Salman Rushdie has lived in the shadow of a death threat since 1989, after his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), led Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa against the writer for offending Islam, the Prophet and the Koran. The extraterritorial edict multiplied the danger to the writer, and though the motive is still unknown, last Friday, Rushdie, 75, was stabbed multiple times at a literary function in New York. He is off the ventilator, but, according to his son, remains in critical condition. Through the years, others have faced violence over the novel too. People have died in riots, blasts, firing to protest against the book; his Japanese, Norwegian and Italian translators were targeted; a bomb killed the person who was trying to set it off. Rushdie went into hiding for nine years, where he burnished his weapon of choice — words. He has talked the language of truth, upheld freedoms of art and the intellect and pushed for ideals of democracy such as the right to dissent in his 14 novels, and in several incisive essays. In fact, under cover, assuming the nom de guerre Joseph Anton (inspired by the wanderer in Conrad, and the melancholy of Chekov; also the title of his 2012 memoir), he penned Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a book he had promised to write for his nine-year-old son.
For his Booker Prize-winning Midnight’s Children (1981), which reimagined India’s independence, he had dispensed with safety nets, just like his literary inspirations, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gunter Grass and Nadine Gordimer. Rushdie found a new language to write about “hot and overcrowded and vulgar and loud” India, shining a light for future writers such as Arundhati Roy. The assault on Rushdie is also an attack against voices who speak out against extremism. Far too many writers, from M.M. Kalburgi, Gauri Lankesh to Anna Politkovskaya, have faced violence, some paying with their lives, for agitating people in a “culture of easy offendedness”. On the frontline, Rushdie has been acutely alive to the expanding threat. “This new idea,” he writes in an essay titled ‘Courage’ (Languages of Truth), “that writers, scholars and artists who stand against orthodoxy or bigotry are to blame for upsetting people is spreading fast, even to countries like India that once prided themselves on their freedoms.” Speak up, he says, every little bit counts. Rushdie’s next novel, Victory City, a translation of an epic, and a book about the “power and the hubris of those in power”, is out next February. But before the long recovery, a spot of cheer from the hospital: his son says Rushdie is being his usual feisty and defiant self, and that his sense of humour is intact.
