Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers (14 page)

A lovely story that illustrates the cultural synthesis of Hinduism and Islam in India was recounted by two American scholars, Lloyd and Susan Rudolph. It seems an Indian Muslim girl was asked to participate in a small community drama about the life of Lord Krishna, the Hindu god adored by shepherdesses, who dance for his pleasure (and who exemplify through their passion the quest of the devout soul for the Lord). Her Muslim father forbade her to dance as a shepherdess with the other schoolgirls. In that case, said the drama's director, we will cast you as Krishna. All you have to do is stand there in the usual Krishna pose, a flute at your mouth. Her father consented; and so the Muslim girl played Krishna.

This is India's “secularism.” Indeed, Hindus pride themselves on belonging to a religion of astonishing breadth and range of belief; a religion that acknowledges all ways of worshiping God as equally valid — indeed, the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. This eclectic and nondoctrinaire Hinduism — a
faith without apostasy, where there are no heretics to cast out because there has never been any such thing as a Hindu heresy — is not the Hinduism professed by those who destroyed a mosque, nor the Hindutva spewed in hate-filled speeches by communal politicians. How can such a religion lend itself to “fundamentalism”? Hindu fundamentalism is a contradiction in terms, since Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals. India has survived the Aryans, the Mughals, the British; it has taken from each — language, art, food, learning — and grown with all of them. To be an Indian is to be part of an elusive dream all Indians share, a dream that fills our minds with sounds, words, flavors, from many sources that we cannot easily identify.

This is why the development of what has been called “Hindu fundamentalism” and the resultant change in the public discourse about Indianness is so dangerous. The suggestion that only a Hindu, and only a certain kind of Hindu, can be an authentic Indian is an affront to the very premise of Indian nationalism. The reduction of non-Hindus to second-class status in their homeland is unthinkable. It would be a second Partition: and a partition in the Indian soul would be as bad as a partition in the Indian soil. The only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts.

Of course it is true that, while Hinduism as a faith might privilege tolerance, this does not necessarily mean that all Hindus behave tolerantly. Ironically, Hindu chauvinism has emerged from the competition for resources in a contentious democracy. Politicians of all faiths across India seek to mobilize voters by appealing to narrow identities; by
seeking votes in the name of religion, caste, and region, they have urged voters to define themselves on these lines. As religion, caste, and region have come to dominate public discourse, to some it has become more important to be a Muslim, a Bodo, or a Yadav than to be an Indian. But this is not merely dangerous; it is an assault on the essential underpinnings of Indianness.

Yet India's democracy helps to acknowledge and accommodate the various identities of its multifaceted population. No one identity can ever triumph in India: both the country's chronic pluralism and the logic of the electoral marketplace make this impossible. In leading a coalition government, the Hindu-inclined Bharatiya Janata Party has learned that any party ruling India has to reach out to other groups, other interests, other minorities. After all, there are too many diversities in our land for any one version of reality to be imposed on all of us.

So the Indian identity celebrates diversity: if America is a melting pot, then to me India is a
thali,
a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast. Indians are used to multiple identities and multiple loyalties, all coming together in allegiance to a larger idea of India, an India that safeguards the common space available to each identity. That is the tradition to which Rushdie's “Overartist” belonged.

At a time when the Huntington thesis of a “clash of civilizations” has gained currency, it is intriguing to contemplate
a civilization predicated upon such diversity, one which provides the framework to absorb these clashes within itself. For Indians across the world, wary of the endless multiplication of sovereignties, hesitant before the clamor for division and self-assertion echoing in a hundred NRI forums, this may be something to think about. In today's globalized world, Indians in Michigan cannot escape identification with what is happening to Indians in Mumbai. So the idea of India is an idea familiar to Americans but few others — of a land where it doesn't matter what the color of your skin is, the kind of food you eat, the sounds you make when you speak, the God you choose to worship (or not), so long as you want to play by the same rules as everybody else, and dream the same dreams. If the overwhelming majority of a people share the political will for unity, if they wear the dust of a shared history on their foreheads and the mud of an uncertain future on their feet, and if they realize they are better off in Kozhikode or Kanpur dreaming the same dreams as those in Kohlapur or Kohima, a nation exists, celebrating diversity and freedom — and that is the India to which Rushdie's “Overartist” would belong.

To return, then, to Sonia Gandhi. Throughout its history the Congress Party has articulated and defended the idea that Indian nationalism is inclusive, tolerant, and pluralist, and that there are no acid tests of birth, religion, ethnicity, or even territory that disqualify one who wants to claim Indianness. As Ashutosh Varshney has pointed out, Sonia Gandhi “is an Indian — by her citizenship, by her act of living in India, and by the way she has adopted a new home. [A]n Indian is one who accepts the ethos of India.”
Some, like the Samata Party spokeswoman, have claimed that Sonia “will never be able to fully understand the intricacies of our culture” because “cultural impulses are gained in the early stages of life.” This argument is preposterous, since some of the greatest experts on Indian culture, who have forgotten more than most Indians will ever know about Bharatiya Sanskriti — from A. L. Basham to Richard Lannoy to R. C. Zaehner — are foreigners. Mani Shankar Aiyar turns the absurd “cultural” argument on its head by pointing out that “it is a disrespect to the millennial traditions of India to question the credentials of a daughter-in-law.”

Sonia Gandhi herself has made her own case: “Though born in a foreign land, I chose India as my country,” she points out. “I am Indian and shall remain so till my last breath. India is my motherland, dearer to me than my own life.” But Sonia Gandhi is not the issue. The real issue is whether we should let politicians decide who is qualified to be an authentic Indian.

After the elections of 2004 Sonia Gandhi resolved the existential dilemma by winning election as the prime minister– designate of the ruling coalition and then renouncing the office in favor of another. The sight in May 2004 — in a country 82 percent Hindu — of a Roman Catholic leader (Sonia Gandhi) making way for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn in as prime minister by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam) caught the world's imagination and won its admiration. No strutting nationalist chauvinism could ever have accomplished for India's standing in the world what that one moment did — all the more so since it was not directed at the world. It was an affirmation of an ancient
civilizational ethos in a new political era, a moment that could have been torn from Rushdie's pages.

India has always proclaimed “unity in diversity,” the idea of one land embracing many. You can be fair-skinned, sari-wearing, and Italian-speaking, and you are not more foreign to my grandmother in Kerala than someone who is “wheatish-complexioned,” wears a
salwar-kameez,
and speaks Punjabi. Our nation absorbs both these types of people; both are equally “foreign” to some of us, equally Indian to us all. To start disqualifying Indian citizens from the privileges of Indianness is not just pernicious, it is an insult to the basic assumptions of Indian nationalism. An India that denies itself to some of us could end up being denied to all of us.

So who is an Indian? Anyone who wants to be, and is qualified by residence, allegiance, or citizenship. My India, like Salman Rushdie's, has room enough for everyone. In
The Moor's Last Sigh,
Moor (Moraes Zogoiby, the novel's narrator), celebrating his Catholic mother and Jewish father (and so referring to himself as a “cathjew nut”), has a metaphorical role as a symbol of Rushdie's India, a “unifier of opposites, a standard-bearer of pluralism” who in his mother's last paintings descends into “a semi-allegorical figure of decay.” India is, as ever, not just a nation but a literary device, the intersection of the many strands of Rushdie's intellectual heritage — an eclectic palimpsest repeatedly painted over by history and myth, by colonial traders and settlers, by the English language, and by the tragic majesty of Islam, symbolized by the placing of the Alhambra on Bombay's Malabar Hill, the author's childhood address. The
novel is suffused with nostalgia for an India much loved and, like King Boabdil's Granada, lost (at the time of its writing, it must have seemed irretrievably lost) to the exiled writer. The sultan in
The Moor's Last Sigh
weeps for the world he has given up, for the history he has betrayed, the tradition he has failed to defend; he sighs for a loss that is intensely personal and yet of far greater significance than his own person. In this novel Rushdie too, through his own moor, sighs upon his loss of the India he had known and loved and believed he might never be able to visit in safety again; but also for the greater loss of the secular, multireligious, pluriethnic India of which he has written with such passion and pride.

That India, though, still exists; it has not yet fallen to the bombs and the bigotry of the chauvinists and corrupt opportunists this novel excoriates. We need not spend much time on them; as Rushdie wrote of a Bombay building populated by the nouveau riche: “Everest Vilas is twenty-nine stories high, but mercifully these are stories I do not need to tell.” The Indian idea — that people of every imaginable color, creed, caste, cuisine, and consonant can live and strive and triumph together in one gloriously mongrel nation — is more relevant than ever, and it has no abler advocate than Salman Rushdie. He has become, as much for his convictions as for his creativity, the finest English writer of India, and the most gifted reinventor of Indianness since Nehru. Perhaps, as Rushdie himself has written, “the only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame.”

The “permeation of the real world by the fictional is a
symptom of the moral decay of our post-millennial culture,” declaims the anonymous narrator of one of the stories in Rushdie's collection
East, West.
“There can be little doubt that a large majority of us opposes the free, unrestricted migration of imaginary beings into an already damaged reality, whose resources diminish by the day.” Rushdie's tongue is of course firmly in his cheek here, but it is the free, unrestricted migration of his imagination that can help heal the tragic damage done to the reality of Indianness — an Indianness that his writing so remarkably celebrates.

L
ITERARY FESTIVALS ARE RARELY NEWSWORTHY EVENTS
; not real news, anyway. They are occasions for authors to get together, wallow in self-congratulation, and persuade themselves that they are performing a public service in the bargain. Writers come, confer, and consume, and literature serves only to provide a unifying purpose under the cover of which a good time is had by all. The emphasis is usually on conviviality, not controversy.

A rare exception occurred, however, at the Sunday Times Hay-on-Wye Festival of Literature in 1992. Britain's premier literary event is actually more pleasant than most, a cheerful occasion set in the picturesque surroundings of the Welsh countryside. Hay-on-Wye nestles among rolling hills, a town of 5,000 which boasts a ruined castle, one first-class hotel — and thirty-four bookshops. And it was here that news was made when Salman Rushdie first emerged from hiding.

I was there myself, to read from
The Great Indian Novel
and to participate in a panel discussion on Wodehouse and
the English comic novel. On the afternoon in question the program announced a talk between Martin Amis, son of Kingsley (and reigning enfant terrible of British letters), and Israeli novelist David Grossman. The pairing was doubly intriguing, since Amis had attracted a great deal of criticism in Jewish circles for his last novel,
Time's Arrow,
a sort of deconstructionist view of the Holocaust whose narrative goes backward in time, like a film run the wrong way through the projector. The near-capacity crowd was thus looking forward to a literary exchange with sharp political overtones. They were to get one, but not quite in the way they expected.

On the morning of the event, word went round the festival that the place was “crawling with Special Branch detectives.” Since Scotland Yard does not usually trouble itself with mere writers, speculation mounted. “I've heard the Israeli ambassador is coming,” one local announced authoritatively. Having been tipped off the previous day, it was all I could do to hold my tongue.

At the appointed hour, Peter Florence, the young actor who runs the festival, stepped onto the stage. “I regret to announce,” he said, “that David Grossman cannot be with us today.” Murmurs of dismay filled the hall. “Martin Amis, however, is here. I wrote to him the other day to say that one could not imagine a British literary festival without him. The same is true, of course, of the author who is replacing David Grossman today — Salman Rushdie.”