Ania Loomba: Rushdie: An eloquent spokesman

As Penn prepares to welcome Salman Rushdie to campus, I find myself thinking hard about what his work means for me today. Because of the fatwa against him, Rushdie became an international symbol of artistic freedom threatened by religious (especially Islamic) fundamentalism. In the Western academy, Rushdie is treated as the most eminent symbol of "post-colonial writing," a master of magic-realism and an eloquent spokesman for those who live in multiple homelands. However, such celebrations sometimes oversimplify both his writing and the contexts that have shaped it. In India, where I lived and taught until a few years ago, many of us recognized Rushdie's English, with its easy borrowings from Indian languages, as our everyday tongue. We saw our world in his descriptions of the heartache and joys of the subcontinent. But we could also see the connections between Rushdie and other writers who had made English their own -- like G. V. Desani, whose All About H. Hatter has been all but lost in contemporary celebrations of post-colonial writing. Writers working in languages other than English are even more neglected. This not only diminishes the scope of anything we would like to think of as post-colonial, but sets up oppositions between writers in English and those working in other languages. Rushdie himself contributed to the controversy when he remarked that in recent years Indian writing in English constitutes a more important body of work than all that has been produced in the 18 other recognized languages of India (a remark which he says he stands by despite the outcry that it elicited from writers and critics in India). But in a polyglot nation like India, writers in different languages share several concerns, such as the failure of the nation-state or the traumatic partition of the Indian subcontinent. Rushdie's criticism of the nation-state is often interpreted as his celebration of some global state of in-between-ness, or hybridity, of which he himself is seen as a living embodiment. But the Rushdie I read conveys the failure of the nations of South Asia not by celebrating a rootless subjectivity, but by taking us to a powerful anti-colonial dream of freedom that dwindled into narrow-mindedness. When the Indian government was thinking of banning his novel The Moor's Last Sigh, I was among the many writers and teachers who staged a public protest in New Delhi by reading from the book. Here's the passage I chose, which features a character called Camoens da Gama, an Indian of Portuguese descent involved in the anti-British freedom struggle: "At night he sat with Belle and her cough, wiping her eyes and lips, putting cold compresses on her brow, and he would whisper to her about the dawning of a new world, Belle, a free country, Belle, above religion because secular, above class because socialist, above caste because enlightened, above hatred because loving, above language because many-tongued, about colour because multicoloured, above poverty because victorious over it, above ignorance because literate, above stupidity because brilliant, freedom, Belle, the freedom express, soon we will stand upon that platform and cheer the coming of the train, and while he told her his dreams she would fall asleep and be visited by spectres of desolation and war." Today, in a world where specters of war and intolerance haunt us more than ever, such dreams are worth evoking and fighting for. Today, when India's Muslim population is increasingly targeted by Hindu fundamentalists, I turn to the passages in Midnight's Children that deal with the shooting of Mahatma Gandhi. The Muslim Sinai family breathe a sigh of relief as it is discovered that Gandhi's murderer was a Hindu fanatic, for their own lives would have been in danger had the killer turned out to be a Muslim. Reading this scene, I also remember certain post-Sept. 11 scenarios here in the U.S. I don't always like Rushdie's writings or agree with his public statements; but the novels I do admire are concerned not only with religious bigotry, but with a closing down of debate and discussion that are also possible in societies that like to think of themselves as secular. Ania Loomba is a professor in the English Department.

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