Letters: The Rushdie alarm

This refers to Nilanjana S Roy’s review of Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton (“Journal of the plague years,” September 26). Rushdie would have been perfectly happy with the stardom he attained as the writer who chutnified English with his bravura Midnight’s Children. However, his was a more insidious cross to bear. The Satanic Verses, as has been commonly held, is a dense novel that would probably have received, at best, a footnote in Rushdie’s otherwise crackling oeuvre were it not for the fatwa. Be that as it may, the larger question is: Had there been no Satanic Verses, would we have had to invent one? As Roy says, Rushdie has become a meme, an idea that is raked every time free speech is under threat. But his case is also different in that he was the first man to be so viciously hounded for questioning (he never blasphemed) certain tenets or practices of his own religion. At a time when a flimsy video on YouTube has sparked riots across the Muslim world, the Rushdie affair was a cautionary alarm for the future. The misfortune is it went off.

Vikram Johri, Mumbai

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