Salman Rushdie Isn’t Afraid of Free Speech

19:30Salman Rushdie:But I went back. After. Before. Oh, before. but you spent a lot of time trying to remember as well the fragments. Yes, I mean, I think memory is a great resource. When you seriously try and remember, it's amazing how much comes back. But no, I did. After I published my unsuccessful first novel, I took what little money I'd earned from it and went to India for many months, living and travelling as cheaply as I could in order to get it back in my system. Making notes? Making notes. And that included, of course, Bombay, but also some parts that I'd never been to, like Benares, for example, which I mean, I had in my mind some crude structure of what would become Midnight's Children.

20:15Salman Rushdie:And I wanted to go to places that I thought might get into the book. And you stood outside your old childhood home, I think. Yes, and went inside because we actually, I actually knew the people to whom my parents had sold the house. So they welcomed us in and the interior had been completely transformed. It looked like a Bollywood movie set. But the house was still the house. Were you setting out to tell a big story of India? No, as I say, it got larger. It started out, I thought I'd just got to write a novel about childhood. And then, because, you know, I'm eight weeks older than the independent nations of India and Pakistan.

20:50Salman Rushdie:And at some point it occurred to me, supposing it wasn't an eight-week difference. Supposing it was the same time. Where did that take you? And of course, where it took you into was to have the subject of the history of the independent nations being a part of the story. So it became a much, much bigger book. And of course, the family is deeply, your own family is deeply affected by this, our family, because I realized as I put the chronology together in my head that your mother with you as a newborn is in Bombay and her two sisters are sort of trying to get from similar to Delhi and eventually to Pakistan.

21:28So you're born at a time of tremendous rupture of different kinds.

21:32Salman Rushdie:Yes. And like many Indian Muslim families, the family was more or less cut in half. So my mother and my uncle Hamid and my uncle Mahmood all stayed in India. And my mother's two sisters were in Pakistan. So, I mean, when we were little children, there were moments when it was easier to travel between India and Pakistan than it is now. There used to be these little boats that went from Bombay to Karachi, not very grand boats, called Sabarmati and Saraswati. And you used to be able to take the boat, because actually Bombay to Karachi is not very far, as the crow flies. You know, it's like a day and a night on a tin pot boat.

22:09Salman Rushdie:And so we would go every so often more to Karachi than to where your family was in Ravapindi. So there was more interchange between India and Pakistan at that time. Was India then the home of your childhood, the country of your childhood, effectively then taken away from you when your parents moved to Pakistan in the 60s? Yeah, I mean, I was very cross with them for selling the house in Bombay. Why did they leave India? I'd never understood it. I mean, they said, amongst other things, that they wanted their daughters to have Muslim husbands, which was very odd, given how lacking in religious faith, particularly my father, had always been.

22:49Salman Rushdie:So I never really got to the bottom of it. And I don't think they were that content after moving to Karachi. Because they had a very nice life in Bombay, which puzzles me that they left. And I felt I had to get it back. There was a point after leaving Cambridge and deciding to base myself in London to try and be a writer that I felt that I was in danger of losing touch. And that's why I went on that long journey of several months. And that led to Midnight's Children. And I felt, you know, I always told myself that Bombay is a city, a lot of it is built on land reclaimed from the sea. The British had a big land reclamation project where they joined up the seven islands into one peninsula.

23:30Salman Rushdie:And I thought, I'm also engaged in an act of land reclamation. And that's what that book was. Did it give you what you were looking for? It did, really. Yeah. Yeah, because the reception of Midnight's Children in India was wonderful. And it gave me a feeling of belonging again. You did make political points through it. It was at the end of the period of the emergency Indira Gandhi had brought about. And were you, you were intending it as that, as a critique of India at that time? As I say, if you're writing a book about in which the character and the country are kind of twins, you have to write about both the twins.

24:07Salman Rushdie:And the emergency was a real shock to many of us. The fact that, you know, the so-called world's largest democracy would flirt with dictatorship. I mean, more than flirt, actually. For a couple of years, it was quite serious. So it had to get into the book. And I mean, actually, I was very worried because I didn't want the book to end on that note. But I also thought I can't end the emergency in my book if it hasn't ended in real life. And then Indra Gandhi called an election and lost. And I felt really grateful to her because she gave me the end of the book. Do you think that as you look at India today, is Indra Gandhi a more benign figure than you thought she was at the time?

24:43Salman Rushdie:Well, not during the years of the emergency. I think that was a very dark time, which is not unlike what's happening now in its way. But I mean, she was a more impressive figure. And of course, she regained power after some years. So, no, I mean, she's an extraordinary woman. And I remember, as I say, when Midnight Children came out, it was very well received. If there was any criticism of it, some people felt that the ending was too pessimistic. And now looking back at it, I think the ending was absurdly optimistic. Compared to what's happened since. Compared to what's actually happened since.

25:15So how do you feel about India today under Prime Minister Modi?

25:18Salman Rushdie:I feel very worried about it, you know, because, I mean, I have a lot of friends in India who are journalists. and from whom I get interesting information about what's going on. And I think everybody is extremely concerned with the attack on freedoms of journalists, of writers, of intellectuals, of professors, etc. Even beyond that, there seems to be a desire to rewrite the history of the country, essentially to say Hindus good, Muslims bad. The thing that V.S. Naipaul once called a wounded civilization, the idea that India is a Hindu civilization wounded by the arrival of Muslims. Invaders. Invaders.

25:54Salman Rushdie:That project has a lot of energy behind it. There's a lot of press. I was looking at this book, Imaginary Homelands, which is your criticism and essays written through the 1980s and first published in 1991. And you do warn about a lot of things that have become more extreme ever since. Yeah, I think, you know, as a writer, if you're paying attention, then sometimes you see things coming. And I think that's what I was doing. I was paying attention. What about the people in your life? because I know that obviously Midnight's Children is a work of fiction, but you draw on the structure of your true family.

26:32Salman Rushdie:My father was very annoyed. He's not the only one, I think. Others closer to me were pretty upset or felt you'd been unfair. My mother was very, very calm about it. She said, oh, yes, I can see this, what's happening here, but this is not me and this is not my husband and it's all made up. So actually, my mother had a very good literary response to it, and other people in the family, not so much. Did you mind that? Because you're also basking in the massive adulation that you had in that period. Yes, of course I minded it. There's a famous sentence by the Nobel laureate Czesław Milosz, who said, when a writer enters the family, the family is screwed.

27:12And that was you.

27:13Salman Rushdie:And that was me.

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30:23Bombay is there in the 11th hour as well, particularly in the story, The Musician of Kahani, The Musician of Stories. And there's a part in it where you do the writer's version of breaking the fourth wall where you talk about your own childhood home and there's an allusion as well to the main character in Midnight's Children.

30:45Salman Rushdie:Yes, who makes a little guest appearance. So tell me what's going on, what leads to that? Is it a flight of fancy at the time you're writing? No, what I thought, one of the things about that story is that it felt to me like a kind of farewell from me to a neighbourhood which has been very important in my writing. It's not only Midnight's children, actually. In my novel, Quixote, one of the major characters has a backstory in the same neighborhood. Is it bigger than A Farewell to the Neighborhood that you grew up in? Is it more like A Farewell to India? I don't know the answer to that. I'm very reluctant to predict what I'm going to write in the future, because every time I've ever done it, I've been wrong.

31:23Salman Rushdie:If I say, oh, I'm never going to write about India again, you might write a 600-page novel about India following. So I don't know. But it felt like a conclusion of a certain concern. And I liked it that I found a story which wasn't about me to tell, but to tell it as a way of saying that's enough from that place. I meant more in real life. Can you visit? Do you want to visit? Oh yeah, I mean I hope to go. There was a pandemic and then there was the attack and that's slowed things down. But yeah, I'm hoping to go. And do you feel you can visit safely? We'll find out. Of course, the first time everything about your daily life changed significantly with your writing was after the Satanic Verses in 1989.

32:06And when you wrote your memoir of that time, you wrote it in the third person as if what's happening is happening to someone else. Was that a conscious effort to distance yourself from the events?

32:16Salman Rushdie:Well, what I felt was that by the time I got around to writing it, it was quite a few years after the events that are described in the book. And what I felt was that the person writing the book and the person about whom the book was written were in slightly different places in their lives. the person about whom the book was being written was, you know, under great stress and was in all kinds of personal and political difficulty. And the person writing the book was in a better place. So I just thought that although they're both me, they're not quite the same me. So that was one of the reasons for the third person.

32:51Salman Rushdie:And the other was I wanted the book to read like a novel. Which was your forte. Yeah. And I think if you're writing a memoir or an autobiography, the character called I has a kind of significance that the other characters don't. And I thought if I take away the I, and if I refer to the me character in the same language as all the other characters, that it brings that character down to the same level as the other characters, that it reads like a novel. So those were the reasons. But then by the time I got around to writing Knife, that felt very personal. I felt that had to be a first person book.

33:24Yeah, it's interesting to me that so after the time of the fatwa and the fact that your life changes overnight when you have to go into hiding and you're under British police protection, that you're still writing, but you're continuing to write fiction. You're not writing about your real life circumstances at that time.

33:43Salman Rushdie:No, but I was keeping a journal, which I don't, I have not in my life been a journalist, a journal keeper, unlike summarizers I know who are very detailed journal keepers. But just in those years, I thought that these events were so powerful and things moved so rapidly, there was so much going on, that I thought there's no way I'm going to remember this. I'm not going to remember like the dailiness of it. And so I need to keep a record. So I did have, you know, hundreds and hundreds of pages of journal that I kept for that almost a decade. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I feel like the decade before the fatwa, your nonfiction is a lot about India and Pakistan and about race relations and so much of what you're seeing around you, which you're doing alongside your fiction.

34:29And then, of course, after the fatwa, you've become much more associated with the cause of free speech because of the price that you've paid for yours.

34:39Salman Rushdie:Yeah, I think that's right. When you look around with free speech, how do you feel about it today? I mean, I'm in favor of it. Yeah. Is it even more challenged or is the right to it even more challenged than it was in 1989 when the fatwa was put on you. Yeah, I think there's unexpected amounts of pressure on free expression and on people to restrain themselves from certain kinds of speech. And the pressure comes, I think, I mean, historically, the pressure on free speech comes from conservative forces in society who disapprove of less conservative voices. But now it comes from the other end as well.

35:15Salman Rushdie:There are people who are willing to, as they say, de-platform voices that they don't like. Whereas my kind of old school view is that the defense of free speech begins when somebody says something you don't like. Because it's actually perfectly easy to defend people who you agree with or to whom you're indifferent. Exactly that is in such short supply now. Most people who are defenders of free speech just really want their own speech defended. Exactly. And that's the opposite of free speech. Over the years, yes, I've been involved in quite a lot of free speech issues. And very often you find yourself defending things you don't like at all.

35:50But do you have to be careful then not to be co-opted too much when you realize that some of the people who want you to rally behind them are actually only interested in one kind of free speech?

35:59Salman Rushdie:Yes. The battle is not easy. You know, it's a complicated battle. And you have to be on your guard. But the general principle, I think, has to be if there's a pressure to censor something, the censor has to make the case. The default setting has to be freedom. And, you know, different countries set the limit in different places. So, for example, here, in the UK, because of the Race Relations Act, there are certain kinds of speech which are forbidden, racist speech. Whereas in America, because of the First Amendment, much of the speech that would be forbidden under the Race Relations Act is permitted.

36:36Salman Rushdie:There are European countries which outlaw Holocaust denial. And there are other countries which think that's a mistake. But the US, which is your home now, do you see a different climate on free speech even there? Yeah, I mean, the writers' organization, PEN America, a few weeks ago issued a report in which it said that at this moment in the United States, there are 23 ,000 active book bans. And in many cases in schools, one parent objecting to the presence of a book on the syllabus or in the library can result in having that book removed. 23 ,000. And these are not just any old books. These are Tony Morrison's Beloved or Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, some of the best books ever written.

37:19Salman Rushdie:And there is a fight back against it because there is the defense of the First Amendment. And there's a lot of court cases. And in many cases, those court cases are succeeding, but there's just a lot to fight about. What's interesting is that recently, there have been a series of elections to school boards across America. And in every single case, the book banners have been swept off the board and more liberal people have come on it. So there is a backlash against the book bans. And hopefully that will prevail. But the fact that they have come in at all, could you ever have imagined that in the U.S.?

37:52Because you've made the country your home for 25 years, I think.

37:55Salman Rushdie:26 now, yeah. But no, I would never have imagined it. Because one of the reasons why people like me wanted to live in America is because of the fact that free speech is enshrined in the Constitution. I mean, the First Amendment is very powerful. And in a country of that kind, that this should happen. And especially what you begin to notice is that many of the books that are being banned have something in common, which is that they deal with America seen from the perspective of people who are not white. If you think about Beloved or To Kill a Mockingbird, books like that, that's what they have in common.

38:26Salman Rushdie:That they tell the story of America from a different viewpoint. And there is, in my view, clearly an attempt, again, to erase that viewpoint. it. And so it's more important than just the fact that this or that title that you happen to be fond of is banned. It's a question of what would happen to a generation of children if they grow up ignorant of the history of the country. That's dangerous. Dangerous to whom? Dangerous because it is a very plural society, a very diverse society. And if all you hear is one version, which is the version of the dominant race, then that's potentially very destabilizing.

39:04It is New York, which you've made your home, and New York now has a new mayor-elect, who I think you must know because you've worked with his mother, Mira Naira.

39:12Salman Rushdie:Well, I haven't worked with Mira, but I've known her a long time. Yes, so I've, yes. The film of Midnight's Children was hers? No, it was Diva Meta. Ah. I thought Mira had, has she not collaborated with you? No, no. Diva and Mira have this joke that they're always being congratulated on each other's films. Okay, don't tell them I said this. But you know Mira Naira. I know Mira, yes. I don't know his father so well, but I've met Mahmoud as well. And I mean, look, he ran a terrific campaign. He energized young people, especially. You know, normally in a New York mayoral election, the percentage of people voting is not that high.

39:50Salman Rushdie:It's a very Democrat city. The Democrat always wins, except Giuliani. So normally it's kind of boring. But this was a very energized race. I think it was the highest percentage of turnout since about the 1960s. So he certainly earned it. Do you think Zoran Mamdani's success is replicable outside New York City? I don't know. I mean, I think it may be in certain parts of the country, but New York is a very particular place. I thought what was interesting on the day that he won the election to be mayor was that in two other places, in New Jersey and Virginia, women, Democrat women, much more centrist than Mamdani, also won by very large margins, much larger margins than were expected, double digits.

40:32Salman Rushdie:margins. So I thought, it's unclear which is the better direction to follow. And maybe you don't have to follow one direction everywhere. Zaran Mamdani did not resile from his support for Palestinian rights, which became an issue for some in that campaign. Tell me how you feel about that particular cause today. Because in Imaginary Homelands, there's a long conversation that you had with Edward Said, who you obviously knew in his lifetime. Edward was a good friend. Well, look, I mean, I still have the view that a two-state solution is the solution, but the question is whether anybody there believes in that anymore.

41:07Salman Rushdie:I think neither Netanyahu nor Hamas were that interested in a two-state solution. But Hamas is not all the Palestinian people. No, it's not. And the question is, how do we get out of this dreadful situation and move towards something that has some kind of justice? And I don't know the answer to that, because the Palestinian Authority isn't supported by a lot of Palestinians. Hamas, I think, has perhaps lost support amongst a lot of Palestinians. So, I mean, who do you negotiate with? And who does the negotiating? And back to the free speech side, in this country, in the UK, today you can't hold up a sign saying, I support Palestine action without being arrested.

41:51What do you think of essentially making it a terrorist group?

41:55Salman Rushdie:I think that's probably a mistake. My view has always been, let voices be heard. Especially if I disagree with them. Because they're saying it's no trick to allow somebody to hold up a placard that you agree with. I mean, I was surprised the last time I was in England, which was some months ago now, there was this huge demonstration in London of 150 ,000 people marching against immigration. The Unite the Kingdom rally. Yeah. And I thought, I couldn't believe that that was happening in England. So I think there is a destabilization here as well as in America. So, yeah, it's a very worrying time.

42:31Well, how does that leave you feeling? Because we've talked about India, the United Kingdom and the United States. Similar things happening everywhere. And you are disquieted by what's happening in all three countries.

42:41Salman Rushdie:Yeah, I mean, you know, this book, which deals with all three countries, writing it, I was aware of the fact that there were echoes. They're not exactly the same situation. You know, they all have their local differences. But there are echoes between all three societies of what's going on. I mean, not to my liking. This is sometimes the world moves in a direction that's not to your liking. All you can do is hope that it'll change. In America, there are some small indications that it'll change. And as I was saying, in the various votes that there have been recently, there's been an enormous swing away from what one might call Trumpism.

43:17And then you, yourself, with a book tour for your most recent book, What comes next? Are you writing again or will you take a breath before you're next?

43:27Salman Rushdie:No, you know, I'm always happier when I'm writing than when I'm not. Ask anybody who knows me, I'm much better company when I have a book to write. I would hope that the next thing will be a novel. And I have a germ of something that I've started work on, but I really don't know where it's going yet. I think I know what it's about, but I don't know how to do it yet. Does that mean you haven't yet sat down with the empty laptop screen in front of you? No, I've got some stuff. I've got some pages. but I'm not sure about them. And what is your routine like? Are you disciplined? Is it like, this is my writing time and this is my personal time?

44:01Salman Rushdie:Actually, what's happened to me over these, as you say, this half century is that I've become very disciplined. And now I do it like a job. And I'm not one of those writers who can get up at dawn and work. I'm not very good early in the morning. So I get up in the morning as a sort of ordinary time and I have my coffee and I go to work and I do a day's work. And I am very disciplined now, I think. There's a funny line of when Hemingway was once asked about literary commitment, you know, by which the interviewer meant political commitment. And Hemingway said, the only commitment a writer needs is the commitment of the seat of his pants to the seat of his chair.

44:41Salman Rushdie:And I think that's very important, sitting down. You can't, I mean, there are writers who work standing up, but mostly you sit down. But is any of that more difficult? Because you have had life-changing injuries. You've lost the sight in one eye. I know you have problems with the other one in your hand. Yeah, it's difficult. I mean, I'm clumsier. I make more typing mistakes, etc. Everything is a bit harder. But, you know, writing is hard anyway. So it's just a different problem. And how do you cope with the solitude required? The locking yourself away to work, is it? Well, I've got, you know, I've got a very nice room to work in and I shut the door.

45:21And come out when you've got to a certain number of words. Yes, I always give myself an artificially low number of words.

45:28Salman Rushdie:That's the cheat. So that you can exceed it. Yes, exactly. So what is the daily total then? Well, if I could get a couple of hundred words done, I would think that's not bad. I mean, a page is usually 300 and a bit, you know, 320, something like that. If I can do that, I'd be extremely pleased. But you know, Flaubert used to come down from his study and say he had a great day today. He wrote a sentence. So writing is sometimes slow, sometimes quick. I mean, with these books, Knife and The Eleventh Hour, I mean, they came out at one-year intervals. For me, that's some kind of a record. Quite often, I've taken five years to write a book.

46:06Salman Rushdie:So it seems I'm getting faster in my old age. Salman Rushdie, good luck with the next one. Thank you. And that's the Michelle Hussain Show for this week. If you subscribe, you'll know as soon as a new episode hits the feed. And to everyone who's rated us here or left comments, thank you. We also have an email. It's michalshow at bloomberg.net. You can watch these conversations on YouTube and Bloomberg TV. And the text version with my notes for added context are at bloomberg.com slash weekend. The show's producers are Jessica Beck and Chris Martlew. The executive producer is Louisa Lewis. Our sound engineer is Richard Ward.

46:54Video editing, Toby Babalola and Evando Thompson. Social media, Alex Morgan. Music by Bart Warshaw. At Bloomberg Weekend, Brendan Francis Newnham is editorial director of Audio and Special Projects. And our executive editor is Catherine Bell. We'd also like to thank Summer Sadi and the Bloomberg podcast team. And thank you for listening. Until next weekend, goodbye.

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