Two decades on from The Satanic Verses, the death threats and the fatwa, the infamous novelist talks openly with Naresh Fernandes about his latest book, intolerance and the changing face of Mumbai

Though Salman Rushdie currently lives in the US, his latest novel focuses on a story from his childhood in Mumbai, which he still refers to as Bombay. The Enchantress of Florence – set in the genteel court of the brooding Mughal emperor Akbar in Fatehpur Sikri, India – is a gripping tale of aphrodisiacs, giant albino mercenaries, luscious women, religious fanatics and phantom lovers in two cities separated by vast oceans, but united by their appetite for hedonism. 

Why did you choose Akbar as a character? 
Like everyone else who grew up in India, I got force-fed the Mughals as a kid and for a time I wanted nothing to do with them – the way English children get force-fed the Tudors and get sick of Queen Elizabeth. I certainly had my anti-Mughal phase and never wanted to have anything to do with them. But one of the things I’ve learnt about myself is that the things that stick around in my head are the things I eventually have to pay attention to. Both the character of Akbar and the character of Machiavelli have been sticking around in my head for as long as I can remember. It never occurred to me that I would write about them in the same book. But it because clear to me over the years that these were historical figures with which my imagination was very engaged and with which I would have to deal at some point. One of the attractions of the period is that many of the things that we now recognise in the modern world had been born. You’re looking at the world in which we now live coming into being. 

Akbar went to great lengths to test his beliefs, didn’t he? 
The characters of the two Jesuit priests who show up in Fatehpur Sikri are historical figures. Akbar’s interest in engaging with Christian philosophy was so great that he sent a message to the Portuguese in Goa and said, ‘Send me your two best philosophers, your two best arguers, because I want them to come and dispute with my guys.’ They sent him two Jesuits, one Spaniard and the other Italian, and they stayed in Fatehpur Sikri for 12 years. For 12 years they were in the Ibadat Khana [House of Worship] debating with Akbar’s philosophers constantly. His level of interest in understanding Christian philosophy and Christian theology was very deep.

What happened in the Ibadat Khana was one of the most extraordinary things about his reign. The sense of disputing the world into being – it’s an imaginative act. They tried to re-imagine the world in which they lived through a really serious process of debate. It was an extraordinarily democratic idea for an absolute ruler to come up with.

How were those debates different from the discussions we now have on TV and on the internet? 
It’s less honest, sometimes. What happens now in this multi-media environment is that you feel people are simply taking up positions rather than in the proper scholarly, philosophical way of arguing out the point. So the argument becomes about a clash of positions rather than an open-ended inquiry. I think that is regrettable.

Were you drawn to Akbar because he represented the cosmopolitanism of the Muslim world? 
One has to say that for every Akbar there’s an Aurangzeb [his fundamentalist great-grandson]. There were people in Akbar’s court who strongly criticised him for not being Muslim enough. The historian Badauni, who is a minor character in the novel, genuinely did believe that he was coming very close to betraying Islam with his syncreticism and his interest in other faiths and philosophies. So even at the time, there was a dispute about what he was up to.

But I do think that that period, which goes from Akbar to Shahjahan, is when Indian Islam developed its much more open, multiple, pluralistic philosophy which embraced and was affected by the other, older belief systems of India. That’s what’s interesting about it and, in the end, along comes Aurangzeb and it all breaks up. Sometimes I think that now that I’ve written about Akbar, I should write about Aurangzeb just to be fair. To use an absurd Star Wars comparison, Akbar is Obi Wan Kenobi and Aurangzeb is Darth Vader. If you’re going to give the best-case scenario, you might as well give the worst-case scenario too. 

An extract from The Enchantress of Florence appeared on the website of The New Yorker on the same day as the release of the film Jodhaa Akbar, the names of two central characters in the book. The conspiracy theorists suggested that the Bollywood producers had orchestrated this with your publisher… 
It’s so weird. When I was writing the book, I wasn’t even aware that the film was being made. It seems amazing that it should come out at the same time. The piece in The New Yorker is one part of the book but it isn’t by any means the subject of the book so I think perhaps that people got the wrong impression that I was writing about Jodhaa and Akbar. I’m sorry, I’m not involved in any conspiracies with a Bollywood director or anyone else. 

You went to the mosque in Fatehpur Sikri as part of your research for the novel. Was it the first time you’d stepped into a mosque since the fatwa? 
Yes, it was. I’d been to Fatehpur many times before, but to go after I’d done the research was to go as if I’d never been before. The way I was able to see the place and understand it was completely transformed. There was a moment that day when suddenly something went click in my head and I understood how all of that part of the novel would go. It was extraordinary. You don’t normally get such a clear moment of, Oh, I’ve got it now. I could see my characters moving across the settings and I could understand how that part of the novel would go. It was probably the most useful research trip I’ve ever had. 

Have you ever done so much research for a novel before? 
I did a lot of research for Shalimar the Clown but it wasn’t anything like this. This has been ten years’ work, on and off. I finished Shalimar three years ago, had a year and a half of full-time reading and a year of writing it. It’s a new thing for me. When I was studying history at Cambridge, I had a professor called Arthur Hibbert who said to me, ‘You should never write history until you can hear the people speak. If you can’t hear them speak, you don’t understand them well enough and you can’t tell their story.’ I always thought that that was good advice for writing fiction as well. Certain in this case, I felt I had to get to the point when you can set the research to one side and then just write as if you’re writing anything else. To get to that point, you have to do so much research that you can understand the characters from the inside and hear them speak. 

Your bibliography lists two books about courtesans in Renaissance times… 
I must say that there was an enormous amount of research about sex. In both cultures, it seems to have been an openly sensual time. So as well as having to see the Kama Sutra and these other things, I also found myself in Italy having to study the activities of courtesans and their various means of bringing [pleasure] to their clients. So yes, it was educational. 

The Enchantress seems to have the fable-like quality of the stories in the Hamza Nama [the illustrated book of adventures commissioned by Akbar]. Was this conscious? 
Yes, I wrote the book as if I was discovering a story that already existed. I wanted people reading the book to have that sense that this is just a story that he wrote down and the latent story was always there. I wanted to have the feeling of a fable, of something that was around for a long time. The Hamza Nama was one of the real inspirations for this book. I’ve been a student of the Hamza Nama for years and have given lectures in art history about the paintings. As an insight into the character of the young Akbar, the Hamza Nama paintings were very helpful because they were very much guided by him and they are very interesting portraits of his imaginative world. They have a great deal to do with his self-image, with the kinds of heroes he wanted to be, and he got the court atelier to paint them into being. It was one of the starting points of the book. 

As a Muslim in the West, what’s it like to consider that the US could soon have a president whose middle name is Hussein? 
But we could very well have a president whose first name is John. I don’t call myself a Muslim in the West – I don’t have a religious affiliation. But I do think there’s a real change in America. I do hope it won’t be a false dawn. I do think that if we have a President [John] McCain then it’s going to be very bleak indeed. But I do think that [Barack] Obama is an inspirational leader and that he has a capacity I haven’t seen in a Western politician in a long time to inspire people. I’m very interested in his candidacy. But it’s only March and the election isn’t until November. There’s an awful lot that could happen in the meantime. 

At the same time, in India, there’s still intolerance all around. The victims of the Gujarat pogrom of 2002 have yet to get justice. 
It’s depressing, I must say. I wonder about whether certain bits of India are going backward, even as the economic revolution marches forward. It seems as if some of the secularist, tolerant, free society aspects of India are being damaged. It isn’t just Narendra Modi [the Gujarat state chief minister accused of planning the violence that left more than 2,000 Muslims dead]. It’s the attacks on various artists, whether it’s [the exiled artist MF] Husain’s pictures or poor old Taslima [Nasreen, the Bangladeshi writer recently asked to leave India] or whoever that might be. It’s a real backsliding and I can only watch with dismay. 

You faced protests yourself when you visited Mumbai earlier this year… 
It was very strange what happened in Bombay. I’ve been coming to India once or twice a year for the last ten years without it at all being problematic. It was probably some local politician trying to get his name in the papers. It certainly isn’t going to put me off. But it’s depressing when it happens because I think more highly of India than that and get depressed when this kind of low-grade stuff takes the centre of the stage. I’ve been all over the place in India and it did seem very odd that all out of nowhere this little storm was concocted. But it’s going to take much more than that to stop me from coming to Bombay, I’ll tell you that. 

You were here to do a piece on eunuchs for a Gates Foundation book on HIV-positive people. How is that going? 
I’m just trying to finish writing my piece about it now. For me, it was a great opportunity because like everyone who grew up in the city, I was aware of hijras [eunuchs] as these people that you’d see around who were vaguely menacing and kind of alien. So to get inside that closed world and to have people speaking to me about their lives was extraordinary. I filled up hundreds of pages of a notebook which I’m trying to organise into this relatively short piece. It certainly showed me my birthplace in a way that I’ve never seen it before. I do think I’m having to relearn Bombay. It’s no longer the place I wrote about in the past and I think that before I ever write about it again, I need to reintroduce myself to the place so I can learn it better. I need to come for longer. 

How has Mumbai changed? 
The centre of gravity has moved to the north. Where the city is is different now. Frankly, when I grew up, we spent our lives in what is now called South Bombay. I’m having to learn the geography of this enormous expansion. I’m beginning to have a sense of how it all hangs together. But it’s made necessary a lot of relearning. I don’t feel able to do another Bombay novel in a long time. 

What are you working on now? 
I promised my ten-year-old son Milan that I’d write him another children’s book so that’s what I’ve got to do next. I do have an idea for a related book to Haroun and the Sea of Stories. The thing I like about the two Alice books is that Alice doesn’t return to Wonderland. I didn’t want to return to the Sea of Stories. That would be boring. I need to find another imaginative universe. 

Why didn’t the Enchantress have any puns? 
I’m sorry to have disappointed you. I’ll try to do better the next time. I suspect the children’s book will have an enormous number of distasteful puns.