Forbidden words

The ban on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses has been lifted in India after nearly four decades, but its absence from bookshelves continues, writes SALIL TRIPATHI

The police impound a vehicle before a protest against Salman Rushdie in New Delhi, India in 2012

WRITERS FROM AROUND the world head for India each winter, criss-crossing the vast country to participate in dozens of literature festivals. Each festival has a bookshop, where writers are invited to sign their books. This winter I took part in six festivals and visited more than a dozen stores across different cities – but I saw Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in only one.

It made a quiet appearance at Bahrisons Booksellers in Delhi, but I didn’t see it displayed anywhere else. It has since been reported that it is on sale in a few stores, although a search on Amazon’s Indian website in early February did not show the novel at all.

This is most peculiar, but not more so than the circumstances surrounding the novel’s reappearance. India banned Rushdie’s book in 1988 (the year it was published). It was the first country to do so but last year it overturned its decision, meaning the book could be imported for the first time in 36 years.

This was not a government attempt to suddenly uphold free speech but was due to a strange legal technicality that bordered on hilarious. In 2017, a West Bengal resident called Sandipan Khan filed a Right to Information request for access to the official notification banning the book’s import, as he wanted to read the novel. When the government could not find the notification, he took the matter to the Delhi High Court in 2019, arguing that it restricted his right to read.

After five years of the government searching to no avail, the court had no option but to presume it did not exist, so the import ban was lifted in November. If the order did not exist in physical or electronic form, how could the court surmise that it ever existed?

This was Kafkaesque bureaucracy at its finest and could itself be turned into a comic novel. But the ban was no laughing matter.

In October 1988, within days of India Today publishing excerpts from The Satanic Verses, protests erupted in India, and Muslim leaders and intellectuals campaigned to Rajiv Gandhi’s government to ban the book. Many had not read it but had heard, or been told, that it was offensive – some literature experts I interviewed at the time told me that there was no need for them to read it as they had already made up their minds. “A novel should be about things that ennoble the mind, not about things that hurt readers’ feelings,” one professor of English literature told me.

In any case, Rushdie’s Indian publisher, Penguin Random House India, was advised by its editorial advisers not to publish it there. The only way the book could legitimately get to the country was by being imported, and the customs department issued a notification prohibiting that.

Rushdie’s myriad fans in India were stunned, but the government cited the need to maintain law and order amid fears of public unrest. Indeed, after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on Rushdie on Valentine’s Day 1989, mass demonstrations took place across India.

As a young reporter in Rushdie’s hometown Mumbai (then known as Bombay), I saw police shoot at a procession of young Muslim men marching towards the British Council Library that had turned violent, and a dozen demonstrators died. Those who justified the ban felt vindicated. In the years since, Rushdie’s Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi was fatally stabbed in 1991; his Norwegian publisher William Nygaard was shot in 1993; and Rushdie himself was stabbed multiple times and nearly died (he lost an eye) in an attack in the USA in 2022. Not only did he survive but he wrote a moving and courageous memoir, Knife, published in 2024.

The recent Delhi court order has removed the obstacle facing retailers wanting to import the book. Rushdie is a popular author in India, and his other novels are easily available. One might think Penguin or another publisher would want to secure rights to publish it in India. But this does not seem to have happened.

It is not known how the government would react if any publisher were to publish The Satanic Verses in India. Narendra Modi’s government is fiercely Hindu nationalist and has been in power since 2014, winning a majority in two elections and emerging as the single-largest party in the 2024 elections. It now leads a coalition.

Over the past decade, attacks on Muslims have increased and discrimination has become more brazen. Muslims are more likely than other groups to get arrested for alleged anti-national activities. Government bulldozers raze their homes for petty reasons (or for no reason), it is harder for them to rent or buy property, and Muslim-owned businesses are discriminated against – with some states requiring shop and restaurant owners to display their names publicly for customers. A new citizenship law that would be used to denationalise Indian Muslims who cannot show documentation of their citizenship has also rung alarm bells.

Some have argued that if a book as emotive as The Satanic Verses gets published in India or is imported and distributed by Indian retailers, it could become the spark that provokes conflagration.

Protesters in Kashmir burn an effigy of British author Salman Rushdie in June 2007, in outrage at his British knighthood

But over the years, Indian society has come to place the rights of the offended on a higher plane than the rights of those who express their views. Security is considered more important than liberty.

The absence of The Satanic Verses from Indian bookshelves has been a stain on the country’s professed commitment to freedom of expression. Rushdie placed writing from India on the global map with his 1981 novel Midnight’s Children. His profound understanding of his homeland, deep love for its syncretic culture, knowledge of Indian history and myths, and vivid imagination encouraged a generation of Indians to own the English language and express themselves with confidence.

True, India has a long tradition of writing in English and a rich range of voices in Indian languages, but Rushdie’s brilliance opened the door for Indians aspiring to make their mark internationally. It was the empire striking back. The absence of his major novel emboldened other people claiming offence to get works of art, books or films banned in India.

And amid the hullabaloo, the sheer literary merit of The Satanic Verses lay forgotten. It is perhaps the most important novel of the last century, reflecting on the meaning and impact of migration, where belief begins and reason ends, and the power of myth over reality. It captures the disturbances brought on by modernity, destabilising the moral certainties of a universe set in stone.

It shows our hybrid identities in the post-colonial world. And its wider access could give readers in India an opportunity to see the novel for what it is rather than how it is described: not necessarily an attack on a faith but a reflection on the human condition.