Marvels of the World Unveiled - author Salman Rushdie - Interview

Whole Earth, Fall, 1999

Salman Rushdie and Whole Earth Editorial Board Member Vijaya Nagarajan talk together at the Berkeley Community Theatre KPFA Benefit

Bombay

Vijapa Nagarajan: You were born in Bombay and raised there until you were a "part" teenager, and then went to England. Would you say a little bit about what that Bombay of the 1950s was like?

Salman Rushdie: The Bombay of that period, of the fifties and the first half of the sixties, was a city going through a kind of golden age. There's a worrying sense that one has about the place that you're a child in, that maybe you're infusing it with a kind of retrospective golden glow of childhood. But I don't think I am, because people of an older generation than I--of my parents' generation and so on--all say this. It certainly felt like that, like a kind of enchanted zone, at the time. It was a wonderful, exciting, vibrant city to grow up in. And I fell in love with it then and forever.

When writers fall in love with cities--they often don't fall in love with cities, in general--they often fall in love with the city at a particular point in time. You can think of the German writer Gunther Grass, of The Tin Drum. He's in love with Danzig, the pre-war Danzig, and he's not nearly so much in love with present day Gdansk. And Joyce's Dublin was a particular Dublin. He carried around a newspaper of June 16, 1904, and actually it's amazing how many bits of that newspaper are in Ulysses. Even down to the advertising: "What is life without plum trees? Potted meat? Incomplete."

So my city was Bombay, and one of the things that interests me now is that when you grow up in a city, you believe it to be eternal. You believe that the city was always there and always will be there. It seems to be a very solid thing. Whereas, in fact, now that I know more it's plain that the city that I grew up in was a very new city. Actually the neighborhoods where I grew up were in some cases only fifteen or twenty years old; they were really only just developed. Malabar Hill, Warden Road, Breach Candy, Mahalaxmi, these were very new parts of town. They aged rapidly because everything in India goes to hell very fast. So they looked kind of dreadful and ancient, but they were actually very new. Twenty years later, they were all knocked down again and the city was replaced by a kind of contemporary high-rise city that you would see if you now went to Bombay.

When I was growing up in Bombay, there wasn't a single skyscraper in town. In fact, I remember the first skyscraper being built on Malabar Hill; the people in the city used to contemptuously refer to it as Matchbox House because it looked like a giant matchbox standing on its side. We all told each other that it would never catch on. One of the many things about which we were wrong.

What I feel now about that city is that it was actually a demonstration of how transient things are, that the apparent solidity of the city was a complete illusion. It was very new and it didn't last long. I think that's true not only of the physical fabric of the city but also of the spirit of the city. One of the things that people in Bombay used to pride themselves on was a sort of openheartedness and tolerance. My parents, for instance, were not particularly practicing Muslims, but nevertheless Indian Muslims. My father's family was from Delhi, from old Delhi. That's where my parents first lived when they got married. They decided not to go to Pakistan because basically they wanted to stay in India, as did many Indian Muslims. Many Muslims in India made that decision; to this day there are more Muslims in India than in Pakistan.

They decided they would move from Delhi because they were worried--quite rightly worried--about the smell of violence in the air. And they went to Bombay because they thought it would be safer.

VN: What year did they move?

SR: Forty-six. End of '46, beginning of '47. India became independent in August of '47 and Pakistan came into being and there was this appalling massacre of the riots. In Bombay, almost nothing happened. Not completely nothing, but almost nothing. Ever since then, until about twenty years ago, that was true: when there was communal trouble in the rest of India, there was very little in Bombay. It was a part of people's self-definition. They would say, "Oh, we don't do that stuff." Then, unfortunately, it became apparent that the place had changed, and that that kind of violence did come to Bombay.

Now it's a very different place because it's run by a Hindu Nationalist Party of very fanatical extremists; a kind of gangsterish party, the Shiv Sena. Minority groups are quite frightened in contemporary Bombay. Families take their names off the doors of their houses because they're alarmed; they're frightened, with good reason, about attacks.

So that Bombay, the tolerant, openhearted, secularized Bombay, has gone. And I think this [new]

Bombay is still interesting, it's still a great capital, it's still a huge buzzing metropolis--it hasn't lost that. But it's lost some essential thing about its flavor, which is what I want to write about.