Disputes about Salman Rushdie's ancestral properties tell a story of his family’s close links with Delhi

Anis Rushdie, author Salman Rushdie's father. (Picture credit: British Library, India Office Records)

If you'd visited Salman Rushdie’s house – Windsor Villa – in Bombay (now Mumbai) in the 1950s, chances are you might have found the family dining on raan (leg of lamb). The writer was born in Bombay in 1947 and would go on to write memorable books on his beloved city, but disputes and court cases about his ancestral properties in India tell a different story of his family’s close links with Delhi.

The writer’s father Anis, who took up the surname Rushdie, grew up in Delhi where his father (Salman’s grandfather) Muhammad Din Khaliqi Dehlavi was a businessman. Just before Partition, Anis moved to Bombay, around the same time when another celebrated author Saadat Hasan Manto left the city for Karachi. Over a decade later Anis Rushdie sold Windsor Villa in 1961 and moved to Pakistan, but just like Manto, the Rushdies too missed the magic of Bombay.

Windsor Villa, which was part of the sprawling Westfield Estate, was in Malabar Hill, considered a rich suburb where successful Indian traders had started moving in from the crowded mohallas since the last decade of the nineteenth century, outnumbering English merchants and officials. Manto became a purveyor of these mohallas, while Rushdie attended school in the toniest part of the city.

Anis managed to sell Windsor Villa at a handsome price and admitted Salman to a boarding school in England. “Rushdies’ neighbours were the Memon merchant and landlord Suleman Haji Oomer, the Parsi general practitioner and politician Dr M.D. Gilder, and the Laljis,” said an old time resident of Malabar Hill, who did not wish to be named.

Rushdie’s writings and public utterances show an unmissable trait of cosmopolitanism which can be traced to his rich and upper-class childhood in Bombay. Krishen Khanna, M.F. Husain and other artists were frequent visitors at Windsor Villa. In fact, Anis Rushdie got Salman’s nursery painted by Khanna who also made a portrait of the writer’s mother Nagin. Nagin’s brother Hameed Butt and his wife Uzra - sister of actor Zohra Sehgal - provided a link to theatre and films. Both Uzra and Hameed were connected with IPTA and counted K.A. Abbas and Balraj Sahni as their friends, all of whom would meet regularly.

Amita Malik, India’s first widely-acclaimed media critic, and a famous radio personality of her time, described Anis as a highly educated businessman, which was true considering he studied law at Cambridge; but he was not successful, according to Salman. So, while the seeds for Salman Rushdie’s cultural and intellectual capital were sown in Bombay and England, his material wealth was due to the business acumen of his grandfather, a successful merchant who invested in and maintained marquee properties in North India.

The ancestral family home in Ballimaran, old Delhi was sold by Anis Rushdie to a cousin in early 1950s. But two other properties remained unsold and were subject to court dispute. A summer cottage in Solan, Himachal Pradesh, and another house in Civil Lines, Delhi, which was valued at Rs 130 crore.

Anis Vila, the summerhouse in Solan, was requisitioned by the Himachal Pradesh government under the evacuee Act in the 1960s as Anis Rushdie had moved to Pakistan. It was only in the 1990s that Salman Rushdie staked his claim on the house. His lawyer Vijay Shankardass showed that the property was taken in the mistaken belief that Salman Rushdie was a Pakistani national whereas the writer always had an Indian and then British passport. It was built as a summer retreat by his grandfather to escape the Delhi heat and he had last visited it as a 12-year-old. In 1997, he got control of Anis Villa and visited it in 2000 with his son Zafar when he came to India for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

Rushdie recalled his visit to Solan with his son to their “reclaimed villa”, calling it “an emotional moment.” He wrote: “One day it would belong to Zafar and little Milan [his other son]. They would be the fourth generation of the family to come here. Theirs was a far-flung family and this little acre of continuity stood for lot.” Media reports now suggest that it needs massive repairs.

The other property that caused much distress to the writer was a bungalow in Delhi, which too was in all likelihood built by his grandfather. The dispute began when Anis Rushdie was alive. He had contracted to sell it to a Congress politician in 1970 for Rs 3.75 lakh and had received Rs 50,000 with the balance to be paid in due course. The transaction got delayed and the matter ended in the courts of Delhi. The original parties were replaced by their children as litigants upon their passing away. The last that came out from the Delhi High Court was that the property was valued at Rs 130 crore which is what the writer and his siblings could expect to get.

It is still not clear what made Anis and Nagin Rushdie leave Delhi for Bombay in the 1940s. In 2011, this writer had discovered papers at the National Archives in London that showed Anis Rushdie was rusticated from the Indian Civil Service (ICS) in 1935 as his birth record was forged to make him appear younger. The failure to get into the services and the forgery slur, along with a failed first marriage that ended in a tragedy could provide some clue for the move to Bombay. Rushdie’s lament has always been for Bombay, so one can only speculate. But clearly Delhi’s loss has been Bombay’s gain.