It all began with Rushdie. The world began its topple the day the fatwa was announced and it has been wobbling like a toy top ever since, doomed to fall eventually. At the time of the fatwa, liberals still had ethics and a spine. So did conservatives. The call for Rushdie’s head was met with outrage and condemnation. It was barbaric and we did not shrink from using that word.
Liberals in both India and the monolithic “West”, which included Japan and Australia, sprung to his defence, yet the book was banned in India. As always, fear, that Sword of Damocles, dictated policy rather than adherence to ideals. But the West was a different matter. Rushdie was given shelter, armed security, and put into hiding, perhaps the first “safe space” we had heard of, and one created with good reason. But the book sold wildly.
I admit I’ve never read it. My favourites are The Moor’s Last Sigh, Midnight’s Children, Shame, and Shalimar the Clown. The Moor’s Last Sigh was my first Rushdie book. I read it in the shade of a quiet veranda in a Kerala backwater. It caught me so fully. As an artist, the character of Aurora became so real for me. I had only just visited the places she goes to in the novel, such as the Mattancherry spice market and the Jewish Synagogue. Rushdie made her so real. By the end of Part One, I wanted to fly to the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi to find her paintings. Unbelievably, Rushdie had described the exact spot in which the paintings hung.
Later, I read Midnight’s Children and Shalimar the Clown on yet another shady veranda, this one connected to my former home in Goa. I can’t forget the endings of either story: the first filled my eyes with tears, the second was a cliff-hanger, leaving me lost in darkness and fear. A pedantic friend of mine pooh-poohed Rushdie: “He doesn’t know how to properly use a semicolon.” Perhaps, but for me, his stories were mesmerising. They became gateways to knowledge about India, my newly adopted home.
One monsoon, after escaping to Sri Lanka, I remember sitting in a café in Kandy, reading Shame. It was a Muslim café, and the owner caught the author’s name on the book. He walked over and wagged his finger; “This man is a very bad man,” I was told. End of story, I continued my tea. But of course, it wasn’t the end of the story. Like Rushdie’s books, stories are long, sentences are longer, and they never seem to end.
Hadi Matar, 24, second from right, in the Chautauqua County Courthouse in Mayville, New York, on August 13 | Photo Credit: Gene J. Puskar/AP
Soon we heard of the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, who was murdered in Amsterdam, and the Dutch/Somali Parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who also needed to go into hiding due to death threats. The world was becoming less tolerant. Something new had arrived on the scene and it was not just radical Islam.
Suddenly, soonly, words were said to be “violent”. The old notion that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”, a children’s song that actually sums up free speech quite succinctly, began to be pushed aside. What entered was a new (at least for the West) culture of taking offence. To be offended was now the real violence. Words had become triggers as dangerous as guns, and they were labelled as such: “Trigger Warning”. We started traversing the long path of being told what we could say and what we ought to think. Always, always, we must be careful to not offend. Offence now had consequences.... Not always a beheading, but perhaps a social ostracising, a social media ban, a university deplatforming, the loss of a job. Shame, the book, had entered our very real world. Shaming became fashionable.
By the time of the Charlie Hebdo Massacre, the coming together of national leaders in defence of free speech was short-lived. A day’s moment of signalling virtue turned into weeks of condemning the “Islamophobia” of the cartoonists. It was, of course, the artists who were to blame. They had caused their own pools of blood.
And then it all expanded rapidly. Freedom from offence is now the mantra in nearly every Western university. In many places, formerly free, it has become the law of the land. Be careful what you write on Facebook, be careful what you post on Instagram or Twitter. Offence is now a punishable offence and it is only the social media oligarchs, working with governments and special interest groups, that are the judges, juries, and executioners.
Get well Salman. Your world will never be the same, and, for years now, neither has ours.
Waswo X. Waswo is an artist and author living in Udaipur.
