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Rushdie Interview, 1982



"I do long to go back to India. To live? I just don't know if that's possible. It might be...I'll tell you when I go back there. You see, I haven't lived in India since I was a child, since I was fourteen, because from then my parents were in Pakistan where they still are. I visit them there all the time
and I now really know Pakistan more than I know India, although I like it less, ad the more I know it the less I like it. So India is a sort of country of my
imagination for me, rather than anywhere that I have actual, concrete day-to-day connections with any more. Although one of the pleasant things that's happened through Midnight's Children is that my contact with India has increased enormously.
[---]
People endlessly ask me whether I think of myself as British or Indian. I don't really think of myself as either. I think of myself as me. I never really have particularly defined myself against nations. I don't see why one has to make that definition. I'm somebody who lives in Britain and has his roots in India. That seems to me to be enough, really. Why does one have to be more precise than that?"

~  A recent Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie talking to co-producer of 'Gandhi', Rani Dube for Debonair Magazine June 1982.

Download the complete interview here

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