In Midnight’s Diaspora: Encounters with Salman Rushdie, recently published by Penguin and edited by Daniel Herwitz and Ashutosh Varshney, writers and intellectuals offer their insights into the cultural and political aspects of Rushdie’s writing. In a discussion with SUDEEP PAUL, Ashutosh Varshney — writer, political scientist and currently Professor of Political Science at Brown University — talks about his interview of Rushdie in March 2003 and offers his own views on literature and politics. Some excerpts:

•Any writing is a political act, and all litterateurs are political beings, existing in political contexts. Some engage in active politics, such as Mario Vargas Llosa; some are anyway intensely political as Marquez; others are very political but never make their political moorings eclipse their fiction as art, such as Philip Roth. Where do you place Rushdie?

I’m not sure I’ll agree that all writers are political beings. Jhumpa Lahiri writes lovely stories, but there doesn’t appear to be a single political bone in her body. But there are writers like Arundhati Roy, who unfortunately make their politics eclipse their art. Rushdie stands in the middle, somewhat like Milan Kundera. That is an attractive intellectual location. In his interview to me, he says it’s virtually impossible for him to write like Jane Austen, because the personal and the political have become deeply intertwined in our times. Indeed, his own life exemplifies how the political and the personal, often, interpenetrate each other.

•Your public interest in Rushdie is premised on his political self. But The Satanic Verses made Rushdie a political object himself, while Midnight’s Children, Shame, Moor’s Last Sigh are better books. Would you have been happier if Satanic Verses had never happened, and not distracted you by Rushdie’s explicatory engagements?

... contd.