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0:19

Welcome to This Cultural Life, the

0:21

series in which some of the world's

0:23

leading creative people choose the most important

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influences and experiences that have inspired their

0:28

own work. I'm John Wilson

0:30

and my guest in this episode is

0:32

the author Sir Salman Rushdie. One

0:34

of the world's greatest novelists, he's

0:36

won many prestigious international literary awards

0:39

and was knighted for services to

0:41

literature in 2007. He

0:44

won the Booker Prize in 1981

0:46

for Midnight's Children, a novel that was

0:48

also twice voted as the best of

0:50

the all-time Booker winners. In

0:52

1989, the Iranian leader Ayatollah

0:55

Khomeini declared that Rushdie's fourth

0:57

novel, The Satanic Verses, was

0:59

blasphemous and pronounced a death

1:01

sentence against its author. For over a decade,

1:04

Salman Rushdie lived in hiding with close security,

1:06

a period of his life that he wrote

1:08

about in the 2012 memoir Joseph Anton. His

1:13

most recent book, Knife, details the horrific

1:15

stabbing that he survived in 2022. Salman

1:19

Rushdie, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you.

1:22

I'm so glad to be able to say

1:24

that because we were meant to have this

1:26

conversation in August 2022. Yeah. And

1:29

just a week before we

1:32

were due to record that interview. Today

1:35

at six, author Salman Rushdie has been stabbed during

1:37

an event in the United States. Oh my God!

1:43

He's being treated in hospital for what police describe

1:45

as a stab wound to the neck. A man

1:47

has been detained. After

1:49

more than three decades of living under

1:51

an Iranian death threat, he is tonight

1:53

fighting for his life. You

1:55

survived a near-fatal attack on stage in

1:58

upstate New York. had

2:00

gone multiple surgical operations and

2:02

rehabilitation and recovery. So I've got

2:04

to ask, how are you now?

2:07

I'm surprisingly well. I

2:09

think I surprised myself, but I

2:11

think I also surprised the medical profession because

2:14

quite a lot of the army of specialists

2:16

who had to sign off on various pieces

2:18

of me have expressed

2:20

the feeling that I have recovered better than expected.

2:23

I remember, for example, the

2:25

hand specialist saying that given the extent of

2:27

the injuries, he said it's really amazing that

2:29

your hand has recovered as it has. So

2:32

I think I'm what they call a medical miracle. How

2:35

have your injuries and

2:37

survival itself affected your

2:40

writing both on a practical and

2:42

emotional level? Practical, it's harder, because

2:44

one eye is harder than two, and

2:47

one and a half hands is harder than

2:49

two hands. So that makes everything

2:51

slower. As far

2:53

as in terms of what I write, I just

2:56

hope it doesn't get in the way of what I do next.

3:01

I just want to do something completely different.

3:04

Was writing knife cathartic for you, though? It

3:07

was not exactly cathartic, but it was a

3:09

way of handling it. It was a way

3:11

of dealing with it. I feel

3:13

now as if I've kind of dealt with the

3:15

subject. Was it something you felt you had to

3:17

do rather than you really wanted to do? Yeah,

3:20

I didn't want to do it. And then I

3:22

discovered that there was no alternative, because

3:24

it was just in the way of everything else, this

3:27

subject. I thought the only way of getting

3:29

past this is to go through it, and

3:31

so let's go through it. On

3:38

This Cultural Life, my guests choose the

3:41

most significant influences and experiences that

3:44

have inspired their own

3:46

creativity. And your first choice is

3:48

the independence of India and partition

3:50

in August 1947. You

12:00

know, and then Mrs. Gandhi

12:03

made the mistake of calling an election,

12:06

which she had been advised that she would win,

12:09

and her calculation was that by winning it

12:11

would kind of legitimise what she'd done. But

12:14

instead, she lost by a landslide. I

12:17

felt like sending her a letter of thanks, because

12:19

she kind of gave me the end of my

12:21

book. But you wrote about

12:23

her, a version of her in the book.

12:25

There's a character known as the widow, who

12:28

was clearly Mrs. Gandhi, and she sued you

12:30

for libel about a particular line. There

12:33

was a thing in there about her relationship

12:35

to her son Sanjay, which

12:38

actually was the thing that had been published many times

12:40

before in newspapers and all that. So I wasn't

12:43

saying anything new, but

12:46

she felt that it was libelous. And

12:49

so yes, she did initiate my

12:51

first run-in with political power, I guess. How

12:53

did you feel about that libel suit? Because

12:55

I mean, in a way, it sort of

12:58

confirms the power of fiction and particularly of

13:00

sort of fabulous storytelling and the genre that

13:02

you're working with. I thought

13:04

it was quite impressive, but that's not

13:06

how my publishers thought. They

13:09

weren't happy about it. They were quite scared of it, I think. But

13:12

then it ended tragically, because soon

13:14

after that whole libel business began,

13:17

she was murdered by

13:19

her bodyguard. Did you take the line out?

13:21

I think it got taken out in some

13:23

editions, but then you

13:25

can't libel the dead. What has

13:27

been the lasting impact of Indian

13:29

independence on your creative

13:31

imagination and the themes of your work, do

13:33

you think? It's the foundation, I think. Although

13:36

my books have gone

13:38

away from India and come back, I've

13:40

always thought of it as the kind of maybe the deepest

13:42

inspiration. I feel

13:44

that at rock bottom,

13:47

I'm still that boy from Bombay. And

13:51

everything else has just been piled on top of

13:53

that, but that's the kid underneath. Is

13:55

that because you draw strength from that character who grew up

13:57

in this street? Yeah, and I like the world. that

14:00

he learned about. I like the shape of it, its

14:03

diversity, its collegiality,

14:06

and in many ways,

14:08

its happiness. And of course, Midnight's

14:10

Children is about, as you say, in a

14:12

way, a kind of betrayal of the optimism

14:15

of independence. There's a moment near the beginning

14:17

of Midnight's Children when

14:19

optimism is described as a disease, that you

14:21

can be infected by it, and

14:24

sometimes lifetime infection. I

14:26

think I got infected by it. I

14:28

think that optimism disease, I

14:31

still to some degree have it.

14:33

How is your relationship with India

14:35

now, four decades on from writing

14:37

Midnight's Children? My literary relationship,

14:39

I'm happy to say, is pretty

14:41

good. Let's say the last novel,

14:44

Victory City, was wonderfully

14:46

well received in India, maybe the

14:48

best received novel of mine since

14:50

Midnight's Children. It always means

14:52

a lot to me that books go down

14:54

well there. So a healthy literary relationship with

14:57

your home country, but what about otherwise?

14:59

Politics not so good. I mean, my

15:02

generation is the generation whose thinking

15:05

was shaped by Gandhi and

15:07

Nehru and that India. And

15:09

that India is very much in retreat now.

15:12

I mean, figures like Gandhi and Nehru

15:14

are criticized heavily by

15:16

the current powers that be. And

15:20

the secularism to which they

15:22

were committed is now something

15:24

which the current regime

15:26

wishes to reverse. The

15:29

Indian constitution contains

15:31

the words secular and socialist,

15:34

both of which are not good words for

15:37

the current regime. And of course, to change the

15:39

constitution is a very difficult thing. You need a

15:41

big majority and they don't quite have that yet.

15:43

But I think they are trying to de-secularize

15:46

the country and create a kind of Hindu

15:49

majoritarian culture. Have you ever met Mr. Modi?

15:51

No. Would you have any interest in meeting

15:53

him and having that kind of conversation? I

15:55

don't know that it would go very well.

15:57

I mean, yes, And

24:00

it was involved in the life of the primarily

24:02

Asian community in North London.

24:06

A lot of it in Bangladeshi, a lot

24:08

of it involved in the restaurant industry. Drummond

24:10

Street. And yeah, so I had quite a

24:12

detailed knowledge of what was going on inside

24:15

the Asian community at that time. And

24:18

in the Satanic verses, when I'm a

24:21

lot of which is about Asian immigrants in

24:23

London, a lot of that

24:25

came out of the knowledge that I'd gained

24:27

through that work. You

24:29

know, the 80s, the racial situation

24:31

in London was much more tense

24:34

than it is now, perhaps. And

24:37

in the middle of the book, the largest

24:39

section of that novel is a

24:41

section called A City Visible But Unseen. And

24:44

what I meant is to say, you know, these

24:46

communities, you know, I know where they

24:49

live. I can take you to those streets. But

24:51

somehow nobody's paying attention. And

24:53

again, that's different now. But it was

24:55

like that then. It felt like a very unexamined,

24:58

you know, ignored community.

25:00

Places like Brick Lane and

25:02

South Hall and Wembley,

25:04

parts of London which had large Asian

25:06

communities. That's so interesting because your work

25:09

is so often associated with fabulism or,

25:11

you know, magical magical realism often. But

25:13

you're talking about reportage there is realism,

25:16

isn't it? I'm talking about, you know,

25:18

a decade of knowledge of working with

25:20

communities. None of the satanic verses has

25:22

caused deep offense and threatened

25:25

the church. The

25:32

Ayatollah Khomeini has ordered Muslims to

25:34

kill a British author. An attack

25:36

and his virtual order to Shiite

25:38

extremists to attack Mr Rushdie was

25:41

reported on Tehran radio this morning.

25:43

The world at one broke news of it to

25:45

Salman Rushdie. I asked him whether he was taking

25:47

the threat to him seriously. I

25:50

think I have to take them very seriously indeed. Will

25:52

you be looking to the British authorities in any form

25:54

for any kind of protection as a result of this?

25:56

I think I must. I think I've honestly I've just

25:58

heard the news and all the... on

28:00

indefinitely? I don't know, I'll let you

28:02

know. Well of course that

28:04

book changed your life, the fatwa changed your

28:06

life, you had to go into police hiding,

28:09

live with police protection for around a decade

28:11

and then you moved to New York so

28:13

this is the second migration in fact, why

28:16

New York? Well I'd fallen in

28:18

love with New York when I was very young, I

28:20

mean I went there before I'd published a book and

28:23

I was in New York City, very different

28:25

New York City, those are the days when

28:27

the city was quite broke and

28:30

kind of dirty and very

28:32

exciting. It was also very cheap,

28:34

you would see young creative people

28:37

of all kinds, you find musicians

28:39

and filmmakers and poets and

28:41

I thought this is very cool and

28:44

I just gave me this feeling that one day I

28:47

would like to just come and put myself here and see what

28:49

happens and then you know then life

28:51

happens to you and that didn't happen for a very

28:53

long time and eventually I remember

28:55

thinking to myself okay if you're

28:57

going to do this you'd better do it

28:59

because you're getting older and so when

29:02

I did make the move I didn't

29:04

know really if I was going for six

29:06

months or the rest of my

29:09

life and ended up I got stuck, I

29:11

stayed. But you talk about arriving in England

29:13

and that sense of being an outsider, the

29:15

sense of displacement, was the second migration easier?

29:17

Yeah, New York opens its door, you arrive,

29:19

you put your bags down and you're in

29:21

New York. Also it's a city made

29:25

up of migrant communities. That

29:28

huge multiplicity of cultures

29:31

in New York is just endlessly fascinating. In

29:33

New York your life became freer, you became

29:35

more of a public figure. What effect do

29:37

you think did that freedom have on the

29:39

writing that you were doing in New York?

29:41

Well it just took away a kind of

29:43

negative pressure you know I mean that in

29:45

England in those years of the

29:47

police protection I mean

29:49

that was really very stressful and it was an

29:51

effort to put that to one side and write

29:54

a book but in New

29:56

York there just wasn't there. So it was easier

29:58

to go back to being The

30:00

person that I always thought I had been and

30:03

then it also gave me an extra

30:05

subject You know and I gave me another place

30:07

to write about and the first book I wrote

30:09

there was this novel called fury which was a

30:12

kind of portrait of New York at

30:14

the turn of the century and Then

30:16

it had this extraordinary fate which its

30:18

publication day was September 11 2001 Very

30:22

bad day to publish a book. Where were you then day?

30:25

I was actually on book tour in

30:27

Houston, Texas And I'd

30:29

agreed to do an interview radio interview from

30:31

my hotel room and the

30:34

journalist called me early And

30:36

he said I'm sorry to call you early but because of what's

30:38

happening in New York obviously we can't do the interview And

30:41

I'm not the kind of person switches on the TV first thing in

30:43

the morning. So I said what's happening in New York and He

30:47

said switch on the damn television and

30:49

I turned on the television like

30:51

many people just in time to see the second plane

30:54

and Then was just

30:56

horrified Standing there

30:59

and staring at the TV. There's two things happening

31:01

there though Your adoptive city is under attack But

31:03

also it must have had an added resonance for

31:05

you personally because this is an act of terrorism

31:07

by Islamic extremists No, I mean I kind of

31:09

knew exactly what it was. There must have been

31:12

traumatic wasn't it? It was horrifying and it was

31:14

as if the thing that happened to me Which

31:17

was this big had been magnified

31:19

to something of global

31:21

scale When I

31:23

wrote Joseph Anton my memoir I compared

31:25

it to the scene in Alfred Hitchcock's

31:28

film the birds When

31:30

the birds slowly amass on the

31:32

climbing frame outside the schoolroom You

31:34

know and when it's just one

31:37

bird sitting on the climbing frame doesn't mean anything.

31:39

It's just a bird It's only

31:41

when there's a thousand birds that you think oh,

31:43

yeah There was that first bird and

31:45

I think that was my fate was to be the first

31:47

black bird Afterwards in New York when

31:49

I was back in New York some quite senior

31:52

eminent journalists said to me

31:55

Oh now we understand what happened to you. I

31:58

thought really all those thousands of people People have

32:00

to die for you to understand. But

32:03

then I thought, no, that's not what he's saying. What he's

32:05

saying is now it happened to him. Your

32:16

next choice for this cultural

32:18

life, Sáman, is surrealism, fabulism,

32:21

and mythical storytelling. And you said in an

32:23

email that you sent to us, learning

32:26

that truth in art can be arrived

32:28

at through many doors. What

32:30

did you mean by that? Well, I mean,

32:32

that realism is only one convention. And if

32:35

you look at world literature, it's not even

32:37

the dominant convention. Many

32:39

cultures, many literatures, have preferred

32:41

the language of myth and

32:44

fable, fairy tale,

32:46

and highly imagined work.

32:50

And it seemed to me that

32:52

that was always something I had

32:54

a very instinctive desire to go

32:56

towards, because of, again, starting in

32:58

India, growing up surrounded

33:00

by the kind of fables and

33:03

myths of that country, the

33:06

Ramayana Mahabharata, the animal fables of

33:08

the Punched Tantra, the

33:10

Thousand and One Nights, all of this stuff. It showed

33:12

me a simple fact, which is that

33:14

stories are not true. Somebody made

33:16

them up. And that

33:18

a flying carpet and Madame

33:21

Bovary are both untrue. They're

33:25

both things that somebody invented. And once

33:27

you accept that, it kind of sets

33:29

you free to fabulate, to make things

33:31

up. And I think that it's, in

33:34

a way, just another way

33:36

of talking about human nature, and sometimes

33:38

a more enjoyable way. And I also

33:40

think another thing, which is that the world has

33:42

ceased to be realistic. The

33:45

world is now surreal everywhere you look. So

33:47

maybe surrealism is a better way of describing the

33:49

truth of it. As you say,

33:51

you're introduced to the myths and the complex

33:54

stories as told by your father in your

33:56

childhood. Was it the same sort of literature

33:58

and films possibly that you were drawn to?

34:00

to when you started developing your own tastes.

34:02

Yeah, I mean, for example, my books have

34:05

often been compared to Gabriel Garcia

34:07

Marquez. And I remember when I read 100

34:09

Years of Solitude, one of my favorite books

34:11

of all the time. But one of

34:13

the things I felt reading it for the first time was

34:16

strangely how familiar it felt, even

34:19

though I'd never been to Latin America at that time. I

34:22

thought the world of this book is not

34:24

unlike the world that I came from, that

34:27

we have dictators too. We

34:30

also have very powerful religious

34:32

forces at play. And

34:35

other things, the gulf between wealth

34:37

and poverty is there in

34:39

both worlds. The kind of

34:41

quarrel between the urban and the rural worldview

34:43

is there in both worlds. So I thought

34:45

a lot of this is like the world

34:47

I know translated into Spanish. And I felt

34:50

a kind of fellow feeling for it. I

34:52

thought, I get it. I see how this

34:54

works. And to borrow your verb, you are

34:56

an author who fabulates, but I mean, are

34:58

you a magical realist or is that a

35:00

term that you resist? The problem with the

35:02

phrase magic realism is that when

35:04

people use it, they only hear magic and

35:08

they don't hear realism. Whereas

35:10

actually, it has to be very, very

35:12

deeply grounded in a sense

35:14

of the real, which also means emotional

35:17

real. There's a wonderful moment in

35:19

100 Years of Solitude where one

35:21

of the characters is shot and his blood

35:24

makes a journey through the town and arrives

35:26

at his mother's feet. And when

35:29

she sees it, she screams because she knows her child

35:31

is dead. Now, of course, that's

35:33

a completely fabulous image, the blood trailing,

35:35

going to the city, turning

35:37

right, turning left, going upstairs. But

35:40

it's completely powerful because it's an emotional

35:42

truth. I think that's the secret

35:44

of this kind of writing, that it has

35:46

to be rooted in a kind of truth.

35:49

I've often drawn on the past, on the

35:51

myths, on the great tales, the great Greek

35:53

story of Orpheus and Eurydice, you borrowed for

35:55

your 1999 novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

36:00

Why did you want to retell that tale

36:02

in a contemporary setting with these two superstars

36:04

singers as the as the protagonist? Well a

36:06

couple of things one is that it's a

36:08

really great love story and the other

36:10

is it this is kind of rock and roll

36:12

novel And the reason why it is is

36:14

because I was trying to write a book which

36:17

united these three worlds of India

36:19

and England and America And

36:22

I thought you know rock and roll music is very

36:24

the first Cultural phenomenon that

36:27

crossed all these cultural boundaries I

36:29

remember growing up in Bombay with listening to

36:32

Elvis Presley singing all shook up and

36:34

the first record I ever bought was heartbreak

36:36

hotel and what was

36:38

interesting about how far that music

36:41

spread? Was that it

36:43

did it before there were the mechanisms that

36:45

now exist I mean now everything spreads everywhere

36:47

in five seconds But in those

36:49

days it didn't and yet this thing did unite

36:51

the world So I thought to

36:54

tell a story about these three countries Using

36:57

the music as a bridge is

36:59

a way of uniting the narrative And

37:02

I thought the story of or fierce in your

37:04

idiocy you can actually tell the story in

37:06

a hundred words It contains

37:08

such power because it

37:11

unites three great things which are art

37:13

love and death and Depending

37:15

how you look at the story you can

37:17

say that it means that love

37:20

Through the agency of art Overcomes

37:22

death or you could

37:24

say more pessimistically the death in spite

37:26

of art Overcomes love

37:29

it tells you very profound things about

37:32

our life on earth You know and

37:34

you could expand it into a 500 page novel.

37:36

So that's what I did You

37:40

said after writing your memoir Joseph Anton that

37:42

you long to return to

37:45

some wildly fantastical Fiction

37:48

and having just written knife

37:50

your memoir of

37:52

surviving that brutal attack in August 2022

37:55

Do you now have a similar hunger to return

37:57

to to fabulous? I said So it's interesting fiction.

38:00

Yeah, I mean, I don't actually know what the

38:02

next book is at this precise moment I don't

38:04

really have it in my head But is that

38:06

sense of that, you know the real and the

38:09

reportage that you did in knife Does that drive

38:11

you into kind of ever wilder imagines? Yes, do

38:13

something do the opposite Yeah, because you know, one

38:15

of the things is when I first thought about

38:18

becoming a writer The last

38:20

thing on my mind was to write about myself

38:23

It was absolutely no interest

38:26

in doing that. I wanted to make things up I

38:29

want to make up stories and tell them Though

38:31

now that I've written two books about

38:33

myself more than enough and

38:36

you say you don't know thematically What

38:38

the next book might be? Do

38:40

you think the attack will impact

38:42

somehow on whatever emerges? I don't

38:45

know stay tuned You've

38:49

spoken in the past about how You

38:51

found it important to remain visible in

38:53

New York to reclaim your life after

38:55

years in hiding You know you were

38:58

seen out and about and we saw

39:00

you in cameos in Bridget Jones's diary

39:02

and W1 a here at the BBC

39:04

And in curb your enthusiasm you've heard

39:06

about you heard about your problem and

39:09

I thought if there's anybody who could

39:11

Understand what I'm going through. It's you and to

39:13

tell you the truth. I'm at my wit's end

39:16

Let me tell you something. It could be scary.

39:18

It could be bewildering etc But

39:21

there are things that you gain There

39:23

are a lot of women who are attracted

39:25

to you in this condition

39:29

Really? Yeah, even with

39:31

me. They would like it. It's not exactly you It's

39:34

the fatwa wrapped around you like

39:36

kind of sexy pixie dust Can

39:39

you imagine taking on those sort of comic cameos now

39:41

though given what's happened to you? Oh, I don't see

39:43

why not I mean it I'm a frustrated actor It's

39:47

the only other thing that I ever wanted to do so

39:50

How important was comedy in helping you

39:52

to? Endure the situation

39:54

are very important. I think I'm kind of

39:56

fortunate in that I have the sense of

39:58

humor and I do I do think that humor

40:00

in a way is an answer

40:03

to fanaticism. It's difficult

40:06

to imagine a funny fascist.

40:09

Also, humor is a thing, laughter is

40:11

a thing we do together. It's important.

40:14

As we've discussed, migration has been one

40:16

of your big themes throughout your writing

40:18

life. Have you considered returning to the

40:20

UK to live? Well, I mean, I

40:22

return all the time. To live? Oh,

40:24

to live. You know,

40:26

I've done uprooting so much in my life.

40:29

It gets a bit harder when you're older, you know? Just

40:32

too much effort. And what drives you

40:34

on creatively? Just what else would I do? I'd

40:38

have no other talent. But I've

40:41

always thought that writing has been,

40:43

for me, my

40:45

way of understanding the world, which is to say

40:47

my way of understanding the world is to tell

40:50

stories about it. And the

40:52

world still needs understanding, including by me.

40:55

So this book is the 22nd book. I

40:58

mean, there's certainly not 22 more. But

41:01

I hope there might be one or two. You've talked

41:03

about how important comedy is to you, keeping

41:06

you going. But it does strike me

41:08

how incredibly upbeat you are, given

41:11

everything that has happened. Yeah,

41:13

I don't know. The resilience.

41:16

I think I discovered that I was

41:19

more resilient than I would have believed myself to be.

41:22

Let's say, if you had told me in advance the

41:24

following things are going to happen, how

41:27

do you think you'll deal with them? I

41:29

would not have bet on myself to do that well. But

41:32

it turns out that

41:34

I'm tougher than I thought. And do

41:36

you think that is as a result of

41:38

having such a near-death experience? Yeah. One of

41:40

the things my editor in New York said

41:42

to me when I was first

41:45

talking about writing this book, he

41:47

said, very few people have the experience

41:50

that you've had, which is to get this

41:52

close to death and then come back

41:54

from it. He said, so tell the story. And

41:57

so I did. Keep telling stories,

41:59

Salma. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed for

42:01

sharing your cultural life with us. Thank you. Well

42:11

I really hope you enjoyed that conversation with

42:13

Salman Rushdie. He's just one

42:15

of several Booker Prize winners that

42:17

we've had on this cultural life

42:19

including Bernardine Everisto, Penelope Lively, Douglas

42:21

Stewart, Ian McEwen and Margaret Atwood.

42:23

To hear them and dozens more

42:25

leading creative figures head to BBC

42:27

Sounds or wherever you get your

42:29

podcasts to subscribe to this cultural

42:31

life. From me John Wilson and

42:33

producer Edwina Pittman. Thank you very

42:35

much indeed for listening. I'm

42:42

Kavita Puri and in three million

42:44

from BBC Radio 4 I

42:47

hear extraordinary eyewitness accounts that

42:49

tell the story for the

42:51

first time of the Bengal

42:53

famine which happened in British India in the

42:55

middle of the Second World War. At

42:58

least three million people died. It's one

43:00

of the largest losses of civilian life

43:02

on the Allied side and there isn't

43:04

a museum, a memorial or

43:07

even a plaque to those who died. How

43:10

can the memory of three million people

43:12

just disappear? 80

43:18

years on I track down

43:20

first-hand accounts and make new

43:22

discoveries and hear remarkable stories

43:25

and explore why remembrance is

43:27

so complicated in Britain, India

43:30

and Bangladesh. Listen

43:32

to three million on BBC Sounds.