The Return of a Book

THE SATANIC VERSES is back on the shelves of Indian bookstores. Or should I say back on at least one bookshelf of one bookseller in Delhi’s upscale Khan Market? Priced at close to `2,000, the cost of reading a forbidden book is rather steep. Especially given that it has been around for over 35 years. Those who really wanted to read it, I am sure, must have done so already.

But its arrival in India is a milestone—after all, we were the first nation to debar the book. That too on the recommendation of no less a worthy than Khushwant Singh himself. His popular column used to be called ‘With Malice Towards One and All’. But this book was too malicious—or should I say salacious—even for him. He believed it would be nothing less than incendiary.

He advised Viking not to publish it in India. It would trigger riots, he feared. He was proven right. Actually, the book was not quite proscribed. It was simply not available for sale or distribution. There was no Indian edition. And the government of the day, led by Rajiv Gandhi, prohibited its import. There are many ways of banning a book—even without actually doing so. This was one. Our colonial masters had employed it with troublesome books such as Mahatma Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj (1909).

When a book isn’t really banned in the first place, unbanning it would also prove much simpler than expected.

In November, the Delhi High Court observed that the notification preventing its import was presumed not to exist because the government counsel failed to produce it. The petitioner in question, Sandipan Khan, in his 2019 plea, had submitted that he was unable to import the book on account of a Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs notification dated October 5, 1988, barring its import. On November 5, a bench consisting of Justices Rekha Palli and Saurabh Banerjee ruled the petition to be infructuous.

Why? Because such a notification was simply not found. “What emerges,” the court observed, “is that none of the respondents could produce the said notification dated October 5, 1988, with which the petitioner is purportedly aggrieved. In fact, the purported author of the said notification has also shown his helplessness in producing a copy of the notification during the pendency of the writ petition since its filing way back in 2019.”

Even the person who supposedly issued the notification was unable to produce it in court! The court continued, “In light of the aforesaid circumstances, we have no other option except to presume that no such notification exists, and therefore, we cannot examine its validity and dispose of the writ petition as infructuous.”

Extraordinary. Or should we say, it happens only in India? Before we conclude that this is a victory of free speech over censorship or secularism over religious bigotry, we might need to pause. The stark reality is that the book was banned either on the basis of a fictitious notification or one that mysteriously disappeared with the change of government.

Who could have imagined such a reversal in a country known to appease angry religious minorities? We might as well ask, with Salman Rushdie himself, “How does newness enter the world?” In Imaginary Homelands, in an essay tellingly called ‘In Good Faith’, Rushdie asks precisely this question. He has been reflecting on his own (mis)adventure in writing The Satanic Verses:

At the centre of the storm stands a novel, a work of fiction, one that aspires to the condition of literature…The Satanic Verses has been described, and treated, as a work of bad history, as an anti-religious pamphlet, as the product of an international capitalist-Jewish conspiracy, as an act of murder (‘he has/ murdered our hearts’), as the product of a person comparable to Hitler and Attila the Hun. It felt impossible, amid such a hubbub, to insist on the fictionality of fiction.

Rushdie defends his novel on the grounds of its fictionality, even though he acknowledges that writing novels is serious business:

Let me be clear: I am not trying to say that The Satanic Verses is ‘only a novel’ and thus need not be taken seriously, even disputed with the utmost passion. I do not believe that novels are trivial matters. The ones I care most about are those which attempt radical reformulations of language, form and ideas, those that attempt to do what the word novel seems to insist upon: to see the world anew. (Ibid)

But he argues that his novel’s central theme is not in the so-called blasphemous passages against Islam or its prophet as his outraged critics allege. He contends that they have misunderstood him and his intent.

The central theme of The Satanic Verses, according to Rushdie, is something altogether different. It is actually about migration, cultural mixing, and globalisation:

If The Satanic Verses is anything, it is a migrant’s-eye view of the world. It is written from the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis (slow or rapid, painful or pleasurable) that is the migrant condition, and from which, I believe, can be derived a metaphor for all humanity. The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure.

Indeed, believing other-wise, he suddenly reveals how newness enters the world, almost surreptitiously, stealing upon us, taking us by surprise:

Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love-song to our mongrel selves.

Rushdie had fondly hoped that his Satanic Verses would be read as “a work of radical dissent and questioning and reimagining” (ibid). He was profoundly mistaken. Published by Penguin Viking in the autumn of 1988, the novel raised a storm as soon as it was published.

Rushdie was, of course, wrong. On Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa sentencing to death all those associated with it: “The author of The Satanic Verses, a text written, edited, and published against Islam, the Prophet of Islam, and the Qur’an, along with all the editors and publishers aware of its contents, are condemned to death.” The fatwa still stands, as does the bounty, now purported $3 million, for Rushdie’s executioner. A zealot named Hadi Matar repeatedly stabbed Rushdie on August 12, 2022. The outrage was committed at a public lecture at the Chautauqua Institution, New York. Rushdie lost an eye in the attack.

The number of people who died trying to publish, translate, defend, or even read this book may well run into hundreds. In India itself, at least 45 people were reportedly killed in riots against The Satanic Verses, of which 12 perished in Mumbai, Rushdie’s birth city.

Newness, indeed, enters the world in strange and unpredictable ways. Sometimes in the form of a lapsed oldness. The Indian state, we have seen in the past with Taslima Nasreen, is unable to take a stance on constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. Instead, we know it yields to street power. Protests, or worse, riots influence it more than principles.

Muslim groups have already started remonstrating against the book’s sale in India. We can only hope that such agitations do not flare up into riots and killings. If that does happen, we shouldn’t be surprised if the present government, too, is moved to renew the ban on the book, as a sop to minority sentiments.

But the powers-that-be would do well to consider that whatever political mileage they might gain in banning The Satanic Verses again will be countered, even reversed, by the radical Hindu right who will attack and pillory them for appeasing Islamists.

ban in IndiabooksfatwaIslamic forcesSalman RushdieThe Satanic Verses