Rushdie feels hurt by rebuffs by India

"What kind of rebuff" from India had "hurt him a lot", he was asked during an interview to CNN-IBN ahead of the release of his memoir 'Joseph Anton' on his days in hiding after writing the controversial novel 'The Satanic Verses'.

"I have heard about how my books get rejected for university syallabus as they say I am not really an Indian writer...Really? In what sense? Where is the foreign blood?

"And that is insulting. These books have been influential in the development of Indian literature, at least they should be studied," Rushdie said.

Talking about the ban on 'The Satanic Verses' in the country, he said the book was banned "without ever being looked at" and that seemed "shocking" to him.

"One reason why it seemed shocking was since that time the attacks on free expression in India have mounted and its become easier and easier to attack writers, painters, scholars (and) cartoonists," he said.

Describing himself as "an Indian from a Muslim family", Rushdie said the Indian Muslim could be "a little bit" moving towards harsher Islam.

"For instance even in a place like Kashmir where the kind of Islam on offer used to very Sufi influenced Islam, you see the beginnings of this very harsher Islam and I think that is going to spread.

"And of course there are groups in India which are interested to push that harsher ideology. So that's a great change, because the Indian Islam in which I grew up was always a very open, tolerant, argumentative, talkative community. All the great poets of India came out of that tradition and it would be a shame for it to be lost," he said. MORE