Rushdie and Pankaj Misra

"In 1999, Salma Rushdie released his eleventh book, The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Pankaj Mishra wrote around 1800 word word review. He produced a ferocious notice (in Outlook magazine) tearing into the novel.

A couple of years ago, my friend William Dalrymple hosted a lunch at his farmhouse in Gurgaon for Salman and Padma Lakshmi, then still married. My wife and I were invited. I promptly accepted because I was keen to explain to Salman that neither I nor Outlook harboured any hostility towards him. He was courteous but cool. I thought I should bring up Pankajs review and emphasise that it reflected only the critics personal opinion.

'About the 1700- word review, Salman, I hope you don't hold it against me,'I blurted jokingly.

'1700 words? 1740 words,'he corrected angrily.

Instinctively, I realised it was futile to pursue the rapprochement.

I do not know many writers of global eminence, but among the few I do, Salman Rushdie tops the list of authors ultrasensitive to criticism, mild or severe. It was just about okay for him to get into a spat with John le Carre or John Updike, but who were we, a piddling New Delhi journal printed out of Safdarjung Enclave! In the British, European and American literary firmament, Salman Rushdie is simultaneously respected and ( gently) mocked. The Sunday Times ( London), played up a story of how Mr Rushdie tried to pick up a girl reading a book in the park. When she rejected his pass, he told her, 'Don't you know who I am? I am the famous writer Salman Rushdie.'The additional information did not impress the lady, who turned out to be a journalist. Naturally, she went to town on the incident. Outlooks books editor Sheela Reddy used the item in her Bibliofile column. Salman, who did not protest to the Sunday Times , was incensed that we had the temerity to publicise his romantic rebuff." (Lucknow Boy)

‎"Rushdie has done a lot of this kind of writing, which is easy to do but hard to read, and which has spawned among Indian writers in English several easy imitations--novels blithely liberated from such considerations as economy, structure, suspense, irony, plausibility of events, coherence of character, psychological motivation, narrative transitions, in short, everything that makes the novel an art form."

‎"The chief points, as once elaborated by Rushdie, of this peculiar strategy inspired by Gunter Grass are: 'Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloodyminded. Argue with the world.'"

‎"It is now beginning to seem as if Rushdie cannot define himself as a writer or intellectual except through extremities, by smashing some frame or other. "Something in me wants the dreadful," goes one ominous confession in The Ground Beneath her Feet, "wants to stare down the human race's worst-case scenarios." It is almost as if Rushdie has to continually re-enact the petulant bad-boy daredevilry of eating, as once described in an essay, a ham sandwich to prove one's 'newfound atheism'."

‎"Rushdie went on to recommend world travel for all writers and claimed that 'Literature has little or nothing to do with a writer's home address.' (The trouble with this-quite apart from the little-or-nothing hedge-as well as with many other of Rushdie's aphorisms, is that they sound equally valid when turned upside down)."

‎"What's interesting here is that Rushdie's uncontrollable urge to denounce both the idea and praxis of 'belonging' invariably leads him back to India ('that place obsessed by place, belonging-to-your-place'), to which he has announced his farewell in, and after, almost every book he has published. ('And so farewell, my country,' goes yet another valedictory dirge in the new novel, 'I go-I hunt-alone'). At the same time he stakes an oddly proprietorial claim over India in the West ("India," he recently told the LA Times, "is like my kid sister"); and the number of expertspeak assertions beginning 'In India it is often said....' continues to grow in recent books, where leave-taking itself is a subject-or, more accurately, an occasion for reiterating one more time the general unsuitability of India for people wanting to get reborn, remade etc."

‎"Such crude and witless buffoonery is indeed how the Indian chi-chi class-which serves as 'India' in Rushdie's fiction-responds to the unwashed masses staking a claim to political power.But the embarrassment we feel while reading this is mostly on the writer's behalf. The strong blast of Malabar Hill snobbery hints at a writer not in control of his writing self, of indeed someone who has been overpowered by it."

"With its banal obsessions and empty bombast, its pseudo-characters and non-events, its fundamental shapelessness and incoherence, The Ground Beneath Her Feet does little more than echo the great noise of the modern world; and in doing so it not only ceases to be literature but invites scrutiny as an alarming new kind of anti-literature."

"The bloodyminded narrator who tries to do too much now makes even Midnight's Children hard going. To read the novel now is to read it without the excitement and novelty of finding the narrative techniques of Gunter Grass and Garcia Marquez adapted to India; and it is to realise that the problems of Rushdie as a novelist since then have been the problems of a novelist unable to break away from his own imitations and imitators. In later novels, where Rushdie was still trying to pull off the same big stylistic coup of Midnight's Children, social setting, character, and human connections were subordinated to big poster-bright themes: the ordeal of immigration, the death of the past, the encounter between the East and the West, the human condition, and that kind of thing. In Shame, he first assumed the now familiar tone ('May I interpose a few words here...') and inaugurated the tub-thumping ('I, too, know something of this immigrant business... Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth'), which makes it hard now to recall, beyond the controversial bits, anything of The Satanic Verses, or The Moor's Last Sigh: they were miscellanies rather than novels, with authorial homilies on various problems faced by mankind filling up the hollow centre. The Ground Beneath her Feet rounds off the process: here, the authorial homilies are the centre, and everything else-story, characters, drama-has come to resemble aborted sublimations of the storyteller's obsessions, his prejudices and biases. "

‎"All this is basically adolescent stuff. The simple fact hardly ever occurs to Rushdie: that expatriation to the West and its giddy existential freedoms is a luxury few people can afford; and that most people have no choice but to stay within the many frontiers they know from birth. If the lack of nuance makes you uneasy, you feel acute discomfort when the expatriate's glee over having successfully crossed frontiers and flown away degenerates into something like contempt, even hostility, for the people he has left behind him."