TIME Magazine September 11, 1995 Volume 146, No. 11 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Return to Contents page --------------------------------------------------------------------------- CONTROVERSIES RUSHDIE OFFENDS AGAIN The fugitive-author returns to the attack, lampooning Hindu nationalists in his new novel BY ANTHONY SPAETH It is commonplace in India, Salman Rushdie's homeland, that only a dedicated few manage to read his novels all the way through. A standing joke says that if a club were started for those who have finished Midnight's Children, the book that made Rushdie's name, it would be the most exclusive in the country. Apparently, however, there is a vast number of people who enjoy skimming his novels in search of the provocative and offensive. A thinly veiled portrait of Indira Gandhi in Midnight's Children helped make the book a best seller on its release in India in 1981, four years after Mrs. Gandhi's 19-month emergency rule. India was the first nation to ban The Satanic Verses in 1989 because it could have hurt Muslim sentiments. Later Iran's Ayatullah Khomeini issued the fatwa, or death sentence, now more than six years old and still in force, that has made Rushdie the most celebrated literary-figure-in-hiding of our time. With the release last month of Rushdie's new novel, The Moor's Last Sigh,browsers are busy again--and they aren't disappointed. The book contains a ribald caricature of Bal Thackeray, a fiery politician at the peak of power in Bombay, the state capital of Maharashtra. It derides the armies of militant Hindu chauvinists who, following leaders such as Thackeray, have stormed mosques and Muslim ghettos since 1990, killing hundreds. It also jabs at Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister, whom the book's narrator, Moraes ("Moor") Zogoiby, an illegitimate child, identifies as his probable father. "A Moor's tale," promises Zogoiby in the opening chapter, "complete with sound and fury." And likely to be matched with much more of the same, in India at least. Although they haven't read the book yet, followers of Thackeray, who has political control of Maharashtra, are scrambling for the warpath. "Our leader is like a god to us," says Suryakant Mahadik, a trade unionist in Thackeray's Shiv Sena party. "If anybody dares to denigrate him, the reaction will be like a typhoon." Four thousand copies of the British edition have been imported to India, but not one has been sent to Maharashtra. Explains distributor Rajan K. Mehra: "We have to maintain peace at any cost." Rumors swept New Delhi last week that the central government was considering a nationwide ban to prevent violent reaction from Hindu militant groups--and in deference to Sonia Gandhi, widow of Neh ru's grandson Rajiv, who has much clout even four years after his death. In a sense the book is Rushdie's attempt to catch up with Indian history: Midnight's Children was a vast allegory of India's post-independence history, but its focus on Mrs. Gandhi's emergency of 1975-77 dated the book. In his new novel Rushdie expands his canvas to include the rise of Hindu fundamentalism since 1989, and it was almost inevitable that he would include a portrait of Thackeray, the trend's most conspicuous symbol. A former political cartoonist, Thackeray has enhanced his party's power by championing the rights of local people, Hindu Marathi speakers, at the expense of migrants to Bombay and its large Muslim population. Thackeray has stated that he admires Hitler, hinting in interviews that if Muslims didn't "behave," they would meet the same fate as Europe's Jews. When asked in a recent TV program called Ru-Ba-Ru (Face to Face) whether he wanted to be the Hitler of Bombay, Thackeray retorted, "Do not underestimate me. I am [the Hitler] of whole of Maharashtra and want to be of whole of India." Thackeray opposed the ban on The Satanic Verses, arguing that if Muslims were upset with the book, Islamic countries should worry about it. As of last week he had not given his reaction to The Moor's Last Sigh because he had not read it. Nonetheless he was quoted in the Daily Times of India as saying that the Bombay-born Rushdie "has no motherland" and has "no business" writing of a land and a people of whom he has little knowledge. His followers were more forthright. "This is an issue that concerns us," said Maharashtra's Information Minister Pramod Navalkar, "so we can ban it." Liberals were aghast at the prospect of another ban in India, a country that prides itself on freedom of speech and publishing. Argues Bombay playwright Vijay Tendulkar: "If Thackeray as a political cartoonist could lampoon a personality, why not a writer?" But as long as people keep skimming Rushdie's books in search of things to upset them, they're almost certainly sure to find them. --Reported by Anita Pratap/New Delhi --------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- "And in his low cane chair with his great belly slung across his knees like a burglar's sack, with his frog's croak of a voice bursting through his fat frog's lips and his little dart of a tongue licking at the edges of his mouth, with his hooded froggy eyes gazing greedily down upon the beedi-rolls of money with which his quaking petitioners sought to pacify him" ...EXCERPTED FROM The Moor's Last Sigh Copyright 1995 Time Inc. All rights reserved. [Image] Related Articles in Britannica Online [Image] Text Only