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Journalism of Courage
Underlining how fact and fiction have become difficult to untangle in modern society, writer Salman Rushdie said that he’s often asked from non-Indian readers how much of his stories are true.
“We live in a moment where the truth has become problematic for all sorts of reasons, because the world is so full of lies. Readers really want to reassure themselves that what they’re reading is either true or deliberately not true,” he said.
The writer was at the Tata literature festival 2023, in conversation with writer and dancer Tishani Doshi.
Rushdie discussed the genesis of his latest novel, Victory City, about 14th century South Indian empire Vijayanagara, and why he returned to India for fictional material after decades of drawing from contemporary American life. “The germ of the novel had been sitting in my head for a really long time. When I visited Hampi in the 1970s, I hadn’t even published a novel. When I wrote Enchantress of Florence 15 years ago, I was again reminded of the south. Then, when I got sick of writing about America, I thought, let me go back there,” he said.
He drew from a “wealth of literature” in Telugu, Kannada and Sanskrit from Vijaynagara, as well as extensive documentation of the area by Portuguese travellers. “A novel about the past does end up dealing with the present, because we look at the past through our present-day concerns. One of the reasons I used the Portuguese name, Bisnaga, in the novel instead of Vijayanagara is because I wanted to say it’s a historical novel but it’s also not. It’s also my imagined space,” he said.
He added that his voice has changed since his second novel, the Booker-winning Midnight’s Children, saying, “I couldn’t write it today because I’ve just changed too much, and that person couldn’t write Victory City… I use language differently now, which is determined by each book’s subject matter.”
Rushdie also commented on his next book Knives: Meditations on an Attempted Murder, based on the knife attack he suffered last year during a lecture in western New York, out in April. “Until I’ve dealt with that, I can’t do anything else. It’s not going to be a shortish book. Under 200 pages.”
On the nature of fiction and truth, he tells curious readers to “not believe anything, except that it’s all true.” He said, “All good literature, in whatever form, whether it’s naturalistic or fabulist, is about trying to approach the truth. To say something truthful about us, about human nature, about who we are and why we do the things we do. That’s the kind of truth that the novel has always dealt with, and if it doesn’t deal with that, it’s no good.”
