Late last year, I saw Salman Rushdie promoting his new book, Luka and the God of Fire, at, irony of ironies, a church in Cambridge (the same church in Harvard Square once hosted Richard Dawkins). A lady in the audience asked him about the Rohinton Mistry/Mumbai university debacle, which, at that point, I hadn’t heard of. It’s quite a story, depressing and hopeful in turns, complete with politics and charismatic leaders. Here’s the blurb for the newsy piece I wrote for The NRI last month.
In October of this year, Rohinton Mistry’s prize-winning debut novel, Such a Long Journey, was pulled from Mumbai University’s syllabus. Following Gustad Noble, a bank clerk and Parsi family man drawn into the intrigue and corruption of the Indira Gandhi years, the novel was added to the English syllabus four years ago.
The novel, writes The Guardian’s Nina Martyris, is evocative of “a Bombay of mutton samosas, prostitutes and convent schools, spies who use lines from Othello to pass on messages and public walls which need god-photos to keep them clean.” It’s a dark, grimy portrait of 70s Bombay, one which takes on Indira Gandhi, the then US and Pakistani governments, and conservative political party Shiv Sena. And therein lies the rub…
Mumbai University Censors Rohinton Mistry @ The NRI: Late last year, I saw Salman Rushdie promoting his new book… http://goo.gl/fb/FUvhb