Note: A bibliography and the previous notes are listed below.

There is a lot more to this than I could have ever predicted. Although I did "guess" that there could be a fair amount of "arguing" in this area. Having completed (almost) Midnight's Children, I think that it does live up to its billing, and that another report can be made. This surveys the larger issues, I will make a subsequent report on the Children.

The book After Empire (Michael Gorda) is quite good also. This book reviews Paul Scott, V.S.Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. Several of the Naipaul novels are discussed, in addition to Scotts work, and a long chapter about Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses . A long chapter is given to each author, critiqued as British novels (i.e. written in, by, for). As for Naipaul, I have only read Among the Believers , and Conversations With Naipaul of his books. I was never able to make much headway in The Enigma of Arrival, but it is still on the list.

I spoke with some people who commented on the condescension of Naipaul and Rushdie's pandering to western readers. Naipaul is a Brahmin from Trinidad and was always mad that he had to rub elbows with "the natives". His searing critiques can be made from almost all of vantage points that I can think of. The duty he has assumed to expose chaos, and "backwardness", presumably to highlight the effects of colonialism, has not been evenly carried out. A great novel can transcend this, and A House for Mr. Biswas is supposed to be very good.

My work colleague had said that Rushdie used too many cultural cues that western audiences would/could not understand. He said that is probably why the club of people (western or otherwise) who have read the "Verses" is small. The size of this club is used as an aphorism (about Rushdie) on an Indian Literature review site.

I said that I could guess why people might think that Rushdie's work could be considered blasphemous. At that time, I read several pages from the midlle of Children and The Moor's Last Sigh. He was describing in detail his own death in one book, and in the other he was a young grotesquely oversized boy having extensive sexual relations with his older female tutor.

Luckily, when I began to read the Children from the beginning, I had read some critique of the plot in Gorda's book. Also, some class reading about Ganesh and Shiva in Bantock's Venetian Wife. So the main character has an incredibly large and powerful snoze (pronounced schnahze)! Like an elephant (e.g. Ganesh). And he initially discovers his power of telepathy while seeing his mother disrobe (and moon him) as he is hiding in a wash-closet. I have not found out yet but this might refer to the god Shiva going to take a bath when something happens (from Indian mythology).

After lots of well-woven prose, with lots of specialized syntax, and some hindi (e.g. begum) and urdu words, some Rushdie contractions (e.g. cousinji), one of Saleem's (head of the Midnight Children's Conference) other escapades include incestuous love for his sister. And Rushdie is talking about current events in the last 50 years of Indian history, so this is a political novel that is designed to parody recent political events in India. The Literature site has a reference that Rushdie was sued in the British courts for libel (by Indira) over this book. And they suggest that the Indian English plays-on-words in the The Moor are overdone and excessively clever.

Then I remembered thinking that Rushdie sounded a little bit disingenuous in Berkeley when I saw him several months ago. Maybe a little too cutesy naive. He tried to (kind of) brush off the fatwa, and said that no one understood that he was just a funny writer. A writer who likes to use language in funny ways. A joke he said on that night could be taken 2 ways depending on your knowledge (or orientation). He said things started to look old very quickly in Bombay. To (at least) 4 western ears, he was commenting (or cracking?) on the Indian inability to keep anything up (i.e. take care of things). To one native's ears, this is a good example of Rushdie using hard-to-comprehend cues. The native tells me that it rains alot in Bombay and it does seem that there is decay factor. To ears from different cultures, different meanings. The mark of a good writer, definitely.

Unless he is using this mostly (or partly) as a device to sell more books; be more controversial or the like. Christopher Hitchens has been down this path as well. And if so, well bully for him, maybe. But if he is getting his kicks, aybe that is also what the people (who I know) who criticize him are saying. Presumably the Muslims hate his guts because of the Verses. But his fun could be seen as pandering to the British literary establishment. So, what a surprise, an author who may not be a nice person in general. Either way, Midnight's Children is an excellent book.

I have read that the book written right after the fatwa called Haroun and the Sea of Stories gives some good background on the mishmash of influences that torment Rushdie. These include among others: the politics and personalities of the subcontinent in modern times as well as in mythology, the cultural influences he has witnessed, all told like one of large number of Hindi movies produced each year in Bombay. This playful book must also be read to understand Rushdie's great range.

And the picture on Sir Vidia is I am afraid not much better. There is an excellent article in a magazine called Transition(the actual issue is not online, but available in the Berkeley library), about how the stuff that Naipual is writing could easily be seen as Hindu fundamentalism. And maybe he has just tired of holding up his mantle of imparitality, which had its own shortcomings many years earlier.

I have not read the Scott book(s) yet, but what first gave some resonance on this is the Gorda book's overview of Hari Kumar from The Raj Quartet. This "anglicized Indian" seemed most like what I consider myself. It even describes Kumar's unhappy trip to India where he is considered neither Indian nor British. And somehow this all and nothing duality causes him to get accused of raping a British girl. And some of the mannerisms described remind me of my father putting his money in $20 wads into his (different) pockets when he used to go in the store in the ghetto, so no one would know how much money he had. The situation is: when Hari finally gets to the British side of town, he tries to buy the tobacco that he likes in England, when the store clerk asks him who he is buying the tobacco for?! I don't understand. What do you mean for?, he asks patiently, drawing the clerk's obvious ire.

The Gorda book analyses and compares/contrasts the most famous British writers about the sub-continent. It concludes that Scott is portraying accurately a sunset (as glimpsed by Forster), and that Naipaul is pessimistic while Rushdie is playful and optomistic. Lastly it draws wider parallels to racism in the United Kingdom, referencing bigoted aphorisms such as there ain't no black in the Union Jack, and how Kumar is repeatedly reminded that he is almost white, but not quite.

I do agree with the many who say that the Forster's book A Passage to India is one of the greatest ever, and even the movie is pretty deep.

Last Update: 1-1-00

I have been doing some study of what is called "post-colonial" literature. I believe that it has some lessons, insight and resonance for me. A few sentences about this:

A little over a year ago, I started reading V.S.Naipaul. I had never appreciated this very accomplished writer, and I was interested in more about him. I started talking to a work colleague about his work and that of Salman Rushdie. My friend gave me some insight about the monotheism/polytheism debate, and some background about the Indian writers of their time period. I have not read much of Naipaul's work, but I have read a lot about him.

I went to see Rushdie speak in Berkeley about his newest book in August and it was interesting indeed; in particular his comments about Bombay. Due to my class schedule, I have only been reading sections of Midnight's Children, and The Moor's Last Sigh. I think that I do not understand Rushdie's work but (maybe) I can tell some ways in which it could be considered blasphemous.

Last Update: 5-Nov-99

	Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie		After Empire, Michael Gorda
	The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie		Among the Believers by V.S.Naipaul
	A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S.Naipaul		The Enigma of Arrival, V.S.Naipaul
	Passage to India, E.M.Forster		Passage to India VHS movie
	The Raj Quartet, Paul Scott		The Moor's Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie
	Indian Literature review site		Venetian Wife, Nick Bantock
	Salon Magazine, Dec 1997		Haroun and the Sea of Stories