Rushdie Turned His Fatal Attack Into a Documentary
The attack almost took a toll on his life, but he managed to survive the fatal-attack and sustained 15 stab wounds in total and also lost his right eye which was succumbed due to the gruesome attack.
The premier Indian author who had won the Booker Prize and known for his most whimsical yet controversial works such as the Moor’s last Sigh , Midnight’s children and quite notably satanic verses , Author Salman Rushdie’s And his wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths had turned the aftermath of his stabbing which took place in 2022 into a documentary.
Rushdie, had been stabbed onstage by a man with a knife back in the year 2022, while at a literary fest held at Chautauqua, New York. The attack almost took a toll on his life, but he managed to survive the fatal-attack and sustained 15 stab wounds in total and also lost his right eye which was succumbed due to the gruesome attack.
This had sparked an inspiration for Rushdie and eventually led him to write a memoir based on this incident and he called the book “Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder” in the year 2024. But he did not stop there. He along with his wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths had decided to make a documentary with his wife as the cinematographer for the documentary and it was premiered at this year’s Sundance film festival in Park city, Utah.
The documentary was titled as “Knife: the Attempted murder of Salman Rushdie”, which was directed by Academy Award Winning filmmaker Alex Gibney. In an interview with a famous magazine Rushdie mentioned that this documentary allowed them to portray the attack and the eventual healing process which involved his challenging recovery and how he was left blinded in one eye, in a new perspective. This documentary basically revolves around the narrative surrounding what happened to him at that event in Chautauqua and the aftermath of the attack.
His wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths had also shot several footage of Rushdie at the hospital after the attack. Salman Rushdie is not new to this kind of scenario. The Author had faced several issues in his life before due to his provocative writing and due to his controversial book called The Satanic Verses, which not only received a violent backlash from the Muslim community but also led towards setting a fathwa, a religious decree calling for death on the author by the then Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Khomeini , which led Rushdie into hiding for the past three decades.
Rushdie Also talked about how the possibility of an assassination attempt upon him revolved around in the back of his mind whenever he visited any public events. But in a way it had also inspired him to speak on the writers freedom and integrity all around the world.
This article is written by Nagadithya Reddy,a student of Loyola Academy, Secunderabad, interning with Deccan Chronicle.
