The recurrent irritation that Salman Rushdie causes to India, and that India in turn causes to Salman Rushdie — a bad marriage that has gone on for the past three decades despite every sign of an impending divorce — extracts collateral costs from the entire reading public. Indeed, we are in some sense the beleaguered offspring of this terrible union, forced to question and rue our very existence from time to time, as our progenitors fight viciously amongst themselves. Are we really a democracy? Are we secular enough? Do we have civility, do we have faith, do we have tolerance, do we have respect? Will we ever get along with others? Do we cherish our languages at home even as we long to speak to and be heard in the wide world? Are we condemned to repeat the mistakes that have soured our parents’ interaction — depleted our otherwise beautiful mother’s ability to inspire great art, undermined our normally irrepressible father’s ability to narrate new tales?

Indians of my generation would not experience their irreverent and yet confident ownership of the English language were it not for the labours of Salman Rushdie, b. 1947, over the course of his altogether remarkable writing career. Nor would we grasp quite so dramatically the difficulty of maintaining the values of freedom of expression, secularism and tolerance in a diverse society like ours were this singular individual not forced to enact and reenact his love-hate relationship with the Indian nation. Be they champions of civil liberties and free speech, organizers of literary festivals, genuine lovers of the novel, or critics of religious fundamentalism — all those who have engaged with this man and his work know that there is and there can be only one Salman Rushdie. Whether we like him or we dislike him, whether he thrills us or infuriates us, we owe a chapter of our collective cultural history to his adventures in literature and life.

At the very beginning of his short but path-breaking book about a prominent but persecuted Hindi intellectual of the 20th century, Hazariprasad Dwivedi (1907-79), Doosri Parampara ki Khoj (The Search for Another Tradition), Namvar Singh asks, “Paramparaa kyaa uttar-paksh hee hai, poorv-paksh nahin?” This sentence is hard to translate into English, but it approximates to something like the question: Does tradition accommodate only those who represent sagacity and authority, or does it also have place for dissenters and mavericks? Must we regard tradition as being essentially conservative — why can we not see it as being inventive, too? Do only those who give answers get to be part of the tradition, or do those who raise questions get to be counted as well?

Namvar Singh’s query was posed in the context of the highly fraught literary traditions of Hindi-speaking north India, where a figure like Hazariprasad at once enjoyed certain kinds of privilege on account of being born a Brahmin and knowing Sanskrit, and endured certain kinds of persecution because he personally came from terrible poverty, and, moreover, championed the language of the Muslim and low-caste medieval poet, Kabir. But we may follow suit and ask the same question about Salman Rushdie and the tradition of postcolonial writing in English (incidentally, a literary tradition that is only slightly younger than that of modern Hindi, and is equally, if not more, charged and contested).

Can our newly-minted but already quite robust tradition only include V.S. Naipaul — can it not include Salman Rushdie? What is gained by hounding Rushdie out (on grounds that his novel of 1988, The Satanic Verses, offends the sentiments of orthodox Muslims)? Conversely, what is lost if he and his books become permanently exiled from India? What kind of a literary tradition of Indian writing in English are we in a position to construct, sans its most eminent practitioner?

From a literary-critical perspective — and when it comes to literature, many of us would rather that criticism drove politics than politics constrained criticism — Salman Rushdie’s oeuvre surely exhibits every characteristic that qualifies a body of work to be admitted into what we think of, loosely or strictly, as “the tradition”: a strong sense of what has gone before, mastery over form, command over language, both a necessary conformity with and a radical departure from established norms of the genre, rootedness in a native literary culture together with openness to foreign literary cultures, and finally, the capacity to give immediate aesthetic pleasure even while alerting us to a few perduring truths.

We may not approve of Salman Rushdie’s theological views, but we are hard put to fault him as a littérateur who is not only original, but also masterful; not only entertaining, but also edifying. We can debate till kingdom come (mixed metaphors permitted) whether we are better off without a text like The Satanic Verses circulating freely in our public sphere, but I don’t see any possibility of salvaging the idea or practice of postcolonial writing in English if Salman Rushdie’s novels, essays, children’s books and reportage were suddenly to disappear en masse from the face of the earth.

Indian democracy — and with it the inevitable vote-bank calculus — will survive upcoming state and national elections, as it has done for the past 65 years. Indian citizens will continue to argue with one another about the shape of their polity and the limits of their freedom for the foreseeable future. Indian media will always find new excitements and distractions to fill pages of newsprint and hours of airtime. The real question is: which works of art — which novels, paintings, films and music — will stand the test of both historical time and political change? In 2047, when India turns one hundred, will Salman Rushdie’s stories still sit on our bookshelves, as M.F. Husain’s images hang on our walls? I suspect the answer is “yes”.

The cultivation of a creative space in which to make enduring art, and the preservation of habits of appreciation and criticism in at least some sections of the population, are goals as important in our national life as the growth of India’s economy, the strengthening of its political institutions, and the safeguarding of its sovereignty.

Besides, dear reader, he’s British.