Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel The Satanic Verses has emerged from a 36-year sales prohibition, a landmark development for literary freedom in India, per deadline.com. This marks a significant shift in the country’s publishing landscape as the book returned to Indian shelves this week through Bahrisons Booksellers in New Delhi after a recent Delhi High Court ruling questioned the validity of its longtime ban.
The novel, which earned Rushdie both the prestigious Booker Prize and a notorious fatwa from Iranian leadership in 1988, had been barred from sale in India following religious protests and riots. The restriction’s apparent lifting stems from government authorities’ inability to produce the original ban notification during recent legal proceedings.
“The book is selling out,” reported a Bahrisons representative, noting strong customer demand. The development has energised India’s publishing community, with Penguin Random House India’s Editor-in-Chief Manasi Subramaniam celebrating the moment by quoting Rushdie’s own words about language and courage.
The legal situation remains complex, however. While importing the book appears to still be prohibited, domestic publication and sale exist in a newfound gray area that has left legal experts puzzled over precedent. Several Islamic groups have already voiced opposition to the book’s availability.
The novel’s reemergence in India carries particular significance given the author’s personal history with the country of his birth and the book’s troubled past. The original publication sparked global violence, including a fatal attack on its Japanese translator and dozens of deaths in Turkey. More recently, Rushdie himself survived a 2022 stabbing attack in New York that left him without one eye, an experience he chronicled in his 2024 memoir Knife.
