In the autumn issue of Granta magazine, Salman Rushdie tells how his Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight’s Children (1981), an epic account of the birth of modern India, was an attempt to “reclaim the territory” of his native country. He started it in the mid-1970s, when he was working in London as an advertising copywriter. He had been out of India for years and his parents had moved to Pakistan. “So I had this worry of losing touch, losing contact with where I came from, and I decided that I’d better write a book that tried to reclaim it.” He says that even now he finds it “almost impossible to have a central character who’s not of Indian origin”. 

  He also talks about how an excerpt from Midnight’s Children — which had yet to be published — was used in Granta magazine without his knowledge. His publisher at Jonathan Cape, Tom Maschler, had approved a request from the then editor of Granta, Bill Buford, and it wasn’t “until after the fact” that Rushdie was paid “something like £40”. 

  In an interview with the current Granta editor, Thomas Meaney, Rushdie discusses his long association with the magazine, the course of contemporary Indian fiction, and the conflicts his own writing has provoked with the Indian state.

   The latest Granta, issue 173, out this week (November 6), is the third devoted to Indian writing, and the first since Narendra Modi and the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) took power in 2014. There’s a special emphasis on Indian languages, with works translated from Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil and Kannada. The magazine has fiction from writers including Geetanjali Shree, whose 2018 novel Tomb of Sand won the International Booker Prize; non-fiction from Sujatha Gidla, whose memoir Ants Among Elephants (2017) was the most acclaimed Indian non-fiction work of the past decade; and pictures from photographers including Yash Sheth (of the monsoon in Mumbai) and Keerthana Kunnath (of India’s satellite industry).