Salman Rushdie on Mythology and Interpretation

University Distinguished Professor Salman Rushdie participated in a class discussion of "The Moor's Last Sigh" led by Associate Professor of English Deepika Bahri with undergraduate students at Emory University on March 7, 2012. Here he responds to a question about the influence of mythology—Hindu, Greek, Roman, Nordic—on his writing. "In four or five sentences, you can tell these stories," he says. "And yet the incredible richness of those stories in terms of what they mean and what they show us about human nature is very valuable to the writer because you could inexhaustibly explore them."

The interdisciplinary course, "India Today: Economics, Politics, Innovation, and Sustainability," is supported by The Halle Institute for Global Learning (www.halleinstitute.emory.edu).