NOTE:

This review was originally published in "India Currents", June 1995.  It
has been placed on the web with the author's permission.
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		Reconciling Opposites

	Salman Rushdie's new book devoid of charged prose

EAST, WEST. Salman Rushdie. Pantheon Books. 214 pages. 
Hardback. $21.

Few writers have been dogged by controversy 
throughout their careers. Some have been persecuted in less 
enlightened times, some behind iron curtains, some behind the 
veil of theocracy. But Salman Rushdie was the first writer in the 
free world to have been pursued from across continents and to be 
forced into hiding because of a death sentence by a foreign 
government.

Certainly The Satanic Verses was not Rushdie's first tryst with 
controversy. He has attracted dissent, protests, and flared 
tempers as easily as a picnic attracts ants. With Midnight's 
Children, an absolutely marvelous novel that deserved every bit 
of the Booker Prize it received, Rushdie boldly entered the arena 
of serious literature while at the same time exhibiting his 
dangerous predilection to rub people the wrong way. Indira Gandhi 
sued him for libel over his depiction of her in the novel and 
won.

With Shame, he grew bolder, testing the waters with impunity. It 
was banned in Pakistan, but Rushdie wasn't fazed by the protests 
it elicited.

When he came out with The Satanic Verses, he did so with bravado, 
offering the world a great work of fiction, but he insisted on 
etching a halo around himself. It made him a convenient target 
for the lynch-mobs espousing intolerance, for fundamentalists 
seeking to bring conformity in the world, using violence if 
necessary. It also made him a demi-god among litterateurs, an 
icon to be brandished in support of free-speech, a metaphor in 
the fight against censorship.

Unfortunately, in the ensuing well-publicized cacophony, both 
sides drowned those voices that called for writers to be more 
responsible and for changing laws governing libel and blasphemy 
in countries where they were clearly hypocritical.

While as a fallout of the Ayatollah's fatwa a clear schism 
between the liberals and the fundamentalists emerged, the innate 
hypocrisies of both the West and the East have prevented any 
solution from being agreed upon. Both sides, in their self-
righteous zeal, branded each other as evil.

However, even in the minds of many of Rushdie's critics his 
depiction of Muhammad did not warrant the fatwa, and death was no 
answer for a writer's truculence. Yet, a legitimate debate on how 
much freedom a writer can demand and when a writer's freedom of 
expression becomes abuse, never took place. While freedom of 
expression is a right everyone cherishes, shouldn't writers also 
exercise this right responsibly?

Rushdie had many opportunities, before the fatwa was issued, to 
arrive at a graceful compromise with his opponents without giving 
in to the demands of the fundamentalists. But at that stage he 
was more uncompromising than his opponents and refused to listen 
to them. Strange it is for someone who grew up in a family of 
believing Muslims in India to have deluded himself of his own 
invincibility.

Not all writers in the West shared his view. John Le Carre said, 
"I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to 
great religions." Roald Dahl wrote, "... he knew exactly what he 
was doing and he cannot plead otherwise." He further said, "If I 
were Rushdie ... I would throw the bloody thing away. It would 
save lives."

Although the dust that Rushdie's halo attracted 
seems to be dormant now, after over six years in hiding, the 
threat to his life has not lifted. A few dozen people (some 
innocent) around the world died over his book; innumerable people 
vociferously expressed their support; dozens of employees at 
Viking and bookstores around the world worked under constant 
threat; Rushdie adamantly held on to his right.

Some of those who had shed crocodile tears for him have moved on 
with their lives, but he still doesn't appear freely in public, 
his movements still remain restricted. One wonders if he'll ever
walk like a free man again in the free world. Reality is sometimes 
a dangerous thing to ignore.

Given the furor and rage The Satanic Verses generated, it is not 
surprising that his subsequent books have seemed somewhat 
anticlimactic. Haroun and the Sea of Stories came out of the new 
reality of his life. It was true that the book was written for 
his son, but one couldn't help noticing that it had none of the 
pyrotechnics and chutzpah that his earlier books contained.

East, West, his latest collection of short-stories, is similarly 
devoid of charged prose. But while the earlier book was a highly 
imaginative story retold simply and gently, this one lacks those 
endearing qualities.

The stories in this volume take place in the East, in the West 
and some in both places. There are free radios to be given, the 
Prophet's hair to be stolen, journeys in both directions to be 
undertaken, ruby slippers to be auctioned. Although any 
comparison of these stories to the high standards set by 
Midnight's Children is bound to be unfair, it is the stories with 
South Asian characters that show momentary flashes of brilliance 
and remind us of the kind of work he is capable of producing.

Outwardly, the book seems to be an attempt at bringing both the 
East and the West together. It is a metaphor that describes 
Rushdie's own life, wherein he has struggled with the concept of 
reconciling both of them not only in his own life but also in his 
writing, sometimes succeeding, sometimes falling prey to the 
confused identity of one pulled between the East and West.

Like Rushdie himself, the protagonist of the last story in the 
volume defies classification and refuses to choose. But the big 
difference is that the protagonist is fictional, he doesn't have 
to; Rushdie, on the other hand, is real.
			- Balaji Venkateswaran