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Will return to India for my next novel: Salman Rushdie

British-American novelist Salman Rushdie is planning to return to India for his next book after spending years abroad. The Booker Prize winner, speaking at a session of the Times Litfest, said his next work will most likely be set in India and he will have to return.

‘The last ten years I have mostly written these western-based novels, these novels mostly based in America, a little bit of England, I think it might be time to come back to India. I think the next book appears to be an Indian novel. It’s in a very early stage, so let me get a little further. But it looks like it’ll be entirely set in India, which means I have to come to India. It’s been very long,’ Rushdie said.

Rushdie last visited India for the promotion of Deepa Mehta’s 2013 film ‘Midnight’s Children,’ which was based on his own Booker-winning book of the same name. His visits to India have been fraught with controversy since his 1988 novel ‘Satanic Verses’ sparked widespread religious outrage, prompting him to withdraw from the country.

When asked about returning to India, the author, who refers to himself as a ‘Bombay kid,’ said religious objections or security concerns make his return very tough. ‘Sometimes it is made quite difficult for me to come to India and that can be off-putting. Sometimes that’s because of religious objections or sometimes it’s because of me being engulfed in a kind of security operation that makes it actually impossible for me to be there really,’ the 74-year-old author stated. He pledged, though, that he would return once the world ‘opened up a little bit.’

While writing ‘Midnight’s Children’ in the 1980s, Rushdie remembered thinking of Indian writing in English as the end of a tradition. ‘I wasn’t sure that Indian writing in English would necessarily survive. I thought after all there were so many other languages to write in and it may be I thought that the Indian writing in English being done was an end of a tradition rather than the beginning of it. And that was wrong, it turned out to be very flourishing,’ the author said.

He went on to say that the present generation of Indian authors were writing in ‘every imaginable style, genre, and form,’ which he thought was ‘quite healthy.’

‘But now it’s a flood and the good thing about that is the writing being done in every possible style, genre and form. So it’s a very rich, varied literature now, it’s a narrow spectrum. It’s a broad spectrum. And I think that’s very healthy,’ Rushdie noted.

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The author, who has written 12 novels as well as a number of collections of essays and nonfiction, admitted that he writes ‘more or less like an office job.’ ‘I usually start work by 10 in the morning and I do a day’s work like anybody going to work,’ he said while admitting to working better at night than morning.

For him, the writing process is also dependent on the stage of the book he is working on; if it is early in the process, writing for three to four hours would tire him, but later in the process, he can work for more than 12 hours at a time. ‘When I get to the later stages of the book, when I am revising and finishing the book then I can work very long hours, then I can work 12 hours a day even more sometimes. I just stay inside the book, write, sleep, write, sleep. Eat occasionally,’ he added.

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