New Delhi: It seems controversial British-American author Salman Rushdie is longing to come back to India.
The Booker prize winner, who was speaking at a session of the ongoing Times Litfest, said his next novel is likely to be set in India for which he will have to come back.
Rushdie’s visits to India have often been embroiled in controversy since his 1988 book ‘Satanic Verses’ caused international religious ire, following which he refrained from visiting the country.
The author, who calls himself a “Bombay boy”, said religious objections or security hassle made his coming back to the country “quite difficult”.
“Sometimes it is made quite difficult for me to come to India and that can be off-putting. Sometimes that is because of religious objections or sometimes it is 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 was quoted as saying.
However, he promised to return once the world “opened up a little bit”. “So it just became difficult for me and it’s sad because it matters a lot to me. I will be back, I’ll be back. Let the world open up a little bit,” he said.
“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 is 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 has been very long,” Rushdie said, PTI reported.
The author last came to India for the promotion of Deepa Mehta’s 2013 film Midnight’s Children, which was based on Rushdie’s Booker-winning book of the same name.
Talking about Indian writing in English, he said contrary to what he thought, it is very flourishing with the current generation of Indian authors, he added, were writing in “every possible style, genre and form”, which was “very healthy”.