Exclusive: Salman Rushdie on his new book

SAVING GRACE: Rushdie says The Enchantress of Florence helped him to sail through his divorce.

        

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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: That is one question I wanted to ask you because Akbar’s rule was supposed to be an age of enlightenment in India and of course when you talk about Florence in the Renaissance it is the age of enlightenment again. Is that a coincidence again or is that something that you actually meant?

Salman Rushdie: Yes, there was a reason. It was to say here are these two cultures at a kind of peak and yet it was a time when historically they had very little connection with each other so I thought let me see what happens if you actually give them a connection and see how they interact.

Also, I thought it was interesting and important in a way to say everybody says about the European Renaissance that it is a period at which important ideas, humanistic ideas about the value of the individual human being, the value of the self rather than the group…if you look at the philosophy of Akbar, the philosophy of the high Mughal period that very similar idea about the individual worth and so on that Indian humanism was also coming into being so I wanted to say that this kind of idea was not just western.

It doesn’t just come into being in just one place at one time and then get exported. It actually grows naturally in more than one culture and has an Indian root as well as a European one.