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Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie views the main purpose of an author as being an antagonist to the state. He has been described as a disaffected intellectual who criticizes or makes fun of nearly everything, but he is nevertheless a highly acclaimed writer whose books continue to trigger arguments on the nature of free speech and an author's social responsibility.

Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay, India, on June 19, 1947, almost exactly two months before India gained her independence from Britain. His parents, Anis Ahmed and Negin (nee Butt) Rushdie, were devout Muslims, and Salman grew up a believer in the Islamic faith. After the partition of India and Pakistan, many of the Rushdies relatives moved to Pakistan, but Salman's parents chose to remain in the predominantly Hindu and cosmopolitan Bombay, where Salman could receive a British education.

The Rushdies were wealthy, and Salman and his three sisters had a sheltered and privileged childhood; he never saw the misery or the thousands of homeless people who slept in the streets of Bombay every night. Instead, most of his time as a child was spent in the world of Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor, and the flying carpets of his favorite book Arabian Nights.

In his family life, Rushdie was "the little prince." "Being the only son and eldest child in a middle-class Indian family does make you think that the world revolves round you," Rushdie once commented. This status certainly spoiled him, but it also had the more long-term effect of convincing him that "he had a special role to play in the world." As an old family friend describes it, Rushdie felt "a responsibility to right wrongs and correct the errors of lesser mortals."

- At the age of 14, Rushdie left for England to attend Rugby School.
- He had always idealized British society, so it was a shock for him to find that he was considered an outsider at school, a "wog," an inferior.
- He was treated with hostility by both students and teachers and was often excluded from social activities.
- This bitter experience with racial prejudice was a shock that caused him to rethink much of what he'd been taught growing up.
During this period of his life, he poured his thoughts into a short autobiographical novel called The Terminal Report. It was the first time that he'd used writing as an outlet for his emotions, and it made him seriously consider writing as a profession.

- When he graduated from Rugby, he went to Pakistan, where his family had moved since he had left for England.
- But even at home he was now an outsider.
At school he had become more independent, more forceful with his opinions, and his English articulation had changed from its original Bombay accent to the more superior sounding English that older Indians associated with former British colonial officials.

- This was no longer his home: Rushdie was a displaced person, and although he'd hated Rugby, he decided, with much urging from his father, to attend Cambridge, where he'd won a scholarship.
- He didn't want to return to England, but it was really his only choice. He described this return in 1965 as "one of the most disorienting moments of my life."
It took Rushdie a few weeks to realize that Cambridge was very different from the Rugby sequel he'd expected. He began to excel in school, studying history in class and English literature on his own. He found an interest in acting and became involved in London's artistic circles, but his secret dream was still to become a writer.

These years at school also made him aware of the world beyond his small circle. The Civil Rights movement was closely followed at Cambridge, and there was much opposition to the American involvement in the Vietnam War. Rushdie was very much caught up in this anti-establishment wave at Cambridge, and its influence would be felt in his writings later on in life.

Rushdie graduated in 1968 with a Master of Arts in history with honors, and again returned to his family's home in Karachi. He spent two unsuccessful years working at a television station, whose constant censorship frustrated him. He returned to London in 1970.

There Rushdie married a British woman, Clarissa Luard, making him a British subject. To pay the bills, Rushdie worked as an advertising copywriter. His first book, Grimus: A Novel, was published in 1976, but this bizarre science fiction version of an old Sufi poem received mixed, though mostly poor, reviews. It was only after a decade working as an ad copywriter that he had his breakthrough.

His second book, Midnight's Children, brought him critical acclaim and the Booker Prize in 1981. This unflattering allegory of India's independence gave him the freedom to devote himself full time to writing at a young age, which also meant the freedom from worrying about how to support his wife and his son Zafir, who was born in 1979.

His third book, Shame, which criticized the leaders and society of Pakistan, also won acclaim when it was published in 1983, but not to the degree of Midnight's Children. It kept the money flowing in, however, and Rushdie was able to travel and to continue focusing on his books.

The Jaguar Smile, a short travel book, chronicled Rushdie's brief trip to Nicaragua in 1986 and his wholehearted admiration of the Sandanistas, perhaps the only group and place that he ever described fondly. It was also around this time that he divorced Luard, and three months later married Marianne Wiggins, an American novelist living in London.

The Satanic Verses was published in 1988 and earned widespread critical praise, establishing Rushdie as a leading member of the London intelligentsia. This story of migration presents challenges against Islam and brought about widespread protest from Muslims. It was almost immediately banned in India.

The most severe reaction, however, came from the Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. On Valentine's Day, 1989, a "fatwa," or decree, from the Ayatollah was announced, sentencing not only Salman Rushdie, but also all of the publishers and translators of The Satanic Verses, to death. He called "on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, wherever they may find them, so that no one will dare to insult the Islamic sanctions. Whoever is killed on this path will be regarded as a martyr, God willing."

Rushdie immediately entered into hiding in London. Bounties, which quickly rose to number in millions, were placed on his head for this blasphemy against Islam. Khomeini himself died that year, but for many years to come Rushdie nevertheless had to live under constant police protection, and all his public appearances took place only with the highest security. Nevertheless, he still managed to write.

During his years in hiding, Rushdie wrote a series of novels and stories, among them Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and The Moor's Last Sigh (1995). It was also during this time that Rushdie separated from his second wife and married a third. In 1999, almost entirely out of hiding, although he was still constantly shadowed by bodyguards, Rushdie published his most recent novel, a love story entitled The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

This rock-and-roll retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice opens with the death of a rock star, on Valentine's Day 1989. This date was very much intentional "because I thought, well, one of the reasons I'm writing a novel about cataclysms in people's lives, about earthquakes, about the fact that the world is provisional and the life that you think is yours can be removed from you at any moment -- one of the reasons I'm writing this book is because of what happened in my life."

In continuing to write, he has succeeded in sidestepping "two traps set by the fatwa: writing timid novels and writing bitter ones." It is his personal philosophy that 'if somebody's trying to shut you up, sing louder and, if possible, better. My experience just made me all the more determined to write the very best books I could find it in myself to write." And now, from his home in New York City, he continues to do so; he continues to push his work to a place where he never thought it could go, and he takes us with him.