Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Silverblatt, and today my guest is Salman Rushdie, the author most recently

of the ground beneath her feet, published by Holt.

The last book was The Moor's Last Sigh. He's the author as well of India's children and many other novels. I'm particularly delighted because this book delighted me, and I have so many questions to ask about it that I'll get started right away. To begin with, the book seems to want to make a composite mythology between Indian legend

and Greek legend.

And of course, it's facing some of the difficulties of doing that in that previous attempts

have led to justifications for Nazism and the like. Could you

speak about that? Yeah. I mean, I've always had an interest not unlike the interest of the

character in the novel, Sir Darius, who is the father of the hero, or Ms. Karma, an interest

in comparative mythology, because it is interesting

to me that the kind of great story stock of Indian and Western culture actually seems to

have come from the same route with all kinds of interesting local variations.

And so I've been just reading in that sea of stories for as long as I can remember.

And of course, the terrible thing that you mentioned that happened was that the word Aryan,

which was only ever used by scholars to mean a language route, was then used by Hitler to build a kind of master

race theory.

And it polluted the field of Indo-European studies for more than a generation, really.

...