The End of a Long-Standing Ban on ‘The Satanic Verses’

Before the infamous Iranian fatwa condemned Salman Rushdie to death, before widespread protests erupted and copies of his book were set ablaze, and before the tragic assassination of his translator, there was a lesser-known yet significant event: India’s customs notification No. 405/12/88-CUS-III. In a dramatic turn of events, India, the homeland of the writer Salman Rushdie, became the first nation to impose restrictions on his controversial novel The Satanic Verses. This ban was initiated in 1988, merely nine days after the book’s initial release in Britain, primarily due to apprehensions that parts of it could be perceived as blasphemous by certain orthodox Muslim communities.

The Indian government acted swiftly, issuing a bureaucratic order through the Ministry of Finance, Department of Revenue, which prohibited the importation of the book. At the time, Rushdie expressed his bewilderment, noting, “Many people around the world will find it strange that it is the finance ministry that gets to decide what Indian readers may or may not read.”

This week, in a rather anticlimactic fashion, the 36-year ban on The Satanic Verses was officially lifted, albeit for a rather pedantic reason: the original order, dated October 5, 1988, seems to have vanished without a trace. The Delhi High Court determined that it had no choice but to annul the ban and permit the importation of the book, given that the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs failed to produce a copy of the original notification.

The court’s decision, dated Tuesday, emphasized this predicament: “What emerges is that none of the respondents could produce the said notification dated 05.10.1988 with which the petitioner is purportedly aggrieved,” the ruling stated. “We have no other option except to presume that no such notification exists, and therefore, we cannot examine the validity thereof.”