Salman Rushdie has written about owing a lot to his father, Anis Ahmed Rushdie, when it comes to ungodliness. He remarked how the two had a similar worldview and thought alike on the larger questions of life. The surname ‘Rushdie’, too, was a gift of his father, whose full significance dawned upon him much later, especially when the author found himself in the eye of the storm over his book The Satanic Verses (1988).
The name Rushdie was Anis’s invention. Rushdie’s grandfather― Khwaja Muhammad Din Khaliqi Dehlavi―had a name that went with his old-world personality. He was an Old Delhi businessman and a part-time essayist, and lived in an old, crumbling haveli in Ballimaran, an area not far from the Red Fort and the Chandni Chowk in Delhi. He had died young and left his son a fortune.
According to Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton, Anis had adopted the name Rushdie because he admired Ibn Rushd, the 12th century Spanish-Arab philosopher and scholar of Islam who took a rational view of things and questioned Islamic literalism. Rushdie writes that the storm over The Satanic Verses was like a 20th century echo of Rushd’s rational thought.
Anis inherited a fortune from his father, who had a flourishing business in textiles. But he lost all that money, and at the time of his death in 1987, all that remained was a small stash of notes in a drawer in his desk.
Anis Ahmed Rushdie―BA Cantab., Bar-at-Law, was the nameplate put up on the front door of the Rushdie house in Bombay. He is said to have practised law in Delhi courts and lived in Ballimaran before he moved to the western metropolis. He would often go to Connaught Place in the evenings after finishing the day’s work, and Marina Hotel was among his favourite hangouts there.
He, it is said, had a raging temper and would turn into a very unpleasant person for his family after getting drunk. Rushdie has written about having had a troubled relationship with his father. When Rushdie was 20, he once punched his father on the jaw during one of the latter’s alcoholic rages when his mother had been the target of his father’s ire.
Anis’s dreams of becoming a civil servant had met with a rather dishonourable end. According to the documents in The National Archives of the UK, his name was removed from the list of probationers because there was inaccuracy about his stated age. As per the documents held by the archives in Kew, under the section ‘Indian Civil Service examination 1933’ is listed the ‘case of Anis Ahmed Rushdie’, with the entry number ‘I 16295’. It states that the case is about “name removed from the list of probationers on ground of inaccuracy of statement of age”, the proceedings dated ‘1934-1935’. Rushdie has not written about this aspect of his father’s life.
Anis had taken a 13-year-old Rushdie to England in January 1961 and got him admitted at the Rugby School. His mother, Negin, had been against the idea of sending him so far from home, but Anis felt it was a great opportunity for him. Rushdie went on to study at Cambridge, and he wrote that he left home for the university in the middle of the 1965 India-Pakistan war.
It is unclear when exactly it happened, but Anis, Negin and Rushdie’s three sisters moved to Pakistan. Rushdie wrote that his parents had, in their old age, sold his childhood home in Bombay and “mysteriously decamped to Karachi”. He recollected in his memoir that they did not enjoy living in Karachi and their stated reason to go there―that they were increasingly feeling alien in India as Muslims―did not ring true. Rushdie was convinced that there must have been business or tax problems or some other real-world issue that made them leave Bombay and go to Karachi.
According to court documents in the case pertaining to the house Anis pledged to sell to Bhiku Ram Jain, Anis was residing in London when the agreement of sale was drawn up. It is specified that the buyers, the Jains, could not take any action against him for non-execution of the sale deed since he was living in London. The property dealer who had executed the agreement deposed before the Delhi High Court that when Anis had come to Delhi from London on three to four occasions post 1970, he had requested him to implement the sale deed.
Also, Anis had himself told the court that he had migrated to the UK in 1962 and that he would have to refer to his passport or his notes for specifying the exact date on which he had gone to the income tax office during his visit to India from August 16, 1971 to September 11, 1971. “I came from London to India. My object was to complete the sale, after getting the price and be free from the property,” he told the court.
As per court documents, Anis was residing in London both before and after entering into the agreement. He had acquired British nationality in 1963 and since then he was a resident of the UK.
Rushdie is the oldest among four children. Sameen, the main defendant in the Delhi house case, is the oldest among his sisters. Rushdie is very close to her and has described her as his “Irish twin”. He recalled that when they were children, he was the good boy and she the naughty girl. He would get her out of trouble with his parents, while she would beat people up for him.
He wrote that the strong bond between him and Sameen was resented by their sister Nevid, who eventually had a fallout with the family and went to California to be far away from all of them.
The youngest sibling, Nabeelah, had a tragic life. Rushdie described her in his memoir as a gifted structural engineer who lost her mental balance because of setbacks in her personal life, took to chewing tobacco, abused prescription drugs, became obese, and was found dead in her bed.