Salman Rushdie: The Man Who Would Not Apologise
On 12 August 2022, Salman Rushdie walked onto a stage at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York to give a talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm. A man came out of the audience with a knife. Rushdie survived, blind in one eye, and wrote a book about it. Near the start of *Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder*, he disposes of the question everyone wanted answered: "If anyone's looking for remorse, you can stop reading right here."
Bombay, Rugby, Cambridge
He was born on 19 June 1947 in Bombay, two months before Indian independence — an accident of timing that would eventually become a novel. He was sent to Rugby School in England in 1961. His family moved to Pakistan in 1964, and from 1965 he read history at King's College, Cambridge, where he developed a specific scholarly interest in early Islamic history. Cambridge also gave him E. M. Forster, art cinema and the orbit of the Footlights. After a brief stretch in Pakistan with his relocated family, he settled permanently in Britain in 1968.
Naughty. But Nice.
His first profession was advertising. He wrote copy for Sharp McManus, Ogilvy and Mather, and Ayer Barker Hegermann, producing campaigns for Aero chocolate and coining, for cream cakes, the line "naughty. But nice." It is a useful thing to know about a writer later accused of impenetrability: he spent years being paid to be memorable in four words.
He was also, through the late 1970s and early 1980s, a volunteer with the Camden Committee for Community Relations, working with South Asian families on housing. His first novel, *Grimus*, appeared in 1975 and sank.
Midnight's Children
Then, in 1981, *Midnight's Children*. The Booker Prize's own summary of it is exact: Saleem's life is "a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirror the course of modern India at its most impossible." The novel won the Booker that year, and later won it twice more in retrospect — the Booker of Bookers and the Best of the Booker — making it, by the prize's own reckoning, the most decorated novel in its history.
*Shame* followed in 1983. Over a career of fourteen novels, Rushdie has collected seven Booker nominations in total: *Shame*, *The Satanic Verses*, *The Moor's Last Sigh*, *Shalimar the Clown*, *The Enchantress of Florence* and *Quichotte* joining the winner, plus a shortlisting for his entire body of work for the Man Booker International Prize in 2007. He also took Costa Book Awards in 1988 and 1995.
14 February 1989
*The Satanic Verses* was published in 1988 and shortlisted for the Booker. On 14 February 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini ordered on Radio Tehran that "Muslims of the world rapidly to execute the author and the publishers of the book," so that "no one will any longer dare to offend the sacred values of Islam." A bounty of $3 million was placed on Rushdie's life; by 2012 it had been raised to $3.3 million.
He went into hiding under police protection and stayed there for more than a decade, moving between safe houses under an assumed name, before relocating to New York in 2000.
The People Who Paid
The cost was not confined to him, and this is the part of the story usually compressed into a clause. On 3 July 1991, Ettore Capriolo, the novel's sixty-one-year-old Italian translator, was stabbed and beaten in his Milan apartment; he survived. Nine days later, on 12 July 1991, Hitoshi Igarashi, the forty-four-year-old Japanese translator and an assistant professor at Tsukuba University, was found dead with multiple stab wounds — slash wounds to his neck, face and hands. On 2 July 1993 a mob set fire to the Hotel Madimak in Sivas, Turkey, where the Turkish translator Aziz Nesin was staying; Nesin escaped down a fire brigade ladder and roughly forty other people died. On 11 October 1993, William Nygaard, Rushdie's fifty-year-old Norwegian publisher, was shot three times outside his Oslo home and survived.
Rushdie married the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths in 2021. He describes falling for her in the terms of an ambush: "And then it came up behind me and whacked me behind the ear and I was powerless to resist." A year later he was ambushed for real.
Why Salman Is Called a Genius
The technical achievement is a form of English that had not existed before him. *Midnight's Children* fused the register of the Anglophone literary novel with Bombay speech, Hindu and Islamic myth, Bollywood, political satire and a narrator whose unreliability is a national allegory rather than a trick. Britannica describes the method as deploying "surreal characters, brooding humor, and an effusive and melodramatic prose style" against historical and philosophical questions. What it produced was permission: a generation of writers from the subcontinent and its diasporas worked in the space *Midnight's Children* opened, and the triple-Booker verdict is the institution conceding as much. He was knighted in 2007 for services to literature and made a Companion of Honour in Queen Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee year, and Britannica describes him as "a central figure in debates about free speech and censorship."
The counter-case deserves stating plainly. Britannica's phrase "effusive and melodramatic" is not purely admiring, and it names the standing objection: the prose can be baggy, the invention can run past the point of control, and the exuberance that animates the best books thins into mannerism in the weaker ones. Seven Booker nominations produced exactly one win, and no subsequent novel has approached the standing of the one he wrote at thirty-four. There is also the awkward matter of the fatwa itself. Rushdie became a symbol of free expression, and symbols are difficult to assess as novelists; a reputation forged partly in a political emergency is not the same thing as a reputation earned page by page, and some of the reverence directed at him is properly owed to his courage rather than his sentences. The safest honest verdict is that one indisputably epoch-making novel, plus a body of ambitious and uneven work, plus thirty-five years of refusing to recant, is a career that does not require inflation.
Legacy
The Chautauqua attack has not silenced him: his attacker, whom he pointedly declines to name in the memoir, sits in custody charged with attempted murder while the book about the stabbing sells worldwide. *Midnight's Children* is now older than most of the countries whose literatures it influenced, and it remains the reference point for what the postcolonial novel in English can do. Rushdie's more uncomfortable legacy is the case study he became — proof that in the modern world a novel can still get people killed, and that the person who wrote it may decide, forty years on, that he still has nothing to apologise for.
Achievements
- PEN Pinter Prize — 2014
- James Tait Black Memorial Prize — 1981
- Booker Prize — 1981
- Kurt Tucholsky Prize — 1992
- Gold Medal of the Círculo de Bellas Artes — 2015
- Notable work: The Satanic Verses
- Genres: magic realism
