Books banned in India

Though India is a democratic nation, the suppression in India mainly targets religious issues. The Constitution of India assures freedom of expression but places certain restrictions on substance, with an outlook towards maintaining communal and religious harmony, given the narration of communal tension in the nation.

Listed below are a few books that created a "topsy-turvy" situation in India which led to ban against these books.

Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses"
India has uncertain respect of being the initial country in the world to ban the Indian-born novelist's divisive work "The Satanic Verses". The novel written by Salman Rushdie had subsequent protest from dominant Muslim leaders. The novel was banned in India in 1988, and fatwa was imposed on Rushdie by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini on February 14, 1989, for demeaning Islam. Rushdie had to spend almost a decade in hindrance. Though Iran has held its government will not carry out the fatwa's death-sentence dictate, the book remains banned in India.

Full report here Siliconindia

Rushdie wants ‘similar’ Depp to play him

Indian-British novelist Sir Salman Rushdie has revealed that he wants Hollywood heartthrob Johnny Depp to play him in any biopic, because he thinks they are quite similar.

The 64-year-old author, whose fourth novel The Satanic Verses (1988) drew protests from Muslims in several countries, is putting the finishing touches to his autobiography and is keen to make it a movie.

“It’s a long read and I’m really excited about finishing the project over the next few months,” the Daily Mail quoted him as saying at the GQ Men Of The Year awards last week.

“If it is made into a film it would have to star someone with a striking resemblance to me, so I’m trying to persuade Johnny Depp,” he said.

Full report here Zeenews

Pitch it right

Do remember your first novel will most likely be your breakthrough work. So, how do you wow an editor?

Writing is only one part of the game, albeit the most important one. After finishing your novel, you want to see it in print and, hopefully, make a few bucks from it. In the West that would mean a literary agent. In India, though, those are few and far between. Everything is vested in the fiction editor. This month let's look at the world from the point of view of an editor.

A former fiction editor at a noted international publishing firm recently told me she quit her job to start her own independent imprint because she was unable to publish the kinds of books she was passionate about. The reason — the brief from her bosses to acquire only certain sellers. When she joined the business in the 1990s, publishers still had a midlist which was made up of authors in which they were investing for the long run. In other words they were supporting talent in the hope that the author would deliver a big hit eventually. Hence authors like John Irving and Don DeLillo were able to survive a few flops before writing their breakthrough novels — The World According to Garp for Irving and Underworld for DeLillo. This penchant for certain sellers has now become the publishing norm, certainly for the big boys, as a result of which the midlist has shrunk considerably. So bear in mind that nowadays your first novel to be published will most likely be your breakthrough novel. And that actually might be the second or third novel you write. Very few writers get it right the first time round. Midnight's Children, for instance, was the fourth novel Salman Rushdie ever wrote. After that he was able to publish everything he had lying about in his drawers.

How do you wow an editor? Well, irrespective of the kind of novel you are writing, you have to write one hell of an opening. These are not the days of the Victorian novel a la Charles Dickens where the author could spend the first 70 pages establishing the world of the novel before making anything happen. We live in an age of short attention spans, and a fiction editor's attention span is very short indeed. So if you don't hook him or her in the first ten-to-15 pages then you are in trouble.

Full report here Hindu

These songs do not die

Could a region as varied as Southasia expect anything other than today’s dizzying cornucopia of literary creations?

Southasian literature, in its many voices, languages and avatars, retains an underlying warp and woof of cultural connectivity. Each country of the Subcontinent has its own political and emotive narrative and its own unique stories to share. Linguistic histories, colonial experiences (or resistance to them), and traumas such as Partition and conflict have fermented and matured the writing of each of our countries and societies. The Empire left – but left its language, literature and genres behind. The phrase, ‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy’ first came into use via the linguist Max Weinrich. In a linguistically diverse set of cultures, the Queen’s English asserted a hegemonic sway.

While Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) was a watershed that impacted how the world viewed Southasian writing, the author’s magical prose also transformed the way this writing looked at itself. Although some critics categorised it as a valorisation of the ‘post-colonial exotic’, Pico Iyer’s famous essay ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ described it as ‘a call to free spirits everywhere to remake the world with imagination’, opening up ‘a new universe by changing the way we tell stories and see the world around us.’ The voice of Saleem Sinai, Rushdie’s main character, reclaimed the spoken sounds of the Bombay streets into English literary usage. The sinuous stylistic flow also reflected the texture and grain of Urdu, which is an important part of Rushdie’s literary inheritance.

Full report here Himal

Salman Rushdie pens kids' book

Salman Rushdie, the prize-winning Indian-born writer, has in the past based novels on the politics of India and Pakistan. But his latest book is for teenagers, and the inspiration — at least some of it — came from video games.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Rushdie said Luka and the Fire of Life, his new novel, was written as a birthday present for his 13-year-old son, Milan.

The book, a fable about a young boy's adventures as he tries to save his father's life, is the second novel Rushdie has written for children. His first, "Haroun and the Sea of Stories," was written for his older son, Zafar, in 1989, as Rushdie was under threat of death.

Earlier that year, Iran's leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had issued a religious edict, or fatwah, ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie, saying his novel "The Satanic Verses" had insulted Islam.

The new book, Rushdie said Friday, Oct 8 drew inspiration from elements of computer games — though he admitted that he was terrible at the games and his sons usually beat him.

"Video games are often based on a classical quest format. That fits well with a fable," he told the AP. "The book is about the value of life, and in video games you can have a thousand lives. So I contrasted those two things."

Rushdie said much has changed since his first children's book, which he described as a response to being forced into hiding. The fatwah, which came amid angry protests and book burnings across the Muslim world, put Rushdie under police protection for almost 10 years.

"This was a dark time for me and I tried to fill the novel with light and to give it a happy ending. Happy endings were things I had become very interested in at the time," he said.

Rushdie said he enjoyed writing the two children's books, but he doesn't see himself becoming a children's author.

Full report here AP

Mystique of Mumbai

In her book City of Gold: The Biography of Bombay, Gillian Tindal evoked an image of a nascent city, a tangle of masonry, bazaar and tram lines forging into the swamp. In books set in more recent times (India: A Million Mutinies Now, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, Shantaram, Bombay and Mumbai: The City In Transition), we see a proud metropolis hollowed out by desperation, violent self assertion and crime. For a sense of how ordinary people, rich, poor and middle class, negotiate this turbulent landscape, we have the writings of Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Vikram Chandra, Anita Desai, Amit Chaudhuri, Manil Suri and a host of less widely celebrated but much beloved local authors and poets. This treasure trove notwithstanding, one feels, there is still much to be said, much more to be understood about this great and complex city. And it is with pleasant anticipation that one greets Gyan Prakash’s Mumbai Fables.

Prakash is the Dayton-Stockton professor of history at Princeton University whose previous books include weighty titles such as Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (1990) and Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (1999). But with Mumbai Fables, a subject he says has preoccupied him for much of the last decade, he seems to have tapped into a less theoretical and more personal register. Explaining his motivation early on in the book, he describes Mumbai, or Bombay, as it then was, as an object of immense fascination and longing for him as a young boy growing up in Patna.

Full report here Indian Express

The myth meister

The author weaves another engrossing yarn, all the while addressing some of his perennial concerns about human life and expression

Luka and the Fire of Life
Salman Rushdie
Jonathan Cape
Rs 915; Pp 216

Nearly two decades ago, Salman Rushdie wrote a novel while he was in hiding after Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa on him, over his novel, The Satanic Verses. That delightful novel was Haroun and the Sea of Stories, an in-your-face response, showing that he could not be silenced and he would not disappear into oblivion.

There, a little boy called Haroun travels to the source of all stories to restore the gift of gab, which his father, Rashid Khalifa, had lost. It dazzled readers, even as it had a particular poignancy and relevance—it was a stirring defence of free speech—of arguments, talkativeness, and verbal anarchy, against khatam-shud, or silence, the dark place where only one voice could speak. Rushdie had written that novel for his son Zafar, who was, to borrow a word Rushdie coined in Midnight’s Children, “nearlynine” at the time of the fatwa.

With Luka and the Fire of Life, Rushdie returns to the Khalifa family. Written for his second son, Milan, who is now 13, the story is about Haroun’s brother, Luka, who is determined to help his father. The Shah of Blah, as Rashid Khalifa is known, is back, but only just: He is ill; life is seeping out, and tubes sustain him by feeding him and people worry around him. Twelve-year-old Luka has to complete a hair-raising journey through the world of magic, and in a nod to the Promethean myth, he must bring the fire of life to the earth, to revive his father.

Full review here Mint

'Being a father changed my writing'

Salman Rushdie is apologetic. His publishers hadn't factored in that America had gone into 'daylight saving time' and so he called me 40 minutes earlier than originally planned. But when the '+401' number from New York flashed on my mobile, I wasn't unprepared, having helped myself with a glass of what I had read somewhere to be the 63-year-old writer's favourite drink: Jameson on the rocks.

After the disrupting force of The Satanic Verses (1988), Rushdie had written his first children's book, the 1990 Haroun and the Sea of Stories. That novel had been written for his then 11-year-old son Zafar after he had wanted to read something by his father that 'children could read'. Twenty years later, Rushdie's out with Luka and the Fire of Life, this time for his younger son Milan. "He told me that it was time he had a book written for him too," says Rushdie, who presented the manuscript to Milan on his 12th birthday.

Full report here Hindustan Times

Bhanot should be spanked: Rushdie

Acclaimed writer Salman Rushdie has ridiculed the Commonwealth Games as a "great humiliation" for India and suggested that OC Secretary General Lalit Bhanot be "severely spanked" for his much-criticised comments on hygiene standards. "It's been a great humiliation for us all. I feel very embarrassed by it and I'm sure many, many people in India feel the same way," the author of the award-winning Midnight's Children said.

The October 3 to 14 Games have had a crisis-hit build-up with reports of shoddy construction work, allegations of corruption and concerns about cleanliness at the Games Village making international headlines.

Reacting to the furore surrounding Bhanot's comments that the standard of hygiene was different for different countries, Rushdie said, "That official who claimed that we in India have lower standards of hygiene, he should be spanked very severely."

Full report here Hindustan Times

Midnight’s other children

In the spring of 1997, the literary quarterly Granta published an issue devoted to India’s Golden Jubilee. The tone was cautious but celebratory: on the cover, the country’s name was printed in bright red letters, followed by an exclamation point. Fifty years after partition, an independent India was rapidly establishing itself as an international power. The issue, which consisted largely of contributions from native Indians writing in English, was a testament both to the country’s extraordinary intellectual and artistic richness, and to one of the few legacies of British colonialism that could be unequivocally celebrated by readers in South Asia and the West: a common language. Seventeen years after Salman Rushdie’s shot across the bow with Midnight’s Children, a new generation of Indian writers was, in Granta’s words, “matching India’s new vibrancy with their own.”

In the ensuing years, the American appetite for Indian culture has only grown. Many of the writers who arrived on the scene in the 1980s and ’90s — Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy (whose wildly successful novel The God of Small Things was first serialized in Granta), Amit Chaudhuri — continued to publish fiction and reportage, and a new wave of novelists, including Kiran Desai and Aravind Adiga, went on to write prize-winning, best-selling books. Readers of Roy, Desai or Adiga — not to mention the viewers who flocked to “Slumdog Millionaire” — have not been spared portraits of Indian life’s miseries (caste-based discrimination, horrific poverty). But the folkloric and redemptive aspects of the stories, already familiar thanks to Rushdie’s magic realism and the more romantic understandings of Hinduism associated with the Kama Sutra, have merely solidified Westerners’ rosy vision of India. These books and films have also complemented the work of writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, who was born in London and raised in Rhode Island and has written vividly about Indian-Americans. The Indian experience, however foreign, has become part of the American experience.

Full report here NYT

Rushdie: UK royalty is ‘archaic, stupid’

Indian-born author Salman Rushdie, who is due to release a new book Luka and the Fire of Life, has courted controversy yet again by describing the British monarchy and its traditions as “archaic ... stupid ... a British oddity.”

Explaining his reason for accepting the knighthood, Sir Salman told the Sunday Times that he had received an honour from the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. “It would be extraordinary to accept something from the French state and then refuse something from my own country,” said the writer, who is a British citizen.

The kinghood ceremony, according to the Booker Prize winner, was a bit ridiculous, “all structured around this furious archaic thing of queens and knights, all a bit stupid, but it’s what we do. You take it for the spirit of it, which is to be complimentary about your work. And I think, thanks. Ian McKellen got something, I got something, who cares? We got our medals and left.”

Sir Salman was knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in June 2007, and at the time had said that he was “thrilled and humbled” by the knighthood.

Rushdie, who spent many years in hiding after his novel The Satanic Verses, published in 1989, provoked violent reactions and an Iranian fatwa calling for his death, said he has observed an intolerance where “to disagree with someone is to offend them.”

Full report here Asian Age

Armchair travelers will relish 'India'

The 13 stories in India: A Traveler's Literary Companion attempt the impossible: to capture the essence of a subcontinent that feels like 20 countries teeming within the borders of one.

Readers will see familiar names with contributions from Salman Rushdie ("The Prophet's Hair") and Vikram Chandra (an excerpt from "Sacred Games"), but the collection's value lies in the stories from writers unknown in the United States.

Phanishwarnath Renu's humorous "Panchlight" follows a group of Bihari villagers who have purchased a lantern but don't know how to light it. A story by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, whose novels form the basis of Satyajit Ray's "Apu" film trilogy, showcases the ingenuity of a Calcutta man trying to win back a lost job.

Full report here Cleveland.com

Rushdie's Solan house in shambles

The ancestral house of India-born British writer Salman Rushdie, situated on the fringe of the Shilly Wildlife Sanctuary on the Forest Road area of the town, is in a shambles. Awaiting whitewash and repairs on its tin roof since the author last visited the house in 2000, the house appears to be in a complete state of neglect.

Spread over three bighas of land, the sprawling bungalow, Anees Villa, which once witnessed activity when it housed the office of the state Education Department, currently wears a deserted look and needs proper upkeep. The main gate of the bungalow, which was damaged after a huge eucalyptus tree fell on it last month, needs repairs.

The bungalow came into limelight when Rushdie filed a writ petition in the Himachal Pradesh High Court in 1993, staking claim to it through his counsel Vijay S.T. Shankadass.

Full report here Hindustan Times

Is there a 'number one' writer today?

It may be a silly question, but it's one that won't go away

Top dog in his day ... Henry James

"Who is number one?" asks Blake Morrison in his Guardian Review essay on Jonathan Franzen. Morrison was recalling the poet John Berryman's question after the death of Robert Frost. Answer: (to Berryman's chagrin) Robert Lowell.

Morrison goes on to write that since the deaths of Bellow, Mailer and Updike, the "number one" question is one that "inevitably comes up in relation to American fiction." Tactfully, he avoids raising the same question about British fiction in 2010. Some of the pack leaders (Amis, Rushdie, McEwan) are getting long in the tooth.

There is always something a little bit canine about the literary world: there has to be a top dog. And there are different, even competing, kennels. When Samuel Beckett died, there was general agreement that a 20th-century master had passed from the scene. The death of Harold Pinter in 2009 left a gaping void in European drama, and it's not obvious who takes his place. Currently, in poetry, Seamus Heaney, with a terrific new collection Human Chain, must be a strong contender for "number one", though he might be publicly dismayed at the vulgarity of the idea.

Full report here Guardian

Rushdie mulls writing, strange times

Iconic writer presents history of writing in a changing world

"Here I am risking my life, maybe, but not for the first time," said Sir Salman Rushdie, apparently referring to his willingness to stand out in public, at his lecture presented by the Sun Valley Center for the Arts at the Sun Valley Pavilion on Friday, Sept. 10.

More than 900 people filed into the amphitheater to hear the iconic writer and speaker, whose life was threatened by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran for his controversial book The Satanic Verses.

Rushdie said writers risk their lives to tell stories, and we live in strange times for writers. About Khomeini, he said, "one of us is dead," receiving laughter and applause from the audience. Rushdie spent nearly a decade "underground" and seldom appeared in public because of Khomeini's death threat.

Rushdie opined on what he said were surreal events taking place in the world today. These events included the controversy of a mosque at the former site of the World Trade Center towers in New York City and a potential burning of holy Qurans by a pastor in Florida to occur the following day in response to the tragic 9/11 events.

A touch of strange: The Booker shortlist

The Booker shortlist doesn’t always offer the best books of the year — judges are fallible, the competition intense, and it often happens that works left off the list continue to find readers and faithful acolytes.

A few years ago, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland failed to make the cut, but did brilliantly despite its omission; this year, David Mitchell’s pyrotechnics in The Thousand Autumns of David Zoet were not sufficient to impress the judges.

But the Booker shortlist is still valuable: the judges may not always pick the perfect books, but they almost always reflect the spirit of the times. The obsession with very English, domestic novels in the 1970s was followed by the rise of the global novel, a period when Ishiguro, Achebe, Rushdie and several others took the prize into far more wide-ranging territory. This year’s shortlist, announced last week, reflects two interesting trends: a growing openness among readers to reading experimental fiction, and the blurring of the line between the novel and other literary forms.

Full report here Business Standard

Salman Rushdie supports mosque near Ground Zero

Controversial Indian-origin author Salman Rushdie has spoken out in support of a mosque near Ground Zero, an issue that has sparked a religious row in US amid opinion polls suggesting that majority of Americans oppose it.

"It's just a stupid argument," Rushdie said at the Brooklyn Book Festival in New York.

"Of course they should be able to build a mosque there," he was quoted as saying by the New York Post.

The writer also noted that the controversy regarding the proximity of the mosque near the World Trade Centre made no sense, since the mosque was inside the World Trade Centre itself.

Rushdie also spoke against the burning of Qurans, which had been planned by Florida Pastor Terry Jones.

Full report here Times of India

Pleasure lost and pleasure found, in a book

In poet, dancer and author Tishani Doshi’s debut novel, The Pleasure Seekers, “the language often rises – when speaking of the great matters, life, death, and above all love – to powerful metaphorical heights” says Salman Rushdie.

Such is the praise The Pleasure Seekers has received since being released, first in Italy - fitting given the Italian love for beauty and pleasure - and now available in India and the U.S. as of last Tuesday.

Doshi was inspired to write the story upon her discovery of love letters written in the 1960’s by her Welsh mother to her Gujarati father during a period of their forced separation. The book, a tribute to her parents' marriage, is a fictionalized version of their journey together. Weaving in themes of identity, home, family, and love, The Pleasure Seekers is an engaging and enjoyable read, reminding us of what it’s like to be human.

Ready to find Pleasure? We’re giving away 10 copies of the book to Republic of Brown readers. Just visit us on Facebook and tell us what brings you pleasure. (We'd like the clean version please - like eating chocolate covered strawberries with chilled champagne while watching an island sunset - our very own Geetanjali's favorite.) The top 10 Facebook posts win a copy of the book. And yes, we'll ship anywhere in the world.

Full report here South Asia Mail 

A banquet for the mind

In the interests of transparency, I should declare that when it comes to David Mitchell, I am less of a critic than a fan. Okay, devotee. Having been blown away by Ghostwritten — a book that is practically the definition of the phrase “masterful debut” — spellbound by the Murukami-like trippyness of number9dream, still reeling from his breathtaking Cloud Atlas, and tickled to death by bizarre suburban Englishness of Black Swan Green, I approached The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet with trepidation. Pedestals are designed for people to fall off, and I feared that Mitchell would go the way of Don DeLillo (Cosmopolis) and Rushdie (Ground Beneath her Feet — a book that truly deserved to be).

Within the first few pages, it is clear that the blurb-writers on the back are not exaggerating: here is yet another book by a “storyteller of genius”, possibly “the greatest British writer of his age” who is “dizzyingly, dazzlingly good”.

 (For those who have not yet encountered this extraordinary writer, a note on what wikipedia calls “disambiguation”: there are two David Mitchells, both British, more or less the same age, one brought up in Wiltshire, the other in Worcestershire. One is primarily an actor and comedian, the other primarily a novelist who is, frequently, very funny. The latter — let’s call him, for simplicity’s sake, “our David” — is a rather handsome chap; the other looks like a haddock.)

Full review here Business Standard

Deepa finds Midnight’s Children lead

After much speculation, the protagonist of Deepa Mehta’s screen adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children has been finalised. 27-year-old Satya Bhabha, Parsi-German by origin, will play the much-talked-about role of Saleem Sinai. The actor has made an appearance in the sci-fi thriller Scott Pilgrim Versus The World, which opened the world over earlier this month.

Rushdie’s protagonist Saleem Sinai is described in the novel as the one who has “an extraordinary nose”. Believe it or not, but Imran Khan was initially being considered for playing the protagonist’s role. Both Salman Rushdie and director Deepa Mehta thought Imran would fit the role the best. But Imran apparently showed little interest in the part.

Full report here Times of India