Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 150
150 Mohamed Arshad Ahmedi ‘If I ever felt that, I would stop writing. I have too much respect for the art of the novel to become a censor of myself. If I felt that I was holding back, I’d stop because good literature happens at the edge and if you’re scared of going near it, you can’t write it. ’ He sees safety as desirable in life, undesirable in fiction. ‘I’ve never been the kind of writer who would deliberately put myself in a place of great unsafety. ’ What an incredible and fallacious statement. It seems that the time in exile has stripped Rushdie of his sanity. All the facts point to the exact opposite that Rushdie, knowingly and deliberately, has put himself in the predicament that he finds himself in. It is only the extremity of the situation that he had overlooked. Another statement that he makes : ‘If you do not take risks, you can’t do anything interesting’, seems to be the criterion applied to all his work, including his latest The Moor’s Last Sigh. This osten- sibly has given him the right to ‘stir things up’ at the expense of any eventualities. Rushdie, will no doubt, be extremely pleased with the hostile reaction in India to his latest novel and, in particular, how it has offended Bal Thackeray who is parodied as a villainous thug, and whose supporters have claimed that they will destroy any copies of the book and have threatened anyone selling it. This has provoked controversy reminiscent of The Satanic Verses. Bal Thackeray, ironi- cally, was among prominent Indians who defended Rushdie over The Satanic Verses. Thackeray, at that time, condemned India’s ban- ning of The Satanic Verses and said ‘freedom of speech was more important than the feelings of any religious group’. (Sunday Times, 3 September 1995). How quickly the principles of ‘free speech’ are forgotten when one oneself becomes the victim of a writer’s venomous pen. It must become doubly painful when one considers that one had been sup- portive of the same writer for another piece of work that had endan- gered the life of the writer. But this comes as no surprise when you