Salman Rushdie's journey from books to movie

Life of Salman Rushdie's has been an open book. He has been fettered, awarded and followed by ardent fans as well as passionate haters. He has received life threats and lived life in hiding.

In an candid chat with CNBC-TV18's Anuradha Sengupta, Salman Rushdie speaks about his best seller Midnight's Children, which has been turned into a movie.    Below is the edited transcript of his interview to CNBC-TV18. Q: In Midnight's Children pretty early on Saleem Sinai your protagonist says, 'nobody from Bombay should be without a basic film vocabulary.' So given that you are originally a boy from Bombay, you get the movies, you use movie descriptions literally to describe your books. Were these 30 years a long wait?
A: Yes, it is very strange because it used to be with almost every other writer I knew was getting their books turned into movies. People only had to sneeze and somebody would make a movie of their sneeze. In my case it just seemed never to happen. With Midnight's Children there were a couple of earlier attempts that didn’t flourish and really I had come to feel that it is not going to happen.
Truthfully I didn't mind, I though the book is still a book, there it is. But I remember that those friends of mine, writers who had good experiences having their books made into movies they all said the same thing, they all said it depends on your relationship with the director. And I met Deepa Mehta a few years before we started work on this and I had admired her film 'Water' very much and we had become close and she suddenly proposed that we should do this. And I thought maybe this is my beautiful moment and actually it has been a very rewarding working relationship. So that has been one of the pleasures of it. Q: You started your career as an ad man, you were a copywriter in advertising so you are hard selling your film these days. What would be the one line thing that you would say to sell Midnight’s Children to a totally new generation?
A: The thing that has interested me from its first audiences including here, we had a screening in Delhi last week, people came out and said to me, it doesn't feel like a period piece, it feels contemporary, it feels like it is speaking to me now.
And it surprised me, I didn't know that people would have that reaction because after all in a way it is a period piece, it is from 1917 to 1977. But, I suppose there were certain things that are eternal. First of all, inside the characters life it is a family novel and it is a lot about fathers and sons, mothers and daughters and these things are eternal.
But also in the public side of it the question about relationship to history how do a small private lives, how are they affected by big public agenda, that is a question we must ask ourselves, I know people ask themselves all the time what is the relationship with power to individuals and how does power operate. So in that sense I was actually very encouraged that people felt that it still had that kind of contemporary relevance. Q: Midnight's Children when you wrote the book was a do or die effort for you isn't it? It was either like we would get Salman Rushdie the writer or Salman Rushdie who continued with advertising or whatever it was?
A: Yes, very much so, because I had a very bumpy start as a writer, lot of my early work was just not very good and fortunately now I think didn't see the light of day. My first novel came out and didn’t do too well and I was very discouraged in some ways. I thought let me just have a final all or nothing shot and that turned out to be this and truthfully when I finished it I was thinking that as far as I can tell this is a good book.
But I had no way of knowing if everybody else would agree or even the publishers or anyone. And I remember saying that, if people don't think this is a good book then maybe I don't know what a good book is, I should stick to advertising, fortunately that did not happen. Q: So you reclaimed India, you went on this journey around India and you did it cheap so you really sort of went down to the ground. What is interesting for me is since then in that reclaiming of your Indian connection, your Indian identity even as you were grappling with the fact and you have described it in your memoir about being multiply routed, being heterogeneous. I find that very fascinating. Since then has your work become almost like a commentary of India or is that limiting of you?
A: Writing doesn't go in a straight line. It loops around. I have gone away from a subject, come back to it, gone away again. I don’t know about commentary but certainly because I have always been interested in history and interested in how public affairs impacts private lives. I always thought for instance when I wrote 'The Moor's Last Sigh' that that was almost like growing up companion piece to Midnight's Children. When Midnight's Children comes out it should be memory of childhood and so on.
And then that novel in a way talks about the transformation of the Bombay where I grew up in into the Mumbai that now exists, the change from that more open, tolerant community which this city was in the 50's and 60's and how it changed into this darker more troubled city that we have now. So I felt like that was a return to the subject but coming out from a grownup perspective. So I have no idea what I am going to do. When people ask me if there is going to be another Bombay novel, etc I remember once saying I don't think so and then the next novel was 'Ground Beneath Her Feet' of 250 pages of India and so it is very rash to foretell.