Salman Rushdie who was in India to promote Deepa Mehta’s film The Midnight’s Children and managed to get into a controversy about the Kolkata Literature Festival, spoke about contemporary English writing in India and why new Pakistani writers thrill him.
There was a time when almost every Indian writer writing in English wanted to be Salman Rushdie – or Vikram Seth. And a bit later Arundhati Roy. What do you make of the situation now?
This phenomenon of Indian writing in English which began in the 80s was a huge boom. And then it kind of faded and then it came back. What is interesting now is that there’s no longer just two or three writers but a whole literature. And that literature goes from the very high-brow Amit Chaudhuri to the very low-brow Chetan Bhagat and there’s a whole spectrum. That’s a very good thing. So I think what’s happened is that we don’t have to talk about it as a phenomenon any more. Now it’s a literature. And that will develop and people will rise and fall and change, but what’s happened is that in thirty years we now have what we didn’t have before: a broad spectrum of Indian literature in English. I like Rana Dasgupta, Jeet Thayil and I enjoyed Nilanjana Roy’s children’s book. But I actually think that the Pakistani stuff is more interesting.
What do you make of Mohammed Hanif?
Yeah, yeah. I think Mohammed Hanif is the business actually. I like Daniyal Mueenuddin, I like Nadeem Aslam, I like Kamila Shamsie. I just think that’s what hasn’t happened before – the arrival of a generation of Pakistani writers in English. Before, there was the odd one. There was someone like, you know, Bapsi Sidhwa. But you didn’t have the sense of a sudden explosion.
Your interest in India is obviously connected to your personal history. But beyond that? Anything beyond wanting to turn memories into fiction?
It’s not only about my past. Shalimar [the Clown] is about Kashmir. I remember when I was writing that book, I told myself, you have to write a novel which happens in a village. If you’re going to write about Kashmir, it can’t happen in Srinagar. The challenge for me of writing that novel was not writing about the politics, but about writing about village life I have no idea about.