Rushdie Vows To Bore India Into Submission
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April 17, 2000
Rushdie Creates Sensation on His Return to India
By CELIA W. DUGGER
NEW DELHI, April 16 -- The long, hurtful exile of Salman Rushdie has ended.
Barred from India for more than a decade after it banned his novel "The
Satanic Verses," a playful, bantering Mr. Rushdie is back with a long-sought
visa in hand.
He came, he said, to repair his broken relationship with the native land that
has inspired much of his fiction.
For a full week, Mr. Rushdie and his son, Zafar, 20, who has not been in
India since he was 4, roamed freely around many of the tourist sites of north
India -- the Taj Mahal in Agra, the Red Fort in Delhi, the City Palace in
Jaipur -- with nary a whisper about their presence in the country's
cacophonous riot of newspapers.
"India rushes in on you from every direction," Mr. Rushdie said in an
interview on Saturday. "I'm suffering from a kind of overload. I just wanted
to put myself back in the place and bring my son, Zafar. He was very keen to
come. And that became the meaning of the trip for me, this father and son
moment."
Their anonymous trek finally dissolved in a blaze of popping flash bulbs on
Friday evening when Mr. Rushdie and his son made a grand entrance at the
Commonwealth Writers Prize ceremony here with all of New Delhi's literati
looking on.
Mr. Rushdie was promptly swarmed by journalists and well-wishers. His latest
novel, "The Ground Beneath Her Feet," lost the best book prize to "Disgrace"
by the South African writer J. M. Coetzee, but Mr. Rushdie was still the star
of the show.
"Just because you didn't find me, you shouldn't assume that I'm in hiding,"
Mr. Rushdie gleefully told reporters who crushed around him.
As the news of Mr. Rushdie's arrival spread, Muslim organizations that said
they had been offended by "The Satanic Verses" organized protests. One group
burned him in effigy. But earlier threats of violence did not materialize,
and the demonstrations were relatively small.
Mr. Rushdie thanked his critics for the civilized nature of their protests.
"If they don't like what I write, I'm sorry," he said. He also spoke of India
in tones of reconciliation. The Congress Party government that banned his
book is history, he said. And while he would love to see the ban lifted, he
said he had done no lobbying on the current visit.
"I have to leave behind the past to be able to go on," he said.
Mr. Rushdie's security seemed almost as relaxed as he was. A crowd of
reporters showed up Saturday at the Taj Palace Hotel in hopes of talking to
him. None were searched before they reached the first floor, where he was
holding court. He emerged for a few minutes to talk to all assembled, then
entertained some one-on-one interviews.
As a clutch of people pressed in on him, Mr. Rushdie, wearing a long, loose
shirt known as a kurta and pajama-style pants, said wryly that he would feel
less regretful about the banned novel "if people would just read my 11 other
books."
Mr. Rushdie, with his acute eye for life in India, has been cut off from the
country where he was born since "The Satanic Verses" was published in 1988,
one of the many blows he sustained after the book came out. The most
disastrous was the fatwa, or religious edict, issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeni in 1989. The Iranian leader, now dead, charged Mr. Rushdie with
blasphemy against Islam and called for his death.
A little more than a year ago, India finally granted Mr. Rushdie, who now
lives in London, a visa to enter the country, with approval coming from the
highest levels of the Hindu-nationalist-led government in New Delhi.
This was his first visit since he got the visa, and it has had a kind of Rip
Van Winkle quality. The dozen years he has been gone have seen India undergo
major changes. The Congress Party, which ruled India through the Nehru-Gandhi
family dynasty, has fallen low, and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata
Party has risen. The government-dominated economy has had almost a decade of
greater openness to foreign investment and market forces.
"It's very clear there's a lot more money sloshing around," Mr. Rushdie said.
"In the newspapers there's a lot of coverage of the high life of the rich
middle class. Almost daily there are color supplements detailing the antics
of the gilded age."
The Grand Trunk Road seemed to him wider and smoother, but it carried him
past the rich roadside life more quickly than he would have liked. The
omnipresence of Coca-Cola ads made him hopeful, he said, that Thumbs Up -- a
local cola drink he despises -- has been eclipsed. (It is still alive and
well.)
In politics, a subject Indians love to chew on, he bemoaned what he saw as
the Congress Party's tilt rightward under Sonia Gandhi, the dynasty's latest
steward. "One can't help feeling the old gang -- the dynastic group and its
supporters -- is preventing the emergence of new kinds of leaders in the
Congress Party," he said.
And Mr. Rushdie, who comes from a Muslim family, said the Hindu nationalists
were more moderate under the aging Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. But
Mr. Rushdie predicts that the coalition government will fall apart once Mr.
Vajpayee ceases to lead it -- and that the Hindu nationalists will revert to
an intolerant Hindu triumphalism, which he likened to fascism.
As Mr. Rushdie introduced his son to the intense smells and sounds and street
life of India, he took him to the family's peaceful ancestral property at
Solan in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh. He said he hoped to turn the
family home, Anees Villa, into a small writer's colony if he could find
someone to administer it.
And Mr. Rushdie, who leaves India today, said he planned to return often. "I
intend to make it extremely boring," he said. "Instead of everyone flocking
to see Rushdie, it's going to be, 'Oh, there he is again.' Boring people is
the best way to regain normal life. I intend to bore India into submission."
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