Salman Rushdie is a writer of multiple, interconnected worlds. He was born into a Muslim family in Bombay in 1947, and attended boarding school in Rugby, followed by Cambridge University, before becoming a celebrated writer of the post-1980s London literary boom. He now lives in New York. At the heart of his work – ever since he won the 1982 Booker Prize with Midnight’s Children – has been some kind of history: the world’s, his own, or both at once. The latest chapter in the history of Rushdie’s life sees the now 78-year-old writer – and survivor of a near-fatal assassination attempt – turn his mind to ageing and dying, which is the unifying thread running through the narratives in his 26th book, the short story collection The Eleventh Hour. I met up with him recently on one of his habitual visits to London.
Tanjil Rashid: Your work depicts journeys and transformations; you’ve made quite a few of these in your life. Of all the transformations you’ve made – all the moves – which one seems most important?
Salman Rushdie: The biggest transformation was coming to England when I was 13-and-a-half years old. I still look back on that and wonder why I did it. I wasn’t forced to do it. It wasn’t that my parents said you have to go to this school in the Midlands. They said, “If you want to go, then you can decide if you want to go.” My mother didn’t want me to go at all. Some spirit of adventure in that teenager took me halfway across the world, and that changed my life more than anything else.
What do you think is more significant in a life? The places you’ve come from or the places that you’ve moved to?
Both. There’s a continuing attachment to the places that I came from. But there’s also a rooting in the places that I’ve lived subsequently. One of the things about migration is that people who lead lives of movement put down roots in more than one place. This multiple rooting is what I feel. I feel like I have three places: India, Britain, America.
This experience of movement – of migration – is where your impulse to write may come from. In your novel Shame (1983), you wrote: “I, too, like all migrants, am a fantasist. I build imaginary countries.”
Certainly at the beginning, in Midnight’s Children, and Shame, I was trying to create the ground under my feet, by reclaiming India-Pakistan, which I was afraid of losing. And I always thought of those books as acts of reclamation. After that I thought, “I’ve spent a lot of time writing about where I came from, I should write about where I came to.” The Satanic Verses is a novel about London. Nobody thinks about it like that, which is frustrating.
I think people increasingly do. For me, it felt like the first time the world I grew up in, in east London, within the Muslim community, was portrayed.
I’m very happy to hear you say it because that was the main impulse for the novel. It was to write about coming here as a member of the South Asian community and trying to make a life and having to decide what you do to adapt, what you preserve of what you’ve brought with you, and the tensions inside you. The central section of that novel is called “A City Visible but Unseen”. At the time that was true. The community was treated as if it didn’t exist.
It seems clear in The Satanic Verses that you are writing about the immigrant culture of which you are a part. Do you still feel that?
It’s more damaged.
In the past you said that you felt like it was a culture to which you belonged.
Culturally, yes. Because it’s my culture too. What I don’t have any more is that kind of on-the-ground intimate knowledge, which I did once have. In the 1970s I was doing a lot of voluntary work in race relations in places like Brick Lane and Southall in London.
I’ve always liked your literary defence of migration, quite apart from all the political defences made by others today: about migration being central to literature.
One of the things that people who move across the world, and end up somewhere other than where they began, have to do is make up the world again. A lot of the roots of the self are uprooted in the act of migration and you have to make a new self. Literature is good at helping to do that.
On the one hand, you’ve made it clear that your homeland is in the imagination. At the same time your books are immersed in real places. There’s a paradox there.
Yeah, I’ve always been a writer of place. In this new book, The Eleventh Hour, I tried to use all the places that I’ve been writing about all my life, such as India. I also wanted to write something arising from my time at Cambridge.
This is the first time you’ve returned, in writing, to your student years in Cambridge in the 1960s.
I’ve wanted to write about Cambridge for a while. I was thinking about my illustrious forebears at King’s College, in particular EM Forster, who I did know a little bit.
It seems to me extraordinary that I just shook your hand and you shook the hand of EM Forster, who was born 150 years ago.
I know, it’s amazing. When I met him, I was coming up for 19; he was coming up for 90. He was very approachable to students. In my case, when he found out that I had this Indian background, he got even friendlier because India had been so important to him.
This encounter is interesting because Forster wrote the great Indian novel in English literature until, some might say, your own Midnight’s Children.
I was enormously impressed by A Passage to India (1924), particularly by its courage. At the time that it was written, it was not at all fashionable to be rude about the British empire. I thought: that’s something to be inspired by. But then I also thought that the way the book was written, in very classicist, cool English, didn’t feel right for the reality of India, which is noisy and vulgar and excessive. So I thought, “How do I make an opposite language?” He influenced me in reverse. That became the language of Midnight’s Children.
The Eleventh Hour seems the book of someone at a late stage in life. Would you say you are in life’s eleventh hour?
I hope I’m only in the ninth or tenth. I’m planning my hundredth birthday party. We’ll see! But for various reasons, you think about what it’s like to be in the fifth act of the play.
Who in the book do you resemble the most? Could “Late”, the story about Forster, be read as a disguised autobiography? You replaced him as the writer of the Indian experience.
I actually think of the young woman student that Forster befriends: there’s a bit more of me in her. When I was at Cambridge, I, like her, had great trouble with the counter-culture. We were being told about free love and drugs and I didn’t know that I was in favour of any of that.
Were you a conservative in your youth?
Yes, because I grew up in a conservative family. I was like that until what happened to me at Cambridge, which is the Vietnam War and the student protests against that.
Is that the moment you joined the left?
I guess so, yes. In my family, it would not have been OK to be trashing the US government.
But your parents were also Indian nationalists, correct?
They were very much Indian, yes. My parents chose not to go to Pakistan at independence in 1947. Weirdly, they went much, much later.
Why did they do that?
I’ve never understood it. I asked them, and the explanations I got were unsatisfactory. So, I don’t know. It’s a secret and a mystery.
Like your choosing to come to England.
Yeah, I’m puzzled by my own decision. When I was growing up in Bombay, I was having a nice time.
Were your parents happy in Bombay?
It seems like they were. I think when they moved to Karachi in Pakistan – I was 17 or 18 – they regretted it.
It feels like that there’s this mysterious compulsion to emigrate.
It’s true, we are uprooted people.
Alongside migration, your instincts as a writer were profoundly shaped by coming from a religious world.
You have to be interested in religion because it’s become such a significant subject, at the centre of all these societies I’ve written about. But I don’t have any need for religious faith.
Yet you have no trouble invoking concepts like transcendence or the soul.
I just think we all have a sense that the thing we call the “I” is not only the physical body, that there is what philosophers called “the ghost in the machine”. That may be an illusion. But we all have it, we all think of ourselves as being something not quite exactly coterminous with our physical existence. I like to explore that. And you can use, in stories, language that helps explain that feeling. It doesn’t have to mean you believe in supernatural things. I think the fable, the fairy tale, these kinds of language can be used to tell the truth.
You are world famous as an antagonist of religion. But looking at your early work, one might not have expected this. Your first book, Grimus (1975), was a spiritual one.
It’s based on a mystical text, The Conference of the Birds [by Muslim poet Farid ud-Din Attar] and it’s about a quest for a God and how, as a result of the quest, you become what you’re searching for – a secular rewriting of religion.
You’re so well versed in Islamic literature. Do you still feel an affinity with it?
I certainly was very affected by some Muslim philosophers, obviously by Ibn Rushd [known in the West as Averroes].
From whom you get your surname.
Yeah. By Ibn Sina [Avicenna], too. And then Urdu poetry has had an influence on me, because of my family’s friendship with Faiz.
Faiz being the greatest modern Urdu poet. And Urdu is your mother tongue?
My mother tongue, yes.
Is that something that has changed in your journey through life, the transition from Urdu to English?
When I was growing up in Bombay, I was speaking English at school. Not so much at home. My mother didn’t really like to speak English; she spoke to us in Urdu. I always had that sense of both languages at once.
Do you ever speak both languages at once?
Yes, I do, with family.
And when you were a child famously listening to your father tell stories of the Arabian Nights, was that in English or in Urdu?
Very good question. I actually can’t remember. In the way that people use language in India, it was probably in a bit of each. I think it was that kind of hybridised language.
Do you have different personalities in each language?
I do think it’s absolutely true that when you change language, you change not just language. A very interesting thing happens to me when I go to India. After a few days, my dreams change language. That always feels to me like homecoming when I start dreaming in Urdu, or Hindi – mostly Urdu.
That sounds like what happens to Saladin Chamcha in The Satanic Verses when he goes back to Bombay and feels the Indian version of himself come back and prevail.
I can’t really remember what I was feeling at the time, but that homecoming at the end of the book is very important because it was written out of the knowledge of my father’s death. That moment of reunion with his father after long years of alienation was also my experience, that return of love at the end of life.
“Falling in love with your father”, you write.
Yes, after a long period of having fallen out of love with him. That’s something that I have in common with Chamcha. It feels like homecoming – like something that was broken was mended.
Do you follow British politics now?
I feel actually very out of touch. If you asked me who the Foreign Secretary was, I’d have trouble answering.
Yet much of your writing in the 1980s was about British politics. You wrote an essay for us, “The New Empire within Britain”, about racism towards immigrants. In that, you say Britain was never “cleansed of the filth of imperialism”.
Yes, there’s a line in The Satanic Verses – a character says that the trouble with the British is that their history happened overseas, so they don’t know what it means. And I think that’s true. We don’t even teach the history of the British empire.
Do you still feel part of the anti-imperialist left in the West, as you once did?
I don’t know that I feel a part of anything much at the moment. I mean, I certainly don’t see myself as being any part of the right. But I’m a bit disillusioned with the left as well. I think I’m just detaching myself from both sides.
You’re a New Yorker now. May I ask how you voted in the mayoral election?
Well, for the obvious person.
How do you feel about Zohran Mamdani and that kind of youthful leftist politics?
That’s the best part, the youthful part. It’s a generation shift, which I think is long overdue. The initial signs are good. His triumph over Trump is almost funny.
Mamdani is associated with pro-Palestine activism in the US. How do you feel about that ideologically – the protests and so on?
My belief in the necessity for a two-state solution, for the Palestinians to have a viable state: that’s still my view. I also am not a fan of Hamas, and some of the left protests have erased the problem of Hamas. But it’s clear to me what Israel has done amounts to the level of a war crime.
Many scholars would call it a genocide.
I don’t know, there’s a kind of bullying about accepting this word. But I certainly would consider that these are war criminals. We have to stop agitating so much about vocabulary. I think the Netanyahu government is a dreadful, immoral government. There’s now an imperfect ceasefire. The question is: where do we go from here, and how do we get to that point that Edward [Said] and I were arguing for in the 1980s, which is for there to be a viable Palestinian state.
Is this a way in which your political outlook has changed from your youth?
I’ve never been in favour of terrorist groups.
What was your friendship with the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said like?
We were good friends. And after the attack on The Satanic Verses, he was one of the people who really defended it and defended it in places like Egypt, not just in the Upper West Side in New York.
Many Muslim writers around the world defended you. For example, the Syrian philosopher Sadiq Jalal al-Azm called you “the Muslim James Joyce”. How does that make you feel?
That’s very flattering to be called the Muslim James Joyce. Except I don’t feel very Muslim!
This is an edited extract from an interview which will be broadcast in January on our newly launched New Society podcast
[Further reading: What Gillian Rose saw in Auschwitz]
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This article appears in the 12 Dec 2025 issue of the New Statesman, All Alone: Christmas Special 2025
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