There are a few authors (Salman Rushdie, Vikram Chandra, Zadie Smith, Michael Ondaatje) who rock so hard, I devour their entire canon in weeks and wait impatiently for the latest installment. Fortunately, I’m not alone. The manly Booker committee just long listed both Rushdie and Smith, author of the Bangla-friendly White Teeth, for their upcoming books.

Amardeep previously pointed us to Amitava Kumar’s review of Shalimar the Clown, whose launch has been moved up to Sep. 6. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, Christopher Hitchens reads the novel as political science tract, comparing Kashmir to Palestine. It’s reportedly a glowing review (only the intro is online) penned by Hitch for his longtime buddy:

Take the room-temperature op-ed article that you have read lately, or may be reading now, or will scan in the future. Cast your eye down as far as the sentence that tells you there will be no terminus to Muslim discontent until there has been a solution to the problem of Palestine. Take any writing implement that comes to hand, strike out the word “Palestine,” and insert “Kashmir…”

If anything calamitous in the thermonuclear line does occur in the next few years, it is most probable that Kashmir will be the trigger. Moreover, it was the lakes and valleys and mountains of Kashmir that made the crucible in which the Pakistan–Taliban–al-Qaeda “faith-based” alliance was originally formed. The bitterest and longest battle between Islamic jihad and its foes is a struggle not between jihad and the West, or jihad and the Jews, but between jihad and Hindu/secular India. It is a matter not of East versus West but of East versus East. [Link]

I know this from a little study and also from a visit to the Pakistani-held side of Kashmir, where I was reminded that although human beings will always fight over even the most arid and desolate prizes, there are some places so humblingly beautiful that it is possible to imagine dying for them oneself. Salman Rushdie knows it in his core: he is Kashmiri by family… [Link]

The Village Voice is turned off by the degree to which Shalimar plumbs the senseless grief of militant violence:

The events of Rushdie’s life are allegory for the unavoidable world-historical collision between rootless cosmopolitanism and theocratic absolutism, between civilization (with its values of secularism, skepticism, and relativism) and the gathering forces of a new medievalism. His greatest novels–Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor’s Last Sigh–percolate around just this kind of conflict, as India, or some subset of the subcontinent, tears itself apart. Rushdie repeatedly returns to the primal scene of a paradise squandered…

Some might question whether Afghanistan counts as South Asia. Geopolitically, it makes sense to see the country more as a hinge between western Asia (i.e., Iran, Iraq, and Turkey), and South Asia, than as decisively belonging to either region. There are certainly strong cultural ties between especially the northwestern (Pashtun-dominated) part of Pakistan and southern and eastern Afghanistan. And they listen to Hindi film songs and ghazals, and through Persian, use words like Zindagi, naan, pakora, mard, etc. On the other hand, while there are some good historical connections to the Indian subcontinent (i.e., through the the British Raj), geographically Afghanistan is cut off from it by mountains so… take your pick. There is a discussion of the question here.

Whether or not it’s certifiably ‘Sepia’, The Kite Runner does feel desi — or Watani — and it’s likely to be a book many of the readers of this blog will enjoy. Besides the (primary) story about a pair of friends growing up in idyllic, pre-1973 Afghanistan, there is an interesting consideration of life in the Afghan neighborhood in the Bay Area, “Little Kabul” in Fremont (a town which also has a large Indian population, incidentally).

Fremont is where author Khaled Hosseini grew up after his folks left Afghanistan in 1980. It’s interesting to me that in real life Hosseini is a practicing physician (age 38), while he makes the protagonist in his somewhat autobiographical book a professional writer. That Amir’s father in the novel accepts his son’s unconventional choice of profession without a fight — which no South Asian parent would ever do! — might be the only thing that really doesn’t ring true for me in terms of the immigrant experience reflected in The Kite Runner. Continue reading →

New stuff:

• Mukul Kesavan on the rise of Jinnah and the Muslim league
• Kamila Shamsie on Tariq Ali’s A Sultan in Palermo
• Amitava Kumar’s critique of Salman Rushdie in Tehelka; my disagreements with Kumar
• Cranky comments from V.S. Naipaul in the New York Times; my bewilderment

Continue reading →