Salman Rushdie and Me

Amitava Kumar in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The organizers of the Jaipur Literature Festival were asked to hand over to the police the videotape of a reading from a novel last month. The tape will show the writer Hari Kunzru and me reading from Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, a book banned in India since its publication in 1988. We were protesting Rushdie's absence from the festival. He had been forced to withdraw after extremist Muslim groups expressed displeasure, and, more urgently, when intelligence reports revealed that hired assassins from Mumbai were on their way to kill the writer. (Those reports were later revealed to be fiction. Cops as magical realists.)

On the tape, the police will have seen that, during our reading, I told the audience that just before the start of the protests in Tahrir Square last year, the Google executive-turned-cyber-activist Wael Ghonim had entered Egypt with a message ready on his computer. It said, “I am now being arrested at Cairo airport.” All he needed to do was press Send.

I joked that perhaps Hari ought to do something similar. Within minutes of my saying this, the festival's producer arrived and asked me to stop reading. I didn't. When the reading was over and we came out, a bank of television cameras was trained on us. A Hindi reporter asked me, “Aren't you guilty of provoking religious violence?” And then, a little later, the police were there, informing us that we had broken the law.

I was staggered at the speed at which all of this happened.

More here.