A court in Delhi has ruled that Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses can be imported into the country three decades after the ban, but publishers are still wary of a backlash. The Times has the story:
Five years ago, Sandipan Khan, a 50-year-old bibliophile in Kolkata, wanted to buy a book. The book he sought, however, was Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.
The magical realism novel, inspired by the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, was condemned by much of the Muslim world as blasphemous when it was published in 1988, motivating a series of extremist bombings and riots — and even an attempt on Rushdie’s life when the Indian-British author was stabbed in the neck and abdomen in New York state two years ago.
Fearing unrest at the time the book was published, the Indian government banned its importation.
Now, though, the original papers outlying the customs order cannot be found. A case filed by Khan to the Delhi High Court, challenging the ban as unconstitutional, required officials to locate the documentation to no avail.
The presiding judge said he had “no other option except to presume that no such notification exists”, allowing the private petitioner to go ahead and bring the book to India.
Throughout the case’s many hearings, over several years, the judge frequently asked customs officials to hand over a copy of the ban with the government continuing to request extensions.
Khan’s lawyer, Uddyam Mukherjee, confessed to being taken aback at how the case collapsed in a country famed for its bureaucracy.
“It’s a very strange thing for the state to lose it in a country where everything is in triplicate and quadruplicate. Maybe there was never a paper, and hence a ban, all these years?” he mused.
Upon the release of the The Satanic Verses — whose title refers to a collection of Quranic verses about pagan Meccan goddesses — riots broke out across India, where about 14 per cent of the population is Muslim. Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death and forcing him to go into hiding.
Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian prime minister at the time, ordered customs officials to stop the novel from entering the country, making India one of 20 countries to ban the book.
At the time, Rushdie had railed against Gandhi, accusing him of appeasing a handful of politicians and clerics. “The right to freedom of expression is at the foundation of any democratic society, and at present, all over the world, Indian democracy is becoming something of a laughing stock,” he wrote in an open letter.
Rushdie, 77, insists that The Satanic Verses does not contain any offensive material and is entirely fictional. His work often deals with the connections and clashes between eastern and western civilization, usually set on the Indian subcontinent. He was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981 for his second novel, Midnight’s Children, before being elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature two years later. He was knighted for his services to literature in 2007.
The lifting of the ban on The Satanic Verses’s is unlikely to lead to its mass circulation in India, however, with publishers still fearing a backlash from India’s 200 million-strong Muslim minority.
Legal ambiguity still shrouds the ban, with Raju Ramachandran, a senior lawyer, telling the BBC that the outcome of the case did not necessarily “give the right to the petitioner to import the book”.
Khan said he was not concerned if publishers did not import the novel and if bookshops did not display it on their shelves.
“Look if something arrives in a parcel, who is looking? If someone brings the book into India in their luggage, who is to know?” he said. “My only concern is that those who want to read it should be able to read it.”
Worth reading in full.
