R A: Looking Through Glass argues so much history it seems very much as if a historian took on the novel genre.M K: I make historical points but I write novels because I've always liked reading them.I didn't write a historical novel where a whole world in the past is recreated. E.L Doctorow (the American novelist) does that, and when I finish reading his books I am exhausted. My narrator in Looking Through Glass is a twenty-something who travels back to the world of the 40's. That world is seen through his eyes. But what historical points are you talking about? What was your Akbar S. Ahmed thinking casting Christopher Lee as Jinnah in the movie! You know that Rushdie, in an essay or article years ago when the movie Gandhi came out, said Attenborough's Jinnah looked like Count Dracula! For your generation I don't know what Jinnah means, but for us the time is here to take Nehru apart. I respect that man for so many things but he was wrong about a lot. Nehruvian secularism was like a salon. If you said the right things you could be a member. If you were from some, say, UP qasbah there was a lot you had to leave behind to be a member. You couldn't say, for example, my family was from Faizabad and it was wiped out during Partition. Now that secular ideology is threatened those people who never really felt at ease with it are not around to defend it either.
(From an interview with Rehan Ansari.)
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