Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows part of an interview with the writer Salman Rushdie conducted by arts journalist and television presenter the late Andrea Stretton, during which they discuss issues of cultural diversity arising from the publication of his novel The Moor’s Last Sigh. They sit opposite one another in a television studio and are seen against a minimally decorated set. The camera usually shows each one in close-up, but there are occasional medium shots of the two of them.

Educational value points

• Salman Rushdie (1947–) discusses what he views as the positive aspects of the cultural diversity of modern cities. He gained first-hand experience of such ‘melting pots’ from living in Mumbai as a child and in London and New York as an adult. These commercial centres have attracted migrants throughout their history. Today Mumbai is India’s most cosmopolitan city while about 36 per cent of New York’s population and 31 per cent of London’s are foreign born.

• Rushdie is familiar with the consequences of cultural and religious conflict. His Indian Muslim family left Mumbai for Pakistan when war broke out between India and Pakistan in 1964. The publication of his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses led Iran’s spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeini, satirically portrayed in the novel, to declare a fatwa calling for the execution of Rushdie and those who, aware of its content, were involved in its publication, for ‘blasphemy against Islam’.

• Rushdie critiques the idea of ‘purity’, whether racial or cultural, which he cites as ‘one of the more dangerous concepts in the 20th century’. Nazi Germany claimed scientific legitimacy for its attempt to achieve racial purity through mass extermination and sterilisation. Ethnic cleansing, the attempt to create ethnic homogeneity through forcible removal or killing, has been associated with the former Yugoslav Republic, Chechnya, Iraqi Kurdistan and Rwanda.

• Rushdie, a writer with a considerable international profile, is seen promoting The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), his sixth book. His second novel Midnight’s Children (1981) won the Booker prize and brought him international fame as a writer. He gained further notoriety when the fatwa was declared against him on the publication of The Satanic Verses, his fourth novel. In 2007 he was awarded a knighthood.

• The matters discussed in the interview relate to Rushdie’s novel The Moor’s Last Sigh which, among other things, examines the complexities of multiculturalism. The action of the novel centres on members of the small Jewish and Christian communities in India and the activities of right-wing Hindu terrorists who oppose Indian Muslims and lower castes. The title refers to the Catholic defeat of Islamic rule in Granada, Spain, in 1492.

• Rushdie refers to the practice of writers basing fictional characters in their novels on real people. In his novel The Moor’s Last Sigh he may be presenting a caricature of Bal Thackeray (1926–), the leader of the Hindu fundamentalist party Shiv Sena, through the character of Raman Fielding. Elsewhere, he claims that even though writers may be inspired by real people, in the process of writing fiction the characters become their own entities.