Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 149
Rushdie: Haunted By His Unholy Ghosts 149 Moor’s Last Sigh. At the debate he openly declared that one of the aims of the writers is to deliberately create controversy and say the unsayable : ‘We will not allow priests to tell us when we have to shut up. Part of our function is to stir things up a bit. . . . stirring things up is our proper function in any society. ’ ( The Times, 8 September 1995 ). And that is exactly what he has done in The Moor’s Last Sigh. Just when the world was about to give a big ‘sigh’ of relief Rushdie has stirred things up yet again. This time he has upset the Hindus, and especially Bal Thackeray, head of Shiv Sena, one of India’s most feared extremist religious groups. The novel relates a cartoonist’s unnerving rise to become an evil political leader. His resemblance to Thackeray, who is motivated by a powerful contempt for Muslims, has been missed by nobody. This novel should also not be mistaken as a defence of Islam; far from it. It is to do with the wide-ranging theme of religious intolerance, and basically Rushdie’s stance on religion does not change - he is still very much averse to it. It seems that the ‘Rushdie of old’ is re-emerging, more intent than before; making up for lost time, as it were! With the passage of time the fear to fully express himself once again seems to have left him rekindling the freedom he flaunted in Midnight’s Children in which he discovered the power that he had acquired through liter- ary expression and which made him remark : ‘It was astonishing how soon fear left me. ’ (p. 162). ‘Think before you leap’ is an aphorism that never entered the mind of Rushdie whose sole aim in writing had been to be basked in glory. In his own words : ‘I prefer glorious failure to modest success. ’ He said this to Kate Kellaway of The Observer in The Waterstone’s Magazine of Autumn 1995. When asked if there was anything that he had to think twice about saying, he makes an equally asinine statement :