It was an episode tinged with intriguing plausibility, just like a scene from one of his novels. In the middle of February, The New Yorker carried an advance extract from Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, ‘The Enchantress of Florence’, exploring the Mughal emperor Akbar’s relationship with an Indian princess, named Jodha — the very week that the loosely historical Indian blockbuster Jodhaa Akbar featuring the same relationship hit the screens. The conspiracy theorists were convinced that Rushdie had negotiated the ultimate cross-promotional deal with Bollywood.

But chuckling over the phone line from New York recently, the author credited the people who started the rumour with having an imagination as fecund as his own. “It’s so weird,” said Rushdie. ‘When I was writing the book, I wasn’t even aware that the film was being made. It seems amazing that it should come out at the same time. The piece in The New Yorker is one piece of the book but it isn’t by any means the subject of the book, so I think perhaps that people got the wrong impression that I was writing about Jodha and Akbar. I’m sorry; I’m not involved in any conspiracies with a Bollywood director or anyone else.’

Set in the genteel court of Fatehpur Sikri, the tumultuous city of Florence in the time of Lorenzo de Medici and points in between, The Enchantress allows Rushdie to sail across a sea of stories involving luscious women, giant albino mercenaries, inter-continental crossing, religious fanatics, aphrodisiacs and phantom lovers in two cities separated by vast oceans, but united by their appetite for hedonism.

‘I must say that there was an enormous amount of research to be done about sex,’ the author said. ‘In both cultures, it seems to have been an openly sensual time. So as well as having to see the Kama Sutra and these other things, I also found myself in Italy having to study the activities of courtesans and their various means of bring please to their clients.” Rushdie added with a chuckle, ‘So yes, it was educational.’

Rushdie’s fans have long delighted in the author’s talent for tracing improbable narrative tangents off historical events, but this is the first time that he has done quite so much reading and travelling for a novel. The meticulousness, he said, is one of the lessons he learnt while reading history at Cambridge. ‘I had a professor called Arthur Hibbert who said to me, “You should never write history until you can hear the people speak. If you can’t hear them speak, you don’t understand them well enough and you can’t tell their story,”’ Rushdie said. ‘I always thought that that was good advice for writing fiction as well.’

The Enchantress is evidence of that advice in action. The novel is also the opportunity for Rushdie to return to themes he’s turned over several times before, including his obsession with the interactions, sometimes acrimonious, often epiphanic, between East and West. ‘The characters of the two Jesuit tourpriests who show up in Fatehpur Sikri are historical figures,’ noted Rushdie. ‘Akbar’s interest in engaging with Christian philosophy was so great that he sent a message to the Portuguese in Goa and said, “Send me your two best philosophers, your two best arguers, because I want them to come and dispute with my guys.” They sent him two Jesuits, one Spaniard and the other Italian. For 12 years they were in the Ibadat Khana [the House of Worship in Fatehpur Sikri] debating with Akbar’s philosophers constantly.’

Rushdie says that those debates were ‘one of the most extraordinary things’ about Akbar’s reign. ‘The sense of disputing the world into being – it’s an imaginative act,’ he said. ‘They tried to re-imagine the world in which they lived through a really serious process of debate. It was an extraordinarily democratic idea for an absolute ruler to come up with.’

What’s next for the East-West bard? He’s planning a project much closer to home. ‘I promised my ten-year-old son Milan that I’d write him another children’s book, so that’s what I’ve got to do next,’ Rushdie said. ‘I do have an idea for a related book to Haroun and the Sea of Stories. The thing I like about the two Alice books is that Alice doesn’t return to Wonderland. I didn’t want to return to the Sea of Stories. That would be boring. I need to find another imaginative universe.’