It’s been 20 years since the controversy surrounding Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, but the 60-year-old is now a force to reckon with in global publishing.
He can’t avoid the spotlight whether it’s his views in Islam or his trouble-split with fourth wife Top Chef Padmalakshmi. But it is his writing that does the talking being not just the Booker but also Booker of Bookers for Midnight’s Children. CNN-IBN’s Anirudh Bhattacharyya speaks to the master of magical realism as his latest novel The Enchantress of Florence releases worldwide.
Anirudh Bhattacharyya: Salman Rushdie thank you so much for joining us here today. Your new novel The Enchantress of Florence has Akbar, the great the Mughal king at the cenrtre of the novel, why did you place him as a character in that role?
Salman Rushdie: He wasn’t originally going to be in the book at all. Originally the book was going to be about a Mughal Princess who gets lost, captured and parceled across the world and she arrives in Renaissance Italy and falls in love with an Italian soldier of fortune.
I thought that was going to be the story in the novel but when I was beginning to write it, I felt that there was a dimension missing because since my original idea was to try and bring together these two different worlds, I thought if the whole action happens in the West then there is a side of a story not there and at a relative point I had an idea of beginning a story later than the story of the princess with this supposed descendant of hers, a young European traveler arriving in the Mughal Court to tell the story of what happened to her.
At that point I felt that the book came into balance. The world of the East, the world of the West, the world of India and the world of Renaissance Italy acquired a proper balance. On the one hand you had major historical figures like Machiavelli and Medeches on the other hand equally important historical figures like Akbar and his courts.
Anirudh Bhattacharyya: Salman Rushdie thank you so much for joining us here today. Your new novel The Enchantress of Florence has Akbar, the great the Mughal king at the cenrtre of the novel, why did you place him as a character in that role?
Salman Rushdie: He wasn’t originally going to be in the book at all. Originally the book was going to be about a Mughal Princess who gets lost, captured and parceled across the world and she arrives in Renaissance Italy and falls in love with an Italian soldier of fortune.
I thought that was going to be the story in the novel but when I was beginning to write it, I felt that there was a dimension missing because since my original idea was to try and bring together these two different worlds, I thought if the whole action happens in the West then there is a side of a story not there and at a relative point I had an idea of beginning a story later than the story of the princess with this supposed descendant of hers, a young European traveler arriving in the Mughal Court to tell the story of what happened to her.
At that point I felt that the book came into balance. The world of the East, the world of the West, the world of India and the world of Renaissance Italy acquired a proper balance. On the one hand you had major historical figures like Machiavelli and Medeches on the other hand equally important historical figures like Akbar and his courts.
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