Salman Rushdie was among the foremost early writers for Granta, when it was still published out of a single room at the University of Cambridge. He has enjoyed a long association with the magazine, and has contributed fiction, reportage, poetry, memoir, and literary essays to its pages. This spring, the editor of Granta visited Rushdie at his place in Manhattan. They spoke for an hour about his dealings with the magazine, the course of Indian fiction, and his brushes with Indian politics. Part of their chat was recorded on the editor’s phone, and has been lightly edited for clarity.

 

Editor:

Bill Buford, the first editor of Granta, tells a funny story: he was reading Midnight’s Children on a train, an early galley, and fell in love with the book before he knew you or met you, and then ran an excerpt of it, without your permission, in this magazine.

 

Salman Rushdie:

In Granta 3.

 

Editor:

In Granta 3.

 

Rushdie:

I learned about that at a party. Jonathan Cape used to have this very grand authors’ party every year, around Christmas, which was, in those days, extra grand because they wouldn’t invite any journalists, only writers. Midnight’s Children hadn’t been published – this was December 1980 – but there had probably been a galley. I was the new kid on the block, going to the Cape party, surrounded by Doris Lessing, John Fowles – anybody you could think of. Martin [Amis] was there – I met him there.

 

Editor:

That’s where you first met Amis?

 

Rushdie:

Yes. But then Bill Buford arrived, and I’d never met him, and he said, ‘I have something to show you.’ And he took me down to the front of the building where he’d left his briefcase and produced a copy of Granta 3. He said, ‘Look, there’s the first chapter of Midnight’s Children.’

I asked, ‘How exactly does this come to be here?’ And then he said that he had asked Tom Maschler, the publisher of Cape, and Tom Maschler had said ‘okay’. But nobody ever told me.

 

Editor:

You never signed anything?

 

Rushdie:

No. I said, ‘You know, the question of payment arises.’

 

Editor:

We can settle that debt here and now.

 

Rushdie:

I think they paid me something like £40, after the fact.

 

Editor:

It seems like you took this in your stride.

 

Rushdie:

Well, there it was, it already existed. I mean, Granta 3 is very interesting. That’s where the magazine began to find its rhythm. Angela Carter and Russell Hoban and all sorts of very good people were in the issue. The company was excellent.

I remember when Midnight’s Children came out, Granta was still being published out of an upstairs room in Cambridge, above an art gallery. Bill invited me up to do a reading and it was the first book reading I’d done in my life.

Bill and I immediately got on very well. I was kind of irritated by what I believed to be bullshit (because Maschler had never confirmed to me that he’d given Bill permission and there was nothing in writing, which there should be) but I just thought, you know, it’s good.

 

Editor:

Buford describes himself in that period as a hustler. But isn’t that what you need to be, with a little magazine, no?

 

Rushdie:

Yeah. The more I learned about him . . . For Granta 1, he just wrote to every living great American writer and said, ‘I want something good from you.’ Amazingly, quite a lot of them sent him stuff.

 

*

 

Editor:

It seems there are multiple ways of looking at your work in the 1980s. One would be ‘He’s come out of Bombay’ and there’s Saadat Hasan Manto in the background. Another way would be, for lack of a better word, ‘world literature’, a sort of ‘Oh, this is Marquez, but for India’. But there’s another way of looking at it too, which is that you were part of a generation in London, with close relationships with Ian McEwan and Martin Amis. How do you think about that generation now?

 

Rushdie:

All of those ways are true. As far as the generation thing is concerned, at the time, everybody tried to make us a generation.

 

Editor:

Including Granta, not least of all.

 

Rushdie:

Martin and Ian and Julian [Barnes] and Ish [Kazuo Ishiguro] and Angela. Some of us got on very well. Some of us didn’t really know each other. Some of us didn’t even like each other’s work. Each of us, I think, resisted the idea of calling us a generation. And we didn’t have a project, right? We were all very unlike each other.

 

Editor:

But there are certain commonalities. For instance, not every novelist of that period or the generation before or after you was reckoning with historical problems the way yours was. Whereas in your ‘generation’, you’re addressing India’s Partition. McEwan has an early novel about Germany, the Second World War. Amis didn’t start off that way so much, but he certainly went in for that when he got older, taking on the Nazis and Stalin. Ishiguro does it in the background of his novels.

 

Rushdie:

I came out of a country which had just been born. And the subject of empire was quite present, at that time. I had also had a very bad English public-school experience and then a very good university experience. So I had learned England the hard way.

 

Editor:

Have you ever talked to Ishiguro about the fact that you both have a hinterland? He left very early, but he still often comes back to it, in various ways.

 

Rushdie:

I don’t want to speak for him. I get the sense that the Japan subject is less present for him than it used to be. These big successes of his later writing, like Never Let Me Go (2005), really have moved on from the subject of origins. I haven’t detached quite in that way. I find it almost impossible to have a central character who’s not of Indian origin.

 

Editor:

One has the sense, though, in that early 1980s moment, that you actually are expressing a kind of love for the lost India of your childhood, or are trying to recreate it in your own mind.

 

Rushdie:

By the time I started writing Midnight’s Children, which was the mid-1970s, I’d been not living in India for quite some time, and my parents had – kind of disappointingly – moved to Pakistan, which I wasn’t attracted to. So I had this worry of losing touch, losing contact with where I came from, and I decided that I’d better write a book that tried to reclaim it. I always thought of Midnight’s Children as the book that reclaimed that territory for myself.

 

Editor:

You wrote a funny piece for Granta 11 (1984) about the Raj and its depictions – I think it was the year Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet (1966–75) was televised. One of the things that comes out in it is that you’re up against an enormous industry that runs from E.M. Forster to Scott, to TV, to pop culture. You had to compete with something working on a very large scale.

 

Rushdie:

When I finished Midnight’s Children3, I wasn’t actually certain that anybody would want to publish it, because it was very long, it was written in a weird English and had almost no white characters in it, and it wasn’t about the British experience of India, which everything else was. Of course there’s A Passage to India (1924), there was Heat and Dust (1975) – that kind of book. It was a big gamble to write that book and, well, I guess it came off.

 

Editor:

Something that people in my generation often forget is that Midnight’s Children came up against the Indian state well before Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa against The Satanic Verses (1988).

 

Rushdie:

Indira Gandhi sued me. There was a lawsuit about one sentence in which I talked about her relationship with Sanjay Gandhi. She didn’t like it because I said that he held her responsible for his father’s early death, because of their separation, a story which is well known in India. It had been published many times. But she decided to use that to sue me. And the problem was that it was a lawsuit about three people, two of whom were dead, and the third was suing me.

 

Editor:

How did that shake out?

 

Rushdie:

She got assassinated. You can’t libel the dead. In the end, it was a very non-aggressive lawsuit. All she wanted was for us to remove the sentence. Not even to withdraw books already in print. I had said, ‘Well, look, if we really have to do it, it’s not even a very important sentence, so we’ll take it out, but the book needs reprinting.’ But then she got killed. So.

 

Editor:

A definitive outcome. But the lawsuit still must have put you under some pressure.

 

Rushdie:

I mean, it was awful to get sued by the prime minister of India. I had some very strange conversations with lawyers. Tom Maschler, and me, and lawyers. I remember asking some very heavyweight lawyer that Cape had employed, ‘So, what’s the defense?’ And he said, ‘Well, to be found guilty of having defamed somebody, the person you’re defaming has to be a person of good character. So if you can explain to me why the prime minister of India is not a person of good character, then you have a defense.’ And I said, ‘Okay, well, that means we can try the Emergency in an English court.’

Tom Maschler’s face went very pale.

 

Editor:

Trying the Emergency: that would have been extraordinary.

 

Rushdie:

Yeah. Though, obviously, a super-high-risk route. And Cape, certainly, were not eager to go down that route. But I thought it would be amazing to have judges that she couldn’t bend, examining the atrocities of the Emergency.

 

Editor:

But that gets into something I’m curious about, which is that you’ve sort of been in permanent opposition when it comes to India.

 

Rushdie:

I’ve always been on the wrong side. Rajiv Gandhi was the person who banned The Satanic Verses.

 

Editor:

Before the fatwa.

 

Rushdie:

Before the fatwa. Because he got some protests from a couple of Muslim MPs. Block vote politics.

And when Shame (1983) came out, it got banned in Pakistan because of Zia-ul-Haq. I guess if you’re going to write a novel which satirizes a Pakistani dictator, and there happens to be a Pakistani dictator in power at the time . . .

 

*

 

Editor:

When you look at Indian writing before Midnight’s Children and then after, one has the sense that that novel created its own genre, and that many Indian writers, perhaps too many, got caught up in its wake. And this was all just in English. In 1997 you write that introduction to an anthology of Indian writing, Mirrorwork. And you say there – it reads even more polemically now than it did then – that the vernacular languages of India can be interesting, there are certainly stories there, but they’re essentially going to be provincial and that the real action is in Indian writing in English. In fact, if I recall, the only vernacular writer you included in that collection was Manto.

 

Rushdie:

I got into so much trouble.

 

Editor:

But let’s just say you were right. What do you think has happened since that moment? Because it now seems like the opposite. You talk to the publishers in Delhi or Mumbai, and it’s all about translation. There’s a real chase for authenticity. Prize committees are completely in thrall to it.

 

Rushdie:

I think what’s happened is three things. One is that the actual publishing industry in India is much more established. It’s on a bigger scale than it ever used to be. The second thing is, yes, they’re beginning to translate. One of the big problems in India was always translating between Indian languages; if you were writing in Bengali, nobody could read you in Hindi, which included Tagore. The translations that existed were often not very good. All that has improved a lot, so people are no longer in the same way confined to the language area – they can cross borders in the way that English crosses borders. And the third thing is that writing in English has proliferated into so many forms; it’s not just literary novels. Now there’s pulp fiction, there’s romantic fiction, there’s erotic fiction, so it’s become a much broader spectrum of publishing, which is healthier. I think young writers starting out in India now might not feel what I felt, which is that I couldn’t actually start out there, because there wasn’t a literary world. Now there is a literary world.

 

Editor:

So you think a writer in Calcutta, writing in Bengali, has a better chance today of being translated into, say, Gujarati?

 

Rushdie:

That’s still the problem – translation between different regions. Also, translating from English into Indian languages. But that’s happening. You know, it was a long time before anything I wrote was being published in Hindi. But now, I get published in several Indian languages: Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, et cetera. So all of this is a really healthy development. I think Midnight’s Children did do something which you might describe as kicking open the door. It allowed Indian writers in English to feel that they could be heard, that they didn’t have to imitate Western writing. They could find their own voices.

 

Editor:

So, despite being written in English, you mean it kicked open what became a succession of doors that got us basically to where we are now, where you can be an Indian writer in a vernacular language and still find an international audience? You point out in your introduction that film was a completely different story. Because of the medium. A director like Satyajit Ray could become a giant, on his own terms, in his own language.

 

Rushdie:

But he was still badly treated in India. The Bollywood folks didn’t like it. Ray was criticized by a lot of big stars for producing negative images of India for Western consumption. The biggest movie star in India, Nargis, who was the star of Mother India (1957), attacked him for that. She said, ‘Why doesn’t he make films about positive achievements in India, such as the building of dams?’

 

Editor:

A Ray film about dams. I would watch that.

 

Rushdie:

When Ray, once in his life, tried to go into the Hindi market with his film The Chess Players (1977) – which was made in Hindi using Hindi movie stars – the Bombay film industry tried very hard to block its distribution. And with some success. Although the film was made to broaden his audience, it was very nearly prevented from doing so.

 

Editor:

It seems that many of the vernacular languages may have paradoxically benefited from the Modi era, in that as much as Delhi backs the proliferation of Hindi, this in turn encourages more concerted countering from local languages in other Indian states.

 

Rushdie:

And it all makes them get more international attention, you know. The International Booker has recently gone to two Indian books not originally in English [Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree (English translation from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, 2021) and Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq (English translation from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, 2025)]. That kind of thing would never have been possible in the early 1980s.

 

Editor:

You and Naipaul are both interpreters of the Indian experience, in both fiction and non-fiction. But, certainly on the historical plane, you’re very far apart.

 

Rushdie:

When I was writing Victory City (2023), one of the things I was writing against was Naipaul’s portrait of the Vijayanagara empire, where he, basically, uses the idea of ‘Muslims, bad; Hindus, good’. Vijayanagara destroyed by Muslim armies is a metaphor for the wounded civilization. Whereas, if you look at the history of that period, that’s not what’s happening. Actually, the Muslim sultanate and the Vijayanagara empire were much more interpenetrated than that. They were intermarrying. There were Muslim generals in the Vijayanagara army. They were Hindu generals in the Golconda armies. It wasn’t about religion. It was about power and regional command, regional control.

The Hindutva people have also picked up on that idea of using Vijayanagara as a metaphor. And I thought this needs to be undone.

Everybody’s trying to rewrite the history of India. And very often they want to rewrite it to downplay the Muslim contribution to it, and enlarge the non-Muslim contribution. One of the things that was strange about Naipaul was that when he first started going to India, when it actually was in much better shape, politically and culturally, he didn’t like it at all. And the more Hindu it got, the more he bought into it.

 

Editor:

In India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990) he seems to be getting back in touch with the Hinduism of his childhood in Trinidad, where a kind of protestantized, fundamentalist version of the religion still thrived.

 

Rushdie:

Vidia and me, we didn’t agree much, you know. We didn’t know each other very well. We only met each other maybe half a dozen times. But it’s one of those strange things, I disagreed with him politically in almost everything, but I like reading him.

It’s not surprising to say that I really like A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) the best. Because, I think as he got older, his writing lost human warmth.

A Bend in the River (1979) is a fantastic novel, but it’s very icy in its attitudes. The Indian non-fiction books I don’t like. Actually, I like An Area of Darkness (1964) more than the other two because it feels more truthful. The return of the native discovering that the glorious homeland is not that glorious. I thought it was actually quite an honest book.

Anyway, I don’t think Vidia ever wrote for Granta, did he?

 

Editor:

Ian Jack published some of his Bombay notebooks in Granta 57. Naipaul published one short story in the Paris Review, and he wrote a lot for the New York Review of Books. He was close with the then co-editor, Robert Silvers, who famously sent him into the fire of Reaganism for a piece about the 1984 Republican National Convention called ‘Among the Republicans’. I think Naipaul was very taken with the New York intellectuals, like my old neighbor Elizabeth Hardwick –

 

Rushdie:

And grand elitism.

 

Editor:

And he was amused by Norman Mailer.

 

Rushdie:

Guess how many times I’ve been published in the New York Review of Books?

 

Editor:

Zero? Really?

 

Rushdie:

Bob Silvers had his ‘Indian’.

In my younger days, there was a moment when we would send something I’d written to the New York Review and it would come back so quickly that it was clear the envelope hadn’t been opened. After that, we just stopped sending.

 

Editor:

One of your deepest forays into what would become Granta-style reportage was your Nicaragua book, The Jaguar Smile (1987).

 

Rushdie:

Yeah, that’s in 1986. I was in the middle of writing The Satanic Verses, and I was kind of stuck. That book had problems that I didn’t know quite what to do with. Then I had this invitation [from the Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers] to go to Managua, and I just thought, let me get out of my own head and go and look at some people with actual problems. And so that book intervened. I had to write it, and then go back to writing The Satanic Verses. It’s the one really extensive piece of hard journalism I’ve ever done.

 

Editor:

You must have produced it quickly.

 

Rushdie:

Very fast, very fast. Because I thought, you know, there’s a war on. And if it’s going to happen, it needs to happen now. And actually, Sonny Mehta, my editor at Knopf, was fantastic for saying, ‘Okay, we’ll publish it immediately.’ It came out a few months after I was in Nicaragua. And a bit of it came out in Granta. That chapter about eating the eggs of love.

 

Editor:

For this Granta issue on India, I’ve been reading through Indian literature from the 1980s and 1990s. There are writers such as Vikram Seth, who, now, when I read him, seems almost to write in reaction, or at least in response, to you. A Suitable Boy (1993) feels like: ‘Let’s go the opposite direction, full pedal to the metal into realism.’ It reads like a patient, loving, heavily detailed portrait of the crummy, provincial, northern Indian bourgeoisie.

 

Rushdie:

It is like an opposite direction, yes, but that was probably a good thing.

 

Editor:

Seth’s The Golden Gate (1986) only gets better with time. It’s such a beguiling and unusual offering.

 

Rushdie:

To use that Eugene Onegin meter.

 

Editor:

It’s wild and great.

 

Rushdie:

I haven’t looked at it for a long time, but I remember really, really liking it. And I like the Ladakh book as well, From Heaven Lake (1983). And now you know, today, there might be a war.

 

Editor:

Fingers are back on the trigger.

 

Rushdie:

There was just a terrorist attack in Pahalgam, a beautiful mountain village in Kashmir. In my childhood, we would go to Kashmir for the holidays, and so I spent a lot of my life there. Just outside Pahalgam, there’s a mountain meadow. This incredibly beautiful meadow up high called Baisaran, and that’s where these tourists were, that’s where the jihadis came and killed them. I used to play in that meadow when I was a kid, and now it’s just somewhere that people get murdered.

 

Editor:

When were you last in Kashmir?

 

Rushdie:

A long time ago. Somewhere in the 1980s. Now, unfortunately, because of Islamist radicalism and all that, it’s probably not good for me to go.

 

Editor:

You would need a bodyguard, no?

 

Rushdie:

The Indian military behaves so badly in Kashmir anyway, that I kind of don’t want that. But if I don’t want that, other people behave badly. My family is Kashmiri. It’s a real loss.

 

Salman Rushdie, June 1988. (Photo by David Montgomery/Getty Images)

 

Feature Image, Salman Rushdie, 1984, Reg Inell/Getty Images

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