Story of how Rushdie took Booker to the Hall of Fame
11 Jul, 2008, 0140 hrs IST,Vikram Doctor,
MUMBAI: Salman Rushdie’s win of the Booker of Booker’s for Midnight’s Children comes as no surprise. He was always, by some margin, the front-runner for this faintly gimmicky celebration of 40 years of the Booker Prize. He had, after all, won a similar award in 1993 to mark 25 years of the prize.
From the moment the Booker’s panel announced their rather odd shortlist of the ‘best’ six winners (Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988), but not Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992)? JM Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) rather than his Life and Times of Michael K (1983)?
And has anyone in the last 20 years read Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist (1974) rather than her many other fine novels there was little doubt that Rushdie would win again. If nothing else, it was a popular vote and, well, when you’ve got all the vast voting power of Indians and the Indian diaspora versus the South Africans (Coetzee, Gordimer), Australians (Carey) and British [JG Farrell for The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and Pat Barker for The Ghost Road (1995)], why did they even bother to have a contest?
And yet the win does make sense if not for Rushdie who, however gratified, must probably have mixed feelings that he is still best known in literary terms — leaving aside fatwas and female attachments — for this early novel rather than his many other that have followed. The real winner is the Booker Prize because what this win acknowledges is the huge difference that Midnight’s Children made to the award itself. Before then it was just another faintly clubby, foregone conclusion sort of an award, decided by a bunch of British literary figures for other British literary figures.
After Midnight’s Children it was drama, spotlights, the big time.A little number crunching will show you why. Before Midnight’s Children’s 1981 win, there had been 13 winners with an average of 50.8 years when they got the award. The previous year’s winner, William Golding, was one of the oldest ever at 69. Rushdie was 34.
All other winners till then had been white Westerners, except VS Naipaul who so clearly considered himself one that he doesn’t count. All the other winners were established novelists — even JG Farrell, at 38 the next youngest winner, had one acclaimed novel [Troubles (1970)] before he won in 1973. Rushdie was British, but also very obviously and proudly Asian and his only previous novel had been almost entirely disregarded. And in the shortlist for his year, there were at least three well-established novelists — Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark and DM Thomas, not to mention the young Ian McEwan — who were all of the type who had won earlier.
But Rushdie won. It was a new generation, a new literary energy, a new sense of possibility for young writers. Year 1981 was also significant — not just the start of a new decade, but of the profound change in British society set in motion by Margaret Thatcher. It was an edgy moment and the supremely edgy Rushdie was the perfect writer for it (not that he approved of Mrs Thatcher — if anything he cast her as an avatar of the devouring ‘Black Widow’, his fearsome invocation of Mrs Gandhi in Midnight’s Children).
Rushdie was not going to take the prize and then go back tamely to his writing desk. He took the opportunity to become a celebrity, always in the news, always stirring up fights and fury (to an extent no one anticipated — The Satanic Verses controversy didn’t directly affect the Booker, but it did mean their most famous winner was for quite a while the writer most in the eye of the world news).
Most of all though, the Booker made an incredible impact on India. Rushdie was not the first nominee — Anita Desai had been nominated the year before. Novels with Indian themes had also done well. Apart from Farrell’s Siege of Krishnapur, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (an European married to a Parsi, so not Indian herself) had won with Heat & Dust (1975) and Paul Scott with Staying On (1977), both set in India. Yet if anything, these novels marked the contrast with Rushdie.
Farrell and Scott’s books were poignant comedies of manners, Jhabvala’s was superior Mills & Boon and none were in the least like Rushdie’s sprawling, occasionally over-the-top, but entirely hypnotic and compelling masterpiece. In its fevered reimagining of India since Independence it managed to be that rarest of things — the Great [Country] Novel. There can be endless debate over which is the Great American Novel or the Great British Novel, but with Midnight’s Children Rushdie hit on the Great Indian Novel.
Which was why reading it was so electrifying for Indians. No one had told us that Indian Writing in English, a term that reeks of depressing literary conferences and boring anthologies, could be anything like this. Those of us who read it at that moment could imagine ourselves as Saleem Sinai, Rushdie’s hapless, all knowing and all suffering protagonist, both recognising ourselves and also amazed at how far Rushdie had gone.
The Emergency was hardly over then, still a painful memory, to be spoken of circumspectly now that Indira Gandhi was back in power. And here was this young novelist so obviously taking her on. Yet it was also so much more, so vivid an encapsulation of the country’s painful history that it would have been hard to read if it had not been so entirely engrossing.
And, above all, it won. Indians probably hadn’t really thought an Indian could win such a British prize (Naipaul didn’t count). But it did and the eyes of hundreds of literary agents and publishers turned to the subcontinent looking for the next Rushdie — or so many aspiring young Indian writers told themselves and for some like Amitav Ghosh and Arundhati Roy it was true.
Indians have also been nominated and won fairly regularly since then, giving us a sense that the Booker was peculiarly our own. How lucky this was for the Booker, and British publishing in general, was probably not realised at that time, but the birth of a vast subcontinent of readers was to affect it profoundly over time. In that sense, it doesn’t matter if the weight of Indian voters swung it for Rushdie. If that did happen, it only affirmed how in 1981, the Booker was the winner by making Rushdie one.
