But Rushdie has been one of those public intellectuals in the US. In 2005, he wrote a piece for the Washington Post, arguing: “What is needed is a move beyond tradition, nothing less than a reform movement to bring the core concepts of Islam into the modern age, a Muslim Reformation to combat not only the jihadist ideologues but also the dusty, stifling seminaries of the traditionalists, throwing open the windows to let in much-needed fresh air.”
In his new novel, there is a barely concealed yearning among many of its characters for free expression, tolerance and sexual freedom and hedonism — ideas that he considers to be as much of the East as of the West. He even allows the emperor Akbar to muse, Lennon-like, on a world without religion. “If there hadn’t been a god,” says Akbar, “it might have been easier to work out what goodness is.”
The book flits between Mughal India and Renaissance Florence. “It’s about the moment the East and West first engage. It’s about what Spielberg would call close encounters of the third kind. Each was the other’s alien,” he explains. But Rushdie has taken liberties:
“This is at the time when Vasco da Gama was in Kerala, when the Portuguese were establishing a foothold in Goa. The thing that interested me was that there was no one going from India to the West. That pricked my novelistic sense of perversity.”
But it is not the novelistic perversity that is attracting attention. It is the sex. Four-times married, Rushdie has written a 10th novel that teems with raunchy scenes, much of it based on exhaustive research of Indian manuals. The book’s eponymous heroine is a woman variously known as Qara Koz and Lady Black Eyes. She is expert in seven types of unguiculation which is — as Rushdie puts it — “the use of the nails to enhance the act of love.” “I spent a lot of time doing the research, not just on Florentine history, Mughal history and not just into the Kama Sutra, but studying other texts about the erotic arts. It’s not all about gymnastic positions. There’s stuff in the novel based on research about brews and potions formulated to help one have 97 successive ejaculations.” I know what you’re thinking: only 97?
One reviewer described Lady Black Eyes as a precursor to Carla Bruni, but surely there is a better comparison — namely with the model and actor Padma Lakshmi, Rushdie’s fourth wife, from whom he was divorced while he was writing The Enchantress of Florence.
Last October, she published the couple’s first post-divorce book, a cookery text enticingly entitled Tangy, Tart, Hot and Sweet. Rushdie denies that his book, which dramatizes the travails of seductive beautiful women who break hearts and mastermind multiple orgasms across different continents, is a roman a clef. “It’s not at all,” he replies, “but you’re free to read it otherwise.”
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