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Podcast Episode Summary: The News Agents - Salman Rushdie on Political Violence, Free Speech, and BBC "Cowardice"
Episode Overview In this episode of *The News Agents*, hosts Emily Maitlis, Jon Sopel, and Lewis Goodall welcome Sir Salman Rushdie, a distinguished author, to discuss his new novel *The Eleventh Hour*, his experiences with political violence, and reflections on free speech and the BBC's current state.
Key Themes
- Mortality and Death: Rushdie reflects on his long-standing confrontation with death, particularly after the attempted assassination in 2022.
- Political Violence: He discusses the normalization of political violence in society compared to the landscape of the late 1980s.
- Free Speech and Censorship: Rushdie critiques the BBC for its recent actions that he perceives as cowardly, linking it to a broader societal issue regarding free speech.
Detailed Breakdown
Introduction
- Rushdie opens by discussing memory and the long-lasting impact of experiences, particularly the racism he faced in his youth, contrasting it with the recent comments of Nigel Farage.
The Eleventh Hour
- The new novel serves as Rushdie's meditation on mortality, having experienced a close brush with death.
- He emphasizes a desire to tackle the topic with a sense of playfulness rather than solemnity.
Reflections on Death
- Rushdie's writing about mortality comes at a reflective phase of his life.
- He comments on the vibrancy of life, even in the face of death, advocating for living fully and not wasting time.
Political Violence and Its Normalization
- The conversation shifts towards political violence, with Rushdie noting its increasing frequency and the dangers it poses to public life.
- He draws a parallel between his own experience of a fatwa and the current climate of threats against public figures.
The State of Free Speech
- Rushdie critiques the BBC for censoring content, labeling it as "stupid" and indicative of a lack of confidence.
- He discusses anticipatory censorship, where institutions preemptively censor content out of fear of backlash.
Authoritarianism and Society's Fracturing
- Rushdie expresses concern about rising authoritarianism and the attraction of young people to far-right ideologies.
- He reflects on how political divisions create fractures in society, leading to entrenched positions and hostility.
The Role of Books and Literature
- On the decline of reading for pleasure, Rushdie argues that literature enriches mental life and warns against the societal impoverishment that could follow if reading continues to decline.
- He expresses skepticism about the death of books, citing their enduring nature despite the rise of various media.
The Impact of Immigration and Racism
- Rushdie shares his perspective as an immigrant, emphasizing the positive contributions of immigrants to society.
- He critiques the rising racialized politics and the normalization of racist rhetoric in contemporary discourse.
Conclusion
- The discussion wraps up with reflections on the current state of British politics, the relationship between the UK and India under Modi’s leadership, and the impact of economic inequity on India’s potential as a superpower.
Key Takeaways
- Memory and Trauma: Individuals often retain vivid memories of traumatic experiences, which shape their perspectives on identity and society.
- Life's Value: Surviving near-fatal experiences can lead to a renewed appreciation for life and the urgency to embrace each day.
- Censorship Concerns: The fear of offending leads to preemptive censorship, threatening the integrity of public discourse and free expression.
- Political Climate: The rise of political extremism and youth disillusionment with democratic institutions poses significant risks to societal cohesion.
- Literature’s Enduring Importance: Despite challenges, literature continues to play a crucial role in enriching cultures and societies.
Final Thoughts This episode of *The News Agents* offers profound insights into the intersections of literature, politics, and personal experience, as Salman Rushdie engages with pressing contemporary issues while reflecting on his own life and work.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:02Jon Sopel:This is a Global Player original podcast. People to whom bad things happen often remember for a lifetime exactly what happened to them.
0:13Salman Rushdie:Things that happened to me, which I now kind of tend to discount, happened when I was 13 or 14 years old, but I remember them very vividly. So memory is not as easily lost as Mr Farage seems to think.
0:31Lewis Goodall:So you remember the racism you received as a schoolboy?
0:33Salman Rushdie:Yes, I do. I remember it as if it happened yesterday.
0:36Lewis Goodall:That is the voice of Sir Salman Rushdie, one of our most distinguished and prestigious authors, expressing some doubt on the excuse that Nigel Farage has put forward this week against those who have accused him of racism in his school days as all being very long ago and easy to forget.
0:55Jon Sopel:On today's News Agents, we talk extensively to Sir Salman about death. His new book is a meditation on the end of life, but also how vibrant he is on so many issues about free speech, on authoritarianism, on the state of the BBC and a lot more besides. Welcome to the News Agents.
1:21Jon Sopel:The News Agents. Dr Salman Rushdie, welcome to The News Agents. It's a great pleasure to have you in the studio with us. So thank you. I suppose my first question, kind of concerning the 11th hour, is that you have spent probably half of your life under the threat of death. Why only now writing about mortality?
1:45Salman Rushdie:I'm getting on a bit, I think, is probably the answer. You know, I think part of it is just that. Part of it is just, you know, when you arrive at this age, first of all, you start losing people. You know, you start losing friends and things like that, and the world changes. And then, of course, I mean, I had a pretty close look at the end, and that focuses the mind as well. So for those two reasons, I think, I began to think about stories about the final act, you know, what it's like to be in Act 5 of the play.
2:14Jon Sopel:And has it, writing that book, has it changed your outlook? Has it kind of left you at peace with Act V of the play? Or do you still want to go raging into the night?
2:25Salman Rushdie:No, I think raging is probably the way.
2:27Jon Sopel:Go out all guns blazing.
2:29Salman Rushdie:Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think this was not... I've noticed that some people writing about the book have wondered if it was a kind of farewell. And I'm just here to tell you it's not. It's just the new book. I mean, I hope to keep going. you know, for as long as the ideas keep coming.
2:47Lewis Goodall:Do you think that death, in the literary world, but generally in life, remains taboo?
2:53Salman Rushdie:No, I don't know. I don't think so. I don't think so. I think, I mean, I talk about it with friends and family, and I think there's a kind of equanimity that comes from having it out in the open.
3:05Lewis Goodall:As John said, though, death very unusually for your life. I mean, it has stalked you. It has been a presence in your life, or the prospect of it, in a way that most people do not confront. How do you think that has changed, if it has, how you think about death?
3:18Salman Rushdie:Well, I mean, it focuses the mind, you know. It makes you think about it more clearly, in a way. But what I wanted, as you say, having thought about this for a very long time, I wanted the book not to be ponderous. You know, I didn't want it to be a kind of dark, gloomy, we're all going to die kind of book.
3:35Jon Sopel:No, it's very much not.
3:36Salman Rushdie:But I wanted it to be kind of playful and mischievous and funny while dealing with this very serious thing that's going to come to us all.
3:46Lewis Goodall:I was struck in the first short story, the first story in the book. One of the characters describes, or you describe one of the characters as basically having achieved little in life, but it doesn't bother him terribly much. That's not true of you, but you almost write about it as if almost admiringly that someone might think that.
4:04Salman Rushdie:Well, I've met people like that, you know, I mean, that story in the South came about after a visit to South India to a city I still call Madras, which you're supposed to call Chennai. And I met old gentlemen like this, you know, who complained bitterly about everything, including still being alive, but were quite cheerful about it, you know, in a very oddly contradictory way. and the story came out of listening to these old gents bitching like crazy about everything in the world including their families and yet being somehow very full of life still, you know, and I thought that's it
4:46Jon Sopel:I love the quote of one where you say that, you know, you're just waiting to die and the other one says, yeah, but you've never learned how to live and I thought that was a kind of perfect summation of some people who've just kind of spent their whole life so miserable. Yes, have kind of never really embraced.
5:04Salman Rushdie:Yeah, but I thought what was nice about those two old geezers is that all they do is complain about each other and bitch about each other. But actually underneath that, there's a kind of love. There's a kind of affection that they don't quite know how to express. Yeah. And so their arguments and their kind of apparent hostility to each other is a disguise for friendship and for intimacy.
5:28Lewis Goodall:I say that death has stalled your life certainly for the last 30, 40 years. Obviously, in 2022, when you were stabbed multiple times in New York, that prospect, that spectre, became very real, very physical, confronted you literally. Did that, despite the fact that you had lived under the threat of death for so long, the fact that it came so close, did that change your view of it again?
5:52Salman Rushdie:Well, it changed my view of life more than of death. Because I think what happens when you have a narrow escape like that is that it gives you a sense of the value of the days. You're given another act. So you're given another spell of life, which in many ways was unlikely because of the seriousness of the injuries. So then you get it. You get an extra lease of life. And you feel the value of it. You feel the value of each day. And what it's made me feel is don't waste your time. You know, if you're given an extra bit of time, use it. Don't waste it.
6:33Lewis Goodall:Do you feel you've wasted any time in your life?
6:36Salman Rushdie:I've tried not to, but I think the urgency has increased, I think.
6:41Jon Sopel:Look, I was working as a reporter on The World at One when the fatwa came through, and I think The World at One rang you.
6:47Salman Rushdie:Oh, yeah, was that who rang me?
6:49Jon Sopel:Yes. And so there was this kind of shock in the newsroom when the Ayatollah Khomeini had issued the fatwa and then suddenly we contact you and sort of, what's your reaction, sir? And you say, well, it's the first I've heard of it. I mean, that seemed so shocking then. And yet somehow political violence today seems to have not, if not normalized, it's become much, much more frequent. Yes.
7:22Salman Rushdie:Yeah, that's true. I mean, it's the world is more violent than it was back in 1989. But what seemed exceptional in 1989 feels less exceptional now.
7:34Lewis Goodall:Do you think that what you experience, in a sense, it strikes me almost as a sort of portent of what was to come?
7:40Salman Rushdie:Well, you know, when I wrote my earlier memoir, Joseph Anton, I began it by likening what happened to me to the scene in Alfred Hitchcock's movie, The Birds, when there are children in a classroom and outside there's like a climbing frame and one bird comes down and sits on the climbing frame. One bird doesn't mean anything, it's just a bird. But each time he cuts back to the climbing frame, there's more and more and more until there's hundreds and hundreds of birds. I've sometimes felt that what happened to me was the first bird.
8:11Lewis Goodall:I wonder, for example, what you thought when you saw Charlie Kirk's murder. Well, I'm against murder. Well, that's good. That's really my reaction. But it must have, given your particular history, and as you say, what happens to you being a sort of portent of these things? It must strike you, you must have a particular perspective on it.
8:31Salman Rushdie:I don't really, I just thought a man got killed who didn't deserve to die. And I think you have to feel that even if it's a political opponent. What does it say about our society that what in 1989
8:47Jon Sopel:seemed so extraordinary and so completely unbelievable that today you hear people leaving public life because their lives have been threatened. You hear people not going into public life because their fear of their lives being threatened. You hear the security being ramped up for all sorts of politicians and people who are in the public eye in a way that was just unimaginable even a decade ago.
9:11Salman Rushdie:Well, I think it's more unimaginable here because there isn't a gun culture here in the way that there is in America. I mean the enormous number of weapons in private hands in the United States makes violence more likely. I mean you're talking here about political violence but there are attacks on schools and things like that almost every week now in America. So if you live in a society which has become so accustomed to gun violence it's less surprising I guess.
9:45Lewis Goodall:I suppose is, in a way, what happened to Kirk and what happened to many other people. It's happened to many other people in public life. It strikes me. They're victims of absolutism, of a form of absolutism in a way that you were. Perhaps it feels more that we have more absolutism now than we did.
9:59Salman Rushdie:Well, I think what we certainly have is, and one of the things I tried to write about this book, is a kind of fracturing in society where people take up very, very embedded, entrenched positions on both sides of the fracture. and the fracture is very deep and very wide and it's actually quite hard to see how you repair it. Do you see how America got there? Well, as I say, part of it is to do with it being a gun culture. I think it's important to keep reminding ourselves of the fact that there are more guns in private ownership in the United States than there are people.
10:36Jon Sopel:But I read a very interesting quote you said about America, kind of once upon a time you kind of americans knew what they were they may disagree politically with each other yes but broadly speaking they knew who they were they knew what it was to be an american and you say that sense of identity has gone whereas in france people still know what
10:56Salman Rushdie:it is to be french yeah i think that's true i mean for example you can't imagine even a a decade or so ago that the republican party would be so affectionate towards russia I mean, in the days of the Soviet Union, it was quite clear who the adversary was. And it's very strange to find the Conservative Party in the United States becoming so okay with the idea of cozying up to Vladimir Putin. That's an amazing transformation. And of course, on the other side of the spectrum, that's considered to be horrifying. But that's an indication of the way in which the place has been intellectually divided.
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11:40Lewis Goodall:You know America very well. I was struck by a line in the book where you say, these are the days in which shamelessness is king. I know you weren't necessarily referring to America or Trump in that regard. But it strikes me that, is that what Trump has done to America, do you think? Do you think he's elevated shamelessness?
11:56Salman Rushdie:I think that is true, but I think it's also not happening only in America. One of the things I felt writing this book was that, you know, the three countries that I spent my life thinking about and writing about, which is India, England and the United States, there's some degree of that happening everywhere.
12:12Lewis Goodall:What do you mean by it?
12:13Salman Rushdie:Well, people brazenly getting away with unrepentant, dreadful actions. In India, the increase in religious sectarianism and the way in which minorities are treated, the way in which increasingly the way in which people in the arts and journalism and the academy are treated brazenly and absolutely without any pretext or reason to attack people, that people are being attacked. So I just think, you know, these are tough times and it needs to be said and it needs to be argued against.
12:51Lewis Goodall:What do you think the answer is to shamelessness? Is there a way back? Because once you sort of unleash that and it becomes OK to act in a way that where it would once not have been OK.
13:01Salman Rushdie:Yeah, I mean, I don't know, you know, I don't really know the answer to it, but I do see that there is a pushback, you know, and just things that have been happening in the United States in recent weeks. I mean, for example, in the last week or so, there have been a large number of elections to school boards around the country. and in all those cases in every single case all the people on the boards who were the people who were banning books have been voted off the board and people and people who just want an ordinary education for their kids have been voted on so this enormous wave of book banning has been combated by a rejection of that wave by by very large sections of the population and not only in liberal parts of America.
13:47Jon Sopel:Yeah, that's so interesting because, you know, we had the Vice President J.D. Vance come over to Europe, speak at the Munich Security Conference, wag his finger at everybody on the importance of free speech and how it's being eroded. And yet you describe a situation in America, as you've described, where books are being banned and certain thoughts are not allowed. And, you know, people are being kind of cancelled left, right and centre if they are not following the sort of MAGA orthodoxy of the day.
14:15Salman Rushdie:I don't think that J.D. Vance has any standing to talk about free expression, you know, because it's quite true that, as you say, that the push towards controlling speech in America is coming very largely from the right. There is some coming from the left of kind of political orthodoxy, what it's OK to say and what it's not OK to say. But the great attack is coming, you know, against television networks, against comedians, against universities, schools. It's all coming from the Trump reinvention of the Republican Party.
14:51Lewis Goodall:I wonder in that vein what you made of the fact that this week that the BBC censored or removed a line from Rutger Bregman's speech.
15:00Salman Rushdie:I know the BBC continues to be really stupid, I think. And there's no cure for stupidity. expand on that what do you mean well i mean i don't believe that the bbc even five or ten years ago would have done that so it's just dumb and it gives ammunition to people who would like to take down public broadcasting i mean i think the bbc is an enormously valuable institution but it seems to be have done some dumb things of late is that a lack of self-confidence is it
15:34Jon Sopel:to do with them feeling that they have got to appease Donald Trump, certainly because they're faced with such a huge legal action. I wonder what you think the roots of this are.
15:45Salman Rushdie:I don't know. You're asking the wrong person. I don't walk those corridors enough to know what's going on. But I know that it's something that the BBC would not have done a decade ago, this kind of foolishness.
15:58Jon Sopel:But is this an anticipatory deference almost, that you fear what could cause trouble?
16:04Salman Rushdie:Yes, pre-censorship. Censorship before you need to do anything. I don't know, I don't sit in those rooms where these decisions are taken, but it does seem like a kind of cowardly thing to do.
16:20Lewis Goodall:But that's the most disturbing thing of all, isn't it? Is when you stop saying things, not because actually anybody has even taken issue or contested it, but you're doing it in the anticipation of someone contesting it.
16:31Salman Rushdie:and I mean in America that was happening a lot I think it's only just beginning to change where people are beginning to stand up to the enormous attack from this administration beginning to push back a little bit but it's a long way, the pushback has a long way to go Well we'll be back with more from Sir Salman Rushdie just after this
16:58Lewis Goodall:news you can trust and the conversations that matter with award-winning journalists at the heart of the stories from the uk and around the world breaking news here in edinburgh i'm simon my american week is next reporting from the heart of card discover how today's story affects your life listen on our free global player app or the new lbc app lbc leading britain's conversation
17:28Jon Sopel:The News Agents.
17:30Lewis Goodall:Do you think that America, and indeed our politics generally, is being gripped by authoritarian impulses now?
17:37Salman Rushdie:Well, I mean, the most worrying thing, I think, is the way in which young people are being attracted to the right wing. Again, that's not by any means unique to the United States, although it's true that especially young men voted for the Republican ticket. in the last election in a way that they didn't before. But, I mean, last year when I was travelling around Europe, when my memoir came out, I was told in various countries, Germany, France, Italy, that young voters were voting for the extreme right. In Germany, the IFD got a lot of support from young and first-time voters and France, the Pen parties, you know, and Italy also, you know, the Maloney party.
18:23Lewis Goodall:Reform and Farage here do well.
18:24Salman Rushdie:among young people. I mean, I was very sad. Last time I was in London, a few, a couple of months ago, there was this huge demonstration of what I was told was like 150 ,000 people protesting against immigration. And I thought if that's happening in London, that's very sad.
18:40Jon Sopel:Yeah, and that is the rise of the far right. Why do you think young people? I mean, the conventional view is that young people kind of grow up with left-wing ideals and then they kind of drift further to the right into middle ages, you know, they've got more money, etc.
18:56Salman Rushdie:Well, I mean, I think there is some of that still, which we see in the Gaza protests, for example. But I do think there's a kind of disillusion with the institutions of democracy that people feel that hasn't delivered, you know. And so they look elsewhere towards strongman politics.
19:15Lewis Goodall:And when you look at the sort of defenders of democracy, as we've seen, as we have it at the moment, the status quo, you might say, people like Keir Starmer, equivalents in America. Do you think that they're up to defending it?
19:26Salman Rushdie:You know, I really do feel a little out of the loop here in the UK. I'm not here that much, and I don't have my finger on the pulse quite in the way that I used to. But I do think it's true that the Labour Party, having won this colossal landslide so recently, has managed to squander that capital with immense speed. And that's a little shocking, more than a little shocking. is that because governance has become so much more difficult in an age of social media
19:57Jon Sopel:in kind of you know sort of almost rabid opinion whether in one side of the argument or on another side of the argument that just to say look this is complicated it might take time is not what people want to hear anymore they want instant solutions to problems and they want people who are pugilists and populists who can make their case.
20:18Salman Rushdie:Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of truth in that. And I also think there's a reluctance here to point to the most obvious cause for Britain's difficulties, which is Brexit. The fact that that enormous shift in the economic structure of this country and its consequences explains not everything, but it explains really a lot of the trouble the country's in. And yet nobody of any political party is willing to say that.
20:44Lewis Goodall:What do you make of Britain now, British political life now?
20:48Salman Rushdie:The country is the country. People are the people. You know, I'm very fond of it. But I think it's in a mess. But then I think everywhere's in a mess.
20:56Jon Sopel:Well, let me go back to the quote I gave you earlier about, you know, that the Americans seem to have lost their sense of identity. Whereas when you're in France, you know what the French think. Has Britain lost some of its sense of identity, do you think?
21:09Salman Rushdie:Maybe. But I do think the divide in society is here as well. And when societies get this deeply divided, then the idea of what it is to be a citizen, what it is to be a member of that society becomes questionable and uncertain and shaken. And I think there is some of that going on here.
21:28Lewis Goodall:I wonder what you make of the rise of, and it's something America has had more of than we have, but you see it here as well, the rise increasingly of a racialized politics. And in particular, you know, driven by X and so on social media, terms are being re-legitimised, racial terms, theories or ideas like re-immigration or the Great Replacement Theory. These are things now being discussed openly in a way that they would never have been. I wonder what you make of...
21:55Salman Rushdie:Well, I'm kind of horrified by it. I mean, I'm an immigrant. I'm a double immigrant. I immigrated to this country from India a long time ago. And then from here to the United States 26 years ago. So I'm biased on the subject. It seems to me that immigrants have brought an enormous amount of positive things to the societies they come to. The argument that radical right posits is that mass immigration dilutes the character of a nation,
22:29Lewis Goodall:the identity of a nation, exactly in the way that you were describing about losing identity.
22:32Salman Rushdie:Yeah, but that's a racist argument. And in the modern world, all societies in the world are plural and multiple. They're not monoculture. The idea of a monoculture is out of the window in the age of movement. So many people move across the world for so many reasons. every great city in the world, including London, is evidence of that kind of multifariousness. A lot of the richness of these cities comes from that diversity.
23:06Lewis Goodall:Very few people in politics seem to want to defend that idea.
23:08Salman Rushdie:Yeah, well, that's the problem. But I've spent my life trying to defend it, and I'm not stopping now.
23:14Lewis Goodall:I know that you experienced some racism when you first came to the UK. Yeah, it's a long time ago. A long time ago as a schoolboy in rugby. I don't know if you've seen this week that Nigel Farage has been caught up in some trouble around accusations of racism when he was a schoolboy. And he said that the people involved can't possibly really remember any potential racism that he allegedly dished out.
23:34Salman Rushdie:Oh, well, he's wrong about memory. That's just a mistake about memory. People to whom bad things happen often remember for a lifetime exactly what happened to them. Things that happened to me, which I now kind of tend to discount, happened when I was 13 or 14 years old, but I remember them very vividly. So memory is not as easily lost as Mr Farage seems to think. So you remember the racism you received as a school board? Yes, I do. I remember it as if it happened yesterday.
24:08Jon Sopel:It's the case that if you are a minority and the victim of that sort of abuse, I mean, you know, I'm Jewish and kind of the odd bits of anti-Semitism that I have faced in my life are things that you never forget.
24:25Salman Rushdie:You never forget, exactly. I mean, I used to make a joke about English boarding schools that there were three mistakes you could make. One was to be clever, another was to be foreign, and the third was to be bad at games. And you could get away with two of those, but you couldn't get away with all three. And I'm afraid I had three strikes. and that was I've always felt that was the reason for the problem if I'd been a brilliant cricketer I might have been forgiven for being foreign you wrote home and told your family how brilliant you were I know I lied I was terrible at cricket it's interesting though isn't it that those debates are
25:05Jon Sopel:coming back and it does and what Lewis was saying about the fact that epithets used against individuals which you kind of seem to disappear are kind of coming back and it's now sort of okay vulgarity or offensiveness.
25:24Salman Rushdie:I think that's really true and it's very worrying. There are things happening now, battles which have to be fought again, which I thought had been won a long time ago. and some of that kind of language, that's one of the issues and religious extremism is another one and there's a whole range of things when I was young, let's say when I was at university here at Cambridge, those things were unthinkable that they would re-emerge as central issues in society I mean what we were thinking about we were thinking about the Vietnam War of course but we were thinking about civil rights and feminism and things like that.
26:11Salman Rushdie:We weren't thinking about these things which have now surged back into the centre of the debate. And I think that's a real tragedy.
26:19Lewis Goodall:I just wonder if we could just talk about books a little bit more generally for a moment. Obviously, you've lived your life as a man of letters, really. You've been one of our foremost writers. And in the literary world, is literary culture, is there a danger that it's dying out? In the sense that we can see from all of the surveys in particular that not only is reading for pleasure on the decline across the generational cohorts, but particularly for the young, in some cases is on the verge of dying out completely. What would it mean, do you think, if a society stopped reading for pleasure?
26:48Salman Rushdie:Well, I mean, it would impoverish the mental lives of the people who stopped reading because reading is one of the most nourishing things for one's mental life. And I've always been reluctant to believe in the death of the book, because it feels to me sometimes that the death of the book has been prophesied almost ever since the birth of the book. So many things were supposed to destroy reading, radio, television, films, so many things. And yet the book persists. So I suspect, you know, the reading was never mass culture. Even a best-selling book, let's accept Harry Potter, what I say doesn't apply to Harry Potter.
27:37Salman Rushdie:But with the exception of that, the readership for even a successful book doesn't compare to the viewership for a huge television success. So it's more of a niche market than it always has been. But it's a very loyal niche market. People go on buying books. I mean, one of the things that happens during the book launch is that you talk to a lot of booksellers, you know, and around America and around England. And I don't entirely see that pessimism amongst the book trade.
28:09Lewis Goodall:It is difficult, isn't it, when you've got generations which are growing up and competing for their attention the entire time. Yeah. It's these sins that we carry around in our pockets that are constantly gasping for our attention, buzzing and vibrating and are addictive. and then on top of that of course you've got the rise of AI which might not just act as reading for us, it thinks for us potentially.
28:30Salman Rushdie:Yeah, I think all of this is very problematic and I don't have a solution to it except to go on doing what I do and to hope that there's still going to be a readership for me. Does it worry you? Yeah, but on the other hand, you know, I had a friend who knows much more about AI than me, who asked I think it was ChatGPT I don't remember which one it was, but he asked it to write 300 words of me in your style in my style as if it was me and it produced this text which was absolutely awful and that nobody who'd ever read a page of my work would ever have mistaken this for something that I would have written that was comforting I thought
29:10Jon Sopel:even on the most ersatz level did it not pass? No it was just garbage
29:17Salman Rushdie:and I was comforted by that and I do think that one of the things about artificial intelligence is that it's not original. The way it works is that you feed everything into it and it produces versions of that. But you don't get an original idea. It's not... I mean, somebody in America, I forgot who, recently described it as the world's largest plagiarism machine. And that's what it feels like to me. It feels like what it lacks is originality and what people want from art is originality.
29:46Lewis Goodall:What do you make, Sasamad, now, of the Anglo-Indian relationship? because that's evolved enormously in recent years even. And occasionally you get politicians like Keir Starmer or David Cameron or they go to India and they say this is going to be a new golden age and so on and this is a sort of answer to our relative isolation in Europe now, our historic links and so on. Is that anything? Does that have any credibility in India?
30:10Jon Sopel:Can I append to that what's happened to the US-Indian relationship, which again is absolutely fascinating under Trump, which was so great in the first term and so terrible now?
30:17Salman Rushdie:Yeah, I mean, I just think that India is also going through a kind of transformational moment because of the effect of the now very well entrenched Modi administration. The attempt to change the country from its secularist origins to being a Hindu majoritarian culture is, I mean, very radically transformational and enormously of concern to minorities in India. I mean, the Muslim minority being the largest one, I mean, a minority of 200 million people is a pretty big minority. So that majoritarian approach to culture and politics in India is changing the country in ways that many people are very alarmed about.
31:02Salman Rushdie:I mean, I have a lot of friends amongst Indian journalists still, and all of them are really scared about what's happening in the country. so I think India is obsessed with that right now and things like what its relationship to the UK is I mean I think is of much less significance
31:19Lewis Goodall:When did you say they're scared because some listeners and viewers won't have followed what's been going on what are they scared about?
31:24Salman Rushdie:Well there are attacks on journalists there's really I mean we were talking about attacks in America on press freedom and so on but that's very much happening in India and people are very worried I mean, even someone like the Booker Prize winner, Anandati Roy, is having legal cases brought against her for having said things which are perfectly reasonable things to say.
31:46Lewis Goodall:Do you think it will? There's always a speculation about India about one day becoming a superpower. Do you think it ever can or will be a superpower?
31:53Salman Rushdie:I mean, I think it's very, it obviously is a huge economy, but I think the problem is the rich are very, very rich now, and the poor are at least as poor as they ever were. And I think that enormous inequity in the country is problematic and I think in a way prevents it from prevents the country from becoming the powerhouse that it could be.
32:16Lewis Goodall:I know that obviously you've written this book, The Eleventh Hour, and it was the first time, I think, since you published your memoir, Knife, if you felt, I think, that you couldn't write fiction again until you had published that. Yeah. Will you write more? More fiction?
32:30Salman Rushdie:I'm hoping to. Yes.
32:31Lewis Goodall:It's not The Eleventh Hour for you then?
32:32Salman Rushdie:No, no, not at all. I mean, I think maybe there's more hours than 12. Yeah.
32:37Jon Sopel:You're doing the 24-hour club. I always think when I watch kind of, you know, movie stars and they're on a chat show talking about their latest movie, which they filmed two years ago and probably had to be reminded of the part they played and the story of the movie by the sort of people behind the junket. I always think, well, Sam Rushdie, I bet you've already got three novels on the go or something like that already at the moment. Are there ideas that are fermenting or is there already in the act of...
33:00Salman Rushdie:No, I've got one. I've got one that started off I don't quite know where it's going yet or exactly how to do it
33:06Lewis Goodall:this is about two brave podcast hosts who take on
33:11Salman Rushdie:it's about sitting in a room a darkened room with two people
33:16Jon Sopel:sounds electric it's going to be a bestseller Sassam and Rushdie thank you so so much thank you
33:32Jon Sopel:the news agents and before we go this is a friday episode and this would be the moment where lewis goodall would normally take the piss out of emily matlis and me for having some hugely decadent weekend while thanking everyone else really great it's usually true it's normally true usually are kayaking in off the galithian coast but today actually in our goodbyes we want to say goodbye to one person in particular georgia foxwell who has been on the podcast since the beginning she's
34:00Lewis Goodall:been a fantastic social media producer she's been a huge part of the success of the show she's often made us look and sound better than we are and so speak for yourself well indeed so uh modest as ever so we are very very grateful to her she is a star georgia best of luck for the future all good
34:17Jon Sopel:things for the future georgia thanks for everything you've done for us we will be back on monday we'll see you then bye bye bye this has been a global player original production
From the publisher
Salman Rushdie has spent half of his life under the threat of death, but it is only in his latest novel - The Eleventh Hour - that he has devoted a whole book to the themes of mortality. It is his first return to fiction since an attempt on his life on 2022.
This Friday, Rushdie joins Lewis and Jon in the studio to discuss his new book, political violence, and the "cowardice" of the BBC.
The News Agents is brought to you by HSBC UK - https://www.hsbc.co.uk/