Step Across This Line by Rushdie Salman

Author:Rushdie, Salman [Rushdie, Salman]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non Fiction
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2002-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

THURSDAY, APRIL 13

I am woken at 5:00 A.M. by amplified music and chanting from a mandir, a Hindu temple, across the valley. I get dressed and walk around the house in the dawn light. With its high-pitched pink roofs and little corner turrets, it’s more beautiful than I remembered, more beautiful than it looked in Vijay’s photographs of it, and the view is as stunning as promised. It’s a very strange feeling to walk around a house you don’t know that somehow belongs to you. It takes a while for us to grow into each other, the house and I, but by the time the others wake up, it’s mine.

We spend most of the day mooching around the premises, sitting in the garden under the shade of big old conifers, eating Vijay’s special scrambled eggs. I know now that the trip has been worthwhile: I know it from the expression on Zafar’s face.

In the afternoon we make an excursion to the next town, the former British summer capital. They called it Simla, but it’s gone back to being Shimla now that they have left. Vijay shows me the law courts where he fought for Anis Villa, and we go, too, to the former Viceregal Lodge, a big old pile that once staged the crucial pre-Independence Simla Conference of 1945 and now houses a research establishment called the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies. The fabric of the building, of course, is badly neglected, and may soon become unsafe.

Zafar walks gravely around the conference table where the shades of Gandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah are seated, but when we get outside again he asks, “Why is that stone lion still holding up an English flag?” The probable answer, I hypothesize, is that nobody noticed until he did. India has been independent for over half a century, but the flag of St. George is still up there on the roof.

A little ducking and swerving in the grounds to dodge the BJP-wallah who now runs the institute. Alas, I am here not only as observer but also as observed, and I mustn’t fall into the trap of looking like the BJP’s man. A handshake that would certainly be photographed is worth a little fancy footwork to avoid.

Unlike V. S. Naipaul (who is also in India, I gather), I do not see the rise of Hindu nationalism as a great outpouring of India’s creative spirit. I see it as the negation of the India I grew up in, as the triumph of sectarianism over secularism, of hatred over fellowship, of ugliness over love. It is true that Prime Minister Vajpayee has tried to lead his party in a more moderate direction, and that Vajpayee personally is surprisingly popular among Muslims, but his attempt to reshape his party in his own image has failed.

The BJP is the political manifestation of the extremist Hindu movement, the RSS (Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh), rather as Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland is the political offspring of the Provisional IRA. In order to change the BJP, Vajpayee would have to carry the leadership of the RSS with him.

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