Mortals with immortal longings

Review by: M A Siraj

Languages of Truth by Salman Rushdie is a collection of essays penned by the author between 2003 and 2020 on a variety of topics ranging from storytelling to myths and from adaptation and biography to memories and migrations. Extremely readable, several of them have never been in print previously and but suffer from deficiency of thematic centrality. Rushdie, who was born around the Independence of India and its partition into two new nations, grew up in Bombay (now Mumbai) admits that several of his characters in previous novels bore close similarity with his own life and had thus an element of autobiography.

Books, in contrast to stories, have a recent origin. Stories were told by everybody and nobody owned them and were popular with communities. We have all heard about Hansel and Gretel and read Alice in Wonderland. All that they told was not real and their unrealism was quite well known. Everyone knew the carpets cannot fly and witches do not exist in gingerbread houses. Superhuman strength of the characters was just mythical. But their essence lies in real things such as love, hatred, fear, power, bravery, cowardice and death. They exposed the bigotry and exposed the libido and brought out deepest fears to light. They have survived the civilisations which shaped them and religion that sustained them. In the ‘Princess and the pea’ we were told to laud the princess’ sensitivity to a pea stuck somewhere under the layers of mattresses. Read today, we may less charitably conclude that the princess was a spoiled brat. Heroes were flawed and villains were not essentially all that vicious or nefarious.

Human existence is replete with contradictions. Human beings are mortals but with immortal longings. We wish to write history in stones which should not be the case and then we try to shape the future by revisiting the past. His observation that even the British are unaware of their own history as much of it lies overseas, the lands they colonized, is an interesting observation.

Even the truth is a contested idea. What is true for one, is not the same for another. The military revolt of 1857 was ‘mutiny’ for the British historians while writers of modern Indian history term it ‘Indian uprising’ which makes it an entirely different sort of a fact. We have multidimensional personalities but are identified as Hindus, Muslims, Serbs and Croats. Succumbing to such narrowness spawns adversaries from amidst ourselves.

English comes in for fulsome praise and gold-like malleability. Its elasticity and syntactical freedom allows a great variety of freedom. But if David Grossman has to be believed, Hebrew is a much more flexible language and it surrenders enthusiastically to all kinds of wordplay. One can talk in slang about the Bible and speak biblically about everyday life. “It is very sexy, glorious, gigantic and heroic but at the same time it has large gaps that yearn to be filled by writers’ ‘, he observes. But he acknowledges that essences of texts reside in languages and most adapters tend to fail in carrying it to the adaptations which is a commonplace artistic activity. Books are turned into plays and plays into musicals. Good movies—Lolita, The Pink Panther—are remade and bad movies are turned into worse movies. Songs by great singers are covered by lesser singers. The main worry while adapting is what one should preserve and carry and what he should jettison, what is changeable and where the line must be drawn.

Slumdog Millionaire was a celluloid adaptation of Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup’s novel Q&A. It was directed by Danny Boyle but adapted by Simon Beaufoy, who admitted he never had been to India. How would one react to a movie on lowlife in New York made by someone who never had been to New York. Critical opinion in the American would have torn him limb from limb. The double standards of postcolonial attitudes have clearly not yet wholly faded away, comments Rushdie.

Rushdie takes a dig at the majoritarianism of the Modi era in India even while India’s commitment to democracy despite being a poor country. “It is harder for a poor country to be free and democratic,” is how he sums up the world’s dilemma in understanding Indian democracy. Wendy Doniger’s book titled The Hindus by Penguin was forced to be withdrawn by the publishing house. James Laine’s book on Shivaji suffered the same fate. By vandalizing Bhandarkar’s Institute the censorship squads heaped injury to insult. Authorities cravenly succumbed and removed parts of Three hundred Ramayanas by A. K. Ramanujam was removed from Delhi university syllabus when extremists demanded it. BJP’s Hinduism, Rushidie pithy remarks, is not Hindu at all which is an amalgam of belief systems and has no single god, holy