The Iconoclast

Salman Rushdie discusses free speech, fundamentalism, America's place in the world, and his new essay collection

Shikha Dalmia from the August/September 2005 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

���� Of course American policy plays a role because it is so powerful. But many of the things that are happening there had local roots.

Reason: Nobody would quarrel with that, but the question is, can--and has--current U.S. foreign policy been a catalyst for positive change?

Rushdie: I think that's an open question. The next decade will tell us the answer.

Reason: So do you or don't you part company with critics of American power, like Roy?

Rushdie: I admire a lot of Arundhati's activism and have written in support of her efforts to stop some of the big dam projects in India. She is an old-style leftist of the sort that there still are in India, and many of them are my friends. But I don't see the world the way they do, with America as the bogeyman.

���� I wrote Shame [1983] when there were still two superpowers. One of the ideas of that novel was that it is very easy to blame the superpowers for the problems of, say, India and Pakistan. The premise was, let's just assume that our problems are of our own making and then exacerbated by this or that superpower. At that point you get back responsibility for your own life. It puts the tools back in our own hands. It's kind of infantilizing to say that everything comes from the outside.

Reason: When I was growing up in India, every communal riot, every instance of government corruption, every thing that went wrong was blamed by politicians on the "CIA Hand."

Rushdie: Everything. Everything was the Hidden Hand. The Pynchonesque conspiracy running the world.

Reason: Your book Step Across This Line is a celebration of migration, commingling, adaptation, hybridization, cultural mongrelization. But even the most thorough cultural mongrel clings to something of his origins. What part of your Indianness do you cling to?

Rushdie: Not a small part. It's a very, very important thing for me. As I wrote somewhere in that book, one of the greatest hardships of those years of the fatwa was my separation from India. A decade. It was amazing to me that there was a 10-year period in my life when I couldn't go back.

Reason: One of the most poignant essays in your book was when you return to India and reclaim your ancestral home in Solan, which had been confiscated in your absence by the state government.

Rushdie: It was a very emotional moment, especially because I took my son with me, and that piece reflects that. Anyway, since then I have been going back a lot and making up for lost time. It feeds me like nothing else. It always has.

Reason: What aspect of India does that?

Rushdie: You know, I don't think theoretically like that. I just go there, and it has a big effect on me. It gives me stories to tell.