Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Satanic Verses’ is Finally Available in India after 36 years of Ban
The controversial novel “The Satanic Verses” by Salman Rushdie which was outlawed by the Rajiv Gandhi administration in 1988 because of protests from fundamentalists and now the book is currently in “limited stock” in a bookstores in Delhi. The book is considered insulting by Muslim organizations worldwide and has caused the British-Indian novelist to endure a great deal of criticism.
“It has been a few days since we got the book and the response has been very good so far. The sale has been good,” Bahrisons Booksellers owner Rajni Malhotra told news agency PTI.
The Delhi High Court halted proceedings on a suit contesting the prohibition on Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” import stating that it must be “presumed that it does not exist” because the authorities had not produced the 1988 notification on the ban.
The Rajiv Gandhi administration had issued the ban while attempting to strike a compromise between growing Ayodhya temple fervor and Muslim emotions. Under pressure from some Muslim quarters, the government introduced a bill two years prior that overturned a Supreme Court judgment requiring Shah Bano to receive alimony.
This was seen as an intervention in Islamic personal law. The Rajiv government had allowed the removal of locks from a building that housed idols at the contested Ram temple site after receiving criticism for this from Hindu organizations. The BJP’s quick ascent was ultimately made possible by the temple movement that grew following this.
An anti-defamation bill that was criticized for attempting to regulate the media and the Bofors incident left the Rajiv government much more damaged prior to the Satanic Verses controversy.
Finally, on October 5th 1988, the government issued a Customs order banning the book in response to growing calls from Muslim clergy. It would later use that as a fig leaf to claim that only the book’s import was prohibited, not the book itself. Rushdie who sent an open letter to the then prime minister was one among several who criticized Rajiv for the “capitulation.”
Rushdie who was born in Mumbai in 1947 to British-American Kashmiri Muslim parents has been involved in a number of scandals because of his religious and political views. Rushdie has also been married four times which kept him in the center of conversation like Indian-American actress Padma Lakshmi, American novelist Marianne Wiggins, Elizabeth West and Clarissa Luard.
After being attacked on stage at a literary event in western New York in August 2022, Rushdie lost the use of one hand and one eye. Later, Rushdie’s new memoir “Knife” detailed his path to recovery from the near fatal stabbing that left him blind in one eye.
Related Posts
