Amitava Kumar is currently at Vassar College, and Salman Rushdie was recently scheduled to be a guest speaker. Amitava, as an accomplished critic and essayist, was suggested by the college to introduce Rushdie, but Rushdie vetoed it [see update below]:
Salman Rushdie came to Vassar College earlier this week to deliver a lecture for the Class of 2010–but he made it clear to the organizers that he would cancel if I was involved in his visit. I had earlier been asked to introduce him, and then, well, I was disinvited. Mr Rushdie and I have never met, although I have heard him speak several times. I presume his dislike of me has to do with essays like these that I have written about him in the past. (link)
The essay Amitava links to is a long, partly sunny and partly sour critique of Rushdie, ending with a review of Shalimar the Clown. I think Amitava’s best criticism is probably the following:
The trouble is that despite all his invention and exuberance Rushdie remains to a remarkable extent an academic writer. He is academic in that abstractions rule over his narratives. They determine the outlines of his characters, their faces, and their voices. Rushdie is also academic in the sense that his rebellions and his critiques are all securely progressive ones, advancing the causes that the intelligentsia, especially the left-liberal Western intelligentsia, holds close to its breast. This is not a bad thing, but it should qualify one’s admiration for Rushdie’s daring.(link)
It’s true, many of Rushdie’s best, most memorable lines are actually socio-historical commentaries, or nuggets of cultural criticism that could very well come from a professor (though they wouldn’t sound as nice). Of course, Rushdie isn’t alone in this, and it might be unfair to be overly harsh about academicism, since academic ideas about the fragmentation of the self and problems of nationhood and nationalism have been widely and generally influential. Lots of novelists these days are discussing issues that are also being discussed at academic conferences. (Indeed, more than a few well-known novelists are themselves academics, to pay the bills — writing don’t pay that well.)
But one can contrast Rushdie’s nuggets of cultural criticism (which are especially prevalent in his later fiction) with deeply felt characterization or a personal, human touch. Vikram Seth, who is sometimes named as a protege of Rushdie, has perhaps gone beyond him, both in A Suitable Boy, and in the marvelous personal memoir Two Lives (a much riskier thing to write and publish than a topical novel like Shalimar). Rushdie is still pretty much Mr. Postcolonial, but is he necessarily Mr. Indian Literature? (Are there term-limits?)
Despite the criticisms, no one can take away from what Rushdie has accomplished as a writer and as a principled public figure over the years, and Amitava acknowledges this at points in his essay as well as in the introduction he had planned to give:
I guess I would be speaking for a lot of readers, particularly in those parts of the planet that used to be called the Third World, who saw Mr Rushdie as having fought and won against, and made an ally of, the English language, the alien language that had come to us with our colonial rulers. Mr Rushdie has had to fight many other battles since; he has made many friends and enemies; and we (IÂ’m speaking as an Indian here) we, as his readers and as writers, have followed his actions, his songs, his mannerisms, and even when we have chosen not to follow him into the sunset, weÂ’ve always had to define ourselves, and our rebellions, against this image we have had of him, looking down at us from giant billboards at each street-corner of our past. (link)
Perhaps a bit passive aggressive? At any rate, nicely put.
[Update: it appears that Rushdie himself has shown up in the comments to Amitava’s post. In it, he indicates that it was the organizer’s decision to disinvite Amitava, but he affirms that he “refused to share a stage” with him.]
Thank you, macaca! But you misunderstand my point: Kumar is free to, and should, critique Rushdie till the cows come home. But if he wants to be taken seriously then he needs to address those parts of Rushdie’s reception that are a little harder to dismiss than some simple target in an Indian weekly. That essay is a fine bit of grandstanding and there’s a strong whiff of that in his blog post as well.
By the way, it’s “gabbar”, not “gabber”.
Rushdie is well within his rights to blow off Kumar; writers are under no obligation to be polite. In fact, someoneone once said that good people make bad writers. Mr. Kobayashi’s attack on Rushdie is excessive. Personally, I think Midnight’s Children stands alongside One Hundred Years of Solitude as a great work of fiction, and will endure, in India if no place else.
Rushdie’s victimization by an aggressive Islam and his continual (and necessary) critique of it is, in a way, the antithesis of Kumar’s quixotic attempt at an anodyne South Asianism. Kumar is a guy who was narcissistic enough to enact his own marriage on the subcontinental stage to demonstrate that bridging the chasm between India and Pakistan was indeed a possibility! (As though Hindus and Muslims havent gotten married before. 🙂 Perhaps Rushdie-as-victim is a problem for Kumar, who play-acted a conversion to Islam to make some kind of point. God knows what that point is. Besides that, like all good South Asianists, he relativizes India and Pakistan, Hinduism and Islam, and always depicts “baddies” from both sides in the interest of “balance.” That he had to pretend to be a Muslim to enter Pakistan spoke loudly about the disparity between the two countries and exposed his relativism as contrivance – what we Americans would call extreme political correctness.
No, no: “extreme political correctness” is when you sentence a writer to death for offending your system of beliefs. Of course, Naipaul uncle thinks of this as extreme literary criticism.
Your own broad-brush painting of South Asianists suggests some other agenda. There are enough South Asianists who have high opinions of Rushdie as well.
i think it is disgusting that an acclaimed writer like rushdie would be so shallow. i am absolutely flabbergasted.
Yes, and why did Hendrix play so much electric guitar? Tch– so flashy. He should’ve played cowbell. I second the request.
Marquez wrote ‘Solitude’ as if paid by the word. Pulp soap opera on paper, plot for plot’s sake.
Yes, the love of language for its own sake.
Your ‘Mozart’: “… sanitary napkins… remain in place… ‘because of the stickiness of pussjuice.’ ” —English, August. You meant ‘jester.’
To you, his style is the problem. It’s not magical realism you detest, it’s this style of wordplay, and Rushdie is one of its leading practitioners.
Some specifically read novels for the truths most sharply told in fiction.
I think you quite clearly have never poured your life into your creative work, your children.
Here is my tribute towards this discussion:
“For Nostalgic Realism”
They will not come back, The minute before Mr. Kobiyashi referred to, “Mr. Indian Literature” as a Right C*nt. The minute after Manish implied that, Garcia Marquez was paid by the word to write 100 years of solitude. Also, the minute before and after, Amitava Kumar never
won a Booker Prizegot a supermodelgot to introduce Rushdie.Thanks Manish!
I just think that people’s hyper-sensitive awareness of Rushdie leads them to critique his personal, individual style as some kind of mass-produced Bollywood gimmick. What about Seth’s ‘monopoly’ on Indian arranged marriages, or Lahiri’s ‘monopoly’ on Gen X desis? The fact is that none exists, but what does exist is a strong awareness of Rushdie’s presence in world literature as a major writer. But he is. Get used to it.
I probably would have agreed with Amitava Kumar a little while ago, but now I’ve gotten over my Rushdie-itis 🙂
I’m sorry Amardeep, but respectfully, I don’t think magic realism looks like a gimmick. Magic realism with a wide-ranging perspective is what Rushdie does as an artist, and I think he does it really well. I like quieter stories too, but I don’t think such writing is necessarily better, that someone like Ghosh is better than Rushdie. You might as well get Alice Munro to stop writing small-scoped short stories about suburban Canada, or get Margaret Atwood to stop trying to re-write fairytales with feisty, feminist prose, or get Toni Morrison to stop being hung up on writing about the African American experience.
Rushdie writes (mainly) about the South Asian immigrant’s experience, and his is only one (major) voice among many important ones. And sorry Maya but that poem still looks painful.
But a head-butt is ok 🙂
Have you read Husband of a Fanatic? You should do – it is good on the rabies of Hindu Nationalism and hatred for Muslims in the North American Indian diaspora. Of course, it is easy to dismiss this as posturing, if writing on this gets under your skin in the first place. To the rest of us, your criticism of Kumar is nonsense.
Have you read Husband of a Fanatic?
Yes. And this is where one encounters the “difficulties” Kumar had upon entering Pakistan. Parts were good, parts weren’t. My argument is that Kumar’s particular project is in conflict with Rushdie’s, and that his criticsism of the author for espousing “mainstream liberal” views is indeed passive-aggressive.
To the rest of us, your criticism of Kumar is nonsense.
Thank you for letting me know. Please convey my regards and my apologies to “the rest of us,” both in Britain and the United States.
That is not your argument at all. At least not before you changed, modified and twisted it just now. Your argument was that he is a dastardly ‘South Asianist’ who proffers criticisms of Hinduism etc only in order to offer a balance and detract from the dreaded iniquities of Islam and Pakistan, and is engaged in a conspiracy of relativisation in that respect. So, rather than accepting that he writes on the world as he sees it, and comments on his experience, you characterised it as an insincere camouflage with ulterior motives, belonging to a dread breed of puppet masters whose sole purpose is, you know, to say bad things about Hindu nationalism/whatever, when really they should be kicking Pakistan, who, you know, deserve it much more. That reasoning has the same basis as those Muslims who denigrate Rushdie and other Muslim dissenters as being motivated by something other than expressing personal commentary and interpretation of their world – it has to, in fact, be part of a zionist conspiracy to defame Islam, or some other tendentious crap like that.
Same old shit, just a different can.
So, rather than accepting that he writes on the world as he sees it, and comments on his experience, you characterised it as an insincere camouflage with ulterior motives, belonging to a dread breed of puppet masters whose sole purpose is, you know,
I didn’t camaflage it. Actually, its more complex than you make it out to be. Kumar’s intentions and the actual work are two different things, which is why “passive aggressive” sums it up succinctly. The mind is not so innocent; objective observers are fictions. And if he can go off on Rushdie, than we can all can go off on him too no? 🙂
. That reasoning has the same basis as those Muslims who denigrate Rushdie and other Muslim dissenters as being motivated by something other than expressing personal commentary and interpretation of their world
Oh sure 🙂 Here’s the principal difference between the two diaporas: Your fanatics actually blow shit up in Western cities, ours don’t 🙂 Some would consider that a salient difference.
Same old shit, just a different can.
Ditto.
Risible, Love the quote about good people making bad writers. As a writer, I’m going to find it rather convenient…
Sorry for digressing..
Hari, Just curious.. Have you read Jayakanthan’s works??.. (since you claim to be a Tamil who grew up in Delhi, I’m aware that many of the Tamils who grew up outside TN (and a few within TN) don’t know how to read or write in Tamil) and how do you judge the relative merits of Jayakanthan and Vikram Seth..
Oooh, Manish. Touched a nerve, did I? grin
All I’ll say in response is (1) that I have deep respect for sanitary napkins, and (2) that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with melodrama. So, if you think Chatterjee is a puerile hack, and Garcia-Marquez is a telenovela script-writer, we can agree to disagree.
The rest of the discussion, my writerly friend, has to happen in the private garrett, as we read and perhaps as we create our own work.
For the record, if Amitava Kumar had actually made lewd comments about Rushdie’s sister- rather than just limiting his critique to literature- I think a headbutt would have been well in order. As it is, Salman’s just being a has-been prima-donna. Come now, be honest, has he even written anything readable since The Moor’s Last Sigh in 1996? With the exception of the essay collection Walk Across This Line, Mr R. has been up his own fundament for more than a decade.
Ah, I love the smell of napalm in the morning…
Ponniyin Selvan,
To Hari,
Times, NYT, WaPost’endra varisaiyai naan kanDEn Andha varisaiyil uLLavar maTTumalla, Ada nEEyum Emaandhai
A twist on Kavignar KaNNadasan’s lines from Kamban Emaandhan… in Nizhal Nijamaagiradhu I am sure he wouldn’t mind
Jayakanthan put his money where his mouth is, making the classic “Unnaippol Oruvan” and barely got away with the shirt on his back. When Hari reads up on that movie we will have a more serious discussion.
risible wrote: Rushdie’s victimization by an aggressive Islam and his continual (and necessary) critique of it is, in a way, the antithesis of Kumar’s quixotic attempt at an anodyne South Asianism
I’m not getting something here (perhaps you should mix in the word c*nt so that us proles can understand!) — how is Rusdhie not ‘South Asian’? I always found him to be the least typically Indian of Indian writers. Shame is a novel about Pakistan. He uses Hindi/Urdu in a way comprehensible on both sides of the Durand line. He accesses a Muslim indian heritage that many Pakistanis identify with. If Rushdie isn’t ‘South Asian’, what the hell does the term mean in literary criticism? That Khomenei likes your work?
Of course, ‘durand line’ is wrong. Though I’m sure many residents of Kabul like Rushdie’s work, I meant to say ‘Radcliffe Award’. Sorry.
English, August is hilarious but juvenile, with a plot that doesn’t move so much as marinate in its own patchouli. One Hundred Years of Solitude was excellent up until one hundred pages before the end. Every new page of pointless, unconnected plot could’ve been its own novel, Dickens minus Dickens. I want insight, not recitation.
But one’s everyday soccer field trash talk, the other’s a cut-down of your baby. Novelists often spend more time on their work than with their children.
I loved The Ground Beneath Her Feet– smart, romantic– and liked Shalimar quite a bit. The Moor’s Last Sigh is still the most textured Bombay novel I’ve read.
I suspect you dislike late Rushdie’s rock pose. It’s L.A., but he’s still got the goods.
Fair enough, Brother Vij, fair enough.
Oi there, don’t hog it all. There is a lot of Cochin in it too:) Also, there are strong rumours that Rushdie prefers Cochin to Bombay because of Padma Junction. Peace
My fanatics? I’m Hindu. Add stale shit in a rusty can as a description of your works and reasoning.
You see, your basic premise, that Amitava Kumar is a conspiring ‘South Asianist’, who writes expressly and tokenistically to counteract and neuter criticism of Islam in the modern world, rather than write about his experiences in an honest way, is patent crap. I understand that it gets under your skin, because you are of the mindset that is irked by that investigation, and you descend to mud slinging of the juvenile my fanatics-your fanatics kind (oh comedy! I am uncircumcised!) but your criticism of his work is really nothing more than a whine for it having been written. Passive-aggressive? Stop being a crybaby.
Is there a character called Jai in your book?
Just kidding, don’t get angry.
Red Snapper,
Don’t feed the troll, mate 😉
And you get insight from Rushdie? Seriously?
I think Rushdie is past his prime and you have to separate the literary strands and the political ones he represents. For his politics and defence of free speech I’m with him 100%, for his novels since The Satanic Verses I don’t have much to say. Read Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum and compare it to Midnight’s Children, he has said himself he stole his tricks from that novel.
I don’t think she’s a troll Jai. I was just being flippant.
Not true, Bidi. But I can see how someone who’s neither a writer nor a critic might think that way.
In reality, there’s a discourse, a very long-running one, in which both the writer and the critic participate. Some critics actually bridge that gap, either by making creative work themselves (Pankaj Mishra writes novels as well as criticism, and the same thing is true of folks like Martin Amis, John Updike, and Vladimir Nabokov), or by absorbing creative techniques into their critical work (such as Amitava Kumar does). A few writers, such as J. M. Coetzee (and Daniel Defoe before him), explore the motivations and difficulties of storytelling (specifically fiction writing) from within a fictional construct. Coetzee’s Slow Man is an example of such a book. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival is another.
Your simplistic division into parasite and host (and you’re not alone in doing this, so don’t feel too bad) might suit the purposes of polemic, but it has nothing to do with the way things are. I recommend that you read Alberto Manguel’s A Reading Diary or Amitava Kumar’s Bombay, London, New York. Either will suffice to rid you of the idea that critics and writers are necessarily at each other’s throats.
The larger question is whether a lot of the book-talk in popular media qualifies as critique. I won’t prejudice your answer to that question by revealing mine. 🙂
And, by the way, for the technically minded, parasitism is a form of symbiosis. One of three.
Someone once said to me that literary critics are like flies on shit. Then he realised he was describing writers as the shit and spent the rest of the evening thinking of a better comparison.
BidiSmoker you might have a point about the fractious nature of the relationship between critics and writer in some cases, but I don’t think Kumar’s comments about His Imperial Majesty were anything close to being a hatchet job.
Don’t be an ass.
Tendentious nonsense. It’s obvious you know nothing of Kumar’s work, and you have no respect for intellectual enterprise.
Ask for your money back.
Is it me or are there too many ad hominems in the current discourse?
My fanatics? I’m Hindu.
Yeah and? You made that clear many times here, and judging from your tourette’s like invocation of “fanatics” and “Hindu nationalism” and other assorted tripe, I suspect you are a “progressive” one too. Funny you should invoke your non_Muslim identity as a defense of the, ahem, rather verifiable charge that your diaspora has fanatics who blow things up. That is a prima facie distinction between right-wing diasporic Hinduism and Islam, and all your tiresome and onanistic sophistry is laughable in light of that.
You see, your basic premise, that Amitava Kumar is a conspiring ‘South Asianist’, who writes expressly and tokenistically to counteract and neuter criticism of Islam in the modern world, rather than write about his experiences in an honest way  Expressly and tokenistically is a vast simplification of intentionality -its much more complex than you make out (you keep missing this, and insist on analzying it as a conspiracy), yes, I do think he’s insincere and agenda-driven, that there are express elements and tokenistic elements in his insincerity, but more interesting to me is that Kumar’s critque centers upon a charge that Rushdie’s own mode of critque is somehow pedantic because its liberal and western – not daring enough as he says. How is Rushdie supposed to respond to Islamism? What would be “daring” in his book? You are one fine progressive goonda, I suggest you write Rushdie a heartfelt letter with some tips. 🙂
Stop being a crybaby.
I’m not crying.
Shame is a novel about Pakistan. He uses Hindi/Urdu in a way comprehensible on both sides of the Durand line.
I read Shame as strong-form criticism of Pakistan. Rushdie is not averse to criticising Hindu nationalism as well, but unlike Kumar’s relativizing antics, Rushdie has some idea, imo, of the difference.
Kumar cannot reason. When Rusdhie called for the lifting of the ban against the Satanic Verses, Kumar wrote that the Sikh issue was more important, and that Rushdie hadn’t been concerned with democracy in the past. As undoubtedly important as the Sikh issue was (and still is), wtf is that?
Kumar is unsatsified with Shalimar because he believes that Rushdie reduced the Kashmir problem to “honor killings.” :)His antics will undoubtedly continue, but Kumar deserves some credit for unintentional comic effect. In his little book, he could not get the idea of “fucking Islam as he fucked his wife” – an idea colorfully suggested to him by a Hindu fanatic – out of his head. In a moment of voyeuristic pathos, he relates to the reader that the idea crossed his mind at the moment he kissed his wife.
DQ: write it well! 🙂
I ban the next person who personally attacks another commenter.
I’d suggest that the fact that (by your own admission) you haven’t read Kumar’s work leaves you ill-qualified to make sweeping (and aggressive) pronouncements such as this.
No personal disrespect intended BidiSmoker. I apologize if any’s taken.
The next person who refers to self-pleasuring in a derogatory fashion will be banned!
Risible you make two very good points which need to be highlighted again;
‘Rushdie is not averse to criticising Hindu nationalism as well, but unlike Kumar’s relativizing antics, Rushdie has some idea, imo, of the difference.’
Rushdie has in fact on many occasions bemoaned the ascent of Hindu nationalism particularly in his hometown of Bombay. However unlike wannabe intellectuals like Amitava Kumar, he understands the several degrees of difference between the dangers posed by Islamic and Hindu fundamentalism.
‘Kumar cannot reason. When Rusdhie called for the lifting of the ban against the Satanic Verses, Kumar wrote that the Sikh issue was more important, and that Rushdie hadn’t been concerned with democracy in the past. As undoubtedly important as the Sikh issue was (and still is), wtf is that?’
My point exactly.
caveat: i haven’t read any of mr. kumar’s works, other than the articles posted on his website and a couple found elsewhere on the internet. while i agree with some of what he says, even when it seems to stem from something very personal and not from more objective literary criticism (but then again, can it ever be really objective?), i don’t quite agree with other things he says.
i may be wrong, but going by the articles on his website and others, mr. kumar seems to focus a lot on rushdie and naipaul.
i am especially curious as to whether he has critiqued “god of small things” in a detailed literary fashion, primarily because roy is another indian writer whose celebrity has outstripped her status as a fiction writer, whose use of the english language is also quite “abstract” at times (he mentions her in several of the articles, and seems to have enjoyed the book but there is no real detail in these articles on her writing, more on her politics). if there is a link to a more detailed critique of her writing, i would appreciate it. thanks.
Yet going by a slightly confusing (to me) article on rediff, mr. kumar appears to be giving her celebrityhood a free pass (with one or two reservations) because she espouses causes that are more in line with and in a manner more in line with his than say, rushdie’s or naipaul’s. nothing wrong with this, but it’s unclear whether he objects to the cult of author as celebrity in general or author as celebrity with whom he doesn’t share the same worldview in particular. granted, it’s an old article, and his feelings on roy may have changed since then. but i am curious as to what he thinks of her actual writing and not her politics.
in that same article he provides a rather strange, to me at least, criticism of kiran desai’s “hullabaloo in the guava orchard.” it’s as if he bit into an apple and is annoyed that it didn’t taste like an orange. it’s one thing to find characters or themes weak or poorly drawn and another to complain that they don’t have the worldview or motives or thinking that you think the author should have given them or that the author never intended to give them in the first place or never intended the book to have, especially in a book like hullabaloo.
Why has no one pointed out just how brilliant this statement is?! Acerbic, dangerously witty and now Mozart references….damn.
Red Snapper (aka Enfant Terrible): Not a character, as I want the book to be interesting. But there is this minor villain, a little gnome-like, Calibanish creature who lives in a hole in the ground, thinks he’s a god, and is forever preening in a mirror, whom I have yet to name. Hmm…
Sorry intern, I couldn’t resist.
OK risible – I’ll spell it out for you in case the onanism you relish is too distracting.
I was not contesting the different manifestations of Hindu and Islamic extremism in the diaspora. I referred to my background because you threw the phrase ‘your diaspora’ at me. In the context of this discussion, I don’t belong to the Muslim diaspora and was pointing that out. So, your rage is wasted – nobody contests that. [Visions of progressive goondas taunting you subside from the horizon]
OK, next….
Nope. That would be you:
A writer with ‘South Asianist’ tendencies (who they? And are they all good?) ‘relativizing’ egregiously by writing on subjects close to him and comparing the tensions and dynamics of fanaticism and extremist nationalism* within his own background in the context of Islamist extremism is part of a dastardly South Asianist agenda/tendency/school/attitude deliberately obfuscating difference between ideologies in order to distract from the murderous nature of Islamic fundamentalism, and not just a writer reflecting on his own life, experience, perspective? Especially given how the two extremisms feed off each other? Mentioning them together is dishonest? In all instances?
Is there no end to their goonda progressive wanking? Does this sophistry never end? Maybe they are just doing it to annoy you. Tripe indeed.
*Whoops! Sorry for repeating those words again. You can slap my wrists.
Ikram,
Rushdie has at various times identified himself as British-Indian and British-Asian. I am sure Rushdie would be fine with the term South Asian as well. But I am troubled by your assertion that he is the least typically Indian of Indian writers. Does the fact that he is an Indian-Muslim, make him less Indian?
I‘m not interested in an idealised, romantic vision of India. I know it is the great pitfall of the exile. So you know for me, always, the issue of writing about India has been not to write as an outsider.
But I think actually there are certain things about me that just inescapably, 100 percent, will always be Indian. That’s to say, that’s what I racially and ethnically am.
Regarding his exile from India
All I can say is that I have felt it as the most profound loss and I still do. There have been many losses in this last decade but the loss of the easy return to India has been for me an absolute anguish, an inescapable anguish. I feel as if I’ve lost a limb
I have never known him to make a similar statement about Pakistan. He did spend time in Pakistan after college. His parents had hoped that he would permanently settle down in Pakistan. If I remember correctly they wanted him to run a towel factory. I suspect that he would not quibble with you about the “South Asian” classification, but his love is specifically for India (and Bombay), I find it very typically Indian.
I remember watching copies of Satanic Verses being burned on da streets of Manchester at the end of the eighties, and as a young writer working out how badily Rushdie had miscalculated the mood of Muslims in the UK and around da world. Got some of his stuff but for me he lacks the poetic ease of Murakami or most of all peeps like Mantoji. Hated seeing books being burnt but understood da anger, There are many ways to have internal critical dialogue about Islam but this incident set certain events in motion to where we are now with some of my bros becoming ‘radicalised’. For many young Pakistani lads the first march that people went on was in 1989 against Rushdie. Bottom line is that for all his left/radical creditenials we don’t see him at meetings or engaging with political struggle (and I don’t mean just defending fellow writers around censorship issues).
Tef wrote: Does the fact that he is an Indian-Muslim, make him less Indian?
Tef– this is all definitional, but no, I don’t think he’s less Indian, I think he is more than just Indian (not that there’s anything wrong with being just Indian). And not because he is ethnically Muslim.
The fact that he is interested in, and willing to critically engage with, Pakistan shows he can transcend national limitations. That his take on PK is critical is not a big deal — many Pakistanis are very critical of PK. It’s that he engages that counts.
Rushdie’s probably transcended Subcontinental limitations as well — he’s a global writer — that’s another story.
Salman & Amitava, I suggest a duel! The first one amongst the two of you to post the 100th comment on this topic will be declared the winner in your literary catfight. OK, on your marks, put your handbags down, and GO!!!
Background Music: “We are the champions my friend…”
Think Salman Rushdie, think trouble, think controversy…like everything else with Mr Rushdie, that’s a controversial opinion. He could start a brawl in a Trappist monastery.
link