Like all things, with the good has come the bad. Sadly, the reason for Rushdie's overwhelming celebrity is a book that has overshadowed his finest work. He could not have known, when writing about Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha -- two Indian actors falling to earth from an exploding Air-India jumbo jet -- that his life would change so drastically. With the publication of The Satanic Verses came death threats and calls for his assassination. It led to him spending years underground.
That episode still eclipses much of what makes Rushdie a powerful figure in world literature. There is Grimus (1975), his exercise in science fiction that draws on a twelfth-century Sufi poem; there is, of course, the hypnotic Midnight's Children, with its star Saleem Sinai and a thousand others born on the eve of India's independence; there is Shame, a powerful indictment of Pakistan's Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Zia-ul Haq; Haroun and the Sea of Stories -- an allegory that continues to delight children and frighten adults; The Moor's Last Sigh's (1995) exposure of right-wing Hindu fundamentalists; The Jaguar Smile's (1987) exploration of the outcome of the Sandinista National Liberation Front in Nicaragua; and the prolonged cry of pain for all that Kashmir has lost, in Shalimar the Clown.
Taken in its entirety, this is a strange, wildly exciting blur of traditional storytelling and fantasy. It is a body of work that has led to the creation of new genres, and new means of definition. Before Rushdie arrived, for instance, academics simply didn't know what a 'historiographic metanarrative' was.
There have been other controversies too. Like his public support in 2006 of comments made by the British leader in the House of Commons, Jack Straw, criticizing the wearing of the veil. The fatwa against Rushdie continues to stand -- it was reaffirmed in 2005 by Iran and requests for its withdrawal have been denied -- while he simply continues to hold forth as a powerful advocate of free speech, be it in his past role as president of the PEN American Centre or current one as supporter of the British Humanist Association.
Image: With Nobel Prize-winning novelist Nadine Gordimer
Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
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