s Children, ‘the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent’ (140). The Prophet’s momentary fling with the satanic verses is recast as a normative Manichean problematic that seems to shadow any number of great works. This is evident in a ‘signature’ that recurs in eight typed pages with cancellations and marginalia in autograph (22/7). The signature is of the name ‘Iago’, capitalized and circled six times. Othello, the Moor of Venice, looms large in the Archive where ‘Iago’ surfaces as a signifier of hate, jealousy and resentment, dominant character traits for almost everyone in The Satanic Verses itself. Twice in these typed pages, Rushdie, in fact, quotes Coleridge’s well-known reading of Iago’s hate as ‘motiveless malignity’. And Othello’s words to Iago (‘If that thou be’st a devil, I cannot kill thee’) are invoked to establish the dramatic tenor of Muhammad’s own relationship with Gibreel Farishta as Angel Gabriel who, if we extend Othello’s words, is himself the Devil. Hate, though, can only be destructive and the novel, as it emerges in the Archive, must not relapse into an intense meditation on jealousy, although, as we read later, the ‘Othello/Iago/Desdemona triangle’ acts as the intertextual mechanism for the highly ‘schizophrenic’ Allie– Gibreel relationship, a relationship ‘subject to violent swings of mood’. And so what the archive affirms, against the Islamic response to the novel, is love and not hate and the novel, says, Rushdie, ‘has a sort of happy ending’; life must go on and there is optimism – the kind of optimism, in a religious sense, one associates with the ending of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. What both remains and endures is love – words with which the eight-page rumination on the novel ends. The controlling power of the Western intertextual tradition and its analytical procedures (especially in respect of the principles of textual transmission) precludes Rushdie from engaging with a reference in an early draft of The Satanic Verses in which Rushdie’s wish to ‘regain [his] mother tongue’ is given emphatic cadence.12 The reference here is to the Urdu language whose religious and cultural semantics are heavily dependent upon Arabic and Farsi. Why the Archive makes no reference to the translation of the title of the novel into Urdu, Farsi and Arabic remains a mystery, for Rushdie would have known that the title ‘the satanic verses’ translated into Arabic (Āyat-al-Shaitāniyya), into Farsi (Āyat-e-Shaitānī) and into

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Urdu (Shaitānī Āyat) directly connotes that the Qur’ān itself is demonic because the word ‘āyat’ is used to refer to the suras or verses of the Qur’ān.13 Although not stated as such in the Archive, in a reprise of an earlier entry in which Rushdie had noted the length of his interest in the episode of the satanic verses, he now acknowledges that he had forgotten ‘how explosive’ the episode was since in his rendition the Angel–Devil dichotomy is never clear-cut because Gibreel may well have been Shaitan (Satan). He mentions the book of ‘The Star’ (sura 53) where ‘the attack on the idea of angels with female names’ occurs and the attack is linked to Muhammad’s momentary temptation by Satan to include the three pagan goddesses as intermediaries. These verses, which Rushdie writes in the roman script and in capitals on a sheet of paper (22/5),14 are, of course, expunged from the Qur’ān. And it is through this struggle between Gibreel and Al-Lat (one of the three goddesses) that an important ‘third principle’ is introduced into the narrative. The third principle involves the story of Al-Lat (via Ally or Allie) which ‘keeps trying to force its way in from the margins, to become central’, and deconstructs the ‘Gibreel/Shaitan division of Allah’ (22/7). The third, female, principle is important because, in the end, it is Zeenat Vakil who gives Saladin Chamcha another chance. The Satanic Verses, therefore, has a decidedly feminist inflection since it is women who are silenced or marginalized. ‘Ever since SV,’ writes Rushdie in a handwritten note in the margins of a typed sheet, ‘I’d had my faith shaken. Then all these rules & convenience of them; e.g. 4 wives after loss of men. So I tested him and he failed’ (22/7). As the archival evidence indicates, Rushdie’s return to the episode of the satanic verses carried this other political imperative too since only in the so-called satanic verses do we get divinities who are women and whom the Qur’ān rejects on the grounds that they are female. The rejection of this radical possibility (women as divine) by the Prophet is mourned by Rushdie since it suggests what Islam may have been like if the culture’s earlier gods had been given some mediating presence and indeed, with Indian Sufism as an example familiar to Rushdie, how more open-minded and culturally accommodating the belief may have become. The loss is presented as a dramatic binary opposition on a redacted sheet (212/8 09-145): ‘Allah v. Allat [Al-Lat] woman’.15 A belief incapable of being metamorphosed (or, to use Rushdie’s own neologism, ‘metaphorphosed’), a belief marked by ‘one one one … [a] terrifying singularity’ (22/7), leads to melancholia since its singularity destroys the very idea of contraries (after Blake). The imagination is hedged in and finds little room to manoeuvre because with the loss of multiplicity, says Rushdie, comes the death of God. In its insistence on singularity the legacy of Muhammad is to leave behind a God who is dead because he and his message become more powerful than God, a theme that Rushdie knew Voltaire, a Rushdie favourite, had developed in his play Mahomet the Imposter (1736; J. Miller translation 1744). In a 1988 journal entry (redacted) we read: ‘The book is finished: certainly my most mature work, possibly my best. And because my memorial to Abba [Father] is in it, I do not need to say more here.’ But he is worried about the extent to which it is really new, and asks himself, ‘Is it a mess?’ to which he replies not only in capital letters (‘NO IT BLOODY WELL IS NOT. IT’S NEW’) but by heavily underlining

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‘NOT’ and ‘NEW’. There is then a consciousness about the book’s radical status, its recovery of a genesis of secrecy seen as a singular and rare achievement. Not only is the book original inasmuch as a good book always is, but it is also new, original and even revolutionary as few books ever are. There is an unease, though, that betrays an uncomfortable self-confidence. In a journal entry he had noted, ‘Why publish so naked a thing?’ to which he himself had replied, ‘Because truth can only be communicated through risk’ (09–196 redacted). There is another entry with a heading ‘15 March 88: Liberation day!’ The date is then circled, a time given (7.00 am) with the following additional note: This is astonishing. Who knows when I wrote this or why; but today, 15 March 1988, the Ides of March [the date of the assassination of Julius Caesar], is in fact the day on which the UK and US publisher for Verses is to be decided: on which the book will enter the “real” world … . (212/8; 09–196 redacted)

Unlike published works, material in archives (unless they are fair copies) are unedited. As marginalia they are often spontaneous, especially when the marginalia or notes are handwritten on readily available material. There are four envelopes, each one 3 × 6 inches, in the Archive (45/11) that capture what may be called frenzied spontaneity in a slightly hysterical handwriting. Ayatollah Khomeini had pronounced the fatwa on 14 February 1989 and the entry on the first envelope begins with the well-known Dickens sentence: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ Capturing the syntax of this quote he continues, ‘Freedom breaks out; but unfreedom surrounds me.’ Referring to a line from Edmund Burke he had cited in one of his unpublished novels (‘Our antagonist is our helper’) he pleads, ‘tolerate even the antagonist’. On the next envelope (envelope 2) he writes about his disappointment at the reception of The Satanic Verses. He had anticipated debate and dispute, but not judgement by people who had not even read the novel. Khomeini had condemned him for blaspheming against the Prophet and Islam even when the work is fiction. He asks, Wd I have written diff if I’d known? I don’t know, wd Mandelstam? Wd I change it now? No ‘thought cannot be unthought. Dürer.’

Dickens, Burke, Mandelstam (Osip Emilyevich 1891–1938, brilliant Jewish-Russian poet exiled by Stalin for holding ‘anti-Soviet’ opinions) and Dürer are again part of Rushdie’s decidedly English or European influences. They are also people who held on to their beliefs, and when he is reminded about his comment that he should have ‘written a more critical work’, he says he was talking about Islam’s own intransigence towards other beliefs for its ‘adherents happily abuse other religions’. On envelope 3, there is a plea for tolerance: ‘undo the wrong that you have done and let’s all go home’. Envelope 4 has notes on his strange predicament where someone who had been fighting for racial equality and religious dialogue is now being accused as an apologist for racism, an apostate, a blasphemer, a Jewish conspirator who

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deserved what he got. He asked for it, he must have known, he is far too cocky, were other observations he makes. In a draft of an essay (‘In defense of The Satanic Verses’) (48/9) written towards the end of the first 1,000 days of his detention (and subsequently published) the language is one of desperation: ‘I have lost my freedom – my home, my family, my life … I have lost it, and I want it back’ (2). In another essay titled ‘Four years’ and dated 4 February 1993 (48/28) we read, ‘It’s been four years and I’m still here. One of my favourite films was Luis Buñuel’s “The Exterminating Angel”. It is a film about people who cannot get out of a room.’ The Satanic Verses, the novel itself, he had argued (45/11 envelope 4), is a contribution to a new historicism and the tone is essentially comic. Here he reiterates that point by emphasizing the tone of the novel; it is ‘as good a novel as I am able to write’. For Rushdie, a creative, fictional re-entry into the genesis of Islam is one way in which the ‘genesis of secrecy’ may be addressed. A fundamental law of the novelistic novel – the repudiation of the mediator (Girard 1988) or in Derrida’s version through this repudiation the move towards an ethics of responsibility (1996b) – must therefore be mobilized to recapture, in all its corporeal immediacy and emotional resonance, the unpresentable as its ‘missing contents’. Rushdie’s intervention into Islam’s absolutism, especially into the Abrahamic covenant, was meant to open up its polytheistic fissures to show that no religion is other than the sum total of its various histories (realist as well as mythic) and Islam too is a historical phenomenon, ‘an ideology born out of its time’. Rightly or wrongly (this is not a matter of correct belief but a question of structural necessity, something which, after Girard, is intrinsic to the novel form), Rushdie makes a case for a secular religious humanism which transforms the act of revelation into a corporeal voice, the voice which says ‘it was me both times’. As it stands, the mediator (Abraham via Muhammad) offers a frightful mystery, a mysterium tremendum, an object of fear and trembling which needs to be accepted through absolute submission even if the submission is to a gift of death. The Rushdie handling of the Islamic unspeakable – the moment of the satanic verses in the Qur’ān (a counterfactual scenario from Islam’s point of view) – introduces a Manichean rupture in belief as it introduces Satan as one of the authors of the religious text and which leads to a repudiation of both mediators (the narrator Muhammad and the character Abraham). In Rushdie’s version, the repudiation, the denial or even the overcoming is possible only through an engagement with the heresy of the Satanic intervention, in itself a proposition with dangerous consequences. The basic principle of repudiating the mediator (which is a novelistic universal for Girard) is crucial for our understanding of The Satanic Verses. Rushdie, however, follows Derrida (without, of course, mentioning him by name) here by offering a nondogmatic doublet of dogma, a philosophical and metaphysical doublet, in any case a thinking that ‘repeats’ the ‘possibility of religion without religion’ (Derrida 1996b: 49). These ideas came, momentarily, in passing, through demonic sacralization, in Rushdie’s fictional rendition, to the foundational prophet of a major world religion only to be immediately repressed. To make this declaration, to uncover the secret, as Rushdie’s own experience showed, is apostasy but can the postmodern sacred define ethical responsibility any differently?

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Derrida, refining Patočka (1996b), had read the Christian secret of the mysterium tremendum as an internal power which delivers a new ethical responsibility, and one which is, finally, grounded in a gospel of love. In other words, the sacred empowers us to undertake the quest for freedom, even when the cost is our own lives. We may argue that Rushdie’s position has this political edge as it arouses in us a terrible power at once metaphysical and activist. An ethics of responsibility sometimes requires embracing the gift of death, but now as a gift of death which is defined by an enduring love of humanity. To Derrida this was a philosophical problem dressed up as narrative; for Rushdie this is, after Girard, essentially a novelistic problem inasmuch as the repudiation of Muhammad as the grand, uncompromising, absolute mediator is crucial for desire to be deflected and find a more socially responsible and relevant form. Confined to the dictates of desire as law, the messenger of God has to be decoupled from the subject and the object because he is simultaneously close to both. In the case of Islam, the novelistic rendition has become difficult, indeed, dangerous because representation of Muhammad is itself blasphemous. The rejection of the novel by the Islamic world was based on the absence in Islamic hermeneutics of a novelistic interrogation of its central prophet as mediator of the object of desire. It may well be that cultural investment in the non-negotiable primacy of the Prophet of Islam – the blasphemy law in Pakistan where punishment is death is an example of the interdiction against dissent of any kind – is such that even in the novel, that great genre of modernity and of the exploration of the self, no compromise is possible. But if Rushdie’s views, as I have indicated, are synonymous with those of Derrida (this is not to say that Rushdie is in sympathy with Derrida) on this subject and resonate with Girard’s imperative of conversion in the context of a triangular desire, then the mediator may be overcome only via a re-introduction of a religion’s suppressed orgiastic traces and through a reformulation of the gift of death as a love of humanity where every other (mediator) is my neighbour and desire, in this religious reformulation, is love of our fellow humans. This indeed was the message of the Messiah, even if it is treated, contra Girard, as a non-messianic message by Derrida and Rushdie. Historians speak of archival fidelity but the latter should not be a matter only of transcription – fidelity, that is, in the literal sense; it is a matter also of the Freudian signature, the hidden lacuna, which surfaces in the uncensored space of the archive. Both the author and the archon – the collector, the ‘magistrate’, the archivist – are aware of this. It is the need to uncover an artist’s encounter with the genesis of secrecy – as a scholarly compulsion, as an act of will and understanding – at the heart of one of the long twentieth century’s defining texts, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, which takes us to the Archive. In ‘anarchiving’ and annotating the Archive as an intentional object we find that, in literary terms, the location of the genesis of secrecy for Rushdie is also a matter of transforming Muhammad into a purely novelistic problematic in need of repudiation before a culturally materialist conversion can take place. Rushdie makes no reference to René Girard, but the reading of the genesis of secrecy in the Rushdie Archive I have advanced – Rushdie’s own Freudian signature – shows that to transform the unpresentable into art (Muhammad as the Islamic Absolute beyond representation) the Prophet

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had to be repudiated and the Qur’ān deconstructed before the novel could come into being. Blasphemy in Salman Rushdie, as Sara Suleri noted so astutely, is an ‘enabling conceit’ that ‘must be apprehended as a narrative device rather than as a statement of religious conviction’ (in Fletcher 1994: 231). The Archive shows that the process was in the making for over twenty years and the deconstruction of the Qur’ān (read as a textual problematic by someone ‘totally without religion’ (182/24)) thorough and uncompromising. ‘I have lived with these ideas for so many years’, he had jotted on a single sheet, ‘that I am beginning to forget how explosive they are’ (22/7). It is the sad fate of such a singular achievement – an achievement which introduces a radical dissensus (after Rancière (2009)) in the aesthetic and ethical hierarchy – that debate about this deconstruction has become muted and the achievement transformed into either a satanic, unethical exercise or a Voltairean excess. In looking for the archive’s concealed offences (‘Why publish so naked a thing?’ Rushdie had written but then added, ‘Because truth can only be communicated through risk’) this chapter uncovers Salman Rushdie’s ongoing critical engagement with the Islamic repressed but at the same time raises difficult questions about belief, ethical responsibility, intentionality, the novel as repudiating authority and a writer’s uncritical investment in post-Enlightenment thought.16 Hermes who, after all, holds the secret of oracles, reveals, initially, only their trivial, manifest content. The secrets come to light after a long delay, and ‘in circumstances not originally foreseeable’.

Chapter 2 MANUSCRIPTS IN THE ARCHIVE

A number of typescripts of unpublished material exist in the Emory Rushdie Archive as fair copies with no corresponding published texts. It follows that the primary use of manuscript material – the construction of a critical edition or an ‘ideal’ work that would replicate as ‘closely as the extant material allows’ (McKerrow 1939: 6), the text by which the author wants himself to be remembered – is inoperative as there are no published versions which may be (re)edited in light of a fair copy. One therefore turns to the second use of manuscript material in an author’s apprentice phase: unpublished (and, perhaps, even unpublishable) manuscripts that show the paths taken by a writer on the road to success. In the case of Salman Rushdie, that success came in 1981 with the publication of Midnight’s Children, unarguably one of the great novels in English in the second half of the long twentieth century. For the textual critic, however, Rushdie himself is not particularly helpful here, because on a number of occasions he has declared that he does not believe in hours spent by scholars to uncover the processes that led to the accomplished literary artefact. To Rushdie, an archive tells a reader what a writer did ‘on the way to other work … a means of getting from here to there’. He confessed, ‘To me the book at the end’ is the important thing, ‘the process is not very interesting’.1 In lectures and talks at Emory University (2007–12), he continued to re-state that lack of interest in the processes of composition was also a feature of none other than Shakespeare himself, who left behind no autograph versions of his plays, no early drafts, let alone handwritten notes about their genesis.2 Why then has Rushdie kept these unpublished works in the Archive if they do not have any value either as holograph material to be compared with their corresponding published works or as material indicating the road taken by him towards superior literary achievement? Rushdie’s views on works in progress are shared by many writers, but by any theory of the unpublished manuscript, works in fair-copy states cannot simply be discarded, considering that these were written during the thirteen years between June 1968, when Rushdie graduated, and April 1981, when Midnight’s Children was published. Some of the manuscripts carry signs of having been rejected by publishing houses, but which, given the current standing of the author, may indeed be published. To Rushdie, his early ‘apprentice’ work may well be no more than ‘unbearable amounts of garbage’ (Rushdie 2012: 49); to the textual critic, archival literary garbage is of immense value inasmuch as it shows the links between labour and genius. It demonstrates the fact that works

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of creative imagination, however flawed, as V. Voloshinov (of the ‘Bakhtin School’) observed, are products of ideological creation that ‘arise only within society and for its sake’ because as ‘ideological formations’ they are ‘internally, immanently sociological’ (1983: 7). Bakhtin himself adds, ‘man, in his human specificity, is always expressing himself (speaking) – that is, always creating a text (though it may remain in potentia)’ (cited in Todorov 1984: 17). So the unpublished manuscript as the creative text in potentia is also by its very nature an ideological phenomenon ‘simultaneously determined from without (extrinsically) and from within (intrinsically)’ (Medvedev and Bakhtin 1978: 29).3 In spite of the use values imposed on manuscript material by textual scholars, and against Rushdie’s own dismissal of it on the grounds that the end product is all that matters, textual manuscripts enter into the usual dialectic of being determined by their formal characteristics (what genre they are written in, what their anxieties of influence are) as well as how they have been ‘determined by other spheres of social life’. They may not have the aura of a published text or earlier less-developed manuscripts, such as those of Midnight’s Children in the Emory Rushdie Archive, because they have not been part of the critical protocols or scholarly apparatus that govern the published work, but they are much more than purely transitional and ungrounded objects. Manuscripts read as ideologically inscribed phenomena, which are immanently sociological – especially when they exist as near fair copies that, if accepted for publication, may circulate in the public domain – are of value. And in the case of Rushdie’s unpublished works, the first two principles of textual criticism, valuable as they are, need to be supplemented by the third, the ideological. In the third part of his Emory Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature (2004), titled ‘Scheherazade’, Rushdie expands on his early apprentice work at some length (62/31). We read that after graduating from King’s College, Cambridge, in the summer of 1968, he shared a house in London (29 Acfold Road, London SW6) with his sister Sameen and three of his college friends. On an Olivetti Dora typewriter and with a £500 start-up seed money from his father, he spent the next few years writing four novels and a television screenplay: ‘The Book of the Peer’, ‘Grimus’, ‘The Antagonist’, ‘Madame Rama’ and ‘Crosstalk’, respectively. Except for one of the novels – Grimus – none of these was ever published or filmed. Those not published continue to languish, he writes, ‘in the drawer in which I consigned them, and there, deserving no better, they will stay’ (11). Since he never read English at university, ‘in the matter of books’ he was self-taught. And, in this matter of books, there were the fabulists such as the writers of Alf Layla Wa Laylah (‘The Thousand Nights and One Night’) who could be placed alongside the interior world of Beckett and the linguistic experimentation of Joyce. These were powerful influences – varied, strong, inimitable – but, as inevitable as they were, slavish imitation of them could only produce ‘still-born texts’ (12). One, The Antagonist was its title, was an approximation of a Thomas Pynchon novel set in Notting Hill and as feebly derivative as the tale of the female Samsa’s metamorphosis into a washing machine. … Another, Madame Rama, was an attempt at Indian political satire, in the vein, I suppose of Philip Roth’s attack

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on Nixon in Our Gang. It transposed the story of Mrs Indira Gandhi into the Bombay film industry and imagined, I am sorry to say, that beneath her sari she grew a talking penis which actually ran the studio. … In the third unpublished novel, The Book of the Pir, I actually came up with a good idea, an idea that even looks a little prescient today. In an unnamed Muslim country a popular holy man or pir, a firebrand and demagogue, joins forces with an unscrupulous army general and an equally unscrupulous billionaire, who propel him to power, intending him to be their puppet, only to discover that he’s too wily and too ruthless to control. Unfortunately I was blind to the story’s requirements. It deserved to be told straight, in a fast, unadorned, even thrillerish style, and had I the wit to do that it might have succeeded. Instead, of course, I wrote it in a Joycean stream-of-consciousness gobbledygook language that ruined it completely. Until I escaped such mandarin influences, I would never write a line worth reading. Later, when I found my way, I could benefit from what they had to show me. But that was later. That was after the TV script Crosstalk, in which, I regret to say, two crucified men on a hill pass the time while awaiting the arrival of Jesus Christ by chatting idly and, I hoped, wittily and profoundly, existentially, in the manner of Beckett’s tramps, Vladimir and Estragon. I might as well have called the piece Waiting for Godot at Golgotha. I entered it for a competition to find a new television dramatist for the BBC. It didn’t win. (12–13)

In a slightly expanded manner, the passage makes its way into Joseph Anton (49–51), where, too, he repeats that between June 1968, when he graduates, and April 1981, when his seminal and highly influential novel Midnight’s Children is published, he ‘wrote unbearable amounts of garbage’(49). In these years the novelistic urge in him was that of any copywriter and author of catchy advertisements, which he then was. Mercifully, as he later acknowledged, except for Grimus which, though published,4 went unnoticed, all his works were rejected by publishers. As seen in the block quotation above, he had misunderstood Joyce and Beckett, thinking that one should write at ‘degree zero’, which meant that there was a ‘kind of coldness in the writing’ from which ‘heat and passion’ had been taken out. He didn’t see himself as a ‘cold writer’, and so, he notes, ‘I never published my first attempt.’ Four works mentioned in the lecture quoted above – ‘The Book of the Peer’ (1969? 43/6–7), ‘Crosstalk’ (1974? 51/5), ‘The Antagonist’ (May 1975, 43/1–4), ‘Madame Rama’ (first version: August 1975, 44/12; second version: February 1976, 44/13–14) – plus an unpublished screenplay, ‘The Courter’ (1996, 51/4, 42/1–4), form the substance of this chapter and I want to turn to them in some detail, handling them in a chronological order. The Archive also carries a manuscript of a ‘Grimus’ stage play (1983? 51/9) that offers a more consummate account of the key theme of the novel, establishing the point that death has to be embraced to make existence itself meaningful. Grimus, the novel, is essentially a rewrite of the great Gothic theme (as in Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)) where the subject of immortality seeks to find meaning in life and in doing so discovers the importance of death in our lives: ‘to die is to live’ is the existential dogma here. Interesting as the stage version of Grimus is, in a personal note, Salman

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Rushdie informs me, even as I finish writing a lengthy critical commentary on this stage version, that the play manuscript in the Archive is not his work and has been inaccurately catalogued. He refers to it as ‘fan fiction’,5 in other words, the work of an over-enthusiastic admirer who probably felt that his play version was an improvement on a novel which lacked generic unity. Thus leaving behind the unpublished ‘Grimus’, the play manuscript, I turn to the other unpublished works noted above. My interest here, though, is less in an unpublished work’s aesthetic merits or its value in delineating editorial problems in Rushdie, than in the Freudian signatures, and more on the manuscripts in potentia as ideologically inscribed phenomena. I want to examine the latent meanings, the meanings guarded so possessively by Hermes and those linked to the sense and the sensible, to reflective as well as determinative judgement, in Rushdie. What is there in an archive – a question addressed in the previous chapter – which a ‘careful concealer’ (Derrida 1996a: 101) wants to keep secret? The idea of concealment takes me to the third principle, which I foreshadowed – a principle that requires a reading of manuscript material as carriers of immanent meaning and as material that tells us about the author’s own ideological leanings, as well as his engagement with the formalism of writing. What the works in manuscript indicate is a sense of loss (personal, religious, philosophical) – a theme to which he returns over and over again. In a 1982 notebook entry (06–15 redacted) we read: ‘If one only writes one book all one’s life then mine is the book of loss.’

The Religious–Political: ‘The Book of the Peer’ ‘The Book of the Peer’, the work mentioned in Rushdie’s Ellmann Lectures, is set in an unnamed coastal town, which is obviously Karachi (‘the city around which the adherents of her particular religion had built their brave new world’ (64)), and deals with the attempts by people of a secretive society to transform a newly formed nation (implicitly, Pakistan) by presenting it with new ideas about God and belief. Playing on the concept of the Trinity (here derived more from Hindu thought than from Christianity), three people – a president (Sahib Sahib), his wife (Begum Sahiba, later replaced by her daughter Beti), and a dedicated acolyte, Vazir – as representatives on earth of this Trinity, set about making this ideological change possible with the aid of a white-robed sage or pir (‘Peer’). Rushdie imposes a layered technique of authorial distancing from the contents of the work, making himself a third-party editor–discoverer of a manuscript originally written by the Peer and collated or translated by an unnamed person. The work has four epigraphs, the first of which repeats the opening lines of sura 96 of the Qur’ān: ‘Recite, in the name of the Lord,/thy Creator,/who created Man from clots of blood.’ Although these epigraphs are from the collator or translator (199), it is clear that Rushdie’s first completed novel pays homage to what were the first religious verses he had ever heard, and these were from the religion of his forbearers. Its title page is followed by a further qualification: ‘the authorised version of the manuscript discovered at Ordu and with a preface by Rushdie’.

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‘Ordu’ refers also to the idiom of the ‘military camp’, later to be known as Urdu (Schimmel 1975: 126). This technique of authorial distancing from the contents of a text is not uncommon, a foundational instance being Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). There are therefore three ‘agencies’ at work here: the ‘author’ of the original manuscript, who is the Peer; the collator of the manuscript, whose notes end the manuscript; and the editor–discoverer of the manuscript, ‘Salman Rushdie’, who writes the Preface and who points to interruptions in the text (158) as he constructs a copy-text. I turn now to the collator’s ‘Afterword’. Here we find that the collator is, in fact, the translator of a text written by ‘three separate hands’ (200) organized as chapters by the Peer, the author. The collator, acting as a textual or analytic bibliographer, has his own views about the text’s authorship: he suggests that the text may well be the work of a single author who has created the varied styles of the three principal narrators and that this author may either be an orientalist or a local with an extensive knowledge of the West. But then, in a final stroke, the collator plays the ‘writerly’ game by insinuating that the text comes to an end only when he lifts his hand from the page. Turning to ‘editor–discoverer Rushdie’s’ Preface (which is his as it is signed ‘s.r.’), we discover the usual technique of declaiming responsibility, with the author referring to a chance encounter with a manuscript. This happens when Rushdie checks himself into a hotel in a ‘small Black Sea port called Ordu’ where, declaring himself a poet, he finds in his allocated ‘Room 7’ a manuscript left behind by an earlier occupant, who was also a poet. The Preface ends with: I know no more of its origins than this, and the account given in the manuscript itself. My additions are limited to this preface and the title. I lay no claim to the work. Its merits and demerits are its own. Unless, of course, I am lying. (1)

The novelist as the most beautiful liar (after Mark Twain) is a well-known conceit, and the very young Rushdie, at no more than twenty-two, puts into the text his entire undergraduate readings to date. If nothing else, one thing is clear from ‘The Book of the Peer’: Rushdie is quite taken with an essentially Manichean view of the world. The view, as we have already seen, had, quite possibly, come from the final-year paper on Muhammad and the Caliphate he had taken at Cambridge. In the Qur’ān the struggle between God and Satan is ongoing, with Satan (as in Milton) acting as the perennial obstacle to man’s desire for absolute submission to the will of God. Through a dialogue between ‘Fatman and Willow’ (the two Manichean figures in constant tension in ‘The Book of the Peer’ who incarnate themselves as the corpulent Begum Sahiba, her husband the silently suffering Sahib Sahib, her daughter the femme fatale Beti, and the gaunt Vazir) the Manichean binary is reversed as ‘God’ is the ‘obstacular’ (20), the real obstacle to a fuller understanding of desire and the sensual nature of the world. Although this is not, outwardly, a critique or a commentary on the Qur’ān or any other religious text, ‘The Book of the Peer’ has the aura of a gospel

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inasmuch as it is presented as a commentary on religious belief in a nascent nation state. This is a country where the ‘holy book is memorized by rote’ (53), where caveats rule, and as a result the philosopher–court minister Chanakya’s idea of ‘living in the world’ (Rushdie is touching on Heidegger and Nietzsche, anticipating Agamben) is lost as priestly dictates make sure that one does not see the world as it is (54). The novel may be read as a first run on Rushdie’s own unease with belief, as he explores the virtues of a polytheistic monism (against the monotheism of ‘the three great Occidental faiths … Judaism, Christianity and our own [Islam]’ (74)). Rushdie’s further interest in the co-existence of the sensual and the spiritual as well as the value of the corporeal and the affective in our lives is clearly evident. The way to expose religion as ‘the opiate of the masses’ (174) was for the earthly ‘triple godhead’ (the Willow and Fatman arriving as members of the society, each with the purpose of curing the ‘body politic of its affliction with the god-virus’ (174)) to make men doubt the validity of the act of belief itself (174). And to do this effectively, as the Begum Sahiba had explained, was to persuade people ‘that a prophet X is the possessor of a truly faith-worthy message, only to expose his fraudulence at the crucial moment’ (174). ‘Creation’, after all, suggests the Begum, ‘is no more than the supreme act of the imagination’ (174) – a theme which, against the backdrop of things generally falling apart, will inform much of Rushdie’s writing.

The Metaphysical: ‘Crosstalk’ ‘Crosstalk’ was written in 1974 and is the next work of Rushdie which has survived in its entirety. This thirty-page play with a three-page preface is set in the afternoon of the Crucifixion of Christ. Christ has yet to arrive, but two people have already been crucified with enough space left in between their crosses for a third man. The two already crucified men are Alph, ‘about 25, a large emotional man’ and Zee, ‘about 47, a smaller, slighter, man, with a rather dainty voice and manner’ (i). The author’s explanatory notes are interesting as these are given under the rubric of ‘Theme’. Here, in a reversal of the Calvary narrative, Zee, a man of ideas to whom death is irrelevant and who is therefore critical of Christ, is ‘dragged down to earth’, whereas ‘practical Alph’ sees in the ‘idea’ of Paradise the fulfilment of the ‘ambitions he never achieved on earth’. In a further directive to the cinematographer (again Rushdie’s interest in cinema is evident), Rushdie asks that a hand-held camera be used and that the first section of the TV play be shot entirely in close-up. The first guard addresses the camera and speaks of the gathering crowd – who it seems are the TV spectators – as participants in a carnivalesque spectacle and bemoans the declining numbers. On the cross Zee and Alph make small talk about birthdays in the style of Beckett (only Zee is dying on his birthday, not Alph). Frivolously, Zee notes Alph’s unusual mouth, his tongue and his teeth which are like bars, and is accused, in turn, by Alph for being a ‘pansy’ because Zee had noted ‘those lips are made for kissing’ (in an allusion to Nancy Sinatra’s ‘these boots are

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made for walking’). Anecdotally Zee tells the story of the illegitimate child who becomes a carpenter but fails to sell his chairs and so turns to stealing. Initially Zee does most of the talking and in between hallucinates that it is nightfall, only to be reminded by the practical Alph that it is midday. Then Alph begins to talk a lot. They are there because of some kind of conspiracy that they had hatched together – a conspiracy in which one Peter was also involved, but Zee had left Peter for Alph because Peter was getting a bit old. The nails hurt and the crucified find it hard to breathe. Then comes the announcement from the first guard: ‘And now … ladeeez an gennelmen … the moment you’ve all been waiting for […] self-styled […] King of the Jews … Jesus E. Christ!’ Rushdie gives the traditional Gospel speeches of Christ: ‘Forgive them – they know not what they do’, ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’ Zee repeats the damned thief ’s line: ‘get off these nails … and get us off ’ while Alph’s request, ‘Jesus … remember me … when you come into your kingdom’ gets the assurance, ‘I say to you … this very day … you will be with me – in Paradise.’ After a few general announcements – the next day being Passover there will be no crucifixion – the legs of Zee and Alph are broken, but not those of Christ, because he is presumed dead. The first guard addresses the camera: Hope you enjoyed the show, madam. If you want to know confidentially, though, it’s a sadness. I can remember when people performed on those crosses for days. These stars nowadays … they’ve got no staying power.

In the director’s notes, Rushdie says that the mood of the piece is ‘balanced on a knife-edge between a rather fierce frivolity and a wealth of accumulated emotion’. Neither of these, he adds, ‘are particularly English characteristics – but that is only a minor difficulty’. A singular moment in history: two criminals alongside God; one asks the right question and is redeemed, the other tells the truth and is doomed. But it isn’t the either/or which has fascinated human history that is of value here, it is the singularity of the event, a rare moment in written human history (another being the encounter in the Bhagavadgītā where Arjuna is redeemed simply through the act of listening to Krishna) when a direct choice is made. In Christian religious eschatology, the moment transforms the Abrahamic narrative of the gift of death into a gift of salvation through an act of love. In modernist existentialism, the moment corresponds to the limit situation through which the idea of being finds its concrete, lived existential value. Largely ephemeral as ‘Crosstalk’ is, it nevertheless points to Rushdie’s own metaphysical grounding in the Christian tradition of love, in religious anecdotal narratives and parables and in the kinds of minimalist writing celebrated in Beckett. In spite of Rushdie’s own avowed disinterest in ‘unarchiving’ an archive for traces of epistemological lineage, both ‘The Book of the Peer’ and ‘Crosstalk’ underscore a consciousness about Western literary forms in need of postcolonial disavowal and even, after Adorno (1997), some creative ‘hating’. In the next fair copy discussed in this chapter, that voice and the disavowal begin to take shape, but without the rare originality one finally uncovers in Midnight’s Children.

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The Precursor Text: ‘The Antagonist’ I turn now to Rushdie’s third unpublished work and his second unpublished novel, ‘The Antagonist’ – Rushdie’s most ambitious project prior to Midnight’s Children. Completed on Monday, 12 May 1975, and written after the copy-text of Grimus (published 1975) had been submitted to Gollancz, ‘The Antagonist’ marks Rushdie’s attempt at creating a distinctive ‘personal’ narrative, different from the heavily keyed roman-à-clef ‘Madame Rama’ and ‘The Book of the Peer’, which are, respectively, his early, highly political, Indian and Pakistani novels-in-manuscript. Unlike the other two novels-in-manuscript, ‘The Antagonist’ gives us an insight into the creative process that led to the writing of Rushdie’s masterpiece. Although the spirit of challenge and innovation, as well as the desire for the ‘new’, is evident from the very first epigraph of the novel (‘Have I the “Spirit of Orthodoxy”? / I have not. But have I / The spirit of opposing? Perhaps – (Gregory Grigson)’), the difficulty with this novel is that the spirit of opposing and innovation functions at too many levels. The work is at times playfully magical and at times painfully autobiographical. It is often science fictional (Rushdie’s fascination with black holes is evident throughout) and at times obsessively paranormal, preferring the intuitive over the empirical. At times Rushdie appears a committed relativist or ‘orientalist’, even magical (155, here Borges is pivotal), numerological (‘numbers are an improvement on people’ (156)) and fantastic (two golden Oaxcu eggs play an important role in the attempt by an underground society located at King’s College, Cambridge, to recreate a brave new world out of the ashes of a fading British Empire). In other words, the early Rushdie is struggling to find the right voice, the right generic register for his Stephen Daedalus-like protagonist named Saleem. There is much here which is symptomatic of a writer putting every idea on paper – from esoteric hobbies (tegestology is the study of beer-mats, phillumacy is love of matches (78)) to the contributions of immigrant cultures to the British way of life. Nothing is what it seems in this novel: there are parallel underworlds, characters have aliases and realist representation is filtered through the eye of the camera. Reality becomes mechanical reproduction with no original as the primary signified. Before we turn to the crux of the novel – the Saleem–Shiva antagonism which would make ‘The Antagonist’ a first run of Midnight’s Children – what else can one say about this novel-in-manuscript as a text in potentia? What themes and influences are obvious? The text in a very real sense is a learning curve, as the intertextual indebtedness to Joyce, Beckett, Borges, Pynchon and Calvino make clear. And it is this indebtedness, often overdetermined by slavish imitation, that makes him cover too much ground. Sometimes the balance is not right, such as in the rather ‘raw’ representation of the sex scenes between Olga and the novelist’s alter ego Saleem Sinai (185). Telepathy and paranormal communication are evident in Olga’s capacity to plug into Saleem’s doppelgänger Black Saleem’s voice and become excited (188). Rushdie’s interest in etymology is on display – ‘smaragd’, we are told, is from Old French for ‘emerald’ (via Sanskrit) – as are his interests in synchronicity (201), wordplay (‘Amalekite’, a male kite), numbers (379 men,

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126 women (201)), black holes, the ‘theory of cosmic parallelism’ (203) and the like. There are wayward and as yet unassimilable, even specious, references that anticipate idioms and expressions which make their way into Rushdie’s mature works. These include Emperor Akbar’s game of ank micholi [āṁkh micaulī] (blindman’s bluff ) (246–7); echoes of a Bollywood song from one of Rushdie’s favourite movies Shree 420 (‘Do not freak me out O my darling’ is a translation of muṛ muṛ ke nā dekh from this film (249)); Rushdie’s interest in the emigrant, as in Sinai’s comment, ‘I am an emigrant who refused to become an immigrant’ (253); the use of the conceit that Sinai is thirteen years old – ‘I happen therefore I am’ (253); dreams of the yellow city Bombay (256–7); descriptions of swampy England (259); the use of Christ’s proverbial ‘Physician … Heal thyself ’ (263); and many more. The novel begins on 10 February 1974, the ‘Year of the Reverse’ (1947 was the date of Indian Independence, but reverse also implies reverse migration from the ex-colonies to Britain), and the opening scenes, on the set of a documentary film, are located in Bliss Grove, a London suburb based on Notting Hill, with its outcasts who had come to ‘a historically snobbish, insular land of elites’ (2). Flashback to January 1961, and we find a thirteen-year-old Saleem Sinai in the old Cumberland Hotel, Marble Arch, Room 947. His father who has accompanied him from India is always drunk, and he finds a little diversion by watching Tottenham Hotspur play. He sees his thirteenth year in England (in 1974) as a rebirth, ‘a second adolescence following gleefully on the first. Thirteen A.B., after-birth’ (14). We continue to read: It is February 1961 in the old Cumberland Hotel at Marble Arch, olive seats snaking down the foyer, paint peeling carelessly off the walls of room 947. I didn’t expect the peeling paint, not in the heartland of empire. The Pure Hell of St Trinian’s at the Odeon next door, Supermac in his heaven, Superspurs en route to the double. John White, John White, where art thou now? (John White, inside-right for Tottenham Hotspur and Scotland, was struck dead by a bolt of lightning when sheltering from a storm on a golf course: an object lesson on the dangers of trees.) The foetal Sinai, thirteen years in the womb of a comfortable, sightless, middle-class Indian childhood, is in London for two weeks before being launched upon an unsuspecting British boarding school. It is to be a painful Birth, since it is his father who will bear him, will bear him in drinksodden nights. Clutching a ten-shilling note he goes nightly to the take-away chicken joint in Edgware Road, then sneaks back into the great hotel, greasy hen concealed beneath new school coat, blue serge. The elder Sinai spends his money on drink, not food, and won’t even share it. Nightly stupors of abuse are hurled at the young foetus, and it is this pain, this opening of the eyes that brings about the Birth. His father died at the instant of it; he is Sinai sapiens, sui generis, innocence corrupted, worldly-wise baby off to school. No going back. Deserts are the desserts of the deserter. (14)6

Although the novel itself is capacious and unwieldy with far too many generic and discursive registers at play, it is self-evidently a work in which one of the key themes of Midnight’s Children (the baby swap and the binary of Saleem and Shiva)

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are given a first run. In this respect, ‘The Antagonist’ is very much a precursor text of immense value to our understanding of the genesis of the Saleem character as well as the latter’s pervasive presence in the Rushdie imaginary. For readers unfamiliar with this novel-in-manuscript, tracing the role of Rushdie’s alter ego, Saleem Sinai, and its suggestive foreshadowing of elements which make their way into Midnight’s Children may be of considerable interest.7 This Rushdie character – Saleem – Rushdie noted in his autobiography, was largely inconsequential as the novel itself was, but he had one value, he was born at midnight 14–15 August 1947. But that was not the only birth that night, there was another, that of Shiva, as we also read in Midnight’s Children. In ‘The Antagonist’, this Shiva surfaces as Black Saleem who, upon discovering his true origins, will stalk the other (Saleem) Sinai, but without ever meeting him. Their interconnected lives are narrated through the device of letters that ‘Black Saleem’ writes to Saleem Sinai who until then had been living a relatively carefree, but in some ways disturbing, life in Bliss Grove. Black Saleem’s letters sent at intervals slowly divulge his genealogical secret – a secret linked to a dramatic baby swap at birth in Bombay. The letters that Black Saleem writes to Saleem Sinai form the crux of a parallel narrative in ‘The Antagonist’ and it is this narrative that is of value in our understanding of the fair-copy text in potentia. The other narrative (which also gives the novel a powerful science-fiction edge) revolves around sinister underworld figures and their designs on the world. The broader theme, in the latter, it seems, involves a post-imperial Britain in which a centrally controlled imperial power is replaced by a new empire (‘born in a nation of shopkeepers’ (75)) which brings Egypt and the Pyramids into its political discourse and has covert colonial designs on the world, including manipulating the first Indian nuclear explosion in 1974 (referred to as the Ahorgan (Atomic Holocaust Organ) Project aimed at creating a war between India and Pakistan). Here, as Yael Maurer argues, Rushdie’s sense of the historical ‘becomes science fictional at every turn’ (Maurer 2014: 79). The empire has its own Empire Room, secret passages and guards called ‘Hypnoguards’ under the leadership of Cheops (after one of the Pharaohs) who is none other than Rudyard Wayland-Smith, father of Saleem Sinai’s wife Susan, and who, we are told, in an earlier avatar as Mr Edwards, was the notorious killer of Calcutta (16–18 August 1946). When we then turn to the Saleem–Black Saleem section of the novel, the section with which the novel ends, ‘The Antagonist’ becomes a more valuable work. Through five letters that Black Saleem writes to Saleem (and these letters are written in the discourse register of thrillers) there is a gradual unfolding of the secret baby swap, the work of the nurse Mary Pereira, ‘the shortest woman you ever saw’ (55), who later comes to the Sinai household as the baby’s ayah. The first letter captures many of the key events, which with greater artistic control and stylistic brilliance we find in Midnight’s Children: the links between ‘the birth of this baby and of the infant, squalling, turbulent nation’ (55), Dr Narlikar’s Nursing Home, father Sinai dropping the chair and breaking the toe of his right foot,8 the four houses on the Southacre Estate (Buckingham Villa, Blenhime Villa, San Souci Villa, Versailles) (55), and so on.9 In his second letter Black Saleem, who upon the

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death of his father Wee Willie Winkie discovers that Mary Pereira did the deed ‘for Joseph’ (135), seeks revenge for a historical miscarriage of justice that had denied him his proper ancestral rights and would kill Mary Pereira. Black Saleem, anticipating the Humming Bird in Midnight’s Children, has the miraculous gift of whistling through which he can locate anyone he wants. Before Rushdie divulges the contents of the third and fourth Black Saleem epistles, in a clear homage to Borges, he inserts a work by ‘a South American surrealist, aficionado of Joyce and antiquity, maker of intricately jewelled fictions, a purblind, Ultraist pedagogue of a genius’ (174). The book, also called ‘THE ANTAGONIST’, is dedicated to ‘Vittoria Babbington’. The title is preceded by a parenthetical statement about the ‘material’ status of the work. (Here’s a thing Sinai will never discover: there is no other copy of this book which contains this story. It is as nonexistent as the Moving Toyshop or the Encyclopaedia of Tlön. It exists here, now, for this reader, and nowhere else.) (174)

The reference to the ‘Encyclopaedia of Tlön’ links the embedded tale directly to Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ in his 1941 collection ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ (Fictions, 1965). ‘Tlön’ going back to Jonathan Swift is a world with labyrinthine rules, but rules plotted by men and ‘destined to be deciphered by men’ (Borges 1965: 33). Since the secret underworld of the Empire is headed by Cheops, named after one of the Pharaohs, Rushdie’s Borgesinspired embedded story deals with two gifted rivals, both Egyptomanes, who tend to be passionate about the same things, including the same women. The two rivals, Arthur Perring and Richard Howard-Vyse, who bore the same surnames as the original archaeologists John Shae Perrins (1813–69) and Richard HowardVyse (1784–1853) leave Buenos Aires to explore ‘the bent pyramid at Dashur, the pyramid of Sneferu, father of Cheops’ (174), precisely the pyramid explored by their namesakes almost a century before. Given that both loved the imbecile Clara, each decided to waylay the other in the hitherto undiscovered passage in the pyramid mentioned in the 1950s by one Ahmed Fakhry (1905–73) who had worked on the same pyramid not long before their arrival. Perring and HowardVyse do discover the hidden passage, a magnificent structure unchanged after all these years. But as they run towards what seems like a great chamber ahead, ‘a great slab of solid stone slid into place behind them, barring the exit for all time’ (176). They are doomed and all thoughts of murder are banished. They look up and Howard-Vyse reads the writing in hieroglyphics which says ‘Welcome’ (176). It is after reading this story dedicated to one Babbington (a name, the middle name of Thomas Babington Macaulay, which returns in The Satanic Verses) that Sinai remembers the third and fourth letters from Black Saleem. The third had already been recounted via its reading by Saleem’s friends Trevor Gutte and Vanilla. Sinai now reads the ‘fourth epistle of Black Saleem’ (177–9). In this letter Black Saleem ‘reveals all’ (177). On Indian Independence Day in 1947 Mary Pereira is the nurse on duty at the Narlikar Nursing Home. Dr Narlikar himself delivers the Sinai

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baby. In an adjoining smaller ward (an act of social responsibility on the part of the doctor), Dr Mrs Uhlendorff and Mrs Edwards deliver the child of one ‘Laxmi Bai, wife of Vinoo (Wee Willie Winkie, the man with the golden voice)’. Still recovering from her unrequited love for Joseph DaCosta, Mary wants to undertake her own revolutionary act and exchanges the two babies: the Sinai baby to Laxmi Bai and the Bai baby to Mrs Sinai. Mrs Edwards notices the exchange but remains silent. (Later in the novel she recalls the baby-exchange episode and connects it with the end of the Raj and hence her lack of power to stop the baby exchange (238).) The act does not redeem Mary in the eyes of Joseph. When she tells him, ‘I have given one poor child the chance of wealth’, he replies (in all probability, recounts Black Saleem), ‘You have no concept of revolution. Do you think that by turning masters into servants and servants into masters you have changed a single thing about the country we live in?’ When Mary replies, ‘Yes’ he calls it a ‘wrong revolution’ of one kind of materialism against another. Later through Dr Mrs Uhlendorff, Black Saleem’s mentor, Black Saleem locates the records of the nursing home and discovers his real parentage, a discovery made all the more urgent because, upon Wee Willie Winkie (Vinoo’s) car accident, he is unable to save Vinoo because his blood is of a rare type totally unlike that of his parents.10 The letter ends: You and I: the signposts of one of history’s blindest alleys. No wonder I adopt your name. No wonder I loathe you so utterly. No wonder Ramaji [his sadhu protector] could not make me gentle … I want one thing only. Revenge. (179)

At the beginning of Book Three there is a quote from Edmund Burke: ‘He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skills. Our antagonist is our helper.’ The quote is repeated in Joseph Anton (345) where it is used to signal the extremist views currently espoused in the name of Islam. Later in the same book (Book Three) we get the fifth epistle of Black Saleem. The letter begins with the warning that Black Saleem would love to tear Sinai into twenty-nine pieces because he had laid eyes on Olga (with whom Black Saleem had been telepathically communing). The number recurs throughout the Rushdie corpus because of its links to the ‘Simurg’ myth made famous by Attar (Mishra 2018: 85, 310–11). After pointing out that India is no longer a spiritual country, its gods abandoned and put to different, cynical uses, he develops the idea of ‘Eki’ or parallelism which means that their lives parallel the history of India as a nation since independence, when in fact for the first time the nation came into being. The latter was the ‘generative moment’ (290). The moment, however, creates not only a ‘new historical direction, but also a human being’ (290) much like the Hegelian Lukács’s notion of the worldhistorical character in his discussion of the historical novel (1974). Since the birth of the nation must have its individual, human, parallel, Sinai and Black Saleem are the individuals. But the act of Mary Pereira reversed their roles: one became the representative of the downtrodden, the other of the privileged, in a replay of the old imperialist notion of divide and rule. So to get to a new ‘Eki’ Saleem has to be

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brought back to India and the two must confront each other, since, collectively, they are the nation’s ‘Ek’ (‘one’ in Hindi). Black Saleem’s revenge is focused on both Sinai and Mary Pereira whose whereabouts in Colaba he knows. His dark plan is hinted at with reference to a ‘special knife, the sister of the one I sent you at the opening of our correspondence … sleep, little mother, don’t you cry, And I will sing a lullaby …’ (292). The letter ends: Come by air to Bombay. Every day for the next month a man will wait at Santa Cruz Airport for you; he’ll find you, don’t worry. He will bring you to me, and then we shall have our little chat. If you do not come, well, you will not hear from me again. I shall have failed in my attempt to create a new generative moment, but revenge on Mary Pereira will console me amply. Think on it. (292)

In India Saleem finds that Mary had been murdered and Black Saleem is awaiting trial. Saleem himself escapes being assassinated because Black Saleem’s agent, one Mr Farthing, loses his nerve. But Saleem’s body is ravaged by non-specific urethritis and he nears death; he screams and talks about the Black Hole (327). The chapter (eleven) ends with a shooting script: A slow zoom down from our heights brings us to the roof of the Breach Candy hospital, and by magic through the roof of the small room where Sinai sits, and now we close in on his face which looks at us – no, not at us – which looks at something through, close right in on them now, through those eternally staring eyes. (331)

In the final chapter of the novel (Chapter twelve) we find Saleem reading his mind as a black hole, a fantasy space into which India with its chaos, noise and streets is sucked. Many years ago, there was of course a real black hole, a historical black hole, the Black Hole of Calcutta (1756) where a number of British soldiers were held and many suffocated for lack of air. The incident also led to the Battle of Plassey (1757) which marked the beginning of a more direct colonization of India. This world cannot be explained but understood only through the gift of the artist for whom alone, as Calvino said, fantasy is available as a means of explaining the world to oneself (334). The hospital is a cage to Saleem and now he is in a nursing home. He is in the care of a sympathetic nurse, Nurse Sharmila (named as is likely after the Bollywood star of the period Sharmila Tagore), who helps Saleem Sinai escape in her 1955 Buick. With Sinai in the back seat, she drives home but stops at a vegetable stall. This is when Sinai walks out of the car towards Regal Cinema in Colaba (then the city’s premier cinema) where ‘an old American movie, starring Lana Turner, John Saxon and Sandra Dee’ is being shown (340). The movie, Douglass Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959), has a guest appearance by the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. Although she does not sing this song in the film (in the film she sings ‘Trouble of the World’), the novel ends with the Mahalia’s classic, ‘He got

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the whole world, in his hand’ (340), the song in his head as he walks away.11 There is a one-word coda, though, on a separate page which reads ‘Or:’ followed at the bottom of the page with ‘First Draught completed Monday May 12, 1975. London’ (341). The one word recalls the ending of James Joyce’s Ulysses: ‘Yes’.

The Fictional–Filmic: ‘Madame Rama’ Whereas ‘The Book of the Peer’ marks Rushdie’s interest in demonic sacralization in Islam, ‘Crosstalk’, his interest in modernist existentialism and ‘The Antagonist’ signifies the search for the right voice and genre for the Indian novel he has been struggling to write, ‘Madame Rama’ takes one to Rushdie’s interest in cinema, specifically Bollywood cinema which functions here not so much as a source of idioms and ideological affirmation as a substrate for the plot itself. ‘Madame Rama’ was completed in August 1975 and then revised in February 1976 (44/12–14). The first version runs to some 50,000 words and the revised to 85,000 words. This mercifully unpublished novel, where one of the narrative conceits in the revised version is a ghoulish penis (and graphically illustrated on a working title cover of the novel (212/3; 03–21 redacted)) as an instrument of recollection in the crotch of a woman, begins, in its first avatar, with a dedication and an epigraph. The dedication reads, ‘This book is dedicated to Mrs Indira Gandhi without whom none of it would have been probable.’ The epigraph is part of a letter which Bertrand Russell wrote to Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873–1938), a literary socialite, on 27 February 1916. In this letter, Russell quoted a speech by a young Indian at the ‘Indian Majliss in Cambridge’. ‘I am going’, he said, ‘from this land of prosperity to the land of plague and famine; from this land of freedom to the land where if I am truthful I am disloyal, if I am honest I am seditious; from this land of enlightenment to the land of religious bigotry, the land that I love, my country. A man must be more than human to love such a country; but those who would serve it have become more than human’. (44/12, p. iii)

Rushdie, a young impressionable man trying to be a writer, does what all diasporic writers do – they write allegories of their nation and here the allegory is a roman-àclef, where the novel is keyed into actual historical events. The Nehru dynasty, with Lal Bahadur Shastri’s short tenure as prime minister, continues with Indira Gandhi (the Emergency was declared on 26 June 1975 as the novel is being written) now in power. It says something about Rushdie’s own relationship with Bollywood that the dynastic theme locates its plot in the workings of a popular film industry. But the novel which makes no pretence of being a satirical (even a mock-heroic) account of Indira Gandhi’s rise to power also shows the literary transformation Rushdie himself had to undergo before he could become a novelist. A novel, as fiction, transcends its subject matter, it transforms and translates historical events so that objective reality is filtered through a variety of lenses and the point of view is never static.

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A failed novel, nevertheless, and especially if the writer indeed becomes preeminent, has archival value and here, in this instance, even a failed novel allows us to think through the role of the popular in providing the author with an enabling structure as well as an identifiable postcolonial language. In The Satanic Verses, as we have seen, Gibreel Farishta had acted in forgettable films such as The Parting of the Arabian Sea (an early title of the novel) and Mahound. At one point in the first version of ‘Madame Rama’, an entire scene involving ‘twelve directors’ of the film company is written as a shooting script and Sergei Eisenstein’s name is given to one of the servants (17–18). It also shows how cinema, especially the content of the Bollywood mythological films, is Rushdie’s point of entry into Hindu India. India is given a name, Ayodhya, but in its female form – Ayodhya Mata, ‘Mother Ayodhya’, – a country mad about movies or ‘fillums’: ‘8% of this great nation is literate, whereas a heartening 92% is fillumate’ (33). The connection is with the early but dominant genre of the Bollywood mythological which Rushdie refers to as ‘theologicals’, but the link between the nation and the mythical Rama’s kingdom cannot be overlooked. After all Ayodhya is the birth place of Lord Rama and functions as a kind of Mecca for many Hindus. The Mahatma too – not one to shirk from an overt Hindu symbology – was fond of referring to national governance as rām-rājya, the dominion of Rama, and title of the only film (Rām Rājya, 1943), it is said, he ever saw. ‘Fillums’ and ‘Ayodhya’, then, establish a kind of ‘ur-Bollywood connection’ which goes back to Dadasaheb Phalke’s foundational Indian film, Raja Harishchandra (1913), itself a ‘theological’ and one which, as some have argued, established the basic genre of Bollywood. In Ayodhya resides the great epic poet Valmiki who is Ayodhya’s Shakespeare or Homer but who may even be, and here the irony falls flat, William McGonagall, the self-declared greatest bad poet of all time and sadly a Scotsman to boot! (1) What is important for us, and for our understanding of Rushdie’s apprentice work as another site of the author’s genesis of secrecy, is his return to an art form and its discourses which the young Rushdie, growing up in Bombay, had internalized. As we argue in a later chapter, it is an art form that not only neutralizes high and low art but also introduces a dissensus in the ethical–aesthetic divide. In this instance too, the novel uses Bollywood as a theme, a matrix or tableau with which or on which to compose a history of India from around the time of partition to the Emergency. This unpublished novel has another immediate value – it is very much a struggle, yet again, to find the right structure and linguistic medium for a novel whose subject too will be the nation itself. ‘Madame Rama’ begins with an account of the Bollywood film industry whose founding father is D. W. Rama, a filmmaker who reappears in Midnight’s Children. This is pre-partition India where Rama’s spiritual mentor is one M. K. Ganpati, a Kenyan lawyer, lovingly remembered as ‘Moviji’ (2). Rama manages to gain monopoly of the industry, but after 15 August 1947 the Westernmost and Easternmost studios of his empire secede from Rama’s Megalomania Company calling themselves Allah-Fillums after ‘their pale, ascetic leader, Allah O. Akbar’ (2) and taking away part of Ayodhya’s great Bungle studio in the East. What remained of the latter studio after this dismemberment, however, was the ‘source of some

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of Ayodhya’s greatest artists and finest movies, most notably those of the one and only Suchagyp Rayon’ (97).12 As for Rama’s mentor Moviji, he retires to his ‘CineAshram or Ethical Fillum School’ but he is shot dead by one Goddi: ‘Antifillumist and bandit, one Goddi, entered the Cine-Ashram and brazenly asked if he might “shoot him” … Moviji naturally misunderstood’ (3). D. W. Rama continues to keep his film empire together for a further sixteen years until his death in 1963, having produced a number of major films including Love and Freedom, Love and Tragedy, Tragedy and Freedom and Love, Freedom and Tragedy (3–4). Upon his death the film world is devastated as fanzines proclaim, ‘After Rama, who?’ To anyone familiar with modern Indian history, the connections are obvious – D. W. Rama, echoing D. W. Griffiths, is Nehru; Ganpati (Moviji) is Gandhi; Allah O. Akbar, Jinnah; the Cine-Ashram, Gandhi’s own; and Goddi, Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse – but in almost every instance the correlation becomes a farce. Of all these fictional names only D. W. Rama survives in Midnight’s Children where names do become a playful conceit. Upon Rama’s death a power struggle ensues in an industry dominated by the producer Balasubramanium Venkataraghavan (‘B.V.’), the director–actor I. S. Nayyar (who incidentally brings the dark Nayyar years of the early sixties to an end by suffocating himself by eating mangoes at Heathrow Customs for fear that they will be quarantined), Lata Walkeshwar and D. W. Rama’s daughter, Vista Rama (‘Vista’ to mean, beyond the common ‘a view or prospect’, a stretch of ‘remembered experiences’), the ‘greatest beauty in the history of the Ayodhyan cinema’, the ‘Devi with the White Streak In Her Hair’ (13) who at the time of the death of her father is forty-five (Indira Gandhi’s age in 1963)13 but who plays the role of a twenty-year-old unbeknown to people that the role is, in fact, being played by her seven-year-old daughter, Pano Rama, who is already five-feet, six-inches tall.14 Vista’s great dream is to act in a new Rāmāyaṇa film. The novel then retraces the life of Vista Rama and we read that Vista Rama’s big hit was her first film, ‘AAM-KA-DAAM’ (‘The Price of Mangoes’) in which she pioneered the technique known as the ‘symbolic kiss’ (28) which in Midnight’s Children is the brain child of Saleem Sinai’s uncle Hanif who devices the art of the ‘indirect kiss’. The description of the ‘Symbolic Kiss, the awful osculation, the lecherous licking of a pure, yellow Alfonso, that has been the shame of Ayodhyan cinema’ (74), which I quote below, is not unlike the one given in Midnight’s Children (Rushdie 1981a: 142). Vista Rama receives a lover in her boudoir. She picks up a mango from the bowl by her bed and raises it tenderly to her lips. She kisses it long, slow and hard, and then places it in his hand. He goes through exactly the same motions. End of scene. At the time, no-one could understand how the Censor had permitted this outrageous piece of flagrant eroticism to remain in the film. (29)

Passages which have only epiphenomenal significance in this work become central motifs and key narrative catalysts in Rushdie’s great work. One such passage is

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a reference to an incident when a seventy-year-old doctor comes to treat Vista Rama’s ailing grandmother and can only do so by touching her grandmother’s ‘naked, withered breast’ from behind a sheet: ‘Two servants, women servants, entered with a large white bedsheet, in which a small hole had been cut, a hole no more than six inches across, but pernicious as the pit!’(53). The doctor dies there and then and Vista says, ‘“Physician, heal thyself ”, you might say, but I did not. I was proud of that man. He did not go gentle into that dark night’ (54). The reference to Jesus’s parable in Luke 4.23 survives in Midnight’s Children (21), as does the perforated sheet, but Dylan Thomas does not. The Bollywood mythological is, of course, a homage to India’s foundational epics and Rushdie’s Vista Rama replicates that homage in her feminist version of the great Sanskrit epic, the Rāmāyaṇa. What emerges, however, is not a desire for the usual Bollywood mythological but a reworking of the epic so that Sita, the sacrificial wife, and not Rama, the noble hero, emerges as the chief character. ‘The final shooting script’ (53) of this new venture, Sitayama, Vista suggests, in a radical departure for the times, will also show that against a gay Rama and lesbian Sita (54) there is the ‘real man’ Ravana, the satanic anti-hero of the epic. The great film Sitayama advertised as ‘RAMA IS SITA!!’ on a giant billboard (88) is to be shown at the New Taj Picture Palais, Agra, a newly recreated theatre where the Taj Mahal now stands (63). The film is, of course, ‘unfillumed’ (92) and yet people come to see this film and respond to it in a positive manner. They are pre-programmed to respond to a film that, in reality, does not exist: The Sexaphones are pouring specially individualized Reviews and Analyses, Reactions and Emotions into each and every member of the audience. These are specially created for the purpose of this première by the ICE-machine which you see over there. Doesn’t it bubble prettily? We are at his moment massproducing ICE-machines for use in every Cinema. Think of it … every member of every audience lulled by the Womb-Beat into a deep, wonderful snooze. Every member of the audience waking at the end with an entirely personal concept of the supposed fillum. Every cinema disgorging happy, contented customers! This show will run and run! Don’t you see … we can now absolutely guarantee the success of all future Premières! (92, author’s emphasis and ellipses)

The satirical point being made here is that Bollywood is pure simulacra as every film simply repeats another so that cinema is really a grand syntagm. What was needed, as Shri ‘George’ Segal wrote, is a properly constituted, Organic Cinema … in which … The True Representatives of the Audience may, in brotherhood and community, create a cinema which reflects the genuine aspirations and legitimate desires of the Cinemass, instead of the ‘dialecto-materio-fetishist Wankings of a Star’. (104–5)15

The analogy with Indira Gandhi’s own promulgation of Emergency Rule as a sign of madness is clearly the subtext here, for with Vista Rama’s own film empire finally

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in tatters she is locked away in Kashi (Varanasi) in what seems like a madhouse and dies in an accident on her way to the Valley (of Kashmir): ‘Madame Rama was smiling happily. The rear wheels of the bus reached the edge; and passed over it’ (121). These are the final words of the novel. The novel doesn’t work because as a roman-à-clef it is too obvious. Later, in Midnight’s Children, fiction distances itself from history by making the latter function as anecdotal pastiche, but here the apprentice hand is still looking for both form and language, some of which it captures but other features escape it. But the function of the popular Bollywood as a means of constructing a dissensus, as a way of intervening into the knowledge–desire opposition (after Rancière) is evident. When we turn to the revised novel completed six months later in February 1976, many of the weaknesses remain but the work is a lot more polished and one gets a better sense of a style which makes its way into the writing of Midnight’s Children. To this revised text (44/13–14) I now turn my attention. The revised novel is a retrospective first-person narrative in which Vista Rama recalls her life locked up in the Widows’ Hostel in Varanasi. Her memory takes her to her father whose ‘pants’ she still wears because this is what her father called an underwear and whose penis, erect, as his body burns on the funeral pyre (22), she recalls yet again, is something she had seen when he was alive as well (83–5). She further defines who she is by recalling her own daughter and her place in the pantheon of movie stars: ‘I am the daughter of D. W. Rama and the mother of Pano Rama. I am the star of The Price of Mangoes and of Sita’ (8). The narrative centre of the revised novel, however, is the long shadow of a father even after his death. The ‘erect penis’ observed as the body burns makes way to Vista Rama’s fantasy of her hermaphroditic body in which resides her father’s phallus (referred to throughout as the ‘bap’ after ‘bāpū’ meaning ‘father’). The power of the latter is such that it dictates Vista Rama’s life and one is never too sure if the presence of it in her loins is real or a fantasy, an idea that plays on the return of the repressed (after all her father wanted a boy not a girl). This new vicariously sexual father–daughter relationship underpins the cinematic point of view of the novel. Even as she lights her father’s funeral pyre at the hallowed burning ghats of Varanasi she remembers her father’s words about cinema in India: ‘Movies are, to the contemporary Indian, what chess is to the Russians, football to the Brazilians, politics to the French’ (13). It is also an industry where ‘popular stars will often make four or even five films at a time, sprinting from set to set; because only about one film in ten makes money’ (121). There are, of course, references to political matters because the novel, as in its earlier prototype, after all, is a thinly disguised account of the life of Indira Gandhi. In need of a proper voice and story about India, the revised version shows a hand searching for the right voice and the right structure. Looking back from Midnight’s Children, the prototypal value of the text becomes readily evident. Apart from the ‘symbolic kiss’ there is also a ‘fully-paid-up, out-and-out birth control fanatic’ (with an embittered childless wife Mala standing at Kemp’s Corner asking for a baby) (132) named Dr Narlikar. The narrator tells us a little later that Vista Rama ‘was born’ at Narlikar’s (140). The latter’s ‘true love’, however, ‘is the manufacture of

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reinforced concrete tetrapods … to reclaim large areas of the sea around Bombay’ (133). It is to Dr Narlikar that Madame Rama confesses the feeling inside her that her ‘father’s penis’ appears in her body, ‘complete with testicles’ (133) with ‘my loins belting out “My Scarf of Red Muslin” or some such ditty’ (134). The ditty is immediately recognizable as the Lata Mangeshkar/Nimmi song in Raj Kapoor’s Barsaat (‘Monsoon’, 1949): ‘havā meṁ uṛtā jāye merā lāl dupaṭṭā malmal kā’ (‘In the wind flies my scarf of red muslin’), repeated in Midnight’s Children (284). In this revised version of ‘Madame Rama’, it is in the winter of 1970 that Vista Rama, a ‘hyphenate’, in film language ‘someone who assumes multiple roles in any production; producer, director and superstar’ (143), produces the film Sita. Again billboards proclaim, ‘RAMA IS SITA!!’ Unlike in the earlier version, here the film is presented as a serious feminist version which gets a ‘real’ première in the Maratha Mandir Cinema (144). But it is also a film in which Madame Rama’s father returns via the ‘bap’ in her groins. The film of Sita wasn’t just my come-back, it was his, too. Because, to tell the truth, he directed it. We evolved a highly subtle system of communication: He’d twitch to tell me when to turn over and when to out. And for the harder aspects of film-making, instructing the actors, supervising the camera-angles, working on the editing, he … well … signalled instructions to my brain. (I suppose I should have worried then … if he could do that, he could take me over far more completely than he had. But, in those days, he didn’t seem to want to. Maybe the whole idea of becoming a woman, rather than controlling one from the groinlevel, was just too much for him). (151, author’s ellipses)

This retelling of the Rāmāyaṇa, with its critique of patriarchy, its celebration of women and a critical reappraisal of the demon-king Ravana, gets rave reviews: ‘Meaningful, valid! Important, radical, masterly! Disturbing upsetting alarming but serious responsible witty profound’ (152). Nevertheless what is clear is that the discourse carries the earlier version’s mock-epic tone and a comedic critical idiom. It also anticipates Gibreel Farishta’s uncompleted and blasphemous version of the Rāmāyaṇa towards the end of The Satanic Verses. ‘Madame Rama’, the retrospective narrative that this version is, works towards Vista’s mental disintegration in the Widows’ Hostel. Constructing her own recollections in the discourse of exile we hear her pitiful refrain, ‘So farewell, Kemp’s Corner, goodbye, Flora Fountain’ as she remembers other exiles like Emperor Shah Jehan confined to the Red Fort in Agra (222). And then, before the end, in a clear homage to Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali and also to Raj Kapoor’s Mera Naam Joker (‘My name is Joker’, 1970) both of which have a Peepshow Man, we read passages which Rushdie had used in Black Saleem’s first letter to Saleem Sinai and which prefigure Lifafa Das’s ‘dugdugee drum and his voice, “Duniya dekho”, see the whole world!’ in Midnight’s Children (74). When I was a child, a gypsy-type would come to the gate with a wonderful magic machine. He would set the machine up outside the villa and begin to

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She pauses to reminisce on her own work in the film industry which has its own imitations and wonders why she would now waste her four-anna chavanni to see the drumming gypsy (‘And sometimes, when I had a bright four-anna chavanni, I’d rush out and glue my eyes to the great machine and see …’ (228)). Like cinema, to which she has made her own contribution, the unreal world must be passed by to see the real thing: ‘I’ve spent too long with imitations; it’s time I saw the real things’ (228). In the end, confined to the four walls of the Widows’ Hostel, she screams: Let me out, Pano! This is your mother talking. You’ll never see me again, believe me! Please believe me. (228)

The Depths of Loss: ‘The Courter’ The short story ‘The Courter’ appeared in Rushdie’s collection East, West (1994). It was one of the three (out of nine) hitherto unpublished.16 In a letter to Rushdie dated 11 January 1995 (43/3) Duncan Minshull, chief producer, Readings, the BBC, showed an interest in doing a three-part serial of the short story provided that Rushdie himself was the narrator. The short story clearly shows Rushdie’s mature style with a greater economy with words and much more controlled irony. The ideas around this story had been in the making for many years as there is an autobiographical rendition of the key protagonist, Rushdie’s childhood ayah Mary Menezes (‘Certainly-Mary’), in a fragment titled ‘The Courter’ of which the first page is in the Rushdie Archive (42/2). Soon after the publication of The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995a) Rushdie sets about expanding the short story into a screenplay. The completion of the screenplay, ‘The Courter’ (51/4), is noted in a fax message dated ‘20 Sept. 1996 to Jane Wellesley [&] Warner Sisters’: ‘I have tried to write a highly personal piece that has great meaning for me. If I’ve failed to communicate that, I’ll just have to live with that failure.’ In the fax he asks Jane Wellesley about the need for a ‘sympathetic director’. Warner Sisters (an independent production company founded by Lavinia Warner) had created several very successful TV series for the BBC and other broadcasting companies but it seems nothing significant came out of Rushdie’s screenplay. Nevertheless, what ‘The Courter’ underlines, though, is Rushdie’s fascination with and attraction to cinema and television. We have noted that ‘Crosstalk’ was written for a BBC TV competition. There is no sign that ‘The Courter’ was either a commissioned work or written for a similar competition. What is clear is that the spectre of the cinematic image has a haunting presence in his imagination. The Archive shows many instances of attempts by Rushdie to either write original film/TV scripts or transform his own novels into stage plays or cinema,

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but, in spite of the presence of these in the Archive (51/8 (‘The Exorcist’), 51/10– 51/13 (‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’), 58/10 (‘Morning in Manhattan’), 60/11– 60/12 (‘Silverland’), 52/3 (‘Haroun and the Sea of Stories … experimental draft’)), ‘The Courter’ survives as the most accomplished ‘text-in-performance’ for stage or screen. The screenplay, as it exists, is a fictional re-creation of a brief period (1963–4) when his family and their ayah lived in London. After London they (without the ayah who returned to Bombay) moved to Pakistan. For the young Rushdie both the arrival and then the sudden and unannounced (from his point of view) departure of his family to Pakistan from the city of his birth, Bombay, was unusually traumatic, which is why in the fax to Jane Wellesley he spoke of it as ‘a highly personal piece that has great meaning for me’. In ‘The Antagonist’ Rushdie had noted the role played by Saleem’s ayah in the baby swap. He had modelled her on his real ayah Mary Menezes, naming her Mary Pereira, a name which she retains in Midnight’s Children. Rushdie had noted how important Mary Menezes was in his life; perhaps even more important than his own mother which is why a first draft of Midnight’s Children was dedicated to her as well. The Mary in ‘The Courter’ does not carry a surname, she is simply Mary. The rest of the family are the Merchants: father A. A. (Anis Ahmed, Rushdie’s father’s name, but this is never spelled out), mother Shama (quite possibly a silent homage to the quietly suffering Shama of V. S. Naipaul’s classic A House for Mr Biswas), son Ronny (Imran), seventeen, daughters Durré, sixteen, Muneeza, twelve, and Scheherazade, three. This replicates, more or less, the age of the Rushdie children in 1963. The surname Merchant belonged to Rushdie’s classmate in Bombay, one Saleem Merchant whose first name he gave to Sinai in Midnight’s Children (Rushdie 2012: 54). Merchant reappears in The Ground Beneath Her Feet as the surname of Umeed (Rai) who like Ronny in ‘The Courter’ has a passion for photography. But it is Mary who is at the centre of this screenplay and it is with her that the screenplay begins. Composed as 208 numbered shots that begin with Mary leaving London in a taxi and end with a naked Ronny running away from the camera in a mist-laden park, the screenplay is presented as a long retrospective narrative with intermittent voice-overs by Ronny, an amateur photographer, who captures stills of a film in which he has a leading part and from whose point of view the narrative is presented. The first shot is of Mary, ‘a tiny Goan Indian ayah aged 60, bespectacled’, rosary in hand, ‘sitting stiffly upright’ in the back seat of a taxicab. She is leaving the family and except for A. A. the family is grief-stricken. And so is the porter of the ‘redbrick Kensington mansion block’, Mecir, except that his grief is one of silence. With Mary gone, the family is left alone. A. A., a man prone to fits of anger and a man without feeling, is unable to understand his son Ronny’s grief. Ronny starts to run, camera in hand. As he runs we hear Ronny’s voice-over and new images replace the running boy, and these ‘stills montage’ take the spectator back to the ‘Bombay of the 50s’. One of the stills is of a photograph in the Rushdie Archive of ‘a boy lying on a bed, flanked by his two small sisters, reading to them from “Peter Pan”’. It is followed by a still of the children with their parents, and then

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Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy Here, finally are the children with their ayah. The ayah is the woman we have seen leaving in the taxi. The camera goes in closer and closer to her face. RONNY [V/O] NOW, IN MY ENFORCED EXILE FROM THE BELOVED COUNTRY OF MY BIRTH, I MUST AT LAST TELL THE TRUE STORY OF HOW I CAME UNSTUCK FROM THE IDEA OF FAMILY, OF BELONGING, OF HOME. THE STORY OF OUR AYAH, CERTAINLY-MARY, THE WOMAN WHO DID AS MUCH AS MY MOTHER TO RAISE MY SISTERS AND ME; OF THE GENTLE MAN SHE USED TO CALL ‘THE COURTER’; AND OF THE TERRIBLE CHOICE SHE HAD TO MAKE. I SEE NOW THAT IT ISN’T JUST THEIR STORY, BUT OURS, MINE, AS WELL.

The voice-over and the slow movement of the camera towards a close-up shot is cut to a ‘technically “treated” version of the horse-roping scene in The Misfits’ (John Huston, 1961), the last completed film of Clark Gable (who died twelve days after the film was completed on 4 November 1960) which also figured Marilyn Monroe who died a year later. The screenplay was written by Arthur Miller whose own marriage to Monroe was on the verge of collapse as the film was being made. References to the film and especially to the classic horse-roping scene where Monroe, traumatized, watches Gable, Montgomery Clift and Eli Wallach, harness a wild horse for later processing as dog meat, are made throughout Rushdie’s screenplay. The retrospective narration proceeds apace as the Bombay home is recalled, Ronny winning a place at Rugby (which remains unnamed) shown as the first of life’s many fractures and Ronny’s Rugby years remembered as those of an ‘Oriental’ who was ‘TOO ALIEN … TOO CLEVER … AND TOO BAD AT GAMES!’ (shot 27), three public school cardinal sins. He befriends a Jewish boy Isaac with whom he shares a passion for Bob Dylan but who is subsequently expelled from school for smoking a joint. Much of this part of the screenplay recaptures what we already know about young Rushdie’s schooldays at Rugby with racial taunts not uncommon: WHO’S THIS CATERWAULING THROUGH THE DAYS OF ICE AND FOG? MUST BE THAT FUCKING JEWBOY AND HIS LITTLE PAL, THE WOG.

And then suddenly (shot 39) a letter arrives from sister Durré via a voice-over that their dad had sold their Bombay home and they will now be coming to London. In a dream sequence (shot 40) it is left to Ayah Mary to console the children. Back in his school dormitory Ronny sings Ayah Mary’s consoling Patti Page (1953) song: HOW MUCH IS THAT DOGGIE IN THE WINDOW, THE ONE WITH THE WAGGILY TAIL? HOW MUCH IS THE DOGGIE IN THE WINDOW, I DO HOPE THAT DOGGIE’S FOR SALE.

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The song is not used in Midnight’s Children but makes its way into the Deepa Mehta film version. The scene now shifts to London and the transition is established once again through the horse-roping scene from The Misfits (shot 43). It is 1964 and Britain has the likes of Lord Home, Harold Wilson, the Beatles and the Stones. The Merchants install themselves in Waverly House, Flat No. 10 (shots 45–47). It is from here on that the screenplay places Ayah Mary at the centre, although she does not get most of the lines. As the title of the screenplay indicates, Waverly House has a ‘courter’, Mary’s mispronunciation of ‘porter’ (shot 50). This porter, Mecir, is an East European immigrant whom we have already met at the beginning of the screenplay. He has had a mild stroke and obsequiously goes about doing his job. Father A. A. remains irascible and intemperate, drinking whisky and soda as the family’s Bombay paradise is ‘translated into a kind of Martian absurdity’ (shot 48). In this atmosphere of gloom it was ‘Ayah Mary who first began to make sense of things for us all’ (shot 48). The girls – Durré and Muneeza – go to a comprehensive school (shots 55–56) and friendship develops between Mecir, called ‘Mixed-up’ by all, and Ayah Mary. Ronny, from whose point of view the screenplay is written, arrives from school during his summer vacation (shot 59) – that glorious summer of love that marked the beginning of the psychedelic age, of flower people. Love too was in the air, memorably captured in the Beatles song ‘She was just seventeen’. Love turns out to be the thematic thread that links the narrative. Mary and Mecir walk in the park; Mecir teaches Mary how to play chess, but as Ronny discovers later, Mecir is in fact a chess Grand Master, originator of the ‘NimzoIndian Defence’ (shot 142). Happiness is there for her but Mary has sudden palpitations of the heart. Mary survives the chest pain, but a brooding melancholy takes over. It is captured in a dream sequence (shot 116) of four scenes from Hindi (Bollywood) movies. 116. LIBRARY FOOTAGE: HINDI MOVIE SCENE.[MARY’S DREAM.]

1. From Mother India: NARGIS, hacking with a pickaxe at the unyielding earth. Music.

2. From Mughal-e-Azam: the Technicolor dance sequence: the nautch girl Anarkali whirling at the Emperor Akbar’s court. Music.

3. From Shree 420: RAJ KAPOOR, in Bollywood-imitation-Chaplin guise, swings down a country road towards the bright lights of Bombay, singing. RAJ KAPOOR MERA JOOTA HAI JAPANI YÉ PATLOON, INGLISTANI SAR PÉ LAL TOPI RUSI PHIR BHI DIL HAI HINDUSTANI …

4. From Mother India again: Crane shot. NARGIS and fellow villagers stand in a wheat field cut into the shape of the map of India.

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The film fragments are placed to mark Mary’s homesickness as well as the lost city, Bombay, the grand temple of Bollywood cinema. Shama consoles her that one should move on and at any rate Mary now has her ‘courter’ (165–6). But there is another unease as the British nation state struggles to come to terms with its dramatically changing racial character. The screenplay would invoke Britain’s ugly face with Paki bashing, Enoch Powell’s racist taunts and roving skinheads calling themselves ‘Stones’ and ‘Beatles’. There are memorable autobiographical moments for sure (such as Ronny embracing Tottenham Hotspurs and recalling its star John White struck by lightning on 21 July 1964) but the London interregnum of the family is largely unhappy. Ronny himself would find love and sexual awakening with a distant cousin Chandni with whom he would see The Misfits as well as Truffaut, Satyajit Ray and Fellini and who would refer to Ronny as her own ‘courter’ (163). These are happy anecdotes that break a screenplay about loss and about displacement that heads towards its climactic moments via two incidents. The first involves the family, the second, Mary. One day, suddenly, out of the blue, Mrs Waglé, known to the family as ‘Mrs Please-Remember-Me’, the new owner of the family Bombay home, turns up at their apartment, and Muneeza is livid as she screams, ‘I want to go home. I want to go home’ (180). She blames her father for selling their home and displacing them. She runs out and returns with a gun, one of many that A. A. kept in a closet. She screams at her father, ‘He sold it. Now we’ll never go back.’ The father tries to calm her down but she squeezes the trigger, but not before Shama runs between them. The family as well as the visitor are aghast, but the gun is a replica, part of a commercial enterprise involving their father to sell replica firearm as there is a growing international market for it. At this point Shama breaks down. EVERY NIGHT I GO TO BED FILLED UP WITH MISERY, EVERY MORNING I WAKE UP AND WIPE THE SLATE CLEAN, WHISTLE A HAPPY TUNE! … HOW ELSE TO SURVIVE IN THIS MADHOUSE? YOU GIVE MONEY IN DRIBS AND DRABS. I MUST SCRIMP AND SAVE. THERE ARE GUNS IN YOUR CUPBOARD, YOU TELL ME NOTHING. STILL I RUN IN FRONT OF YOU TO SAVE YOUR LIFE. THE MAD ONE IN THE FAMILY IS ME.

She sobs, her breath shrieks, and, incensed, A. A. slaps her. In turn Ronny punches his father but he does not hit back, he simply slumps into a chair and covers his head. This (180) is a long, intense shot, the crux of the filmic narrative. We turn to the second moment in which Mecir intercedes to help Shama who is molested by skinheads calling themselves the two Beatles. In the ensuing fracas Mecir is wounded (188). As the Beatles run off Ronny tries to photograph them. In the ambulance Mary kisses the wounded Mecir on the lips (190). Next morning (196) in the hospital waiting room Ronny is told that Mecir’s wounds were not fatal. In the next shot Mary and Mecir sit together in Mecir’s lounge. Mary tells him that she has decided to go back home, to her niece in Mangalore. Mecir remains silent. She continues,

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GOD KNOWS FOR WHAT-ALL WE CAME OVER TO THIS COUNTRY. BUT I CAN NO LONGER STAY. NO. CERTAINLY NOT.

The screenplay returns to the beginning and there is a reprise of shots 1, 3 and 5. Ronny is taking photographs, the taxi leaves, his father calls him but he walks away. He runs and the frame freezes as he is caught in mid-stride. A number of cuts follow with Ronny’s voice-over. In shot 201 the voice-over captures Mary in the taxi: MARY WAS RIGHT ABOUT HOMESICKNESS. AFTER HER RETURN TO BOMBAY, SHE NEVER HAD A DAY’S HEART TROUBLE AGAIN. THIRTYTHREE YEARS LATER, SHE SENT ME A CARD ON MY 50TH BIRTHDAY. SHE WAS NINETY-FIVE YEARS OLD.

Other voice-overs inform us that Chandni performs in a theatre in India (203), Isaac turns into a drug addict (204), Durré had agreed to an arranged marriage, Munneza eloped and as for baby Scheherazade, she enters into myth (205): SCHEHERAZADE MARRIED A CRUEL SULTAN AND HAD TO TELL STORIES TO SAVE HER LIFE. UNFORGETTABLE STORIES. STORIES YOU HAD TO HEAR THE END OF. EVERY NIGHT, FOR A THOUSAND NIGHTS AND A NIGHT.

In the margin at this juncture is an additional voice-over for Ronny in Rushdie’s handwriting: ‘+Ronny: What happens [when] love makes them run?’ The frame unfreezes and Ronny is running again (207). There is the sound of his heartbeat, his breathing, the only sound. The next scene shows him coming to a halt in a park. He undresses and stands completely naked. A cinematic description follows, ending with Ronny’s voice-over. A riderless horse – a pale horse, like the horse in The Misfits – perhaps the dreadful death-symbol of the Apocalypse (‘behold a pale horse’) goes past; with lassoes trailing from its neck. Wider shot. The naked figure in the misty park. In a series of mixes, the camera retreats from RONNY, until he is just a small figure in the distance, an indistinct figure in a thickening mist.

RONNY [V/O] AT SEVENTEEN, YOU STILL THINK YOU CAN RUN AWAY FROM ANYTHING. YOUR FATHER, YOUR PAST, YOUR WORLD. YOU AREN’T LISTENING TO THEIR VOICES SPEAKING THROUGH YOUR MOUTH. YOU DON’T SEE THEM IN THE WAY YOU HOLD YOUR BODY. IN THE WAY YOU SIGN YOUR NAME. YOU DON’T HEAR THEIR WHISPERS IN YOUR BLOOD.

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But here, a screenplay written while the phantom of the fatwa invades all aspects of his life, and soon after completing The Moor’s Last Sigh, another work about loss, here Mary’s passing fling with passion and love and her homesickness, is one way in which Rushdie’s own break with family and homeland is articulated. Rushdie’s interest in screenplays will continue, as will his understanding of cinematic motifs (such as those in John Huston’s memorable film The Misfits), culminating in the screenplay for Midnight’s Children, finally filmed in 2012. In this instance, unencumbered by a prior established text, Rushdie can roam freely and write a unified screenplay. It is not successful in every way but the artistic control and mastery of cinematic form is readily evident.

Theorizing the Unpublished Manuscript The foregoing account is for many readers their first encounter with key unpublished works of a writer who is now canonical. ‘The Book of the Peer’ marks Rushdie’s interest in demonic sacralization in Islam; ‘Crosstalk’, his interest in modernist existentialism; and ‘The Antagonist’ signifies the search for the right voice and genre for the Indian novel he has been struggling to write (in this respect it anticipates Midnight’s Children). It also provides him with the kinds of fabulist time-travelling machines that will make their way so much later into Fury (2001) and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015a). ‘Madame Rama’ takes us to Rushdie’s interest in cinema and specifically Bollywood cinema, which functions in this novel not so much as a source of idioms and ideological critique as a substrate for the plot itself. And ‘The Courter’, written in the period of a personal crisis under a perverse ‘gift of death’, recalls a moment from which things begin to go wrong for him. These early unpublished manuscripts, especially the novels, as read here are often overdetermined by generic fluidity, thematic capaciousness and a disingenuous style. Self-consciously designed to reflect personal recollections as well as the political disenchantments of the author’s two homelands – India and Pakistan – the novels-in-manuscript are meandering, largely decentred narratives. But although they are neither earlier drafts (as the Midnight’s Children manuscripts in the Archive are) nor works of great power and imaginative force, they are not to be read as pure ephemera of little consequence. They have value in their own right insofar as they are a crucible of materials (both aesthetic as well as ideological) which make their way into Rushdie’s mature works. The screenplay manuscripts – ‘Crosstalk’ and ‘The Courter’ – show Rushdie’s interest in the literary work as a ‘performed text’ or as a ‘text-in-performance’. The modalities are of a different order here. By the time he writes ‘The Courter’ Rushdie has mastered the craft of fiction and he can now build into his writing a consciousness of the malleability of this literary form, its capacity to function as the foundation for other genres, notably drama and cinema. Apart from their functional use value, the summary and analysis of these unpublished works take us to the larger problematic with which we began this

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chapter: What is the ‘mode of being’ of the unpublished work as an intentional object, and what is its critical–auratic status? These works exist in near-fair-copy typescript and require no palaeographical skills on the part of a scholar to edit them as copy-texts for purposes of a critical edition (if indeed the author’s permission to do so were available). In that respect their auratic value (often linked in textual criticism to published first editions to which the manuscript may be compared) is negligible. But as texts in potentia, texts which were written to be published or produced, they carry ideological meaning and are a valuable source for an understanding of the making of a writer. They do, as argued in this chapter, have an undertheorized standing in the sense that they belong to what may be called the genre of the unpublished text as fair copy, that is neither a first draft of the more accomplished later texts nor one that the writer, as later suggested, wished to publish. They therefore exist in a vague world as texts in potentia, an expression of will and volition, of the capacity to write which is the defining characteristic of being human. Rushdie himself has resisted the idea of reading archival material as steps towards an understanding of the more accomplished products, and certainly of a work like Midnight’s Children that exists now as novel, play and cinema. The evidence given and the readings offered here, however, clearly show a writer’s attempts to find the right voice, the right balance between fantasy and reality in the unpublished novels-in-manuscript and the struggle to master principles of adaptation and dramatic composition in ‘Crosstalk’ and ‘The Courter’. Reading and understanding manuscripts in an archive allows us to historicize Rushdie and to grasp his fascination with the two key genres of modernity: the novel and cinema. Archives have stories to tell and this chapter has told stories, stories unavailable to the general reader, of another genesis of secrecy.

Chapter 3 THE RIDDLE OF MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN: UNRAVELLING A TEXT

The Rushdie Emory Archive contains a large amount of material on Midnight’s Children, his seminal novel, about which in the introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition Rushdie wrote, ‘If it can pass the test of another generation or two, it may endure’ (Rushdie 2006: xvii). Clearly the novel had gone past the first generation and should it transcend the second, which is what it is in now, its status as a classic of world literature would be assured. The Archive is prescient on this prognosis as it carries many more drafts and associated marginalia on Midnight’s Children than on any other work by the author. Apart from notes in his journals, appointment books and notebooks which are, at this point in time, under an embargo and available only as redacted fragments, there are four boxes (15–18) with 32 folders of material related to the novel and nine boxes (52–60) with 116 folders related to radio, stage and film adaptations of the novel in the Archive. In the latter consignment of boxes, the novel may be found under a number of titles: ‘Midnight’s Children’, ‘The Riddle of Midnight’, and ‘Saleem’s Story’. References to his foundational novel are not limited to these. There are fragments of a screenplay (62/18–19), notes towards lectures and seminars on it (50/20, 61/28–29), fragments from it (175/5 and 19/15, and catalogued under ‘The Moor’s Last Sigh’) and promotional material (195/1). Years later in a CBS interview of 1 November 2004 (62/1) Rushdie referred to Midnight Children’s inspirational moment: ‘But, you know, substantially it came out in one go. I mean, in a – in a day’s work … ninety percent of what is in the published version – came out on that day.’ The great inspiration, as he confesses later, was Laurence Sterne: ‘And Sterne’s Tristram Shandy still has the gold medal in the literature of delay’ (Reynolds and Noakes: 20). Writers can get carried away with the romantic concept of the inspired moment that heralds also the arrival of the genius, but archives, should they exist, often tell a tale of considerable labour and work. We learn from the archive that Grimus, his first published novel, led to an advance of £700 which he used to travel to India to re-imbibe himself with memories of a place to which he had not returned for many years. To capture those memories and move back and forth from them, Rushdie turned to a character and a theme in his unpublished novel ‘The Antagonist’ that held great aesthetic possibilities. ‘Saleem Sinai’ was the name of the character whose haunting presence was such that he is given control of an entire novel, Midnight’s Children. But even

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after that he is not readily forgotten as he was originally designed as the friend of Saleem (only later Saladin) Chamcha in The Satanic Verses. For a long time, I thought Saleem was dead. Being susceptible to fanciful notions, I took literally his assertions of cracking up … I began to think up a new story, foolishly imagining it to be my own … I’ve realized that this is the very fellow, Saleem himself, stirring from his sleep, transported to England, with Padma, Aadam and all. This, then, is Episode Two of the Life and Opinions of Saleem Sinai; Snotnose rides again! The first chapter is entitled ‘The British Customs’. Here, Saleem, arriving to develop the export market for what was now called Brag’s Pickles, finds himself carted off to Harmondsworth where he meets the novel’s other major character, Saleem Chamcha, also called Sal, and also Ibrahim Segal. Spoken of are the women Ayesha Muhammad and her daughter Anna, also her boyfriend ‘Editor’ (a new name needed here). (45/6)

In The Satanic Verses, Saleem Sinai will soon be replaced by Gibreel Farishta, but we can go even further back, in fact to a time before these notes about Saleem as a likely companion to Saladin Chamcha were written, to read the seeming allure of Saleem Sinai after his pivotal role in ‘The Antagonist’ where the seeds of the essential drama of baby exchange had been sown.

‘SINAI’ Soon after ‘The Antagonist’, and ‘Madame Rama’, two of the three novels-inmanuscript discussed in the previous chapter, a novel called ‘SINAI’ becomes his grand passion. The composition of this novel would take some two and a half years (mid-1976 to the end of 1978) as we read in his notebook (212/2; 02–36 redacted). It will be nearly Christmas, 1978, before I finish Sinai. When I began, I was newly-wed and just 29. When I ended I had a house, a wife, a son, had lost my hair and was 31½.

Entries in his 1976 diary (14 August–27 August; 212/4; 04–29 to 04–35 redacted) show Rushdie’s use of his own personal memory as the basis for many of the ideas and episodes in the proposed novel. He writes about Sinai’s three phases – ‘Bombay/Rugby/London’; his childhood days as a member of the Bombay MetroCubs’ Club; and his interest in the concept of the ‘Vanishing Point’. On the latter he notes (04–29 redacted): Sinai discovers his ability to vanish. Gets him out of some difficult positions. First noticed when his parents quarrel & suddenly he realizes he is no longer ‘there’ for them, despite all his efforts to be ‘seen’. This vanishing becomes more frequent – in his vanished state he enters his sleepworld. Possible gate into the Black Hole once he finds a way to vanish on stage. A symbol, this, of the urge to dissipate self.

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He recalls his mother’s affectionate words for him (‘Piece of the moon’) and feels the ‘need to invent more images’ in the tradition of Günter Grass: ‘like Oskar’s screaming & smallness & drum, through which to enter history’. On another page (04–30 redacted) he notes that he can ‘never manage to “drop”’ Wee Willie Winkie’s ‘malevolent child (“Black Saleem”)’. He struggles to find a ‘straight’ story for the school period, his ‘brilliance at Cathedral School’, and then his unpopularity at Rugby. The narrative will capture memories of his childhood: Mary Pereira’s usage of ‘Omens’ (‘O men, it’s hot today’, ‘O me I’m tired’), the fact that his mother had him rather late in her life and so on (04–31 redacted). The ‘whole Mary Pereira baby swap story’ will be told by ‘Black Saleem’ which would later poison Sinai’s relations with Mary. ‘What Sinai possesses in vast measure – what gives the book its tone –’, Rushdie adds in another entry (04–32 redacted) ‘is a sense of over-weening self-importance, which, in the end, turns against itself, seeking to annihilate itself.’ Many of these entries (and these entries are made not long after ‘The Antagonist’, where the ‘Black Saleem’ character had been already written out in full) are reflections on a text he was trying to salvage and transform into a more coherent narrative called ‘SINAI’. The first attempt at composing the ‘SINAI’ novel survives as ‘Chapter One’ and as two loose sheets, each separately entitled ‘Chapter Two’ (17/6) and both with the page number given as 9. There are no dates but the composition is very likely to have taken place in 1976–7. The two chapters (‘Chapter One’ and the two loose sheets, titled ‘Chapter Two’) are quickly retyped as ‘The Holy Sheet’ (17/6) of fifteen pages (numbered pages 2 to 16). As relatively complete first runs, ‘Chapter One’ and ‘The Holy Sheet’ show the author’s struggle to get the location of the narrator’s point of view and the narratorial voice itself right. I turn to the two documents sequentially. ‘Chapter One’ begins with a Bob Dylan epigraph: ‘I pity the poor immigrant/ When his gladness comes to pass.’ The epigraph is of value inasmuch as it grounds the text in an enabling diasporic sensibility. The author, barely thirty, looks back at a period in his homeland free from anxiety and social disjunction. Alone with a monochrome TV in a room with pink walls he begins with a memorial recall: ‘We were two brown boys then. … He was Sonny and I was Sal.’ The voice is not quite right, the personal too persistent, the writing somewhat agitated, and so he would continue to revise and rewrite the ‘SINAI’ text. Much of the rest of the chapter is about the narrator Saleem’s life as a boarder in a ‘Black Hole’ (3) in Ebury Sreet, close to Victoria Station, London. The rundown boarding house, with immigrants as primary lodgers, is managed by one Mrs Edge, an unpleasant, racist woman, who, though not particularly good-looking, is nevertheless sexually voracious. The combination of these characteristics encourages Sal (who is named a few pages on) to ‘immortalize’ (4) her by taping and filming her sexual encounters through a ‘spyhole’ in the basement. He confesses that a reader would see him as a ‘self-glorifying voyeur’ (5) but then, as if to defend the usage, he says that a reader is a voyeur anyway. The narrator avoids a linear narrative by employing ‘cut-up techniques’ borrowed from William Burroughs, whom he thanks (7). Television keeps him company, and advertisements delight him. Most of the chapter is then cancelled, but two parts, one cancelled, another heavily circled may

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‘SINAI’ text, Chapter One, box 17, folder 6, Salman Rushdie Archive, Emory University.

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be noted. The cancelled section gives the characters already mentioned their full names: ‘My name is Saleem Sinai; I should have mentioned that before. Sonny is Sonny Ibrahim. We knew each other in Bombay in a place called Westfield Estate’ (7). The circled section is an early theorization of Rushdie’s own writing: Understand this, before I give you my topsy-turvy tale: I am not one of your fashionably alienated selves: but I am an alien. I am not a fantasist; but believing as I do in the supremacy of the real, I also know that reality is not a thing out there, outside the dulled-pink room, not an object to be found and grasped and hugged to the self until the two, the self and the real, merge gratefully into a new and more complete Existence. Reality is a tool we make, and we are all master craftsmen. (2)

As already noted, ‘Chapter One’ is followed by two loose sheets (numbered as page 9) both of which carry the title ‘Chapter Two’. In the first of these, the narrative is retrospective with a clear directive from the author: ‘(Begin. Construct a man.)’ The opening sentence is more direct: ‘In the early Spring of 1915’ is how the passage begins. A man, six foot two, with blue eyes carries a prayer mat. His name is Aadam Aziz and he kneels to pray, intoning the opening words of the Qur’ān: ‘In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful’. He is a recently returned Heidelberg-trained doctor who remembers one Ingrid as he sees old Hatim’s (Tai’s) boat slicing across the lake. A hoopoe is seen sitting on the grass. It seems after a break, for the style is different, Rushdie writes another ‘Chapter Two’ which, like the earlier version, exists only as a single loose sheet, and is also given as page 9 of the manuscript in 17/6. The narrative once again turns to Dr Aziz and begins with a description of the valley in Kashmir. The typed page is heavily edited by hand with a thick felt pen. The first few sentences with the author’s own corrections, shown here in square brackets, are given below: The world was new again. After a winter’s gestation in its eggshell of ice, the valley had poked [beaked] its way out into the open, yellow and moist [moist and yellow] as a hatching chick [these four words cancelled]. Greenness lurked happily in the ground [The new grass bided its time underground]; the mountains had [were] retreated [retreating] to their hill-stations for the warm season.

Dr Aziz then enters the scene, returning after five Kashmiri springs, remembering the words of the old boatman Tai who had said, ‘The ice is always waiting, under the winter’s skin’. In those days (‘It was the early spring of 1915’ given in brackets is cancelled) the ‘temple of Sankara Acharya, a little black blister … still dominated the streets and lake of Srinagar’. Memory and recall would frame the novel as suggested further down the page in Rushdie’s own edited hand: At the end, when he came to sacrifice himself at the shrine of the black stone god in the temple on the hill, he would try and recall his childhood springs in Paradise, the way it was before travel and tussocks and army tanks messed everything up.

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‘SINAI’ text, Chapter Two, box 17, folder 6, Salman Rushdie Archive, Emory University.

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The page ends with a description of Dr Aziz’s height (‘about six foot two’), his red beard and blue eyes. The document titled ‘Chapter One’ and the two loose pages (both numbered as page 9) are then combined into one chapter, this time titled ‘The Holy Sheet’ (17/6). The story begins, as before, in Mrs Edge’s boarding house which the narrator now refers to as ‘the Edge Hostelle’. The epigraph from Bob Dylan disappears and the opening sentence moves away from the memory of ‘two brown boys’ to a direct statement about the narrator himself: ‘I have become a voyeur’, which is used here not in its ‘peeping-tom’ meaning found in Midnight’s Children (1981: 129: ‘I became a voyeur’). He makes a defence of his voyeurism, for, apart from the sensual aspect of a voyeur’s point of view, a voyeur is also a reporter, a collector of images as well as a transformer of them. The text, as before, is retrospective, a matter of rememoration, but memory here is not simply a matter of recall (as Proust did with his ‘madeleines’ (3)) but one that would change memory, that would ‘twist and cut it up’, ‘to make the past in my own image’. In a black hole of a room with its holey blankets, he watches his monochrome television, his ‘necessary fiction’ (4) with which he (now that he declares his name, ‘My name is Sinai, Saleem Sinai, I should have mentioned that earlier’) will recall his friend Sonny Ibrahim. Having made this declaration we get an authorial entry that reads ‘(Begin, then. Construct a world)’, a variation on the earlier comment on the loose sheet (p. 9) about the necessity of constructing a man. With this directive, the narrator returns to his ‘lodging-house life’ (4) and writes about his voyeuristic explorations through the spy-hole, and refers once again to the ‘cut-up technique’ but this time adding Mary Shelley (‘Thank you, too, Baron Frankenstein’) to William Burroughs (8).1 As in the earlier draft (‘Chapter One’) Vera Ebury (better known as Ena, the name given her by her mother – ‘a name … matters a lot does a name’ we are told) becomes the voyeur Saleem’s subject as through a ‘spyhole in the wall of her basement bedroom’ he photographs her sex trysts and records the accompanying noises, especially her orgiastic whistle ‘which sets dogs barking’ (6) a conceit made good use of in the ‘humming bird’ sequence in Midnight’s Children. Saleem acknowledges that his actions verge on pornography but he turns this observation around and says that this is ‘precisely the opinion I hold, dear moralizing putative reader, of you’ (7). From his Black Hole of a room with thin walls, he hears the sounds of fellow lodgers, and especially the reggae music of his immediate neighbour, Isaac, whose relationship with his Rasta Lady he films and tapes. But the audiovisual information gathered is then recast, reconstructed, changed, to recreate new patterns, new narrative possibilities: ‘This is not voyeurism, but art’, he tells the reader (8). With the establishing scenes thus complete (the landlady, the room, the television, the Rastafarian neighbour), what is inserted is the section (‘Chapter Two’) which, as we have noted, survives in two forms. Before the story of Dr Aziz begins, we are given the following: I can’t begin with myself. To re-write history properly, I must go back beyond my own experience, and work on the things that made me what I no longer am today. I am beginning to understand the size of the job I’ve taken on. But no cowardice,

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‘SINAI’ text, ‘The Holy Sheet’, box 17, folder 6, Salman Rushdie Archive, Emory University.

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‘SINAI’ text, with Saleem Sinai introduced, box 17, folder 6, Salman Rushdie Archive, Emory University.

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Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy now. There is the light of the screen to write by, and time is no problem, having been abolished. No shirking! I take a deep breath. I bounce on the bed, on the spring board. (It twangs in annoyance.) I spread my arms. I dive. (9)

And so the magic begins, as Rushdie (through his narrator Saleem) locates a character in a Kashmiri setting soon after the spring thaw had set it. We are again in the single sheets referred to earlier as page 9 of ‘Chapter Two’. The edited version already quoted is given as the departure point: ‘The world was new again. After a winter’s gestation in its eggshell of ice, the valley beaked its way out into the open, moist and yellow’ (9). The narrative is finally on firmer ground; Midnight’s Children, the masterpiece, is beginning to emerge. In winter the valley had shrunk under the ice, and the mountains, snarling, had moved forward (9). The first substantive image is that of the old boatman Tai, named after the mythic traveller Hatim Tai, subject also of a number of Bollywood films and in a cancelled sentence (12) referred to as a ‘spirit of the valley, a watery Ariel. Or a Caliban’, making his way on his shikara, pushing his long yellow oar in the water. It is the early spring of 1915 and waiting at the lake’s edge is the young Heidelberg-trained doctor who had returned home after five years, two in Aligarh, three in Heidelberg, with memories of the German girl Ingrid still so green and raw. And in that moment of charged ‘kairos’ time, the time of fiction when the past is recalled and so much of the character’s life is spelt out, we get the outline of the doctor’s character and a description of him that would lay the groundwork for the novel to proceed. In the 1976 diary (212/4; 04–33 redacted) we get the note ‘“The Holy Sheet” – Babajan’s experience as doctor-to-purdah ladies becomes an analogue for his vision of the world – only it’s harder to get life to drop the sheet, truth being even more coy than a veiled woman’. Over the next seven pages the broad outline of what will become ‘The Perforated Sheet’, first chapter of Midnight’s Children, is established and we need to briefly go over its chief characteristics. It is a trial run so to speak and shows a quite intense struggle for the right narratorial voice and the right narrative structure. The thaw sets in, and Tai makes his way on the shikara. The Sankara Acharya temple, ‘a little black blister on a low brown hill’ (10) is described. An account of Dr Aadam Aziz watching Tai from the lake’s edge is given: Dr Aziz with his prayer mat and large nose, about which Oskar and Ingrid, as well as Tai had joked (‘There are dynasties waiting inside it, like mucus’). Dr Aziz realizes that Tai, whose indecipherable age is commented on, had come for him and he goes inside to get his ‘doctori bag’. Dr Aziz recalls Tai’s monologues during their meetings years before when Aziz was a boy (‘I saw Christ Isa come to Kashmir to die … a beard down to his balls and on his head, bald as an egg … but he knew his manners … calling me aap, none of your condescending tu’s’) and his stories about the Emperor Jehangir. Dr Aziz recalls Tai’s comments about his nose as he places the rolled-up prayer mat back on the shelf of his bedroom above copies of Vorwärts and Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? And so the narrative proceeds. Tai informs him that ‘Ghani the landowner’s daughter is sick’. As he takes him on board Tai comments on his bag, which he curses, and on his stethoscope, the ‘elephant’s trunk’ which, he assumes, is to be

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used instead of the doctor’s nose! In the landowner’s house, Dr Aziz notices that although blind Ghani likes the painting of ‘Diana as the Huntress’ which he had purchased from an ‘Englishman down on his luck’ (16). Ghani, who after repeating Christ’s dictate in Luke 4.23 ‘Physician, heal thyself ’ (16), explains his daughter is sick. When he enters the patient’s room he notices ‘two more women in black head-to-toe purdah stood erectly. Each holding a corner of an enormous sheet’ and Ghani adds ‘My lovely sick Naseem is behind that white sheet there’ (17). And the chapter ends with the memorable lines (varied, of course in later rewrites): ‘So how am I expected to examine her?’ ‘You will specify which portion of her body it is necessary to view. I will then instruct her to place the said portion against the hole you see there. In this fashion the thing may be done.’ ‘What is the matter with her?’ Aziz asked despairingly. ‘She has a terrible stomach-ache.’ ‘Then,’ Aziz said, stoically, ‘Would she show me her stomach, please.’ (17)

There is no direct evidence that the fragments examined above belonged to the novel entitled ‘SINAI’. But nor do these fragments carry the later title of ‘Midnight’s Children’. What may be conjectured with some certainty is that the ‘Holy Sheet’ chapter is from one of the many ‘SINAI’ holographs which were then rewritten or re-edited in the third person as ‘SINAI’, the first working title of ‘Midnight’s Children’. Two unnumbered pages of a notebook (one verso, the other recto) (212/2; 02–38 redacted) indicate that, by 26 April 1977, Rushdie had written chapter 5 of ‘SINAI’, which went on to thirty-five pages. The entry indicates that by 6 June 1978, sixteen chapters had been written. An outline of ‘SINAI’ with the ubiquitous snot dripping down (212/2) is given in a holograph (see image on the next page).

The First Draft ‘It will be nearly Christmas, 1978, before I finish Sinai’, Rushdie had added in his notebook. There is no manuscript in the Archive titled ‘SINAI’ completed, as the notebook says, by Christmas 1978. The first draft of Midnight’s Children in the Archive (of 552 typed pages, with page 350 missing) is dated 5 September 1978 (15/10; 16/1–4). It appears from notes written for a presentation dated 1 February 1983 and titled ‘The Project of Literature: A Reclamation of the Writer’s Intent’ (50/20) that there was an earlier draft of Midnight’s Children that does not exist in the Archive, and this draft, completed before the surviving first draft of Midnight’s Children of 5 September 1978, may well have been the ‘SINAI’ novel, completed quite possibly some six months before Christmas, 1978. On page 6 of the typed script of this essay, Rushdie writes: The first draft of Midnight’s Children was a complete failure precisely because it was written in a third-person, reasonably correct English. It felt wrong; the

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An outline of ‘SINAI’ text, box 212, folder 2, Salman Rushdie Archive, Emory University.

language held false notes, wrong resonances. It felt alien. Then I allowed my hero Saleem to narrate the book in his own voice. It was a voice that made an assault on the language, shifting its natural Anglo-Saxon rhythms, distorting its syntax and punctuation, attacking its metaphor – structures. The moment Saleem began to speak I felt that the book had begun to work.2

Although the first draft as it survives in the Archive (not to be confused with the ‘first draft’ mentioned in the passage quoted above and which, I suggest, was in fact ‘SINAI’) allowed the hero Saleem to ‘narrate the book in his own voice’, an examination of this draft of Midnight’s Children clearly shows its origins in the

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failed ‘SINAI’ novel (described as a ‘complete failure’ by Rushdie). The work, now rewritten in the first person, draws heavily on the ‘SINAI’ text. This is clear from the Prologue (‘Omnipotence’) and the first chapter (‘The Holy Sheet’) of the first draft where the headings follow those established in the holograph outline of the ‘SINAI’ project. If this stemma is accepted (the first draft as a rewrite of the ‘SINAI’ text), then from here on the genealogy of the texts in the archive is straightforward. The first draft (as it exists in the archive) is then revised by 10 June 1979 (17/2, typescript incomplete) with yet another revision completed on 27 November 1979 (16/5–8), followed by a copy-text dated 20 January 1980 (17/3–5), after Rushdie had received the publisher’s review dated 12 November 1979 (18/1). The last two, with minor changes made in the copy-text, are identical. My interest here is in the first draft (15/10; 16/1–4) since it establishes all the themes that went into his masterpiece. It also parts company from the Saleem– Shiva subplot of ‘The Antagonist’ discussed in the previous chapter as well as from the original plan of the ‘SINAI’ novel where, as seen in the surviving fragments, the narrative would have taken the form of recollections of the past from the constrained and miserable space of Vera Edge’s lodging house. But nostalgia and memory would continue to remain central. A lost sense of belonging is signalled in the dedication itself: ‘For my parents, Anis Ahmed and Negin Rushdie; For my three sisters, Sameen, Nevid and Nabila; and for Miss Mary Menezes who will never read it.’ Furthermore, indebtedness to others is noted in the Acknowledgements (16/4) given on the next page. Chapter One of the ‘SINAI’ text, the first page of which survives as a fragment retitled ‘Prologue: Bombay, circa 1952’ (17/6), is rewritten as ‘Prologue: Omnipotence’ with only some fourteen lines of the original kept in this version. The narrative goes straight into the family’s Bombay garden. Saleem (unnamed) is eleven and his sister, the Brass Monkey, ten. The family, along with the ayah (also unnamed) watch Sputnik II (launched, with the dog Laika, on 3 November 1957; it disintegrated upon re-entry on 14 April 1958) cross the sky.3 The ayah’s crooning of the memorable verse, now slightly modified, is recalled: What-all you want-to be, you kin be, You kin be jus’ what-all you wan’.

Wee Willie Winkie may come around to sing that evening, and with another reference to Sputnik, the one-page Prologue ends. The Prologue done, the draft turns to ‘The Holy Sheet’ chapter already written as part of the ‘SINAI’ narrative. As it enters the novel now called ‘Midnight’s Children’, ‘SINAI’ disappears completely from Rushdie’s thinking and ‘Midnight’s Children’ takes over. But except for some nine lines on the first page of the chapter (2) the entire chapter as present in the Archive is cancelled, including the opening sentence about which, later in his autobiography, Rushdie was to write, ‘The original opening sentence of Midnight’s Children had been “Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence”, and even though in the end he had buried it elsewhere in the text, thinking it too Tolstoyan an opening … the idea continued to nag him’ (Rushdie 2012: 69).

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Acknowledgments, ‘Midnight’s Children’ first draft. Box 16, folder 4, Salman Rushdie Archive, Emory University.

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Prologue: Omnipotence, ‘Midnight’s Children’ first draft, box 15, folder 10, Salman Rushdie Archive, Emory University.

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The Holy Sheet, ‘Midnight’s Children’ first draft, with the cancelled original opening sentence, box 16, folder 4, Salman Rushdie Archive, Emory University.

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As seen in the facsimile reproduction of the opening page of ‘The Holy Sheet’, in this version Rushdie dispenses with the lodging-house preamble of the ‘SINAI’ version. Instead it is the ‘large white bed-sheet with a roughly circular hole of some seven inches in diameter cut into the centre’ that guides his narrative and functions as the unplummable nodal point of the composition. Although the chapter and the rest of the first draft is thoroughly revised (17/2), the new moves made by Rushdie in this chapter (‘The Holy Sheet’) require some analysis. As seen in the reproduced page, Saleem’s birth ‘on the stroke of midnight, August 15th, 1947’ signals an intimate link between personal biography and national history. In his ninth year (the year of the Sputnik, 1957) Saleem finds the ‘holy sheet’ in his grandfather’s bedroom where it lay in a beat-up leather bag along with a stethoscope and a ‘stick of Vick’s Inhaler’ (3). He uses it to play the part of a ghost during the family’s stay in Dr Aziz’s Aligarh home. The performance angers both Dr Aziz and the Reverend Mother, but his grandfather leaves the sheet as well as the leather bag and the stethoscope to Saleem in his will, an act of generosity which Saleem attributes to the fact that he alone had his grandfather’s sensationally large nose. Dr Aziz’s nose had been commented on by the boatman Tai and the description may be used here to show an instance of how Rushdie revised the description in the final version. In the first draft manuscript version we read: ‘A nose like yours, little idiot, is a great gift. Just trust it, that’s all. When it warns you, take care. Follow your nose and you’ll get somewhere. Ignore it and you’ll be lost. An officer I knew in the army of Alexander …’ (Aziz settled back on the hay) ‘… one Brachycephalus, had such a big pink vegetable as your hanging between his eyes. But when the victorious army was halted at Gandhara, he fell in love with a local girl and forgot about his itching nasal passages. As a result he never saw his native Macedonia again. When the armies left he stayed behind in his wretched Taxila and turned into a strange thing, not Greek, not Gandharan, a half-way being with a nagging wife and nose, and in the end he fell on his sword.’ (9)

And here is the final, published version: ‘A nose like that, little idiot, is a great gift. I say: trust it. When it warns you, look out or you’ll be finished. Follow your nose and you’ll go far.’ He cleared his throat; his eyes rolled away into the mountains of the past. Aziz settled back on the straw. ‘I knew one officer once – in the army of that Iskander the Great. Never mind his name. He had a vegetable just like yours hanging between his eyes. When the army halted near Gandhara, he fell in love with some local floozy. At once his nose itched like crazy. He scratched it, but that was useless. He inhaled vapours from crushed boiled eucalyptus leaves. Still no good, baba! The itching sent him wild; but the damned fool dug in his heels and stayed with his little witch when the army went home. He became – what? – a stupid thing, neither this nor that, a half-and-halfer with a nagging wife and an itch in the nose, and in the end he pushed his sword into his stomach. What do you think of that?’ (MC 19)

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The geographical details are removed, the officer’s name disappears, Alexander is replaced by the vernacular Iskander and the language made less formal, a lot more conversational, idiomatic and playful. The nose and the itch become more pronounced and anticipate the narrative crux in the form of Tai’s message: ‘“Ghani the landowner’s daughter is sick.”’ The shift to Spring 1915 and to the Vale of Kashmir where the recently returned Heidelberg-trained Dr Aziz awaits the arrival of Tai in his shikara with a message from the landowner Ghani follows closely the narrative of the ‘SINAI’ outline already given (17/6 ‘The Holy Sheet’). The account, covering eleven pages (4–14), is a little more extended with a number of interpolations like Dr Aziz’s father’s stroke and his mother’s entry into the gemstone business added. Other references such as Tai’s resentment towards the doctor’s leather bag, his misreading of a doctor’s stethoscope, Dr Aziz’s nostalgic memory of Oskar Lubin, Elsa and Ingrid and the makeshift curtain with the hole (the ‘holy sheet’) behind which stood Ghani’s daughter Naseem are better integrated. When told that Ghani’s daughter ‘has a terrible, a really too dreadful stomach-ache’ (14), Dr Aziz’s reply is given the same form as in the ‘SINAI’ original, varied, however, a little, to ‘“Then,” Aziz said, with restraint, “Will she show me her stomach please”’. This, now defining, sentence surfaces in the published version with minor changes as the last sentence of the opening chapter now retitled ‘The Perforated Sheet’. ‘In that case,’ Doctor Aziz said with some restraint, ‘will she show me her stomach, please.’ (MC 24)

The sheet, we are told, will begin to ‘obsess the large, lonely Doctor’ (15) and Dr Aziz will make regular visits to Ghani’s house to treat the daughter for minor ailments (twisted ankle, ingrowing toenail and the like). (This section will make its way into the Mercurochrome chapter of the published work (MC 25–31).) At this point the first draft has an extended section about Elsa turning up to tell Aziz that Oskar, an old Heidelberg friend, had died. The one paragraph final cut of the published novel (MC 29–30) gets some five pages (18–24) beginning with Elsa (Ilse) sipping lassi and not ‘fresh lime water’. In the longer first draft manuscript version there is a dinner conversation with Aziz (pronounced by Elsa as ‘As Is’) in which Aziz tells Elsa about the boatman Tai who had stopped washing and about his own love of a ‘lady I’m not allowed to see’ except ‘through a hole in a sheet’ and ‘her bottom blushes’ (19). Elsa thinks this is crazy and suggests he see Freud who will rewrite the ‘Psychology of Everyday Life’ after hearing him. Upon Elsa’s suggestion they go to bed and Aziz declares that she’s the first after Ingrid (20) but then Ingrid was so very passive, she ‘never moved in bed’ (22). They discuss Marx and Freud, and Russian politics and socialism and history. We get to know that Elsa married the pacifist Oskar but Aziz didn’t marry Ingrid because he said he would have ‘if [he] could’, a circular way of speaking that Aziz says is a mark of the slanted, repressed nature of Oriental talk, with its lack of directness: ‘Nobody here says what they mean’ (21). Freud is again invoked: ‘Give a repressed idea a name and it becomes potent’ (21).4 He asks Elsa why she came to Kashmir, and indeed

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why does anyone, to which she retorts, ‘To love life, to end it, or both. Jesus Christ, Emperor Jehangir, Elsa Lubin’ (22). Soon after her bloated body is discovered by ‘blank-faced boatmen’. And she had left a note. ‘It said: I didn’t mean it’ (22). After the final paragraph (22; MC 31) dealing with Tai’s illness and Dr Aziz’s wedding and departure for Aligarh (Agra in MC 31), the next six pages (24–29) carry a handwritten title ‘Mercurochrome’ in the top left margin with ‘Padmainspired “Ode to Dung”’ immediately beneath it. There is no first reader/listener in the first draft; Padma, noted in hand, will become central to his narrative only in the next version. This section (‘Mercurochrome’) begins with the memorable account of the city of Amritsar smelling of dung. On the sixth of April, 1919, the city of Amritsar smelled of dung. How this must have offended my grandfather’s sensitive nose! Not that he was unused to the odour: in Kashmir the peasants dried dung in cakes in the sun and then used it as a kind of plaster, to hold together their walls. Even in Srinagar hawkers with barrows of round dung-cakes like thick chapatis were not an uncommon sight. But in Kashmir the stuff was dried and muted, and useful. Amritsar dung was fresh and redundant. (24)

Compare with the published version: On April 6th, 1919, the holy city of Amritsar smelled (gloriously, Padma, celestially!) of excrement. And perhaps the (beauteous!) reek did not offend the Nose on my grandfather’s face – after all, Kashmiri peasants used it, as described above, for a kind of plaster. Even in Srinagar, hawkers with barrows of round dung-cakes were not an uncommon sight. But then the stuff was drying, muted, useful. Amritsar dung was fresh and (worse) redundant. (MC 33)

Apart from incorporating the first reader Padma (in the manuscript she exists only as a holograph afterthought), the passages given above are symptomatic of the stylistic changes that take place between the first draft and the final product. Of the two passages quoted above, the second is a lot tighter and the modalities (given in brackets) are suggestive of the stronger ironic tones that mark out the final version. But there are two moments in the first draft – the reference to ‘chapatis’ and the use of ‘dried’ (against ‘drying’) – that draw our attention. The first is a creative metaphor now lost in the revision; the second is improved upon as ‘drying’ suggests not-asyet dry state of dung with echoes too of ‘dying’. Except for two important changes, one on a matter of narrative technique, the second on a key theme, the first draft largely captures the spirit and language of the published version including the well-known ‘discovery’ of the great Rushdie conceit, ‘the Indirect Kiss’: and then Hanif revealed his idea, which would revolutionize the Indian cinema and give him three supercolossal hit films. … Watch me and Pia, he said, Imagine this is a movie scene; and he went to the fruit-bowl sitting by Amina Sinai and

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picked up an apple, which he kissed, lusciously deeply kissing it to the core, until my mother went vermilion, and then he put the apple down and Pia picked it up and kissed it violently, nibbled its redness, crushed it into her mouth. … You are truly a genius, he [Homi Catrack] said, and so it was that … Amina Sinai … was present at the birth of Indian cinema’s most electrifying innovation, the Indirect Kiss. And now Homi Catrack … was kissing apples, bananas, melons, Aag brand matchises, anything, This is big, he was saying, This will be huge. (122)

We have already referred to this passage with reference to ‘Madame Rama’ and have noted the final published version of the same description. But here, to reprise our earlier point, the struggle for the right tone is evident, and the use of the vernacular version of matches (‘matchises’) symptomatic of the need for a distinctive and creative lexicon in the correct places. I now turn to the second of two key aspects of the first draft which are changed in the published version. In Pakistan the whore Tai Bibi tells Saleem that he is in love with his sister the Brass Monkey (402), the name also given to Rushdie’s real-life sister Sameen, who is now Jamila Singer, the siren of Pakistan. In the published version Saleem’s love for the Brass Monkey is a lot more muted; here it is like a confessional. Mutasim the Handsome5 is in love with Jamila who, at this point in the narrative, has been invited to sing at a wedding reception. Over four pages (409–12) the narrative changes from the first to the third person and in the margins we get very brief notes: ‘night:-Jamila: - Mutasim Saleem’ (409), ‘night love (2)’ (410) and ‘incest’ (411). The voice of his sister ‘had penetrated him and showed him that Tai Bibi had been right’. ‘In the fragrance of Jamila’s songs’ he had discerned ‘the perfume of unspoken illicit love’ and affected by it Saleem enters the women’s quarters (410). He stands in Jamila’s room and observes the ‘huge mosquito-net caught by a stream of colourless light from the maddening midnight moon’. At that very moment he notices Mutasim the Handsome making his way in through the window. Both understand why they are in Jamila’s room and after a brief altercation in which Mutasim the Handsome threatens to expose him to his mother Amina, Saleem lets Mutasim the Handsome climb down. What follows is a rather long passage that needs to be quoted as extensively as possible. This left me alone with my sister and my secret … Saleem approaching sisterbed. Net parting at his touch. Unblemished beautiful sisterface staring at him anxiously, full of innocence. And then Saleem … tells his sister everything … [revealing] the difference between sacred and profane. Jamila clasps mouth with hand … as Big Brother tells of Tai Bibi’s final insight. O No No, sings Jamilavoice. But there’s a smell in it which gives the lie to the words … then it’s her turn to cry, and she’s putting into words what sixteen years have not heard, could not have heard, and in both their hands a six-letter word is forming, which contains two vowels, an I and an E, and four syllables, an N, a C, an S and a T; but they will not arrange it in its proper sequence, the letters hang jumbled up over their heads, because now history plays another of its little pranks, and all of a sudden they are obliged to repeat the behaviour which Saleem once observed at a back

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table of the Pioneer Café, of which Jamila has no knowledge, but she plays her part well nonetheless: their hands are moving now, closer and closer … (411)

And so here again, in a repeat of the Pioneer Café scene (250–2; MC 211–13), hands will move but they will not touch, they will perform a slow ‘dance of longing’ without a caress, and there will be the sense of illicit love (‘O god so dirty’) with thoughts of Mutasim the Handsome, her lover. There will be memories of Bombay days and especially of Sonny Ibrahim (he whose head was ‘forcep-dented’) who had declared his baby love. In Sonny’s place is someone else with a ‘bignose birthmarked face’ and guiltily they weep as their hands continue to do ‘their hand-off dance’. The silence is broken, the guests are awake and he escapes down the drainpipe. The voice shifts to the first person and Saleem blames the winds from the opium fields, or the moon, or even just the midnight for the declaration. And yet, later, as Saleem continues to be a student of history at Aunt Alia’s college, he declares that he was ‘determined to marry Jamila’ (422). He gathers enough courage to tell his parents. I did not know if they would ever understand, but I never found out, because Jamila, somehow divining what was in my mind, came running into the room, begging me to say nothing … [she] begged for silence. I gave in … and then I reminded her of what we had all forgotten. ‘For God’s sake,’ I said, ‘There’s nothing bad in this. You’re not my sister, after all!’ It was my trump card; but it didn’t work. … Our belief in our incestuous crime overpowered our knowledge of the facts. We felt like brother and sister, and that was what mattered. (422–3)

Later when he is brought back from Dacca to the Delhi Magicians’ Quarter by Kodak Singh and Parvati the witch, Saleem would always see Jamila’s face in Parvati’s, and could not get around to having sex with her. It always ‘seemed to him that there was another face superimposed on hers, the face of his forgotten sister, Jamila; and he found that his unconsummated and impossible love for her had grown mouldy inside him’ (493). He had to avoid the crime of ‘substitute-incest’ and therefore they must remain as brother and sister. The last chapter of the novel in its first draft is called ‘Scheherazade’, a title that captures Rushdie’s self-proclaimed role as a teller of tales. But who in fact tells the story? ‘Syntax only permits me the use of three persons,’ is the opening sentence of the chapter with the interesting parenthesis ‘like life’ following ‘Syntax’ deleted. Ridding himself of the third person ‘he’ and the second person ‘you’, Saleem turns to an existential ‘I’ (‘here am I, freed at last’ (532) he writes). Yet the incarceration of the body during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency with its forced vasectomies had turned even the existential ‘I’ into a mirage. With the Most Charming Man in the World, Kodak Singh, Saleem and his son Aadam return to Bombay. The chapter has notes in the margins and as elsewhere sections are cancelled. In the marginalia Kodak Singh’s name is changed to Picture Singh and anticipating what would become the changed title of the final chapter Rushdie notes, ‘Aadam’s first and

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only word: Abracadabra’ (535). Back in Bombay, the city has changed; Kemp’s Corner has disappeared; Uncle Hanif ’s home has been replaced by the OberoiSheraton and the grandiose Taj Hotel now has an unsightly addition. Kodak Singh will challenge the Maharaja of Cooch Naheen to a serpent-charming competition which the latter will lose and in dismay flee from the room and shoot himself in a taxi (544). And then after the challenge Saleem tastes a chutney, a ‘green chutney … green as grasshoppers’ (544) and rushes to find the master chef of ‘Perry’s Pickles’ so that he too could attempt ‘the encyclopaedic pickling of my history, the complete and utter chutnification of Time!’ (544–5). And the moment is right too for it is ‘August the fourteenth now’ and people are ‘preparing to celebrate the thirty-first anniversary of the myth of independence’ (545). It is at this point that Saleem addresses his first reader, not Padma, but Valmika: ‘The cracks are getting worse. I must get to the end. Valmika: wait on: don’t think I’m not going to manage to invent you, too.’ And then as he goes looking for ‘PERRY’S PICKLES (PRIVATE) LTD’, he tells Valmika to do some fossicking herself and find the factory: ‘(Find it yourself: I’m not going to do all your work, Valmika – do a little digging!)’ (545). Now that he has found the owner of Perry’s Pickles, his erstwhile ayah, the woman at the heart of the novel’s primary plot (Peri after Pereira of Mary Pereira), Saleem begins to ‘pickle’ his history which he sends to Valmika, daughter of the great photographer Kalidasa Gupta who had photographed the baby Saleem all those years back, and like her father she too is named after a great poet (albeit in the female gender). She is also a journalist of note as the author of the ‘syndicated gossip column, Scheherazade’s 1001 Indian Nights’ (548). Although words are poor substitutes for pickles, words are all he has and Saleem therefore begins to write to this Valmika who, however, never gets to know who he is. She uses information about his personal knowledge of the subcontinent which she then embeds in her own newspaper column. Sinai claims that he suspects Valmika has fallen in love with him because Valmika clearly understands that Saleem and not she is the real Scheherazade. Although memories remain and sustain him, it is time to say goodbye to Valmika because his body is cracking up; syntax alone cannot hold the personal pronouns together. Shiva, his double, is dead, shot by Roshanara Shetty who, like many others, had been made pregnant by Shiva and then rejected. In one sense this too becomes a twice-told tale. The final paragraph of the novel narrates his departure, for when Valmika comes to find him she will only find ‘Mary, and a woman in a nun’s habit who [would have] got here just too late … you three who have loved me, Mary Valmika Monkey’ (552).6 His son, Aadam, is yet to utter a word, but Saleem will leave behind for all three a jar of pickle which would capture in its ‘precise sequence of odours and tastes’ his history. ‘With your first taste of it’, he writes to Valmika, ‘you will be standing beside the Dal Lake looking for the ice beneath the water’s skin, and as you eat your way down the jar you will smell and taste love, death, war, magic, devilment, allegory …’ (552). And when you have reached the bottom of the jar, in an Eliotesque echo you would have ‘ended up where you began, because I shall leave you here, on this spot, exactly and precisely here’. And so the first draft ends.

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Ending of ‘Midnight’s Children’ [p. 552] first draft, box 16, folder 4, Salman Rushdie Archive, Emory University.

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Ending of ‘Midnight’s Children’ [p. 553] first draft, box 16, folder 4, Salman Rushdie Archive, Emory University.

The Second Draft On 10 June 1979, Rushdie finishes a revision (the second draft) of the first draft and as we read in the 2006 Introduction (xiii–xiv) of Midnight’s Children (published also in Outlook Magazine, 8 May 2006, under the title ‘His Own Mt Sinai’) he sent the manuscript to his friend and editor Liz Calder. As already noted the Archive carries the third revision, which is dated 27 November 1979 (16/5–8, p. 499), but the second revised draft does not exist in its entirety. The third revised text, except for minor typographical and factual changes here and there, is identical with the copy-text (dated 8 January 1980 with the note ‘MS agreed with Liz [Calder]’) which is again revised (MS dated 20 January 1980) (17/3–5) with the same number of MS pages (499) as the third revised text and which formed the text of the final published version (1981). So what was the MS that Rushdie sent to Liz Calder? This is the text of 10 June 1979 (the second draft, also dated in hand as ‘2nd draft: June 5th, 1979’ on the final page of the first draft – see copy above) but which only exists as an incomplete, undated draft in the Archive (17/2). (The second draft is also mentioned in the 27 November 1979 third revision (16/8, p. 499).) We know this because a reader’s report (titled ‘Salman Rushdie, MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN 200,000 words approx’) of this second draft exists in the Archive (18/1). It is dated ‘CC 12/11/79’ and more or less forms the basis of the quick revisions that Rushdie

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makes by 27 November 1979. ‘CC’ is a giveaway as the initials stand for the other ‘eminent publishing figure, the editor Catherine Carver’ mentioned in Rushdie’s 2006 Introduction (xiii). It is a brief report but extremely informative. ‘Rushdie’s huge Rabelaisian whatsitsname (as Saleem’s grandmother would say of a book – almost as long as Finnegans Wake and forty times, I’m afraid, as readable – is so enjoyable at every level’, Carver begins (18/1). The enthusiasm continues and is tempered only by criticism of the book’s ‘inordinate and finally almost intolerable length’, Saleem’s amnesiac adventures in the Pakistan army as human ‘sniffers’ in the first forty pages of Book Three, and the excessively mediated nature of the narration. Carver suggests that while Padma is crucial to the structure, the gossip columnist Valmika Gupta to whom the composition is sent (and with ‘constant interjections to and about her’) should be dispensed with. In this context the ‘Scheherazade caper’ (which now replaces the Prologue of the first draft) is unnecessary and the narrator should simply ‘plunge’ into the narrative proper. She adds that the incest motif which comes into play when the Brass Monkey becomes the siren of Pakistan as Jamila Singer does not work too well and should be rethought. The reference to the ‘Scheherazade caper’ by ‘CC’ indicates that the revised version (dated 10 June 1979 or 5 June 1979 or 19 June 1979, as Rushdie enters varying dates in hand) was the second draft of which Book One is in the Archive (17/2). This draft has an additional short first chapter of mere four pages (‘Scheherazade’) in Book One which in the third (and near-final copy) is reduced and incorporated into ‘The Perforated Sheet’. The chapter begins (see facsimile reproduction) with the classic opening paragraph of Midnight’s Children and then quickly moves to an account of the addressee Valmika where we also find ‘the god Ganesh as the Valmiki amanuensis howler’: ‘the author of the Ramayana, Valmiki, who dictated his masterpiece to the elephant-headed god Ganesh’ (2) (Mishra 2018: 25–7). The one-line paragraph (‘Please believe that I am falling apart’) at the end of page 2, and the next paragraph beginning ‘I am not speaking metaphorically …’, with the addition of a phrase and a sentence (‘before I forget. (We are a nation of forgetters.)’), will appear as the opening paragraph of Chapter Three ‘Hit-the-Spittoon’ of the published version. Except for the final paragraph, the last four paragraphs of the Scheherazade Prologue, with minor changes, will make their way into the first chapter of the book (‘The Perforated Sheet’) as paragraphs 2–4. The ‘Scheherazade’ version (with some ellipses) is given below: Time is short. Unlike the first Scheherazade, I have no hopes of saving my life. Nor can I count on having a thousand nights and a night. I must work faster than the spreading fissures if I’m to finish. But like her (like you) my future depends on my ability to weave webs and make you remember, so that I shall end up meaning – yes, meaning – something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity. So that whereas, for you, horror is the possibility of an empty tomorrow …

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I will soon be thirty-one years old. Perhaps. If the fissures permit. But in the meantime, guided only by my memory-image of a large white bedsheet with a roughly circular hole some seven inches in diameter out into the centre. … I commence the business of remaking my life … (The sheet, incidentally, is stained too: with three drops of old faded blood. As the Quran tells us … )(4)

The rest of the Scheherazade chapter is an address to Valmika Gupta. What shape does the addressee take and why would the reviewer have suggested dispensing with this mediated addressee? The narrator declares that he and Valmika are very much alike: ‘I suddenly saw how we are alike, you and I’ (2). And the familiarity is due to their capacity to swallow lives; he is the source of her journalism, he is the embodiment of Indian history. This Indian history, though, is ‘affected’ through the narrator’s body into which this history has been squeezed, like pickle in a jar. He needs ‘someone (you)’ who would listen as he has so ‘many stories to tell’, stories not only about himself but about ‘the children’, the latter reference anticipating the larger theme of ‘midnight’s children’. But there is also a difference; this is Saleem Sinai’s India, not Valmika’s who is really a gossip columnist for the Times of India regurgitating secrets ‘to feed a nation of reader-chicks, greedy for revelations’ (3). She is a Scheherazade whom the nation’s rich and famous fear, but Saleem is one better. He ‘shall be Scheherazade’s Scheherazade’ and Valmika his ‘Prince Shahryar’, to whom he will narrate: Such stories, Valmika! Of the slum that moved, of the famous swimmer… of the ghostly armies in the Rann, and of the holey, that is to say perforated, sheet of my grandfather Aadam Aziz … I grant freely – you don’t know me from Aadam … we are total strangers, you and I. But when I’ve finished, when I have re-invented my entire life for your benefit … Then, see if you feel like calling me crank. (3–4)

He knows that Valmika is frightened because one day she will have no stories to tell and here Saleem alone can sustain her. So far, the nation has been Valmika’s Prince Shahryar (to whom the original Scheherazade told her nightly stories), but with no stories to tell it will now be Saleem’s ‘necessary ear’(3). The incest and Valmika passages were in the manuscript that Catherine Carver read. Her criticisms were valid as they pointed to where Rushdie himself was heading since Scheherazade (as Valmika) must now become Saleem himself. But in this version it is not life that Saleem seeks, as Scheherazade as well as Valmika did by telling never-ending stories. His aim is not to live with a thousand and one tales but to leave behind memorable stories so that he himself, his life, will have some meaning. To tell a story is to find meaning; it is to transform aesthetics into ideology so that art becomes a triumphant gesture on its own, not a means towards something else, like Scheherazade and Valmika’s mediated tales. And so Valmika has to be removed and Padma, who in this ‘second draft’ is a sultry figure no more than a foil, has to be made into the principal addressee and not just an unnecessary

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Fragment of Table of Contents, ‘Midnight’s Children’ second draft, box 17, folder 2, Salman Rushdie Archive, Emory University.

structural plinth. Valmika goes in spite of Rushdie’s other declared aim: that as the female counterpart of Valmiki, her name locates Rushdie’s novel in one of India’s foundational epics. Rushdie accepts Carver’s advice – and it is good advice – because in an age where the unities that governed life and art were fractured, the epic makes way for the novel, the latter, as Georg Lukács (1971) observed, can now function only as a ‘degraded epic’ where irony is the dominant mode.

The Unending Text: The Text-in-Performance Midnight’s Children, published in 1981, was a triumph both artistically and personally. Almost overnight it became a source text for theorizing postcolonial or post-orientalist representation. It was an ‘urgent’ text, immediate, radical and relevant; and because of these qualities, Rushdie himself kept the text ‘alive’ through its continued citation and ‘transformation’. The first significant moment for this transformation, a kind of ‘re-living’ of the text, happened with the fortieth anniversary of Indian independence in 1987, a year that also marked the author’s own fortieth birthday. The ‘moment’ took the form

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First chapter of ‘Midnight’s Children’ second draft, box 17, folder 2, Salman Rushdie Archive, Emory University.

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First chapter of ‘Midnight’s Children’ second draft, box 17, folder 2, Salman Rushdie Archive, Emory University.

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of a ninety-minute documentary, ‘The Riddle of Midnight: India, August 1987’, telecast on Channel 4, UK, on Sunday, 27 March 1988, at 8.45 pm (174/1). (The first title was ‘In Search of Midnight’s Children’ (49/22)). In a typescript (49/22; March 1987, 5 pp.) we read Rushdie’s concession that ‘everybody constructs his or her own notion of India, his or her own version’ but ‘this is to be a personal film, a film in which I seek to measure myself ’ (2). Rushdie’s personal account continues: I was born in the city of Bombay … once upon a time, the narrator of the novel begins his tale; and so was I. 19th June, 1947, in Dr Shirodkar’s clinic (strangely the daughter of this legendary and now dead gynaecologist now owns the house in which I grew up). Our house was called Windsor Villa, one of an eccentric quartet, all named after British palaces: Sandringham Villa, Glamis Villa, Bal Moral. They still stand, although skyscrapers tower behind them now. … My education in the Cathedral School … a background that was Kashmiri, Muslim, and well-to-do … in everyway, that is to say, untypical of a country in which the majority is Hindu, and poor; and there are only 5 million Kashmiris … I was a city boy in a largely rural country; I was educated in English, unlike most of my fellow-Indians … (2). [My family] background was not excessively religious [imbued as we were with the Nehruvian] ideology of multiplicity (3).

He is home again in this TV retrospective except that it isn’t quite home anymore: ‘The old house doesn’t even look like the old house anymore,’ he says. The work is a reverential documentary although with Hindu–Muslim antagonism arising because of the struggle over ownership of the Babri Masjid, Rushdie’s commentary notes the decline of Indian secularism. For this documentary Rushdie had made a number of suggestions for montage shots. For shot 10 he suggests a ‘Clip from “Shree 420” Raj Kapoor arriving in Bombay singing, Chaplinesque, a hopeful tramp. Cut to: At the Bustee, the slum dwelling constructed of old crates, corrugated iron, etc.’ (6). He also says the film should start with shots of the locations of his childhood with the actual ‘moment of the [country’s] fortieth anniversary – the midnight of 14/15 August 1987 – … placed near the end of the film’ (4). The making of the documentary coincides with Rushdie’s desire to transform Midnight’s Children into film, a genre for which he has had an abiding passion. The history of the making of the film version, finally made by Deepa Mehta in 2012, and before that the novel’s stage version, shows how the entry of a literary text into a different semiotic system (here film and drama) is never a matter of a seamless transformation. In 1995–6 a number of draft screenplays for a fivepart BBC production of Midnight’s Children were written. By 27 February 1995 Ken Taylor had written drafts of a screenplay of Midnight’s Children (52/11–15) subsequently co-written with the help of Rushdie himself (53/1–6, 9, 13). However, Ken Taylor who genuinely believed that his drafts were near shooting scripts had disagreements with Richard Spence, the director of the television series version, and with Salman Rushdie himself. In the end Rushdie took over the writing of the screenplay with the Pakistan sections reduced and Shiva’s parentage made known to Shiva in the end. In all of the revisions undertaken by Rushdie (55/9, 55/10,

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55/14–15, 56/1, 56/3) the screenplay begins with Lifafa Das’s peepshow. In the end Rushdie’s script was for a five-episode series made up of a ‘feature length opener followed by four fifty-minute episodes’ which at 290 minutes all up was a full hour less than Ken Taylor’s seven-episode screenplay. He also made suggestions of possible actors for the teleseries, notably Rahul Bose as Saleem and Roshan Seth as Ahmed Sinai. Filming was planned to start in Colombo in January 1998 but at the last minute the Sri Lankan government, under pressure from its Muslim Parliamentarians and quite possibly from Iran itself, withdrew its permission, an act that replicated India’s decision to deny filming in Mumbai under similar pressure the year before. It was a terrible blow to someone who had written a novel about India with so much love and commitment and who for years had been forced to live a life of seclusion. The end of a film or a teleseries for Midnight’s Children had a predictable outcome – Rushdie turned to the stage. There was first, it seems, a radio play: ‘The Riddle of Midnight Final Script by Salman Rushdie TS January 1988: Play with monologues, voice over for India’s 40th birthday’ (59/1). There is no direct link between the radio play and the first typescript of the play version of Midnight’s Children edited in March 2002 (56/14) and authored by Salman Rushdie together with Simon Reade and Tim Supple. The play is revised further in May 2002 (56/15–16; 57/1–5). At this stage the play is in three parts: Part I (51 pp.), Part II (47 pp.), Part III (37 pp.). There are yet other changes made in July 2002 (57/5) and in November (57/7), the latter typescript titled ‘rehearsal draft’ has in Rushdie’s own handwriting ‘Salman’s copy’, in which the three-part play is reduced to a twopart play. The typescript was published by the Modern Library in 2003 with an explanatory note: Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children was first published in 1981. His fiveepisode, 290-minute television dramatisation was published in 1999 – after the BBC production was abandoned. This is the first time Midnight’s Children has been adapted for the theatre. It draws upon the television version as well as the novel. (2003: iv)

The play was premièred at the Barbican Theatre on Saturday, 18 January, and had a short run of five weeks (to 23 February 2003). The Sunday before (12 January), a performance was held for the press (the ‘Press Night’) for which Salman Rushdie requested, on 8 January, 16 tickets or failing that ‘at least 10 or 12’ and was willing to pay for them (‘Obviously I am not expecting them to be comps …’). On Friday, 10 January, Neil Constable from the Royal Shakespeare Company sent him the following email: Dear Salman I look forward to seeing everyone at the Barbican on Sunday (12 January). I will put you down for 16 tickets for the Press Night – at the moment it should be OK within my allocation. Contractually, I can offer you 4 comps and the rest at the

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RSC standby rate of ₤12. We have four tickets allocated for you for the post show party at the Bombay Brasserie. (58/1)

The first public performance was on Saturday, 18 January 2003. A few days later (Tuesday, 21 January, and Thursday, 23 January), the director Tim Supple asked if the Pickle Factory and the naming of Shiva could be clarified. Changes were also suggested to Part Two. After its season at the Barbican in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company the play was presented at the Power Center, Ann Arbor, by the University Musical Society and the University of Michigan on 12–16 March 2003 (195/14). It was subsequently presented at the Apollo Theatre, New York, by Columbia University on 21–30 March 2003 (184/5). The reviews of the play ranged from ‘respectfully disappointed’ and ‘dismissive’ to a work that was ‘unable to save Rushdie’s epic’. Of the Barbican performance, the Evening Standard (30 January 2003) in a melancholic tone declared that there was ‘too little magic in Rushdie’s realism’. One gets a better insight into the performance by looking at the BBC discussion of the play on Thursday, 6 February 2003. The discussants Germaine Greer, Bill Bufford and Paul Morley were led by the BBC’s interviewer Mark Lawson. Greer, who is asked first to respond to Lawson’s question if the play actually works as drama, begins by declaring the iconic status of Midnight’s Children the novel, its standing as ‘the great postcolonial novel’ with its ‘dense linguistic structure … its amazing ebullience …’. But transformed into a play it becomes a ‘little booklet’, a kind of ‘Dynasty [the American prime time soap opera] in tribal costume’, something of a caricature of the complex relationship between colonial English and Indian cultures. Greer’s criticism is taken up by Bill Bufford who suggests that the ‘tribal costume’ (inasmuch as Greer had the play’s non-European cast in mind) was in fact its outstanding characteristic because one had totally non-white actors performing in front of a primarily non-white audience. The fact remained, as Bufford, adds, great books never really make good plays or films; sadly bad books invariably do. Paul Morley took up a similar line: a complex play squashed into three and half hours left one a little ‘bloated’. Serendipity one may call it: Greer and Morley attended the performance with Salman Rushdie sitting in front of them. During much of the performance Morley felt as if the play were ‘coming out of his brain’. Morley’s humorous observation may be read a little more seriously as the novel (and the play too) were very much a personal tribute to the author’s homeland and to his family. In that respect it was very personal and autobiographical. The homage was also to cinema because in many places, like the novel, the play too was structured as a shooting script. As Mark Lawson himself observed in the BBC discussion the play with its film insets gestured towards the failed BBC teleseries. As we have already noted Salman Rushdie’s real dream was to transform the book into film, be it television or cinema. Plans for a film version remained mothballed until 2010 when Deepa Mehta stepped in. The BBC series dead, the hope for a feature film, however, remained. And since Rushdie had written the screenplay for the teleseries, he took it upon himself to

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write the film screenplay. This would turn out to be both a blessing and a curse. Blessing because he could now negotiate with like-minded directors; a curse because the author (with little success as a screenplay writer) will get too closely involved with the film’s production. On 28 February 2010, speaking about the film version of Midnight’s Children he was optimistic: ‘I could be disrespectful to the text that others couldn’t.’ Two days before, at Emory, Deepa Mehta declared that she had agreed to direct the film and added, ‘My friendship with Salman Rushdie began with my film “Water” for which he wrote a supporting blurb.’ She also said that Rushdie’s screenplay for the film was remarkably similar to how she herself would have reorganized the novel into a film script. By then Sri Lanka too had had a change of heart and had given permission for the film to be shot in Colombo. For Rushdie cinema is the great art form of modernity and he had always felt that his greatest work should someday be filmed and in this respect the novel’s filmic adaptation was seen as being as important and triumphal as its publication as a book in 1981. Adaptations, here as dramatic performance and as cinema, change one’s reading of the original text, and in this respect Midnight’s Children is no exception. The novel is a silent form where worlds are imaginatively recreated by the reader; a play is a performance where the audience interacts with the players, and no performance is an exact replication of an earlier one. Against these genres, cinema transforms the spectator into a voyeur who participates in the text but undergoes a process of ‘misrecognition’, whereby he (the voyeur whose gaze is always masculine) mistakenly identifies with an Other in an act of wishfulfilment, forgetting that the screen is not a mirror. In a novel the author has total control; in a play the author as dramatist retains some control; in a film the author relinquishes that control to the auteur, in this case, Deepa Mehta. We take a final turn here towards the film, since the film (as an always available electronic text) offers a text of the novel that adds to the novel (and the play) but also changes how one reads it. The film may well be the thing wherein we may capture the mind of the master.

The Film Text The lure of the work of art began with cinema in Bombay, both Bollywood and Hollywood. Later Rushdie was to write a short monograph (1992) on one of the more influential films of his life, The Wizard of Oz. Like the screenplay for the BBC teleseries, this essay too was a product of his years of seclusion under the fatwa. At the age of ten, we read in the first few lines of the monograph, he wrote his first story, now lost, titled ‘Over the Rainbow’ (1992: 9). At the age of ten, in 1957, he watched The Wizard of Oz at Metro Cinema, next to Dhobi Talao, Bombay, and he confesses, it was his ‘first literary influence’ (9), which is both surprising (because Hindi films like Homi Wadia’s Hatim Tai which Rushdie saw in 1956 were even more fantasy ridden) and not (because as his first composition shows English by then was a more natural language to him than either Hindi or

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Urdu). But whereas Bombay Hindi films, although enjoyable, were often corny, even trashy, The Wizard of Oz was definitely a ‘good film’ with ‘high production values’ including that elusive value, ‘imaginative truth’ that made it a work of art (13). When he turned to screenplay writing, to capture that elusive ‘imaginative truth’ would have been at the forefront of his thinking. In the BBC discussion on the stage version of Midnight’s Children, Bill Bufford had noted that great novels often make terrible films. Sadly, this observation is true of the film version of Midnight’s Children (Dir. Deepa Mehta, 2012). Part picaresque, part magical realist, part historical, part realistic and part fantasy in the Orientalist mode, Midnight’s Children cannot be grounded in any one single genre. Like a Bollywood film, the novel was something to everybody, a point often acknowledged by Rushdie himself whenever he referred to the book’s reception in India. A novel, a genre in the making with no formal generic parameters, can be capacious, meandering and even decentred, but it works because its language, if written well, captivates the reader and keeps him involved. Cinema, on the other hand, is often more generically singular unless, like Bollywood, it opts for melodrama because the latter genre creates enough space for digressions even as it pushes the text towards a predictable narrative resolution. Had the film version of Midnight’s Children opted for an essentially melodramatic temper, it may have had a certain unity as it transformed this masterly literature of delay. It didn’t because like the novel (where genre-mixing worked) it brought all the genres together to cinema: realism, fantasy, history. There is a moment in the film, possibly the film’s most powerful cinematic moment, when Salim returns to the Braganza Pickle factory and is recognized by Mary Pereira, the factory owner. Mary’s role is played by Seema Biswas, an accomplished Bollywood actor familiar with both Indian ‘art’ and ‘masala’ cinema. When Salim introduces her to his son as ‘my mother’ (‘Aadam, this is my amma’) Seema Biswas’s look is so powerful that tears flow from those of the acting participants (Mary, Salim, Picture Singh) as well as the spectators of the film. At that point it becomes clear that perhaps Midnight’s Children, the film, should have been a Bollywood melodrama, not quite the novel, but a kind of parallel text that located itself in the cinematic mode (both Bollywood and Hollywood) of the fifties with which Rushdie was familiar and which was also the period that defined Salim’s own days in Bombay. Its fundamental flaw, already noted, is its failure to locate itself in a filmic genre. This is not to say that every film should belong to a genre but that the question about a film’s generic status has to be asked. The film does not allow us to pose that question. The flaw is compounded by the largely autobiographical tone of the voice-over. The voice-over, with which the film begins, is rendered by the author himself, although the pretence is there that it is really Saleem’s voice. However one reads it, the identity of Rushdie and Saleem makes the film an authorial statement which may be read in a number of ways. First it is a statement about authority or who is authorized to speak for the film. Here that authority resides with the author from which it follows that this is a kind of an endorsed version of the book. ‘I was born in the city of Bombay …’: this is true of both Rushdie and Saleem. ‘I was mysteriously handcuffed to history’: again it is true of both. Then there are other

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qualifications such as the comment that minor narratives are what really matters in life and so on, which again collapse character-narrator with author-narrator. But once the identity has been established and the voice becomes interminable, and often even unnecessary, the distinguishing characteristics (such as the fact that the narrator of the novel is unreliable) are no longer part of the structural dynamics of the text. Along with generic inexactitude and the identity of the voiceover with the narratorial voice, the film disproportionately allocates time to the various locations. Kashmir Agra Bombay Pakistan–Bangladesh Delhi & environs Bombay

8 minutes 16 minutes 41 minutes 37 minutes 32 minutes 5 minutes

Pakistan–Bangladesh takes up a good quarter of the film and much of that is about Pakistani politics. The Delhi and the Emergency sections are almost equally long, leaving very little time for the Bombay sections, which are in fact the heart and soul of the novel. Events centred on Saleem’s birth, William Methwold’s sale of houses on the eve of his departure to England, Ahmed Sinai’s alcoholism, the children at Cathedral School, the language march are what gave a special tone or register to the novel. These ‘Bombay events’ are far too schematically sketched in the film and cease to be memorable. Only in the cameo appearances and fableaux scenes – Wee Willie Winkie’s singing, the indirect kiss in the Pioneer Café, School master Zagallo’s human geography lesson, among a few more – do we see possibilities of what the film may have been like. And as it is progressively the case with Bollywood films, the minor characters, as in the scenes noted, triumph over the major, with two exceptions: Seema Biswas as Mary Pereira and Darsheel Safary as the young Saleem. It is as if the film version captures nostalgia for a loss, a loss shown in the blue/ velvet/black cinematographic palette used by Deepa Mehta for the Emergency scenes. Between 1981 and 2012 India too had changed. From one point of view, sectarian violence was on the increase, terrorism (leading to the Bombay Taj Hotel massacres) and the excesses of the Emergency may well have been instrumental in changing the political face of India. But in making that point (a sense of loss) the sombre atmosphere deflects much of the joy that infused the novel. It has also led to a seriousness of filmic representation, even a certain solemnity. Whereas ‘Good Night Ladies’, ‘How much is that doggie in the window’ and folk songs of love-longing and absence are heard, there is high seriousness in many of the other Hindi/Urdu songs. Rushdie’s homage to the Urdu ghazals of Ghalib and Faiz Ahmed Faiz are evident with Jagjit Singh’s fine early-seventies rendition of Ghalib’s poem ‘un ke dekhe se jo ā jātī hai muṁh pe raunaq’ (on seeing her my face brightens up) used as a recurring musical motif. There is another homage, this time to Faiz Ahmed Faiz, as Jamila Singer sings not the patriotic song of Noor Jehan (the likely

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reference in the novel) but ‘mujh se pahalī sī mohabbat merī mahbūb na māṁg’ (do not ask of me, my love, that love I once had for you), Rekha Merchant’s song from The Satanic Verses. And except for the historically appropriate ‘āo twist kare’ (come let’s do the twist) from the 1965 Bollywood film Bhoot Bangla, the only other song we hear is from Guru Dutt’s phenomenal film Pyaasa (1957), ‘jāne vo kaise log the jin ke pyār ko pyār milā’ (who were those people who found love reciprocated). Rushdie would have seen Pyaasa, but the film, like The Wizard of Oz, is high art. It does not figure in any form in the novel but the song is used as a counterpoint to the positive, affirmative ending of the film. The narrator’s last words speak of lives that in spite of everything had been ‘acts of love’ against the novel’s ‘unable to live or die in peace’ (446). Some novels may, indeed, be ‘unfilmable’ or some novels lend themselves better to a teleseries. As five episodes of over five hours, there may have been room enough for a novel structured as anecdotal narratives and digressions to be given another equally strong semiotic form. As film qua film, sadly, Midnight’s Children, in spite of occasional glimpses of ‘imaginative truth’, fails. The historical sections are far too long, and the generic register used for the film not particularly focused. At one point in the film Saleem and Jamila twist to Manna Dey’s song ‘āo twist kare’ from the film Bhoot Bangla. They’re in Pakistan and it is the midsixties. Indian films are still readily available in Pakistan and so it does not sound wrong. More importantly, for a brief moment, Bollywood melodrama enters the scene and gives us a glimpse of another form that may have been more extensively used for the cinematic adaptation. And so Deepa Mehta is unable to either repeat her consummately filmed trilogy (Earth, Fire, Water) or deliver her homage to Bollywood via Midnight’s Children. There is Ghalib, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and even Guru Dutt; but there is no Raj Kapoor of Rushdie’s beloved Bombay in the film version. The city in the fifties was Raj Kapoor’s city; its filmic paean is Shree 420 (1955), whose establishing song ‘merā jūtā ha jāpānī’ (These shoes are Japanese) was used as Gibreel Farishta’s song in The Satanic Verses. And, as we have seen, Gibreel Farishta had started life as a clone of Saleem. The chapter has traced the genesis of Rushdie’s finest achievement or at any rate the novel by which he is best known as a writer. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the novel Rushdie had posed the question about his classic work’s longevity: would it pass the test of time? With the Booker Prize in 1981 and subsequent ‘Booker of Bookers’ (1993) and ‘The Best of Bookers’ (2008) accolades behind it, the novel has certainly passed the test of time, at least in its initial twenty-five years. Over the years the work had become his magnificent obsession, a work that he felt should exist in other forms, notably drama and film. Sadly, its other semiotic transformations, in spite of Rushdie’s belief that these transformations could be equally, if not even more, successful, were never as artistically accomplished. And yet the novel itself remains unsurpassed both as a seminal postcolonial and world literature text because it was a rare instance of a postcolonial novel that found the right objective correlative to emotion and feeling. The achievement was possible for another reason – Rushdie’s understanding of the creative use of language in the larger Western (including Latin American

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and Anglo-American) tradition of the novel form. When after many starts he gave Saleem his own voice, he immediately sensed that it was a voice ‘that made an assault on the language, shifting its natural Anglo-Saxon rhythms, destroying its syntax and punctuation, attacking its metaphor-structures’. The recognition is followed by an indebtedness to none other than Joyce whose genius it was to create an ‘English that was more Celtic than Anglo-Saxon, that borrowed from other languages, that coined what it could not find’. And in the case of Joyce it was not ‘a purely aesthetic achievement’ because if you changed a language you changed ‘what it is possible to think’ (50/20: ‘The Project of Literature. A Declaration of the Writer’s Intent’, TS, 1 February 1983). To show how successful this achievement was in the English language, and in the English language alone, one has to turn to the novel’s Hindi translation as a postscript to the substantive part of this chapter. Since much of Midnight’s Children is a translation of vernacular thought processes, one would assume that its Hindi translation would capture a kind of ontology of the text, that is, capture the original language of which the novel is in fact an English translation. To test this hypothesis let me undertake an unusual exercise: let us say a ‘reverse’ translation. In 1997 Priyadarshan translated into Hindi Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as Ādhī rāt kī santāneṁ. At some point the translation was revised by one Rajkishore. I give below the first paragraph of the novel in its Hindi translation with each sentence sequentially translated first into English (my literal translation) followed by the Rushdie original: Hindi + (my translation) + [Rushdie original] Sūrākhvālī cādar (The Perforated Sheet) [The Perforated Sheet] maiṃ baṁbaī śahar meṃ paidā huā thā … yah kāfī pahale kī bāt hai. (I was born in the city of Bombay … this is a tale of the ancient of times.) [I was born in the city of Bombay … once upon a time.] Nahīṃ, itne se nahīṃ calegā. Tārīkh se bacne kā koī rāstā nahīṃ hai. Merī paidāiś 15 agast, 1947 ko Dākṭar Nārlikar ke narsiṁg hom meṃ huī thī. (No, this won’t work. There is no escape from the exact date. I was born in Dr Narlikar’s Nursing Home on 15 August 1947.) [No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947.] Aur vakt? (And the time?) [And the time?] Vakt kī bhī ahmiyat hai. (The time is also important.) [The time, matters, too.] To ṭhīk hai, rāt ko. (So here it is, at night.) [Well then: at night.] Nahīṃ, yaha zarūrī hai kī āp is se bhī zyādā … ṭhīk ādhī rāt ko, bilkul bārah baje. (No, it is important that you know more … exactly at midnight, at exactly twelve o’ clock.) [No, it’s important to be more … On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact.] Jaise hī maiṃ āyā, mere svāgat meṃ ghaṛī kī hatheliyāṃ adab ke sāth juṛ gaīṃ. (Just as I came, to welcome me, the hands of the clock came together respectfully.) [Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came.] Are, iskā matlab samjho! Iskā matlab samjho! Ṭhik jis pal bhārat ko āzādī milī, usī pal maiṃ is duniyā meṃ ā girā. (I say, understand its meaning! Understand its meaning! Just the moment India got its independence, that very moment I fell

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into this world.) [Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world.] Cāroṃ or afrā-tafrī thī. Aur khiṛkī ke bāhar bhīŗ-bhāŗ aur ātiśbājiyāṃ. (All around there was commotion, confusion. And outside the window, crowds and fireworks.) [There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds.] Kuch hī lamhe bād mere abbājān apnā aṁgūṭhā tuŗā baiṭhe, magar unke sāth huā hādsā uske muqāble ek chotīsī bāt thī jo us andhere lamhe meṃ mere ūpar guzrā thā, kyoṃki adab ke sāth ādāb kartī un ghaŗiyoṃ ke chipe hue zulm kā śukriyā, mujhe bahut hī rahasmay ḍhang se itihās ke sāth natthī kar diyā gayā thā, merī kismat aṭūṭ rūp se mere mulk kī kismat ke sāth jakaṛ dī gayī thī. (A few moments later my father broke his big toe, but this accident of his, compared to what happened to me at that moment in the dark, was of little consequence for, no thanks to the respectfullygreeting clocks behind which hid a crime, I was threaded to history in a most mystical manner, my fate in an unbroken, unfailing fashion was conjoined to the fate of my country.) [A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but this accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in the benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country.] Agle tīn daśkoṃ tak is se bacne kā koī rāstā nahīṃ thā. (For the next three decades there was no escape from fate.) [For the next three decades, there was to be no escape.] Najūmiyoṃ ne merī bhaviṣyavāṇiyāṃ kīṃ, akhbāroṃ ne mere āne kā jaśn manāyā, rājnītijñyoṃ ne merī prāmāṇiktā kī tasdīk kī. (Astrologers prophesied my future, newspapers celebrated my coming, politicians verified my authenticity.) [Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity.] Is samūce māmle meṃ mujhe ek śabd bhī kahne kā maukā nahīṃ milā. (In this entire matter I was given no chance to say a single word.) [I was left without a say in the matter.] Maiṃ Salīm Sināī, jise bād meṃ tarah-tarah se dagiyal, gañjū, suṁsuāhā, buddh aur yahā tak ki cānd kā tukṛā bhī kahā gayā, apnī kismat ke sāth burī tarah uljhā huā thā – behtarīn vakt meṃ bhī yaha ek khatarnāk kism kā lagāv thā. (I, Saleem Sinai, who was in time called The Stained One, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the Moon, was malevolently tangled to his fate – even at the best of times this was a dangerous kind of connection (attachment).) [I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate – at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement.] Aur us vakt maiṃ apnī nāk tak nahīṃ poñch saktā thā. (And I couldn’t even wipe my own nose at the time.) [And I couldn’t even wipe my own nose at the time.]

Picking up George Steiner’s terms from his influential After Babel (1976) we can speak of translation in terms of source and target languages. The source language is the language in which the work has been written; the target language is the language into which the text is to be translated. In the case of Rushdie we can speak of an ‘Ur’ source language which is a variety of what has been called Hinglish, Indian English, or an admixture of Hindi/Urdu and English. Assuming this to be

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true, and Rushdie has suggested as much, it follows that Midnight’s Children is a translation into English, by the author himself, of a hybrid mother tongue. At this point Midnight’s Children becomes the source language. However, if we were to translate the novel into a language which captures best the idioms of the novel, then we need to get back to Rushdie’s ‘Ur’ language. As one can see from the literal translation of the translated text, the target language does not capture the original. First it is far too formal Hindi/Urdu; secondly it eschews precisely that special cadence of Bombay/Mumbai-English which Rushdie captures. Third, the target language is high cultural modernist whereas the source language (here Midnight’s Children) is low cultural, quotidian ‘postmodern’. Look at two instances: ‘Oh, spell it out; spell it out’ and ‘Piece-of-the-Moon’. The first in Hindi as: ‘Are, iskā matlab samjho! Iskā matlab samjho!’ (I say, understand its meaning! Understand its meaning!). ‘Are’ is appropriate, as it is a common enough interjection, but the formality of ‘understand its meaning’ or given that ‘samjho’ is in the imperative (simply ‘Understand!’) insinuates a different linguistic register. But there is the alternative in the colloquial Mumbai Hindi: ‘Are, bol do! Bol do!’ (Oh, say it! Say it!). The second, ‘Piece-of-the-Moon’, is given in the Hindi in its literal translation as ‘cānd kā tukŗā’. Indeed what happens in the original English is a brilliant conceit. In English ‘Piece-of-the-Moon’ is meaningless as an appellation for a child, its nonsensical quality pointing to the absurdity of a literal translation of a proverbial expression. No one in English calls a child, approvingly, ‘Pieceof-the-Moon’ for its equivalent in English is an ‘apple of my eye’. The translation into Hindi alone gets it right, but not getting it right should be the aim of the target language because the English original constructs two parallel readers: the native informant and the monolingual English speaker. For Rushdie, the doubling is essential, even critical, for his postcolonial discourse, which is why even as the Hindi translation gets it right, it misses the point because it shouldn’t get it right. In the ‘Project of Literature’ Rushdie had noted, ‘Change a language, and you change what it is possible to think.’ He had added that the tradition within which he is writing – a tradition ‘as important as … the naturalistic “Great Tradition”’ – requires the presencing in his art of Don Quixote, Dead Souls, Gargantua and Pantagruel and Tristram Shandy (12). Midnight’s Children, the novel, was all of these. The struggle to get the right voice, the right form was long; the writer had to transcend the experimentations of his unpublished works; he had to re-fashion himself and discover a new way of composing or performing what Jenni Ramone has called ‘intralingual translation’ (2013: 3). In Midnight’s Children, he found this secret and its genesis, and this is why in the end his monumental achievement did not need being transformed into a play or a film. It has passed the test of time.

Chapter 4 THE AFFECTIVE TURN AND SALMAN RUSHDIE

sa vijñāya manaśchandaṃ rāmasyākārasūcitam citām cakāra saumitrirmate rāmasya vīryavān (But, sensing Rāma’s intentions, which were betrayed by his facial expression, mighty Saumitri, obedient to Rāma’s wishes, built the pyre.) – The Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa VI. 104. 21 In their celebrated 1946 essay titled ‘The Affective Fallacy’, Wimsatt and Beardsley (1970) read ‘affect’ as emotional response to objects ‘contemplated as a pattern of knowledge’. Affects were not ‘communicated to the reader like an infection or a disease … a bullet or a knife wound … not simply expressed as by expletives or grimaces or rhythms’ (38). In other words, affects had to undergo cognitive reduction before they could be contemplated as knowledge. The idea that affects could constitute ‘knowledge’ in their own right never crossed their minds. On textual critics, the impact of the Wimsatt and Beardsley essay (in conjunction with their complementary ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, also published in the same year) was huge. The essay had positioned itself as a theory of subjective reception in which the object triggered a ‘considered’ response in the reader. The response in itself presupposed an engagement with the object (the text) based on critical judgement. However, inasmuch as the object triggered in the reader a non-ideational response (say horror, disgust or shame) it did not fall within the compass of critical judgement and was therefore extraneous. A similar tone is manifest in T. S. Eliot’s polemical essay ‘Hamlet’ (1919) in which he argued that Hamlet, the play, was an artistic failure because Hamlet, the man, is ‘dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear’ (Eliot 1969: 145). To Eliot this is so because there is no circumstance, event, action or character which, as external facts, could generate a sensory experience capable of expressing the emotion in an objective sense. ‘The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”,’ wrote Eliot (145) and again, without arguing for or against the phenomenological value of the explanation, he accepts that emotions as affects are sensory perceptions reduced to cognitive understanding. In recent years, the failure on the part of Wimsatt and Beardsley to address the body’s ‘affective intensities’ has led to the production of a solid body of theory that has challenged intentionality itself by examining the corporeal as the site of the production of embodied knowledge prior to cognition.

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The place of the body in theories of meaning has a long and troubling history. Spinoza, for one, seems to have come to a frustrated conclusion some 330 years ago when he declared in his Ethics: ‘No one has yet determined what the body can do’ (Gregg and Seigworth 2010: 3). Language, however, had been a little less anxious about dissociating the body from cognition. This much is certainly evident from dictionary entries of two keywords relating to the body in meaning: ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’. In the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) the meaning of the word ‘affect’ is divided into two broad classes, mental (I) and physical (II), with mental taking up four meanings (1–4) and physical, two (5–6). Under mental (I), the meanings given are ‘feeling, desire, or appetite, as opposed to reason; passion, lust, evil-desire’ (1619 Middleton, ‘No doubt affects will be subdued with reason’). The mental category has a special entry (1. e.) Psychological with two citations that capture a shift in meaning: ‘We may also feel a general seizure of excitement, which Wundt, Lehmann, and other German writers call an Affect, and which is what I have all along meant by an emotion’ (W. James 1894); and ‘the terms “affect” and “affective” denote the emotional-conative aspect of all mental activity’ (W. McDougall 1926). Except for the meaning given under (1. b) – ‘an inward disposition to be contrasted with external manifestation’ – with a supporting 1591 citation, language has consistently linked affect with the body and indeed to the extent that in a number of citations (Middleton, Elyot, Shakespeare, Fraunce) affects are without premeditation, they are bodily disturbances which in the case of the Middleton citation will be ‘subdued with reason’. In the last case, an affective response is only subsequently qualified by reason or given semantic form. In a number of places, the entries for ‘affect’ point to an emerging recognition of the relationship between affect and emotion. Etymologically the word ‘emotion’ is an adaptation from the Latin ēmōtiōn-em, neuter, formed on ē-movē-re (ē ‘out’ +  movē-re ‘to move’). Since the first three meanings given in the OED (1–3) are stated as obsolete meaning, the fourth, divided into two (4.a. figurative and 4.b. psychology) alone has contemporary usage. So at 4.a., we read ‘any agitation or disturbance of mind, feeling, passion; any vehement or excited mental state’. At 4.b., the connection between ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’ is made more explicit: ‘A mental “feeling” or “affection” (e.g. of pleasure or pain, desire or aversion, surprise, hope or fear, etc.) as distinguished from cognitive or volitional states of consciousness’ (1842 Kingsley: ‘The intellect is stilled, and the Emotions alone perform their … involuntary functions’). Although the general provenances of the words generated by the head words (‘affect’ and ‘emotion’) occupy different historical spaces – ‘affect’, first cited from Chaucer (c 1374) with the word ‘affection’ going even further back to around 1230, and ‘emotion’, first cited in its current meaning in 1660 by Jer. Taylor (‘The emotions of humanity … the meltings of a worthy disposition’) – at the level of their psychological meanings, they tend to coalesce, a point noted at 4.b. in OED’s definition of ‘emotion’ where it is ‘distinguished from cognitive and volitional states of consciousness’. The changes in meaning reflect a more ready incorporation of emotion as a constitutive feature of the body itself: the body reads emotion before the mind reduces it to a semantic category. Language had anticipated theory.

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Intentions Betrayed by Facial Expression The place of affect theory in respect of the body’s autonomic response to objects has its more immediate genesis in the foundational work of Silvan Tomkins who had narrowed down affects to eight and called them ‘primary affects’. Giving them hyphenated joint names, he had categorized them as positive (interest-excitement; enjoyment-joy), resetting (surprise-startle) and negative (distress-anguish; fearterror; shame-humiliation; contempt-disgust; anger-rage).1 All these primary affects would have distinguishable facial expressions so that shame-humiliation would find its autonomic corollary in ‘eyes down, head down’ (Tomkins 1995: 74), a response triggered at ‘subcortical centers in the brain where genetically inherited, specific “affect programs” for each distinct emotion are stored’ (Leys 2012: 882). Ruth Leys, not a sympathetic affect theorist, nevertheless gives Tomkins’s basic emotions paradigm a valuable gloss. These basic emotions, which minimally include the emotions of fear, anger, disgust, joy, sadness, and surprise, are viewed as genetically hard-wired, reflexlike responses, each of which manifests itself in distinct physiologicalautonomic and behavioral patterns of response, especially in characteristic facial expressions. On this conception, when our facial expressions are not masked by culturally determined or conventional ‘display’ rules that control for appropriate social behavior, our faces express our affects, which is to say that our facial displays are authentic read-outs of the discrete internal states that constitute our basic emotions. The work of Joseph LeDoux and other neuroscientists has helped consolidate this view by suggesting that the basic emotions, such as fear, are subserved by neural circuits in the brain, such as the subcortical group of neurons known as the amygdalae, which operate automatically and more quickly than the higher, more slowly acting cognitive systems. (Leys 2011a: 438)

Affect theory thus moves away from a semantically constituted world of intentionality to one where the subject is biologically constituted with its own intensities. Affect and cognition are therefore ‘two separate systems’ (Leys 2011a: 437) because, unlike cognition, an affect is not conscious of the object that triggers it and therefore not subject to an ‘appraisal theory’. The object is simply a ‘tripwire’ and not something that creates an intentional state. Fear, anger, disgust, joy, sadness and surprise are characterized by facial expressions because these are unmediated, discrete and authentic ‘read-outs’ of our basic emotions. Following on from the works of Silvan Tomkins and Paul Ekman, more recently Nigel Thrift, Brian Massumi, Eric Shouse, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, William E. Connolly, Sara Ahmed and Eugenie Brinkema, among many others, have looked at the quicker autonomic and unconscious bodily or affective reactions to the source of the message as being ‘independent of, and prior to, ideology – that is, prior to intentions, meanings, reasons and beliefs – because they are non-signifying autonomic processes that take place below the threshold of conscious awareness and meaning’ (Leys 2011a: 437). For Brian Massumi, a key target of Leys’s critique

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of affect, the privileging of the body-brain over the mind and intentionality (a central paradigm of phenomenology generally), corrects an error about the role of the body as a meaning-making system that goes back to Plato. Referring to phenomenology, Brian Massumi argued that the issue here is that consciousness as an intentional act (acts of consciousness in Husserl) simply repeats objects already pre-embedded in the world and is never an involuntary act (2002: 191; 287–8, n. 14). Subcortical or subliminal perceptions (for these are what an immanent realism or naturalism signifies) would require a different language, a language of visceral intensities, emotion and feeling where the poetic supplants the propositional. Language and its most complex instantiation, the literary work of art, were always aware of both the interdependence of intentional actions and motor or body movements and their incommensurability. Our earlier lexicographical citations of the words ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ clearly suggest that affects are not matters of intellect understood through the analytic of pure and applied reason. Instead if we examine closely the trajectory of the word ‘affect’ as the OED does so well, the theoretical language most appropriate for its understanding and enunciation comes not from analytical philosophy but from philosophy as essentially an aesthetic. The philosophical lines of flight take us, therefore, to William James, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Wilhelm Worringer, T. E. Hulme, Alfred North Whitehead, Theodor Adorno (especially the Adorno of Negative Dialectics) and more recently to Deleuze in all of whose writings we find precisely those visceral or affective intensities associated with the body in language. Duration, intuition, laughter, the élan vital, emotional speculation, feeling tones, the evanescent, motion, process, muddied unmediated relatedness, an accent on a polytheistic monism in matters of belief and generally theories of vitalism displace the Cartesian primacy of the thinking subject. In Negative Dialectics (1973), Theodor Adorno had questioned philosophy’s fundamental premise – the identity of rationality and reality – and had argued, against philosophy’s positive dictate, that a negative dialectic must engage with our pre-intellectual drives so as to better apprehend the complex features that inhere in the object/reality. Inasmuch as a negative dialectics is informed by a structural transformation of subjectivity itself, Adorno’s point is that the subject can no longer consider itself as the centre of reality. Conceptual operations alone cannot explain the world as it is. It is not a matter of the body speaking but of the body’s in-between role, the body as the space of those intensities that poetry rather than analytic philosophy captures. What life-energizing, emotional forces are at work that may not be explained through conscious knowing? In a useful reader on affect theory one reads this sentence: ‘Indeed, affect is persistent proof of a body’s never less than ongoing immersion in and among the world’s obstinacies and rhythms, its refusals as much as its invitations’ (Gregg and Seigworth 2010: 1). Affect and emotion capture thresholds, the outpourings of feeling and the assemblages of poetry, love and desire that govern our corporeal beings. What analytic philosophy is to the prosaic, affects are to the poetry. A new vocabulary is needed for an evanescent semantics of ‘body intensities’. Affect theory therefore becomes creative in style – evanescent, visceral and poetic ̶ and the literary text is its exemplar. To prove this

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point, we turn to Salman Rushdie’s own investment in the body and its affects – indeed to the genesis of secrecy in the body.

The Body in Salman Rushdie The strong position of affect theorists is that affect and cognition are now dissociable when once they were not; the body itself is a meaning-making system. The work of art, however, does not endorse totally this dissociation because, as we find in our Rushdie proof texts, the relationship between affect and object is reciprocal. Even as visceral intensities and the language of the body and emotion pervade the Rushdie text, intentionality is not totally dispensed with. It is as if intentional consciousness, the ideological, is somehow harnessed alongside the affective, an ‘immanent realism’ taken on as an alternative to phenomenological notions of intentionality, making consciousness a ‘more modest power’ (Connolly 2011b: 793). There is, thus, an ongoing dialogue between the creative and the theoretical in Rushdie who has, as well, an emic understanding of an earlier theory of affects, the Indian rasa theory explained in an endnote to this chapter. There are (and this is no new insight about the literary work of art generally) disruptions in Rushdie of fixed or conventional meanings through an insistence on the vital, the unpredictable and the nonlinear. Affects and their intensities, as seen in Rushdie, are part of the body’s grammar. Six bodily affects in particular – sigh, dance, smell, sound, religious passion and shame – may be isolated as variations on a basic emotions paradigm. The Moor’s Last Sigh (1994) carries Rushdie’s affect manifesto with reference to sigh; in Shalimar the Clown (2005), desire is linked to dance; in Midnight’s Children (1981), Saleem’s olfactory prowess is on display; sonic affects are on display in The Satanic Verses (1988) and The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) rewrites the Orpheus myth as an affect of sound; The Satanic Verses critiques the presumption that austere monotheism is revelation transformed into absolute meaning by exploring what Donovan Schaefer in another context has called the ‘economies of religious affect’ (2015: 9); and in Shame (1984), ‘shame’ itself is read as an innate affect programme, a function of a self exposed to an other eye, as a ‘tripwire’ or stimulus for what Silvan Tomkins called our ‘muscle, vascular and glandular responses’ (Leys 2007: 28).

The Body as a Sigh: The Moor’s Last Sigh There is a very short chapter, Book 1, Chapter 4, barely four pages in all, in The Moor’s Last Sigh which is primarily about the body in language. Embedded in the descriptions are what may be called ‘feeling-tones’. The Moor Zogoiby is of course severely asthmatic with heavy breathing not uncommon. Most nights he hears noises, ‘the croaks and honks of fantastic beasts’ (53) from inside his lungs. It is easier for him to breathe in than out, easier for him to make gasping sounds as one breathes in than to voice language for this requires breathing out. Life, as

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he says, is absorbed and then given in language; life is a body experience. The Moor’s body has the capacity to affect and be affected as only when the wheezing is finally overcome is breath exhaled to make sound. There are intensities here, muddied connections between thought and body, a body struggling to give voice to ‘I breathe therefore I am’: death is the end of the body; birth is an exhaled cry; death is marked by a clear mirror that captures no breath. We are pronounced dead ‘when a glass held to my lips remain[s] clear’ (53). What then is the sign of the end of the body? ‘It is not thinking makes it so, but air’ (53), the body’s answer to Hamlet’s words to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: ‘for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’ (Hamlet II. ii. 249–50), words, in terms of the materiality of the text, that are found only in the First Folio (1623) and are not in either Q1 (1603) or Q2 (1604). Rushdie recalls this line – as he recalls Shakespeare elsewhere in the novel too – specifically for purposes of a radical juxtaposition ̶ thinking versus the body. Hence we read what may be seen as Rushdie’s affect manifesto: Suspiro ergo sum. I sigh therefore I am. The Latin as usual tells the truth: suspirare = sub, below, + spirare, verb, to breathe. Suspiro: I under-breathe. (53)2

In the beginning, continues the Moor, there was the lung, that divine afflatus, not the mind, not the heart because the lung allows us to voice, to make sound; breath is not death. ‘I sigh therefore I am’, the central motif of the novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh, but also Zogoiby’s breath and his wheezing, too, which he inherits from his father Abraham. It was after all Boabdil, the last Sultan of Granada, who cried upon surrendering the keys of the Alhambra to the Catholic king Ferdinand and Isabella in January 1492 and it was his mother who rebuked him with the memorable words: ‘Well may you weep like a woman for what you could no defend like a man’ (80, emphasis in original). The breath then merges into a sigh, but we read ‘a sigh isn’t just a sigh’ (54). It wasn’t for Boabdil, and nor was it for Ingrid Bergman who listens to Sam (Dooley Wilson) singing on the piano in Casablanca (1942). The song itself was written by Herman Upfeld in 1931 and has entered the annals of film lore in all sorts of ways. Here Rushdie, the film buff, wants to bring the sonal or the sonic into the picture, the sound as the defining feature of the body. Body affect as a visceral force beyond what has been called conscious knowing now shapes the reference to ‘a sigh isn’t just a sigh’. The reader hums, relating to the displacement of mind by sigh through a sonic recollection, not of the Upfeld original but Wilson’s rendition which does not have the first three verses. You must remember this A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh. The fundamental things apply As time goes by …

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‘We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can. – We breathe light – the trees pipe up’ (54), continues Moor Zogoiby. As he moves, the olive trees, the El Greco ‘cultivars’, the chatty oliviers (pun here is intended) speak to him. The cultivars he names after ‘that light-breathing God-ridden Greek’, the narratorial voice here combining with that of Rushdie himself who is familiar with the El Greco Museum in Toledo. The ‘arboreal metaphysics’ of these prattling olives is given the portmanteau word ‘chlorophyllosophy’ (54). Plants breathe light through their innate catalyst, the green (chloros) leaf (phyllon). Without it there is no photosynthesis – the latter, a plant’s capacity to breathe light and thereby transform carbon dioxide into oxygen. Without ‘chlorophyllosophy’, atmospheric oxygen levels would collapse and there will be no energy left for life on earth. We breathe therefore we are; but without chlorophyll we would be dead. The body, as noted earlier, becomes ecologically sensitive. The chapter ends with an account of Mahatma Gandhi’s favourite hymn to a composite God: Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram Patitha pavana Sita Ram Ishwara Allah tera nam Sabko Sanmati dé Bhagwan. (55)

After the singing, Camoens, the Moor Zogoiby’s grandfather, who had attended the Mahatma’s gathering in R. K. Narayan’s fictitious town Malgudi, tells his wife, Belle, he heard nothing, no sermon, no discourse on the state of the nation. The sound was all there was, the sound as a dhun (Hindi for ‘tune’, the word used by Rushdie) was all that remained. And of course for the Mahatma too, his dhoti, his walking stick and his self-conscious adoption of what Churchill called the garb of the ‘naked fakir, the leper in a diaper’ were all part of the symbology of the speaking body. The short chapter of four pages foregrounding as it does the body as a legitimate site of meaning and breathing (without which there is no sound and therefore no language) signifies that brief gap before enunciation: I breathe therefore I am. The Moor’s Last Sigh offers the clearest theoretical statement about the place of the body in Rushdie, but that statement takes different articulations and symbology in other works.

The Body as Cosmic Dance: Shalimar the Clown In Shalimar the Clown (2005), Rushdie turns to medieval Hindu cosmology and especially astrological signs that govern human desire by directly affecting the body. Our lives are under the influence of the seven known planets including the Sun and the Moon (Surya and Soma) and the shadow planets Rahu and Ketu, which are present everywhere. The shadow planets especially have a greater influence because they were ‘heavenly bodies without bodies’, without physical form, but this very fact made them spectacularly influential since they had power over our

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emotions: ‘Kaam the Passion, Krodh the Anger, Madh the Intoxicant … Moh the Attachment, Lobh the Greed and Matsaya the Jealousy’ (48). Over these emotions Rahu and Ketu are in an eternal moral combat because as Rahu intensifies, Ketu blocks and suppresses. There will be lovers – the acrobat Noman Sher Noman (known as Shalimar the Clown) and the alluring Bhoomi (or Boonyi), the great dancer whose signature performance was the dance of the Mughal courtesan Anarkali (as enacted in the classic film Mughal-e-Azam). They will part ways as soon as, through dance, Boonyi wins the heart of the American ambassador to India, Max Ophuls. But not before her body – enchanted by the story of Ravana, the ever-present demon-king whose allure even the divine Sita could not escape from (for Boonyi the ‘demon king still existed’ (50)) – infected by pot (cāras) and devoid of undergarments, one moonless night by the river forces itself on her sober lover Shalimar. The encounter is not a dance but is structured in all the conventions of the Radha-Krishna rasalīlā, the round dance of the dark lord and his lover. As a dancer, she is familiar with the relationship between dance and facial expression as found in Indian theories of abhinaya or performance. In this theory, the dancer shows feelings through the eyes and expresses meaning through hand gestures (mūdras). The Sanskrit manual of performance, the Naṭyaśāstra, speaks of yato dṛṣṭis tato manas (where the eyes go, the mind follows) and yato bhāvas tato rasa (where there is expression, there is mood/rasa). Abhinaya, as an affect, is an outer manifestation of an inner impulse, not as an accessible semantic component but as an image or a picture in its own right, an autonomic expression and a primary act with specific goals or purposes. How close this comes to Tomkins’s observation (‘the self lives in the face, and within the face the self burns brightest in the eyes’ (quoted by Leys 2007: 129)) as Boonyi noticing Max observes, ‘and here it is, staring me in the face and banging its hands together like a fool’ (SC 133)? And in the dance of Anarkali that she reprises before the ambassador she understood that her dance was changing her life, that what was being born in the eyes of the moonstruck American ambassador was nothing less than her own future. … Then her eyes met his and blazed their answer and the point of no return was passed. (181)

And when rejected, betrayed and abused she confronts her lover, Boonyi turns to the dancer’s gaze. ‘Look at me,’ she repeats, for in her looks are contained the meaning of his deeds. ‘Your love looks just like hatred,’ she adds, for she is his ‘handiwork made flesh’ (205). The repetition here is both intentional and corporeal because language keeps the object that generates affects firmly in focus and in doing so builds into one’s response a cognitive appraisal mechanism that does not dispense with intentionality altogether. ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’ W. B. Yeats had written years before. In this respect the literary work is not subject to one or other philosophical outlook; it creates an other world where the laws of sensibility (aesthetic) challenges and modifies the laws of sense. The non-cognitive and the visceral shadow the intentional. In this understanding of

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the literary work of art, the Rushdie corpus is exemplary and shows the writer’s ongoing engagement with affect and intentionality as autonomic responses of the body, and cognitive reappraisal of these responses come together, something which Sanskrit rasa theory and abhinaya performativity in their engagement with spectatorial response to drama had theorized as bhāvas (bodily responses) and their rasas (aesthetic configurations).

The Body as Smell: Midnight’s Children As every reader of Midnight’s Children knows, Saleem’s nose is a distinctive feature of his body. He is defined by it but he also thinks through it. In so many instances, it is the smell of spices, of cardamom, fenugreek, coriander, cinnamon, peppercorns, asafoetida, aniseed, cumin, fennel, nutmeg, saffron, turmeric, varieties of chillies and so on that jolt Saleem’s memory. Without a theory of smell as sense-affects it is difficult to understand Saleem’s engagement with the olfactory imaginary of India – the smell of India as one gets off a plane for instance – and Rushdie’s foregrounding of the body as an instrument of meaning creation. Saleem’s extraordinary powers of smell in Midnight’s Children are expressed most extensively through his knowledge of the smell of spices. In fact it is spices – that special combination which produces the exemplary Indian condiment, chutney – that is used as a metaphor for history itself. The nation (and it seems fiction too) chutnifies history to the extent that the ‘chutnification of history’ (MC 433) has become a signifier of Rushdie’s own take on fiction. But affects are never totally dissociable from cognition or intention since Saleem’s body responds – but his responses are affects directed towards an object. This direction, however, is not strictly phenomenological as affects restructure the object. In displacing and then replenishing the object, the body becomes a critical element in the phenomenological identity of consciousness and intention. To reprise our opening argument, without a sense of spices and their role in the olfactory imaginary of India, it is hard to make sense of the way in which Saleem’s nose participates in this corporeal experience that foregrounds the body as an instrument of meaning creation. Built into Saleem’s responses (for he is the narrator as well) is an appraisal mechanism albeit one that is autonomic or non-conscious. To make the case I turn to just two of many accounts of smell in the novel. The first is an account of a discourse on smell by Saleem. This account is found both in the published version and in the first draft of the novel. In both versions, Saleem offers a general theory of smell and refers to himself as the ‘lexicographer of the nose’. The passage cited below is from an early manuscript version, and since it is only available in the Emory Rushdie Archive, the excerpt given below is somewhat long. Alone in my long thin bedroom I sat blindfolded with the twelve bottles [of fizzy drinks] open in front of me, sniffing at their gaping neck, until I could distinguish by smell alone between Pakola and Hoffman’s Mission, between Bubble Up and

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Seven Up, between Citra Cola and Fanta; I learnt the olfactory signatures of Canada Dry, Coca Cola, and Pepsi Cola, as well as their local imitations. At first, I must tell you, I was in severe danger of losing my reason. Unclassified smells poured into me, at random, overwhelming me with their multitude as mere numbers never did: the pungent and decaying smell of faeces, … the sharp fragrance of betel-nut. The streets bombarded me with camel-smells, car-smells … the overpowering auras of beggars.  … Imagine the thrill of knowing that this odour here was not simply a rottingsmell, but dogshit! And that one, its cousin, camelshit … until my Nose became as sensitive and sharply-focused an organ as a third eye! … I was engaged in something more than a mere olfactory drugtrip: I was working towards a great work of my own, a General Theory of Smell. My key discovery was likeness. At first, primitively, I expressed the similarity of different smells as colours, perceiving that boiling underwear and printing ink shared a quality of Blueness … I also attempted classification by weights, dividing the world into flyweight smells (paper), … heavyweight (fresh dung, patchouli, dark rooms, crowds). … Then I went for a language of shapes … dividing the olfactory universe into Roundsmells and Squaresmells … I was, at this stage, a lexicographer of the Nose … O wondrous voyages before the birth of philosophy … I knew now that some smells were ‘sacred’, others ‘profane’. I had invented the science of Nasal Ethics. Now, as in a flash, I saw the olfactory ‘families’ reshape themselves … western records and movie-stars and pigflesh and booze all smelled like inventions of the devil. Now that I could tell the difference between sacred and profane … I learned of the fumic incompatibility of Hinduism and Islam … that people of different potential views and socio-economic interests inevitably smelled different … they were the source of the politics of Olfactory Envy, because people who smell bad (poor) hate others who smell nice (rich). My nose like Occam’s Razor … I had only to follow my nose … to eschew profane smells for sacred. The trouble was, I was a Muslim from India, corrupted by years of proximity to bad-smelling people and ideas; and the profane had, for me, a fatally irresistible attraction. (Midnight’s Children, first draft 1978, 394–7; author’s emphases)3

It is an important passage that makes its way with few changes into the published version (MC 307–8) where Saleem, having mastered physical scents, declares that he could also smell the ‘perfumes of emotions and all the thousand and one drives which make us human: love and death, greed and humility’ (308). The published version shows greater ideological control (the wonderful ‘fumic incompatibility of Hinduism and Islam’ is changed to ‘the olfactory incompatibility of Islam and socialism’), but the ruggedness of the body’s encounter with smell is lost. The fact remains that Rushdie theorizes over half way through the novel a practice that had been central to his aesthetic. And this principle begins with the narratee Padma herself. Padma – the patient listener of the tale, the inset reader in a sense – is after all the name of the ‘Dung Goddess’. A key turning point in the narrative, and one which marks Dr Aadam Aziz’s move from Kashmir to Agra, is Dr Aziz’s unwitting involvement in the Amritsar

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political agitation in the first two weeks of April 1919. I quote again from the memorable account of the city of Amritsar smelling of dung. On April 6th, 1919, the holy city of Amritsar smelled (gloriously, Padma, celestially!) of excrement. And perhaps the (beauteous!) reek did not offend the Nose on my grandfather’s face – after all, Kashmiri peasants used it, … for a kind of plaster. Even in Srinagar, hawkers with barrows of round dung-cakes were not an uncommon sight. But then the stuff was drying, muted, useful. Amritsar dung was fresh and (worse) redundant. (MC 33)

The narrator’s nose follows dung of various kinds – of horses, of cows – each equally precious for the flies which cross-pollinated them, and each type mingling with the ‘spicy sweet fumes [that] arose from a street-snack barrow’ (33). Smells produce affects and generate a kind of thinking which in Rushdie’s writing style insinuates autonomic responses that only later get transformed into the political agitation that the scene encompasses.

The Body as Sound: The Satanic Verses and The Ground Beneath Her Feet In the Emory Salman Rushdie Archive, ten great films are mentioned on a single typed sheet (written quite possibly at the time Rushdie had finished a first draft of The Satanic Verses, that is, in February–March 1988).4 As discussed in some detail in the next chapter, a key feature of these films is the part played by the sound of cities. Often extra-diegetic music would intervene to dramatize special features of city sounds that a director wished to highlight. Rushdie began to note early on a director’s sonic style (which was true certainly of the Bombay films he knew well) as an auteur’s signature. Critiquing the limits of auteur theory, especially its emphasis on cinematic formalism, James Wierzbicki in his essay ‘Sonic Style in Cinema’ had noted the deliberate use of sounds by auteurs. He cites Jack Sullivan’s definition of music for Alfred Hitchcock: [Music] encompassed street noise, dialogue (especially voice-over), sounds of the natural world … sonic effects of all sorts … [and] silence, the sudden, awesome absence of music, capable of delivering the most powerful music frisson of all. (2012: 8)

Sound adds an extra layer of meaning to both narrative and image, a classic instance of which is the use of a single extended note on the tār shehnai in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955). Commenting on the film’s music, Salman Rushdie noted that the cry of Harihar, when he realizes that Durga, his daughter, is dead, is a silent scream which is carried forward by Ravi Shankar’s incredible music. The emotional weight of the moment – its timeless, transcendental quality, what Andrey Tarkovsky called ‘sculpting in time’ (Fairweather 2012: 32) – is transmitted

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through sonic effect. For Rushdie this is, unarguably, the greatest emotional scene in cinema, a point reinforced yet again by the narrator René in The Golden House (2017: 345).5 A turn to sonic affects is not meant to replace the other body affects in Rushdie, especially those already mentioned, and certainly not to subordinate the visual representation in favour of the sonic. Rather, it is meant to show the way in which the Rushdie aesthetic draws quite consciously on sounds, sounds as they function in cinema, including the use of non-musical sounds – of railways, machines and the like – with which to create a musique concrète in the literary text itself. The effect was the aural version of literary defamiliarization because it too broke the normal relay of reception (the anticipation of the familiar) by directing us towards sounds not normally associated with a sonic aesthetic, whether musical or poetic. Let’s turn to the first five lines of The Satanic Verses which begins with a crane shot of Gibreel Farishta, ‘the tuneless soloist’, singing a ‘gazal’. What is less obvious to a reader is the sense of the soundtrack and its ‘sonic visualization’. To underline this point, let us offer the song in verse. To be born again, first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won’t cry? How to win the darling’s love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again … (SV 3)

As a ghazal, that great Indo-Persian lyrical genre with a very precise prosody and restricted subject matter, this is inconsolably mundane, but that is not the aesthetic point. What we get is the presence of sounds, of notes that recall any number of songs that Gibreel ‘only mimed to playback singers’ (3) in Bollywood movies. It is the soundtrack of films, here intradiegetic, that becomes a foundational reference. For Farishta is the delusionary actor, too, who only mimes songs and voices of others, including those of Angel Gabriel (Gibreel). The song is, however, not disconnected from noise – no foley art is required for post-production insertion of sonic effects to create a fall to the ground or the voice of the chorus. Gibreel himself breaks the song, first with ‘ho ji’ (literally ‘you there, I say’, but otherwise quite meaningless) and then with ‘Tat-taa! Taka-thun!’ a common opening tāl (or beat) on the tabla, the Indian percussion. And this sound ends in the onomatopoeic sound of someone falling in Hindi, ‘Dharraaammm!’ the word itself given in italics, and with a conscious allusion to musique concrète in cinema. Struck by their tonality, the sounds function as an earlier bow-wow theory of language when, before Saussure, the origin of language was in onomatopoeia: dogs barked because

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‘bark’ is the sound they made and so on. The sounds here capture, in some sense, the materiality of the signifier, without the triad of signifier/signified/concept and engender a ‘sonic discomfort’ (van Elferen 2012: 179). There is, in fact, a vast repertoire of onomatopoeic sounds which reinforce the corporeal, the material and the body in Rushdie. Here I wish to highlight only one: ‘abracadabra’. In Midnight’s Children this sound is not the cabbalistic formula derived from the name of the supreme god of the Basilidan Gnostics containing the number 365, but a sound that captures the motion of trains. Saleem recalls, And then we were in a third-class railway carriage heading south south south, and in the quinquesyllabic monotony of the wheels I heard the secret word: abracadabra abracadabra abracadabra sang the wheels as they bore us back-tobom. (MC 434)

One can hear the symphony of the motion of the train wheels, which in cinematic tracking would fuse the ‘real’ sounds of the wheels with their orchestral equivalents, morphing the tedious and monotonous sound of train wheels into what may be called musical incantations. The tracking shot in the opening pages of The Satanic Verses also involves Saladin Chamcha who, in response to Gibreel Farishta’s tuneless song, offers, in a shot-reverse-shot mode, ‘an old song, too, lyrics by Mr James Thompson, seventeen-hundred to seventeen-forty-eight’ (6). Here, of course, the ‘old song’ invokes a militaristic temper, the colonized celebrating (without one suspecting any ironic intent) a hymn to imperialism. The old song is by James Thompson, Scottish by birth, but known best as an English poet and dramatist (1700–48), who wrote The Seasons (1726–30). In 1740, he co-wrote (with Daniel Mallet) a masque called Alfred that carried a poem celebrating British naval successes by invoking Britain’s great Saxon king Alfred. The lines sung by Saladin Chamcha, ‘at Heaven’s command, arooooose from out the aaaazure main … . And guardian aaaaangels sung the strain’ are from the poem from the masque now commonly known as ‘Rule Britannia!’ The first verse of ‘Rule Britannia!’ reads, When Britain first, at Heaven’s command, Arose from out the azure main; This was the charter of the land, And guardian angels sang this strain: ‘Rule, Britannia! rule the waves: Britons never will be slaves.’

The verse soon began to lead an independent life of its own, separate from the masque, and became the jingoistic song of imperial power (and latterly of English soccer hooligans) with changes made to the last two lines to read, ‘Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves/Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.’ The verse also has had a wide provenance in music history with the likes of Handel, Beethoven, Wagner, Strauss and Sullivan including it in their musical compositions.

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Whereas an ideological reading, quite correctly, would place the two songs in structural opposition to each other – a monological imperialist dogma against postcolonial cosmopolitan dialogism – a turn to tonality and to affects captures what may be called a corporeal disconnectedness where the body utters sounds without immediately connecting them to their thematic referents, where one displays, with Jumpy Joshi, borrowing from W. B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’, such ‘passionate intensity’ (277). (‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.’) It should not surprise us that the central problematic of the novel – demonic sacralization in Islam, or at least the Prophet’s momentary attraction to it – first surfaces as a barely discernible sound, as an affect: Rekha Merchant (on the flying Bokhara carpet) cursing in a language Gibreel does not understand, a language of all ‘harshnesses and sibilance’ which carried the unnerving sound/word ‘Al-Lat’ (8). Al-Lat, literally ‘The Goddess’ (cf. ‘Al-Lah’, meaning the God), is the great pre-Islamic Arabian mother goddess (whom the Greeks called Lato) representing the Sun. This Arab pagan goddess, a key figure in the censored satanic verses in the sura called ‘The Star’ (‘Al-Najm’), surfaces as no more than onomatopoeia and for the common reader is therefore no different from other unruly sounds, including the songs of Farishta and Saladin. The sound and image are broken apart. Sonality then becomes a key feature of a writing that cultivates, self-consciously, autonomic responses that challenge cognition. Often, though, with the tracking of sounds there is also, as in Farishta’s own tuneless singing, the relic of another language which in Rushdie is either Bombay Hindi or its higher linguistic register, Urdu. It is a register which leads Rushdie to play with homonyms such as ‘khana’ in ‘Pagal Khana’ (SV 341, 346) where khānā is Hindi for food but Urdu for both food and a house or a place of business (because the phoneme ‘kh’ in the latter meaning is the Persian and not the Sanskrit/Hindi ‘kh’). In the Rushdie Archive (folder 22), there are eight typed pages with cancellations and marginalia in autograph which deal with the composition of The Satanic Verses. In what is clearly a reconciliation with his own father, Rushdie gives Saladin Chamcha his native tongue back as he says to his dying father, ‘hum sab aap ke saath hain, abba. hum sab aap ko pyaar karte hai. bahut pyaar’. And, as Rushdie’s typed notes expand on the washing of the body and the stitching of the burial shroud, his hands move towards the margin and in ink we get ‘when as a boy he saw his father’s penis’. In the published version (in the censored archive so to speak), the original Urdu words are given in translation: ‘Now Salahuddin found better words, his Urdu returning to him after a long absence. “We’re all beside you, Abba. We all love you very much”’ (SV 530). The reference to ‘his Urdu returning’, again, takes the native informants to the words given in the notes, as if the text has been subtitled. In a sense the turn to the sonic as meaning (semantic) and as sound (onomatopoeia) define the Rushdie corpus. Without suggesting that Rushdie alone is engaged in an alternative, sonic visualization, what, nevertheless, needed emphasizing are the corporeally lived experiences that his works capture: audiovisuality informs his style and becomes central to the writer’s aesthetic vision. The image transforms itself into descriptive prose, sound into interference through noise, abracadabra into the motion of a

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locomotive. For Rushdie, to capture writing as corporeal expression, Saussure had to be transgressed, a bow-wow theory of language, however outdated and wrong, foregrounded and, through the multiplicity of sounds, the musique concrète of people and of their language, given felt presence in art. Of Stanley Kubrick Kate McQuiston asks, ‘What makes a Kubrick film sound like a Kubrick film?’ (McQuiston 2012: 139). Of Rushdie we can similarly ask, ‘What makes a Rushdie novel sound like a Rushdie fiction?’ Sonality, sound, holds a more radical place in The Ground Beneath Her Feet where the intertext (argued at greater length in Chapter 6) is the tale of Orpheus, the gifted composer, singer and musician. We don’t know what Orpheus sang, but it is clear that in The Ground Beneath Her Feet song functions as an expression of the body, as something that may be called aural (against visual) ekphrasis. It is as if the filmic musique concrète is harnessed so as to foreground an acoustic universe of sounds, rhythms and noises in the novel. The body as sound begins to function as a ‘sonic palette’ (Kulezic-Wilson 2012: 76), but one whose symphonic form is not simply Western but also drawn from the ‘form of the raag … and the point about that is that its like jazz. There is a lot of room for improvisation inside a melodic form’ (Rushdie Archive 70/15). Ormus, Vina and Rai (Umeed) – the modern-day Orpheus, Eurydice and Aristaeus in the novel – play out the themes of ‘Music, love, death’ (GBHF 22) updating the Orpheus myth and rewriting it as an allegory of rock ’n’ roll. The pop singer with the heavenly voice is, of course, Vina-Eurydice and not Orpheus who, as Ormus, is the lyricist (which Orpheus also was). Ormus, born on 27 May 1937, is a dizygotic twin, except that his brother Gayomart Cama is already dead at birth. An annotator’s craft is called for immediately as the allegories of meaning embedded in this, the most allegorical of all Rushdie’s novels, double up. The dead Gayo (as he will be remembered) will echo Elvis Presley’s own twin brother dead at birth. As for the baby Ormus, at whose birth Umeed’s parents, hitherto strangers, brought identical bottles of honey (for them it was ‘the handiwork of distant bees’ that would, in a clear reference to Virgil’s version of the Orpheus tale in the Georgics, ‘ease the path of love’ (34)), his prodigious musical skills were soon evident – in fact, far too soon evident – as even from his crib he could gurgle sounds that replicated the entire Indian musical scale, both in its āroha (forward keys saregama padhanisa) and its avāroha (back movement sanidhapa magaresa) (46). But his dead twin is taken to the underworld, from where he provides lyrics that would push one towards the very abyss, ‘down to some supernatural inferno’ (54), to the frontier of the skin, ‘the underworld of doubt’ (178). Rushdie, ever conscious of the sonal, the sound, writes a prose poem camouflaged in metaphors of Hades – a song, about the frontiers of the skin, composed by Ormus for Vina, which may be rendered in verse: At the frontier of the skin. Where I end and you begin. Where I cross from sin to sin. Abandon hope and enter in.

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And lose my soul. At the frontier of the skin No guards patrol. At the frontier of the skin Mad dogs patrol. At the frontier of the skin. Where they kill to keep you in. Where you must not slip your skin. Or change your rôle. You can’t pass out I can’t pass in. You must end as you begin. Or lose your soul. At the frontier of the skin Armed guards patrol. (55)

Hardly a page goes by without some such reference to music and song and their affects. And when Ormus himself arrives upon hearing about the death of Vina (in 1989, he is fifty-two) at the El Huracán, Guadalajara, Mexico, in a ‘black linen suit and matching velvet eye patch’, one hears the sound of an acoustic guitar and the reprise of the old song, ‘Beneath Her Feet’, albeit with new words, modelled, in melodic terms and perhaps even in substance, it seems, on John Lennon’s ‘A Hard Day’s Night’. All my life, I worshipped her. Her golden voice, her beauty’s beat. How she made us feel, how she made me real, and the ground beneath her feet. And now I can’t be sure of anything, black is white, and cold is heat; for what I worshipped stole my love away, it was the ground beneath her feet. She was my ground, my favorite sound, my country road, my city street, my sky above, my only love, and the ground beneath my feet. Go lightly down your darkened way, go lightly underground, I’ll be down there in another day, I won’t rest until you’re found. Let me love you true, let me rescue you, let me lead you to where two roads meet. O come back above, where there’s only love, and the ground’s beneath your feet. (475)

It is a song (later made famous by Bono of U2 with the third verse omitted6) to which Ormus returns two years later with a Vina lookalike, one Mira Celano, as a final affirmation of the body as sound affects.

Economies of Religious Affect: The Satanic Verses A striking feature – indeed the striking feature – of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is the placement of the body in belief. In two of the key sections dealing with

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belief – the Mahound and Ayesha sections – bodies carry feelings and emotion as they ‘flow into relationships’ and are ‘guided through thickly textured, magnetized worlds’ (Schaefer 2015: 3). In Rushdie, religion is read as an embodied experience, a bodily practice directly linked to feeling even before thought converts a situation, the economy of wonder and pleasure (or even anger and shame), into an ‘explanation’ (Schaefer 9). It is as if Rushdie, like affect theorists, is ‘interested in histories that start before texts: phylogenetic histories originating with prelinguistic bodies … driven by forces outside of language’ (11). Religious feeling or the body in belief is meaningful in ways well beyond its presumed capacity to cognitively appraise the world. The body embodies cognition; in it are imbricated addictions and passions, shame and aversion – be they of prophet or anchorite. In this respect, the question that The Satanic Verses poses is: ‘What is the body of both the messenger and the believer and what does the body itself mean?’ Cinematic affects (both visual and sonal) elicit from the spectators feelings and emotions before cognitive appraisal takes shape and Salman Rushdie, ever conscious of narrative as shooting script, turns to this form so that Gibreel the dreamer, the Bollywood actor, dreaming himself as the archangel can perform the task of acting as the surrogate origin of the divine word, the transcendental logos. Clearly this is a difficult proposition because any attempt to show that religion, too, feels before it thinks or speaks is an act of apostasy. The turn to cinema is a political act that circumvents possible blasphemy and, at the same time, reinforces it because cinematic representation (or at any rate its syntax) prioritizes feeling over cognition. Gibreel: the dreamer, whose point of view is sometimes that of the camera and at other moments, spectator. When he’s a camera the pee oh vee is always on the move, he hates static shots, so he’s floating up on a high crane looking down at the foreshortened figures of the actors, or he’s swooping down to stand invisibly between them, turning slowly on his heel to achieve a three-hundred-and-sixtydegree pan, or maybe he’ll try a dolly shot, … or hand-held with the help of a steadicam. … He watches and weighs up the action like any movie fan. (SV 108)

In the novel, the Prophet after all comes to this ‘idiot actor’ who is ‘having a bhaenchud nightmare’ (109) but who is also ‘the archangel … actually inside the Prophet’ (110). The cinematic eye therefore reinforces the primacy of embodied experience in language by shifting an ‘exclusively cognitive’ (Schaefer 6) experience to an image which requires emotional spectatorial response. From this archangel (who is also the voice of the actor Gibreel) Mahound gets conflicting messages because the sound that comes to him, the source of the recitation, is prior to the phenomenological reduction. ‘This is what he has heard in his listening,’ we read. The Prophet feels tricked, because the Devil had come in the guise of an archangel (to deliver the satanic verses which he now repudiates): ‘So that the verses he had memorized, the ones he recited in the poetry tent, were not the real thing but its diabolic opposite, not godly, but satanic’ (123). The Prophet’s immediate reaction is to internalize the message as sound and only later reflect upon its dramatic inconsistency.

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Years later, in fact some 1300 years after the Prophet, there is another messenger who has the divine vision that she will take believers across the Arabian Sea to Mecca. Her Moses-like presence will part the waters. ‘This idea,’ as we read in the Archive, ‘which began with the terrible story about the village that walked to the sea, has begun to grow’ in his mind and he connects it with other journeys, that of Paul, of Kim, of Marco Polo, of Ibn Battuta and his own to England (44/25). The messenger, Ayesha by name (and Ayesha was the Prophet’s last and child bride), the butterfly woman, is an epileptic prone to convulsions, an orphan who made a living by making small enamel animals, ate butterflies and, as a consequence, her face was ‘heavily stained by the many different colours that had rubbed off the dying butterflies’ (219). Rushdie got the butterfly image, it seems, from Professor Akumal Ramachander, the man who made a chance discovery of the New York painter Harold Shapinsky. The overall story of Ramachander’s ‘discovery’ is one of the outstanding narratives in Rushdie’s collection of essays, Imaginary Homelands (1991). For our purposes I want only to turn to Ramachander’s familiarity with butterflies. But what was it that enabled Akumal to see what everyone else had failed to see? The answer, it seems, is those butterflies: ‘My art school was a small field near my house. I would spend quite a long time there, chasing butterflies. Hundreds of thousands of them, you know, in all their brilliant hues. I would never destroy a butterfly, just chase them and wonder at that great profusion of colours. And I think all that colour sank into me … all those permutations and combinations, they were already there in me. All that had to happen was to get someone’s work, and see if I could get back all the colours I saw in my childhood. And Shapinsky seemed to come very close to that.’ (IH 155)7

Although nineteen, her body is that of a child, with a child’s susceptibility ‘to the affective intensity of religious pedagogy’ (Schaefer 81). She also has a calling from the Archangel Gibreel who ‘had appeared to her in a vision and had lain down beside her to rest’ (SV 225). His command was explicit: ‘Walk from this place [Titlipur, meaning “town of butterflies”] to Mecca Sharif, to kiss the Black stone in the Ka’aba’ (235). In spite of their doubts about the parting of the sea, the villagers make the long journey and, of course, they drown. The extended narrative, however, is presented as an act where affect, emotion and feeling bypass interpretation and reason. But those who can reason like the educated Mirza Saeed Akhtar, whose wife follows Ayesha to death by drowning in spite of his warning that miracles no longer occur, will also find that the body has its own logic. The episode of the journey to the Arabian Sea (which is based on an actual event), however, written as an act of faith or madness (‘Who is the madder’, Osman the clown with his ‘boomboom’ bullock, had asked (240)), once again acts as a counterpoint to an austere religion. But even Osman is convinced that the ‘water opened, and I saw them go along the ocean-floor, among the dying fish’ (504). ‘What kind of an idea are you?’ was the question asked of the Prophet. Here the idea gets transformed into a narrative of affects, will (volition) and understanding flowing through the body

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beyond reason. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Mirza Saeed Akhtar’s return to the village after his wife had drowned along with the butterfly woman. ‘Much better’ it is, he feels, to simply rock in his chair ‘and not think, not think, not think’ (506). As he awaits death, noticing a fire moving towards his mansion, he feels ‘something brushing at his lips’. Butterflies struggle to enter his mouth as he finds himself drowning together with Ayesha, hearing her cry, ‘Open wide!’ (507). The waters do part ‘and they walked to Mecca across the bed of the Arabian Sea’ (507). If sense is cognition and sensibility affect, then the body is a kind of bricolage, a woman infested with butterflies. Religion too is emotion as body affects.

From Guilt to Shame: The Body in Shame In recent years, shame has been gradually displacing guilt as a key human feeling or prepossession, for shame, after Tomkins, is a primary or innate affect, amenable to secondary correction, whereas guilt, apart from being non-primary, is irreversible. Further, guilt does not lend itself to facial expression, to bodily affects, as its distinguishing feature is melancholy, a dark brooding atmosphere that clouds the mind. Shame has the capacity to heal and is seen to be more productive. The argument here is that one can do better things with shame than with guilt: better self-theory, moral theory, queer theory, survivor theory and even trauma theory. Tomkins’s formulation may be quoted here. Shame theory is [for example] … [a] source of great power and generality in activating shame, in alerting the individual to the possibility or imminence of shame and in providing standardized strategies for minimizing shame. Although shame theory provides avoidance techniques, it is also one of the major sources of the experience of shame, since it provides a shame interpretation of a large number of situations, which if there had been a powerful distress theory might have aroused distress, given a fear theory of equal generality and power might have aroused fear rather than shame, and given a monopolistic enjoyment theory might have altogether attenuated the negative aspects of the situation. … The existence of a shame theory guarantees that the shame-relevant aspects of any situation will become figural in competition with other affect-relevant aspects of the same situations. (Tomkins 1995: 165)

For affect theorists, the preference is understandable, because against guilt shame is ‘antiintentionalist or anticognitive in nature’ (Leys 2007: 125) as it finds expression through involuntary corporeal and automatic responses. Facial expressions replace brooding melancholy. But shame requires the gaze of the other; one’s eyes are downcast only after one has been looked at, one’s ‘scene of crime’ under immediate exposure through the gaze of the other. For shame to arise, one has to be seen, the act already observed and nakedness, in a fashion, exposed. A personal anecdote is in order here. As a child, whenever nature called, we would take off our shorts and run to the outdoor toilet (latrine) which in our

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Fijian home was some thirty metres away from our front verandah. I was a good sprinter and ran fast so that no stray eyes may fall on my exposed genitals. My genitals were my shame, an association now deemed rare or obsolete in the OED, although the OED does cite James Joyce’s memorable line: ‘And with loving pencil you shaded my eyes, my bosom and my shame’ (Ulysses 1922: 533). Speed meant that I, invariably, ran to the toilet unnoticed. Except once, when my old friend ‘Tomato’ (Sarwesh Kumar Singh, later an influential social worker and pastor in the Methodist Church of Fiji) lurking behind a hibiscus hedge called my name as I was running to the latrine. This had never happened to me and I paused to look, and there it was my genitals, my shame, fully exposed to Tomato. I was seven or eight years old, and throughout my primary school years Tomato would shame me by obliquely referring to this incident. ‘Shame lives in the eyelids’, ‘shame requires an audience’: these common expressions point to the spectatorial side of shame. In my own case the spectatorial exposure left me feeling naked (literally), I hid my face in shame, with downcast eyes. Shame is one of the innate affect programmes, which in my case was triggered by Tomato’s gaze. The affect of the gaze was autotelic in that it did not require introspection; it emphasized selfhood – what we are, rather than what we do. Shame affects us in this immediate bodily sense, but because of this it has little of the metaphysical complexity that comes with guilt. The exposure of the child’s genitals was not a matter of guilt; it was not an internalized reflective judgement on a concept, but a reflexive, immediate act that later in life continued to manifest itself through the body. But here comes the difficulty, because the adult looking back at the scene remains uneasy; he has regrets, and he links it to an object. Whereas the first response and subsequently my running away from Tomato’s gaze at school may well have been autonomic, the fact that it is recalled gives it something of an intentionalist colour albeit one where the power of intentionality or consciousness is shown to be a lot more modest. Once again a turn to the lexicon is necessary to show that language had, even before theory, captured the affective dimension of shame. The word ‘shame’ in English is not borrowed from either Greek or Latin. Its origins are local, going back to Old English ‘sc(e)amu’ which corresponds to Old Frisian ‘scome’. The OED devotes some seven columns to the substantive and verb forms of the word and covers a number of ideas raised about this emotion in affect theory. Its principal meaning, the one familiar to us, which is given as the first, and hence the more important, entry, has as its earliest Old English citing as c. 725 and c. 950, the latter from Lk. 14.9: ‘Ðu inginnas mið sceoma [cum rubore] þæt hlætmesto stoue gehalda’ (‘and thou begin with shame to take the lowest room’ in the Authorized Version). This is the message of a parable that Jesus narrates: at a wedding do not sit in the best room in case it is allotted to someone more important than you. The parenthetical cum rubore (literally ‘with redness’) may be from the Lindisfarne original gospel (in Latin, written by Eadfrith, bishop of Lindisfarne in c. 715) as the Old English translator Aldred inserted interlinear gloss into the Old English text. Given the placement of the Latin parenthesis after ‘sceoma’ (shame), one wonders if it describes a facial description, shame turning the face red, indicating that one is blushing. If so, shame as an emotion finds its expression in the body

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and primarily in the face. In OED’s two further citations (from Shakespeare and Tennyson) one blushes or glows with shame, where again a clear link is established between emotion and corporeal expression. In Spenser, the connection is more graphically made through personification: ‘1590 Spencer F. Q. II. vii. 22 Lamenting Sorrow did in darknesse lye, And Shame its vgly face did hide from liuing eye.’ Drawing from the first citations – some twelve in all – the OED gives the following first meaning: The painful emotion arising from the consciousness of something dishonouring, ridiculous, or indecorous in one’s own conduct or circumstances (or in those of others whose honour or disgrace one regards as one’s own), or of being in a situation which offends one’s sense of modesty or decency.

Except for one reference (Tennyson’s ‘guilty shame’ (1847)) given in the context of I. 1. c ‘sense of shame’ (‘the consciousness of this emotion, guilty feeling’), the dictionary entries do not associate the word with guilt. It is not uncommon to examine cultures in terms of guilt and shame. The OED in fact has an entry for ‘shame culture’: ‘A culture in which conformity of behaviour is maintained through the individual’s fear of being shamed.’ One of the more common extensions of this has taken the form of the binary occidental guilt and oriental shame. And a further extension: the former produces tragedy, the latter a more decentred, capacious form that oscillates between tragic ‘potential’ and comic melodrama. In the Indian epic tradition, shame culture produces an ambiguous ‘sphere of kingship’ as the world is not closed, it does not lock itself into meaning. Only once – in the figure of the neglected prince Karna – does the culture come close to embracing the possibilities of a tragic world view, but this is denied by the ‘divine clown’s (Krishna’s) savage mercies, his disastrous playing with the world’ (Shulman 1985: 399). The distinction is recognized by Rushdie too. In a note on Othello (45/4), Rushdie refers to Othello, the (Arab) Moor’s moral universe as one dictated by the ‘polarities [of] honour and shame’. It is this guilt/shame binary and the specific ways in which shame governs Eastern cultural practice which is at the heart of Rushdie’s novel Shame. ‘This dark and bitter book’, as he wrote in a fragment titled ‘Nostalgia’ (44/24), was written with great speed as by Christmas eve 1982 he had reached ‘p. 206 of [his] final revision of Shame … and [will be finished] around twelfth night [January])’ (06–13; redacted copy of notebook beginning 6 September 1982). The novel is essentially a comic melodrama encased in a Gothic blanket where the mad daughter of one of the protagonists, Raza Hyder Sufiya Zenobia, is a killing machine, a vampire, a werewolf, an exterminating angel, for whom shame is a kind of perverse honour killing. A girl ‘possessed/made bestial by shame’ is how Rushdie notes in a fragment on Shame (20/50) and on another sheet (20/6) Rushdie adds, ‘SHAME is a collection of monologues. Voices, alone, remembering or falsifying … . One voice is never heard: the voice of Sufiya Zinobia Hyder, nicknamed “Shame”, whose tragedy is at the heart of the book’.8 ‘Shame’, the word, is everywhere as if the narrative is really about the word itself as a picaro figure, as it interacts with people

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in its journey on the road. The novel begins with father Shakil dying in front of his daughters (Chhunni, Munnee and Bunny) ‘in the grip of an asphyxiating fist of shame’ (Shame 14). When one of the three sisters is put ‘into the family way’ on the night of the grand party after their father’s death, we read, ‘O shame, shame, poppy-shame!’ (16). Signs of pregnancy are acted out simultaneously by the three sisters, a behaviour that suggests ‘the operation of some form of communal mind’, so that no single sister is the mother of Omar Khayyam Shakil (20). Shame keeps cropping up: ‘But shame is like everything else; live with it for long enough and it becomes part of the furniture’ (28). And again, ‘shame, dear reader, is not the exclusive property of the East’ (29). Such is the power and presence of the word that in the novel itself the word is heavily self-annotated with reference to the word’s associations in Urdu. The occasion for this explanation is Omar Khayyam Shakil’s request to his three mothers (Chhunni, Munnee and Bunny) ‘to let [him] out of this horrible house … and to tell [his] father’s name’ (37). The first request is granted – he can go to school – but he is forewarned by his eldest mother Chhunni, ‘[The outside world will make] you feel the forbidden emotion of shame’ (38). The second mother’s (Munnee’s) gloss is telling: ‘That would be a completely debased effect’ (38). At this point the first-person narrator intervenes with an extended gloss on the word ‘shame’. This word: shame. No, I must write it in its original form, not in this peculiar language tainted by wrong concepts and the accumulated detritus of its owners’ unrepented past, this Angrezi in which I am forced to write, and so for ever alter what is written … Sharam, that’s the word. For which this paltry ‘shame’ is a wholly inadequate translation. Three letters, shìn rè mìm (written, naturally, from right to left); plus zabar accents indicating the short vowel sounds. A short word, but one containing encyclopaedias of nuance. It was not only shame that his mothers forbade Omar Khayyam to feel, but also embarrassment, discomfiture, decency, modesty, shyness, the sense of having an ordained place in the world, and other dialects of emotion for which English has no counterparts. No matter how determinedly one flees a country, one is obliged to take along some hand luggage; and can it be doubted that Omar Khayyam (to concentrate on him), having been barred from feeling shame (vb. int.: sharmàna) at an early age, continued to be affected by that remarkable ban throughout his later years, yes, long after his escape from his mothers’ zone of influence? Reader: it cannot. What’s the opposite of shame? What’s left when sharam is subtracted? That’s obvious: shamelessness. (38–9)

Rushdie does not give the Urdu word for ‘shamelessness’: ‘besharam’, a word meaning someone who is incapable of shame and hence outside of the civil relations. In other words, sharam is part of civility; one must possess the capacity for shame, it is essential, one cannot not have sharam or shame. Omar Khayyam, unaware of

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this emotion, asks his mothers, ‘What does it feel like?’ and gets the reply, ‘Your face gets hot … but your heart starts shivering’ (39). As Omar Khayyam goes out to meet the world, his mothers too, for the first time, find themselves ‘pierced by the forbidden arrows of sharam’ (39). At the Cantonment School, ‘unashamed, accustomed to solitude, he began to enjoy his near-invisibility’ (45), while Mrs Farah Rodriguez (née Zoroaster) returned to Q. shamelessly having aborted her child (whose father was Omar Khayyam). Upon the suicidal explosion in the theatre that kills Mahmoud Kemal, owner of Empire Theatre and called the ‘Woman’ as well as the ‘Weakling’, his daughter Bilquìs manages to escape. Her clothes singed by the explosion, her body naked, she grasps the remnant of her dupatta to cover her shame (64). Shame here is exposure of her modesty which she covers as she enters the Red Fort, a place of safety for Muslims in the days before partition. Later, after her marriage to Raza Hyder, a vicious cousin Duniyazad Begum scolds her, ‘The disgrace of your barrenness, Madam, is not yours alone. Don’t you know that shame is collective?’ (84). But when daughter Sufiya Zinobia is born and is almost rejected by Raza Hyder (she is not the desired boy to replace the earlier dead son) the baby blushes. We read the final sentence of the chapter, ‘Then, even then, she was not too easily shamed’ (90). However, when Bilquìs’s daughter Sufiya turns into a brainless idiot Bilquìs declares, ‘she is my shame’ (101). Shame affects Omar Khayyam in an altogether different fashion. We are told that at thirty he is ‘entirely without shame’ (81) because he refuses to be conscious of the meaning of the word: ‘He has deliberately chosen to expunge the word from his vocabulary, lest its explosive presence there amid the memories of his past and present actions shatter him like an old pot’ (81). We read again about Omar: ‘the fellow feels no shame’ (127), a description extended by Omar’s friend Iskander Harappa’s wife Rani who tells her daughter Arjumand Harappa, ‘[Omar] was world champion of shamelessness; he was international rogue and bastard number one’ (108). When Sufiya Zinobia kills the 218 turkeys, she discovered ‘in the labyrinths of her unconscious self the hidden path that links sharam to violence’ (139). The Urdu word sharam is used here because it is one of those words that remain untranslatable; they belong to the ‘law of takallouf’, a concept ‘which refuse[s] to travel across linguistic frontiers’ (104). In all these instances, as Omar Khayyam, now an immunologist, notes in his treatise The Case of Miss H., the power of the mind effects ‘“via direct nervous pathways”, the workings of the body’ (142). Shame and shameless, though, are part of an axis on which we turn, and ‘shamelessness, shame’ are the roots of violence (116). Shame leads to shameless acts, such as debased honour killings, a shameless act arising out of shame, the body’s action dissociated from thought and the superego. A ‘hapless country’ (251) can act in this manner and so can the progeny of the nation’s leader Raza Hyder, Sufia Zenobia. Imbecile, and an ‘incarnation of their shame’ (200), she whom Omar loves turns literally into a murderous beast on a rampage as the Devil gets inside her (232). In the chapter entitled ‘Blushing’ (Chapter Seven), Rushdie, for here it is clear that the author is speaking (‘I had recently become a father myself ’ (115)), writes about the Pakistani father in London who murders his only daughter

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because she had made love to a white boy. At one point he writes, ‘The news did not seem alien to me’ (115), because the diet of honour and shame (and he uses the common metaphor ‘diet’) ensures that shame should, in fact, outlive the act: the body will continue to live not so much in shame but as shame. Where do you imagine they go? – I mean emotions that should have been felt, but were not – such as regret for a harsh word, guilt for a crime, embarrassment, propriety, shame? – Imagine shame as a liquid, let us say a sweet fizzy toothrotting drink, stored in a vending machine. (122)

Shame the liquid, a ‘spectral fluid which might at any moment ooze uncontrollably from his every bodily opening’ (Rushdie, East, West 45), is never drunk, it simply spills like a ‘frothy lake’ because shame is not emotion as such, it does not belong to the language of feeling. That comes later. Shame is the body reacting, responding and bypassing the laws of intentionality. For the moment, it stands alone with its temper, timbre, voice, intonation (the suprasegmentals of language), as the words needed to reflect on the act (which the literary work will provide) come later. In the literary work of art (against one may suggest visual art generally), a description follows the act. It must compose a commentary around it and it is here that shame, even as its materiality is admitted, is nevertheless contained within some idea of intentionality. Rushdie’s own confession is apt here: ‘To unlock a society, look at its untranslatable words’ (104). In self-annotating the Urdu sharam (for shame) he had invoked the law of takallouf: ‘When takallouf gets between a husband and a wife, look out’ (104). Guilt, which is also a ‘modification or “phenotype” of shame’ (Leys 2007: 149), has heteronormative teleological presumptions built into it; shame involves a ‘Gestalt’ (148) by introducing the ‘primacy of personal difference’ (150) where takallouf, or tongue-tying formality, is the only response. Whereas trauma has a historical, collective teleology, an intergenerational consequence, a capacity to share, shame individuates us – one’s shame is distinct from another’s and cannot be reduced into a macro form, into a generalized concept, into a normative force field or narrative of desire.

Rushdie’s Affective Turn The theoretical section of this chapter began with a quotation from Wimsatt and Beardsley. I turn to it once again for this concluding statement. At one point in their essay Wimsatt and Beardsley return to ‘objects [as] the reasons for human emotion’ (36) by invoking Matthew Arnold who believed that ‘[poetry] attaches the emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact’ (34). The ‘idea’ is the consequence of a cognitive act without which the object has no meaning: affect and cognition are indissociable. To Arnold, as to Wimsatt and Beardsley, the affective fallacy transforms a subjective response into a personalized knowledge of the object. The response itself, without knowledge, has no value. The six affects canvassed in this chapter with reference to Rushdie’s works underscore the more nuanced,

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subtle and evanescent link between affect and object (the affect–object reciprocity) found in Rushdie. Jumpy Joshi’s ‘execrable poem’ shown to Saladin Chamcha is titled ‘I Sing the Body Eclectic’ (SV 405), a clear play on the Walt Whitman poem ‘I Sing the Body Electric’, a poem which places the body on equal footing with the soul. The body in Rushdie is itself an appraisal mechanism which does not require the soul (Plato’s Reason) to make immediate sense of objects. It is as if the creative artist does not read affect and cognition as two separate systems because the primary affect reappraises the object even when affect bypasses principles of intentionality. Bodily expressions – smell, sigh, voice, dance, religious ecstasy and shame in Rushdie, for instance – are not purely ‘authentic read-outs’ that correspond directly to discrete internal states; they are complex assemblages irreducible to ‘an idealized, self-authenticating interiority’ (Frank and Wilson 2012: 876). In other words, smell or sigh or shame (immediate, unmediated ‘products’ of the brain-body) is not absolutely identical with the mind’s reduction of them through categories of reason. The turn to affect in Rushdie (and the consciousness of it is quite explicit in the works discussed in this chapter) confirms what language has always known about the body’s place in the construction of meaning. Without an understanding of affects as autonomic but with the proviso that affects reappraise the object (i.e. possess some cognitive capacity to restructure the object), one misses the take on affects in the Rushdie aesthetic. Affects are presented neither as a semantically constructed world of intentionality nor as purely automatic body movement. Rushdie had given his affect manifesto as ‘I sigh therefore I am’ because, as is true of language itself, affective disposition is at the heart of the creative impulse and it is on this point that Petya, the agoraphobic and autistic eldest son of Nero Golden in The Golden House (2017), disagrees with the Borges character Ireneo Funes who remembered everything but only as figures and symbols (GH 196–7). The affective disposition is prior to the mind’s organization of perception – neuroscience gives it the more specific time frame of half a second in which the body with phenomenal speed ‘thinks’ below ‘the threshold of conscious recognition’ (Leys 2011a: 450) – and replenishes the role of intentionality through a ‘dissonant’ mode of agency that breaks ‘the previous identity between consciousness and intention’ (Connolly 2011b: 793). Making consciousness a more modest, less intrusive, power – as Salman Rushdie himself does and which is, I suggest, Rushdie’s own manifesto on affects – gives the body itself a degree of control, its tactile acts and ecological sensitivity acknowledged: shame, for instance, generates a mood before consciousness detects the link. The literary evidence, as gathered here in respect of Rushdie, certainly shows how the exchange between a hierarchical mind and a body network – the aloof, critical, detached disembodied mind against a brazen, embodied brain – now enters into a more open, layered and non-hierarchical network that rejects the binaries of sense and sensibility, body and mind embedded in the wider culture. The Rushdie aesthetic provides textual evidence for this reading of non-volitional states outside of the domain of will and understanding.

Chapter 5 SALMAN RUSHDIE CINEMA AND BOLLYWOOD

Film has been one of the great art forms for Rushdie – an art form to which he has returned in all of his works. Indeed in his latest work, The Golden House (2017), discussed at length in the Epilogue chapter of this book, the narrator’s point of view takes the form of Sergei Eisenstein’s shooting script.1 Ten great films – Pather Panchali (about which Rushdie said in an interview in the Emory Quadrangle (2010b: 13), ‘Pather Panchali [Satyajit Ray, Song of the Little Road, 1955] is the film that I would choose when asked for the greatest film ever made … Citizen Kane would probably come second’), The Seven Samurai (Kurosawa, 1954), The Seventh Seal (Bergman, 1957), Ashes and Diamonds (Wajda, 1958), 8½ (Fellini, 1963), L’Avventura (Antonioni, 1960), Alphaville (Godard, 1965), Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), Jules et Jim (Truffaut, 1962), The Exterminating Angel (Buñuel, 1962) – are mentioned on a single typed sheet in the Salman Rushdie Archive (22/7). Citizen Kane (Welles, 1941) does not appear on this list; its inclusion in the Emory Quadrangle interview seems like an afterthought and, effectively, expands Rushdie’s list to eleven. What do we make of this list? The taste is catholic and high culture. One Indian film is mentioned but, then, it is a Satyajit Ray classic which never entered the Indian popular imagination, at least not in states outside of Bengal. The list is principally of European avant-garde films made during a very short period between Bergman (1957) and Godard (1965). It is very likely that Rushdie saw these films during his late Rugby and Cambridge years (1961–5; 1965–8) and quite possibly in art-house cinemas where, before the video cassette revolution, re-runs of classic films were not uncommon and responses to them governed by a collective sense of engagement with the ‘new’. As already noted in Chapter 1, in the Rushdie Archive (22/6) a passage from Godard’s Alphaville is given as the second epigraph to The Satanic Verses. The first, which is from Defoe, is retained in the published version; however, the one from Godard (‘We live in the void of metamorphosis … are we near to our conscience, or far from it?’) is not. The epigraphs (one published, the other edited out) show how Rushdie moves seamlessly between authors and auteurs with the avant-garde, the lure of the experimental and the challenging, invariably informing his choice. Rushdie’s cinematic ‘catholicity’ finds a qualification in the long essay he wrote on The Wizard of Oz (1992). As already noted, he comes to this work with a different criterion, not one of ‘sense’ but one of ‘sensibility’. The Wizard of Oz,

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which Rushdie refers to as ‘definitely a Good Film’ (13), is also ‘Art’ even if the latter is qualified through an ironic injunction: ‘Call it (reach for your revolvers now) art’. The monograph on The Wizard of Oz, which was a foundational film for Rushdie, tells us that he saw the film at the Metro Cinema in 1957 at the age of ten, a crucial age around which he also saw Bollywood films, which had a decisive influence on him: Shree 420 (1955; ‘Mr 420’), Funtoosh (1956; ‘The Madhatter’), Hatim Tai (1956) and Mother India (1957). The ten-year-old child experiencing this classic Hollywood fantasy may have been ignorant of foreign countries and ‘about growing up’, but he came with a better understanding of the ‘cinema of the fantastic than any Western child of the same age’ (11). Rushdie was a Bombay boy and, like any other Bombay boy, regardless of class, he knew his Bollywood – a Cinema in which fantasy figures prominently. He confesses that it is easy to satirize Bollywood, but then he continues: ‘gods descending from the heavens to meddle in human affairs, supermen, magic potions, superheroes, demonic villains and so on have always been the staple diet of the Indian filmgoer’ (11). Although there is, on public record, a list of avant-garde and modernist great films that Rushdie admires, The Wizard of Oz (the fantasy which, according to him, is also art and a good film) is the one on which he writes a short monograph. What The Wizard of Oz does (and what his own fiction achieves so remarkably well) is transform the tawdriness, the vulgarity, the excesses of Bollywood cinema into art. And it was Bollywood that ensured that he always knew from his childhood a lot more about the ‘cinema of the fantastic’, and by extension the aesthetics of fantasy as a literary form, than many others (11): ‘Nobody from Bombay should be without a basic film vocabulary,’ he had noted in Midnight’s Children (33). Rushdie’s passion for cinema is not limited to a passive fascination with what is modernity’s greatest art form, since there is strong evidence of his interest in the writing of screenplays for film and TV. Earlier, we had examined the screenplay of ‘Crosstalk’ and ‘The Courter’. Two further screenplays in the Rushdie Archive may be noted here to show his long-standing interest in cinematic composition.2 The first is a screenplay entitled ‘Silverland’, dated 13 November 1984 (60/11, pp. 100) and subsequently revised on 15 December 1984 (60/12, pp. 101). The text, written soon after he had completed Shame (a novel which he did think about transforming into a film), is divided into two – ‘Argentina Scenes 1935–1939’ and ‘English Scene in the present c. 1983’.3 ‘Silverland’ is very much a first run of ideas that make their way into Part III, Section 2, of The Satanic Verses: ‘It was so, it was not, in a time long forgot, that there lived in the silver-land of Argentina a certain Don Enrique Diamond, who knew much about birds and little about women, and his wife Rosa’ (SV 143). The second composition is not a full screenplay but an outline, a ‘film essay’, titled ‘Mr Kipling as the Bandar-log: A Fragment for a Television Script’ (58/12). Rushdie reads Kipling’s works as a vicious satire on Indians (‘bandar-log’ in The Jungle Book, of course, means ‘monkey people’) and not in the manner of someone like Nirad Chaudhuri who felt that Kipling’s ‘racism was a relatively minor part of his make-up’. The film essay suggests that the film would have three main locations: the first would be ‘Sezincote, the imperial folly built in Gloucestershire by Charles Cockerell, an East India Company Grandee:

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onion domes, Hindu gods … weather should be grey and drizzling – final assimilation of Kipling into the “idea” of an Empire’. The second would be scenes in India: Kipling House in Bombay Esplanade, Marine Lodge in Lahore, to which Kipling belonged, and Shimla. ‘Silent movie-style cards to punctuate the action as the period also captures the birth of cinema. Use of Goanese Indian woman as ayah’, writes Rushdie. He adds, ‘Kipling is twice upstaged: when he died he was upstaged by the death of George V; when he went to receive his Nobel Prize for Literature, the city was in mourning for the death of the King of Sweden.’ The film essay suggests that the final shot would be of ‘Monkey People’ who had been ruling themselves for thirty years. The evidence is not clear-cut, but it looks as if the project was sketched in 1977, or a little later, because this is thirty years after Indian independence. The proposed running length of the film is given as seventyfive minutes. There are a few loose leaves on the subject as well: ‘A satiric verse of the period ran …’, observes Rushdie, When the Empire needs a stitch in ‘er Send for Kipling and for Kitchener

Remembering Max Ophüls Salman Rushdie’s fascination with cinema and the art of screenplay composition informs his fiction at every point. In Shalimar the Clown (2005), Max Ophuls (Maximilian Ophuls, the ‘u’ without the umlaut), an ex-American ambassador to India, is dead before the second page of the novel is finished (SC 4). What follows in the next forty-odd pages of the section titled ‘India’ is a long tracking shot that recounts Ophuls’s life during the two days prior to his brutal killing. As already noted, to Rushdie, cinematic techniques are essentially novelistic, since for him the camera functions as the character or narrator’s point of view (‘pee oh vee’, as we read in SV 108). Conversely, in a homage to cinema, and in fiction as well, the shot (tracking, dolly, crane, shot-reverse, the axial cut and so on) ‘alters’ and even ‘condenses’ ‘[London] according to the imperatives of film’ (SV 422). So in the case of the first section of Shalimar the Clown, the narrative is tracked with an implicit homage to a great director who made films in German, French and English and after whom the character in the novel is named. Maximilian Ophüls, originally Maximilian Oppenheimer, of Jewish heritage, was born in Germany in 1902 and died in Germany in 1957 while working on his French film The Lovers of Montparnasse. In America, between 1941 and 1950 (having escaped from Nazi-occupied France), he made four films: The Exile (1947), Letters from an Unknown Woman (1948), Caught (1949) and The Reckless Moment (1949). I mention these films so as to ‘locate’ the name of Rushdie’s character. The question we ask once again is, ‘Why the far too obvious choice of Max Ophuls as a name in a Rushdie novel?’ I turn to a fascinating essay by Daniel Morgan (2011: 127–63) on the aesthetics and ethics of camera movement in the

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films of Max Ophüls. Morgan’s argument – using Ophüls as his proof text – is that ‘camera movements are in some way deeply, perhaps inextricably, interwoven with concerns with ethics … tracking shots (after Godard) are matters of morality’ (128). Aesthetics and ethics in this argument are closely connected. My point, however, is not that Rushdie’s novelistic tracking is like Ophüls’s extensive use of tracking shots and is primarily a matter ‘of ethics’ (132), but that there is a consciousness of cinematic point of view in Rushdie as well. Naming the ambassador Ophuls is both a homage to cinema as an art form and an acknowledgement of the aesthetic as well as ethical links between form and content. Take sound away from Rushdie, take tracking shots away from his narrative design and, like Ophuls (the character as well as the historical director), he is in agony. There is the oft-quoted doggerel written by the actor James Mason on the set of Caught (1949) about Maximilian Ophüls: I think I know the reason why Producers tend to make him cry. Inevitably they demand Some stationary set-ups, and A shot that does not call for tracks Is agony for poor dear Max Who, separated from his dolly, Is wrapped in deepest melancholy. Once, when they took away his crane, I thought he’d never smile again. (Morgan 132)

Rushdie requires a similar freedom, the freedom of Ophüls – the use of the crane, the dolly, the track shot to bring image and sound together. Rai (Umeed) Merchant, the narrator of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, born like his creator in 1947 and already prefigured as the camera-obsessed character Saleem Merchant in ‘The Courter’, is the pictorial or ekphrastic amanuensis (‘Photography is my way of understanding the world’, says Rai (GBHF 210)) of Vina Apsara. He begins to document Vina singing when he is given a German camera (a Voigtländer Vito CL) at the tender age of thirteen. There, is in fact, an entire chapter (Chapter 8, ‘The Decisive Moment’) devoted to the history of photography. His break as an accomplished photographer comes with his acquaintance with the French photographer M. Henri Hulot who, during the improbable earthquake in Bombay, had turned his camera not towards the falling houses and the debris but towards the sky to capture kites ‘being torn to shreds by the boiling winds and the Dionysiac madness of their sudden freedom’ (218). Photography, Hulot tells Rai, is the ability to ‘precompose’ an image in the mind and then capturing it at the decisive moment, intuiting, in a sense, what Bergson had called ‘pure duration’ – that affective moment which comes just before cognition or semantic reduction (221). Photography, after all, is the foundation of cinema, and films convince us because on the screen there is a levelling out of reality: everything is wraith-like

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and, therefore, equally real, as is the case with Ugetsu Monogatari by the Japanese filmmaker Mizoguchi. The kind of cinematic cosmopolitanism noted above is especially evident in the technique of visual and descriptive juxtaposition (ekphrasis), the ‘pictorial turn’ that we find in Rushdie. The Millais painting, The Boyhood of Raleigh, in Saleem Sinai’s bedroom and other ekphrastic ‘moments’ are not instances of technical virtuosity but are sites where, in W. J. T. Mitchell’s words, ‘political, institutional, and social antagonisms play themselves out in the materiality of representation’ (1994: 91). The technique brings into the text a second, visual text with its own affects on the reader – affects not necessarily corresponding to either the character–viewer’s or the narrator’s description of it. The visual provides Rushdie with a conceptual space in which to show the place of painting and film in literary modernity and, at the same time, challenge the canonical fetish for descriptive prose. It follows that the references to the Moor Boabdil’s last sigh upon the surrender of Granada in The Moor’s Last Sigh cannot be disentangled from the representation of that event in the Spanish painter Francisco Bayeu’s ceiling fresco Surrender of Granada (1763) or in Francisco Pradilla’s nationalist painting Sigh of the Moor (1892). In Vassilena Parashkevova’s exceptional chapter in the Mendes volume (2012: 50–69), these paintings function as visual palimpsests to the novelistic art of verbal representation. Ekphrasis is not the only technique of visual representation we find in Rushdie – verbal description as cinematic shooting script is another – but it is certainly one with a more powerful ideological function inasmuch as it unsettles and questions what Ramone has called ‘Eurocentric storytelling forms and structures’ (Mendes 2012: 99). A cinematic form that questions these culturally exclusive structures is Bollywood, to which I now turn my attention.

And Then There is Bollywood Rushdie’s interest in Bollywood has been discussed by a number of critics, most notably by Stadtler (2014), but without any supporting data about Rushdie’s own familiarity with Bombay cinema as he was growing up in Bombay. What has not been explained is the nature of the young Rushdie’s own connection with Indian Cinema, a form whose beginnings in India in 1913 with Dadasaheb Phalke’s silent film Raja Harishchandra is near congruent with Dr Aziz’s return from Heidelberg in Midnight’s Children. In a private conversation at Emory University on Wednesday, 23 February 2011, Rushdie reminisced about the movies he had seen before leaving for London and Rugby in 1961 and explained that the ‘Pioneer Café’ chapter in Midnight’s Children was consciously written with cinematic techniques in mind and as a homage to the form. He said he saw all of Raj Kapoor’s movies to that year. He had also seen Funtoosh (1956), the film that made the neologism famous, but the word itself had a different meaning in his family – they used it to mean ‘finished’ and the like. His family was involved in the film industry and one aunt (Hamida Begum), in fact, had an affair with Raj Kapoor’s father, Prithviraj, the

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grand patriarch of the family, who played the role of Alam Ara’s father in Hindi cinema’s first talkie, Alam Ara (1931). Rushdie declared his love for Hindi cinema, his familiarity with fanzines, notably Filmfare, but reminded me of a 2005 interview in which he stated that he had not been particularly influenced by Indian movies ‘except in one regard’. ‘Except in one regard’ is a key qualification because the exception is made not to Indian cinema’s cinematographic possibilities and their influence on his writing but to its narrative capaciousness, its portmanteau quality and its generic fluidity where ‘everything [is] at once’, as it can be ‘an adventure, a love story, a comedy, and a musical, all at the same time’. This is a revealing testimony and casts a disquieting shadow on any claims to a singular or dominant cinematic anxiety of influence. The onus is on us to undertake another form of research. How much did the young Rushdie know about Bombay Hindi/Bollywood cinema before he left for England in 1961, since this is his only continuous period of engagement with this cinema as one heterogeneous but interconnected cultural commodity?

The Wonderful World of Filmfare Precocious as the young Rushdie was, he would have started reading film fanzines from an early age in ‘that super-epic motion picture of a city’ (MLS 129). The most influential fanzine of the fifties and sixties was Filmfare, back issues of which are held in the Pune Film and Television Archive. Filmfare was a fortnightly publication which devoted many pages as well to Hollywood and fashion: a film magazine that doubled up as India’s answer to Vogue. Given the family’s film connections, it is very likely (and I suggest almost certain) that at four and a half, Salman Rushdie would have seen lying in his imperially named Windsor Villa home on Warden Road, Bombay 26 (now Bhulabhai Desai Road, Mumbai), the first issue of Filmfare, dated 7 March 1952, delivered to his parents as a gift from The Times of India Group (publishers of the Times of India as well as Filmfare). Between 1952 and 1961 what did he read or just see in the pages of this magazine? In the context of a reading of Filmfare between 1952 and 1961 (when Rushdie leaves Bombay) his Indian film (and even European/Hollywood) references take on a different meaning. In ‘The Kolynos Kid’ chapter of Midnight’s Children, the magazine gets a direct mention by Saleem Sinai’s aunt Pia Aziz, a greater star than even Vyjayantimala: ‘once the reporters of Filmfare and Screen Goddess would pay black money to get inside [her flat]’ (235). Earlier the nine-year-old Saleem (it is 1956 and Rushdie himself is nine) had noted: ‘I learned the truth behind the Filmfare gossip about the dancer Vyjayantimala’ (171). Apart from news about the Indian film industry (and primarily what came to be called Bollywood), Filmfare carried extended sections on Hollywood films as well as British and European cinema. The first issue has Kamini Kaushal, the reigning Queen of Indian Cinema, on the cover with a colour poster of the film Sangdil (‘The stone-hearted’). The cover girl, Kamini Kaushal, is not mentioned in the

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Rushdie oeuvre, but as he grew older he would have recognized that Sangdil was a reasonably sincere copy of the Charlotte Brönte classic Jane Eyre. Although cinema production was not officially part of a legitimate industry until much later (in fact, the early nineties), there was an entertainment tax of 33 per cent plus a further 60 per cent on producer’s profits. Banks would not fund projects which meant that families like the Rushdies would have made private investments in Hindi cinema. The second issue of the magazine (21 March 1952) shows Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru (a Rushdie favourite) mingling with the leading stars of the time, among them Suraiya, Vyjayantimala, Nargis and Raj Kapoor, the last three mentioned in a number of places in Rushdie’s works.4 The new nation, and its first prime minister, certainly, clearly saw popular cinema as a useful medium for the nationalist project. Filmfare began a regular cartoon in its early years in which R. K. Laxman, the Times of India cartoonist of the celebrated ‘Common Man’ sketch, depicted caricatures of well-known Hindi film actors with the title ‘Stars I Never Met’. The first cartoon (2 April 1952) was of India’s finest actor, Dilip Kumar, and followed in later issues with caricatures of well-known actors such as Madhubala and Bhagwan (4 March 1955). Salman Rushdie, who grew up on both the Times of India and Filmfare, knew Laxman’s cartoons well. In The Moor’s Last Sigh (229) there is a tiny line sketch of the Common Man’s face. Laxman is introduced as the bemused commentator on Aurora Zogoiby’s erotic rendition of an innocuous cricket pitch kiss planted on the cheek of the Indian cricketer Abbas Ali Beg by an over-enthusiastic supporter at the Bombay Brabourne Stadium. Rushdie writes: ‘Even the cartoonist R K Laxman’s celebrated Common Man [sketch embedded here], was perched in the East Stand bleachers, looking shocked in his goofy, unworldly way.’ The Common Man in a variant Hindi or Urdu translation ‘Ajeeb Mamouli’ (Mr Odd Ordinary or Mr Strange Ordinary) is a pseudonymous name that Rushdie suggests for himself during the fatwa years. In Joseph Anton, he recalls Laxman’s cartoon as a figure who no longer had control of his name: he found that he had begun to look ‘like the famous Common Man created by the cartoonist R K Laxman in the Times of India: innocent, bemused, bald, with tufts of graying hair spraying out of his ears’ (JA 164). The British Secret Service found this name too much of a mouthful and accepted his other suggestion, ‘Joseph Anton’, the first names of the great writers Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. In the Bollywood film Chennai Express (2013), Shah Rukh Khan, the male lead, makes a virtue of the expression ‘the common man’, which he uses in English throughout the film. Filmfare captured many instances of the nation’s leaders, showcasing Hindi cinema as national or even nationalist cinema. Prime Minister Nehru and the nation’s first president, Dr Rajendra Prasad, are often seen attending award ceremonies for films and actors (Filmfare, 2 January 1956, 3 February 1956, for instance) and indeed attending opening nights of films on cultural or nationalist subjects such as Kavi Kalidas (1959) on the life of India’s greatest dramatist and Raj Kapoor’s Jis Desh Mem Ganga Behti Hai (1960; ‘The Land through which flows the Ganges’), a melodramatic revolutionary epic. An Indian Film Delegation is sent by Nehru as part of a cultural exchange with China and Filmfare (17 February 1956)

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carries photos of Bollywood film stars with Chinese leaders (including Chou-enlai and Mao) and with workers in a Shanghai film studio. In return, members of the Chinese armed forces visit R. K. Studios. Reflecting Nehru’s own tilt towards socialism, a Soviet film delegation, too, visits India (1 February 1957). In a meeting with the star Vyjayantimala, Nehru tells her that Burma’s president U. Nu is a great fan of hers (1 March 1957), and on his state visit Indonesia’s president Sukarno meets film stars Nalini Jaywant, Dev Anand and Sunil Dutt. Sukarno also watches the shooting of Dev Anand’s film Kalapani (31 January 1958). On his visit to India the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh watches, given his revolutionary instincts, with the director Shorab Modi his film Jhansi Ki Rani (28 February 1958), a melodramatic epic about the queen who during the Indian Mutiny (1857–58) became a symbol of resistance to the British Raj. Scattered throughout the Rushdie corpus (both published and archival) are references that may be easily traced back to his reading of Filmfare. The 20 March 1953 issue of the fanzine carried a review of the film Teen Batti Char Rasta (‘Three Lights but Four Roads’, dir. V. Shantaram) in which the three lights are love, learning and loyalty. It was a very successful film about which Filmfare wrote: ‘It is hard to recall a full-length comedy on the Indian Screen that has successfully sustained the interest of the audience throughout the showing time.’ In Midnight’s Children, the three sisters Alia (learning), Mumtaz (later Amina, love) and Emerald (who is anything but loyal) are ‘known as the “Teen Batti”, the three bright lights’ (53). Around this time the glamour stars of Indian cinema were Raj Kapoor and Nargis. They were linked romantically, with Raj Kapoor’s suffering wife often left behind when Nargis and Raj Kapoor travelled overseas to attend film functions. Both these stars would play a pivotal role in Rushdie’s cinematic imaginary. The young Rushdie would have seen a photo of the music room at R. K. Studios (Filmfare, 18 February 1955) with Raj Kapoor singing and playing on the tambourine and Nargis listening. Nargis is invariably seen in a white sari. It is a sari, and not any other Indian dress, that women wear in Rushdie. Also in the photo are his music directors Shanker on the harmonium and Jaikishan on the accordion. Lyricist Hazrat Jaipuri is there too. Another photo (Filmfare, 11 May 1956) on the sets of the forthcoming film Mother India (1957) carries the caption: ‘ “Mummy” Nargis and her “boys” Sunil Dutt & Rajendra Kumar’. The filmic mother–son relationship turning into a real-life wife–husband relationship is made much of in The Moor’s Last Sigh. An important feature of Filmfare was a section titled ‘Films Abroad’. Hollywood films figured prominently in this section with reviews and publicity posters of British and European cinema as well. The 8 January 1954 issue carried an advertisement for the forthcoming film The Robe (1953, with Richard Burton and Victor Mature). The 30 April 1954 issue carried a full coverage of the 26th Academy Awards ceremony, and a fortnight before (16 April 1954), the visit of Gregory Peck to Bombay is celebrated while the meeting between the Bombay filmmaker Bimal Roy and David Lean is covered in the 19 February 1954 issue. Lean shows an interest in producing a film on the Taj Mahal. Alfred Hitchcock is also enthusiastically entertained at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay (9 December 1955).

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There are colour pictures of Ginger Rogers, Rita Hayworth, Sadie Thompson and John Crawford in the 14 May 1954 issue, with an account of Rita Moreno, the provocative twenty-one-year-old Puerto Rican beauty in Garden of Evil (1954). Filmfare, 18 March 1955, ‘News from Hollywood Section’ had colour pictures of Jean Simmons, Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Robert Taylor and Stewart Granger.5 The 8 July 1955 issue carried a glamorous photo of Marilyn Monroe with another of Rita Moreno in the 22 July 1955 issue. Lana Turner is in the 2 September 1955 issue. That year, Ava Gardner and Elizabeth Taylor had also made their way into Filmfare with colour photos of them, and both Marilyn Monroe and Jean Simmons are in the 16 April 1957 and 13 September 1957 issues, respectively. Claudia Cardinale in a swimsuit in Filmfare, 9 October 1959, a photo of Joan Collins in 11 September 1959, Gina Lolobrigida in 15 March 1960 and one of Sophia Loren in 2 December 1960 were among other memorable non-Indian stars who featured in the fanzine. A special section entitled ‘Letter from Hollywood’ would mention film greats such as Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift (23 May 1958, for instance). The year 1955 was important. The young Salman turns eight and from now on has a fuller memory of Bombay films. The 18 March 1955 issue carried a full coverage of the 2nd Annual Filmfare Awards with chief minister of Bombay Morarji Desai presiding. This politician, ‘who was intolerably ancient, drank his own urine, had skin which rustled like rice-paper’, as chief minister of Bombay had banned alcohol (MC 394) and when his party won the January 1977 elections ‘the nation had been placed in the custody of an ancient dotard who ate pistachios and cashews and daily took a glass of “his own water”’ (MC 425). This impossible politician returns to preside over the Filmfare awards ceremony the following year and is ceremoniously introduced with Shakespeare’s words, ‘All the world’s a stage’ (Filmfare, 30 March 1956). More importantly a key text for the Rushdie filmic imaginary, Shree 420, is premièred on 7 October at the Regal Theatre (Filmfare, 11 November 1955). The Regal, now in need of serious restoration, was then the premier Bombay theatre where many of the early Filmfare award ceremonies were held. It may well be that the Rushdie family was invited to the film’s première. The review of the film in that issue is entitled ‘Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420 Impressively Spectacular Production’. The reviewer, unlike the later, more mature writer Rushdie, remains unimpressed with its shallow social philosophy: ‘With all these assets and virtues, “Shree 420” suffers from its unrealistic, unnatural philosophy, which permeates character, incident and each line of dialogue and serves up trite criticism of the social order. Is goodness, as shown here, exclusively a “have-not” virtue?’ The year’s Filmfare (9 December 1955) also carried an advertisement for the film Funtoosh. The actor Dev Anand’s many disguises in the film is celebrated in the 23 December 1955 issue of Filmfare. Chapter 17 of Midnight’s Children carries the title ‘The Kolynos Kid’. An advertisement for Kolynos Toothpaste with a kid with Kolynos toothpaste on his toothbrush first surfaces in Filmfare on 13 May 1955. It recurs, with different images, in a number of later issues (10 June, 24 June, 1 August). The jingle (this time with a woman in the advertisement) for the toothpaste in the 10 June 1955

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issue reads: ‘Green Kolynos with active Chlorophyll not only whitens your teeth. It also arrests decay.’ The advertisement on a Kemp’s Corner hoarding with Rushdie’s own variant jingle (‘Keep Teeth Kleen and Keep Teeth Brite, Keep Teeth Kolynos Super White!’) makes its way into Midnight’s Children twice: we find it first in the ‘Snakes and Ladders’ chapter (152–3) and then again in ‘The Kolynos Kid’ chapter (234) where the jingle is italicized. Apart from Kolynos, bath soap Lux would be endorsed by Waheeda Rehman and Vyjayantimala (25 August 1961) and the facial cream Ponds would figure in a number of advertisements too. In The Ground Beneath Her Feet (124) we find: ‘Vina liked to claim that she’d taken the name from a magazine advertisement in Femina or Filmfare for beauty soap or luxury silks or some such frippery.’ In Shame (33), Hatim Tai (who also provides the name Tai to the boatman in Midnight’s Children) is referred to as the ‘legendary adventurer’. Although the tale of this adventurer alongside those of others in the Arabian Nights apocryphal collection (there is only a passing reference to the tale of Hatim Tai in the critical edition (Nights 270 and 271)) would have been part of family lore, the story of Hatim Tai would have come to young Rushdie’s attention through Homi Wadia’s famous film version Hatim Tai (1956). The young Rushdie clearly saw this film, which was given prominence in the Filmfare of 2 March 1956. The advertisement for ‘HATIM TAI’ (in capitals) ran: ‘The Most Colourful Episode from the Arabian Nights Thrillingly Told on Celluloid in Full Gevacolour’. Seven further pages were devoted to this film which opened in a number of Bombay theatres simultaneously: Novelty, Chitra, Neptune, Kasturba and Vijay Cinema. The fanzine also carried full colour photos of the key actors Jairaj and Shakila together with the producer and director Homi Wadia’s letter of thanks to the cast. A year after Hatim Tai, the film with the deepest impact on Rushdie, Mother India, is described with considerable reverence in the pages of Filmfare. The figure of Nargis, Mother India, as the upholder of the Law of Dharma, transformed into a Durga or Kali figure holding a gun is striking (25 October 1957). (The figure is reprised in a large advertisement in the 8 November 1957 issue.) The star is quoted as saying, ‘[Cinema] does not belong to any one nation. It belongs to humanity’ (16 August 1957). The review of the film in Filmfare, 22 November 1957, refers to the film’s ‘intensely emotional drama and superb performance’ by Nargis, ‘the First Lady of the Indian Cinema’. The review also commends Kanhaiyalal’s reprise of his role first played in the earlier version of the film (Aurat, ‘Woman’, 1940) seventeen years back. The film is recalled throughout 1958 as it breaks box office records (the 14 March 1958 advertisement for the film reads: ‘Now in its 21st glorious week’). Nargis receives India’s fourth highest civilian award, the Padma Shri, from the President of India (28 February 1958 and 21 November 1958). The stars of the mother and son characters in the film (Nargis and Sunil Dutt) get married (Filmfare, 28 March 1958), and there are many pages devoted to Nargis in the fanzine (Filmfare, 29 August 1958, has two full pages in colour of the star). The director of the film (which is nominated for an Oscar in the Best Foreign Film category) travels to Hollywood with his wife and meets John Ford (15 April 1958). Rushdie clearly knows his Mother India extremely well.

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In 1957, the Rushdie family’s favourite Urdu poet and a family friend, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, comes to Bombay from Pakistan (in those days, cultural exchange, including through cinema, between India and Pakistan was not uncommon). The poet’s mushaira (poetic gathering) takes place on 9 February and is reported in Filmfare, 1 March 1957. The great poet, whose magnificent ghazals are sung by Rekha in The Satanic Verses and by Jamila Singer in the film version of Midnight’s Children, is accompanied by another from Pakistan, Hazrat Jigar Muradabadi. The mushaira is compered by the poet and translator Sardar Ali Jafri. Among those present are Hindi film lyricists Hazrat Jaipuri, Shailendra, Qamar Jalabadi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Shakeel Badayuni and Rajendra Singh Bedi, directors Kamal Amrohi and Shorab Modi, musicians Shanker and Jaikishan and actors Balraj Sahni, Shyama, Nirupa Roy, Om Prakash, Guru Dutt, Dev Anand, Bharat Bhooshan, Nargis, Meena Kumari and Waheeda Rehman. Nargis was seen jotting down the poems and possibly composing her own while the accomplished Urdu poet and actor Meena Kumari remained a passive participant. The mushaira did not finish until one in the morning. After Shree 420 and Mother India, the third film that Rushdie returns to often enough in his works is Mughal-e-Azam.6 As early as 19 March 1954, Filmfare had noted that K. Asif ’s Mughal-e-Azam had been on the floor for the past three years. The film would take another six years to complete. The first reference to its date of release is given in Filmfare, 1 July 1960, with a photo of the film’s lead actors Dilip Kumar and Madhubala and a release date of 5 August 1960. The first advertisement for the film with the rubric ‘The sword that couldn’t kill romance’ appeared in Filmfare, 29 July 1960. Another advertisement (12 August 1960) carried large black-and-white photos of the chief actors Prithviraj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar and Madhubala in connection with this film. In the 26 August 1960 issue, Mughale-Azam was reviewed as a ‘history-making film’. The young Rushdie would have been disappointed to read (21 April 1961) that in the year’s 8th Filmfare Awards Mughal-e-Azam received only three awards, those for best film, best dialogue and best cinematography. The ceremony was presided over by the President of India Dr Rajendra Prasad himself (14 July 1961). Later in life, the adult Rushdie would declare that the greatest film was Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955). This film was noted with some regularity, beginning with Filmfare, 13 April 1956, with a review that said, ‘Satyajit Ray makes a film and prods his audience … but that is his greatness, not his fault.’ It is praised again in the 11 April 1958 issue: ‘The chief ingredient of a great film is the integrity that goes into making it.’ In the 24 October 1958 Filmfare section entitled ‘A film letter from Hollywood’, director George Stevens wrote, ‘Pather Panchali is one of the best pictures I have ever seen.’ And so memories linger on only to reappear in fiction.

Back to Bom/Bollywood In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Moor Zogoiby, reflecting his own creator’s passion for trivia, confesses that he was a kind of ‘information magpie’

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gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered, and caught the light. Fool’s gold, or priceless nuggets mined from my singular childhood’s rich bohemian seam? (240)

The young Rushdie, an ‘information magpie’, gets a chutnified version of Indian popular culture largely through India’s dominant fanzine of the fifties and sixties. As the many references to cinema in his corpus show, the material is creatively used towards an aesthetic that combines surfaces with depths, the high with the low and the avant-garde with the readily consumable and iterative. By the time we reach Rushdie’s paean on love and music, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Filmfare memories flow in and out. So very unoriginally, Vina professes to be in love with Raj Kapoor (126), nostalgically remembers the days when some Bombay cinema halls only showed Western films (128) even as Ormus himself is sought after by ‘Hindi movie playback producers’ (181), influenced as he is by Bombay rock Boom Chickaboom (a clear reference to some of the comedic songs of Kishore Kumar as well) (251). In the novel, the colour scene from Mughal-e-Azam (only one scene was in colour in the original; sadly the film has subsequently been rendered in full colour) is recalled as the moment when the film bursts ‘into colour for the big dance number’ (416), the scene that connects directly with male spectatorial desire. When Rushdie returns to this film in his novels, it is invariably to invoke the allure of Anarkali, the courtesan dancer, to suggest that great moments of history are, in fact, moments of passion, of love, of desire unrequited and entombed. In Shalimar the Clown, where Boonyi’s great dance is modelled on Anarkali’s in Mughal-e-Azam, this is especially evident. The account of Filmfare given above, and Rushdie’s familiarity with it, reinforces an important claim we make: When Rushdie writes about Indian urban culture as a culture ‘full of fakery and gaudiness and superficiality and failed imaginations’ but also full of ‘high vitality, linguistic verve’ (1991: 110), and metropolitan excitement, he reads Indian urban culture through the eyes of his beloved Bombay and its dominant art form – the Bollywood cinema as captured primarily in the films of the fifties and celebrated in Filmfare. In this fanzine, however, the term ‘Bollywood’ is never used for Hindi or Bombay cinema. And yet this glossy fanzine had already begun to capture what Ormus speaks of as the ‘mystic vulgarity of Bollywood’ in The Ground Beneath Her Feet (425). Although Rushdie himself had used only ‘Bombay’ or ‘Hindi’ cinema in his early writings, his usage always carried a more capacious meaning, the kind now attributed to Bollywood. The emergence of ‘Bollywood’ as a generic descriptor of Bombay or Hindi cinema is recent, but it is culturally so pervasive that it has made its way into the Oxford English Dictionary. What the OED is unaware of – and what Rushdie understands so well – is the way in which the word has acquired its current meaning and has now displaced the earlier descriptors (Bombay cinema, Indian popular cinema, Hindi cinema) functioning, horrifyingly perhaps, as an ‘empty signifier’ that may be used for any reading of popular Indian cinema. The triumph of the word is

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nothing less than spectacular as it is now a stand-in for ‘a more diffuse cultural conglomeration involving a range of distribution and consumption activities from websites to music cassettes, from cable to radio’ (Rajadhyaksha 2008: 20). This association with Bollywood ‘dreams’ was in many ways seamless for what Rushdie did was read Bombay cinema as ‘Bollywood’ (which, as we have seen, is more than just Bombay cinema) even before it had acquired that meaning. In his treatment, Bombay cinema was both film and a particular logic of culture. It was, finally, a form that mediated how Indians, both homeland and diaspora, read quotidian life. After all, ‘nobody from Bombay should be without a basic film vocabulary’, Saleem Sinai had declared as he narrated his story in Midnight’s Children (33). And all Rashid had to do as the teller of tales in Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) was to ‘part his lips in a plump red smile and out would pop some brandnew saga, complete with sorcery, love-interest, princesses, wicked uncles, fat aunts, moustachioed gangsters in yellow check pants, fantastic locations, cowards, heroes, fights, and half a dozen catchy, hummable tunes’ (1990: 16–17). So both in terms of controlling narrative structure and representation, Bombay cinema, ‘that raddled old tart’ (MLS 173), invades the Rushdie text. To reprise my argument, this is largely because, for Salman Rushdie, any discussion of popular culture – here Bollywood – necessitates inquiry into his investment in modernist aesthetics. In Rushdie’s reading of the popular, dissensus (the placement of heterogeneous and incommensurable logics) and consensus, as put forward by Rancière (2009), come together. Cinema, that great form of modernity and the democratization of the spirit (after Benjamin’s foundational essay on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction), functions for Rushdie as the site of this dissensus. And his works demonstrate the ‘neutralization’ of the high and low, the canonical and the non-canonical, the ethical and the aesthetic. It may be suggested that Bollywood provided Rushdie with a structural principle of creative organization and ideological otherness that helps him articulate this dissensus. Two films celebrated in Filmfare –Shree 420 and Funtoosh – may be used to define this dissensus since they are films whose magic is singularly felt in the Rushdie corpus. Both these films rework the picaro hero towards a distinctly Indian cosmopolitanism. In Shree 420, the simpleton traveller on the road saves a city’s underclass from exploitation and transfers a term applied to absconders and cheats (‘Mr 420’) to a city as a whole. The second film, Funtoosh, touches on the fine line dividing the sane from the insane, the real from the magical. In the establishing shots, a man called Ramlal ‘Funtoosh’, the latter an attribute rather than a name, gone insane because of a personal trauma, is located in an ‘International Madhouse’. The inhabitants of this madhouse are from all over the world (poetic licence is necessary here for the spectator) and the man to be released, our Funtoosh, will now carry this cosmopolitanism. His story will be written down by an out-of-work writer; his life will be transformed into an item to be insured and from which profit may accrue should he, in his madness, kill himself. Funtoosh, of course, escapes all attempts at suicide at the behest of a shady industrialist who had insured him and made himself the sole benefactor. He manages to win the heart of the industrialist’s daughter and drives the industrialist himself insane as

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he, in turn, ends up in the International Madhouse. Although the use of the word ‘funtoosh’ in Midnight’s Children implies that a person is ‘finished, washed-up, or in our own expressive word, funtoosh’ (MC 64) (which are not its meaning in the film from which the word is derived), the narrative of the film and its style shadow Rushdie’s writings and indeed provide an insight into the ways in which the faculties of knowledge and desire, of the higher and the lower, of reflective and determinative judgement and, finally, ethics and aesthetics come together in the context of popular Bollywood cinema. This began to be evident quite early on in his career as we have seen in our reading of the unpublished novel ‘Madame Rama’ (44/12–14), completed in August 1975 and then revised in February 1976. By the time we get to Midnight’s Children, the discourse on cinema is a lot more sophisticated. Saleem Sinai confesses, ‘I accept my life has taken on, yet again, the tone of Bombay talkie’ (350) because like many Bollywood films, he too has a double in Shiva. If we believe Saleem, albeit only on this point, we begin to understand why Bollywood is so pervasive. Two features in particular of this cinematic practice come across powerfully in Rushdie’s first major novel: the synchronicity of the form (the Bombay film makes sense regardless of when you enter it as a spectator/viewer) and its generic capaciousness. In Rushdie, cinema functions as the dominant cultural form of the country. India is recalled through it and its mode of representation mediates the Indian diaspora’s understanding of India as well. At times, in Midnight’s Children, direct stylistic connections are made between film and novel: at one point, for instance, ‘a Bombay-talkie-style close-up’ (346) is inserted. What is the Bombay-talkie-style close-up? One suspects the style refers to the way in which the camera focuses on the face of the actor, lingers on her for a while, absorbs her look and then cuts to a flower or a gushing waterfall. The montage technique referred to here is a predictable form, since the cuts to the natural object are always thoroughly systemic and capture in segmental shots the juxtaposition of images that one finds in Indian calendar and related art, including their chromolithograph forerunner. In a massive metaphorical conceit (which, after Dr Johnson, is the violent yoking of disparate images together) for which Rushdie is famous, we are told it was in Homi Catrack’s film The Lovers of Kashmir that the famous ‘indirect kiss’ (MC 142), the ‘symbolic kiss’ in ‘Madame Rama’, was introduced to Indian cinema by the film’s director Saleem’s uncle Hanif.7 The indirect kiss is a special use of montage where a cinematic cut to flowers or birds or a half-eaten apple just before the lovers’ lips meet is meant to indicate the actual kiss that has taken place but which the spectator is forbidden to see. In this way, Rushdie brings to his writing, indeed to his representational apparatus (for this is what the novel has to do), a discourse that connects directly with this cultural form. The link between Rushdie’s narrative discourse and the Bollywood film semiotic becomes clearer when we return yet again to the role of the indirect kiss in Rushdie’s playful mode of narration: In those days it was not permitted for lover-boys and their leading ladies to touch one another on screen, for fear that their osculations might corrupt the nation’s youth … but thirty-three minutes after the beginning of The Lovers, the

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première audience began to give off a low buzz of shock, because Pia and Nayyar [the lover-boy] had begun to kiss – not one another – but things. Pia kissed an apple, sensuously, with all the rich fullness of her painted lips; then passed it to Nayyar; who planted, upon its opposite face, a virilely passionate mouth. This was the birth of what came to be known as the indirect kiss. (MC 141–2)

Rushdie clearly constructs a non-existent film as no film of that name appears in any catalogue of Indian Cinema, but it is the moment of cinema that bears witness to one of the great tragedies of modern India – the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Against the backdrop of the invention of the indirect kiss, as lovers kiss apples, mangoes and flowers, the ‘Serpent’ of the fictive discourse takes centre stage and makes his dreadful pronouncement: the amplified voice of the bearded man said: ‘Ladies and gents, your pardon; but there is terrible news.’ His voice broke – a sob from the Serpent, to lend power to its teeth! – and then continued, ‘This afternoon, at Birla House in Delhi, our beloved Mahatma was killed.’ (MC 142)

The Lovers of Kashmir passage, with its ‘end’ in the death of Gandhi, demonstrates a key feature of the Rushdie narrative generally. For what is being suggested is the reading of our lives through texts, and, in a sense, there is nothing that exists outside of them. So cinema, as text, provides Rushdie with both a context (cinema as social fact) and a language (cinema as a particular discourse, a particular representational technique) with which to write national allegories. Filmfare had noted Eisenstein’s shooting script (21 June 1957; 5 June 1959), and Rushdie’s understanding of montage – the ‘symbolic kiss’, the ‘indirect kiss’ – confirms Rushdie’s own familiarity with it. Eisenstein, of course, had reversed the history of the technique by first locating it in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Referring to blind Milton’s grand epic, Eisenstein had noted the ‘cinematographic instruction’ of Milton, the ease with which lines from the monumental epic could be transformed into a ‘shooting script’ where ‘each number’ could indicate ‘a newmontage piece’ (1970: 55–6). One of the extras in Vista Rama’s Sitayama (in the unpublished ‘Madame Rama’), Sanjay, sits ‘every morning in one Pioneer Café, where producers come to look for extras’ (145). He gets the role of a monkey in the legion of Hanuman the Monkey-God in what turned out to be a dream sequence in the film. It is the only scene which is a period piece as the rest of the film is a contemporary version of the Rāmāyaṇa. This café in ‘Madame Rama’ provides the title of a chapter in Midnight’s Children (‘At the Pioneer Café’). In the later Pioneer Café, as in ‘Madame Rama’, producers once again come ‘from all major film-studios to find extras’ (199). What draws our attention, though, is the conscious use of a shooting script in one section of the ‘At the Pioneer Café’ chapter. In Midnight’s Children, the Pioneer Café is close to both Mrs Braganza’s (Mary Pereira’s) Braganza Pickles (Private Ltd) and Saleem Sinai’s office where we see him recovering from a delirious fever. He has been talking out aloud to Padma, his ever-patient first

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reader and listener, about a widow in green and black: ‘the Widow is green but her hair is black as black. The Widow sits on a high chair the chair is green the seat is black the Widow’s hair has a centre-parting it is green on the left and on the right black’ (204). The description, with its languid punctuation marks, signifies Saleem’s state of mind as well as Rushdie’s own memory of the colour green in The Wizard of Oz. More importantly, for the lineage developed here, and given that Saleem is writing in 1978 (‘when I could be describing the elections of 1957 – when all India is waiting, twenty-one years ago, to vote’ (205)), the reference to the widow is indeed to Mrs Indira Gandhi as the widow in the Varanasi Widows’ Hostel in the revised version of ‘Madame Rama’. We leave the widow reference and follow Saleem’s thoughts which indeed do go back to the elections of 1957, but it is not the elections themselves but the place of a Communist candidate in his mother’s life which is intriguing. Safely hidden in the boot of his mother’s Rover, like a stowaway, Saleem follows his mother to The Pioneer Café, a ‘repository of many dreams’ where, as already prefigured in the ‘Madame Rama’ manuscript, for half an hour each morning, when D. W. Rama Studios and Filmistan Talkies and R K Films were taking their pick, the Pioneer was the focus of all the city’s ambitions and hopes; then the studio scouts left, accompanied by the day’s lucky ones, and the Café emptied into its habitual, neon-lit torpor. (MC 211)

In the afternoon, the same café was a Communist Party hideout and it is here that Amina Sinai, the mother, meets her lover and former husband Nadir Khan, now the Communist Party candidate Qasim (‘Lal’ [Red]) Khan. Through the ‘dirty, square, glassy cinema-screen of the Pioneer Café’s window’ (212), Saleem watches his mother and her lover converse. Saleem’s eye now gets framed as a camera eye and we can reduce the images to a series of shots which may be read as a shooting script.

1. ‘On the reccine-topped table, a packet of cigarettes: State Express 555’: midshot. 2. ‘the figure five was repeated three times on the packet; and that its manufacturers were W. D. & H. O. Wills’: close-up. 3. ‘cutting from two-shot of lovers to this extreme close-up of nicotine’. 4. ‘now hands enter the frame’: a series of shot-reverse-shot. 5. ‘first the hands of Nadir-Qasim, their poetic softness … hands flickering like candle-flames, creeping forward … then jerking back’; 6. ‘next a woman’s hands, black as jet, inching forwards like elegant spiders; hands lifting up … hands hovering above three fives … hands longing for touch … but always at last jerking back, fingertips avoiding fingertips …’ 7. ‘because what I’m watching here on my dirty glass cinema-screen is, after all, an Indian movie, in which physical contact is forbidden’ (director’s note, here as narrator’s voice)

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8. alternating mid-shots as camera is lowered and then moves up because ‘there are feet beneath the table and faces above it, feet advancing towards feet, faces tumbling softly towards faces, but jerking away all of a sudden in a cruel censor’s cut’ (212–13). Narrative as shooting script requires a voice-over in the form of a critical and, where necessary, ironic commentary by the detached narrator or as reflective judgements from the point of view of the character who is narrating the story. Here, we are told, the two characters act out their roles bearing ‘screen’ names because neither Qasim nor Amina carry their birth names which are, respectively, Nadir and Mumtaz. And still carrying the discourse of cinema, Saleem leaves ‘the movie before the end’ (213) with ambiguous feelings, wishing he had never seen it but ‘wanting to watch it all over again’. Bollywood remains a huge conceit, and this is how Rushdie uses it because, finally, what the camera eye has established is the persistence of the indirect kiss which conceals an offence because its manifest form would have been censored. What I saw at the very end: my mother’s hands raising a half-empty glass of Lovely Lassi; my mother’s lips pressing gently, nostalgically against the mottled glass; my mother’s hands handing the glass to her Nadir-Qasim; who also applied, to the opposite side of the glass, his own, poetic mouth. So it was that life imitated bad art, and my uncle Hanif ’s sister brought the eroticism of the indirect kiss into the green neon dinginess of the Pioneer Café. (213)

Life Imitates Art ‘Life imitated bad art’ may be a confirmation of the hierarchy of knowledge (‘life’) and desire (‘bad art’). But this is not so much a statement about hierarchy or, indeed, about Bollywood as ‘bad art’ against Rushdie’s pure avant-garde tastes – as an acceptance of the incommensurable and its place in the heterogeneous logics that come to govern Rushdie’s works. The link between the film image and mental impressions, especially in interior monologue or stream-of-consciousness style, had been detected before, by Virginia Woolf, by James Joyce, and in the symbolic-realist domain, by D. H. Lawrence. To Rushdie, cinematic representation is a semiotic system that had already made use of what has come to be known, generically, as postmodernity’s own brand of fragmented narration. Earlier in the ‘Hit-the-Spittoon’ chapter of Midnight’s Children, cinema is both the dominant art form of Bombay (and of India) and the form that gives the lumpen proletariat access to cultural capital. Not surprisingly, the moment of filmic celebration is mediated through the consciousness of Rashid, the seventeen-year-old rickshaw boy who reads posters advertising, the new film Gai-Wallah, starring Rashid’s favourite actor Dev. FRESH FROM FIFTY FIERCE WEEKS IN DELHI! STRAIGHT FROM SIXTY-THREE

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SHARP-SHOOTER WEEKS IN BOMBAY! the posters cried. SECOND RIPROARIOUS YEAR! (MC 49)

Intertextual indebtedness to Bollywood is an endearing or enduring feature of the Rushdie corpus. Indeed, the Gai-Wallah film itself (which should be translated as ‘The Cowboy’) crops up again in Shame, Rushdie’s second major work. Cinema in the latter novel becomes a symbol of the growing separation of Hindus and Muslims, based largely on the power of religious difference. So as tempers flare and partition becomes inevitable, the lone attempt by the cinema owner, Mahmoud the Woman, to run a double bill with Gai-Wallah for vegetarian Hindus (‘the stone-godly’), and a Randolph Scott Western for the meat-eating Muslims (‘the one-godly’) is a dreadful failure as ‘both sides, veg and non-veg, boycotted the Empire [theatre]’ (Shame 62). Cinema, the premier product of the age of mechanical reproduction and, as Walter Benjamin added further, a thoroughly democratic form, becomes the site of nationalist fervour. In a parody of both the nature of the Indian spectator (here divided between the vegetarians and the non-vegetarians, the polytheists and the monotheists) and the form (Gai-Wallah is an impossible Bollywood narrative), the reference to the double bill at this point in Shame explores the consequences of the end of tolerance and the failure of people to transcend sectarianism. Mahmoud’s solution is to show a double bill, but here again with a view to making an ironic statement about those who wish to break up the nation – these people would rather see an American film than one made in their own country. In fact, no one came to see the double bill because consensus requires faith in multiplicity, in the play of difference, in accepting that life is not to be divided along the lines of irreconcilable binaries. Mahmoud the Woman’s scheme fails as he watches the films alone and the theatre is bombed. The debate between multiplicity and oneness – the crux of Midnight’s Children and Shame – won, in these novels, by those on the side of the many, is replayed in The Satanic Verses. In this novel, the chief character, Gibreel Farishta, is an ex-film star. When we first meet Gibreel, he has miraculously survived the explosion on the hijacked Air India jumbo jet (flight AI-420). Suspended in the air he sings, ‘O, my shoes are Japanese … . These trousers English, if you please. On my head red Russian hat; my heart’s Indian for all that’ from Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420. The name Raj Kapoor had already appeared in abbreviated form in Midnight’s Children as ‘R K Films’ is one of three key studios seen picking up extras from Bombay’s Pioneer Café (MC 216). Rushdie’s interest here, however, is not simply in the sentimental underpinning of the song and of the film as a whole, but also with the song’s celebration of an incipient Indian cosmopolitanism.8 If Gibreel Farishta’s initial entry into the novel is heralded through a song (a song which is also heard in Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (1992) as a kind of diasporic homage to both Raj Kapoor and Salman Rushdie), the character himself is coded through the lives of N. T. Rama Rao, a successful actor in mythologicals, and Amitabh Bachchan, arguably Indian cinema’s most endurable actor and a towering figure since the mid-seventies. The latter’s near-death on the sets of

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Coolie (1983) is transformed into Gibreel’s own collapse at the hands of the stunt man Eustace Brown. Rushdie writes: The whole of India was at Gibreel’s bedside. His condition was the lead item on every radio bulletin, it was the subject of hourly news-flashes on the national television network. … The Prime Minister cancelled her appointments and flew to visit him. Her son the airline pilot sat in Farishta’s bedroom, holding the actor’s hand. A mood of apprehension settled over the nation, because if God had unleashed such an act of retribution against his most celebrated incarnation, what did he have in store for the rest of the country? If Gibreel died, could India be far behind? (SV 28–9)

The passage ends with an echo of Percy Shelley’s concluding line in ‘Ode to the West Wind’: ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ There is hope in Shelley; in Rushdie there is despair or, at any rate, ironic despair, for the nation is rendered in terms of a film star whose near-fatal illness brought the nation itself close to death. The logic of the ‘Serpent’ announcing, metaphorically, the death of a nation during The Lovers of Kashmir is repeated as the actor’s life itself becomes theatre. The ‘real’ gets theorized through fiction, the latter informing the former, changing the normal hierarchy of archive and commentary. For, as the novel proceeds, it is Farishta, Mr 420, the fabulist, who dreams the text of Islam, re-projecting belief as desire, rendering the archive indirectly as if it were the kiss of the lovers of Kashmir. ‘Why be afraid of love?’ sings Anarkali in the film Mughal-e-Azam, which, along with Shree 420, Mother India and Funtoosh, has a very special place in the Rushdie corpus.9 This film and its earlier prototype, the artistically more unified Anarkali (1953), find their way into The Satanic Verses. Gibreel, walking through the city streets, recalls songs sung by Rekha Merchant (modelled on the seventies and eighties Bollywood megastar Rekha): Rekha … serenaded him with the sweetest of love songs … singing everything from the gazals of Faiz Ahmed Faiz to the best old film music, such as the defiant air sung by the dancer Anarkali in the presence of the Grand Mughal Akbar in the fifties classic Mughal-e-Azam, – in which she declares and exults in her impossible, forbidden love for the Prince, Salim, – ‘Pyaar kiya to darna kya?’ – That is to say, more or less, why be afraid of love? (SV 334)

K. Asif ’s Mughal-e-Azam (1960) is one of the two great film epics of India, the other being Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (1957). It is a story about Salim’s (Jehangir), Emperor Akbar’s son’s love for the dancing girl Anarkali, the daughter of a courtesan in the legend. The story had been made into films before – a silent version in 1928, sound versions in 1935 and 1953, with the last, in 1953, setting the standard for songs that K. Asif followed. The 1953 Anarkali remained true to the legend as Anarkali is entombed alive. It also had the haunting song ‘ye zindagī usī kī hai jo kisī kā ho gayā/pyār hī meṃ kho gayā’ (‘Life is for those who love; who

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lose themselves in it’) sung by Lata Mangeshkar, the voice heard on All India Radio in Midnight’s Children (70). The K. Asif version transforms this song – which is a private, somewhat melancholic, paean – into a song of defiance sung in Akbar’s court in the presence of both the emperor and his son. For Rushdie, the dance and the story acts as a cinematic spectacle, as an evanescent moment that reminds him of the special syncretic quality of Indian culture, the triumph of multiplicity over oneness. As a text about diaspora and migration interwoven into the narrative of the arrival of a great world religion which chose the law of austere oneness over the many, The Satanic Verses uses cinema as a means of imparting an alternative, parallel narrative of cosmopolitanism. In that narrative, the discourse of Bollywood brings an erstwhile vision before fundamentalism began to shake India’s liberal democratic and philosophically open culture. Rushdie returns, in a decidedly melancholic vein, to this film and the song in Shalimar the Clown (2005) where Boonyi Kaul Noman (or Mrs Shalimar the Clown) performs ‘the dance number from Anarkali, a new play devised by the group after the immense success of the film Mughal-e-Azam’ (132). Later Shalimar, the actor, proposes that the Anarkali play should be reworked to show the dancing woman as a Vietnamese peasant woman bricked up in her wall by American soldiers (231). This, Shalimar felt, would be readily seen as an allegory of India’s treatment of Kashmir or Anarkali, and for Rushdie, himself, it would represent the loss of a Kashmir paradise, the latter still in its pristine form when Dr Aziz returns to his homeland from Heidelberg in Midnight’s Children. In Rushdie’s next major novel after The Satanic Verses, that is, The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), his interest in films is extended and the references to them brought forward to the early nineties. The novel also takes up references, at times fictitious, to films in his earlier works as a means of conflating the real with the ‘hyperreal’. The ubiquitous Gai-Wallah, transformed into an ongoing conceit, resurfaces: ‘cinemas [are] showing the widescreen remake of the old classic Gai-Wallah’ (MLS 374). Two things strike us: the first is the word ‘remake’ which clearly situates The Moor’s Last Sigh (at this moment in the narrative) at a time closer to our own; the second is that there has been a technological advance. The old classic was probably a black-and-white 35-mm film. The new version is widescreen and in colour. The use of cinematic moments as part of the novel’s histoire is a powerful endorsement of the enormous cultural significance of Bollywood, especially if we also read this to mean that life in India is indeed measured by dates of particular films. Cinema therefore acts as a marker of history, providing the reader with implicit dates. So a Shree 420 song not only places the narration after 1955 but also suggests that the character at that juncture in the narrative would have seen the film. The same relationship is underlined by Sammy ‘Tin Man’ Hazaré’s rendition of a song as he holds the photo of Nadia Wadia (the Australian Mary Evans who played lead roles in many of Homi Wadia’s action movies in the forties and fifties under the film name of Nadia). He sings Madhuri Dixit’s Khalnayak (1991) song: ‘What is under my choli? … What is under my blouse?’ (357). The song was a breakaway hit both in India and in the Indian diaspora.

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The more sustained use of cinema in The Moor’s Last Sigh, however, has a different aesthetic motive. The magical narratives of Indian cinema, captured in all their gaudiness and excess in films like Mr India (1987), become entry points into the competitive claims of magic and realism in the novel itself even when the binary between magic and naturalism in Indian cultural forms is often non-existent. Although, in describing Mr India, the narrator doesn’t spare the film from being subjected to a critical idiom of irony, the engagement with this film suggests that, for Rushdie, it is films like Mr India that carry the real deconstructive capacities of art and through the popular ‘provide us with an image of the National father after all. … In Mr India’s struggle against Mogambo I recognize the life-and-death oppositions of many movie father and sons’ (168–9). But more than the narrative of fathers and sons, there is the trope of ‘Motherness’, the key trope in The Moor’s Last Sigh. The narrator turns to the definition of Bollywood cinema as ‘“Epico-Mythico -Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art”’ (148–9). The great text of this genre is Mother India, released in the year of the Moor Zogoiby’s own birth (1957).10 The year I was born, Mehboob Productions’ all-conquering movie Mother India – three years in the making, three hundred shooting days, in the top three all-time mega-grossing Bollywood flicks – hit the nation’s screens. (137)

The towering figure in this film, which is also a response to Katherine Mayo’s antagonistic but immensely influential critique of Hindu casteism in her book Mother India (1927), is, of course, Nargis who played the part of Mother India in the film: And as for its leading lady – O Nargis with your shovel over your shoulder and your strand of black hair tumbling forward over your brow! – she became, until Indira-Mata supplanted her, the living mother-goddess of us all. (137)

The image is a still from Mother India that graced the cover of Screen (1985: 26.3–4). However, Rushdie misremembers, as what Nargis is actually carrying is not a shovel but a manual plough. The ‘strand of black hair tumbling forward’ over her brow is in that image. Aurora da Gama’s interest in Nargis, however, is more personal. She knew her, of course, but couldn’t quite understand how she could have married her own son, the actor Sunil Dutt who played the role of Birju, Mother India’s younger son in the film: ‘And now look – you have gone and marryo’ed him!’ (137), a matter noted in Filmfare albeit without Aurora’s venom. Beyond asserting the cultural valency of a canonical Bollywood film, Rushdie uses Mother India as the intertext for Moor Zogoiby’s own rebellion against his mother, Aurora. And insofar as the real-life relationship of Nargis and Sunil Dutt shadows the mother–son fictive relationship in the film, this composite text of actor, wife and mother shapes the world of Rushdie’s Moor Zogoiby as well. Recounting the episode, Moor Zogoiby also establishes two further connecting threads. First, like the husband of Mother India in the film, who is made symbolically impotent because his arms are crushed by a rock, his own father too may have become

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impotent. Second, Birju’s desire for his mother in the film may be Moor Zogoiby’s own: ‘I have been keeping my secret for too long’ (139), he says.

The Sonic Imaginary in Salman Rushdie I return to my opening remarks about Rushdie’s list of great films. These films were made between 1954 and 1965, a period marked by a modernist, cosmopolitan, art-house aesthetics that pushed the European avant-garde (with its surrealist foundations) to the limit. One of the striking features of these films, which includes Fellini’s 8½ (1963) and Godard’s Alphaville (1965), is the space given to cities. But their representation is not simply visual; there is a symphonic architecture about them as music both mediates and provides extra-diegetic acoustics for the mechanical sounds of the city (cars, trains) and the organic sounds of the human world. Visual literalism works with sonic literalism as cities reconfigure cinema aesthetics. Rushdie’s Emory list with its avant-garde, city bias resurfaces in The Satanic Verses as it receives near-replication in Saladin Chamcha’s list. Responding to Gibreel Farishta, Saladin Chamcha (‘Spoono’) offers a list of his favourite films, which are all ‘conventional cosmopolitan’: ‘Potemkin, Kane, Otto e Mezzo, The Seven Samurai, Alphaville, El Angel Exterminador’. Gibreel is critical of Saladin’s choice (‘You’ve been brainwashed … . All this Western art-house crap,’ he says) because his own ‘top ten of everything came from “back home”, and was aggressively low brow. Mother India, Mr India, Shree Charsawbees [Mr 420]’. And in a curious reversal of aesthetic judgement, Gibreel tells Saladin that his conventional cosmopolitan choice reflected a head ‘so full of junk … you forgot everything worth knowing’ (SV 439–40). Rushdie’s interest in modernity’s most powerful and pervasive art form, and in cities too, takes me to an aspect of Rushdie’s relationship to cinema aesthetics often overlooked. This aspect relates to the persistence of another cinematic effect – the soundtrack – in Rushdie’s novels. I want to contextualize Rushdie’s writings in Saladin Chamcha’s conventional cultural cosmopolitanism by drawing attention to the role of cinema’s sonic style (source music, diegetic music, underscore, extradiegetic music, musique concrète and so on) in Rushdie. The city boy and the sonic both come together in a draft summary of The Ground Beneath Her Feet for publishers deposited in the Rushdie Digital Archive at Emory University: I’m a city boy myself. And the music in my novel is as urban, as metropolitan a kind of magic as the mythic Orpheus is pastoral. I have always tried to find in my books a poetry of the city. Ormus Cama sings the city, and so, I hope, will the book in which he appears. Cocteau put Orpheus on a French motorbike. Orfeu Negro took him into the Rio carnival. This is Orpheus in Bombay, London, New York. Orpheus is the city of words. Orpheus is Alphaville.

As we have noted in Chapter 4 (The Affective Turn and Salman Rushdie), The Ground Beneath Her Feet is clearly a paean to the cosmopolitan city, and capturing

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sonality, the poetry of the city – Orpheus the lyre-player’s city meanderings – is one of its aims. Elsewhere, too, sonality characterizes the Rushdie aesthetic, a fact which – given Rushdie’s declared interest in cinema – necessitates an exploration beyond Rushdie’s fictionality – beyond a reading of his works via homologous correspondences between novelistic representation and cinematic representation – to his interest in ‘auteur music’, a term used to refer to the sonic as a defining characteristic of an auteur. How auteur music functions as a key supplement to visual representation necessitates finessing the correspondences between cinema and the novel, where Rushdie’s use of narrative design as shooting script was one of the points of entry. The argument in favour of a sonic cosmopolitanism – that soundscapes in Rushdie invoke an auditory literalism borrowed from cinema and already discussed in some detail in the previous chapter in the context of affects – is not meant to replace other cosmopolitanisms and certainly not to subordinate the visual to the sonic in Rushdie. Rather, it is meant to show the manner in which the Rushdie aesthetic draws quite consciously on sounds, specifically sounds as they function in cinema. A direct lineage of Rushdie’s sonic cosmopolitanism may be traced back to those modernist musicians who used non-musical sounds – of railways, machines and the like – with which to create musical pieces. Their compositions were referred to as ‘musique concrète’, a term used by Rushdie himself in The Ground Beneath Her Feet: ‘and even the music concrète of Stockhausen’ (306). For Rushdie, musique concrète constitutes a parallel sonic repertoire alongside the familiarly onomatopoeic, a kind of literary version of the filmmaker’s ‘sonic palette’ (Kulezic-Wilson 2012: 76), where an acoustic universe of sounds, rhythms and noises are part of the literary soundscape. And yet in Rushdie we do not discover a recurring musical leitmotif as such; there is no sound that functions as a controlling metaphor which would constitute an acoustic fingerprint of the author.

Back to ‘O, My Shoes are Japanese’ Let us return to, unarguably, the most discussed Bollywood song in Rushdie and track it yet again. After all, if Gibreel is indeed the anti-Angel, we need to remember what Rushdie had noted on a single sheet of paper: ‘The devil (has all the best) tunes’ (22/7). This song is Farishta’s translation of the ‘old song into English in semi-conscious deference to the uprushing host-nation’ (SV 5). The translation, rewritten as verse, is as follows: O, my shoes are Japanese, These trousers English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat; My heart’s Indian for all that.

A postcolonial critical reading would thematize this song along the cosmopolitan lines (or after the narrator’s directive) given in the sententia ‘deference to the

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uprushing host-nation’: Farishta, the delusory Indian, is comfortable with his hybrid self and symbolically presages a new age of multiple identity formation. What is less often written about is the invocation of another form of narrative assemblage where the sound track is divorced from meaning. In the film from which the song is borrowed – Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420 (1955), a film not mentioned by name until much later (‘while Gibreel yowled an air [aria] from the movie Shree 420’ (SV 407)) – the song, ‘merā jūtā hai jāpānī’, is sung by the picaro figure who, en route to Bombay, reads on a road sign ‘Bombay 420’ meaning that the city is 420 miles away. This is an in-house joke – and again commented on by many – but the song itself has little to do with either the Indian Penal Code 420 or the traditional account of the picaro figure on the road, although in the verses which follow – verses cast in a comic–parodic mode – the hero’s estrangement from the world is evident enough. So, in a sense, it is not so much the principle of cultural hybridity, so enthusiastically celebrated in postcolonial criticism, which is addressed here; rather, it is a studied incorporation of the structural principle of ‘assemblage’, the disjunction between sound and meaning, as well as, because of playback singing, a schizophonia (‘the separation of sound from its origin by means of recording technology’ (van Elferen 2012: 180)) that characterizes the Bollywood film. An informed reader singing along with Farishta (songs, in a variation on Lionel Trilling’s statement about books, read us after all (1967: 23)11) tracks the song with interest. In The Satanic Verses the God–Satan binary (‘Ooparvala …The Fellow Upstairs’ and ‘Neechayvala, the Guy from Underneath’ (SV 318)) is rendered through a deflationary Bollywood rhetoric borrowed from the second and third verses of the ‘My shoes are Japanese’ song. Here ‘Uparvālā or Ooparvala’ (‘The Fellow Upstairs’) is the person who alone knows the destination of the picaro figure as he declares that he has taken off on an open road. Of course, in this – ‘The Satanic Comedy’, an early title of the novel clearly borrowed from Dante – Rushdie is on the ‘Neechayvala’s’ side, the word itself not a legitimate opposite of ‘Ooparvala’ in the Hindi or Urdu lexicon and hence a Rushdie neologism. Further – and if we want to stage the song differently, moving from auditory literalism to instrumental literalism – the rāga in which the original song is composed is rāga bhairavī, the film director–actor Raj Kapoor’s signature rāga in his major corpus from Aag (1948) to Mera Naam Joker (1970). Thus, Farishta’s song has an aesthetic valency that transcends the outwardly political and insinuates a postcolonial genesis of secrecy not recuperable through a simple declaration of the song’s cultural cosmopolitanism. The visualization of the sonic may be traced back to Rushdie’s earlier works as well. In Midnight’s Children, Saleem’s sister Jamila Singer (the Brass Monkey) becomes ‘Pakistan’s Angel’, ‘The Voice of the Nation’, the ‘Bulbul-e-Din’ or ‘nightingale-of-the faith’ (MC 304), who sang behind a lengthy veil held by two female attendants. The veil had an aperture through which Jamila sang, a point which takes us back to the perforated sheet through which her grandfather had treated her grandmother’s illness in Kashmir. Interesting as this narrative allusion is, what is of value for the tracking of sound is the manner in which Jamila Singer, who specializes in patriotic songs during the 1965 India–Pakistan War, plays out

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the role of the other real singer in Pakistan who earlier had left an illustrious actor– singer career in Bombay for the newly created Indian Muslim nation. The singer was Noor Jehan (1926–2000), the Malika-e-Tarannum (the Queen of Melody) and the Tamgha-e-Imtiaz (the Pride of Performance) of Pakistan who sang the patriotic song ‘aye watan ke sajīle javān/mere naghme tumhāre liye hai’ (‘O you stylish soldiers of the land/My verses are for you’). Like Noor Jehan’s rendition of the Faiz Ahmed Faiz song (1962; remembered by Rekha Merchant discussed below), this patriotic song too would have been familiar to Rushdie. (Jamila’s singing in the film version of Midnight’s Children (2012) is certainly modelled on Noor Jehan.) So when she sings in the hall of private audience in the presence of the Pakistani military brass, the regimented approbation, so different from the ‘wah-wahing’ of a rowdy crowd, captures a controlled, patterned applause. The difference between the earthy, simultaneous approbation captured in the word wah-wahing (to say ‘wah-wah’ is a common response of praise from the audience in Urdu), and a controlled approbation is vast, which is why the comparison is made in the novel. Whereas no chaste Urdu song is actually given in Midnight’s Children (although we can assume that Jamila Singer sings many on Voice-Of-Pakistan Radio (MC 304)) a real ghazal (a nazm to be precise) is sung by Rekha Merchant (SV 334–5) and it is a ghazal composed by the great Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–84), whose visit to India, as already noted, is memorably recorded in Filmfare (1 March 1957). The song sung by Rekha Merchant, ‘Do not ask of me, my love …’, is one of Faiz’s best-known lyrics which appeared in his first volume of poems Naqsh-e-faryādī (‘A Lover’s Complaint’, 1941). The poem has twenty lines of which the first and last are the same. Rushdie translates lines 1 and 17–20 which, in the original, are: mujh se pahalī sī mohabbat merī mahbūb na māṅg … ab bhī dilkaś hai terā husn magar kyā kīje aur bhī du:kh hai zamāne meṃ mohabbat ke sivā rāhte aur bhī hai vasl kī rāhat ke sivā mujh se pahalī sī mohabbat merī mahbūb na māṅg

Rushdie’s translation (given in italics): Do not ask of me, my love, that love I once had for you … How lovely you are still, my love, but I am helpless too; for the world has other sorrows than love, and other pleasures too. Do not ask of me, my love, that love I once had for you.12

The poem achieved a wider audience through Noor Jehan’s ‘play-back’ rendition of it (with some variation) in the Pakistani film Qaidi (1962). It is very likely that

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Rushdie recalls Noor Jehan’s singing when Rekha Merchant is given this great poem to sing. But what of the frame of reference of Rekha Merchant’s song? Gibreel sits on a bench in a small London park and the memory of Rekha Merchant, his former lover who had thrown herself and her children from a Bombay high rise – the Rekha he had seen on the Bokhara carpet as he fell from the exploding plane, uttering the satanic ‘Al-Lat’ – returns. He walks through the city streets and Rekha’s vision follows him. She is no tuneless soloist as she sings, accompanied by a harmonium, not only songs of Faiz Ahmed Faiz but also great Bollywood songs. Gibreel Farishta had sung from Raj Kapoor’s social realist Shree 420 in translation; Rekha sings a song, in the vernacular, from the K. Asif epic Mughal-eAzam (1960), the story, as already noted, of the great Mughal Emperor Akbar’s son Salim’s (later Jehangir’s) passion for the court dancer–courtesan Anarkali, a muchloved and filmed story. Rushdie gives the reader the opening line of the song – ‘Pyaar kiya to darna kya?’ – and its translation too: ‘Why be afraid of love?’ Our mental tracking though takes us back to Madhubala’s dance, the only part of the original film filmed in colour, where she, as Anarkali, throws the gauntlet of love at Akbar himself. It is a dramatic challenge, a courtesan defying her king as her song reaches the point where it challenges the King’s power: if God alone knows all, why fear his servant, even if a king? Any Bollywood buff would know the scene and would be aware of the cinematic tracking at work here. With Gibreel, he (for the spectator as voyeur is male) too would understand the power of love: she had asked for ‘such a little thing, after all’ (SV 334). Rekha sings this ‘defiant air [aria]’ but we are only given the first line of the song, composed by another great Urdu poet Shakeel Badayuni. With the Faiz song, we get a full verse. The Faiz song has an important thematic function as well, as it leads to the invocation of the name of a poet at the genesis of Islam. The poet’s name is Baal. He is the ‘precocious polemicist’ (SV 98) we encountered earlier in the novel; he is the troublesome satirist that Mahound fears. He asks the foundational question, ‘What kind of an idea are you ?’ (SV 335), because Rushdie had defined the poet’s role as the person who is asked to ‘name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep’ (SV 97). And, continues Rushdie, ‘if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish him’. The unruly poet also voices, he is heard, he works through an auditory literalism, and it is sound that is feared. Like numbers which, for Rushdie, are prior to cognition (numbers too like songs read us) (Mishra 2018: 48–63), sounds need tracking and should be given felt presence in art. Without suggesting that Rushdie alone is engaged in an alternative, sonic cosmopolitanism, what, nevertheless, needs emphasizing are the corporeally lived experiences that his works capture. Rushdie’s fiction thus becomes, like cinema, both representation and sound, sonic ekphrasis in a sense, leaving behind the author’s sonic fingerprint, his ‘visceral sensuality of form’ (KulezicWilson 2012: 85), the kinds of things that Isabella van Elferen attributes to David Lynch’s films: ‘obsessively dismantling signification, schizophonically challenging origin, and trans-diegetically erasing the limits of perception’ (186). Rushdie

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endorses an aesthetic regime which takes us to debates about the ethics of formal experimentation so central to modernity. As Morgan had argued with reference to Ophüls, there may well be an ethics of the sound, of onomatopoeia, of the image that also underpins the Salman Rushdie corpus. In this argument, the sonic in art (music for instance) not only mediates the organic and the mechanical (the human/animal and the sound of machines) but introduces, after Jacques Rancière, a dissensus, the placing of different logics on the same stage, ‘the commensurability of incommensurables’ (2009: 11), that cuts across the hierarchy of representation – image over sound – precisely the challenge posed by Max Ophüls’s tracking shots and Rushdie’s visualization of the sonic. As an instance of a creative appropriation of cinematic practices, this chapter has argued that the Rushdie aesthetic uses the archive of cinema, especially Bollywood cinema, to bring cinematic ‘structures of feeling’ (point of view, tracking, sonality and the like) to literary representation. Cinema functions as a text within a text and cinematic characters invade characters in the body of his works. In Rushdie’s modernist poetics, cinema is an evanescent presence, a structural reference point, an aesthetic as well as an empowering mode of corporeal identification and selfrepresentation, the genesis of which may be located in his childhood familiarity with a fanzine such as Filmfare.

Chapter 6 ARCHIVAL MODERNISM

This chapter examines another genesis of secrecy with reference to Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999a) as an exercise in ‘archival modernism’. Years ago, in a Paris Review interview (2009: 51–2), Ezra Pound had spoken about the aesthetic design of The Cantos.1 His primary difficulty, he felt, was packaging six centuries of material that wasn’t in Divina Commedia. ‘The problem’, he continued, ‘was to build up a circle of reference – taking the modern mind to be the medieval mind with wash after wash of classical culture poured over it since the Renaissance.’ Building up a circle of reference necessitated understanding the glossatory techniques of the medieval moralizers. Their exemplum-type verses, in which often Death was personified, were both emulated and absorbed by modernist writers and certainly by great exemplary figures such as Pound, Joyce and Eliot. There are two types of absorption at work here: the first is formal, the second, thematic. In formal terms, Pound and, to a lesser extent, Eliot inserted into the design of their works commentarial techniques – annotations, emblems and the like – that were the stock-in-trade of medieval writers. At the thematic level, the conscious use of Boethius (c. 480–524) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, of Johan Scottus Eriugena (815–77) in Pound’s The Cantos, of Dante, Virgil and Ovid in T. S. Eliot’s poetry and critical essays are powerful instances of a turn to earlier supposedly premodern archives. The interest in etymology, too, is clear when we recall Pound’s self-conscious use of linguistic archaisms.2 Visual analogies, later theorized as ekphrasis, emblematic coding and homeomorphs (the structural correspondences between one narrative and another, such as Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses) are all signs of a larger memory system. For Pound, especially, archival modernism was simply a recognition of the interconnectedness of memory. In Eriugena, for sure, Pound found theophanic patterns (borrowed from neo-Platonic thought) embodied in the materiality of text and writing. Chinese ‘ideogramic’ writing represented the latter mode prescriptively and Pound was clearly fascinated by these earlier expressions of modernity and their affective links to the corporeal. What then of Salman Rushdie’s turn to archival modernism? Although Rushdie makes references to Sanskrit and old Hindi texts, Rushdie’s archival modernism draws primarily on medieval Islamic and European archives. Prior to the Rushdie texts discussed in this chapter, that is, before The Ground Beneath Her Feet (GBHF), Rushdie had used Attar’s Persian tales in Grimus (1975),

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subversive medieval commentaries on the Qur’ān in The Satanic Verses (1988), the Arabian Nights and early Indian tales (notably the Kathāsaritsāgara, composed in the second half of the eleventh century) in Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and the history of Moorish Spain in The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995a). The form that a turn to medieval archival modernism in Rushdie’s later novels takes is a lot more marked, and the glossatory techniques employed are more dramatically suggestive of Salman Rushdie’s own homage to earlier modes of addressing modernity and late modernism’s indebtedness to them. Embedded in The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury (2001) are classical myths, those of Orpheus and the Furies respectively. In Shalimar the Clown (2005), medieval pastoral serenity is destroyed by jihadist as well as state terror. The Enchantress of Florence (2008) turns to Mughal India as a Renaissance site equal to Florence and Luka and the Fire of Life (2010c) is informed by the tradition of Oriental storytelling. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015a) projects a crisis in modernity (Western secularism versus Islamic fundamentalism) on to the battle between two medieval Islamic thinkers, known in the West as Algazel and Averroës. The Golden House (2017) is informed by a karmic, preordained narrative.

We all Come Out of the Orpheus Tale I return to the later novels mentioned in the list above in the Epilogue to this book where I link Rushdie’s archival and comparative research to claims that one can make about his standing as a writer of world literature. In this chapter, my focus is on one book, GBHF, Rushdie’s fullest statement on love and music. Love as a theme had haunted him before as it had surfaced somewhat dramatically in the painful reunion between Saladin Chamcha and his father in Rushdie’s defining novel The Satanic Verses (1988). Clearly, to Rushdie, any writer’s greatness is connected to his or her capacity to understand this most important of all human emotions, a point that he made in his review of V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival in which, sadly, Rushdie noted, the word ‘love’ was totally missing (IH 151). That Rushdie would have picked the absence of this word (which does occur but only once in the novel) says something about a writer’s relationship to the world that he writes about. It may not be essential to trace the idea of love as a creative force in its entirety (the literature on the subject is literally unmanageable), but some moments of its philosophical genesis are worth considering. I want to do this in two ways, especially since GBHF addresses both these moments. The first is by going back to Plato’s The Symposium; the second by returning to the great myth about love, the myth of Orpheus. To make the case for Rushdie’s archival modernism explicit, a retrospective commentary needs to be reasonably exhaustive. One begins with Plato’s dialogue on love in The Symposium. A friend of Socrates, Apollodorus tells an unnamed friend a series of monologues on love at a party. The monologues were narrated to him by one Aristodemus who, serendipitously, was invited by Socrates to a dinner party organized by the tragic poet Agathon, a friend of Socrates some ten years before. The narration is unreliable and what we

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are given, recalling Alexander Pope, are ‘Fragments, not a Meal’. But the subject matter, love, engages all the participants: ‘Isn’t it a shame … that while certain of the other gods have hymns and songs of praise addressed to them by the poets, not one in all the multitude of poets has ever composed a single panegyric of so ancient and mighty god as Love?’, Phaedrus, a man of letters, asks Eryximachus, one of the seven guests (Plato 1973: 40). What follows, in the classic style of Plato (one recalls especially Phaedo), are expositions on love in quick succession by Phaedrus himself, followed by Pausanias (the host Agathon’s lover), and then the doctor Eryximachus who, for once, is given priority over the great dramatist Aristophanes (he has hiccups, in itself a wry comic touch on the part of Plato himself) and then, following Aristophanes, Socrates himself. Philosophy, of course, needs to find an appropriate analytic that would transcend subjective comments on love and turn it into a question of knowledge. It is for this reason that love is not discussed in terms of its precognitive affects (which is how a novelist may treat it) but as a quality or a characteristic defined by something other than itself. This mode of analysis is established by the first speaker Phaedrus, who defines love as a quality of those lovers who ‘will sacrifice their lives for another’ (43). Pelias’s daughter Alcestis (in Euripides’s play Alcestis) agreed to die in place of her husband Admetus when the latter’s parents refused to do so (117) and her sacrifice won the hearts of the gods who released her from Hades, in itself a rare event. To Phaedrus, Orpheus, on the other hand, did not have ‘the courage to die for love like Alcestis, but contrived to enter Hades alive’ (44). Phaedrus’s definition in terms of a single relationship between the word and a deed (love equals willingness to sacrifice oneself) is disputed by the next speaker Pausanius who suggests that ‘Love is not single’ (45) and argues for relationships (including those with boys) on the ground that any relationship (and here servitude is one of the characteristics of love) ought to be linked to ‘the acquisition of excellence’ (51). Excellence is in itself a virtue because a lover (even if he is a boy) through the act of love acquires excellence: to love is to transcend the physical as its object is acquisition of something beyond the physical. Our age (and quite correctly) would squirm at the paedophilic agenda that inheres in Pausanius’s discourse. But this is Plato’s Greece, and our aim here is to provide a ‘genealogy’ of love. We may bypass the doctor Eryximachus’s quite legitimate claim that a healthy body manifests love of a different kind and order than a ‘diseased body’ (54), valuable as the distinction is, and move on to Aristophanes’s panegyric on love because he introduces and explicates an early discourse of androgyny. ‘In the first place’, he says, ‘there were three sexes, not, as with us, two, male and female; the third partook of the nature of both the others and has vanished, though its name survives’ (59). A return to the condition of the hermaphrodite is therefore love’s desire as the cutting of the original body (because the gods feared their strength) into half by Zeus left behind on the part of the divided selves a lack that could be fulfilled only by a return to the unity of the original undivided body. Although Agathon, the host, it seems, had not intended to speak, he does so now. After all, he too is a playwright of note and, in the style of a classic poet, speaks of love as a god who is ‘the most happy’ (68). In this respect, Love (now capitalized) is a

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god in whom inhere qualities we associate with love, the feeling. Endowed with self-control, Love is ‘supreme in beauty and goodness himself ’ and is the ‘cause of like qualities in others’ (71). As this is Plato’s method, the stage is now set for Socrates to enter the debate with a critique of the positions on love advanced by the speakers. A discussion of Socrates’s summary and counterargument would take it to areas outside the strategic use I make of the material before me as I lay the foundation for a reading of Rushdie’s GBHF. It is sufficient, therefore, to note that Socrates questions Agathon’s premise that goodness and beauty, for instance, inhere in Love, because if this were so then neither beauty nor goodness can be the object of Love. Since love exists ‘only in relation to some object’ (a point made by all other participants except Agathon) and since desire is always for a lack in the subject itself, the object of love cannot be either beauty or goodness or other qualities that define Love itself. As with the overall structure of The Symposium where the narrative is given in mediated form, Socrates too offers his understanding of love through the voice of Diotima, part oracle, part prophet, part instructress ‘in the art of love’ (79). Diotima explains that Love is a being of ‘an intermediate nature’ and therefore it is a spirit that ‘bridges the gap between them [gods and men, their sacrifice, prayers, commands, rewards], and prevents the universe from falling into two separate halves’ (81). The qualities of this spirit called ‘Love’ is directly linked to his birth as the child of Contrivance (father) and Poverty (mother) conceived on the day of Aphrodite’s birthday. Love is always poor, ‘weather-beaten, shoeless and homeless, always sleeping out for want of bed’ (82). A cunning huntsman, Love devises schemes to get whatever is beautiful and good. Neither mortal nor immortal, he is of an intermediate class (83) that seeks its other lost half (as Aristophanes had noted) but only if the other half happens to be the good it would want to possess perpetually. ‘To sum up’, says Diotima, ‘love is desire for the perpetual possession of the good’ (86). Having established what love is, what type of action must men show that would deserve the name of love? In other words one’s action is given the designation ‘love’ if the aim of the action is ‘to procreate and bring forth beauty’ (87), the theme indeed of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The matter does not rest there, and here we enter the world of a different kind of love, the sort already alluded to by Phaedrus and others with reference to Achilles’s love for Patroclus for which, in killing Hector, he embraced his own ultimate death. ‘There are some’, Diotima tells Socrates, ‘whose creative desire is of the soul, and who long to beget spiritually, not physically, the progeny which it is the nature of the soul to create and bring to birth’ (90). The emphasis on the beauty of the soul against the beauty of the body leads Socrates (via Diotima) to stress the value of homosexual love which is rendered as a philosophical partnership. In The Symposium, Socrates declares his love for Alcibiades, one of the guests, although what young men get from Socrates is a ‘beauty which is incomparable and far superior’ to physical looks (106). The line from Plato to Rushdie is more or less clear-cut as there is evidence in the Archive and in his published works that he had The Symposium in mind when he wrote on the theme of love. One may, therefore, locate Rushdie in a commentarial

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tradition that informs all Western discussions on love. And here, in the context especially of GBHF, Phaedrus’s comment on the failure to sacrifice himself for love on the part of Orpheus is important, which explains why the infernal deities of Hades only presented an apparition of Eurydice to Orpheus and not the real thing. Later Rushdie himself was to write, ‘To be part of the dead world it was necessary that you die as well’ (The Enchantress of Florence 191). We, therefore, turn to the Orpheus myth and annotate its history so as to establish a composite intertext for Rushdie. Here we are on solid ground because the evidence, both published and archival, shows that Rushdie had read all the versions of this myth, both literary and filmic. Further the Socratic god of Love, as we read in Rushdie, is crossed with Kama, the Hindu god of Love, who arouses sexual desire in the ascetic god Shiva only to be turned to ashes by the glance of the god’s third eye. This Kama, however, undergoes resurrection as Krishna’s son Pradyumna because of the pleas of Kama’s wife Rati. In GBHF, Rushdie’s turn to archival modernism is informed by a reading of the Orpheus myth as one composite text in a number of versions. The versions constitute five phases of the myth: the classical (Virgil (Georgics, IV, 453–527) and Ovid (Metamorphoses, X–XI)), the medieval (the Middle English Sir Orfeo, Robert Henryson, the Scottish Chaucerian’s Orpheus and Eurydice, both influenced by Boethius’s poem on Orpheus in The Consolation of Philosophy, the latter translated as well by Chaucer (which was available to Henryson)), the revisionist (Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice), the pre-modernist (Rilke’s poem ‘Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes’) and the late modern (Cocteau’s surrealist Le Testament d’Orphée, 1950, and Marcel Camus’s carnivalesque version Orfeu Negro, 1960). The already known classical accounts, that is, the foundational narratives of Virgil and Ovid, may be quickly summarized at this juncture before we turn to the medieval versions as part of the myth’s pre-history in the English language. Orpheus, renowned poet, inventor of the alphabet and master of the lyre, was the son of the Thracian King Oeagrus and the Muse Calliope. With the blessings of Apollo and the Muses, his music enchanted both animal and plant kingdoms. He falls in love with Eurydice, marries her, but she dies soon after being bitten by a snake as she escapes from Aristaeus, a shepherd, who attempts to rape her. In agony, Orpheus sings his grief and his song is such that the world is moved and Apollo, responding to such singular cry, sends him to Hades to fetch his beloved back. On his way to the underworld, he charms the ferryman Charon, the dog Cerberus, the three judges of the Dead and it seems Hades (Pluto) himself, who agrees to restore Eurydice to the upper world. He lays down one condition: that Orpheus not look behind him until Eurydice had reached the upper world of the sun. Guided by the sound of his lyre, Eurydice follows him, but as he reaches the light of the sun, he looks back and loses Eurydice forever. Orpheus continues to play his lyre and sing melancholic songs, spurns other women, becomes a priest of Apollo, but gains the ire of Dionysus (his first personal god) who out of jealousy set the Maenads upon him who tear his body apart, throwing his head, still singing, into the river Hebrus. In other versions one reads that Orpheus had condemned the Maenads’ promiscuity and had preached the virtues of homosexual love, and these were the causes of his slaughter. Orpheus’s singing head, however, entered another myth

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as it turned into an oracle and challenged the veracity of the oracles at Delphi and others. The gods, forever wary of mortals who challenge their prerogative over prophecy, finally silenced the singing head: ‘Cease from interference in my business; I have borne long enough with you and your singing!,’ charged Apollo (Graves 1964: 113). As for Orpheus’s lyre, which too had drifted in the river with his head, it was placed in heaven as the constellation Lyra. But the return from Hades too is not taken easily by the gods. After all, the underworld is a secret which mortals must never know, but which Orpheus in search of Eurydice did. After such knowledge what forgiveness? For revealing divine secrets Zeus had to kill him off with a thunderbolt. And so the variant readings continue. In the strict sense, Virgil’s is one reading of the myth which in the preceding paragraph I have presented as a composite text. But Virgil’s reading is no simple yarn; it is inserted towards the end of the Georgics as an exemplary tale, a cautionary tale, in fact, for the keeper of the bees, Aristaeus, who, as the sexually charged shepherd, is the indirect cause of Eurydice’s death and who is now responsible for a crisis in the lives of bees. The Georgics, as the name implies, is about working the earth; it is about labour and agriculture and about the farmer as both carer and guardian. On the face of it, the long poem is a paean on agriculture and is a founding pastoral. With the insertion of the Orpheus tale as a parable, the poem, at the end, is transformed into something much more than a celebration of husbandry. The earth, after all, is but an epidermis of the underworld and it is this underworld to which, through his act, Orpheus’s beloved Eurydice had been forever consigned. So the end of the poem brings a cautionary tale which is at once didactic in its import and at the same time, in both form and discourse, transcends the conventions of the pastoral that had, thus far, informed the poem. At this moment of transcendence, Virgil’s poetry acquires another, haunting, kind of power. Presented as an anecdote, the tale of Orpheus is narrated by Proteus, a minor sea god, a son of Neptune but an oracle, who is approached by Aristaeus upon the advice of his mother Cyrene to whom he had come lamenting the loss of his bees to ‘sickness and starvation [morboque fameque]’ (2010: IV, 318). ‘Him, son’, says Cyrene, ‘you first must clap in shackles, so that the whole cause of malaise he may unriddle and rally your fortunes’ (IV, 397). Upon finding Proteus, Aristaeus seeks ‘an oracle for [his] flagging fortunes’ (IV, 449) and is told, ‘The wrath of no mean deity hounds you’ (IV, 453). The deity in question is Orpheus who heartbroken ‘stirs up these punishments’ against him. The subject matter here is a myth that is also a kind of national allegory of love and loss, of the need to balance sensibility with sense. Virgil presupposes prior understanding of the myth and moves swiftly through the narrative, placing less emphasis on the details of the story than on the evocative power of the language. He writes with speed, moves from epic invocation (the wailing of mountains Rhodope and Pangaea, the plains Rhesus and Getae, the river Hebrus, the wind Boreas) to melancholic monody: But he, consoling love’s agony with his hollow-shell lyre, sang you, sweet wife, you to himself on the lonely shore, you with the rising day, you at the day’s decline. (ll. 464–6)

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The subject of address shifts from Aristaeus to ‘you [Eurydice] sweet wife’ in whose memory he sings and plays the lyre across the universe in time and space, even to Taenarus, the mouth of the underworld ruled by the ‘terrible king’ Dis (Pluto). Orpheus enters Tartarus, the deepest part of Hades (Virgil calls it Manes) where even the Furies, those goddesses of the underworld, and the guardian dog Cerberus are charmed and for the moment Ixion, the ruthless king of Thessaly who had tried to seduce Juno, chained to the wheel, remains still. Pluto and Proserpina, his wife, moved by such lamentation, restore Eurydice but ‘already at the very edge of light,/forgetful … he looked back’ (ll. 490–1). What made him do it? In Virgil’s rendition, it was ‘reckless loving’ but ‘truly forgivable, if [only] Hell knew [how] to forgive’ (l. 489). Later, other poets and commentators, some with religious exegesis in mind, will read Orpheus’s act as a sign of lack of belief in love, of faith – that he doubted if Eurydice indeed was behind him. In Virgil, the act is totally explicable within the emotional field of love; it is, in fact, within its very expectations. With the ‘pitiless tyrant’s pact’ broken, there is no offer of help, a second time, from the ‘ferryman of Orcus [Pluto]’ in spite of his even stronger mournful dirge in icy lands. Proteus’s version ends with Orpheus’s death at the hands of the bacchanalian ‘Thracian dames’. His head thrown in the river Hebrus continues to call ‘Eurydice’ and the banks reply in kind. Proteus disappears in the deep sea, Aristaeus is shaken and Cyrene, his mother, explains that the curse upon his bees came from the nymphs who were Eurydice’s companions in the ancient groves when she was pursued by Aristaeus. To supplicate, he must sacrifice four bulls and four heifers to the wood nymphs and on the ninth day send ‘Lethean poppies’ to Orpheus as a funeral offering and sacrifice a black ewe. Once the sacrifices are made, Aristaeus returns to the grove where the animals had been slaughtered and sees ‘in the oxens’ liquefied guts and through the whole/belly, bees buzz and swarm through the split flanks’ (ll. 555–6). The Georgics return to the theme of husbandry and Virgil ends with a pastoral note to harmony. In Ovid’s version (Metamorphoses X ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’), the narrative is a lot tighter than in Virgil’s Georgics IV. Ovid’s version is quick-paced and economical in style as the opening lines presage the unhappy end to Orpheus’s marriage to Eurydice because the torch of Hymen, ‘the god of the marriage feast’, can only sputter smoke and is never ignited (X, ll. 5–6). Immediately after – in compositional terms, in the very next line – the ‘outcome [of the omen] was even worse than foreshadowed’ as the ‘newly-wed bride’ falls down dead ‘with the fangs of a snake in her ankle’ (l. 10). Lyre in hand, the forlorn Thracian bard makes his way to the Styx River and makes such a sorrowful plea before Prosperina, Queen of Hades, and her lord Pluto, in which he also reminds them of their own love towards one another, and speaks of his own willingness to remain in Hades if his request were not granted (‘You may joy in the deaths of us both’ (l. 38)), that for the moment all the movements of all the dreadful figures in Hades are stilled. The powers of Hades relent but with the inevitable condition that he never look back until he had left the dominion of Hades. He does and is left clutching not Eurydice’s hand but the ‘yielding air’ (l. 59). There is no moral here of the kind found in Plato that Orpheus fails to get his wife back because he is not willing to sacrifice his own life (in fact,

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he offers to stay back in Hades). As the title of Ovid’s work implies, the poem is about transformation, about change, about metamorphosis. And Orpheus himself changes. He wishes to cross the Styx yet again but the ‘ferryman pushed him away from the bank’ (l. 73). Forlorn and angry with the gods, Orpheus sings his dirge, shuns the love of women and turns to immature males to pluck ‘the flower of a boy’s brief spring’ (l. 85) taking up, one senses, Socrates’s ideal of homosexual love. As in Virgil, his turn to Apollo does not please the Bacchanals or the Maenads and his wonderful songs turn to silence. The birds weep, but so do rocks, trees, rivers and the nymphs of the streams who ‘edged their garments with black and allowed their hair to flow loose’ (l. 49). Orpheus’s limbs lay scattered, but his lyre and head are thrown in the river Hebrus. His head floats until it reaches ‘Methýmna on Lesbos’ coast’ (l. 55) where, in a replay of Eurydice’s own death, a snake opens its fangs to bite the head and is turned to stone by the quick intervention of Apollo himself. And as Orpheus’s own shadow passes under the earth, he finds his wife, and the lovers are united, taking turns to walk in front or behind, for now he knew he could ‘look back on his own Eurýdice safely’ (l. 65). In a poem that follows, ‘The Punishment of the Maenads’, Bacchus, now regretting losing one of his great minstrel–priests, transforms the Maenads into trees, the poetic description itself turning out to be one of the more graphic accounts of transformation. For medieval romancers, the tale of Orpheus came to them through an extraordinary prison literature, Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy (De Consolatione Philosophiae). Boethius, a young Roman consul under the Barbarian Ostrogothic king Theodoric, composed this part-apocalyptic dialogue, partMenippean satire (a genre which, after Lucian and Varro, aimed at ridiculing pretension and deployed verses towards satirical effect) around 524 CE while in prison awaiting his execution. This was such an influential text that C. S. Lewis could state enthusiastically: Until about two hundred years ago it would, I think, have been hard to find an educated man in any European country who did not love it. To acquire a taste for it is almost to become naturalised in the Middle Ages. (1967: 75)

In Book III of his essay, Boethius writes a short narrative poem on Orpheus so as to interpret it (in the context of the argument about goodness that Plato had started) as a moral fable. But it is a moral fable that ‘remains a story of failure’ for although Boethius himself had ‘regained true understanding through Philosophy’s dialogue’ in The Consolation, Orpheus himself does not make a successful ‘mental ascent’ because the power of love distorts understanding (Marenborn 2003: 149). In Boethius, Philosophy (personified as a lady) is not divine and this was a troubling matter to medieval commentators who failed to find anything specifically Christian in Boethius. It was, therefore, left to medieval glossators such as Nicholas Trivet, an English Dominican, to obliquely Christianize the text by invoking the idea of divine prescience in what is essentially a largely Platonic text. In this re-reading, the point of the Orpheus exemplum in Boethius was that upon realizing divine presence one should not look back at ‘worldly objects’. Orpheus’s fatal backward

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glance captures this moral and Boethius’s lines on Orpheus’s backward glance acquired great importance in any retelling of this tale. Orpheus backwards turned his sight And, looking lost her twice to fate. (Boethius 84)

Boethius’s version is barely fifty-eight lines long, but it captures the kernel of the tale and ends with Orpheus’s fatal look followed by another seven-line moral commentary. What the medieval minstrels and poets gained from Boethius (since this was the pervasive intertext) were the following elements of the tale: invocation concerning leaving earthly shackles behind once the ‘good’ has been found; the melancholic music and song of Orpheus upon the death of his wife; the power of music to still nature; the power of music to calm the dog Cerberus, the ‘triform porter’, the Furies, Ixion, Tantalus, the vultures who cease to shred the giant Tityus’s liver and Pluto, the ‘monarch of the dead’ himself and, finally, the leave granted that Orpheus may take his wife back to light, to the upper world, on condition of course that he ‘look not on her by the way’. Even in this paraphrase, one gets the power of Boethius’s rendition as the verses in Latin become the stock-in-trade of the medieval versions. Chaucer, wrote G. K. Chesterton, ‘feeling the same need of a portable philosophy … also quotes from Boethius, consciously and unconsciously, in any number of his ordinary poems’ (128), having himself translated Boethius De Consolatione Philosophiae into Middle English (Chaucer 1967: 130–205). ‘Each age’, wrote John Block Friedman, ‘has fashioned Orpheus in his own image … and even changing the course of the narrative to make the Orpheus myth conform to the values of the day’ (1). In the absence of a definitive version of the myth, the kind that a great poet may give by synthesizing all the many variants, the creation of an ‘ur-Orpheus’ has been linked to the specific moral and religious politics of the times. Thus the fourteenth-century cleric Pierre Bersuire wrote a commentary on Ovid’s version (Ovide moralisé, a handbook of commentaries on Ovid’s stories) by allegorizing Eurydice’s death upon being bitten by a serpent as a Christian fable. The serpent is Satan who carries Eurydice off to the underworld. It is left to Orpheus-Christus to bring his wife back, which he does. Like the figure of Christ as the Good Shepherd, Orpheus began to be rendered through the rhetorical device of ekphrasis or pictorial representation that superimposed the Good Shepherd onto a figure in Phrygian dress, lyre in hand, surrounded by animals. And in search of monotheism’s classical pedigree, it was suggested (by Eusebius in Praeparatio Evangelica (ca.300 CE) and by Clement of Alexandria in The Exhortation of the Greeks (sixth century)) that Orpheus had, in fact, come into contact with Egyptian Jews of Alexandria and become thoroughly acquainted with the Mosaic code (Friedman 2000: 11–22). The wisdom of the Greeks, in particular the unchanging absolutes of Plato, was, in fact, non-Hellenic in origin. To the Medieval Age, Orpheus had already become larger than life and even when the judgement of great commentators like St Augustine was not altogether generous (Augustine felt that Orpheus knew the truth about a monotheistic God but could not act on it) the spectre of Orpheus as something of a precursor Christ figure,

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the symbol of love, reason and compassion, remained strong. As well, Orpheus carried epistemological valence: after all, his myth combined the ideas of the soul’s immortality and the body’s resurrection (Plato, The Last Days of Socrates 1971: 75ff ). I now return to the medieval versions of the Orpheus myth in my examination of the treatment of the myth in the English language. The first is Sir Orfeo, a Middle English Breton lai, a subgenre of romance made famous by Marie de France who wrote lais accompanied by a harp for Henry II in the 1170s. The lais (which reached their most consummate form in Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale) were rhymed tales of love and chivalry, invariably short for a narrative poem. Imbued with the world of fairies and the supernatural, it was nevertheless a quest myth that worked on the principle of descent followed by ascent. Sir Orfeo, whose earliest surviving manuscript is dated 1330, is a relatively early lai in English literary history. As we have seen, the Orpheus myth was adapted to suit the ideology of the age and the conventions of the dominant literary genre of the time. The changes are strikingly obvious in the opening lines of the poem. Orfeo was a king, In Inglond an heighe lording, A stalworth man and hardy bo; Large and curteis he was also. His fader was comen of King Pluto And his moder of King Juno That sum time were as godes y-hold For aventours that they dede and told. (ll. 1–8; Sands 187)

The genealogy through Pluto (‘monarch of the dead’, in Boethius’s poem on Orpheus) and Juno (wife of Jupiter but with a vengeful aspect in both Virgil and Ovid), although confusing and indeed even contradictory since Pluto is the Lord of Hades, imparts a sense of common knowledge about these gods and their provenance in medieval times. More importantly, there is an early vernacularization or indigenization of the myth so that Orpheus becomes a Celtic king as well as a harpist, the latter because of the conventions of the lai. The connection with the ancient gods are maintained and it is suggested that Winchester was, in fact, Thrace although the Thracians would deny it (‘For Winchester was cleped tho/ Thraciens withouten no’ (ll. 25–6)). Other significant changes may be quickly noted: Eurydice is a queen named Herodis (‘y-cleped Dame Herodis’); she is taken away by the king of the underworld as she lay asleep under the supernatural ‘ympetree’ on a pleasant May day but not before she tells Sir Orfeo about the strange king whose crown was not of silver or gold but of a precious stone (‘As bright as the sonne it shon’ (ll. 28)) and who told her that the next day she would be taken away from that very ‘ympe-tree’; the loss of the queen makes Sir Orfeo renounce his throne and lead the life of a mendicant and sing with his harp. Ten years go by and suddenly he encounters a fairy retinue whom he follows only to discover, in their world, his ‘owhen queen, Dam Herodis’ (l. 298). This world which he enters on his own volition (and, unlike Plato’s reading of the myth, totally out of love) is

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coded in the language of romance: ‘a fair cuntray, / As bright so sonne on somers day’ (ll. 327–8). Sir Orfeo enters ‘the pride court of paradis’ (l. 352). The porter is no Cerebrus and the people of this fairy world (for there is nothing of Hades here) are wounded knights and wives who had died. Sir Orfeo sees his wife asleep ‘under an ympe-tree’ (l. 383) and then he ‘tempreth his harp’ (l. 413) so magically that the music soothes the king of this fairy underworld. The king, under the spell of his harp, offers him his wish and Sir Orfeo takes his wife back to Winchester (‘To Winchester he is y-come’ (l. 454)). A lengthy coda of some 125 lines follows as Sir Orfeo, in the form of the dishevelled beggar that he had been these past ten years, returns to his kingdom, plays the harp in front of the Steward and the barons and, seeing the loyalty of his regent king, declares who he is. Soon after, the king and the queen are crowned again and harpers began to compose their lais based on the life of Sir Orfeo which they ‘nempned [named] after the King’ (l. 576). The medieval romance as exemplified in ‘Sir Orfeo’ has little of the darker tones of the original and is, like other lais, a remarkably sparkling affair. There is little of the allegorical reading that was a characteristic of the retelling of this tale. When we turn to the final and most comprehensive expression of the myth in the late fifteenth-century poem by Robert Henryson, ‘Orpheus and Eurydice’, the poem’s narrative reconstruction is followed by moralitas, an allegorical commentary along the lines of the moralizing commentary that Nicholas Trivet (c 1258–1328) wrote on Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae. The latter provided Henryson with another account of the Orpheus story beyond Virgil and Ovid. The first part, as noted by the paraphrase of one of the poet’s editors, Charles Elliott, ‘agrees generally with the accounts deriving from Ovid … and from Virgil … but also shows the influence of the story as given in Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae’ (Henryson 1968: 156). The second part is an extended commentary on the myth that expands Boethius’s own reading of the myth as a Christian moral fable about not looking back at worldly goods once the absolute truth, the divine presence, had been located. Trivet had extended this line of reasoning in his influential commentary on The Consolation of Philosophy which helped Chaucer, too, in his translation of Boethius’s influential treatise (Patch 1970: 30). Henryson’s version is a key transitional text for Rushdie’s archival modernism in GBHF. Indeed, as Friedman noted (Friedman 2000: 3–4), a reader ‘may wonder why, with some four centuries yet remaining after the death of Henryson until Cocteau’s “Orphée”, he was not offered a complete history of the legend’. In the Asloan Manuscript the poem begins with, ‘Heir followis the tale of Orpheus and Euridices his quene’ and immediately establishes the not-uncommon medieval notion of the link between nobility and virtue: ‘It is contrair the lawis of nature / A gentill man to be degenerate’ (Henryson 2010: ll. 8–9). The genealogy of Orpheus gets established through an extended citation of all the daughters of Jupiter one of whom, Caliope, married Phoebus ‘Of quhome he gat this prince ser Orpheous’ (l. 63). In a characteristically medieval move, and perhaps even alluding to representations of the Nativity, we are informed that his gift of music came to him because his mother let him ‘souk of her twa paupis quhyte / The sweit lecour of all music perfyte’ (ll. 69–70). Like that other medieval romance,

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Sir Orfeo, the sincerity to a prior genealogy itself is less important than sincerity to the discursive conventions of the medieval lai which imparted to the classical myth local idioms and fantasies. In Henryson, Orpheus becomes king through his marriage to the ‘quene of Trace … Euridices that lady had to name’ (ll. 74, 78). And in the characteristic medieval belief in the transience of life, perfection carries with it a premonition of doom: Lyk till a flour that pleasantly will spring Quhilk fadis sone and endis with murnyng. (ll. 90–91)

Upon losing his wife (and the storyline here follows the standard narrative), he plays his harp to ‘maid his mone’ (make his lament) (l. 133): ‘Quhair art thou gone, my luve Ewridices?’ (l. 143 refrain). The impact on nature is predictably clear: the birds sing, the trees dance as ‘bludy teiris sprang out of his ene’ (l. 150). As in Sir Orfeo, Henryson’s Orpheus too rejects royal robes and opts for homespun and rough clothes as he roams the woods, playing his harp. He seeks the help of the gods (Phoebus, Jupiter) and searches for Eurydice in all the spheres until Venus the goddess of love tells him that ‘Ye mone seik nedir mair’ (he must seek further below) (l. 210). Orpheus’s journey to the heavenly spheres had one important outcome: familiarity with the music of the spheres, what Plato called the soul of the world (l. 225) after the Pythagorean concept of musica universalis, taught him music theory and so the poem, borrowing from Boethius’s De Musica (Elliott in Henryson 1968: 156), provides a technical account of ‘tonis proportionat’ (musical notes) (ll. 226– 39). Alluding to Chaucer’s technique of confessing his own inadequacy in technical matters, Henryson confesses that when it came to music he could only write drivel (‘I do but doit’) and as for singing he was tone deaf (‘I cowth nevir sing a noit’) (ll. 240, 242). The personal touch, not uncommon with the Scottish Chaucerians (William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas for instance), through self-deprecating humour humanizes the poet even as it brings the poem closer to the reader. With the preliminaries done, the first part of the poem now takes us to the familiar story: Orpheus’s entry into Hades. The three-headed Serberus (Cerberus) falls asleep with the ‘sweitnes of the sound’ of Orpheus’s harp (ll. 257–8), as do the three Furies (‘sisteris thre’) when Orpheus ‘playd a joly sping’ (‘played a happy note’, l. 268). The wheel on which Exione (Ixion) is spread out stops and he, condemned to his everlasting fate, for the moment creeps away from the wheel. Tantelus (Tantalus) too, forever denied food and water for the crime of killing his son Pelops and serving it as a sacrifice to the gods, is given respite through the power of music and is able to drink from the errant river and eat an apple from the swinging tree. The vulture ceases to peck at Ticius’s breast. As Orpheus, playing the harp, ‘attour his wame’ (creeping on his belly) (l. 259), moves through Hades, the underworld is written expressly in the code of medieval definitions of hell. It is full of ‘pikis’ (spikes) (l. 292), its stench ‘rycht odius’ (l. 306), it is a bottomless ‘deip dungeoun’: Furnes of fyre with stink intollerable, Pit of dispair without remissioun,

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Thy meit vennome, thy drink pusonable, Thy grit panis to compt unnumerable, Quhat creature cumis to dwell in thee Is ay deand and nevirmoir may de. (ll. 311–16)

In this hell where, as in the last line of the above quote, one is forever dying and never again can die, the poem portrays tyrannical and unjust kings with burning crowns: Herod with his brother’s wife, Nero and Pontius Pilate, the Pharaoh who oppressed God’s chosen people as well as holy men who had committed abuses. The catalogue is lengthy and the world of Pluto is the place of eternal fire. In this context it follows that Orpheus comes as the bearer of light and knowledge, of justice and goodwill. After all, in his non-royal garb, he is dressed as the good shepherd and that connection too is consciously made. To the approaching Pluto and Proserpina (Proserpyne), he plays on his harp’s complex keys, from the lowest to the highest, capturing music that corresponds to medieval understanding of the music of the spheres. The Lord of the underworld is moved. But, of course, there is Proserpina’s condition: Gife thou turnis or blenkis behind thy bak, We sall hir haif to hell forever agane. (ll. 382–83)

To Henryson, Orpheus’s loss is like a morality play in which love, both as emotion and as a god, is rendered in ambiguous terms: ‘luve, how sall I thee define?’ (l. 401) asks Orpheus. Love is at once pleasurable and painful; constant and variable; and even those who serve her well regret that they did. And reflecting on himself, he notes that for that one look (of love) he lost love itself and now he goes home a ‘wofull wedo’ (a sad widower) (l. 414). The despairing cry, though, has a more immediate intertextual source in Chaucer’s Troilus who had earlier made a similar monologic declaration of the agony of love lost (Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde ll. 1821ff ). Following in the tradition of Trivet’s extended commentary on Boethius – and Nicholas Trivet’s example may well have made such commentary mandatory – as well as Chaucer’s own paraphrasing of the last few lines of Boethius own poem on Orpheus (Chaucer, Boethius De Consolatione Philosophiae, Book III, Metre XII, ll. 68–78), the second half of the poem titled ‘Moralitas’ (ll. 415–613) may be read as an extended annotation of the preceding half that is something like the classical scholia (or commentary) of the scholiasts (commentators). For what is shown by Henryson is learning and its celebration and by extension the place of learning in an exegetical enterprise that also functions as poetry. Narrative and moral, source text and annotation, co-exist but not necessarily in a seamless harmony and this feature has characterized almost all versions of the myth going as far back as Plato. The annotation works on the scholia principle of correspondence where abstract qualities stand for the corporeal. Thus, Orpheus’s mother Caliope (Calliope), from whom he received the gift of music, is given the virtue ‘eloquence’ (l. 426), a virtue that suggestively combines rhetoric with the harmony of the spheres. Eloquence in its fluency, in its poetic flow, in its musicality therefore unites with Phebus’s quality

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of ‘sapience’ (knowledge) to produce in Orpheus sense (reason) and understanding untrammelled by sensuality. To get the binary underway, Henryson has to locate sensuality (‘effectioun’ or desire) in Eurydice. To transform the object of sensuality (Eurydice) into an agent, he has to change Arestius (Aristaeus) into an instrument through whom the primal allegory of the satanic snake may be replayed. Eurydice, thus, becomes the centre of the moral allegorizing because desire, represented by Eurydice, leads one astray and reason must control it. In the upward spheres, reason does not find her because desire is bound to the body; she is ‘tedderit in thir wardly breiris’ (tethered to these worldly briers) (l. 456) and must go down into the monstrous caverns. In the underworld, it is the ‘herp of eloquence’ that alone can draw us away from sin and desire and hence subdue the three deaths represented by the three heads of Cerberus or still the wheel to which Exione (Ixion) is forever bound. Similarly, the three Furies are the wicked thoughts, not unlike the deadly sins which in a well-known treatise – Frère Lorens’s Somme le roi – could be destroyed only by the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit (Tuve 1977: 93). Tantalus, who had fed the gods his own son, and Ticius (Theseus), who had usurped Apollo’s right to prophecy, with Orpheus’s melody find temporary redemption or at least true knowledge. When one goes from bad to worse, when hopelessness is our condition because of our habitual acts of sinning, then Orpheus, our reason, is sorrowful and plucks his harp and calls a halt to ‘our desire and fulich appetite [foolish appetite]’ (l. 612). It is only when desire with reason makes peace and seeks the life of contemplation, free from sin, that Pluto relents and bows before reason. But a final moral remains. In overcoming, one must never look back to fleshly lust and desire, for in so doing one ‘gois bakwart to the syn agane’ (l. 624) and ‘makis reassoun widow for to be’ (l. 627). The poem ends with a plea for the gift of the Holy Spirit so that one may lead a sinless life, and it is on this moral note that the poem ends: ‘And thus endis this tail of Orpheus’ (l. 633). There is a long tradition of handbooks and quasi-encyclopaedic entries that annotate and comment on classic texts. Francis Bacon’s short entry (‘Orpheus, or Philosophy’) in his ‘The Wisdom of the Ancients’ (1619) argued that Orpheus’s wonderful singing embodied two kinds of philosophies: first, natural, in that his singing was aimed at restituting, conserving and renovating the human body (the harmony of singing and the playing of the lyre symbolized this achievement, noted as well by Edmund Spenser: ‘None but God or godlike man can slake [wicked discord]/Such as was Orpheus’ (Faerie Queene IV, 2)) and, second, moral or civil, because upon the failure of the first (the natural, because the restitution is beyond the powers of philosophy) it turns to moral philosophy in that it attempts to distil in men’s minds the ideas of the good, the virtuous, the peaceful and the like. Writes Bacon, [And this application of Philosophy to] civil affairs follows in its due place; because by a plain demonstration of the unevitable [sic] necessity of death men’s minds are moved to seek eternity by the fame and glory of their merits. (Craik 1846: 112)

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Alongside Bacon’s philosophical reading of the myth, there were also other forms of moralizing. Bersuire’s interpretation of Ovidian stories (Tuve 232) and Colard Mansion’s Ovide Methmorphose (1484) (Tuve 294) are examples of imaginative allegorization aimed at ‘saving the texts’ by moralizing them. The process, as is clear in Henryson and elsewhere, involved a conscious act of Christianization and sometimes designed even to ‘overwhelm the warning meditative image beneath a weight of moralizing’ (Rosemary Woolf 1968: 320). Indeed the moralitas section in Henryson begins with a reference to Boethius himself (‘Now wirthy folk, Boece that senator’). Rosamond Tuve’s descriptive term ‘imposed allegory’ is useful here as it captures the difficulty writers had in imposing ‘upon classical images any profoundly allegorical significance’ (330). For readers, medieval and modern, the primary question is whether the text has actually embedded in it the likelihood of allegorical meanings. Again Tuve’s warning is profound and requires underlining: The imposing of allegory upon an already extant artistic fiction, whether of different religion or not, apparently involved such difficulties that the only hope of success occurred only when a fundamental similarity in meaning or drift of thought allowed the old decorum in details to suit the new interpretation. In this situation, which we know in a few images like Orpheus as good shepherd or Circe as luxury, when the seemingly new Christianized meaning was really already ‘in’ the images, the allegory is found rather than imposed. (330)

Thus far, a good part of this chapter dealt with one myth, the myth of Orpheus, and its historical transmission. I now move to a reading of that myth as Rushdie uses it in his novel. In Henryson (ll. 69–70), Orpheus is predisposed to music as his musicality came directly from his mother’s milk and his musical power grows with time. What he lacks – and this can only be arrived at through an imposed allegory of reading as suggested by Tuve – is intellectual mastery of his music, which he learns only through an encounter with the music of the spheres. This would require an understanding of music theory, the kind found in Boethius’s Fundamentals of Music, so that Orpheus can theorize his own innate ability with music. Again, as in Rushdie, music here has instrumental, rather than emotional, value. Orpheus uses it to charm the underworld, not to relate his own feelings or the impact of music on others. The underworld is charmed but not emotionally moved; and as we shall see in GBHF, too, we never know why Ormus’s music enraptures the world of popular music.3 As foreshadowed in Chapter 5, in a draft summary of GBHF for publishers deposited in the Rushdie Digital Archive at Emory University, Rushdie had declared his novel was based on a composite Orpheus myth more or less from Plato to Orfeu Negro (1960). The opening chapter of the novel, ‘The Keeper of Bees’, gives the secret away.4 Although the intertextual archive is classical, in fact, primarily Virgil’s the Georgics, no Virgil is ever unmediated, which is Salman Rushdie’s point throughout this new imposed allegory of reading, the modernist novel as a new moralitas.

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The narrative gets underway when a disoriented Vina Aspara, the once great but now waning (‘the wrong side of forty’ (4)) singer, with a casual lover Raúl Páramo half her age dead through an overdose, is saved by the photographer Umeed Merchant (Rai), Vina’s occasional lover. His is an unrequited love although in an echo of Princess Diana’s death he ‘would have crashed into a concrete wall for her if it had been her desire to die’ (4). He flies with her to Tequila where Don Ángel Cruz, a plantation owner and a good countertenor, had invited Vina to a banquet. En route we are told that earthquakes are becoming common in that part of the world due to French nuclear explosions in the Pacific, a reference (given that the explosions took place in the 1960s) which is one of many anachronisms littered throughout the novel. At the banquet, Don Ángel Cruz sings in a voice which with its ‘sidereal sweetness’ is ‘like the music of the spheres’ (after Donne), a chorus, ‘Trionfi Amore’ (Temple of Love), from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) with the libretto by Ranieri de’ Calzabigi. Vina Aspara herself joins in and sings the soprano parts, celebrating as she does so the power of beauty and the tormented heart as the emblem of happiness. As she finishes, there is an earthquake that opens up, symbolically, the crevice to the underworld, the ground beneath our feet, the ‘unsolidity of solid ground … the gaps in the earth through which our history seeps’ (54). The returning helicopter manages to take Vina away, but Umeed never sees her again as one assumes that the helicopter itself is dragged into the magnetic strength of the shaking earth. Rai (Umeed) is left behind; as Aristaeus, the keeper of the bees, he will narrate the retrospective tale, a modernist fable of a pop singer through whom an allegory of the greatest decades of popular music will be given figurative form. He will do so as a pictorial or ekphrastic amanuensis: ‘Photography is my way of understanding the world,’ he says (210).5 We discover later, and as we have already noted in Chapter 5, his break came when the French photographer M. Henri Hulot taught him the art of ‘precomposing’ an image in the mind and then capturing it at the decisive moment. And, so, yet another imposed moralitas begins. Three people – Orpheus, Eurydice, Aristaeus – in the great myth play out the themes of ‘Music, love, death’ (22). Of these it is Aristaeus’s role that Umeed (the word meaning ‘hope’) re-enacts as Rushdie fuses the story of the beekeeper of Virgil narrated in ‘seventy-six blazing lines’ (21) with another archive, largely contemporary with Virgil in its Puranic versions, that of Shiva, the Hindu god who is both the Creator and the Destroyer, ‘Not only stung by bees but a bringer into being of bee stings’ (22).6 Archival modernism therefore excavates from earlier archives ideas that a later, modern, writer uses to disrupt rigid periodization to show that the modern is precisely the creative and ever-changing use of earlier epistemologies that, with the availability of different discourses and radical linguistic usages, both informs the modern and blasts open its claims to exclusiveness. By turning to both European and nonEuropean medievalisms Rushdie adds to the great tradition of the European high modernists (one is reminded yet again of Pound with Eriugena as well as classical Chinese, Eliot with Latin and Sanskrit, and Joyce with almost everything else) who engaged creatively with earlier premodern archives. The research into a composite Indo-European mythology underlines Rushdie’s own larger interest

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in earlier modernisms whose chief practitioners in the field of Indo-European mythology had been Max Müller and Georges Dumézil (GBHF 40–3). In GBHF, through these Indologists, Sir Xerxes Darius Cama, father of Ormus (the Orpheus figure in the novel), and his friend Sir William Methwold (he of Midnight’s Children’s fame) explored the ‘real Trinity’ of ‘religious sovereignty, physical force and fertility’ (42) that defined both European and Oriental civilizations. With his dizygotic son Virus (the other was named Cyrus) now totally mute after being hit by a cricket ball struck with great force by his own father, Sir Darius wonders if the austere precision of the Trinity (which Boethius had handled through a theory of predication that explained God’s trinity as qualities that inhered in God and were not synonyms) may require a fourth concept that reflects the world of people who do not belong, who remain unattached, who challenge the parergon, the frame of reference. Reinforcing a principle that informs the entire Rushdie corpus, Darius Cama (pronounced ‘Kama’ after the Hindu god of Love) himself murmurs, ‘The only people who see the whole picture … are the ones who step out of the frame’ (43), the latter phrase, a title, with a little variation, of Rushdie’s own second collection of essays, Step Across This Line (2002a). And apart from Cama and Methwold’s interest in the classics, India is in the grips of its own engagement with modernity with references given to the artist Aurora Zogoiby, the actress Pia Aziz, the writer Sadat Hasan Manto (recognizable through the description of his stories about local insane asylums (50–1)), and the conscious reference to ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ in Homi Catrack the Bollywood filmmaker’s ‘rolled trouser leg’ (49). We return to our departure point. Virgil gives Aristaeus the hope of redemption, the ritual sacrifice that renews the lives of bees, something the doomed lovers were denied by the gods. But Aristaeus himself would remain the lonely lover; his role enacted by the Rushdie persona in the novel, the narrator Umeed, born like Rushdie in 1947 (Rushdie was born on 19 June 1947).7 Like the fantasist Rushdie, Rai, too – steeped as he is in mythological tales, both Western and Oriental, gathered from seeing Hollywood films and reading children’s classics (74) – will create a historical pastiche in the manner of the medieval minstrels, in the manner of Scheherazade, and in the manner of Vyasa, the author function in the great Indian epic and Puranas. In these historical pastiches, synchronicity will distort chronology, historical figures may become mysteriously alive even when dead, wars (like the 1965 and 1970–1 India–Pakistan wars) will get combined (203) and so on. European modernism, in a sense, pays homage to one instance of planetary modernisms extensively debated by Susan Stanford Friedman (2015). In the Digital Archive, Rushdie refers to fragmentations, slippages and rifts – represented in realist terms through actual ‘faults’ and earthquakes – that express ‘the age’s radical uncertainty’. Of his new novel he adds, One of the very first fictions about the globalization of culture, written from both sides of the cultural divide, with knowledge of all the nuances and crises inherent in the process.

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Love, ‘the one orderly product’, familiar to Rushdie through Frank Kermode’s brilliant essay on E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (Kermode 1963: 79–85), is the distilled theme of the myth and will be played out not as an exemplary anecdote but as an extended dialogic epic in eighteen chapters, not quite the eighteen cantos of the Mahābhārata but at 575 pages substantial enough. A lengthy prose-poem on love is given on pages 422 and 423 of the novel, and in the archive (45/11) Rushdie had noted, ‘Also, centrality of love. And of speech’. In the Digital Archive, from which we have already quoted, there are other ‘self-reflective’ endorsements of the novel where Rushdie refers to his own work as ‘the first great landmark work of the third millennium’ in which ‘not since Molly Bloom’s soliloquy has there been writing of this emotional and erotic force’. From Rai’s point of view, love would be no more than a ‘painful remembering’ (85) as his grieving soul, the narrator in the text, and Rushdie’s mouthpiece Umeed (Rai), narrates Vina’s story with the echoes of the high old yarn of, oh, Helen, Eurydice, Sita, Rati and Persephone – tall Vina’s tall tale, which in my circumambulatory way I am hastening to tell, certainly had a tragic dimension. (58)

Except in Gluck’s version and in Orfeu Negro, this Vina is no Eurydice as tradition has depicted her. And, so, when Umeed meets Vina (as Nissa Doodhwala or Nissa Shetty, who had also been Nissy Poe and Diana Egiptus, newly arrived from America after a tragic family life), Umeed’s mother, Ameer, calls her a ‘bad egg’ (83) who had disowned her Nissa moniker in favour of the classical Indian Vina Apsara. Umeed is no match for her; she would, however, meet her match in Ormus Cama, ‘beautiful and dangerous as the revenant sun, nineteen years old, with a “reputation”’ (84). Two names had been mentioned and the typological connections with the myth already foregrounded: Eurydice–Vina Apsara (‘Vina, the Indian lyre’ (55), ‘Apsara, from apsaras, a swanlike water nymph’ (55)) and Aristaeus–Umeed. The triad needs completing and we turn, as anticipated, to Orpheus–Ormus Cama,8 son of Sir Darius Xerxes Cama, an amateur classicist who, as we have already noted, together with his friend Sir William Methwold, is into the study of interconnections between European and Hindu myths. Rushdie toyed with the idea of naming Ormus Dionysius Cama ‘or the invented Apollodion’ (45/11) but probably felt that the Dionysian connection with Ormus–Orpheus would be far too obvious. But once Ormus enters the scene as Vina–Eurydice’s Orpheus, hardly a page goes by where, in spite of the titles of rock ’n’ roll songs, an archival modernism – both Western and Indian – is not at play. And as in the myth with its gory decapitation of Orpheus by the Dionysian worshippers, the novel has its own many killings at the hands of Ormus’s psychopathic older brother Cyrus Cama (136), himself a twin of Virus, the latter forever mute after being struck by a fiercely hit cricket ball by his own father. And Cyrus is also ambiguously linked as the parricidal killer (was it he or his mute brother Virus?) who suffocated with a pillow both his father Darius and his manservant Gieve (196). Vina’s mother, foster father and step brothers and sisters are all killed too. Rai’s mother Ameer dies of a brain tumour at fifty-one and his father is found ‘hanging from the ceiling fan’ (206).

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If we then turn to the son of the Thracian king, Ormus Cama, born on 27 May 1937, modelled on Elvis Presley (with curly upper lip and thick black hair ‘hanging in sensual coils’(89)) ‘whose lyrics could unlock the very gates of Hell’ (89), we discover his voice and lyrics making their way into some of the great songs of contemporary popular culture. ‘That’s my song’, he declares in 1956 as he listens to ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ (released in January 1956), ‘I wrote it years ago. Two years, eight months and twenty-eight days ago [a full 1,001 nights to be precise], if you want to know’ (93). The extended conceit, in which Elvis Presley himself is named Jesse Garon Parker (Jesse Garon Presley was his twin brother, dead at birth) and his manager the sinister ‘Colonel’ Tom Presley (the real ‘Colonel Tom Parker’ may have had a secret Dutch past), draws on the tradition of Orpheus outlined above since it captures Scheherazade’s 1,001 nights and re-archives that tradition within another modernity. Like Elvis Presley’s own twin brother (who died at birth) Gayomart, Ormus’s twin dead at birth haunts him in dreams populated by the figure of Death who, as in Bergman’s magnificent The Seventh Seal, ‘plays chess with a knight on his way home from the Crusades’ (98). At the ‘Rhythm Center store in Fort, Bombay’ (90), where Ormus hears his compositions being pilfered by the great popular singers of the age, it is Vina Apsara who salutes this genius and their lives become intertwined: the composer–musician and singer Orpheus’s great talents now manifest through two (in fact, three since it is mute Virus Ardaviraf who is the magical flute player, both a pied piper and Krishna) figures, not one as in the myth. The latter is the foundational myth, the heart of this medieval archival modernism, but superimposed on it are other archives – Indian (Pilloo Doodhwala loses Vina to Ormus after a game of cards recalling Yuddhisthira’s loss of his wife Draupadi in the game of dice with Shakuni in the Mahābhārata; Vina reads Upanishadic invention of time), Islamic, as well as contemporary popular Western (‘as if he were both John and Paul, both sour and sweet’ (131)). In perhaps the most incisive use of archival modernism we get Oppenheimer quoting from the great Hindu text: The atom-splitter Oppenheimer, on beholding the power of his brainchild the Bomb, quoted the Bhagavad Gita. I am become Death, the Destroyer of the Worlds. (423–4)

When the silence of the Cama house is broken through Virus’s flute playing, Ormus’s genius, like that of Orpheus, surfaces: ‘prodigy from the start, he had only to touch an instrument to become a virtuoso player, only to attempt a style of singing to master it’ (141). And he composes the anthemic, the signature, the establishing song, ‘Beneath Her Feet’, which I give in verse: What she touches, I will worship it. The clothes she wears, her classroom seat. Her evening meal, her driving wheel. The ground beneath her feet. (142)

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Like the great hit ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ of another duo – ‘Carly Simon and Guinivere Garfunkel’ – where one is struck by the contribution of Garfunkel to the song, so too ‘Ormus had the vision; but Vina had the voice’ (157); they were ‘a single entity in two bodies’ (148). When Vina leaves with the help of Persis Kalamanja, Ormus’s rejected lover, to make her singing career elsewhere, Ormus, despondent, tells Rai that he would go to ‘the ends of earth … and even beyond’ to find her (178) even after Rai warns him that he may have been no more than her ‘Indian fling’ (178). At this point, we get a clear statement of the Orpheus intertext: ‘Was Ormus ready to plunge even into this inferno, the underworld of doubt?’ (178). Alone, Ormus pens, in the early 1960s, songs which were to be great hits a little later: ‘Eve of Destruction’, ‘I Got You Babe’ and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ (183). These oneiric songs and others he hears from his dead twin Gayomart: ‘I follow him in my dreams, he sings, I listen, and these days I’m getting better at hearing the words? Getting better all the time?’ (187–8). Earlier, another song, ‘Yesterday’, too had come to him even when it had not even been recorded (187). As the chronicler, Rai sees himself as ‘Dunyazade, Scheherazade’s sister [who] told tall stories to save her life’ (180), vicariously participating in the details of Ormus’s affair with Vina, listening to his ‘erotic gospel’ (181), enjoying the glory of the great singer whose services were sought after even by ‘Hindi movie playback producers’ (181). In a fictional world where both John and Bobby Kennedy are presidents (but are assassinated), where John Lennon and not Mick Jagger sings ‘Satisfaction’ and where works are attributed to different fictitious authors (one Pierre Menard, for instance, writes Don Quixote (280)), Ormus searches for Vina (‘Vina I’ll be the ground beneath your feet’ (270)), forms his first band ‘Rhythm Center’ (298) and releases, through Colchis Records, the double A-side 45 ‘“Beneath Her Feet” b/w “It Shouldn’t Be This Way”’ (320) in a direct homage to the Beatles’ ‘Strawberry Fields’ and ‘Penny Lane’. Vina hears the double-A record in a Bombay hotel and ‘flies back into his life: and saves it’ (321). As the narrator says, ‘this is a story of a deep but unstable love, one of breakages and reunions. … This is a human love’ (322). And later in the mid-1980s she would boast to Rai: So let’s never forget I was the one who fetched him out of the underworld, she boasts, like that Hindu goddess?, what’s her name, Mousie. Rati, I correct her. Yeah, right. Rati who saved Kama the god of love. (323–4)

As Ormus ‘storms the citadels of rock’, it is Vina’s voice – as Yul Singh, owner of the Colchis music label, foresaw – which is ‘his weapon’ (378). The band VTO (Vina to Ormus) is ‘Supremer than the Supremes’ (379) because in an America recovering from its disastrous Indo-Chinese experiment new sounds are welcome, as Ormus adds ‘to his tracks: the sexiness of the Cuban horns … the holy passion of the Pakistani qawwals’, and VTO’s quake album Quakershaker and peace album Peace Ballads break records but also create racist and right-wing discords (380–1). Vina’s

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voice ‘releases something primal, even animal, in the listener’ (390), driving, as rock music generally does, ‘otherwise reasonable men to rapture, to excess’ (392). What is the nature of Vina’s song and Ormus’s lyrics and music? The adherents of VTO start calling themselves New Quakers as they see in the relationship between Vina and Ormus the tension between wisdom and eloquence. The Francophone Martinican Remy Auxerre said that he seeks ‘not only to sing Apollo’s pure, clean song but also to move to Dionysus’s dirty rhythm’ (392), not the goat song (which is tragedy, a mediated product as Nietzsche said between the Apollonian and Dionysian principles), but an alternation between the two, a fusion of reason, light, madness and darkness: ‘The singer uses the frenzy of the gods’ (392). With Ormus’s ten-year celibacy over (it was a period when, like Rushdie, he had remained sequestered for ‘three and a quarter years’ (308)), he marries Vina (412). On the sleeve of their 1981 VTO hit, a double album, Doctor Love and the Whole Catastrophe, he and Vina posed as the fig-leafed nude, like classical statues wearing shades. Like mythical lovers, Cupid and Psyche, Orpheus and Eurydice, Venus and Adonis … . This sleeve was afterwards called a prophecy of death by the same people who believed Paul McCartney was dead because he was the only one walking barefoot across the zebra crossing on Abbey Road. … The world of popular music – the fans as well as the artistes – sometimes seemed to be populated exclusively by people with troubled minds. (422)

The ‘prophecy of death’ takes us back to the beginning of the novel. It is Valentine’s Day and ‘we have been here before. Here is Vina in the hotel corridor, panicky and uncertain’ (464). The Raúl Páramo business had badly jolted her as she speaks to Rai in Hug-me, her Bombay lingo (464). Her death is captured in a photograph for ‘a photograph can create the meaning of an event’ (466). In this last photograph, ‘the ground beneath her feet is cracked like crazy paving, and there’s liquid everywhere. She’s standing on a slab of street that’s tilting to the right. … This last Vina is calamity incarnate’ (466). After her descent in what in the time of Voltaire was seen as underground earthquakes flowing with sulphur with ‘its stench of Hell’ (465), the photograph, says Rai, will become iconographic like ‘Monroe’s flying skirt, the burning girl in Indochina, Earthrise’ (467). And here in this achievement there is compensation for Rai’s own earlier ‘inglorious fraud’ of the Indian pictures, where a dead man’s photos were passed off as his own (467). The final goodbye, however, transforms the Orpheus myth because here Rai for the moment receives from Vina a declaration of love: ‘I really trusted you … then the earth moved and you abandoned me. … The next time I see you will be the beginning of the rest of our lives’ (468). Can this ‘one woman for the love of whom/ more lamentation burst out from one lyre’ (472) be sung back to life? Is this force, called love, the one orderly product of our lives? And when Ormus himself arrives (in 1989 he was fifty-two) at the El Huracán, Guadalajara, Mexico, in a ‘black linen suit and matching velvet eye patch’ one hears the sound of an acoustic guitar and

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the reprise of the old song, albeit with new words (‘All my life, I worshipped her’ already cited in Chapter 4) later made famous by Bono and U2. In death, Vina supplants ‘dread Persephone’ (479). Her afterlife spirals uncontrollably, the outpouring of grief reminiscent of Princess Diana: singers, pop stars, gurus declare that Vina ‘has become the patron divinity of the age of uncertainty’ (483). Words from Marlowe’s Dr Faustus capture her condition: ‘Then will I headlong run into the earth: Earth, gape! O, no, it will not harbor me!’ (484). People write about her death, about how to ‘live a moral life in an absurd universe’ (488), and there is no end to the impersonation craze. Ormus too, a recluse, gets dragged into the craze and equipped with Vina’s recordings he visits the impersonators. High on drugs, Ormus chases the illusory Vina only to be reminded by her father, ‘Doorman Shetty’, in a version of the old Orpheus tale, that if he loved her so much then why doesn’t he ‘blow his head off ’ and then ‘they’ll be together until the end of time’(497). We get the narrator’s self-annotation here: Doorman Shetty doesn’t know it, but he’s echoing Plato. This is what the great philosopher has Phaedrus say in the Symposium’s first speech about love: The gods honor zeal and heroic excellence towards love. But Orpheus … they sent back unfulfilled from Hades, showing him a phantom of a woman … because he seemed to them a coward … [who] didn’t venture to die for the sake of love, as did Alcestis, but rather devised a means of entering Hades while still alive. Orpheus … the singer with the lyre or, let’s say, guitarist – the trickster who uses his music and wiles to cross boundaries, between Apollo and Dionysus, man and nature, truth and illusion, reality and the imagination, even between life and death, was evidently not to austere Plato’s taste. Plato, who preferred martyrdom to mourning, Plato the ayatollah of love. (498, the first three ellipses in the text)

What follows is Rushdie’s direct engagement with the myth, the salient features of which, from Rushdie’s point of view, may be summarized here, for at the heart of the myth is the problem with naming, of Eurydice in particular. She comes into the myth rather late as she first appears in the first-century-BCE retelling of the myth. In an earlier third-century-BCE version she was called Agriope (‘savage watcher’), the name of the witch goddess Hecate and of Persephone herself. We know of Eurydice as a wood nymph, a dryad, but is she really from the underworld herself, a satanic force, a Queen of Darkness, who steals Orpheus’s heart and destroys the idea of love? In Rilke’s poem ‘Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes’, Eurydike (Eurydice) has difficulty remembering Orpheus when he turns around to see her in the underworld of Hermes, a point noted by Rushdie (499).9 And when suddenly the god stopped her and, with anguish in his cry, uttered the words: ‘He has turned around’ – she comprehended nothing and said softly: ‘Who?’ [begriff sie nichts unde sagte leise: Wer?]

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For Rushdie, the myth that informs the novel raises a number of questions about love and art: Does love always die? Is art incapable of raising the dead? Is love always cowardly? Are the gods dead against lovers? (499). In the novel, the afterlife of Vina haunts Ormus but also Rai who wishes to declare that he, and not Ormus, was Vina’s great love. In an echo of the opening sentence of V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, Rushdie notes, ‘The world is what it is’ (515), but this is also the fantasy world of Ormus, ‘fifty-four going on ninety’ (516) who finds another Vina, a new skinny Vina in Mira Celano (like Ormus also Parsi in origin; her mother, Mehra Umrigar, is Indian, her father, Tomaso, is Italian-American) born in January 1971. A rebellious single mother (whose daughter’s name is Tara), she leaves college and takes to singing and becomes part of Ormus’s theme of reincarnation as ‘he truly thinks she’s come back’ (529). Mira turns to sacred music, in particular the Dies Irae, putatively composed by Mira’s own thirteenth-century ancestor who was St Francis of Assisi’s first biographer and this, of course, works well with Ormus’s heterotopic vision, his ‘forays into alternative realities’ (537), which go back to his belief in the voices of Gayomart, who from the other side of the world foretells songs. Four years on, the Vina impersonations continue, although Mira herself feels progressively uneasy about dressing up as Vina (543). The novel, though, turns on its underlying motifs as Rai himself researches operas on the Orpheus theme – Jacopo Peri, Rinuccini, Monteverdi, Striggio – so as to help the new show that Ormus has in mind, a show that explores the ‘ourworld/otherworld duality’ (547). At the heart of this show will be ‘O Angry Day’, ‘the first-ever rock lyric to be translated from a Latin original written by a duecento Italian monk’ (548). But at the Roseland, September 1993, performance and after Mira’s uncomfortable stage diving (from which she returns to the stage with a greater sense of certainty about her talents since she knows she was now going to be ‘a big, big star’ (551)), the Mira impersonation idea disappears and she tells Ormus that nobody returns from the underground, that Vina Apsara is gone (552). Ormus, whose mind is back in the Rhythm House, Bombay, where he is talking to a young girl about the authorship of ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ (552), turns around, his reverie gone, and replies ‘Vina Apsara? Oh, I’m sorry, she died’ (552). One turns to Chapter eighteen, the final chapter, to read how the two ideas of love and the Orpheus myth enter a late modern idiom. The shift in tone here may be remarked. Having declared to Mira that Vina was dead, Ormus too severs all links with Vina and begins to look for death (557). In 1994 and 1995, with Mira, Ormus creates the Into the Underworld tour. Throughout the performance, Ormus plays his guitar magically, inspired by some thought, moved by some inner and powerful force. The musicians playing with him begin to think of him as a ‘creature from another world, because they could see how hard he was trying to get there’ (560). The stage built for the show – in Rio, Sydney, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Beijing – was constructed to suggest the Gate of Hell. And here we get a return to the myth as Rushdie describes its features. The stage is like a cave, a maw, guarded by the three-headed ‘animatronic Cerberus’. At its edge we see Ormus alone, ‘like Orpheus at Aornum in Thesprotis, contemplating his terrible descent’ (561). The

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description, for purposes of the argument of an archival modernism, requires citation in full to capture its impact without asking the reader to return to the text itself for corroboration of the argument. On this stage Ormus played his opening solo, an acoustic version of ‘Beneath Her Feet,’ while Vina’s image towered over the stadium. … At the end of the song the mechanical dog lay down and slept and Ormus stepped into a clear bubble which moved forward on a track and was ‘swallowed’ by the Maw … [in] McWilliam’s fantasy Hades where the other band members awaited him, as well as a zoo of flame-belching iron demons, giant inflatables and citizens of Pandemonium who were both costumed mimes and machines … the bubble became a metaphor of life, of his continued membership in the world of the living during his adventure in the country of the dead. And Mira was there, of course, she was the woman he had come to rescue from the Prince of Darkness … that was her destiny, stepping free of Vina’s shadow and playing the part of Love trapped in Hell and longing to be free. … And at the end when she went inside it, when she was sealed in with Ormus and the bubble blazed with light and disappeared and then all of a sudden it was just Mira and Ormus back on the secondary stage, out of Hell, liberated from the bubble, and Ormus was playing his guitar as if it were sex itself. (561–2)

Seeing them perform, Rai begins to realize that he had in fact misunderstood Ormus whose love for Vina was greater than his although he too had mourned her death. There was something superhuman about Ormus’s love for Vina as he no longer wanted Mira to take Vina’s place, for, whereas Rai could love again (he could love Mira, for instance), Ormus could not. From that lost love only Death could set him free; only Death could unite them in the ‘forest of the forever dead’ (563). Rushdie (through Rai) reflects on Francis Bacon to whom the story of Orpheus was an allegory not only of the failure of love but ‘of civilization itself. Orpheus had to die, because culture must die’ (563–4). And people die: Ormus’s mother Spenta is dead, his brother Virus dies in a fire that consumes the Methwold home. And Death is finally embraced by Ormus too, shot as he is at the entrance of the Rhodopé Building, near Central Park, New York, on a cold wintry day, in an echo of John Lennon’s killing by David Chapman at the entrance of The Dakota on 8 December 1980. But who is Ormus’s killer? Vina returned? A Phantom? Madonna Sangria doing Cyrus Cama’s work now that Cyrus, in refusing to marry her, has confessed his hatred for his younger brother? Mira herself who owned a similar gun? As Ormus reached the entrance … a tall dark-skinned woman with red hair … dressed [in spite of the cold] only in a sequin-glittered gold bustier, a pair of tight leather pants and stiletto heels. Her shoulders and midriff were bare. (569)

It seems Ormus recognizes her as she empties, point blank, bullets into his chest. And then she disappears leaving behind a red wig, a pair of leather pants, a

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sequinned bustier and a pair of stiletto shoes (570). Ormus dies in Clea’s lap and when asked if he knew who he was replies, ‘Yes, mother, I know’ (570). The killing is attributed to one of many Vina wannabes although Rai is convinced that the killer was none other than Vina herself who alone knew how much Ormus wanted to die so that he could be with her. The gods leave us to our own mercies; their dramas, their loves are our own and Rai, the Aristaeus figure, will never be able to get Vina-Eurydice out of his head. Like Pound, Rushdie too must package centuries of material so as ‘to build up a circle of reference – taking the modern mind to be the medieval mind with wash after wash of classical culture poured over it since the Renaissance’. And so here too the genesis of secrecy turns, once again, to Hermes the ‘patron of interpreters’ whose oracular utterances always insinuated ‘the superiority of latent over manifest sense’ (Kermode 1980: 2). Boethius himself had written the Orpheus-Eurydice legend as a fifty-eight-line poem. In this exercise in archival modernism, Rushdie turns to one of Western civilization’s greatest tales of love and transforms it into a contemporary tale of popular culture. In the tradition of Henryson, he writes his modern ‘moralitas’.

EPILOGUE: SALMAN RUSHDIE HUMANISM AND WORLD LITERATURE

‘The world is what it is,’ is a refrain we’ve alluded to often enough. The world being prior to nations defines who we are; it follows that the literary imaginary was worldly before it became linguistically exclusive, racialized and national (more or less in that order). The modern tale of world literature begins with Goethe’s enthusiastic endorsement of the future of imaginative writing as Weltliteratur, as recalled by his young disciple Johann Peter Eckermann in his Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens (Conversations with Goethe in the Last years of His Life) published in 1835, three years after the great poet’s death. As recalled by Eckermann, Goethe’s hope for a world literature (until Herder’s views on the direct link between nation and language gained traction in Europe) came from a relatively naïve understanding of cultural differences (Goethe, for instance, felt that the Chinese thought like him). David Damrosch, who refers to Eckermann’s work in the opening pages of his book What Is World Literature? (2003) and understands the immense weightiness of the term as well as Goethe’s implicit Eurocentric bias, will go on to offer definitions of world literature that have now become part of our current understanding of world literature as an aesthetic reordering of globalization or even internationalization. In his reading, world literature is a canon of neither great works or of classics, nor is it one of an infinite number of texts forever beyond the reach of any one person, let alone any one culture or language. The key to his definitions is the circulation of a text beyond its cultural origins and its varied articulations in literary systems not necessarily congruent with the original culture that produced it. And, of course, in this process of exchange (a dialectical relation between source and target cultures) textual absoluteness will be replaced by textual instability inasmuch as a literary work will ‘manifest (itself) differently’ depending very much upon where it is located (6), how it is translated and how the translated work is ‘reframed’ (24) in its new environment. A major problem remains and this relates to the question of a common patrimony. For Damrosch, great writers – let us say, Valmiki, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare (Valmiki, who? One may ask. But we correct ourselves now that the entire Baroda critical edition of one of the great epics of world literature has been magnificently translated1) – are no more than a grouping varied according to cultural or national or even intertextual preferences. Invoking M. H. Abrams’s well-known account of ways in which a text may be read in his phenomenal and path-breaking The Mirror and the Lamp ([1953] 1958) where he wrote about four

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coordinates that enable us to interpret a text (text, universe, artist and audience), Damrosch proposes a threefold definition of world literature in terms of the world (world literature as a refraction of national literatures), the text (a literature that gains in translation with the translation itself read differently by the specialist and the common reader) and the reader (world literature as a mode of reading outside of our own cultural comfort zones). But good reading practice, he adds, does require a thorough knowledge of another language and an understanding of how a text gains in translation once it is prized out of its cultural confines. And it is precisely this ‘good reading practice’ that transforms Damrosch himself from a common reader to a specialist reader albeit not as George Steiner may attest (as in After Babel where he reads the specialist as a multilingual European comparatist). So, even as Damrosch theorizes world literature in terms of its presence and affect as text-in-translation, his own reading practice of texts as varied as the Epic of Gilgamesh and Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio Me Llamo Rigoberta Menchú demonstrates superb mastery of comparative textual criticism and a sensitivity towards linguistic coding and literary historiography. Damrosch’s book was published the year Edward Said’s last published work, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), went to press some weeks before Edward Said’s untimely death in September 2003. Two chapters of this book had appeared before and one may assume that these chapters were known to Damrosch. Said had referred to democratic criticism in the context of a universal humanism – a humanism that is not a prerogative but a definition of being itself. Damrosch’s critical practice and understanding of world literature express something of the universalism one finds in the following passage from Said’s book: I believed then, and still believe, that it is possible to be critical of humanism in the name of humanism and that, schooled in its abuses by the experience of Eurocentrism and empire, one could fashion a different kind of humanism that was cosmopolitan and text-and-language-bound in ways that absorbed the great lessons of the past from, say, Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer and more recently from Richard Poirier, and still remain attuned to the emergent voices and currents of the present, many of them exilic, extraterritorial, and unhoused. … For my purposes here, the core of humanism is the secular notion that the historical world is made by men and women, and not by God … historical knowledge based on the human being’s capacity to make knowledge, as opposed to absorbing it passively, reactively, and dully. (10–11)

Said addresses humanism in this fashion because so many of the liberal proponents of humanism felt that true humanism had been violated by unruly practitioners (races, nations, the multicultural and the multilingual) who had brought ‘disreputable modishness … uncanonised learning’ (18) to the gates of humanism. It is clear that the subtext of the critique is of course ‘Eurocentrism’, in itself a key pillar of European faith. Eurocentric humanism is based on principles of withdrawal and exclusion, not on participatory democracy. It is a humanism of secrecy which disavows its own principles of sapere aude; it is a humanism that

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fails to see that its principles have always unearthed historical injustices because the past is not fixed, canonical or canonized but is an uncompleted history. To know that uncompleted history or to complete the project of a true modernity, humanism has to be delinked from Eurocentrism and made into a feature of the human mind itself, not just the European mind. Giving a scheme for heroic first readings on Islamic principles where reading is dependent on a chain of witnesses and available to pious forerunners as an example, Said underlines the need for a critical dialogue between textual paradigms, the point here being that an Islamic hermeneutic is not unlike a humanist hermeneutic as both work from similar principles. The fact is that an Islamic hermeneutic may have been appropriated by the West through the work of Western scholiasts such as the Italian Gerard from Cremona, Italy, who travelled to Toledo around 1140 to uncover with the help of the great Jewish theologian Abraham ibn Ezra Arabic translations of the works of Aristotle whom Arab scholars dubbed the ‘Master of Those Who Know’. Gerard went about translating into Latin works by Aristotle (from Arabic translations) ‘that no one in western Europe has opened in six hundred years’ (Herman 2014: 225). Gerard of Cremona’s translations included Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, ‘which completed the West’s knowledge of Aristotle’s works on logic’ (226), and this amazing rediscovery of Aristotle allowed the West to re-enter the seemingly lost world of Greek mathematics and analytical philosophy. In this transmission of Greek science and mathematics, the pre-eminent Arab scholar of Aristotle was none other than Ibn Rushd (after whom the Rushdie family named themselves) known in the Christian West as Averroës, born in Córdoba in Spain in 1126. To Ibn Rushd, Aristotle complemented divine truth (truth as Qur’ānic revelation) by revealing the laws that governed the natural world. Dante acknowledges Averroës in his Divine Comedy as does, a little later, Raphael who in his great fresco ‘The School of Athens’ (1509–11) places him in a triangle alongside Boethius and Pythagoras. The account given here is far too schematic, but the point is clear: world literary systems were undergoing planetary combinations and the centrality of an exclusive Western humanism fully formed on its own terms is a hugely problematic notion. Alternative paradigms designate a universal humanism, which is Damrosch’s point, and his indebtedness to the kind of humanism outlined by Said is clear. What Damrosch failed to see was that Said himself understood very well the unequal power centres of world literature, their centrifugal bias even as the bias itself required deconstruction through contrapuntal or heroic readings. And herein lay the difficulty of theorizing world literature because Said understood a bias which was internal to the project of world literature itself, a project that, in the end, did not deprovincialize the canon. To invoke Said’s better-known critique of Western literary power, world literature remains an enterprise impossible to disentangle from the logics of orientalism. This, indeed, is the argument of two systemic readers, Pascale Casanova and Franco Moretti, who construct world literature in terms of unequal power systems. And it is in accepting unequal power relations, even as one accepts humanism as a common enterprise where the nonWestern is not an unruly multicultural mob but intrinsic to its very project, that

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we begin to understand the secret of Rushdie’s own aesthetic formulation. To get to the heart of Rushdie’s genesis of secrecy in respect of his placement within world literature one has to turn to Casanova and Moretti, two theorists who define world literature in terms of unequal centres of cultural power. Pascale Casanova’s influential work La République mondiale des lettres appeared in 1999. Its English translation, which is my reference text here, came out in 2004 as The World Republic of Letters. The work was seen as both Eurocentric and Francocentric because of its location within a binary metropole-periphery model. In a collection of essays edited by Christopher Prendergast (Debating World Literature, 2004), in a footnote in Damrosch’s work already discussed (27, fn 6), in Emily Apter’s Against World Literature (2013) and in a fine essay on orientalism and the institution of world literature by Mufti (2010), to mention only a few major interrogations, Pascale’s work has been critiqued primarily for its ethnocentric bias, its schematic readings of postcolonial writing (the writing-back-to-the-metropole proposition), its generalized use of the ‘Herder-effect’, its failure to explore variables other than the nation and the world and the absence of close readings of texts within specific historical and intertextual articulations. Against these criticisms, a defence may be mounted by invoking the spectre of Marx. In his Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx had noted that the bourgeoisie gave a ‘cosmopolitan character to production’ through its ‘exploitation of the world market’. It is in the context of the new production modes of capital that Marx drew an analogy with ‘intellectual creations’ which also follow the narrative of bourgeois exploitation. Just as world economy is controlled by market forces at the behest of a capitalist class, so too ‘from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature’ (Marx 1973: 71). This turn to Marx is valuable because it links world literature to the control of capital and reinforces unequal power relations even at the superstructural level. It is easy to see how for Pascale Casanova a world literary space parallels the world market space insofar as it too is a space of ‘rivalry, struggle, and inequality’ (4). Even as the relative autonomy of literature is conceded (and in places she even declares the absolute autonomy of the work of literary art once it reaches the status of a classic), Casanova’s work is never far from the language of Marxist political economy. Invoking the work of Paul Valéry at one point she adds that the competition among writers in the world of letters is over a commodity to which names such as ‘culture’ or ‘civilization’ or even ‘literary capital’ may be given (13). And before Valéry, Casanova reminds us, Goethe himself had described the literary world as ‘a market where all nations offer their goods’, a remark that led Antoine Berman to observe, ‘The appearance of Weltliteratur was contemporaneous with that of a Weltmarkt’ (14). Like the world market, the world of letters has also been unequal with its centres of power and its privileged languages and texts. To achieve ‘literariness’, dominated cultures and languages with little literary capital had to either adopt prestige languages or get translated into them. But there is also the matter of recognition, either by way of successfully challenging a superior text or textual tradition in the hierarchy of world literature or by finding patronage in one of the centres of patrimony. Casanova gives the example of Paris here as a key

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centre for consecration of the literary work (James Joyce and Samuel Beckett for instance) but London (for Naipaul and Rushdie) or New York (for Rushdie’s later works from Fury (2001) to The Golden House (2017)) could be easy substitutes. Thus W. B. Yeats was instrumental in persuading Macmillan & Co to publish Rabindranath Tagore’s translation of Gitanjali (1913), a manuscript of which Yeats kept on him for days, ‘reading it in railway trains, or on the top of omnibuses and in restaurants’ (Tagore 1965: xiii). The Introduction, which denied Tagore’s Indianness in favour of a universal humanism, seems to have played a large part in Tagore winning the Nobel Prize for Literature that year. And, so, the republic of letters is a variant on the city and the suburb, the centre and the periphery, in fact, the nation and the world. Within these coordinates are located three larger literary– historical movements in world literature which may be referred to as the rise of the vernaculars (marked say by a Descartes renouncing Latin in favour of French for philosophical thought), the rise of national literatures (the after-effect of Johann Gottfried von Herder’s linking of language and nation) and finally the challenge of decolonization seen in the works of marginalized or excluded entrants. The last of these requires a second look as the literary production of the postcolonial has to address simultaneously the demands of a localized nationalism as well as the norms of an international, here primarily European, definitions of literariness. The evidence demonstrates unequal power relations because literatures produced in Anglophone or Francophone postcolonial nations, even when written in native vernaculars, find literary consecration only when they resonate well with a European sense of literariness. Modernity may well have been planetary, but the transmission of literary capital is marked by an imbalance, a point also picked up by Franco Moretti. Referring to a ‘Republic of Letters’, but without mentioning Pascale Casanova by name, Moretti asks what does Goethe’s Weltliteratur mean: ‘world literature, human literature? Or the literature of imperialism?’ (Moretti 2013: 39). The latter was instrumental in creating European modernism but now that it is gone (ironically reflected in the dying Kurtz’s utterance of ‘The horror! The horror!’), has the imbalance or the hierarchy also disappeared? Moretti’s own answer is one of the more engaging and systematic inasmuch as it transforms Casanova’s claims to the centrality of Paris into a core, periphery and semiperiphery model derived from Emmanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory. Moretti concedes that world literature is now ‘unmistakably a planetary system’ (45), but the challenge is how to make sense of it if one does not acknowledge the power and function of capital. In Moretti’s Distant Reading (2013), from which we have already quoted, one chapter (published originally in 2000) takes centre stage. The chapter is titled ‘Conjectures on World Literature’. Although Moretti will have occasion to refine the central thesis of this chapter elsewhere in the book in light of the critical bibliography on it, the thesis itself remains more or less intact. Like the world capitalist system, world literature too is ‘simultaneously one, and unequal’ (46). Using the novel as the crucial genre Moretti makes the case, and I believe it is a powerful case, that source literatures generate literary systems which are then adopted, via local and contingent practices (sometimes in transit through a semi-periphery), by the periphery. The space of the source literature (referred

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to as core) is itself not free from contamination as it too had undergone levels of consecration or interference. Thus Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones could not have been written without Cervantes’s Don Quixote and so on. Nevertheless the general principle holds good and is remarkably congruent with the world capitalist order, the dominant economic form since the eighteenth century. Moretti’s endorsement of Itamar Even-Zohar’s reading of the relationship between source (core) and target (periphery) literatures may be noted here: ‘There is no symmetry in literary interference. A target literature is, more often than not, interfered with by a source literature which completely ignores it’ (47). As a general rule, the source literature carries the foreign form, while the target literature provides local content as well as narrative voice. The consequence has been a structural compromise, but the compromise itself has never been singular or uniform. Local content has provided variations leading to forms of the novel marked by generic instability, a classic instance of which is the foundational West African novel Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1959) where indeed local content as raw material entered into the formal systems of the European novel. Reading it in this binary fashion, however, misses the point because the relationship is not binary but triangular: ‘foreign form, local material – and local form’ which may be more explicitly reformulated as ‘foreign plot; local characters; and then, local narrative voice: and it’s precisely in this third dimension that these novels seem to be most unstable’ (57). If one were to turn to textual criticism, the interference and conscription necessitate a more fluid understanding of the idea of a stemma. National literatures follow the stemma of the tree (root and branch), while world literature follow the ‘anti-stemma’ of the wave that work on principles of overlapping, dissemination and interconnected flows. Later on, in Distant Reading, Moretti will reflect on his conjectures on world literature by acknowledging that other genres such as drama and poetry may not follow the presumed ‘laws of the novel’ and that radical changes need not occur in the core alone. Nevertheless, movements from the periphery to the centre are unusual, while those from the centre to the periphery continue to be common. This does not mean that the core itself has not undergone interference and compromise as noted in the shift of the picaresque from Spain to England in early eighteenth century. This much acknowledged, the central Moretti thesis remains intact: there is no literature without interference, no literature that is not a compromise between ‘the local and foreign’, and no world literature (because every literature is world literature) which is not embedded within unequal power relations that correspond to those unequal relations that govern international capital. To Damrosch, a little optimistically, world literature was a mode of reading, in fact, a close reading that worked on the principle that literatures gained in translation and the canon itself was immensely flexible and contingent. The Rushdie example, however, strengthens Casanova and Moretti’s arguments (and I use them as exemplars here) that a ‘national’ writer enters an international competition armed with a mastery of his own literary history as well as that of the core. That there are centres that consecrate and endow value and that these centres are linked to monetary and cultural capital must be acknowledged.

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To understand a writer a double location becomes important: within a writer’s own and within the space of world literature. It follows that a writer like Rushdie occupies the position of both the insider and the outsider in the circuit of ideas. To make this case, I turn to Rushdie’s recent novels as my proof texts of the argument that even as he challenges one kind of literary hegemony – the literary hegemony of the West – he remains ‘trapped’ (and I use this word advisedly) in the foundational practices of ‘source’ literatures that generate literary systems subsequently adapted to local conditions. So we see in Rushdie the wish to know, the wish to dismantle Eurocentric assumptions and deconstruct orientalist representations within a declared radical humanism even as his aesthetic investment is primarily Western. I use four texts of Rushdie to make my point and bring the book to a close.

The Law of the Furies In researching the myth of Orpheus for The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie would have been struck by the grief of the Furies who were, as Ovid tells us, ‘assuaged by the song [of Orpheus] (and) wept real tears for the very first time’ (Ovid: X, 384), tears which moved even Pluto to release Eurydice. Two years after GBHF, Rushdie publishes Fury (2001), a rushed, seemingly computer-generated novel signalling the writer’s arrival in another great metropolis, New York. Towards the end of the novel, Rushdie provides an account of the Erinnyes/Furies as a generative engine of the novel. In Athens the Furies were thought to be Aphrodite’s sisters. Beauty and vengeful wrath, as Homer knew, sprang from the selfsame source. That was one story. Hesiod, however, said that the Furies were born of Earth and Air, and that their siblings included Terror, Strife, Lies, Vengeance, Intemperance, Altercation, Fear and Battle. In those days they avenged blood crimes, pursuing those who harmed (especially) their mothers – Orestes, long pursued by them after he killed bloody-handed Clytemnestra, know all about that. … ‘Serpent-haired, dog-headed, bat-winged’, the Erinnyes hounded him for the rest of his life, denying him peace. These days the goddesses, less regarded, were hungrier, wilder, casting their nets more widely. As the bonds of family weakened, so the Furies began to intervene in all of human life. From New York to Lilliput-Blefuscu there was no escape from the beatings of their wings. (251)

Apart from Homer and Hesiod – the texts, respectively, being the Iliad and Theogony – what other archives are being invoked here? Two great Greek playwrights, Aeschylus and Euripides, are important. From Aeschylus’s The Eumenides, the third in the Oresteian trilogy, Rushdie gets the reference to the pursuit of Orestes by the Furies because he had killed his mother Clytemnestra. Named ‘Eumenides’ (meaning the ‘gracious ones’) because uttering their real names may be fatal, the Furies occupy a large dramatic space in this play, which

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they also did as a more accommodating and forgiving Chorus in Euripides’s Electra to inform Clytemnestra that her ‘revenge on your husband [Agamemnon] was unholy’ (Euripides, 145) and therefore Orestes’s counter revenge was proper. With Virgil and Dante, however, the Furies’ names get specified and their origin as daughters of Chaos (predating indeed the arrival of the gods) given greater prominence. Fury (the title also of Fritz Lang’s first American film (1936)) is a novel about getting to know a city, New York, the writer’s third metropolis after Bombay and London, and because it is the newest it is unburdened by histories that cast an exhaustingly critical shadow over the other two. Here is a city that changes its shape and exists not so much as an objective fact that can be fixed in any descriptive sense but as one that gets formed and re-formed through technological lenses that keep changing. It is, therefore, both real and simulacral, both being and non-being, both existential and spectral. In this quasi-illusory cityscape where the ‘exceptional was as common place as diet soda’ (39), the kind of allegory that Dante wrote by informing it with myth would lack depth because the city itself is all surfaces. It is a city unable to arouse emotions because it is defined not so much by labour as by the triumph of the digital over the analogue, ‘the final victory of the numerate over the literate’ which also meant the death of the ‘richness of language’ (8). Life gets commodified through demands for ‘three hundred dollar corkscrews’, ‘latest anti-virus software’ (3) and interactive computers. America is the land of self-creation, the ‘country whose paradigmatic modern fiction was the story of a man who remade himself ’ (79) but also of Gotham city in which ‘Jokers and Penguins were running riot with no Batman … this Metropolis built of Kryptonite in which no Superman dared set foot’ (86). This is the America where killings become simulacral, part of a system of representation where the image becomes the real. In this city, we find a fifty-five-year-old professor, Malik Solanka, ‘retired historian of ideas, irascible dollmaker’ and celibate (3). Estranged from his wife Eleanor Masters (author of a doctoral thesis on one of Rushdie’s own pet theories – Othello’s murder of Desdemona as a Muslim Moor’s ‘honour killing’ (11)), he is haunted by the memory of the fateful night when he had ‘brought a carving knife upstairs and stood for a terrible, dumb minute over the body of his sleeping wife’ (39). Solanka lives on the proceeds of his very successful talking doll named ‘Little Brain’ which, as the character in the TV cult classic The Adventures of Little Brain (itself ingenuously modelled on Monty Python’s The Life of Brian (1979)), impersonated and interviewed ‘Great Minds’. Solanka had also created a sci-fi fantasy about a Rijk civilization in Planet Galileo-1 which had the ‘cynical cyberneticist Akasz Kronos’ (161) as its leader. This was the world of manipulative Puppet Kings written with Calvino’s values in mind: ‘Lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, consistency’ (164), values he felt gave his cyborgs a degree of human ethical independence. PlanetGalileo.com, the Puppet Kings project had taken off – Mattel, Amazon, Sony, Columbia and Banana Republic (214–5) lined up to be part of it. The characters in this virtual world become agents in their own right and one, Babur,

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a name like the others ransacked from the ‘world’s storehouse of old stories’ (190), emerges out of the world of the virtual, the real-unreal of the internet, and escapes the control of the master cybernist Professor Akasz Kronos who is really Solanka’s virtual double. His fictional characters now find they’re in demand as the living dolls from the imaginary PlanetGalileo-1 intervene in the public affairs of the Indo-Lillies (the exploited descendants of indentured labourers in LilliputBlefuscu, a nation, of two islands modelled on Fiji, a country whose Indian prime minister Mahendra Chaudhry was ousted from office in a coup in 2000, and named after Jonathan Swift’s foundational satire). Their presence is everywhere, even in the ill-fated island-nation’s capital Mildendo where leaders as well as counterrevolutionaries have names of these cyborgs. Counter-coups are orchestrated by them. But what of the furies who are everywhere? The ‘enraged trinity’, the ‘ferocious deities’ in Solanka’s life are three women. Once there was Eleanor Masters, his wife, then came Mila Milo and then again Neela – collectively, ‘the three Furies, the “good-tempered ones” themselves, in full possession of the physical bodies of the women to whom his life was most profoundly joined’ (233). Milo (Mila Milosevic) was the original admirer of Solanka’s first major creation, the Little Brian episodes, but she becomes for Solanka his doll substitute. With Mila Milo, Solanka had found something like happiness and yet the ‘dark goddesses still hovered over him’ (130) because Mila Milo, naked as Fury, the world swallower (178), was feeding off his fury and Solanka knew that he was playing with fire (134). The third fury Neela Mahendra, in looks recalling Rushdie’s fourth wife Padma, comes transformed as a Lilliput-Blefuscu revolutionary, ‘the most beautiful woman’ (61). She enters the scene as the grandchild of nineteenthcentury indentured labourers or coolumbers (after a ‘call number’ but historically a ‘coolumber’ was the plantation overseer) whose country, Lilliput-Blefuscu, is currently in the throes of a coup by the indigenous Elbees of the country led by a failed merchant Skyresh Bolgolam (modelled on George Speight, the Fijian coup leader of 2000 and a failed businessman with an extremist nativist agenda) against the descendants of indenture. In Neela, Solanka discovers that ‘furia could be ecstasy, too’ (206) as well as hope. Obsessed Solanka follows Neela’s revolutionary impulse to save her beleaguered nation but finds that the living dolls from the imaginary planet Galileo-1 intervene in the public affairs of the actually existing earth (226). Their presence is everywhere in the ill-fated island-nation of LilliputBlefuscu, too, where leaders as well as counter-revolutionaries are named after these cyborgs. So when he arrives in Lilliput-Blefuscu, Solanka finds his Galileo-1 puppet creations everywhere; he notes that the virtually named Commander Akasz Kronos of the rebellion is none other than Babur who, having overthrown the commander, had captured the city and overthrown the racist Bolgolam. In an act that recalls Eleanor’s complaint that Solanka always betrayed those who loved him, Neela, who is in a Zameen of Rijk’s mask, the signature mask of the imaginary planet, too acts out a betrayal as the fury of ‘these unhappy isles’ ran deeper than Solanka’s own ‘pitiful rage’ (246). In the end, Neela plans Solanka’s escape from the confused world of Lilliput-Blefuscu but is herself killed. What exists of the

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revolution is nothing but a film because in this new ‘fury’ the world is flattened out, it no longer locks itself into meaning, one in which the flows of the internet merge into the erstwhile pre-internet reality of the world. Cyborgs have no ethical responsibility and, if an allegory is to be drawn, it is a frightening vision of a world where the analogue (which would produce a classical narrative of the Furies) is replaced by the dystopic digital. Life was a fury in all its forms – ‘sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal’ (30) – and it drove one to highs and lows. ‘The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy’ (31), Solanka thinks, but it seems now he does not need gods to understand both fury and the Furies. He had flown to America to ‘unwrite’ the haunting accident of that dreadful night when he almost murdered his wife. To ‘unwrite’ that event Rushdie turns to ‘deep’ classical myths with which to generate a ‘surface’ syntax. The homage is clear and the self-evident reverence with which the source texts are treated once again affirms the power of the European intertext in Rushdie’s writing. The world of letters continues to have its privileged classics and its privileged centres of consecration even as unruly figures attempt to deprovincialize them. In some ways, to invoke Damrosch’s idea of the translated text (which gains in power in the act of translation over the original), the Rushdie novel is already a ‘translation’ from the semi-periphery of the deep abstract texts of the West. But that translation also comes with a humanist challenge in Rushdie’s later works.

A Planetary Literary System Susan Stanford Friedman speaks of an ‘early modernity’ in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in India centred around Mughal rulers. She uses the syncretic devotional (bhakti) poet Kabir (fl. fifteenth century) Hindu by birth, Muslim weaver by profession, as an instance of an oral poet who used the vernacular to create local, discrepant and challenging beliefs against the transcendental claims of high Hinduism and orthodox Islam.2 A century after his death, Kabir’s vernacular syncretism gets regal endorsement by Akbar (1542–1605), the greatest of all Mughal emperors, whose reign (1556–1605) so closely coincides with that of Elizabeth I (1558–1603). Friedman concedes that in Akbar’s reign grew ‘a particular cosmopolitanism in which a multicultural blend of religion, knowledge, and the arts flourished’ (205). Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence (EF, 2008a) is a celebration of this vital modernity and the global linkages that Akbar sought to establish, even if one of Rushdie’s own heroes, the idealist Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, felt that Akbar’s inquisitive mind had not ‘sought to find out what was happening in other parts of the world’ (Nehru 1995: 264). Against the internecine religious wars of Europe around the same time, Akbar’s India offered a model of tolerance and peace, a point on which both Rushdie and Nehru agree. What then does a writer – who is himself an exemplary latter day cosmopolitan – do with this oriental modernity and what is the secret of this novel’s engagement with world literature? We need to let the novel speak for itself.

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The novel, Rushdie had noted in a preliminary outline (41/8, The Enchantress of Florence), will be written, following Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millennium, in a style that is ‘light and comic throughout, and the telling [is] swift’ (2), a feature endorsed, as we have seen, by Malik Solanka himself. In the outline, Galil Khan Galili (himself an astronomer, the name echoing that of Galileo), an ambassador from the court of the first Mughal Emperor Babur Shah, arrives at the court of the Medici Duke of Florence. Machiavelli, master of a ‘form of sycophantic writing known as “mirror-of-princes”’ (3) but subverting it in his own The Prince, is in exile but Galil Khan Galili is fascinated by him. Through the dancing girl Lakshmi, soon to be the new model for Botticelli, and the Duke’s lover, Galili is able to advance Machiavelli’s rehabilitation, learn about Renaissance humanism but ultimately escape with Lakshmi because Machiavelli’s theory of politics had made it clear that ‘a servant is never free’(17). Although Medici Florence remains an important site, and Machiavelli an important character, the early outline given by Rushdie is completely discarded in the novel that he writes. In the final published form, the novel begins with the arrival of a European traveller, a multilingual who spoke seven languages including Persian, to the newly constructed city of the Mughal Emperor Akbar called Fatehpur Sikri near Agra, a city, for so the traveller felt, which was larger than Florence or Venice, larger, it seemed to the eye, than even Rome or London (8). The traveller has a story to tell and the story’s primary listener has to be none other than the emperor himself: ‘“I’m a man with secret, a secret, that’s what – a secret which only the emperor’s ears may hear”’ (7), he tells the bullock-cart driver en route to Fatehpur Sikri. With the skills of an accomplished conjuror he had come as a stowaway on Lord Hauksbank’s ship styling himself Uccello di Firenze. Lord Hauksbank is on his way to the Mughal court (in Italy they say ‘Mogor’ (15)) with an introductory note from Queen Elizabeth. But that letter is now in his overcoat ‘of coloured leather lozenges’ (6) styled so expertly by the tailor Shalakh Cormorano, the ‘green-eyed Moor of Venice’ that it felt ‘light as a feather’ (22). That letter of introduction he had discovered in one of the hidden panels of the Scottish milord’s living quarters on the ship as the lord himself lay asleep under the effect of laudanum placed in his drink. This man from Renaissance Florence is heading for the court of another Renaissance man, a philosopher king who was to become the greatest ruler the nation had ever known. The two modernities are historically parallel and Rushdie uses the traveller’s story and his Florentine background to create a dialogue between cultures by ‘linking rather than dividing paradigms’ (Parashkevova 2012: 178). In doing so, though, Rushdie utilizes his considerable craft as a writer of fiction thoroughly acquainted with its global intertexts and especially with European Renaissance cartography. The cultures connect and disperse as the traveller’s alluring tale – a tale given in parts like Scheherazade’s to defer death itself – is unravelled. The young man who called himself Mogor dell’Amore (‘The Mughal of Love’, ‘Mughal born out of wedlock’ (93)) is, of course, an accomplished conjuror, but Rushdie through his narrator suggests the young man required no magic wands or potions, all that was needed was language itself: ‘Language upon a

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silvered tongue affords enchantment enough’ (75). And language is the ground of debates in this enlightened court, debates that replay the struggle between reason, ‘a mortal divinity’ (80), supported by Abul Fazl, follower of Ibn Rushd, and dogma, fanatically defended by Badauni whose mentor is Al-Ghazali. This Mogor dell’Amore who now calls himself Niccolò Vespucci (after the political theorist and Agostino Vespucci, one of three Florentine friends) would claim that his mother (Angelica, named after a character in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516) who is described by the text’s translator Barbara Reynolds as ‘daughter of the Great Khan of Cathay; loved and pursued by numerous knights, both Christian and pagan; marries Medoro’, an African soldier) was a princess of the true Chaghatai blood, a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, a member of the house of Timur, the sister of the First Mughal Emperor of India, whom she called ‘the Beaver’ (Babur, grandfather of Akbar) (107). This Angelica, a princess, was none other than Qara Köz (‘Lady Black Eyes’), excised out of Mughal genealogy. The tale is intriguing for if indeed the traveller were the princess’s son his mother would have given birth at sixty-four, a biological impossibility. Unless, of course, the princess had a daughter. Intrigued by the traveller’s narrative, the emperor asks his court painter Dashwanth to create the life of this lost princess in pictures, which he does in a series called Qara-Köz-Nama (‘The Annals of Qara-Köz’), a series which, alas, except for a single painting, disappears with the painter himself.3 The touch is Rushdie’s – an instance of ekphrasis internal to the text. The technique also suggestively undercuts the claims to truth conditions that historical narratives insinuate. To push this further, Rushdie will borrow narrative styles from Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532), a work written in the medieval and early Renaissance style called ‘specula principium’ (mirrors-of-princes style) which was aimed at instructing in a forthright manner kings and newly installed kings and princes.4 The tale of the princess, who has her ‘mirror’ double, as narrated by the traveller now takes us to Medici Florence. Conterminous civilizations – one Indian, the other Italian – will now come together and the larger comparative principles of Renaissance humanism, especially the nature of philosophical reasoning, would be deployed by Rushdie towards a programmatic world literature. The novel then turns to three young friends – Nino Argalia, Niccolò (‘il Machia’) and Agostino (Ago) Vespucci, the latter golden haired – in a Lorenzo de’ Medici Florence peopled by the likes of the great painter Alessandro Filipepi Botticelli (1445–1510) but also in a city which is the world capital of sodomy (146). The young traveller (variously named Uccello, Niccolò and Ago) is part of this Italian world, although it is clear that dates are not reliably given. The dates of Niccolò il Machia (Machiavelli 1469–1527) are a little before Akbar’s reign and would have made the young traveller a lot older. Inserted in the novel is the idea of a memory palace, a repository of memories to be recalled, and this memory palace is in the mind of the great courtesan Giulietta Veronese who narrated, as a twice-told tale, Ago Vespucci’s own life and then, more importantly, of their friend Argalia, now the Turkish general Arcalia who left Florence to go to the other side and who believed, after his friend il Machia, that ‘the end justifies the means’ (169). And it is this Arcalia or Argalia who, years

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later, will meet Qara Köz (175). All this makes its way into the narrative through il Machia’s unrestricted access to Giulietta’s memory palace (181). The memory palace told him how Argalia acquired extraordinary martial skills, how the Swiss giant mercenaries Otho, Botho, Clotho and D’Artagnan were bought as slaves and joined him, how he killed Vlad III ‘Dracula’ who ‘drank the blood of his impaled victims’ (185) and was rewarded by the Sultan with the title ‘Pasha Arcalia, the Turk’ (186). In this memory palace or dream, il Machia sees a vision of Angelique (Angelica) who repeats her ancestry and then gradually, slowly, deletes parts of the predicate so that only her name remains: ‘My name is Angelique’ (188). And in this memory palace or in a vision he sees the yellow-haired figure conversing not with a Turkish sultan but with another king who speaks of love. Fantasy or truth, the palace of memory or visions, fiction or fact, the novel charts these principles of narrative art without clear narrative transitions from one to the other. And so here we have the golden-haired traveller Niccolò Vespucci in the court of Emperor Akbar soon after the great musician and singer Tansen had created his new musical composition (raag deepak) returning to his story, and more precisely to the time when the ‘great warrior Argalia met the immortal beauty Qara Köz’ (197). What begins to enthral the king, the Jahanpanah, ‘Shelter of the World’, is the tale itself, the story as discours, as language, as expression, as dialogism and not as histoire with meaningful referents. The narrator gives the emperor space to articulate the logic of the tale. After the Mogor dell’Amore’s story had become one of the great hits of the time, indeed, the city’s grand passion, its singular infatuation, the emperor himself tells the assembled crowd: What we know is that he has crossed the world to leave one story behind and to tell another, that the story he has brought us is his only baggage, and that his deepest desire is the same as poor vanished Dashwanth’s – that is, he wants to step into the tale he is telling and begin a new life inside it. In short, he is a creature of fables, and good afsanah [romance] never did anybody any real damage. (203)

And, so, the traveller’s tale of Qara Köz continues, and stories as the emperor himself concedes cannot be hurried.5 This Qara Köz could charm any man, as Ariosto himself notes about Angelique in Orlando Furioso. Her great love, however, was Argalia the Turk although Lorenzo de’ Medici loved her equally fiercely and, infatuated as he was, she came to be known as the Enchantress of Florence. Once when, during a banquet, Lorenzo de’ Medici had recited ‘certain choice words from [Plato’s] the Symposium itself ’: ‘Love will make men dare to die for their beloved – love alone,’ he declaimed, ‘and women as well as men. Of this, Alcestis, the daughter of Pelias, is a monument to all Hellas; for she was willing to lay down her life on behalf of her husband, when no one else would’ (290–1)

Qara Köz, absorbed in her narcissistic ‘mirror’ self, was totally disinterested.

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The traveller’s tale becomes, for Rushdie, an exercise in comparative history, aesthetics, religion and philosophy. Akbar himself begins to doubt religious absolutism as the Florentine’s message of humanism enables not a retreat into quietism but the celebration of difference and discord, iconoclasm and irreverence. The traveller gave accounts of European Dukedoms where philosophers engaged with questions and debates about humanism and the centrality of Man and with the foundational principle of a divine world order of which the Duke was God’s representative, and via the Pope, endowed with divine rights. So across civilizations and intellectual traditions, humankind were alike in their struggle to theorize will, understanding, volition and determinism. The Mogor dell’Amore, who claimed to be the king’s uncle, it seemed, had mastered, like il Machia, the rules of statecraft, helped the King make sound decisions, and the King, in turn, toyed with the idea of making him a farzand, an honorary son against the advice of many, including the King Mother and Mariam-uz-Zamani, the eldest Queen who looked upon him as an infidel sent to destroy Akbar’s kingdom by wit and not force. The foreign, as always in Rushdie, may be the ‘revitalizing force’ or on the contrary disturb the inner essence of a culture and its people, ‘alienate them from their essential beings’ (319). The world, of course, is changing with new discoveries, new routes and new ways of mapping the globe. In particular, the tale of Qara Köz will bring about a shift in ideas about space and time, ideas that redefine cartography and our place in the world. The traveller turns to the Age of Discovery, an age so called because of the European ‘discovery’ of Mundus Novus, the New World, by Columbus and Vespucci. In their discoveries, chronology became uncertain as time became disjointed. India could be elsewhere (for this is what Columbus’s discovery told Europe) and since time and space were getting out of control, historical veracities, the location of periods in an absolute chronology no longer made sense. The emperor’s imagination could not grasp this, but Khanzada’s sister, the emperor’s aunt, Qara Köz, it seems, had made the journey, crossing the Ocean (the Black Waters) ‘into unreality, into a world of fantasy which men were still dreaming into being’ (330). And on board is also Ago Vespucci, the great discoverer Amerigo’s cousin, whose contribution to the Benedictine Monk Waldseemüller’s Cosmographiae Introductio he peruses with Qara Köz and the Mirror (332). Qara Köz disappears from history as she enters a universe of paper and ink, ‘becoming in short a story, a tale, a romance’, and as in all romances the dying hero is overtaken by death (335). Fifty-four years after Qara Köz had set sail from Italy ‘a young yellow-haired rogue, no more than twenty years of age’ (335), born in 1553, tells Akbar, concluding his tale, that his mother died when he was nineteen and a half (that is in 1572) having stilled time and age but trapped in the new world. The emperor retorts, ‘This finally is what you ask us to believe. … That she learned how to arrest time’ (336–7). He has his own theory, the traveller is a product of incest, the child of his own sister who was Qara Köz’s maid and ‘Mirror’s’ daughter. His father was one of the three friends of Florence, Ago Vespucci. ‘That is not what happened. … My mother was Qara Köz, your grandfather’s sister, the great enchantress, and she learned how to stop time’ (339–40), cries the Mogor but the truth is out. The emperor’s retort is emphatic, ‘No, she did not’ (340).

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The tale at an end – the tale of the road, the picaresque story: a traveller comes, he tells his tale and then he departs – the petty politics of the state, the historical here and now intervene. The lake that the traveller had seen on his way to Fatehpur Sikri years ago dries up; the traveller, together with his two whores (the knife thin and the mattress fat), escapes. The emperor feels defeated. He has lost his city: Was it a curse for spurning the traveller he thinks? Machiavelli, in what may be called a proto commedia dell’arte style, had also written a satirical comedy, La Mandragola (‘The Mandrake Root’, 1524), along with his better-known works of statecraft. The play was a statement about love against the backdrop of both religious and social piety. The emperor thinks of religion and the quarrel over God as he leaves his city. For the moment – during the years when the traveller told his tale and lived among them – love ruled; in future, it would be harshness and not civilization as the ruler, he thought (347). But the enchantress Qara Köz affects his dreams, she invades his fantasies. She tells him that she was barren which is why she never bore a child despite her many lovers. The traveller’s mother could not have been her daughter. But she did have a Mirror, her exact image, her duplicate in every way and she had a daughter. ‘The Mirror’s daughter was the mirror of her mother and of the woman whose mirror the Mirror had been’ (348). The child grew up to believe what she was not, that is, not the Mirror’s daughter but her own. A crime against nature was committed but not by her own child. In the New World where values are still being formed, where need and necessity govern ethical standards, where the law of the Father, the interdiction against incest, the threat of castration have not been given a legitimate and foundational narrative as a warning against incest, there is no super ego to control the consequences of culturally ungoverned desire. A traveller comes, tells a fantastic tale and departs. In a talk given at the Miami Book Fair International soon after the publication of the book (in 2008), Rushdie spoke about Akbar as the Indian proto-humanist recalling Said’s suggestion that humanism was not a purely Western idea. He spoke about the water drinkers and the wine drinkers, the fundamentalist and the liberal, about the co-existence of magic in our lives and especially at a time when magic had more power over our lives than religion. He spoke of his passion for the sixteenth century, the age of change and discovery. And he spoke about the Memory Palace, an earlier version of a virtual reality. The principle here was governed by attaching memories to places and then remembering the places through these memory associations, a mode of memorializing perfected by the Greeks. About Qara Köz he said, she’s probably a witch and the novel itself was ‘essentially a love story and a road novel’ that transcended geographical and cultural boundaries, that affirmed a ‘worldly’ humanism but at the same time shown the powerful legacy of the European novel form. World literature, in Rushdie’s version, is one that affirms the generic power of the form but invests it with local material. Rushdie deploys the mystery of Qara Köz to reflect on larger principles of humanism as noted by Said, principles also so central to any theorizing of world literature. These principles lead to connections between conterminous civilizations, one in India, the other in Europe. To do this Rushdie turns once again to two related ideas – love as the one orderly product and the exploration of equally impressive but alternative modernities – which progressively inform Rushdie’s writings.

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Consecrating the Past The medieval archive that Rushdie turns to in Two Years Eight Months and TwentyEight Nights (TYEM 2015a) is the debate between Ibn Rushd and Al-Ghazali, already foreshadowed in EF and embedded in all his novels. It is a battle of ideas, the ‘right war’, and Rushdie himself casts his vote in favour of Ibn Rushd, a name he shares with the philosopher because his father had changed the Dehlavi surname to Rushdie as a homage to the ‘acclaimed commentator upon the works of Aristotle’ (Rushdie 2012: 22). The idea of the ‘right war’, the war of aesthetics versus blind ideology, the war of art over righteousness, the war that would find place for both sense (reason) and sensibility (art), that war, temporarily fought with disastrous consequences for the author (during the fatwa years), insinuated that freedom of expression was at an end. That ‘right war’ a quarter of a century later after the publication of The Satanic Verses, it was felt, required an extended commentary, in short, a lengthy allegory of meaning in the tradition of Bunyan, Swift, and all those writers who always felt that fiction was after all allegorical: it said one thing but meant another. Rushdie returns to the battle of the books, of ideas, and enlarges that brief war into a catastrophic encounter in which the future (a thousand years hence) looks back at the crisis of the end of the second millennium. How to give it form? Allegory, the genre of understatement and critique, the genre at once objective and self-reflective, offers its services to the writer. And Rushdie grasps it; the world, indeed, reached a crisis point because of the competing forces of irrational belief and critical philosophy and that crisis could be understood only with historical hindsight by looking forward a thousand years and then looking back at what occurred over a period of 1,001 nights a thousand years before. And for the allegory to work, archival modernism once again provided the necessary conceit. ‘To tell a story about the past’, the narrator will tell us, ‘is to tell a story about the present’ (TYEM 207). To Rushdie, this medieval archive with its struggle over modernity provides the right material that could be reworked into the principles that govern the genre of urban fantasy (UF), a genre, given Rushdie’s own fascination with the city (once when asked what he’d like to come back as, he’d replied ‘a city’), that works on the liminal spaces of the city, its sewers, its hidden crevices, its garbage dumps, its graveyards, its ‘wormholes’, characteristics celebrated in the works of China Mieville (King Rat, 1998), Charles de Lint (Dreams Underfoot, 1993), Emma Bull (War for the Oaks, 1987), Laurell K Hamilton (Guilty Pleasures, 2007; The Laughing Corpse, 2009), Kelly Gay (The Better Part of Darkness, 2009) and others.6 Strong parallels may be drawn between Emma Bull’s novel in which the city is saved from the ‘Fairy Queen’ (TYEM’s penultimate section is titled ‘The Faerie Queene’, the spelling itself alluding to Spenser’s great poem), between Marvel Comics Graphic novels based on the character Anita Blake in Hamilton’s novels and generally the use of urban hunters in urban fantasy. These are intertexts that help explain many features of Rushdie’s own novel. However, a narrower focus is required here and, so, let us enter the text with the account of Ibn Rushd’s exile which begins very much like the account of the philosopher given in Joseph Anton (2012: 5).

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Ibn Rushd was a beaten man, defeated by the re-emergence of the works of Al-Ghazali whose book The Incoherence of the Philosophers, written some eightyfive years before, he had refuted in his own The Incoherence of Incoherence but to no avail. Such is the power of belief, of returning everything to a First Cause without critique, that philosophy with its tendency to relativize, to establish different foundational principles, is unable to withstand the onslaught of the clarity the idea of God brings to people by removing volition or will from their lives. Al Ghazali had won because people believed that God’s will was the only cause, the only law: ‘the cotton caught fire because God made it so’ (8) not because through an act of will an agent lights the cotton up. Into this broken world of Ibn Rushd, enter the Jinnia, the female Jinn, Dunia (meaning ‘world’ in a number of Oriental languages) eager to seduce him and produce a thousand children, all named after the teller of tales Shahrazad’s (Scheherazade’s) sister Dunyazad, and to be known, collectively, as ‘Dunia-zát’. This Dunia Jinnia is, of course, none other than one of the great jinns or jinnias of the other world, Peristan, the world of peris or fairies, also named Lightning Princess, the mistress of the thunderbolt. Within 1,001 nights of his exile, Ibn Rushd is rehabilitated and Dunia returns to her other world, but his children born of Dunia remain in this world, marked by an absence of lobes. In a spatial reconfiguration of the two worlds in the Orpheus story, our world, the world of Orpheus, is itself rendered as an underworld into which through slits would enter the jinnias of Peristan ‘eight hundred and more years later’ (19) to play havoc with humankind. The world eight hundred years on has changed; an age of the irrational has begun; an era of ‘strangenesses’ has taken hold. One hundred and one days after a catastrophic storm, in this unruly, uncertain condition of the world, Ibn Rushd’s decaying body, more like a phantom than any kind of substance, hears the voice of Dunia, his beloved, who tells him that the ‘slits in the world are reopening’ (56) and she can return to be with Ibn Rushd again. Al Ghazali’s triumphant voice reminds them that the reconciliation of ‘the rational and the sacred’ (57) is an impossibility and as Dunia now declares it falls to Ibn Rushd’s children, his race, the Duniazát, to save the world. And at the forefront of this battle, this war to save the world of reason will be the Lightning Princess Dunia herself. Her great strength will be her capacity to love the human race. She would ‘love love itself ’ (61), a theme that goes back to the Orpheus myth, and a theme that functions as the overriding principle in Rushdie’s works. We, therefore, get into an era of ‘strangenesses’ as reality collapses, natural disasters of near-cosmic proportions are common and finally evil jinns from Peristan, these malicious beings, compatriots indeed of Dunia herself, but of Al Ghazali’s philosophical persuasion, invade the earth. Strange things happen. Chief among them, the Grand Ifrit Zumurrud Shah had been released from the opaque blue bottle by none other than Al Ghazali and as per the rules of tales about jinns, Zummurud became Ghazali’s slave or personal jinni. ‘Teach them to fear the improper use of words,’ Ghazali had commanded Zumurrud (233). This jinn’s directive from Ghazali is to destroy those who believe that God is love. Zumurrud is a family of four dark forces whose sole aim is to show, through their destructive

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force, how insignificant humans are in our universe, a point made dramatically in another time when they killed Dunia’s father even as he defended the mountain of Qâf, abode of the bird-god Simurgh (157). The one nodal point in this yarn is the gardener Geronimo Manezes, an Indian immigrant, an illegitimate child of an Indian Catholic priest, ‘Ibn Rushd reborn in Geronimo’ (203), to whom Dunia turns in a replay of the sexual encounter with Geronimo’s ancestor Ibn Rushd and who with Dunia travels to Peristan (218) in their struggle over the dark forces. But here, again, as elsewhere in the novel, commentaries and asides, extraneous information about the world, discursive variations on quotidian philosophical ideas and anecdotal writing generally triumph over narrative pace and descriptive prose. The world is not what it is and realism would only extend the muddle, but even a chaotic world may be rendered in a manner that establishes the chaos, that would be absorbing. Instead, the novel, unlike The Ground Beneath Her Feet or The Enchantress of Florence, does not have a strong enough scaffolding for a replay of archival modernism. And, so, in the end, the point is made – that Ibn Rushd’s reason triumphs over Al Ghazali’s fundamentalism (and the allegorical correspondences are only too obvious) – but the craft is missing. There will be innumerable references to our own times – the description of America, its crazy Second Amendment (236), world politics with the first steps made towards the creation of ‘the global jinn sultanate’ (241) allied to the vicious and illiterate Swots of A. who forbade everything (227, 241) – as well as cross references to fundamentalist Islamic thinking but the work in the end preaches or tells rather than shows (to use a very old explanation of the craft of fiction put forward by E. M. Forster many years before). And so in spite of the description of the War of the Worlds where Dunia, who is blessed by the ‘magic bird on her shoulder’ (201), battles with the four evil jinns (in a replay of Superman’s battle with the three equally strong invaders of earth from the dead planet Krypton, a conscious Rushdie allusion) and defeats them, the novel tells us much about Rushdie’s own world view at the expense of character and motivation beyond the simulacral world that the author creates. We are told that a fairy king ‘can only be poisoned by the most dreadful and powerful of words’ (178) and narrative is like the contents of a Chinese box with its multiple layers with unfinished stories because ‘digression was the true principle of the universe’ (197). We are told that the Simugh King (guarded by the holy bird of Qaf) before his death ‘opened his eyes and in his final delirium demanded to see a book that had never been written, and after that immediately began to recite its invisible contents as if he were reading it aloud’ (199). The world of the now, a thousand years hence, has no race, no religion, no colour (207), but it had to survive the near-apocalypse of a thousand years before, during those dreadful 1,001 days when the War of the Worlds raged. Ten centuries ago, the ‘“death of the gods”’ occurred (269). Ten centuries ago, the War of the worlds ended ‘religion as a justification for repression’ (269). During the final battle on the Thousandth Night (275), between Light (Dunia) and the prince of the dark jinn, Zumurrud, it is Geronimo who experienced a ‘sort of inner vision or epiphany’ (274).

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The doors of perception opened and he saw that what was evil and monstrous about the jinn was a mirror of the monstrous and evil part of human beings, that human nature too contained the same irrationality, wanton, willful, malevolent, and cruel, and that the battle against the jinn was a portrait of the battle within the human heart, which meant that the jinn were somehow abstractions as well as realities, and that their descent to the lower world served to show that world what had to be eradicated within itself, which was unreason itself, unreason which was the name of the dark jinn within people, … [that] needed to be expunged … so that an age of reason could begin. (274)

Rushdie turns to the foundational epistemic struggle between Ibn Rushd and Al Ghazali to write an allegory of Islamic fundamentalism, and what better way of doing it than to return to Islamic modernity itself, a time when debates were not uncommon, even if in that flowering of modernity absolutism and unreason triumphed. Allegory becomes the mode, but the form verges on what James Wood has called ‘hysterical realism’, a genre where the plot is in perpetual motion, the characters inhuman and ‘conceptual relatedness’ its theme.7 The epigraphic print from Goya in the novel carries a fuller caption: ‘Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels.’ Uniting fantasy with reason designates as well Rushdie’s own understanding of narrative form. Ibn Rushd (Averroës to the West), who revered Aristotle, combined fantasy with reason, the sacred with an understanding of the world as it is. Rushdie, like the Italian Gerard from Cremona, finds in medieval Islamic thinkers the way forward, another way in which to read the Western masters, but he can only write in borrowed garb, in the Western allegorical mode, even as he refines that clothing and gives it a different colour. There is, as Moretti had noted, no (world) literature without interference.

The Cinematic Voice-Over: The Golden House ‘Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death’ (Benjamin 1968: 94). The Orpheus story is the defining tale for Benjamin’s proposition and it is one that Rushdie himself had turned to in GBHF to write the story of death and love, two key elements in the Rushdie corpus. In The Golden House (GH 2017), Rushdie turns to them to write an exemplary text of world literature, a text that makes it quite clear that the source texts of the novel form remain Western, and target texts require endorsement from the metropolitan centre, in this case New York. To Rushdie, as we have noted in this book, the world is what it is and the generic power of Western forms – here both fiction and film – invades world textual production. In his early drafts of Midnight’s Children, at least in the pages that remain, there is a narrator as voyeur, and in ‘The Courter’ the narrator, who is a photographer, has a fine sense of filmic techniques. Both these come together in Rushdie’s latest novel, with the difference that the narrator here is not a voyeur but a filmmaker who tells a story, borrowing as he does his authority

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from Death. There is an Arabic fable that Rushdie cites towards the end of the book. It is a fable that Somerset Maugham had used in his last play Sheppey (1933). Death speaks, There was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the market-place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra. (GH 277)

A family of four, billionaire father Nero Golden and his three sons, Petronius (Petya), who is agoraphobic, alcoholic and autistic, Apuleius (Apu), an accomplished painter, and Dionysius (D), uncomfortable with his sexuality and in search of a transgender life, leave Mumbai soon after the Mumbai terrorist attack of 23 November 2008 when Pakistani terrorists attacked ‘a railway station, a hospital, a movie theatre, a Jewish centre, a popular café and two five-star hotels’ (16) in one of which, the iconic Taj Hotel, Nero Golden’s wife was one of about two hundred killed across Mumbai during two days of rampage. Arriving in America, father Nero purchases a mansion, not unlike the mansion celebrated in Luis Buñuel’s classic film The Exterminating Angel (as we have noted a Rushdie favourite, and a film specifically mentioned towards the end of the novel), in the bohemian New York neighbourhood of Greenwich Village. Macdougal Street, with its common gardens, is where the mansion is located. It is also where René Unterlinden, son of an academic father, a Belgian émigré, lives. However, soon after the arrival of the Goldens, René has to relinquish the house because his parents die in a car crash, but he contrives to stay in the neighbourhood by living in the house of a Burmese family friend and, briefly, in the Golden mansion itself. He has to do this because the subject of the film he is making is the newly arrived Goldens. The tale that he writes as a shooting script will have as its backdrop the years of the Obama presidency and the beginning of the Trump presidency, that is, between 2008 and, in fictional time, 2018. René, who is in a stable relationship with the Indian-American activist Suchitra Roy, has another role which is internal to the script that he writes: he is the biological father of Nero’s youngest, and fourth son Vespasian (Little Vespa), born in America of his young Russian-born American wife Vasilisa Arsenyeva. Since the argument offered in this final chapter relates to the place of Rushdie in the context of theorizations of world literature, the plot of the novel is less interesting than the quite conscious framing of the text in the generic and

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discursive lineage of Rushdie’s source literatures and cultural forms. The plot may, therefore, be summarized quickly. Arriving in New York the elderly Nero Golden, now in his seventies, is taken in by the charms of Vasilisa whom he marries and with whose wishes he readily acquiesces often after a few dramatic tantrums by his immensely beautiful wife. Two of the three older sons – Apu and D – move out of the Macdougal Street mansion, D with Riya Zachariassen and Apu with Ubah Tuur, a tall Somali-American model. D, who finds his masculinity difficult to handle and begins to define himself as female, shoots himself (268), while Apu is a victim of assassination when he visits Mumbai. Petya, who stays on in the mansion, is shot along with his Australian therapist Murray Lett as they participate in a Halloween parade. Their killer is the deranged Kinski who kills seven people and wounds another nineteen (295). It is the killing of Apu, reminiscent of the episode of the hired killer in search of Saleem in the unpublished ‘The Antagonist’, which gives the text its narrative closure, for Apu’s assassination is revenge killing because Nero himself had a criminal past in Mumbai. He was part of an Indian mafia network that dealt with smuggling, funding Bollywood films on black money, drugs and even terrorism. And it is the latter which haunts Nero because he had facilitated the November 2008 terrorist attacks and was therefore also responsible for the death of his wife in the Taj Hotel. There are hints throughout the novel that his two older children were aware of his involvement (D is illegitimate), but these are never spelt out unambiguously. So Death catches up with three of the family members (Nero, D and Petya) not in Baghdad or Mumbai but in Samarra or New York. As for Nero’s own death, he dies with his wife when their mansion catches fire. Little Vespa, René’s biological son, survives unharmed: ‘destiny, kismet, karma, fate, were so powerful in every tongue’ (269), recalls the narrator. The outline of the plot offered in the previous paragraph does not tell the whole story, but it does capture what for Rushdie is the art of the storyteller: to offer a tale where the narrative is karmic or preordained, in effect a twice-told tale. As noted, the secret subtext of this book as a whole is Rushdie’s own theory of source and target texts. That secret subtext may be traced with a quick schematic run through two cultural forms: literature and cinema. Apart from Somerset Maugham and regular references to Joyce, the novel embeds in its overall discursive form references to Eliot, Calvino, Kafka, Beckett, Borges, Golding, Yeats and Shakespeare, among others. Nero’s first encounter with Vasilisa on New Year’s day 2011 is recounted with reference to the aging Prufrock in T. S. Eliot’s memorable poem where, as Eliot’s biographer Peter Ackroyd (1984) notes, the poem also reflects Eliot’s wife Vivien’s state of mental health. Rushdie quotes generously from this poem (78–9) and Prufrock’s own agitated state (‘Do I dare’) is repeated as René himself faces the moral dilemma about his relationship with Vasilisa. Should he tell his partner Suchitra Roy about it? (142). Two other literary references may be cited. Referring to Nero’s life in New York (there were rumours that in spite of outward show, his finances were not in order), the narrator cites from Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities (1979: 61). I thought of him as a citizen not of New York but of the invisible city of Octavia which Marco Polo described to Kublai Khan in Calvino’s book, a spiderweb

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city hanging in a great net over an abyss between two mountains. ‘The life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities,’ Calvino wrote. ‘They know the net will last only so long.’ (GH 159–60)

Calvino’s Marco Polo pretends that all the cities in the novel are different when in fact they are only variations on Venice. And a city, as Rushdie himself had noted when he said he wished to come back as a city in his next incarnation, has a soul of its own and New York too is that kind of a city, and one not unlike Mumbai, built largely on reclaimed land. The second literary citation (among many in the novel) comes from Borges’s story ‘Funes, the Memorious’ (Borges 1965: 97–105). This time the literary reference is made in respect of Petya’s agoraphobia, his bouts of drunkenness, his right-wing conservatism and as it transpires his genius with computers. A hypnotherapist, the Australian Michael Lett (Geoffrey Rush in The King’s Speech (2010) is the model), has been hired to ‘cure’ him and one of the cures is a long-distance walk around New York. The agoraphobia cured, he would meet his fate one Halloween Night. Petya noticed too much, autism perhaps gave him sharper perspectives on some matters, and this made him irascible, difficult and argumentative. The narrator then remarks, I mentioned the famous Borges story, ‘Funes the Memorious’, about a man who was unable to forget anything, and he said, ‘Yes, that’s me, except it’s not just what happened or what people said. That writer of yours, he’s too wrapped up in words and deeds. You have to add smells and tastes and sounds and feelings also.’ (GH 196–7)

This, in response to Borges’s character Ireneo Funes who, crippled after falling from a horse, found that his ‘perception and his memory were infallible’ (Borges 102). What Ireneo embarked upon were projects that dealt with abstract terms which corresponded to numbers, a catalogue of images and the like but did not carry Petya’s interest in the affective dimension of our lives, matters of interest to Rushdie as we saw in an earlier chapter. I have cited selectively, but the novel is replete with literary allusions invariably from the storehouse of Western literary traditions. In The Golden House, nonWestern texts are not the guiding principles of composition, let alone function as organizing intertexts. This feature is true of the filmic texts too. When it comes to cinema, here again the great texts (and this is defensible because René’s filmic archive is primarily Euro-American, with the qualification that his Indian-American partner, Suchitra Roy, is a Bengali and he knows something of Bollywood through the Merchant-Ivory film Bombay Talkie (312)) are primarily Western. When recalling his son’s name (‘Little Vespa’ for Vesparian) which was the name of Audrey Hepburn’s car in Roman Holiday René muses: He deserved at the very least the name of one of the grand masters of the cinema, Luis or Kenji or Akira or Sergei, Ingmar or Andrzej or Luchino or Michelangelo, François or Jean-Luc or Jean or Jacques. Or Orson or Stanley or Billy or even, prosaically, Clint. (GH 305)

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Buñuel, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Eisenstein, Bergman, Wajda, Visconti, Antonioni, Truffault, Godard, Renoir, Tati, Wells, Kubrick, Wilder and even Eastwood are famous auteurs of Euro-American world cinema. True Kenji and Akira are Japanese, but they have been readily incorporated in a primarily Europeanengendered conception of world cinema. Their names alongside many others – notably Alfred Hitchcock and Francis Ford Coppola – would be cited often enough with The Godfather films providing the Don Corleone name to the Mumbai/ Bombay gangster lord. Eisenstein gives Rushdie the shooting script and the muchcited essay by Laura Mulvey the doctrine of the filmic spectator’s gaze as the ‘male gaze’ (177). The political backdrop of the novel (and René’s film) is the Obama presidency and the rise of Trump, the latter getting its satirical representation via the figure of the Joker, all green hair, white skin and red lips as in the Gotham City of the Batman comic and film. But in all these (and to do justice to all the references would require thorough annotation) the voice of the author is not far away. When René finally finds enough strength to declare Little Vespa’s parentage, words are replaced by a moment in an extraordinary film. Near the end of Satyajit Ray’s sublime Pather Panchali can be found what I consider to be the greatest single scene in the history of the cinema. Harihar the father of little Apu and his older sister Durga, who left them in their village with their mother Sarbajaya while he went to the city to try to earn some money, returns – having done well – with gifts for his children, not knowing that in his absence young Durga has fallen ill and died. He finds Sarbajaya sitting on the pyol, the porch of their home, silenced by tragedy, unable to welcome him home or respond to what he tells her. Not understanding, he begins to show her the children’s gifts. Then in an extraordinary moment we see his face change when Sarbajaya, whose back is to the camera, tells him the news about Durga. At this moment, understanding the inadequacy of dialogue, Ray allows music to surge up and fill the soundtrack, the high piercing music of the tar-shehnai crying out the parents’ grief more eloquently than their words ever could. (GH 345)

The music is by the young Ravi Shankar whose sitar (the one on which he taught the Beatles George Harrison to play) lay displayed in the Taj Hotel. We know from the Archive and Rushdie’s other writings that this is Rushdie speaking. And indeed a large number of the literary (modern and classical) as well as filmic references are not new as they are scattered throughout his published and unpublished corpus. The narrator is René, but there is considerable authorial presence in a tale about death and the need for love; the author in this novel is in fact everywhere which is why it acts as a valuable text about world literature, world cinema and the Rushdie aesthetic. And hence a confession: I have read the texts used in this final chapter selectively and in the case of The Golden House, perhaps, far too selectively so as to bring the genesis of secrecy in Rushdie to a close. I have, therefore, avoided reading this text as the Time Magazine (25 September 2017) cover story on Rushdie declared as ‘a political romp through turbulent times’. I turn to Said’s published lectures on humanism with which I began the Epilogue. The penultimate chapter of the book, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, is

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an essay on Auerbach’s magnificent Mimesis, ‘an exile’s book’ (97), which Said says, embodies ‘the best in humanistic work that I know’ (85). Throughout the lectures, Said singles out Auerbach as the exemplary humanist critic and thinker, an example of humanistic practitioner of the highest order, a writer whose work is the ‘hallmark of philological hermeneutics’ (92). The influence of Giambattista Vico too is clear: each age has its own method for ‘seeing and then articulating reality’ (91) and since human beings make their own history authors enter into dialogues with each other across historical divides (91). In the first – and, for many, the most brilliant – essay in Mimesis (‘Odysseus’ Scar’), Auerbach argues that Homer conceals nothing; there is no devious design in the epic poet, he is simply a harmless liar. Biblical stories and let us add Qur’ānic narratives too are a different matter. Their narrator, the Elohist, or the Islamic Prophet, is a political liar who presents his stories as historical truth and invests them with psychological depth and moral values. There is something terribly ‘tyrannical’ about this narrator who presents God’s gift of death to Abraham as an absolute covenant between man and God. Against the Elohist or the prophet, like Homer, Rushdie, as this book has shown, in the end conceals nothing. Uncovering the genesis of secrecy in Rushdie requires reading the Rushdie corpus with the help of the patron of interpreters, Hermes, who declares truths after a long delay. One has to acknowledge Rushdie’s place in the republic of letters as the outsider who knocks on the doors of world literature having mastered all the texts of the Western canon. Even if, after Pascale and Moretti, the world of letters is unequal with its centres of power and privilege (and this much is acknowledged by both Said and Rushdie) and to garner literary capital one has to adopt prestige languages so as to challenge a superior text or, as in the case of Rushdie, entire textual traditions in the hierarchy of world literature, the outsider is no longer the marginalized or excluded entrant because he comes with a history (the kind narrated by Mufti) that was already in contestation with European definitions of literariness. This is not an escape from postcolonial theory but an acceptance of the fact that, like the world market, the world of letters is also unequal with its privileged centres of power. To acknowledge as much in no way diminishes Rushdie’s place as a great writer.

NOTES Prologue 1 Salman Rushdie Papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library [MARBL], Emory University. For ease of reference, all citations from the Archive, except those redacted, are given as box number/folder number and pagination where necessary, hence, for example, ‘183/2: p. 59’. The Digital Archive is simply referred to as the ‘Digital Archive’. 2 ‘“A World Mapped by Stories”: The Salman Rushdie Archive’, opening ceremony, Schatten Gallery, Woodruff Library, Emory University, 25 February 2010. Speeches at the opening by Rick Luce, vice provost, University Libraries; James W. Wagner, president; Deepa Mehta, filmmaker; Deepika Bahri, professor; Christopher Hitchens, writer and columnist; and Salman Rushdie. Access: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v =jOjXy9TjoI 3 Referring to The Moor’s Last Sigh as ‘the best piece of writing I’ve ever done’, Rushdie notes that the reason for this ‘is the removal of the mechanical art of typing. I’ve been able to revise much more’ (Digital Archive). 4 As Deepika Bahri, the curator of the installation of the Archive in February 2010 observed, ‘Rushdie may not have been born digital but he has been reborn digital.’ 5 See Amitav Ghosh (1992) for an account of the Jewish tradition of depositing all documents (however peripheral) in the Geniza or chamber of a synagogue. 6 In a note (212/8; 09-184), Rushdie mentions ‘Mitti ki Gadi’, a reference to the Tara Arts Group’s production of the play by the eighth-century dramatist Shudraka as The Little Clay Cart in 1985. But there is little, if any, engagement with the texts of the great Asian traditions, Arabic, Farsi or Sanskrit/Hindi. 7 ‘I would like to inform all the intrepid Muslims in the world that the author of the book entitled “Satanic Verses” … as well as those publishers who were aware of its contents, are hereby 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 Islamic sanctity. Whoever is killed doing this will be regarded as a martyr and will go directly to heaven.’ 8 Rushdie notes in 45/4, p. 7: ‘Othello himself, obviously, is not a black man, but a “Moor”; an Arab, a Muslim, his name probably a Latinization of the Arabic Attallah or Ataullah. So he is not a creature of the Christian world of sin and redemption, but rather of the Islamic moral universe, whose polarities are honour and shame. Desdemona’s death is an “honour killing”.’ 9 On Bob Dylan’s award of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Rushdie tweeted (13 October 2016, 8.35 PM): ‘From Orpheus to Faiz, song & poetry have been closely linked. Dylan is the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition. Great choice.’ 10 In notes (22/7, p. 3), the interest in Shakespeare is readily evident: ‘Anne Hathaway … to whom in his will he left his second-best bed, which may or may not be as insulting as it sounds because according to … one scholar at least, [in] an Elizabethan bourgeois household … the best bed was kept in the guest bedroom in case some

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Notes mighty-visitor came to stay … the second best bed was the marital bed … the genius who couldn’t spell his own name, writing it, on one occasion in those days before formalized orthography and spelling bees, as Chakspaw.’ Elsewhere he had noted, ‘Of course, English stopped being the sole property of the English long ago. The greatest English novel of the eighteenth century was written by an Irishman from Clonmel, Laurence Sterne; of the twentieth, by the expatriate Dubliner James Joyce [to which may be added the greatest novel of the nineteenth century, Moby-Dick by an American called Melville]’ (50/40). From the loose pages in the Archive we discover: ‘I see now that in choosing for a subject the expulsion of the Arab rulers from their kingdom & the subsequent humiliation of those who remained, I am writing about the present too, Palestine. That the Jews were also expelled from Spain helps the tale achieve true complexity, and avoid literalness, & move towards art.’ In a note on his interest in a book relating to the Alhambra (212/12; 14-09), Rushdie wrote: ‘Ideas are coming together. This Granada trip coincides with my notion of Law, at last to keep my appointment with the Alhambra, Moorish Spain and El Ultimo Suspiro del Moro. I think I may write a play called “Othello”. “Othello, or, The Moor’s Last Sigh”.’ Rushdie recalls (45/11) lines from Derek Walcott’s ‘The Schooner Flight’: I had no nation now but the imagination. After the white man, the niggers didn’t want me.

Chapter 1 1 To reprise the point already made in the Preface, archival material (except when redacted) are indicated by their box, folder and where necessary page numbers for print material; hence box 40, folder 7 is given as 40/7. Digital materials are described by their titles. 2 Author’s typed copy of the novel is dated 17 February 1988 and catalogued as 21/11– 12; 22/1–3. 3 I have used The Koran, trans. N. J. Dawood, as my translated reference text. 4 The Quran, Translated into the Urdu Language by Shaikh Abdul Qadir Ibn ī Shah Walī Ullah of Delhi, 1790. With a Preface and Introduction in English by the Rev. T. P. Hughes, C. M. S. Peshawar. And an Index in Urdu by the Rev. E. M. Wherry. Printed and Published at the Mission Press, Lodiana, 1876 (title as it appears in the 1876 edition). 5 There is a loose page in the Archive (20/6) entitled ‘On Epigraphs’ where Rushdie observes: ‘An epigraph is a form of self-defence. Its purpose is to place the protective glow of another writer’s genius around one’s own rather lesser notions.’ 6 One or many, austere monotheism or polytheistic monism: the struggle continues and the Rushdie Archive casts an unqualified vote for the latter. The dust jacket of the first English edition carries a detail from Rustum Killing the White Demon from a Clive Album in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the first American edition has the same image, although here the image is no longer in multicolour but in black and gold. The Spanish translation (Los Versos Satánicos) has a blue Shiva with a doubleheaded serpent around his neck on its cover. The Rushdie Archive has this cover which may have been sent to Rushdie for his approval, which he evidently gave as

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this is indeed the cover of the book in the Spanish translation. Rushdie’s approval, we could argue, suggests that at least in the Spanish translation, Rushdie invokes Shiva the destroyer as a metonym for the satanic verses, but in doing so, given the holy trinity in which Shiva is located, the choice reaffirms both the indispensability of the Manichean Other in religious thought and, via Shiva, a reading of ‘Satan’ as more than just the Devil of Judaeo-Christian-Islamic monotheism. In The Satanic Verses (323) we read, ‘Shall there be evil in a city and the Lord hath not done it?’ echoing Amos 3.6, where the assumption is that God was initially depicted as the source of both good and evil. Lord Byron, ‘The Vision of Judgment’ (Byron 1960: 156). Lord Byron’s poem was written in response to Robert Southey’s ‘Vision of Judgement’ (1821). Of Muhammad, Robert Southey said, ‘[He was] far more remarkable for audacious profligacy than for any intellectual endowments.’ Access: http://www.nndb.com/people In ‘A Symposium with Salman Rushdie’ (26 February 2010), Christopher Hitchins said, ‘Southey wrote to a friend saying that Byron’s Don Juan should not be called “Don Juan” but the “Satanic Verses”.’ On a single sheet (22/7) a list of ‘contraries’ are placed under the headings ‘Chamcha’ and ‘Gibreel’. Here and in what follows on the subject of the Islamic history of the satanic verses I draw upon Shahab Ahmed (2004). Cited in Maulana Muhammad Ali, trans. The Holy Qur’ān. Introduction. We get this note written on 27 December 1986: ‘And I must regain my mother-tongue and culture – that goes with it’ (redacted copy of the note). These associations are certainly not available to speakers of other languages such as Hindi where the translation is Shaitāni kāvya or Sanskrit where the translation is Asurim śloka. 22/5, The Satanic Verses Fragments, TS (1 of 2): ‘TILK AL-GHARĀNĪQ AL-‘ULĀ WA INNA SHAFĀ’ ATA-HUNNA LA TURTAJĀ’ (‘These are exalted females whose intercession is to be desired’). 212/8, 09–145, redacted (‘the Exalted Birds’): Allat means the goddess, one aspect of Venus, the morning star; Uzza: the all-powerful may be also Venus; Manat, ‘goddess of fate, who held the shears which cut the thread of life, and who was worshipped in a shrine on the seashore’. The great god of Mecca was Hubal, an idol made of red cornelian. During the Hajj, pilgrims must stone three ‘satanic pillars’. These are not symbolic of these goddesses, ‘but of the 3 temptations of Ibrahim before the sacrifice of Ismail. But a useful echo’ (212/8, 09–182 redacted). ‘I find myself thinking that one day the Muslim world would realize, as postEnlightenment Europe has realized, that freedom of thought is precisely freedom from religious control’, we read in a redacted note. A month after the fatwa, on 14 March 1989, Rushdie wrote a poem to his sister Sameen. The revised version of the poem (5 May 1989) begins with the words, ‘“Now is your brother scared?” the caller sneered./I’ll answer: yes’ (63/63).

Chapter 2 1 ‘A World Mapped by Stories: The Salman Rushdie Archive’, opening ceremony, Schatten Gallery, Woodruff Library, Emory University, 25 February 2010. Speech by

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Notes Salman Rushdie. Repeated in ‘Salman Rushdie on Liberal Education’, a talk given at Emory University, on 1 March 2012. The author attended lectures and talks given by Rushdie at Emory in the month of March (2010–12). In his introductory note to The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, Albert J. Wehrle, the work’s translator, examines the contentious issue of authorship, whether the work was co-authored or individually authored or simply the product of the Bakhtin School. Wehrle is more comfortable with the idea of a ‘Bakhtin School’ of which Bakhtin as well as Medvedev and Voloshinov were a part. ‘In this sense,’ he writes, ‘the slash separating the names on the title page of this translation may be taken as the conventional signifier/signified bar (Medvedev/Bakhtin)’ (xi). 61/10: ‘Face to Face’ (Jeremy Isaacs talks to Salman Rushdie (TV episode 1994) transcript, 25 pp. including 2 pages of credits), p. 1: ‘As a writer my worst mistake was my first novel. My first novel, “Grimus” the one before “Midnight”, the one mercifully nobody reads, was a book in which I tried to write a long way away from my own experience of the world … (a friend said) … it was a “cowardly book” … sold 800 copies and got remaindered.’ Personal email dated 17 August 2017 from Salman Rushdie: ‘its definitely Fan Fic’. In a modified form, this passage reappears in Joseph Anton (2012: 21). As Rushdie noted in Joseph Anton, ‘Saleem’ was deliberately created as his alter ego ‘in memory of his Bombay classmate Salim Merchant (and because of its closeness to “Salman”), and “Sinai” after the eleventh-century Muslim polymath Ibn Sina (“Avicenna”), just as “Rushdie” had been derived from Ibn Rushd’ (54). This incident is mentioned in Midnight’s Children as well. Note the changes to the name of the estate and the names of the houses on it in Midnight’s Children: Southacre becomes Methwold and Blenhime changes to Escorial Villa; hence Versailles Villa, Buckingham Villa, Escorial Villa and Sans Souci. During his February–April 1983 visit to India and Pakistan, on Thursday, 10 February, Rushdie goes to see his old home Windsor Villa, Warden Road, Bombay–26 in the Westfield Estate. He notices the slope past Somerset Lodge and Ramani’s building down which Arif rode his bicycle, lost control and broke his front teeth. But Windsor Villa had changed. Old fir trees planted for him and his sister Sameen had grown wild and both the exterior and interior of the house had changed drastically. The new owner Sunita Pitambar turns out to be Dr Shirodkar’s daughter. He enters his old bedroom which is now unrecognizable but the view is the same: Breach Candy pools and the Arabian Sea. This segment is changed in Midnight’s Children to Saleem’s parents being unable to give their blood to Saleem after he loses a lot of blood. The incident leads to Mary Pereira’s confession that she had swapped the babies at birth. It may well be that the twelve-year-old Salman saw the melodramatic Imitation of Life in Bombay and got from it the idea of two girls, one white, the other black, the latter passing as white because of her light skin. Upon the death of her black mother, however, the black girl acknowledges her heritage. The reference here is to Satyajit Ray who reappears in The Moor’s Last Sigh (173) as the great Bengali film director Sukumar Sen. ‘Madame Rama’ (34): ‘In the last days of the life of the immortal D. W. Rama, his daughter Vista nursed him hand and foot, day and night, root and branch.’ Lata Walkeshwar is, of course, the pre-eminent Bollywood song-siren Lata Mangeshkar, I. S. Nayyar echoes the early Bollywood fusion musician O. P. Nayyar and

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Balasubramanium Venkataraghavan is the Congress Party kingmaker Kamaraj, chief minister of Tamil Nadu. 14 Drawing on Sanjay Gandhi’s presumed power over his mother Indira Gandhi, Rushdie writes, ‘“They say” said Mr Sivaji “That Madame Rama is frightened of her monstrous infant. Pano accuses her mother of denying her a father, and Madame quails and grants her daughter’s every whim”’ (51). In the first edition of Midnight’s Children (1981a: 406) we read a passage which is deleted from subsequent editions. The passage reads: ‘It has often been said that Mrs Gandhi’s younger son Sanjay accused his mother of being responsible, through her neglect, for his father’s death; and that this gave him an unbreakable hold over her, so that she became incapable of denying him anything.’ 15 See The Moor’s Last Sigh (148–9) where Vasco Miranda sees himself (along with Aurora) as an exponent of an ‘Epico-Mythico-Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High -Masala-Art’. 16 The Archive shows that between 1977 and 1987 Rushdie wrote a number of short stories, many discontinued, others progressively refined. Among these were ‘The Free Radio’ (1977), ‘The Golden Bough’ (originally ‘The Interview’) (1983), ‘Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies’ (19 August 1977, first draft; revised 20 May 1987), ‘Yorick’ (1 March 1982). (42/22–3).

Chapter 3 1 In his 1976 diary entry (212/4, 04–34 redacted) he had called a character ‘Jim Whale’ after the director of the 1931 Frankenstein film. 2 The Archive carries notes written for students in Stockholm (212/5 0; 5–68 redacted) with the following entry: ‘Originally there was only one MIDNIGHT CHILD, then two. Then my insane calculations, & finally 1001. Also meaning of the number 420.’ 3 The chronology is not correct because the timeline of Sputnik II’s orbit does not tally with other events mentioned. The sputnik must have been orbiting the planet these past five years if the time span could have included the India–China War, the Nanavati murder case and the celebrations around Sherpa Tenzing Norgay’s conquest of Everest along with Edmund Hillary. 4 Later in the first version (333–6) Dr Aziz will leave for Mecca on a pilgrimage to Ka’aba where he’ll be seen throwing a molotov cocktail. He escapes with the loss of an eye and is later responsible for bomb blasts in temples and mosques. He also steals Muhammad’s hair from the Hazratbal mosque in Kashmir which he throws in the lake. His dead body is found atop the Sankara Acharya hill and subsequently sent to Pakistan for burial. 5 It is likely that the choice of the name Mutasim is a quiet homage to the Borges short story ‘The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim’ (Borges 1965: 35–41) in which reference is also made to ‘Farid ud-din Attar’s venerated Colloquy of the Birds’ (40). 6 Jamila, the Brass Monkey, disappears from this scene in the final version, as does the narratee Valmika.

Chapter 4 1 When we turn to Tomkins’s account of biologically based primary (innate) affects we note a remarkable correspondence between them and rasa theory. Indian theory of

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3

4

5 6

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aesthetic response – rasa theory – is itself about affects insofar as the categories are not simply mental but bodily. Look at the number of the words used in rasa theory that are body descriptors: śṛṅgāra (erotic), hāsya (humour, laughter), karuṇa (grief), raudra (furious), vīra (energy), bhayānaka (fearful), bībhatsa (horrific), adbhuta (marvellous) and even the ninth additional rasa śānta (peaceful). They are all affective and not intellectual categories although as rasas (as distinct from bhāvas, the primary emotional response) they are represented as distilled aesthetic categories available only to the seasoned aesthete. What the latter – the distillation of emotions into refined sensibilities – hides is the grounding of India’s principal theory of the cognition of the work of art in the body itself. Seven of Tomkins’s eight affects closely correspond to rasa affects: interest-excitement (śṛṅgāra), enjoyment-joy (hāsya), distress-anguish (karuṇa), anger-rage (raudra), fear-terror (bhayānaka), surprise-startle (adbhuta) and shame-humiliation (bībhatsa). For Tomkins’s seventh affect (contempt-disgust) a corresponding rasa is hard to specify. 29/4 (The Moor’s Last Sigh, ‘Early notes, jottings, experiments’) page 2 of two typed pages: ‘Suspiro ergo sum: I sigh therefore I am: Suspirare, to suspire, to take a deep breath, to sigh. Whereas spirare means simply, to breathe. Why choose sighing over breathing? Because breath comes from old words for fire, whereas the sigh, the suspiration, is airy. And I am air, not fire. I am a deep breath not a flame.’ ‘Midnight’s Children [First Draught in MSS 1978]’ Stuart A Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library [MARBL], Emory University, 16/3. Complete text: 15/10 & 16/1–4. 22/7: Of the films mentioned on the original single typed sheet only two films, Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954) and Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955), are non-European, with only The Seven Samurai and The Seventh Seal dealing with themes located in the distant past. ‘Salman Rushdie on Pather Panchali, interview 2012 London Film Festival’, www.bfi.or g.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/video/video-salman-rushdie-pather-panchali Rushdie Emory Archive 34/7, ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet, extracts of lyrics used in the text, Typescript [with note to Bono]’. Dear Bono These are fragments of my lyrics extracted from the text of The Ground Beneath Her Feet – sometimes very fragmentary, sometimes more complete. In most cases, I’ve left in a bit of the surrounding narrative text, just to give a flavour of what it’s like. The actual lyrics are picked out in bold type. I’m very curious to know what you think!

Salman X 7 See also ‘The Painter and the Pest’, Channel 4, 26 May 1985, narrated by Salman Rushdie. 8 The novel was written very fast. Completed on 18 April 1982, the Jonathan Cape offer of ₤15,000 was settled on 16 May 1982 and the Knopf offer of ₤10,000 settled on 23 May 1982 (20/6). Rushdie states on another sheet in the same folder (20/6) that it was inspired by Borges (The South), Calvino (The Non-existent Knight), Hesse (Steppenwolf), Stevenson (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), Opie (Beauty and the Beast), and

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Warner, who ‘all own pieces of it’. The original plan (again in 20/6) was to move away from the East to the West, locate scenes in the ‘strange milieu of London’s Asian haute bourgeoisie and compose a black comedy’. The original plan would have also included the short stories ‘The Free Radio’ and ‘The Prophet’s Hair’ later published in East, West (1994).

Chapter 5 1 As noted in the Epilogue chapter of this book, Bollywood is replaced almost totally by the European avant-garde in The Golden House (2017). Except for occasional references – names of two songs, one which captures his beloved Bombay (‘Bombay meri jaan’ from the film CID (1956) (322)), the other about the night (‘Tuhi Meri Shab Hai’ from the film Gangster (2006) (128)), a few major Bollywood actors, and the fictitious Indian ‘Don Corleone’s own megahit Kuch Nahin Kahin Nahin Kabhi Nahin Koi Nahin (Nothing Nowhere Never Nobody), better known as KN4 (313), and echoing the real Bollywood hit Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gam (K3G) (2001) – Bollywood disappears from the art of the shooting script. 2 ‘Monologues of a Hanged Man: A Play for Television by Salman Rushdie’ (9 pp.) also survives in the Archive (20/6). 3 60/9: ‘“Shame”: An idea of a film’:

4 5

6

7 8

9

The heroine is ‘Nazi’ (no ‘tz’ here) Singh (hence Nasi Singh). SHAME is set in the strange, baroque milieu of London’s Indo-Pakistani haute bourgeoisie. … In the end Nazi kills her husband having finally agreed to have sex with him. … She sits on the bed, beside her dead husband, muttering at first inaudibly and at last with greater clarity (3), a simple, hopelessly inadequate and also ambiguous line: ‘Oh, the shame of it’ (4). ‘In the background, the television flickers. A race riot is in progress.’ Unless stated otherwise, dates given in brackets refer to the relevant issue of Filmfare and not to the dates of the events themselves. 176/16, in reviewing Andrew Robinson’s book on the Raj, Rushdie says he knew the movies of Robert Taylor, The Three Stooges, Francis the Talking Mule and Maria Montez. For a frame-by-frame analysis of key segments of this film, as well as an excellent study of the role of songs in the ‘classic black-and-white’ Hindi films of the fifties and early sixties, see Jasmine Dean, ‘Sentimental Songs, Melodrama and the Nature of Filmic Narrative in Hindi Cinema (1951–63)’, unpublished PhD thesis, Macquarie University, 2015. The indirect kiss is alive and well. In Subhash Ghai’s Taal (1999) the lovers sip Coca Cola from the same straw and then drink from the same bottle. Unlike in the novel, where only the translation exists, in the archive the chorus of the song is given by Rushdie in a romanized Hindi transliteration, followed by a translation (22/6). The song from Raj Kapoor’s film Shree 420 is used here to underline one of the central themes of the novel which is about, if we are to believe the archive, ‘hybridisation, migration, translation, metamorphosis, adoption: the need to contest descriptions’ (22/7). See also M. G. Vassanji (1994) where the Anarkali story is again part of the fabric of the novel.

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10 Released during Diwali week, October 1957, Mother India, directed by Mehboob Khan (1909–74), son of a Gujarati policeman with strong agrarian roots, ran for a whole year at Liberty Cinema, Bombay. It received rave reviews in key film journals such as Filmfare and Filmindia and in Bharat Jyoti and went on to become the Bollywood film dubbed and subtitled more than any other. The usually acerbic Baburao Patel noted in his Filmindia review, ‘[Mother India] is the greatest picture produced in India during the forty and odd years of film-making’, to which he also added in a later paragraph, ‘Remove Nargis and there is no Mother India.’ See also Bunny Reuben (1999: 261–8). 11 Trilling notes, ‘I invert the natural order not out of lack of modesty but taking the cue of W. H. Auden’s remark that a real book reads us’ (23). 12 Rushdie’s translation is a variant of Mahmood Jamal’s translation. See Acknowledgments to The Satanic Verses.

Chapter 6 1 Ezra Pound’s 1962 Paris Review interview (part of its Art of Fiction Series) is collected as Paris Review Interviews Vol. IV (2009) with an Introduction by Salman Rushdie, in which he writes about the impact the Paris Review interviews had on him as a writer. His opening remarks point to the malleability of English as a language, a comment that he soon corrects when David Grossman reminds him that Hebrew is equally flexible and amendable to all kinds of wordplay (ix). 2 The use of the word ‘forloyn’ and other borrowings from early English, notably from Laʒamon’s Brut and Anglo-Saxon poems such as ‘The Seafarer’ again in The Cantos may be noted (Kenner 1975: 94ff ). 3 See also The Ground Beneath Her Feet (audiobook) read by Christopher Cazenove, abridged by Camille Franklin. Los Angeles: NewStar, 1999. 780 minutes. 4 In an undated handwritten letter (195/11) addressed ‘Dear Booksellers of Germany’, we read: ‘I hope you will like and support my new book, “The Ground Beneath Her Feet”, when it comes to Germany next year. It’s perhaps my most ambitious book, a love story with echoes of the Orpheus myth (the epigraph is from Rilke), set in the world of popular music of the last half century, an examination of loss, love, death, celebrity, the strange marriages between the East and the West, disorientation, cities; in short, the modern age.’ (signed Salman Rushdie). 5 Rai is given a German camera, a Voigtländer Vito CL, by his father at the tender age of thirteen and there is an entire chapter (Chapter 8) devoted to the history of photography. In Chapter 2 we noted Ronny’s passion for photography in ‘The Courter’. 6 30/11, ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Notes towards a Novel’ (Typescript 1996: 20pp dated 23/4/1996): ‘Vina is the Indian lyre. Kama is the Indian god of love. It is said that when he committed the crime of trying to shoot Shiva with love’s arrow, the great god burned him to ashes with a thunderbolt. It was his wife the goddess Rati who had to plea for his return. In this narrative it is Eurydice, the beloved, who brings love back from the dead’ (p. 2). He continues with the comments that the journey to the underworld is both Indian and Greek. Dionysius is in search of Persephone; Rati in search of Kama; Rama in search of Sita. 7 In 1956, Rai (Umeed) is nine, which was also Rushdie’s age then. The novel ends in 1997 when Ormus is sixty-three.

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8 30/11, p. 18: ‘Ormus is a variant of the Parsi name usually spelt, in India, anyhow Hormus or Hormuz – variant of the name Ormazd or Ahuramazda, the name of the “good” one of the two Zoroastrian creator-beings. [The “bad” counterpart is Ahriman or Angra Mainyu].’ Ormus Cama, as lyricist, is silently modelled, as well, on Freddie Mercury, a Parsi with the birth name Farrokh Bulsara, who, as the lead singer of the band Queen and author of the phenomenal pop lyric ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, is considered one of the great pop singers of all time. 9 62/31, p. 25 we read, ‘Rilke’s work on the Orpheus myth helped me with The Ground Beneath Her Feet.’

Epilogue 1 The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki, seven volumes, translated under the general editorship of Robert P. Goldman, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984–2017. Immaculately edited and translated, this stands as a testimony to the power of translation in world literature. 2 In Shalimar the Clown, Boonyi’s father, Pyarelal Kaul, had turned to Kabir’s syncretic religiosity. 3 In 1572, Akbar established a painting studio at Tasvirkhana (‘Painting Studio’) under the two famous Iranian artists Mir Sayyid Ali and Abd-as-Samad who along with other Indian artists illustrated the Baburnama, memoirs of Zahirudin Muhammad Babur, the first Mughal Emperor of Hindustan and grandfather of Akbar. See Thackston (2002) with Salman Rushdie’s introduction. 4 Parashkevova employs the term ‘catoptrics’ to address the ‘problematics of figuring the variety of mirror effects’. She writes, ‘Mediating between science and magic, truth and illusion, and knowledge and speculation, mirrors occupy an ambivalent, unstable conceptual position’ (2012: 19). 5 In Luka and the Fire of Life (34), Noboddady berates Luka who had said, ‘But that’s just a story’: ‘You of all the boys should know that Man is the Storytelling Animal, and that in stories are his identity, his meaning and his lifeblood. … Man alone burns with books.’ 6 I thank my postgraduate student Sarai Mannolini-Winwood for drawing my attention to these writers. 7 Wood (2001). I owe this reference to my PhD student David Wright.

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INDEX Abrams, M. H. 14, 201–2 Achebe, Chinua 206 Things Fall Apart 206 Ackroyd, Peter on T. S. Eliot 221 Acts of the Apostles, The ix, 30 Stephen in 31–2 Adorno, Theodor 16, 59, 124 Aeschylus 207 affect theory 123–5 affect defined 122 and Indian rasa theory 128, 229–30 n.1 and other affect theorists 123–4 in Ruth Leys 123 and Salman Rushdie 125–43 in Silvan Tomkins 123 Ahmed, Shahab 227 n.10 Akbar, Mughal Emperor 210–11, 233 n.3 as Indian proto-humanist 215 Al Ghazali [Algazel] viii, 176, 217 Alhambra, The 226 n.13 and Boabdil 126 as mosaic pattern 18–19 allegory 216 ‘Antagonist, The’ 54, 55, 60–6 as precursor to Midnight’s Children 60–1 Ariosto, Ludovico 212 Orlando Furioso 212 Aristotle 203 Arnold, Matthew 144 Attar, Farid-Ud-Din viii, 64 Auerbach, Erich 224 Mimesis and humanism 224 Baburnama, The 233 Bachchan, Amitabh 164–5 Bacon, Francis 188–9 Bahri, Deepika 225 n.2 Bakhtin, M. M. 54, 228 n.3

Balzac, Honoré de Eugenie Grandet viii–ix Beatles, The 75 Beckett, Samuel viii, 54, 55, 60, 205 and ‘Crosstalk’ 58 Bergson, Henri 124, 150 Biswas, Seema 114 Blake, William ix, 42, 47 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 42 Milton 42 blasphemy in Christianity 31–2 defined 32–3 in Islam 33–4 Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus 175, 179, 182–3 The Consolation of Philosophy in Chaucer 182–3, 185, 187, 199 Bollywood 158 defined 158–9 Bono [of U2] 26, 136, 196, 230 n.6 ‘Book of the Peer, The’ 36–7, 54 Borges, Jorge Luis 60, 145, 222, 229 n.5 ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ 63 Bufford, Bill 112, 114 Bulgakov, Mikhail viii Bull, Emma 17 War for the Oaks 216 Buñuel, Luis 19 Burke, Edmund 48, 64 Byron, Lord 42 Don Juan 42, 227 n.8 Calder, Liz 103 Calvino, Italo viii, 16, 60, 65, 208 introduced by Rushdie 23 Invisible Cities 221–2 Six Memos for the Millennium 22–3 Camoens, Luis de 27 Carver, Catherine 105 Casablanca 126–7

Index Casanova, Pascale xi, 203–5, 224 Cervantes, Miguel de 42, 206 use of Arabic names in 22 Chaucer, Geoffrey 183, 184, 185, 186, 187 the Scottish Chaucerians 186 Chesterton, G. K. 183 Coetzee, J. M. ix on The Moor’s Last Sigh 23–5 Cohen, Jackie 11 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 46 ‘Courter, The’ 72–8 and The Misfits 74, 75, 76, 78 Cronenberg, David 14 Dahl, Roald 14 Damrosch, David xi What Is World Literature? 201–3, 206 Dante, Alighieri 42 Davison, Robyn 10 Dean, Jasmine 231 n.6 Defoe, Daniel 42 The History of the Devil 42 Derrida Jacques 4, 16, 49, 50 anamnestic enquiry 29–30 Archive Fever 4–5, 29, 31 on belief 45–6 Desai, Morarji 155 Descartes, René 205 Dickens, Charles 48 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 42 The Brothers Karamazov 46 Dürer, Albrecht 48 Dutt, Guru 116 Pyaasa 116 Dutt, Sunil 116 Dylan, Bob 74, 83, 225 n.9 Eckermann, Peter 201 Eisenstein, Sergei 67, 147, 161, 223 ekphrasis 150–1 pictorial ekphrasis 190 El Greco 127 Eliot, T. S. 190, 221 on Hamlet 121, 175 on Othello 22, 102 Enchantress of Florence, The xi, 23, 210–15 epigraphs 226 n.5 Eriugena, Johannes Scottus 175, 190 Euripides 207–8 Even-Zohar, Itamar 206

245

Faiz, Ahmed Faiz 115, 157, 171–2 Fatwa, the 13–15, 225 n.7, 227 n.16 Fellini, Federico 76 Fiji 140, 209 Filmfare 152–7 Forster, E. M. 192, 218 Freud, Sigmund ix ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ 29 ‘Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s “Gradiva”’ 30 ‘Moses and Monotheism’ 30 ‘The “Uncanny”’ 30 Friedman, John Block 183 Friedman, Susan Stanford 191 Funtoosh 151, 155, 159–60, 165 Furies, the 207–8 Fury viii, xi, 207–10 Gai-Wallah 164 Gandhi, Mahatma 6, 13, 67, 127 Gandhi, Mrs Indira 55, 66, 69, 162 Gandhi, Sanjay 229 n.14 Geniza 5 Gerard of Cremona 203 Ghaffari, Reza 15 Ghosh, Amitav 225 n.5 Gibreel [Gabriel], Angel 39, 41 Girard, René 42, 49–50 Gluck, Christoph Willibald 179, 192 Godard, Jean-Luc 42 Alphaville 42 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 27, 201, 204 Golden House, The viii, x, xi, 25, 145, 147, 219–23, 231 n.1 and Calvino’s Invisible Cities 221–2 and the filmic archive 222–3 Goya, Francisco 219 Grass, Günter viii, 16, 83 Greer, Germaine 14, 112 Grimus viii, 10, 54, 81, 228 n.4 stage play 55 Ground Beneath Her Feet, The viii, xi, 135–6, 150–1 composition of 21, 232 n.4 writing the Orpheus tale 189–99 Grove, Valerie 34

246

Index

Hamilton, Laurell K. 17 Haroun and the Sea of Stories 15 Harvey, Andrew 12 Hatim Tai 113, 156 Henryson, Robert 185 and the Orpheus tale 185–8, 199 and the writing of ‘Moralitas’ 187 Hermes 27, 224 Hesiod 207 Hibbert, Arthur 35 Hitchins, Christopher 225 n.2, 227 n.8 home and migration 6, 12, 13, 16, 166, 231 n.8 Homer 1, 175, 207 humanism 202–3 and Edward W. Said 202–3, 223–4 and Eurocentrism 202

Kubrick, Stanley 135 Kundera, Milan 22 Kurosawa, Akira 17

Ibn Rushd [Averroës] viii, 176, 203, 216–18 Imaginary Homelands 14 Imitation of Life 228 n.11 Indirect Kiss 99–100, 160, 231 n.7, see also Symbolic Kiss Islam 13 and the Alhambra 18 blasphemy in ix and Orientalists 44 pre-Islamic idols in 227 n.15 as religion of reason 18

Macaulay, Thomas Babington 63 McCartney, Paul 26, 195 Machiavelli 211 La Mandragola 215 the mirrors-of-princes style 212 The Prince 212 McKerrow, Ronald B. ix, 53 ‘Madame Rama’ 66–72, 161 and cinema 66–8 as roman à clef 70 Mahābhārata, The 192, 193 Mahound 40, 41, 44, see also Muhammad, Prophet Mandelstam [Osip Emilyevich] 48 Manto, Sadat Hasan 191 Marley, Bob 20 Márquez, Gabriel García viii, 16 Marx, Karl 41, 204 Mason, James on Max Ophüls 150 Massumi, Brian 123–4 Maturin Charles 55 Maugham, Somerset 220, 221 Mayo, Katherine 167 Mehta, Deepa 110, 112, 113, 116, 225 n.2 Menezes, Mary [Rushdie’s ayah] 7, 93 as character in ‘The Courter’ 73 letter from 8 Mercury, Freddie 20, 233 n.8

Jackson, Mahalia 65–6 Jagger, Mick 194 Jaguar Smile, The 12 Jehan, Noor 171–2 Joseph Anton viii, ix, 2, 30 Joyce, James viii, 22–3, 29, 30, 42, 54, 55, 60, 63, 117, 140, 175, 190 Finnegans Wake 29, 105 Ulysses 22, 66, 140 Kabir 210, 233n.2 Kapoor, Raj 71, 75, 110, 116, 153–4, 155, 164, 170 Kermode, Frank 27, 192, 199 Khomeini, Ayatollah 13, 14, 48 Kipling, Rudyard 148–9

Lackey, Mercedes 17 Lakshmi, Padma 10 Lang, Fritz 208 Lawson, Mark 112 Laxman R.K. 153 in The Moor’s Last Sigh 153 Lennon, John 20, 194, 198 Levinas, Emmanuel 45 Lewis, C. S. 182 Leys, Ruth 123, 128, 139, 145, see also affect theory Luard, Clarissa 10 Luce, Rick 225 n.2 Luka and the Fire of Life 233 n.5 Lukács, Georg 64

Index Midnight’s Children x, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 19, 20, 81 antecedent in ‘The Antagonist’ 81–2 the body in 129–31 and the Booker Prize 116 the character Saleem 17, 228 n.7 and cinema 160–1, 163–5 earlier characters notably Valmika 102, 106–7 film version of 113–16 the first draft of 91–104 Hindi translation of 117–19 origins of Saleem 82 the second draft of 104–7 as shooting script 162–3 as ‘Sinai’ 82–91 stage version of 110–13 Milton, John ix, 42, 161 Misfits, The 74, 75, 76, 78 Mitchell W. J. T. 151 Moor’s Last Sigh, The ix, 18–20, 23, 125–7, 151, 157–8, 225 n.3 and affect theory 125–7 and Boabdil, the last Sultan of Granada 126 and cinema 166–8 and religious extremism 20 Moretti, Franco xi, 203 literary systems 205–6, 224 literature and world systems 205 source and target texts 205–6, 219 Morgan, Daniel 149–50, 173 Morley, Paul 112 Mother India 75, 156, 167–8, 232 n.10 Mufti, Aamir 204, 224 Mughal-e-Azam 75, 128, 157, 158, 165–6, 172 Muhammad, Prophet 33, 35, 36, 39, 40, 46, 49, 50 and the ‘satanic verses’ 43–4 stolen hair of the prophet 229 n.4 Naipaul, V. S. 11, 16, 73, 176, 197 Nargis 154, 167 Nehru, Jawaharlal 66 Nehruvian 153, 210 Nietzsche, Friedrich 195

247

Ophüls, Maximilian 149–50, 173 Oppenheimer, J. Robert 193 Orpheus tale in Boethius 182–3, 199 in Gluck 179, 190 in Henryson 185–9 and Hindu mythology 232 n.6 in Le Testament d’Orphée 179 in Ovid 179, 181–2 in Plato 177 in Rilke 179, 196, 232 n.4, 233 n.9 in Sir Orfeo 184–6 in Virgil 179–81 Othello 18, 141, 225 n.8, 226 n.13 and The Moor’s Last Sigh 18–19 Ovid 179 Metamorphoses 179 Page, Patti 74 Parashkevova, Vassilena 151, 233 n.4 Phillips, Caryl 10 planetary literary system 210 Plato 186 The Symposium 176–9, 196, 213 Pope, Alexander 1 Pound, Ezra xi, 175, 190, 199, 232 nn.1, 2 Powell, Enoch 7 Presley, Elvis 193 Pynchon, Thomas 54, 60 Qur’an, The viii novelistic engagement with 46, 49–50 and Satan 43, 56 and the satanic verses 12–13, 43–5 Urdu translation of 34–5, 226 n.4 verses as āyat 46–7 Rabelais, François 22 Rajadhyaksha, Ashish 159 Ramachander, Akumal 138 Ramone, Jenni 151 Rancière, Jacques 159, 173 Rao, Raja 11 rasa theory 229–30 n.1 Ray, Satyajit 17, 71, 76, 147, 228 n.12 Pather Panchali 131, 223, 230 n.5 Reade, Simon 111 Reed, Lou 26 Reynolds, Barbara 212

248

Index

Riddle of Midnight, The 11, 17, 18 Rilke, Raina Maria viii, 179, 196, 232 n.4, 233 n.9 Robbins, Jill 45 Roth, Philip 54 Roy Ram Mohan 16 Rushdie, Salman xii, see also individual works appearance on stage at Bono [U2] concert 26 and avant-garde cinema 147–8 at Cambridge viii, 35–6 at Cathedral School 8–9 early education at Rugby 9–10, 35 early education in Bombay 8–9 early work in advertising 10 and the Ellmann Lectures 21–2, 54 and the Emory Archive ix, 1–5; its installation 2; its description 2–5 encounter with the ‘satanic verses’ 35–8 and the fatwa 13–14 his first limerick 9 and his home and family 6–8, 15, 228 n.9 and ‘magic realism’ 20 and Muslim culture 6, 13 narrative technique in 17–18 and Pakistan 6–7, 10 personal contents in the archive 5–6 personal encounter with Bollywood films 151–2 and polytheistic monism 226 n.6 and the process of composition 53 references in film and television 25–6 and screenplays 148 sonic effects in 131–6, 168–9, 173 visit to India [1983] 11 Russell, Bertrand 66 Said, Edward W. xi, 202–3, 223–4, 215 Sangari, Kusum 22 Satan [Shaitan] 41, 42–3, 44, 45, 47, 49 Satanic Verses, The viii, 2, 9, 10, 12, 13, 18, 19, 22, 25, 30, 34, 49, 53, 131–5 and cinema 164–6 epigraphs in 42 growth of a text 38–46

and Manichean premise 41, 46, 49, 227 n.7 publication of 48 religious affect in 136–9 Spanish translation of 12, 226–7 n.6 Schaefer, Donovan 125, 137 Shakespeare, William viii, 2, 21, 27, 46 Hamlet 126 Othello 18–19, 22, 46, 225–6 n.10 Shalimar the Clown 127–9 and tracking shot 149 Shame 11, 19, 25, 139–44 composition of 230–1 n.8 and connections with Midnight’s Children 18 as Gothic 141 shame defined 140–1 in Urdu as sharam 142–3 shame theory 139–41 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 165 shooting script 137, 151, 223 Shree 420 75, 116, 155, 159, 169–70, 231 n.8 Siddiqui, Kalim 13 ‘Silverland’ 148 Sinatra, Nancy 58 Sirk, Douglass 65 Sita 20 feminist film Sitayama in ‘Madame Rama’ 69 Smith, James K. A. 46 Southey, Robert 42, 227 n.8 Spenser, Edmund 188 Spinoza, Baruch 122 Steiner, George 118 After Babel 118, 202 Sterne, Laurence viii, 81, 226 n.11 Suleri Sara 51 Supple, Tim 111 Swift, Jonathan 63 Symbolic Kiss 68, see also Indirect Kiss Tagore, Rabindranath 27, 205 Taher, Amir 15 takallouf 144 Taylor, Ken 110–11 Tebitt, Norman, criticism of Rushdie 13 Thomas, Dylan 69 Thompson, James 133 and ‘Rule, Britannia!’ 133

Index Tomkins, Silvan 123, 125, 128, see also rasa theory and affect theory 122, 139, 229–30 n.1 Topolski, Felix 12 Trilling Lionel 170, 232 n.11 Trivet, Nicholas 187 Truffaut, François 76 Tuve, Rosamond 189 Twain, Mark 57 Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights viii, xi, 216–19 urban fantasy, genre of

216

Valéry, Paul 204 Valmiki 121, 201, 233 n.1 Vassanji, M. G. 231 n.9 Vedas 30 Virgil 179 the Georgics 179–81

249

Voloshinov, V. 54 Voltaire ix Mahomet the Imposter 47 Wagner, James W. 1, 225 n.2 Walcott, Derek 226 n.14 Weltliteratur 201, 204 West, Elizabeth 10 Whitman, Walt 145 Wierzbicki, James 131 Wiggins, Marianne 10, 14 Wimsatt, Jr, W. K. and Monroe C. Beardesley 121 the affective fallacy 121, 144 Wizard of Oz, The 113, 114, 147–8, 162 world literature 201–7 and humanism 202–3 and Marx 204 and the world market 204 Yeats, W. B.

128, 134, 205