That Rushdie has celebrity status in the literary world can hardly be denied. So when he came to speak at Tufts yesterday, Sep 27th, the event was a sellout and a simulcast had to be arranged in an overflow area for those who could not get a ticket to the main hall!!!
He was gracious, funny, articulate, frank, and surprisingly to me, very forthcoming about his Indian origins and influences. In fact he admitted to the influence of the non-traditional structure of Indian storytelling that he has used so tellingly and that he remarked was treated under the exotic category of "Magic Realism." Well, Indian stories are largely mythical...and thus magically real.
He read some passages from his new book Shalimar and the Clown. But, it was events related to the Satanic Verses, the fatwa, free-speech etc that made up a bulk of his talk. It would appear that that event still shapes much of his day to day thinking.
Though he ostensibly had a topic and an organizing theme for his talk, one of "borders" and "borderlines", and he did dwell on some related issues in his trademark symbolic manner (Kashmir, the setting of the latest novel is a border state; great literature only happens at borders), yet he kept straying off to topics that came to his mind: a quote from Saul Bellow, his experiences with free speech, the Indian culture, the ubiquity of religion around him while growing up etc.
He took some questions at the end and after a thunderous closing applause, proceeded towards the book-signing area. I had hastened in that direction ahead of most people and was quite early in the queue, fortunately.
When it was my turn to get the book signed, I reminded him of my sister's recent interview with him for the Times of India and he instantly recalled that occassion!
Salman Rushdie, speaking at Tufts...
Yours truly, showing him a copy of my sister's newspaper interview with him, which he recognized. This was during the book signing.
No comments:
Post a Comment