Politics & Power Quote by Salman Rushdie

Rushdie frames the writer-politician clash as less a polite disagreement than a turf war over reality itself. “Natural rivals” is a sly escalation: it implies the conflict isn’t contingent on personalities or parties, but baked into the job description. Both professions traffic in stories, not just policies. A politician needs a narrative that turns messy life into a mandate; a novelist needs a narrative that exposes how mandates get manufactured. Same medium, opposite incentives.

The key move is “make the world in their own images.” Rushdie isn’t romanticizing authors as mere observers. He’s admitting that writers, too, are imperial: they impose shape, motive, meaning. That candor matters because it denies writers the halo of neutrality politicians often accuse them of wearing. The rivalry, then, isn’t between truth and spin; it’s between competing versions of the world, one backed by the state’s machinery and one backed by imagination’s insurgent force.

“Territory” is doing heavy lifting. It suggests borders, occupation, censorship, even exile. In Rushdie’s orbit, this isn’t metaphor for metaphor’s sake; it’s lived context. After The Satanic Verses and the fatwa, the line between storytelling and state power stopped being abstract. When governments and clerics treat fiction as a threat that must be disciplined, they’re conceding his point: narrative is governance by other means.

The quote works because it collapses a comforting distinction. Politics doesn’t just manage the world; it authors it. Literature doesn’t just reflect society; it competes to rewrite what society thinks it is.