Gospel & Universe ♒️ A River Journey
Rushdie’s Sea of Stories:
A Tale of Birds & Fishes
Rushdie’s Oceanic Oeuvre - A Flight to Save the Ocean
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The origin of the word Hindu is more geographic than religious. It initially denoted the land on the other side of the Indus River (originally the Sindhu). Successive invaders — Persians, Muslims, Britons — called the inhabitants of the region Hindus and eventually named its dominant religious strain Hinduism. In fact, what we think of as one religion is a multifarious collection of sects, traditions, beliefs, and practices that evolved from the Vedas, the world's oldest sacred texts, and took shape across the vast Indian subcontinent over the course of many centuries. […] In many ways Hinduism is more diverse than the sum of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, which, if history had been reversed, might have been lumped together as Jordanism, after the river valley in which those traditions were born.
(Philip Goldberg, American Veda, 2010)
Rushdie’s Oceanic Oeuvre
Blocking diversity of thought is like trying to block a great river. It will eventually get to the sea, no matter how hard you try. This is one of the central points made throughout the fiction of Salman Rushdie, a writer from the Indian subcontinent who lived most of his life in England and now lives in New York. Rushdie’s fiction covers a wide variety of themes, yet foremost among these is the freedom to question even the most sacred ideas. I take a close look at Rushdie’s questioning, especially as it pertains to doubt and belief, in 🇮🇳 Rushdie 1: The Fiction of Doubt. I also look at his democratic fight against religious and cultural dogma in 🔨 Rushdie 2: Iconoclasts, where I focus on his first four novels: Grimus (1975), Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983), and The Satanic Verses (1988). On this page, I want to touch on Haroun and the Sea of Stories, his fifth novel, written for his son Zafar and published in 1990. In Haroun, Rushdie uses water metaphors — especially ocean currents — in a way that’s consistent with what I’ve looked at in this chapter, ♒️ A River Journey, and with what I’ll look at in 🇫🇷 The Priest’s Dilemma and 🧜🏽♀️ The Mermaid.
Like Rushdie, I see the endless change represented by the metaphor of the river as finding its resting place or home in the metaphor of the ocean. Rushdie’s Sea of Stories represents the infinity of ongoing changes and the impossibility of fixing one pattern onto either narrative or reality. Some see the ocean as a metaphor for a final or fixed resting place, yet Rushdie’s ocean has currents, and these currents signal the ongoing fusion of stories or version of realities. Because Rushdie comes from the Indian sub-continent, it’s not surprising that two of his big currents are Hinduism and Islam. These two currents have enriched the sub-continent, yet they have also created a conflict as intractable as the one we find between Islam and the more secularized Judaeo-Christian West.
Haroun attempts to mitigate this conflict by using an Islamic Sufi motif of mystical flight (borrowed from the 12th century Conference of the Birds, by the Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar) and fusing it with a Hindu metaphor of a sea of stories (borrowed from the 11th century Ocean of the Streams of Stories, by the Kashmiri writer Somadeva). Unlike many of his previous adult novels, Haroun and the Sea of Stories manages to fuse these paradigms very neatly — something we see even in the title: Haroun refers to the famous Muslim caliph Haroun al-Rashid, and the Sea of Stories refers to Somadeva’s Sanskrit collection, Kathāsaritsāgara. The idealistic fusion of Sufi and Hindu paradigms that we find in Haroun is of course impossible in the real world. It also differs sharply from the muddied or imperfect versions we find elsewhere in Rushdie’s fiction. For instance, in Midnight’s Children (1981) Saleem tries to host an All-India Conference in his head and he tries to become the mystical Hindu bird who lives in both worlds. Yet in the end Saleem becomes a victim of history and of the communal hatred between Hindus and Muslims. Torn apart by the violent and the anti-democratic forces of the subcontinent, Saleem can’t reconcile what he increasingly comes to see as the polymorphic madness of Hinduism and the monomaniacal rigidity of Islam.
Haroun’s idealistic structure is also far less complex than his first novel Grimus (1975), the most idealistic and syncretic of his early novels. Grimus uses the same syncretic mode (in this case fusing Norse, Dantean, Sufi, and Hindu paradigms) in order to highlight the ideal of multidimensionality, Yet Grimus also contains a profusion of myths and loose ends, complex characters like Deggle, Virgil and Grimus-Eagle, delves into dark and problematic visions of the universe, and ends in paradoxes and conundrums. Haroun on the other hand ends with a neat fusion of Sufi and Hindu paradigms, a happy ending that’s clearly in the comic and fairy tale mode. That Haroun operates purely in the realm of the fabulous becomes doubly clear when, returning to a more realistic exploration of subcontinental politics in his short story “Chekov and Zulu,” Rushdie drops the idea of a happy ending: the politics of the subcontinent (in this case Sikh separatism) become as many-headed as the politics surrounding Aadam’s Free Islam Convocation or Iskander’s Popular Front. And in the The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), optimism takes an equal beating, as Abraham the Overlord of the Semitic Underworld engages in a mutually-destructive communalist street battle with Hindus led by the Battering Ram.
On the level of a children’s story, Haroun is a lively, light story, complete with an ending in which the villain vanishes (with none of the violence of the Grimm’s brothers) and everyone lives happily ever after. On the adult level, the cartoon scenarios turn more serious: the portrayal of the villain (the Cultmaster) can be applied to people (such as Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini) who want to fix narratives so that only one version remains, and who want to silence writers who exercise doubt, free enquiry, and free expression. In this sense, the fabulous world of Haroun comes from Rushdie’s desire to write a children’s book for his son Zafar, yet it also seems to come from Rushdie’s desire to fabricate a happy ending to the unhappy story of his life during the first year of ‘The Rushdie Affair.’ This Affair was caused by Khomeini, who pronounced a judgment (or fatwa) which amounted to a death threat for writing The Satanic Verses. Rushdie chronicles these difficult years in his 2012 memoir Joseph Anton, the title of which derives from his alias, a mix of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. In Haroun, Rushdie touches on serious conflicts in the story — the Cultmaster is a reincarnation of the the censorious Imam in The Satanic Verses; Snooty Buttoo manipulates the Kashmiri electorate; the Gups and Chups represent cultures at war; Rashid and Soraya are on the verge of divorce — yet in this children’s tale he doesn’t go into the kind of realistic context and detail we see in his earlier or later novels. The only close parallel to Haroun in Rushdie’s oeuvre is its sequel, Luka and the Fire of Life (2010).
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A Flight to Save the Ocean
One of the most interesting aspects of Haroun is the way Attar’s 12th Century Persian paradigm slides into Somadeva’s 11th Century Sanskrit one. Initially Attar’s schema is dominant. His Hoopoe even does double duty: he first takes the form of Butt the speed-possessed bus driver and then of Butt the mechanical bird who flies Haroun and Rashid to the moon. The name Butt appears to derive from the conference-given right to differ, to say but, and in this sense it complements Iff, which is both the name of the water genie on the moon and an indicator of the conditional tense, which, extended politically, signals the proposals and initiatives that enliven the conference or body politic. The Sufi paradigm of flight toward unity gives way to the Hindu paradigm of multidimensionality when Butt transports Haroun and Rashid to the Sea of Stories on the moon.
Rushdie knits Somadeva’s conceit of a great sea containing many currents of narrative into his own story on many levels, all of which suggest that problems and contradictions can be resolved by opening them up into new ways of configuration, into new ways of telling. Once conflicts are mixed into the great sea in this way, positive transformation occurs in society, where division turns into unity (Chups unite with Gups), in the political sphere, where coercion turns to conference and the Cultmaster and Snooty Buttoo are defeated, and on the emotional level, where alienation turns into sympathy (there are multiple reconciliations, culminating with the reunion of Rashid and his wife). Attar’s unity is thus injected into the chaotic profusion, the many-currented sea of Somadeva. It’s impossible to say exactly where the Hindu conceit takes over from the Muslim, or which remains the stronger in the end, and this impossibility strengthens the pro-unity moral Rushdie is aiming at.
The division between Chupwalas and Gupwalas can represent any religious, cultural or political division, and as such it brings to mind the division between us and them, pure and impure made by the Axonans in Grimus, Bariamma in Shame, and the Imam in the Verses. In light of Haroun’s subcontinental settings (probably Bombay and certainly Srinagar), the division suggests the great Muslim and Hindu divide. The same division is represented in Midnight’s Children in terms of flight and the diversity of Bombay. Yet in Midnight’s Children Saleem’s unifying flight is grounded, whereas Haroun and Rashid succeed in unifying the dark and light sides of the moon, and, consequently, in restoring harmony to the earthly city by the sea. Father and son also come together, in that Haroun rediscovers his faith in his father’s stories and in the imaginative Ocean of Notions which supply them. Thus Haroun and Rashid regain the unity from which their names derive, that is, from the historical and legendary Haroun al-Rashid (764-809), the Caliph celebrated in The Arabian Nights’ tale of “Khalifah the Fisherman.”
Haroun and Rashid defeat the Cultmaster and hence succeed in making the lunar poles spin, an action which suggests a union of opposites, a commingling of the infinite number of things symbolized by light and dark, force and counterforce, us and them. And as new stories churn in the lunar ocean, the monsoon breaks on Earth, and the waters flow again deep in Rashid’s Ocean of Notions. This liberating chain of events effects both otherworldly and worldly settings: on the moon the Cultmaster’s idol of sewn lips topples from its place in the Citadel of Chup and on Earth the politician who urges Rashid to turn his creativity into propaganda slinks out of town. Buttoo’s departure from Kashmir leaves “the people of the Valley free to choose leaders they actually liked” (H 207). In this sense the otherworldly dynamic parallels that in Grimus, where Eagle’s defeat of Grimus (a Cultmaster of sorts) liberates the citizens below.
Haroun may be light fare, yet it helps to clarify the ideals which from Grimus to the Verses are increasingly difficult to discern amid a tangled web of mythic figures, narrative ambiguity, demonic possession, oneiric shifts, diabolic innuendo, and outright satanic invasion. While Haroun’s intricacies require a certain amount of concentration on the reader’s part, they are nowhere near as perplexing as those in Grimus, Midnight’s Children or the Verses. Once one identifies Rushdie's Muslim and Hindu sources as well as the novel’s subcontinental setting, the moral becomes rather easy to see. While there’s some complication involved in the dream shared by Haroun and Rashid, one should remember that the two names come from the name Haroun al-Rashid and that therefore a certain amount of commingling is appropriate. Moreover, as Aklujkar notes, the sharing of dreams is “in keeping with the treatment of names and dreams” in the Sanskrit collection of tales from which Rushdie draws. Whereas in the Verses dreams lead Gibreel into dark, entangling webs (and lead readers into confusion), in Haroun they suggest what Aklujkar calls Rushdie’s “general concepts of freedom of speech, growth of language, dialogue between the binary oppositions” and “the life-line of good literature.”
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