 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It is an honour to be here with you this evening and with so many incredible writers and so many friends and supporters of Salman Rashdi. I'm Philippe Sands, I'm president of English Pen and we are all gathered this evening to defend and advance freedom of expression, to show our support and to send a message of hope and solidarity to writers and to readers across the world. Defending freedom of expression is the beating heart of Salman Rashdi's work as a writer and as an activist and we want together here tonight to express our infinite gratitude to him for everything he does and continues to do for the passion and the courage with which he writes and fights. Thank you Salman. Let's go back to December 1948, the drafting of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, article 19. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression. This right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. That was a singular moment when freedom of expression went truly international. Everyone in that text includes Salman Rashdi. He is a beacon around the world and I'm so pleased to join in this expression of solidarity for him and also for everyone who finds themselves on the receiving end of arbitrary, inappropriate, outrageous or illegal acts that seek to undermine their freedom of expression. One such person is the Ukrainian translator of my books. At the very moment that we gather he is actually fighting as a soldier in eastern Ukraine for the freedom to carry on his work as a translator. To translate for example the works of Raphael Lemkin, the man who invented the concept of genocide and whose writings are banned in Russia because he considered the events of the 1930s the Holodomor to be a genocide. Another such person is the Russian translator of my books, a 67-year-old poet. A month after the attack on Ukraine, this lifelong and passionate defender of human rights was detained on the edge of Moscow's Pushkin Sky Square as she headed for the spot that was traditionally associated with expressing views. She just wanted to read a poem, one that was written out on a large sheet of paper. The police spotted the rolled-up paper poking out from her backpack. They stopped her and they asked to see what was written on the paper and together they read the lines drawn from a poem entitled Listening to the Horrors of War written in 1855 by the renowned Russian poet Nikolai Nekrasov. He was the editor of Sovremennik, a literary magazine in Moscow. Nekrasov was inspired by stories submitted to him by a man called Leo Tolstoy who had recently returned from fighting the war in Crimea. Nekrasov published those stories as Sevastopol sketches and of course they inspired what became war and peace. My translator was arrested, she was charged, she was tried and she was convicted and she did time in a prison. What was her crime? Allow me to quote from the charge sheet. Quote, discrediting the current special operation by reading the text that Nekrasov wrote at the tail end of the Crimean War having been influenced by Tolstoy's Sevastopol sketches. End of quote. Astonishing but totally true. I was in touch with her this morning to tell her about this evening. We exchanged thoughts, me in London, she in Moscow and I can do no better than read her words about Salman Rushdie. I have translated two books by Salman Rushdie. She wrote, including Harun. As for creative inspiration, I find in this author some things that I really need. Imagination. This is a great human freedom. Dignity. Self-esteem. Rushdie writes a lot about identity and the danger of losing it. But his complex and tragic identity is very individual and she continues as such anti-ideological. I like very much his love and respect for all whom he creates and his obvious hate against cruelty. He never puts aesthetic before ethics. Rushdie's writing is Dante-like and visionary. It opens the way to go down to hell and then to come back and to tell. If possible, please allow me to send Salman Rushdie my expression of love from Moscow pen. We all read about this awful murderous attempt and think much about him and hope for better news. End of quote. Thank you so much for your attention. I'm very pleased now to introduce to you our major, Georgina Godwin, who is a trustee of English pen. Very many thanks to Philippe and good evening and thank you all for joining us, either online or here in person. As Philippe said, I'm Georgina Godwin and I'll be introducing the incredible writers who'll share readings and reflections with us this evening. There were many others who wanted to take part in this show of solidarity and lots of other organizations around the world have coordinated fantastic events. We are inspired and moved by the outpouring of support for Salman Rushdie, which extends to a much wider global community beyond this room. I'd like to thank the organizations who helped put this evening together. English Pen, Pen International, Index on Censorship, Article 19, and Humanists UK. All human rights organizations who work tirelessly to defend freedom of expression. Please consider supporting those organizations by joining, donating, and helping with their ongoing campaigning work. This event would not have been possible without the tremendous support of Caroline Michelle, the British Library, and Penguin Random House. I am honored to introduce the writers who'll be offering their personal reflections on Salman and reading from his work. And so I'd like to begin by welcoming to the stage Mona Ashie, who'll read from the Moors last sigh, and Alan Yentob, who's reading from Midnight's Children. Good evening. This is a piece about love that lands on a simple emotional truth. And I thought about mad love, about all the amorphous Dada Gamba, the Zagobi generations. I remembered Kamauam, and Belle, and Aurora, and Abraham, and poor Inna, eloping with her country and eastern cash on delivery bow. I even included Mini and Matora Flores, finding ecstasy in Jesus Christ. And of course, I thought endlessly like a child scratching at a wound about Uma and myself. I try to cling to our love, to the fact of it. Even though there were voices within deriding me for the size of the mistake I had made with her. Let her go, the voices advised, at least now after all this cut your losses. But I still wanted to believe what lovers believe that the thing itself is better than any alternative, be it unrequited or defeated, or insane. I wanted to cling to the image of love as the blending of spirits, as malage, as the triumph of the impure, mongrel, conjoining best of us over what there is in us of the solitary, the isolated, the estear, the dogmatic, the pure of love as democracy, as the victory of the no man is an island, two's company, many over the clean, mean, apartheiding ones. I try to see lovelessness as arrogance, for who but the loveless could believe themselves complete, all seeing, all wise. To love is to lose omnipotence and omniscience. Ignorantly is how we fall in love. For it is a kind of fall. Closing our eyes, we leap from that cliff in hope of a soft landing. Nor is it always soft. But still, I told myself still. Without that leap, nobody comes to life. The leap itself is a birth. Even when it ends in death, in a scramble for white tablets, in the scent of bitter almonds, on your beloved's breathless mouth. Good evening, everyone. I first came across Salman Rushdie when I read and fell in love with midnight's children. That was over 40 years ago. And as a consequence of that, I made a film about Salman. And what followed was a lifelong friendship. And that too was a love story. I want to read then to you from midnight's children, which was a book which completely pulled me over. One Kashmiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather, Adam Aziz, hit his nose against a frost hardened tussock of earth, while arranging to pray. Three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly in the brittle air, and lay before his eyes on the prayer mat, transformed into rubies. Lurching back until he knelt with his head once more upright, he found that the tears which had sprung to his eyes had solidified. And at that moment, as he brushed diamonds contemptuously from his lashes, he resolved never again to kiss earth for any God or man. This decision, however, made a hole in him, a vacancy in a vital inner chamber, leaving him vulnerable to women and history. Unaware of this at first, despite his recently completed medical training, he stood up, rolled prayer mat into a thick churrut, and holding it under his right arm, surveyed the valley through clear diamond free eyes. The world was new again. After a winter's gestation in its egg shell of ice, the valley had beaked its way out into the open moist and yellow. The new grass bided its time underground. The mountains were retreating to their hill stations for the warm season. In the winter, when the valley shrank under the ice. I record that Dr. Aziz was a tall man, pressed flat against a wall of his family house. He measured 25 bricks, a brick for each year of his life. My grandfather's nose, flaring, curvaceous as dances. Between them swells the nose's triumphal arch, first up and out, then down and under, sweeping into his upper lip with a superb and at present red tipped flick. An easy nose to hit a tusk with. I wish to place on record my gratitude to this mighty organ. If not for it, who would ever have believed me to be truly my mother's son, my grandfather's grandson. This colossal apparatus, which was to be my birthright to Dr. Aziz's nose, comparable only to the trunk of the elephant headed God Ganesh, established incontrovertibly his right to be a patriarch. It was Tai who taught him that too. When young Adam was barely past puberty, the dilapidated boatman said, that's a nose to start a family on, my prinsling. Very many thanks there to Mona and to Alan. And now please welcome Pauline Melville, who'll share some personal reflections. Good evening everybody. I've been asked to speak for five minutes about my friendship with Salman. I could speak for hours. The friendship is one of the great pleasures of my life. In the early 80s, we first met when Salman came to live next door to where I was living. Now, Salman is a great communicator. In fact, if he doesn't have the means to communicate, it's a kind of torture for him. And in those days, there were no mobile phones. And it so happened that the landline in his new house hadn't yet been installed. So when I offered my phone, the use of my phone, he jumped at it and came in every other day, sat on the floor because there were so much books and piles of paper and clutter and phoned whoever he needed to phone. His agent, his publisher, his friends, whatever. But from then on, we just struck up a great friendship. And it's lasted to this day without a break. Now, Salman is unfailingly generous to new writers. He's encouraging. He's enthusiastic. He gives advice. And I was a new writer. A bit later, I'd written a collection of short stories, but I was embarking on my first novel. And I was taking a long time. I was experimenting and going off to tangent and putting this chapter here and that there and changing the structure. I was going on for too long. And one day, I got a call from Salman. Pauline, he said, a novelist is someone who gets to the end. Good advice. I've always heeded it since. But it's the conversations with Salman that are truly wonderful. He is such fun. And there's a breathtaking range of topics from the politics of Kashmir to American elections, to the latest gossip about Mariah Carey or Beyonce. It's the conversations about literature that are to die for. I'm sorry for all of you if you haven't had the chance to have that kind of experience. For instance, had I ever thought that Othello never really loved Desdemona, that maybe she was just a trophy wife, that maybe the name Othello was derived from the Arabic for Atala or Atala? And did I know that Helen of Troy in the end was actually bumped off by other women? All these things, the range is extraordinary. I mean, I once asked him about a Polish poet. And immediately he gave me the names of five unpronounceable Polish poets that I should read. The conversations are in a way, you'll hear it in the readings. They're a sort of reflection of his work, that mix of popular culture, erudition, scholarship, humor, wit, insight. Absolutely everything is there in the work. And every now and then when I'm chatting to him, I'm jolted with the realization that I'm actually probably talking to one of the great contemporary figures of literature. And in fact, if there was somebody in the future who could look back at now and see us, I mean, all of us, because I'm sure all of us have these conversations with him. They think that we were in the company of a Voltaire, or a Zola, or an Ovid. Because the work is so extraordinary and brilliant. In fact, it's not fair really all that intelligence and wit, and talent and imagination and wordplay, all packed into one person. I mean, you know, what chance is there for the rest of us? You know, you could, you could hope for the trickle down effect. But we all know that doesn't work. Recently, or a few months ago, my email was hacked. And everybody, all my friends got a message saying, oh, Pauline's in some terrible kind of trouble and sent her money immediately. You know, the score. And apparently Salman got this message when he was in a cab on his way to teach at the university in New York. And being a loyal friend, he's a wonderful, wonderful friend. He just bunged off the money straight away without checking too carefully. And then a bit later, he phoned me from New York and said, oh, Pauline, how are you? What's happened? And I said, oh, my God, I hope you haven't sent any money. There's been a terrible scam. And he said, oh, oh, actually, I have, I better hang up and phone my bank. And then about half an hour later, he rang giggling with delight. Guess what he said. My bank has got a special department for abused elders. For people of my age who fall victim to that kind of scam. And I've got all the money back. So anyway, we laughed a lot about that and sent emails to each other for a while, signing off one abused elder to another. I mean, there's so much to tell. There's not enough time to tell it. There are the fat were years. And many of us have anecdotes, some hair raising some hilarious, but all that time he was so resilient, so courageous. And he never stopped writing. I know he has a very deep love for his family, his sons, his sister and her family, and of course, his wife. And I don't know if you're listening, Salman, or if you can watch this, but get well soon. And everybody here sends their support and love and ciao for now. Many thanks there to Pauline. Next, Julian Barnes will read from Imaginary Homelands. And Monica Ali will read a passage from Midnight's Children. This is the start of an essay called censorship. My first memories of censorship are cinematic. Screen kisses brutalized by prudish scissors, which chopped out the moments of actual contact. Briefly, before comprehension. I wonder I wondered if that was all there was to kissing, the languorous approach, and then the sudden turkey jerk away. The effect was usually somewhat comic and censorship still retains in contemporary Pakistan, a strong sense of comedy. When the Pakistani censors found that the movie El Seed ended with a dead Christian with a dead Charlton Heston leading the Christians to victory over the Muslims, they nearly banned it. Until they had the idea that simply cutting out the entire climax, so that the film as screened showed El Seed mortally wounded. El Seed dying nobly and then ended. Muslims won Christians nil. My first direct experience with censorship took place in 1968. When I was 21, fresh out of Cambridge and full of the radical fervour of that famous year, I returned to Karachi where a small magazine commissioned me to write a piece about my impressions of returning home. I remember very little about the piece. Mercifully, memory is a censor too, except that it was not at all political. It tended, I think, to linger melodramatically on images of dying horses with flies settling on their eyeballs. You can imagine the sort of thing. Anyway, I submitted my piece and a couple of weeks later was told by the magazine's editor that the press council, the national censors, had banned it completely. Now, it so happened that I had an uncle on the press council and in a very unradical string-calling mood, I thought I'd just go and see him and everything would be sorted out. He looked tired when I confronted him. Publication, he said immovably, would not be in your best interest. I never found out why. I have my very well-loved, well-worn copy of Midnight's Children here. I first read it as a teenager and I loved it as did everyone else for its fantastic Dazzling style and its ferocious intelligence, but also because it was the first novel in which I had found a description of the birth of Bangladesh. It's a book that's been close to my heart ever since. I go to read from the beginning. Book one, the perforated sheet. I was born in the city of Bombay once upon a time. No, that won't do. There's no getting away from the date. I was born in Dr. Nalika's nursing home on August 15, 1947. And the time? The time matters too. Well then, that night. No, it's important to be more on the stroke of midnight as a matter of fact. Clock hands joined palms and respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out. At the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps and outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe. But his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment. Because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly, blandly saluting clocks, I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history. My destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me. Newspapers celebrated my arrival. Politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Salim Sinai, later variously called snot nose, stain face, baldie, sniffer, bidder, an even piece of the moon, had become heavily embroiled in fate. At the best of times, a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn't even wipe my own nose at the time. Many thanks to Julian and to Monica. Now, please welcome Hanif Qureshi, who will offer his tribute to Salman. There's a spectre always haunting the world. Sometimes it's further away. Other times it's close. But it's always present, always a possibility and always has to be fought. This spectre is a political and religious idea called fascism. This contamination is, as we know, common in the world and becoming ever closer and more common, leaving the liberalism and democracy we'd like to take for granted in its wake. And fascism, like literature, is personal, as well as political. It's inside the human being as well as outside as ideology. It can, as we know, become a state of mind, even of our own minds, of course. And what a mind it is that fascism creates. It's an arid, one dimensional place, a terror state stuck in the past, where there cannot be any complexity or doubt, and which separates the internal population into us and them. Nothing new can be taken in. Fascism claims to know everything already. It's a simplified, purged, antiseptic, and childish idea of the world which requires the annihilation of all opposition, as well as, in its public dimension, the destruction of fascist journalism, universities, and free thought. If fascism is all noisy slogans, flags, propaganda, and the idealization of fatuous leaders, if fascism is a dehumanizing patriarchal monologue that never ends, the satanic verses is the rude contrary of the authoritarian lie. It is resistant to God, who is the ultimate fascist, along with his psychophants, because the novel is, in itself, a debate, a conversation, and an argument worth having. The satanic verses is a rollicking, whirling, kaleidoscopic book of upside downness, and of through the looking-glass-ness. It's rich with jokes, wit, dreams, reversals, questions. It's as real and difficult and complex as the world, as it celebrates the importance, necessity, and beauty of blasphemy. In a way, you could say that it's freewheeling, literary madness that keeps us sane in this out-of-joint time. And the literature made from the alchemy of reason and imagination reminds us that there is always an alternative, that we can be creative, that we are not at the end, that we can make new things, bringing, as Rushdie puts it, newness into the world. In the face of the horror and sadness of what has occurred, we should recall that the satanic verses is an essential book, an always urgent and crucial novel, which prompts us not to forget that our colleague and dear friend, Salman Rushdie, has devoted his life to struggling with the specter of authoritarianism on our behalf. And he has taken responsibility as we all must. And so we give him thanks here today for his bravery and for his heroism. And we wish him well in his recovery. So thank you, Salman, for what you've given us. Thank you. Thank you very much to Hanif. Up next, Kathy Lett will read short passages from Selected Works and Melvin Bragg will read from Haroon and the Sea of Stories. When our beloved Salman came off the ventilator in hospital and found his voice again, his son's reported that their father's feisty and defiant sense of humour remained intact. Salman has always known that laughing at life enables you to strap a giant shock absorber to your brain, which is why humour has always been a huge part of his armory. Satire is sewn through his magical prose like sequins. And his wit is sharp enough to shave your legs. It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book, he once said. You just have to shut it. And the only thing worse than a bad review from the Itola hominy would be a good review from the Itola hominy. And then there's this wonderful one liner. If Woody Allen were a Muslim, he'd be dead by now. Deadpan humour, literally. And he also once said, to read a 600 page novel and then say that it has deeply offended you, well, you've done a lot of work to be offended. And how do you defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorised. As well as the wit, there's also wisdom, like my favourite quote from Satanic Verses. What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche to survive? Or are you the cussed, bloody minded, ramrod-back type of damn fool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? The kind that will almost certainly 99 times out of 100 be smashed to bits. But the hundredth time will change the world. Salman has given us such a treasure trove of literary gems and golden nuggets, but I think it's appropriate to end on this quote. The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism. And so, dearest Salman, we can't wait to see you again soon, back on the dance floor. I'll be reading an extract from Haroon and the Sea of Stories. I came across that after the fatwa when I called up Salman and said, could I interview him? And he said, I don't want to talk about what's happened. And I said, that's fine by me. What do you want to talk about? My new book. So I bought Haroon and the Sea of Stories. It's a classic, an instant classic. It's elegant, it's witty. It seems to have nothing whatsoever to do to the terrible things that were happening to him and have happened since. But it was the most perfect rebuttal of what was going on, a work of art, an inviolable work of art. So I read a couple of pages from Haroon and the Sea of Stories. There was once in the country of Alibay, a sad city, the saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its name. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish, which was so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy, even though the skies were blue. In the north of the sad city stood mighty factories in which, I'm told, sadness was actually manufactured, packaged and sent all over the world, which never seemed to get enough of it. Black smoke poured out of the chimney of the sadness factories and hung over the city like bad news. And so in the depths of the city beyond us, an old zone of ruined buildings that looked like broken hearts, there lived a happy young fellow by the name of Haroon, the only child of the storyteller Rashid Khalifi, whose cheerfulness was famous throughout that unhappy metropolis and whose never-ending stream of tall, short and winding tales had earned him not only one of two nicknames, he was admirers, he was Rashid, the ocean of notions, stuffed with cheery stories as the sea was full of glumfish, but his jealous rivals called him the Shah of Blah. To his wife, Saraya, Rashid was for many years a loving husband as anyone could wish for. And during those years, Haroon grew up in a home which was instead of misery and frowns, he had his father's ready laughter and his mother's sweet voice raised in song. Then something went wrong. Maybe the sadness of the city finally crept in through the windows. The day Saraya stopped singing in the middle of a line as if someone had thrown a switch, Haroon guessed there was trouble brewing, but never suspected how much. Haroon went with his father wherever he could because the man was a magician, he couldn't be denied. He would climb up to some little makeshift stage in a dead-end alley packed with raggedy children and toothless old timers all squatting in the dust. And once he got going, even the city's many wandering cows would stop and cock their ears and monkeys would jabber approvingly from rooftops and the parrots and the trees would imitate his voice. Where did those stories come from? It seemed that all Rashid had to do was to part his lips with a plump red smile and out would pop some brand new saga complete with sorcery, love interest, princesses, wicked uncles, fat aunts, mustachioed gangsters in yellow check pants, fantastic locations, cowards, heroes, fights, and half a dozen catchy, hummable tunes. Everything comes from somewhere, Haroon reasoned, so these stories can't simply come out of the thin air. But whenever he asked his father, this important question, the sharp blur would narrow his to tell the truth slightly bulging eyes and pat his wobbly stomach and stick his thumb between his lips where he made a ridiculous drinking noises, glug glug glug. Haroon hated it when his father acted that way. No, come on, where did they come from, really, he'd insist. And Rashid would wiggle his eyebrows mysteriously and make witchy fingers in the air. From the great story, she replied, I drink the waters, I drink the waters, story waters, when I feel and then I feel full of steam. Very many thanks there to Melvin and to Kathy. Well, up next, it's Margie Orford from International Pen. She's going to speak about Salman and the impact of his work. The power of doubt over faith, the power of speech over silence, and the power of courage over acquiescence. It's my five minutes and perhaps 40 years with Salman Rushdie. But I first met him in person with my friend Salil Tripati's house in London. Salil was then the chair of the Writers and Prison Committee of Pen International. And he and Salman have been friends since 1983 when they met in India when Salman went there for his after his book a prize win with Midnight's Children. That was a book I have feverishly read in Cape Town in the early 1980s. Rushdie's imaginative reach into the post-colonial, his magic and his realism, when illumination in the bleak years of the apartheid regimes repression of almost all political dissent and of free speech. The student newspaper I worked on then was heavily censored. Other newspapers as well as books were banned by the censors and by the security services. Writers were detained, banned and exiled. It was a formative time and one that taught me just how dangerous creativity of thought, humane playfulness and satire are to men with rigid minds and ideologies that drive them to silence, to repress and to kill those who challenge their narrow, certain and sanctimonious world views. Salman Rushdie has been an active supporter of Penn International on whose board I was privileged to serve. He joined our campaigns and he lent his name advocating for persecuted writers around the world. Salman speaks out whenever a case is brought to him and he was doing that when he was stabbed in New York. He has shown his exceptional generosity and concern for writers facing persecution and imprisonment. His voice matters in public, but his is not only a public voice, that private literary voices I think something that we all carry with us in our ears, in our minds ears. And he has helped writers in so many ways with promptness and with generosity. Last year he participated in Penn's Centennial Congress as he did in 1993. He was also part of the Writers in Prison Committee meeting in 2004, which saw the spearheading of advocacy at the United Nations and at a national level on religious defamation and blasphemy. These vital initiatives informed the work done on behalf of writers in Egypt, in Ireland, in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey to name just a few places. But Salman Rushdie's satanic voices has been a lightning rod in the history of free speech or lack of it in South Africa as it has been in many places. That book was banned for blasphemy in 1988 by a strange collusion of security sensors, apartheid security sensors and certain anti-apartheid Muslim groups who petitioned the state. At that time Rushdie was meant to speak at a literary festival in Cape Town, but his disinvitation in the wake of the funeral around the novel from the festival saw an incendiary disagreement between John Kutseer and Nadine Gordema, South Africa's two Nobel laureates. And I should just say I think Salman Rushdie should be the one too. Satanic verses was technically unbanned in 2002 in South Africa, but with extensive restrictions that meant that the book could not be sold in public, it could not be displayed or held by libraries. Now that was the state, an unhappy state of affairs when I was president of Penn in South Africa, when in about 2014 a young novelist was interviewed about her debut novel at a literary festival in Durban. At the end of the interview she was asked about her influences and literary heroes and Salman Rushdie and his work was who she cited. This caused outrage among certain members of the audience as well as threats against her. But she drove home and when she was on a dark road she was pushed off the road in her car by a group of men in another car. It was hard for her to identify her attackers and the police case turned up nothing. She faced sanctions at home as well because her husband's religious, because of her husband's religious Muslim family and she was incarcerated for a while in her own home. She approached Penn and this distressing and dangerous case I took to Salman. He worked with us to resolve it and it was very complicated because of the domestic situation involved and it was here that Salman's finesse and attention and care as well as his unstinting patients really came to the form. It was his response through us and to this writer that made all the difference. And so she who loved Salman Rushdie's work found her way through, found her way out, found sanctuary and thanks to his support she has continued to write. I think perhaps I will end because Salman Rushdie says it best and I quote from one of his essays. The creative act requires not only freedom but also the assumption of freedom. If creative artists worry if they will still be free tomorrow then they will not be free today. If they are afraid of the consequences of their choice of subjects, of their treatment of those subjects then their choices will not be determined by talent but by fear. If we are not confident of our freedom then we are not free. Great art or let's just say more modestly original art is never created in the safe middle ground but always at the edge. Originality is dangerous. It challenges, questions, overturns assumptions, unsettles moral codes, disrespect sacred cows or other such entities. It can be shocking or ugly or to use the catch all term so beloved of the tabloid press controversial. And if we believe in liberty, if we want the air we breathe to remain plentiful and breathable, this is the art whose right to exist we must not only defend but celebrate. Art is not entertainment, at its very best it's a revolution. Thank you Salman. Many thanks there to Margie Orford. Now it's time for us to welcome Burhan Sonmez who will read from Anton Joseph a memoir and Mina Kandasami who'll read from Languages of Truth essays 2003 to 2020. When he was a small boy his father at bedtime told him the great wonder tales of the east told them and retold them and remade them and invented them in his own way. The stories of Sharazat from the thousand one nights stories told against death to prove the ability of stories to civilize and overcome even the most murders of tyrants and the animal fables of the Panchatantra and the marvels that poured like a waterfall from Katasari Sagara the ocean of the streams of story the immense story lake created in Kashmir where his ancestor had been born and the tales of mighty heroes collected in the Hamzanama and the adventures of Hatim Tahi this was also a movie whose many embellishments of the original tales were added to and augmented in the bedtime retellings to grow up steeped in these tellings was to learn two unforgettable lessons first the stories were not true there were no real genies in the bottles or flying carpets or wonderful lambs but by being untrue they could make him feel and know truths that truth couldn't tell him and second they that they all belong to him just as they belong to his father Anis and to everyone else they were all his as they were his fathers bright stories and dark stories sacred stories and profane he's to alter and renew and discard and pick up again as and when he pleased he's to laugh at and rejoice in and live in and with and by to give the stories life by loving them and to be given life by them in return man was the storytelling animal the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was the story was his birthright and nobody could take it away I feel very emotional standing here and reading Salman Rushdie's book because as a teenager I had a I stole actually a copy of the satanic verses from friends of the family and I would carry it to school every day because just to be seen with that book meant everything it meant that rebel and rebellion was something that writers did it meant that fearlessness was how I wanted to be seen so the book was like a statement and most of all it meant to a young nerdy geeky girl that intellectualism was sexy and if you wanted to you could take on anybody with just the power of your words so I'm reading from his collection of ss the languages of truth we were not hindus my family but we believe the great stories of hinduism to be available to us also on the day of the annual ganapati festival when huge crowds carried effigies to the elephant-headed deity Ganesh to the water's edge at chopati beach to immerse the god in the sea Ganesh felt as if he belonged to me too he felt like a symbol of the collective joy and yes unity of the city rather than a member of the pantheon of a rival faith when I learned that Ganesh's love of literature was so great that he sat at the feet of India's Homer the sage Byaasa and became a scribe who wrote down the great Mahabharata epic he belonged to me even more deeply and when I grew up and wrote a novel about a boy called Salim with an unusually big nose it seemed natural even though Salim came from a Muslim family to associate the narrator of midnight's children with the most literary of gods who just happened to have a big trunk of a nose as well the blurring of boundaries between religious cultures in that old truly secularist Bombay now feels like one more thing that divides the past from India's bitter stifled sensorious sectarian present the Mahabharata and its sidekick the Ramayana two of the longest wonder tales of all are still alive in India alive in the minds of Indians and relevant to the daily lives in the way the gods of the Greeks and Romans were once alive in Western imaginations once and not so long ago it was possible in the lands of the west to allude to the story the shirt of Nessos and people would have known that the dying centaur Nessos tricked Diana the wife of Hercules into giving her husband a shirt knowing it was poisoned and would kill him once everyone knew that after the death of Orpheus greatest of poets and singers his severed head continued to sing these images and many others were available as metaphors to help people understand the world art does not die when the artist dies said Orpheus head the song survives the singer and the shirt warned us that even a very special gift may be dangerous but in India as I grew up the wonder tales all lived and they still do nowadays it isn't even necessary to read the full Ramayana or Mahabharata fortunately for younger readers the immensely popular comic book series Amar Chitra Kata the immortal picture stories offers a depth renderings of tales from both and for adults a 94 episode TV version of the Mahabharata brought the attention to a stop each week when originally screened in the 90s and found an audience numbering in the hundreds of millions it has to be admitted that the influence of these tales is not always positive the sectarian politics of the Hindu nationalist parties like the BJP uses the rhetoric of the past to fantasize about a return to Ram Rajya the reign of Lord Ram a supposed golden age of Hinduism without such inconveniences as members of other religions to complicate matters the politicization of the Ramayana and of Hinduism in general has become in the hands of unscrupulous sectarian leaders a dangerous affair the attack on the book The Hindus a work of consummate scholarship written by one of the world's greatest Sanskritists Vendi Doniga and the regrettable decision of Penguin India to withdraw on pulp copies of it in response to fundamentalist criticism is a sharp illustration of the fact problems can extend beyond politics too in some later versions of the Ramayana the exiled Lord Ram and his brother Lakshman leave Sita alone in their forest dwelling one day when they hunt a golden deer not knowing that the deer is actually a Rakshasa a kind of daemon in disguise to protect Sita in their absence Lakshman draws a reika or an enchanted lion around their home anyone who tries to cross it except Ram, Lakshman and Sita will be burned to death by flames that erupt from the lion but the daemon king Ravana disguises himself as a beggar and comes to Sita's door asking for arms and she crosses the line to give him what he wants this is how he captures her and spirits her away to the kingdom of Lanka after which Ram and Lakshman have to fight a war to get her back to cross the Lakshman reika has become a metaphor for overstepping the boundaries of what is permissible or right of going too far of succumbing foolishly to iconoclasm and bringing down upon yourself dire consequences a few years ago in Delhi there occurred the now notorious assault and gang rape of a 23-year-old student who afterwards died from her horrific injuries within days of this awful event a state minister remarked that if the young woman concerned had not crossed the Lakshman reika in other words taken a bus with a male friend in the evening instead of staying demurely at home she would not have been attacked he later withdrew the remark because of a public outcry but his use of the metaphor reveals that too many men in India still believe that there are limits and boundaries women should not transgress it should be said that in the most traditional versions of the Ramayana including the original version by the poet this story is not to be found however a wonder tale can sometimes be as potent as a canonical one I want to return however to that childhood self enchanted by the tales whose express in soul purpose was enchantment I want to move away from grand religious epics to the great horde of scurrilous conniving mysterious exciting comic bizarre surreal and very often extremely sexy narratives contained in the rest of the eastern storehouse because not only because but yes because they show how much pleasure is to be gained from literature once God is removed from the picture one of the most remarkable characteristics of the story is now gathered in the pages of the thousand nights and one night is just is take just one example is the almost complete absence of religion lots of sex much mischief a great deal of deviousness monsters jins chained rocks at times enormous quantities of blood and gore but no God this is why censorious islamists dislike it so much very many thanks there to Burhan and Tamina well thank you all for joining us wherever you are in the world in the room or somewhere out there we really appreciate that you were here to show and share with us solidarity with Salman Rushdie now please welcome the final speaker of this evening Nigella Lawson go home soon I find tonight complicated as I'm sure that many of you do and many of my fellow speakers do I mean I'm always I'm always happy to talk about Salman his writing him he's been a big part of my life and yet I find it's very hard to get over the shock I mean daily anyway but why we're here now and what's prompted this and it's I think it's impossible not to feel that but the but anyway as I say I'm always happy to talk about Salman and I do have this sense as well that any words I could say I am not going to talk about him are inadequate because really I just want to hear Salman's words I have such as hunger for them and I've been thinking a lot about because obviously I haven't had him around my table for a while but I love hearing him talk he's the he's the best chatter I mean we know he's clever and he's so funny but he's so cozy and I think in many ways what I really love about him is he has something which many very clever people have and that is an immense and buoyant silliness and I when I was looking for to see what reading I might do I obviously rereading his novels his essays but I was thinking too about the things that give him such joy and his friends such joy for example the plays of William Shakespeare retitled in the manner of the novels of Robert Ludlam so for example this is Ray Salman the the quadrilia conundrum King Lear obviously the Elzinore vacillation Hamlet now for Othello the handkerchief deception the merchant of Venice the Rialto sanction I mean that is Justin the thing is and I think this is something that Pauline said earlier too which is what makes him such a wonderful company what makes him such a great friend or one of the things that makes him such a great friend is so a piece with with his writing that that's sort of bustling I would say Mumbai but he Salman always calls it Bombay but that's sort of the bustling Bombay streets of his mind the it's so people the busy and widely informed and colourful and he enjoys the riffs on language this the the the pop lyrics he knows every pop lyric every pop lyric he knows the script to every film and he'll even sing sometimes I don't encourage it but I mean it's fine and he's a he's a great eater I always like feeding him I was I was thinking actually I suppose it's impossible now not to be thinking of the time when he had to be in hiding after the the fatwa and the first time I had a very small flat in North Kensington at the time the first time he came for dinner and obviously with special branch and I it was very small so special branch had to go into my bedroom and had to sit on my bed because there wasn't any other furniture Salman and I were talking in the kitchen and I was cooking for him a leg of lamb and just chatting as you do as you potter about and then as I went to check the lamb the oven exploded I was you know loose seal ball with like those sort of sooty round cheeks my hair up and slightly panicking he was very calm special branch ran in thinking there was explosion and Salman and I had to dine of breakfast cereal which actually I rather like anyway but I have chosen not to do any more of his very good games but anyway I've chosen a poem that it was in the March 1989 grantor to so you know scarcely a month after the fatwa and well I don't need to explain why I'm reading it because you'll you'll understand why boy they sure called me some good names of late e.g. opportunists dangerous e.g. full of hate self-aggrandizing Satan self-loathing and shrill the type it would clean up the planet to kill I just just remember my own good name still damn brother you saw what they did to my face poked out my eyes knocked teeth out of place stuck a dog's body under hung same from a hook wrote what all on my forehead wrote bastard wrote crook I just just recall how my face used to look now misters and sisters they've come for my voice if the cat got my tongue look who would rejoice mufties politicos my own people hacks still nameless and faceless or not here's my choice not to shut up to sing on in spite of attacks to sing while my dreams are being murdered by facts praises of butterflies broken on racks