A little more than a decade ago, speaking at a conclave in India, Salman Rushdie reminded his audience of how the ancient Indian text Natya Shastra had specific mention of the gods defending the idea of freedom of expression and, more specifically, in the realm of arts. In particular, Rushdie recalled that the text talked about the sanctity of the idea of the stage as a sphere of freedom.
The backdrop for the comment made in 2012 wasn’t particularly reassuring. Earlier that year, Muslim groups had forced him to stay away from speaking at the Jaipur Literature Festival in person and via video. It was a decision that writer William Dalrymple, a co-director of the festival, had called a choice between causing a riot and upholding a principle. Two months later, Pakistani politician and ex-cricketer Imran Khan, who later became prime minister, pulled out of the conclave, refusing to share space with Rushdie.
In the subcontinent, these setbacks to the idea of the stage, for Rushdie in particular, were preceded by India and Pakistan promptly banning his book The Satanic Verses in 1988. The book had provoked the Iranian regime to issue a fatwa against him. In some ways, it was the hostility from the Indian subcontinent – the land of his birth – and the people he had written about in the past that Rushdie later described as being “harder to bear”.
But the long-feared attempt on his life came much later and on a stage far away. On August 12, 2022, in the “cozy, cloistered” ambience of the Chautauqua Institution in the United States, a 24-year-old man attacked Rushdie with a knife. Ironically, Rushdie was on the stage to speak on the theme of keeping writers safe from harm.
The attack could have been fatal; it barely missed being deadly. Nonetheless, it left Rushdie with multiple injuries and the loss of an eye. His new book Knife offers an immersive register of how he found a way through the agony of physical damage and the scars of a shocked physique to rediscover the spirited presence of his family and his creative core as a writer.
In piecing together a poignant, even edifying, account of the attack and the phases of coming to terms with it, Rushdie brings his prowess as a storyteller to a real encounter. It combines the brutal caprice of violence with the absurd aftermath he had to tame. He peoples the book with key figures who anchored his way to recovery – ranging from his fifth wife Eliza and his two sons Zafar and Milan to the medical team led by doctors and later rehabilitation centre staff. The book thematically traces his journey from a snap with normalcy to spells of self-doubt to the determined embrace of life’s varied remnants.
Despite its moments of sparkle, the account takes too many detours into literary referencing. There are many points where this impedes the flow of retelling. Moreover, the frequent resorting to an array of work from world literature to make a point robs the reader of the chance to get the author’s observations after the attack. Even if Knife makes informed literary connections and is educative in a way, it makes scholarly demands on a reader who may only be looking for the originality of a lived experience.
At the same time, some references to fictional characters and fantasies carry a phantasmagoric imprint in line with Rushdie’s fictional device. That, however, doesn’t come in the way of his striking exploration of some of the ideas, like that of the ‘knife’ or ‘one eye’ in literary traditions.
But this may be a quibble compared to some of the ways in which Rushdie’s gaze in the book is blinkered. In the process, the account loses a more probing and observant view that the writer Rushdie could have offered if the activist Rushdie hadn’t taken charge.
First, for all the horror that the fanatical young man (“the A.”) inflicted with the knife, an important chapter featuring him suffers from conceit of articulation. In an earlier chapter, the author says he dropped his plan to meet his attacker and get a first-hand explanation for what had spurred him into attempting a murderous assault. To be sure, there can be no moral validation for the attack. But the meeting, if enacted and dutifully recorded, could have been a literary moment, a way of bringing forward the working of a frenzied mind in the words of the fanatic himself.
It’s understandable if the idea was dropped out of practical concerns. But Rushdie offers muddled reasoning for not permitting the attacker’s voice. He argues that the attacker’s “intelligence didn’t appear to be high” and that “his powers of self-expression lacked a certain sophistication”. So the author concludes that he wouldn’t get “interesting responses” and there was “no need to hear his cliches”.
Instead, Rushdie comes off as a bit condescending when he says “the A.” will get his chapter but in Rushdie’s own voice as he will “get in his head” by imagining him.
That’s one way to say someone can’t interestingly say what he thinks, so an author will instead say what he thinks. It’s essentially the conceit of articulation. Moreover, one man’s insight can be another man’s cliches – worn-out expressions cut both ways.
Second, there are other instances where Rushdie lets the polemic of activist prose lose the chance of a more developed, open-ended take on political and social currents in different parts of the world. This is evident in his simplistic take on the Ukraine war, laced with the lexicon of the dominant western propaganda which has an oversimplified binary of heroic Zelensky pitted against the Putin-led evil Russian state. This hasn’t left much scope for a more rounded understanding of the war in east Europe, other than what’s seen through the lens of the west’s narrative.
Similarly, his assessment of the current political dynamics in India is bereft of a longer historical arc and understanding of how the present ideas and forces emerged. Much of this could also be traced to how Rushdie prejudged the scene, as he was one of the co-signatories to a joint letter to The Guardian in 2014 which had opposed the prospect of a BJP-led regime taking over the reins of power in India. With that prism, the chances of an objective India watcher and writer dim in favour of an activist.
Keeping these aspects aside, Rushdie puts the eponymous knife to allegorical use to depict the dangers of intolerance piercing the free play of ideas. More significantly, the book has its moments in telling an edifying lived tale of resistance against such forces. The account of resolutely, and largely luckily, surviving a murderous attack will strike a chord with the cause of free speech, even if Rushdie’s status as a global literary celebrity might not exactly mirror the scale of the everyday dangers.
It is, however, the spells of activist prose and polemical platitudes that limit the register of the book. And sometimes it’s the conceit of articulation that lets it miss the larger frame of an examined view.
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