What if the Satanic Verses had not been banned?
Even the Marxists in West Bengal who proscribed Taslima Nasrin the other day were against banning Satanic Verses in 1988. The ban was a result of ‘Secular’ advice to Rajiv Gandhi. Frankly, I don’t own a copy of Satanic Verses that remained banned in India for long. But I have an impression from reading about the book. It’s a fiction where the author has allowed wide latitude for his imaginativeness. Magic Realism, the literary technique in which Salman Rushdie writes, not just fictionalizes facts but ‘factualizes’ fiction. The book might have literally merit but I am unsure of its intellectual or scholarly pot ency. There are absurdities and ‘supernatural peculiarities’ in every religion including Islam. Rushdie had simply wanted to make a highly sellable story of it, which backfired. It was least his intention to expose the unsavoury aspect of Islam. It was not an objective study unlike what Sir Vidia Naipaul undertook amongst converted Muslim societies and produced Among the Believer
