IMAGINARY
HOMELANDS

The upheavals of 1989 and 1990 changed all that. Now that we’re contemplating a transformed international scene, with its new possibilities, uncertainties, intransigences and dangers, it seems not inappropriate to pull together our thoughts on the rapidly receding decade in which, as Gramsci would have said, the old was dying, and yet the new could not be born. ‘In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms,’ Gramsci suggested. This book is an incomplete, personal view of the interregnum of the 1980s, not all of whose symptoms, it has to be said, were morbid.

In 1981 I had just published my second novel, and was enjoying the unique pleasure of having written, for the first time, a book that people liked. Before Midnight’s Children, I had had one novel rejected, abandoned two others, and published one, Grimus, which, to put it mildly, bombed. Now, after ten years of blunders, incompetence and commercials for cream cakes, hair colourants and the Daily Mirror, I could begin to live by my pen. It felt good.

Almost all the important ‘Indo-Anglian’ writers were at the London seminar: Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Anita Desai, Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand among them. Of the big names, only R. K. Narayan was absent, though I’d been told earlier that he’d accepted the invitation. ‘Narayan is so courteous that he always accepts,’ somebody told me, ‘but he never shows up.’ It was exhilarating for me to meet and listen to these writers. But there were worrying moments, too; indications of some participants’ desire to describe Indian culture—which I had always thought of as a rich mixture of traditions—in exclusive, and excluding, Hindu terms.

One distinguished novelist began his contribution by reciting a Sanskrit sloka. Then, instead of translating the verse, he declared: ‘Every educated Indian will understand what I’ve just said.’ This was not simply a form of intellectual grandeur. In the room were Indian writers and scholars of every conceivable background—Christian, Parsi, Muslim, Sikh. None of us had been raised in a Sanskritic tradition. We were all reasonably ‘educated’, however; so what were we being told? Perhaps that we weren’t really ‘Indian’?

Later in the day, an eminent Indian academic delivered a paper on Indian culture that utterly ignored all minority communities. When questioned about this from the floor, the professor smiled benignly and allowed that of course India contained many diverse traditions—including Buddhists, Christians and ‘Mughals’. This characterization of Muslim culture was more than merely peculiar. It was a technique of alienation. For if Muslims were ‘Mughals’, then they were foreign invaders, and Indian Muslim culture was both imperialist and inauthentic. At the time we made light of the gibe, but it stayed with me, pricking at me like a thorn.

A decade later, India has arrived at a full-blown crisis of descriptions. Religious militancy threatens the foundations of the secular state. Many Indian intellectuals now appear to accept the Hindu nationalist definitions of the state; minority groups respond with growing extremisms of their own. It is perhaps significant that there is no commonly used Hindustani word for ‘secularism’; the importance of the secular ideal in India has simply been assumed, in a rather unexamined way. Now that communalist forces would appear to have all the momentum, secularism’s defenders are in alarming disarray. And yet, if the secularist principle were abandoned, India could simply explode. It is a paradoxical fact that secularism, which has been much under attack of late, outside India as well as inside it, is the only way of safeguarding the constitutional, civil, human and, yes, religious rights of minority groups. Does India still have the political will to insist on this safeguard? I hope so. We must all hope so. And we shall see.

The fourth section deals primarily with movies and television. I have tinkered only a little with the original form of these pieces, but I should say that, seven years on, I find ‘Outside the Whale’ a little unfair to George Orwell and to Henry Miller, too. I have not changed my mind about Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi, but it must be accepted that the film’s influence outside India was often very positive; radical and progressive groups and movements in South America, Eastern Europe and southern Africa, too, found it uplifting. The piece about Handsworth Songs stimulated a lively debate among black British film-makers, some of it supportive of my views, some of it critical, all of it fascinating and, I think, helpful. And one footnote to the piece about Satyajit Ray. When I met him, he was shooting scenes for The Home and the World in an old zamindar’s mansion in the depths of rural Bengal. He rightly thought it the perfect setting for his movie. I found that I needed it, too, and it became the model for the dream-mansion, ‘Perownistan’, occupied by Mirza Saeed Akhtar and his wife in the ‘Titlipur’ sections of The Satanic Verses. (The giant banyan infested by butterflies wasn’t there, however. I saw that in southern India, not far from Mysore.)

Section five contains five pieces about the experience of migrants, primarily Indian migrants to Britain. Of these, ‘The New Empire Within Britain’ requires a few words of comment, because of its rather strange afterlife. It was originally written for the Opinions slot in the very early days of Channel 4. (It was the second programme in the series, following E. P. Thompson.) The many British blacks and Asians who phoned in or wrote agreed, virtually unanimously, that the lecture had done no more than tell the simple truth. To them, I had gone no further than the ABC of racial prejudice in Britain. There was also, unsurprisingly, a hostile response from some members of the white community, though they were outnumbered by other white Britons who had found the piece informative and useful. My purpose had been simple: to tell the white majority how life in Britain all too often felt to members of racial minority groups. (I’ve been in a minority group all my life—a member of an Indian Muslim family in Bombay, then of a ‘mohajir’—migrant—family in Pakistan, and now as a British Asian.) By articulating a grievance, I could help, or so I hoped, to build bridges of understanding.

I had thought of television programmes as evanescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow things. But we were at the beginning of the video boom, and to my surprise the tape of the broadcast circulated widely, through the Commission for Racial Equality and other organizations. This was satisfying, of course, but also a little worrying. I had written and spoken at a particular moment in the history of British race relations. Those relationships moved on, developed, changed. Some things (more black faces in television programmes and in the commercial breaks) got a bit better, others (racial harassment) got rather worse. The tape remained the same.

What I had, perhaps naïvely, failed to anticipate was that the text of the lecture would be distorted, falsified and used against me by people of a different political disposition than myself. I was accused both by Geoffrey Howe and by Norman Tebbit of having equated Britain with Nazi Germany, and so of having ‘betrayed and insulted’ my adopted country. Now it’s true that the text of this essay is deliberately polemical, and no doubt that upset the Howes and Tebbits. I make no apology for being angry about racial prejudice. But it is also true that the piece repeatedly insists that the situation in Britain is not comparable to life under Nazism or apartheid. I draw attention to this now, because distortions and falsehoods have a way of becoming true by virtue of being repeated frequently. The ‘Nazi Britain’ smear has been around for long enough. The republication of ‘The New Empire Within Britain’ in this volume enables readers to decide for themselves whether it was justified or not.

I am, of course, by no means the only British writer to have come under fire in these past years. The regular scoldings meted out in the newspapers to all of us who wrote against the grain of Thatcherism were a notable feature of the past decade. Ian McEwan was scolded by a Sunday Times leader for his novel The Child in Time. Harold Pinter was scolded for his views about American policy in Nicaragua. Margaret Drabble was scolded for being worthy, Hampsteadish and boring. In between scoldings, such writers were dismissed as ‘champagne socialists’. This is because their books and plays and films were popular. If the work had been unpopular, no doubt they would have been attacked as failures. It was a good decade for double binds.

Section six contains three pieces—reflections on the Thatcher/Foot election, on Charter 88 and on the question of Palestine—of, I suppose, the scolding-provoking variety.

The next five sections—on writers from Africa, Britain, Europe, South America and the United States—need no footnotes. The last section deals with a subject—the crisis that engulfed my novel The Satanic Verses—to which far too many notes have already been appended. I have little to add.

A few years ago I revisited Bombay, which is my lost city, after an absence of something like half my life. Shortly after arriving, acting on an impulse, I opened the telephone directory and looked for my father’s name. And, amazingly, there it was; his name, our old address, the unchanged telephone number, as if we had never gone away to the unmentionable country across the border. It was an eerie discovery. I felt as if I were being claimed, or informed that the facts of my faraway life were illusions, and that this continuity was the reality. Then I went to visit the house in the photograph and stood outside it, neither daring nor wishing to announce myself to its new owners. (I didn’t want to see how they’d ruined the interior.) I was overwhelmed. The photograph had naturally been taken in black and white; and my memory, feeding on such images as this, had begun to see my childhood in the same way, monochromatically. The colours of my history had seeped out of my mind’s eye; now my other two eyes were assaulted by colours, by the vividness of the red tiles, the yellow-edged green of cactus-leaves, the brilliance of bougainvillaea creeper. It is probably not too romantic to say that that was when my novel Midnight’s Children was really born; when I realized how much I wanted to restore the past to myself, not in the faded greys of old family-album snapshots, but whole, in CinemaScope and glorious Technicolor.

Bombay is a city built by foreigners upon reclaimed land; I, who had been away so long that I almost qualified for the title, was gripped by the conviction that I, too, had a city and a history to reclaim.

It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge—which gives rise to profound uncertainties—that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.

Writing my book in North London, looking out through my window on to a city scene totally unlike the ones I was imagining on to paper, I was constantly plagued by this problem, until I felt obliged to face it in the text, to make clear that (in spite of my original and I suppose somewhat Proustian ambition to unlock the gates of lost time so that the past reappeared as it actually had been, unaffected by the distortions of memory) what I was actually doing was a novel of memory and about memory, so that my India was just that: ‘my’ India, a version and no more than one version of all the hundreds of millions of possible versions. I tried to make it as imaginatively true as I could, but imaginative truth is simultaneously honourable and suspect, and I knew that my India may only have been one to which I (who am no longer what I was, and who by quitting Bombay never became what perhaps I was meant to be) was, let us say, willing to admit I belonged.

This is why I made my narrator, Saleem, suspect in his narration; his mistakes are the mistakes of a fallible memory compounded by quirks of character and of circumstance, and his vision is fragmentary. It may be that when the Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost.

I knew that I had tapped a rich seam; but the point I want to make is that of course I’m not gifted with total recall, and it was precisely the partial nature of these memories, their fragmentation, that made them so evocative for me. The shards of memory acquired greater status, greater resonance, because they were remains; fragmentation made trivial things seem like symbols, and the mundane acquired numinous qualities. There is an obvious parallel here with archaeology. The broken pots of antiquity, from which the past can sometimes, but always provisionally, be reconstructed, are exciting to discover, even if they are pieces of the most quotidian objects.

It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to me self-evidently true; but I suggest that the writer who is out-of-country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being ‘elsewhere’. This may enable him to speak properly and concretely on a subject of universal significance and appeal.

But let me go further. The broken glass is not merely a mirror of nostalgia. It is also, I believe, a useful tool with which to work in the present.

John Fowles begins Daniel Martin with the words: ‘Whole sight: or all the rest is desolation.’ But human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death. The Fowles position seems to me a way of succumbing to the guru-illusion. Writers are no longer sages, dispensing the wisdom of the centuries. And those of us who have been forced by cultural displacement to accept the provisional nature of all truths, all certainties, have perhaps had modernism forced upon us. We can’t lay claim to Olympus, and are thus released to describe our worlds in the way in which all of us, whether writers or not, perceive it from day to day.

In Midnight’s Children, my narrator Saleem uses, at one point, the metaphor of a cinema screen to discuss this business of perception: ‘Suppose yourself in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, . . . until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars’ faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; . . . it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality.’ The movement towards the cinema screen is a metaphor for the narrative’s movement through time towards the present, and the book itself, as it nears contemporary events, quite deliberately loses deep perspective, becomes more ‘partial’. I wasn’t trying to write about (for instance) the Emergency in the same way as I wrote about events half a century earlier. I felt it would be dishonest to pretend, when writing about the day before yesterday, that it was possible to see the whole picture. I showed certain blobs and slabs of the scene.

Let me apply Brenton’s question to the specific case of Indian writers, in England, writing about India. Can they do no more than describe, from a distance, the world that they have left? Or does the distance open any other doors?

These are of course political questions, and must be answered at least partly in political terms. I must say first of all that description is itself a political act. The black American writer Richard Wright once wrote that black and white Americans were engaged in a war over the nature of reality. Their descriptions were incompatible. So it is clear that redescribing a world is the necessary first step towards changing it. And particularly at times when the State takes reality into its own hands, and sets about distorting it, altering the past to fit its present needs, then the making of the alternative realities of art, including the novel of memory, becomes politicized. ‘The struggle of man against power,’ Milan Kundera has written, ‘is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory. And the novel is one way of denying the official, politicians’ version of truth.

The ‘State truth’ about the war in Bangladesh, for instance, is that no atrocities were committed by the Pakistani army in what was then the East Wing. This version is sanctified by many persons who would describe themselves as intellectuals. And the official version of the Emergency in India was well expressed by Mrs Gandhi in a recent BBC interview. She said that there were some people around who claimed that bad things had happened during the Emergency, forced sterilizations, things like that; but, she stated, this was all false. Nothing of this type had ever occurred. The interviewer, Mr Robert Kee, did not probe this statement at all. Instead he told Mrs Gandhi and the Panorama audience that she had proved, many times over, her right to be called a democrat.

So literature can, and perhaps must, give the lie to official facts. But is this a proper function of those of us who write from outside India? Or are we just dilettantes in such affairs, because we are not involved in their day-to-day unfolding, because by speaking out we take no risks, because our personal safety is not threatened? What right do we have to speak at all?

My answer is very simple. Literature is self-validating. That is to say, a book is not justified by its author’s worthiness to write it, but by the quality of what has been written. There are terrible books that arise directly out of experience, and extraordinary imaginative feats dealing with themes which the author has been obliged to approach from the outside.

Literature is not in the business of copyrighting certain themes for certain groups. And as for risk: the real risks of any artist are taken in the work, in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it—when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.

So if I am to speak for Indian writers in England I would say this, paraphrasing G. V. Desani’s H. Hatterr: The migrations of the fifties and sixties happened. ‘We are. We are here.’ And we are not willing to be excluded from any part of our heritage; which heritage includes both a Bradford-born Indian kid’s right to be treated as a full member of British society, and also the right of any member of this post-diaspora community to draw on its roots for its art, just as all the world’s community of displaced writers has always done. (I’m thinking, for instance, of Grass’s Danzig-become-Gdansk, of Joyce’s abandoned Dublin, of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Maxine Hong Kingston and Milan Kundera and many others. It’s a long list.)

Let me override at once the faintly defensive note that has crept into these last few remarks. The Indian writer, looking back at India, does so through guilt-tinted spectacles. (I am of course, once more, talking about myself.) I am speaking now of those of us who emigrated . . . and I suspect that there are times when the move seems wrong to us all, when we seem, to ourselves, post-lapsarian men and women. We are Hindus who have crossed the black water; we are Muslims who eat pork. And as a result—as my use of the Christian notion of the Fall indicates—we are now partly of the West. Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools. But however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory for a writer to occupy. If literature is in part the business of finding new angles at which to enter reality, then once again our distance, our long geographical perspective, may provide us with such angles. Or it may be that that is simply what we must think in order to do our work.

Midnight’s Children enters its subject from the point of view of a secular man. I am a member of that generation of Indians who were sold the secular ideal. One of the things I liked, and still like, about India is that it is based on a non-sectarian philosophy. I was not raised in a narrowly Muslim environment; I do not consider Hindu culture to be either alien from me or more important than the Islamic heritage. I believe this has something to do with the nature of Bombay, a metropolis in which the multiplicity of commingled faiths and cultures curiously creates a remarkably secular ambience. Saleem Sinai makes use, eclectically, of whatever elements from whatever sources he chooses. It may have been easier for his author to do this from outside modern India than inside it.

I want to make one last point about the description of India that Midnight’s Children attempts. It is a point about pessimism. The book has been criticised in India for its allegedly despairing tone. And the despair of the writer-from-outside may indeed look a little easy, a little pat. But I do not see the book as despairing or nihilistic. The point of view of the narrator is not entirely that of the author. What I tried to do was to set up a tension in the text, a paradoxical opposition between the form and content of the narrative. The story of Saleem does indeed lead him to despair. But the story is told in a manner designed to echo, as closely as my abilities allowed, the Indian talent for non-stop self-regeneration. This is why the narrative constantly throws up new stories, why it ‘teems’. The form—multitudinous, hinting at the infinite possibilities of the country—is the optimistic counterweight to Saleem’s personal tragedy. I do not think that a book written in such a manner can really be called a despairing work.

One of the changes has to do with attitudes towards the use of English. Many have referred to the argument about the appropriateness of this language to Indian themes. And I hope all of us share the view that we can’t simply use the language in the way the British did; that it needs remaking for our own purposes. Those of us who do use English do so in spite of our ambiguity towards it, or perhaps because of that, perhaps because we can find in that linguistic struggle a reflection of other struggles taking place in the real world, struggles between the cultures within ourselves and the influences at work upon our societies. To conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free.

But the British Indian writer simply does not have the option of rejecting English, anyway. His children, her children, will grow up speaking it, probably as a first language; and in the forging of a British Indian identity the English language is of central importance. It must, in spite of everything, be embraced. (The word ‘translation’ comes, etymologically, from the Latin for ‘bearing across’. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.)

To be an Indian writer in this society is to face, every day, problems of definition. What does it mean to be ‘Indian’ outside India? How can culture be preserved without becoming ossified? How should we discuss the need for change within ourselves and our community without seeming to play into the hands of our racial enemies? What are the consequences, both spiritual and practical, of refusing to make any concessions to Western ideas and practices? What are the consequences of embracing those ideas and practices and turning away from the ones that came here with us? These questions are all a single, existential question: How are we to live in the world?

I do not propose to offer, prescriptively, any answers to these questions; only to state that these are some of the issues with which each of us will have to come to terms.

In common with many Bombay-raised middle-class children of my generation, I grew up with an intimate knowledge of, and even sense of friendship with, a certain kind of England: a dream-England composed of Test Matches at Lord’s presided over by the voice of John Arlott, at which Freddie Trueman bowled unceasingly and without success at Polly Umrigar; of Enid Blyton and Billy Bunter, in which we were even prepared to smile indulgently at portraits such as ‘Hurree Jamset Ram Singh’, ‘the dusky nabob of Bhanipur’. I wanted to come to England. I couldn’t wait. And to be fair, England has done all right by me; but I find it a little difficult to be properly grateful. I can’t escape the view that my relatively easy ride is not the result of the dream-England’s famous sense of tolerance and fair play, but of my social class, my freak fair skin and my ‘English’ English accent. Take away any of these, and the story would have been very different. Because of course the dream-England is no more than a dream.

Sadly, it’s a dream from which too many white Britons refuse to awake. Recently, on a live radio programme, a professional humorist asked me, in all seriousness, why I objected to being called a wog. He said he had always thought it a rather charming word, a term of endearment. ‘I was at the zoo the other day,’ he revealed, ‘and a zoo keeper told me that the wogs were best with the animals; they stuck their fingers in their ears and wiggled them about and the animals felt at home.’ The ghost of Hurree Jamset Ram Singh walks among us still.

As Richard Wright found long ago in America, black and white descriptions of society are no longer compatible. Fantasy, or the mingling of fantasy and naturalism, is one way of dealing with these problems. It offers a way of echoing in the form of our work the issues faced by all of us: how to build a new, ‘modern’ world out of an old, legend-haunted civilization, an old culture which we have brought into the heart of a newer one. But whatever technical solutions we may find, Indian writers in these islands, like others who have migrated into the north from the south, are capable of writing from a kind of double perspective: because they, we, are at one and the same time insiders and outsiders in this society. This stereoscopic vision is perhaps what we can offer in place of ‘whole sight’.

This raises immediately the question of whom one is writing ‘for’. My own, short, answer is that I have never had a reader in mind. I have ideas, people, events, shapes, and I write ‘for’ those things, and hope that the completed work will be of interest to others. But which others? In the case of Midnight’s Children I certainly felt that if its subcontinental readers had rejected the work, I should have thought it a failure, no matter what the reaction in the West. So I would say that I write ‘for’ people who feel part of the things I write ‘about’, but also for everyone else whom I can reach. In this I am of the same opinion as the black American writer Ralph Ellison, who, in his collection of essays Shadow and Act, says that he finds something precious in being black in America at this time; but that he is also reaching for more than that. ‘I was taken very early,’ he writes, ‘with a passion to link together all I loved within the Negro community and all those things I felt in the world which lay beyond.’

Art is a passion of the mind. And the imagination works best when it is most free. Western writers have always felt free to be eclectic in their selection of theme, setting, form; Western visual artists have, in this century, been happily raiding the visual storehouses of Africa, Asia, the Philippines. I am sure that we must grant ourselves an equal freedom.

Let me suggest that Indian writers in England have access to a second tradition, quite apart from their own racial history. It is the culture and political history of the phenomenon of migration, displacement, life in a minority group. We can quite legitimately claim as our ancestors the Huguenots, the Irish, the Jews; the past to which we belong is an English past, the history of immigrant Britain. Swift, Conrad, Marx are as much our literary forebears as Tagore or Ram Mohan Roy. America, a nation of immigrants, has created great literature out of the phenomenon of cultural transplantation, out of examining the ways in which people cope with a new world; it may be that by discovering what we have in common with those who preceded us into this country, we can begin to do the same.

I stress this is only one of many possible strategies. But we are inescapably international writers at a time when the novel has never been a more international form (a writer like Borges speaks of the influence of Robert Louis Stevenson on his work; Heinrich Boll acknowledges the influence of Irish literature; cross-pollination is everywhere); and it is perhaps one of the more pleasant freedoms of the literary migrant to be able to choose his parents. My own—selected half consciously, half not—include Gogol, Cervantes, Kafka, Melville, Machado de Assis; a polyglot family tree, against which I measure myself, and to which I would be honoured to belong.

There’s a beautiful image in Saul Bellow’s latest novel, The Dean’s December. The central character, the Dean, Corde, hears a dog barking wildly somewhere. He imagines that the barking is the dog’s protest against the limit of dog experience. ‘For God’s sake,’ the dog is saying, ‘open the universe a little more!’ And because Bellow is, of course, not really talking about dogs, or not only about dogs, I have the feeling that the dog’s rage, and its desire, is also mine, ours, everyone’s. ‘For God’s sake, open the universe a little more!’

In Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai makes a reference, at one point, to this old tradition. But his version is a little different. According to Saleem, Ganesha sat at the feet of the poet Valmiki and took down the Ramayana. Saleem is wrong.

It is not his only mistake. During his account of the evolution of the city of Bombay, he tells us that the city’s patron-goddess Mumbadevi has fallen out of favour with contemporary Bombayites: ‘The calendar of festivals reveals her decline . . . Where is Mumbadevi’s day?’ As a matter of fact, the calendar of festivals includes a perfectly good Mumbadevi Day, or at least it does in all versions of India except Saleem’s.

And how could Lata Mangeshkar have been heard singing on All-India Radio as early as 1946? And does Saleem not know that it was not General Sam Manekshaw who accepted the surrender of the Pakistan Army at the end of the Bangladesh War—the Indian officer who was Tiger Niazi’s old chum being, of course, Jagjit Singh Arora? And why does Saleem allege that the brand of cigarettes, State Express 555, is manufactured by W. D. & H. O. Wills?

I could continue. Concrete tetrapods have never been used in Bombay as part of any land reclamation scheme, but only to shore up and protect the sea wall along the Marine Drive promenade. Nor could the train that brings Picture Singh and Saleem from Delhi to Bombay possibly have passed through Kurla, which is on a different line.

Etcetera. It is by now obvious, I hope, that Saleem Sinai is an unreliable narrator, and that Midnight’s Children is far from being an authoritative guide to the history of post-independence India.

But this isn’t quite how unreliable narration usually works in novels. Conventionally unreliable narrators are often a little stupid, less able to work out what’s going on around them than the reader. In such narratives, one deciphers the true meaning of events by ‘seeing through’ the narrator’s faulty vision. However, the narrator of Midnight’s Children is neither particularly stupid, nor particularly unaware of what’s happening.

Why, then, all the errata? One answer could be that the author has been sloppy in his research. ‘If you’re going to use Hindu traditions in your story, Mr Rushdie,’ I was asked by an irate and shiny-headed gentleman in Bangalore—he had spotted the Valmiki/Vyasa confusion—‘don’t you think you could take the trouble to look it up?’ I have also received letters arguing about Bombay bus routes, and informing me that certain ranks used by the Pakistan Army in the text are not in fact used by the Pakistan Army in Pakistan. In these letters there is always an undertone of pleasure: the reader’s delight at having ‘caught the writer out’.

So let me confess that the novel does contain a few mistakes that are mine as well as Saleem’s. One is to be found in the description of the Amritsar massacre, during which I have Saleem say that Dyer entered the Jallianwala Bagh compound followed by ‘fifty white troops’. The truth is that there were fifty troops, but they weren’t white. When I first found out my error I was upset and tried to have it corrected. Now I’m not so sure. The mistake feels more and more like Saleem’s; its wrongness feels right.

Elsewhere, though, I went to some trouble to get things wrong. Originally error-free passages had the taint of inaccuracy introduced. Unintentional mistakes were, on being discovered, not expunged from the text but, rather, emphasized, given more prominence in the story. This odd behaviour requires an explanation.

When I began the novel (as I’ve written elsewhere) my purpose was somewhat Proustian. Time and migration had placed a double filter between me and my subject, and I hoped that if I could only imagine vividly enough it might be possible to see beyond those filters, to write as if the years had not passed, as if I had never left India for the West. But as I worked I found that what interested me was the process of filtration itself. So my subject changed, was no longer a search for lost time, had become the way in which we remake the past to suit our present purposes, using memory as our tool. Saleem’s greatest desire is for what he calls meaning, and near the end of his broken life he sets out to write himself, in the hope that by doing so he may achieve the significance that the events of his adulthood have drained from him. He is no dispassionate, disinterested chronicler. He wants so to shape his material that the reader will be forced to concede his central role. He is cutting up history to suit himself, just as he did when he cut up newspapers to compose his earlier text, the anonymous note to Commander Sabarmati. The small errors in the text can be read as clues, as indications that Saleem is capable of distortions both great and small. He is an interested party in the events he narrates.

He is also remembering, of course, and one of the simplest truths about any set of memories is that many of them will be false. I myself have a clear memory of having been in India during the China War. I ‘remember’ how frightened we all were, I ‘recall’ people making nervy little jokes about needing to buy themselves a Chinese phrase book or two, because the Chinese Army was not expected to stop until it reached Delhi. I also know that I could not possibly have been in India at that time. I was interested to find that even after I found out that my memory was playing tricks my brain simply refused to unscramble itself. It clung to the false memory, preferring it to mere literal happenstance. I thought that was an important lesson to learn.

Thereafter, as I wrote the novel, and whenever a conflict arose between literal and remembered truth, I would favour the remembered version. This is why, even though Saleem admits that no tidal wave passed through the Sundarbans in the year of the Bangladesh War, he continues to be borne out of the jungle on the crest of that fictional wave. His truth is too important to him to allow it to be unseated by a mere weather report. It is memory’s truth, he insists, and only a madman would prefer someone else’s version to his own.