Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SALMAN RUSHDIE: Try to learn.

You know, try to learn.

The more you learn, the more will

be at your fingertips to use.

Writing books is like an education that never ends.

It's always trying to increase the sum of what you

know so that you can use it.

[EXOTIC MUSIC]

Probably the most directly historical novel

that I've written is The Enchantress of Florence,

in the sense that a lot of my novels

deal with more or less contemporary history.

But this deals with 400 years ago.

And in the famous sentence of L. P. Hartley, which

is the opening line of his novel "The Go-Between," he says,

the past is another country.

They do things differently there.

And that's a thing you always have to remember.

And that's a thing you always have to remember.

When you're going into the past, people

don't behave like they behave in the 21st century, you know.

And they don't think like that.

So to do the research about the social circumstances

of the period, and the political and cultural events

of the period, I mean, that's hard work.

But it's relatively straightforward.

The hard bit for an imaginative writer

The hard bit for an imaginative writer

is to imagine yourself into the thought processes of people who

don't think like you, you know.

Not just pre-Freudian, but a long way before that, you know.

People whose way of-- cast of mind is very alien to you even.

You know, and then to try and humanize them.

Try-- to try and give them a life

on the page with which readers can identify,

on the page with which readers can identify,

rather than thinking, those people

are too alien for me to identify with them.

So I'm writing about the court of the Mughal Emperor

Akbar, second half of the 16th century.

And for me, yes, I mean, there's a lot

of material about his reign.

Because he was a very big historical figure.

But the thing that interested me was a complexity in him,

which is that he had begun to think what-- in a way

that we would now call humanist.

He had begun to think about human individuals

He had begun to think about human individuals

and their rights and their sovereign powers

as individuals.

So on the one hand, he's thinking some quite modern

thoughts.

On the other hand, he is completely an absolute ruler.

Everybody does what he says or else.

And he has no desire not to be an absolute ruler, you know.

He wants to be that.

But he has these other thoughts.

And I thought that's-- that makes him, to me,

really interesting, that there's a contradiction in him.

really interesting, that there's a contradiction in him.

So that's what you're looking for.

I mean, you can do the--

as I say, you can do the research stuff.

That's fairly mechanical.

You can read the books and find out what the world was like

and what-- how people dressed and--

and how the court was arranged and so on.

But to find the interior truth, you know,

that's what-- that's what took work.

The big problem of history and writing about the past

is it's hard to find a way of making that

accessible to readers in the present because

of the alien nature of thought in the past.

And yet, you-- and yet, what you can't do

is make people in the 16th century

think like people think today, because that immediately

feels fake.

There were, for example, in the court of Akbar, very, very

powerful women characters.

There were women who were entrepreneurs,

There were women who were entrepreneurs,

who owned fleets of ships and traded with Arabia,

and even traveled the world, you know, in a way

that you don't think--

you think of women at that period

as being in a secondary role.

But not the case.

There were very, very independent

and strong-minded women in the court of Akbar.

But what you can't do is impose upon them

a modern feminist sensibility.

Because they didn't have that.

Because they didn't have that.

I mean, at the heart of the novel is this question of what

it is to be a strong woman in a world entirely dominated

by men, you know.

How do you express your selfhood,

and how do you achieve your dreams and your visions,

you know?

Without my trying to impose on them

a sensibility that belongs to the-- to our time

and not to theirs.

You know, so you have to always be aware of that,

that you're talking about a different age

of the world in which people's cast of mind was--

of the world in which people's cast of mind was--

was different.

I think when you're talking about a major historical

figure, obviously, you're not the first person to do it,

you know?

And in the case of a figure like the Emperor

Akbar, the so-called great Mughal, you know,

there's an enormous amount.

Even in the movies--

the Indian film of the 1950s "Mughal-e-Azam,"

which means The Great Mughal, is one of the most popular films

which means The Great Mughal, is one of the most popular films

ever made in India and tells a kind of version of the story

of Akbar with, you know, fictional elements.

So you have to know about that.

But in the end, you have to find your Akbar.

You know, you have to find the one that speaks to you.

At least, I felt I had to find the one that spoke to me.

And it's not the grandness.

For me, it's not the grandness.

But it was this interior conflict

that I-- that-- which I'm willing to admit, may be more

that I-- that-- which I'm willing to admit, may be more

my invention than the psychological reality

of the emperor himself.

But that invention is what gave me,

if you like, the freedom to write about it in a way that

didn't just feel borrowed from earlier versions.

I think this is, in general, one of the great things

that you should think about as a writer, is how do you

write your thing, rather than simply rewrite somebody else's

write your thing, rather than simply rewrite somebody else's

thing?

You know, it's-- that's true whether it's a historical novel

or a contemporary novel.

When you're trying to make a character who is famous,

you know, there's much written about,

try and find your entry point into that character,

you know, which belongs to you, because it

has something to do with your needs as a writer,

you know, something you want to write about, not just what

you know, something you want to write about, not just what

the world has said about him.

And if you can get there, then the chances

are you will write something very good.

You know, research is--

it's hard to do.

Because it works best when you're looking

for very specific things.

Although a Google search will go very broadly,

it won't go very deep.

it won't go very deep.

I still think libraries and books

are the places from which you find the best stuff.

Because a lot of things, especially

if you're writing about--

about history that isn't very recent history--

you know, the internet is not very good at old stuff.

If you want to write about the 16th century,

you're not going to find a whole lot of really interesting stuff

you're not going to find a whole lot of really interesting stuff

on the internet.

So, like, when I was researching The Enchantress of Florence,

the New York Public Library was probably my biggest resource.

And just books I ordered to--

to get from whatever source and to read them.

Because, see, the thing about history

as a source material for a novel is

that it's relatively easy to find out historical events,

that it's relatively easy to find out historical events,

and who was king and who was president, and what battles

were fought, and-- so all that stuff you can do quite easily.

What is much harder to find out is how ordinary people lived.

You know, that requires digging.

And because that material is really in--

in books and things that have never been digitized,

you know--

they're not on the internet.

So you still have to go back to the printed word.

So you still have to go back to the printed word.

And that's, for me, always been the most useful.

I would say about imagination that, in the end,

that is what you have to rely on.

No matter how much-- how exhaustively

you've done the research, there's

a point at which you have to put it aside and make it up.

You know, and sometimes you can make up things the turn out

You know, and sometimes you can make up things the turn out

afterwards to be true.

You know, because the imagination

is a wonderful weapon, you know, that can--

that can stumble on the truth without you actually

having any expertise.

I mean, I have a case-- a case of this from my friend,

the British novelist Ian McEwan, who

wrote a novel in which somebody had killed somebody

and wanted to chop up the body and carry it

and wanted to chop up the body and carry it

in a couple of suitcases in order to get rid of it.

And Ian didn't know anything about chopping up bodies.

So he was living in Oxford--

Oxford in England at the time.

And he asked a friend of his who was a--

who lectured in medicine at the University.

And his friend said, well, I'm actually

going to be doing a dissection on such and such date.

Do you want to come and watch?

So he thought, OK, I'll come and watch.

And then on the day he was going to go,

And then on the day he was going to go,

some little voice in his head said, don't go.

And so he didn't go.

And then he made up the chopping up of the body.

And when his friend the surgeon read the passage,

he said to Ian, how did you know all that?

How did you know that that's where you chop?

How did you know that that's the place where you make the cut?

And Ian said, I just--

I just made it up.

I just imagined it.

So yeah, if you're lucky, you can imagine the truth.

In the end, imagination is your best and first and last weapon.

Because what we are doing here is an imaginative act,

you know.

The whole-- whole act of writing is an act which

depends on the imagination.

And no matter how much research you

do, if you can't imagine yourself into that world,

into the skin of that world, then the book won't work.

into the skin of that world, then the book won't work.