Haroun and Luka : A study of Salman Rushdie’s talismanic stories

Abstract

Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and Luka and the Fire of Life (2010) are telling instances of his hybridization of Eastern and Western narrative and aesthetic traditions. However, scholarly attention paid, perhaps rightfully, by the overlapping discourses of postcolonialism and postmodernism to the themes of Rushdie’s hybridity and cosmopolitanism has led to only a token acknowledgement of his indigenous influences. Particularly, the Islamic storytelling tradition of the dastan has been completely overlooked. While acknowledging that many narrative traditions of the West and the East, such as fairy tales, fantasies, boys’ adventure stories, as well as One Thousand and One Nights, Kathasaritsagar, Panchatantra, mythography, and so on, intersect in Rushdie’s children’s stories, this article seeks to foreground Rushdie’s embeddedness in the Indo-Islamic visual, narrative, and performative cultural heritage through tracing the dastan elements in Haroun and Luka.

Salman Rushdie’s fiction, including his children’s stories Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) ¹ and Luka and the Fire of Life (2010), ² described as “melange, hodgepodge, a bit of this and a bit of that” (Rushdie, 1992: 394), embodies the rhetoric of cosmopolitanism and hybridity. Rushdie scholarship, largely framed within Homi Bhabha’s (1994) concept of energized liminality, Timothy Brennan’s (1989) critique of the Third World cosmopolitan, Linda Hutcheon’s (1989) “de-doxification”, and Deleuzian (1977; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) “nomadology” has rightly been sensitive to his ability to articulate both the postcolonial, the postmodern, and now, the globalizing moments of displacement, decentring, and rootlessness. These readings of Rushdie’s works, corroborated by Rushdie’s fiction, have resulted in his indigenous sources receiving only cursory attention. While the legacy of Kathasaritsagar (Somadeva, 1997) and Panchatantra (Sarma, 2007) on his writings has been perfunctorily mentioned (Cundy, 1994: 339; Durix, 1993: 121; Mukherjee, 1998: 167) and the Sufi strains in Haroun partially explored (Aji, 1995; Teverson, 2001), the strong trace of the Indo−Islamic storytelling tradition of the dastan has been completely overlooked. ³ Feroza Jussawalla’s (1996) reading of The Satanic Verses (1988) as Rushdie’s “dastan-e-dilruba” or a love letter to Islam and her view of Rushdie as post-British colonial as well as post-Mughal colonial, however contentious, ⁴ may, therefore, be considered the first step in this direction. ⁵ Through closely examining the dastan elements in Rushdie’s writings, Jussawalla argues that The Satanic Verses (as also Rushdie’s other novels such as Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983), Haroun and the Sea of Stories) is less of a novel and more of a dastan written in the tradition of Urdu poets such as Ghalib, Hali, and Mir (1996: 64−71).

While conceding that Rushdie’s children’s tales reflect his celebrated eclecticism that draws on a range of oriental and occidental narrative traditions, this essay traces the influence of the dastan in Haroun and Luka to establish his Indo-Islamic visual, narrative, and performative cultural heritage. After a brief elucidation of the dastan and tilism and citing evidence of Rushdie’s acknowledged interest in the dastan, the essay focuses on the specific influence of the dastan in Haroun and Luka in three sections. First, We talk about the tension between the form and the content of the dastan and investigate its implications for Rushdie’s children’s stories; second, We trace the dastan tropes and, finally, We elaborate the tilismic space of the stories. We conclude that this space, as the contact zone between the text and its contexts, has counter-hegemonic implications with respect to “the Rushdie Affair” and that Rushdie draws on dastan elements to energize his children’s stories beyond either a nostalgic or a playful appropriation of exotic traditions. ⁶

Defining the dastan and tilism

Jussawalla (1996) chiefly concentrates on the dastan as a space for voicing long-winded complaints for specific purposes and uses the term “dastan-e-dilruba” to refer to complaints addressed to a beloved in the sophisticated repertoire of Ghalib, Hali, and Mir, which are directed at the shortcomings of Islam. Contra Jussawalla, who conflates the elite adaptation of the dastan in Urdu verse tradition with the popular culture of pre-colonial and colonial India, this essay focuses on the popular tradition of the dastan, particularly the Indo−Islamic tradition of the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza, in tracing its influence on Rushdie’s writings.

The dastan, translated as “tales” or “legends”, is primarily an oral art form (Farooqi, 2012: 539) of epic proportions weaving together loose, episodic tales of magic and adventure about the exploits of larger-than-life heroes. As Frances Pritchett observes, this oral story-telling tradition includes “stories about gallant princes and their encounters with evil kings, enemy champions, demons, magicians, jinns, divine emissaries, tricky secret agents called ayyars, and beautiful princesses who might be human or of the Pari (‘fairy’) race” (1992: 27). The dastan originated in medieval Persia and is believed to have reached South Asia around the eleventh century. However, as Pritchett (1992: 28) points out, it was particularly “the story of Hamza”, or Amir Hamza, the uncle of Prophet Mohammed, the warrior of Islam that “took firm root in the new soil” and that it was firmly established in India by the Mughal period. In the sixteenth century, the Emperor Akbar commissioned the codification of the entire cycle of stories in twelve volumes that were accompanied by brilliant illustrations. Now, about two hundred of the illustrations survive as Hamzanama (the story of Hamza) paintings in museums across the world. After enjoying immense popularity in the Mughal court during Akbar’s reign, the dastan migrated to Lucknow and Rampur where it was narrated by storytellers or the dastangos in royal courts as well as public squares and became a very popular form of entertainment called dastangoi. Eventually, the Ghalib Lakhnavi edition of the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza was published in Calcutta in 1855 and the Abdullah Bilgrami version published in Lucknow by the Naval Kishore Press in 1871 and remained in print until 1969. A new chapter Tilism-e-Hoshruba, (meaning “The Enchantment of the Senses”) was added to the Hamza cycle by the Lucknow dastango Mir Ahmed Ali and transcribed between 1883−1893 by two rival storytellers, Muhammad Husain Jah and Ahmad Husain Qamar (Farooqi, 2009). Pakistani−Canadian writer Musharraf Ali Farooqi (2009) calls Tilism-e-Hoshruba an elaborate hoax as these storytellers passed on their own stories as forgotten tales from the prestigious Dastan-e-Amir Hamza. However, the importance of the Tilism-e-Hoshruba lies in elaborating the concept of tilism or “enchantment created by a magician” (Pritchett, 1992: 30), which Pritchett says is “central to the dastan” (1984: 379). The tilism “cannot be escaped but has to be broken” — the way to break the tilism being prescribed in a tablet called lauh and generally resulting in the death of the (often evil) magician who creates it (Pritchett, 1992: 31), and perhaps also in the acquisition of some treasure for the person who breaks it. Throughout his daring adventures, including the breaking of the tilism, the chivalrous hero is aided by a class of secret agents called ayyars, or mischievous and fun-loving tricksters who are adept in the art of metamorphosis. Although tilismic stories were largely enjoyed as delightful tales of adventure and magic at the popular level, the tilism can also be interpreted as an esoteric Islamic concept reflecting Sufi mysticism (Khan, 2000). ⁷

Rushdie and Dastan-e-Amir Hamza

While specific references to the Hamzanama or Dastan-e-Amir Hamza are completely absent in Haroun and minimal in Luka, they feature prominently in The Satanic Verses and The Enchantress of Florence (2008) — texts, which, as this essay aims to explore, are connected to Haroun and Luka through the talismanic motif. Rushdie has not only acknowledged his indebtedness to Indian storytelling traditions in a number of interviews but also specifically mentioned “the tales of mighty heroes collected in the Hamzanama” as his favourite bed-time stories (Rushdie, 2012: 19). Before the release of The Enchantress of Florence, Rushdie had also delivered lectures on the Hamzanama paintings commissioned by Akbar in which he had dwelt on the cycle’s inherent eclecticism. ⁸ The Hamzanama paintings indeed play a significant role in The Enchantress of Florence in which they are attributed to a prodigiously talented Hindu lad called Dashwanth, who quickly masters the art of painting the fantastic adventures of Amir Hamza. He perfectly understands that while satisfying “the wild, fantastic imagination — the khayal — of the youthful king”, he is bringing “the emperor’s dream-autobiography into being, [and] that although his hand held the brush it was the emperor’s vision that was appearing on the painted cloths” (Rushdie, 2008: 119). The narrator states that Amir Hamza was the emperor’s “alter ego” and victories, not unlike Hamza’s in their strangeness and gore, were shaping up Akbar’s greatness (2008: 119). The connection between Hamza and Akbar is further established as Akbar dreams of a death similar to Hamza’s. A crow enters the imaginary queen Jodha’s bedchamber and Akbar dreams that the bird is devouring his heart just as, according to the legend, “Hind of Mecca on the battlefield of Uhud had eaten the heart of the fallen Hamza” (2008: 71). ⁹

In The Satanic Verses, the Hamzanama paintings are preserved in the Chamchawala art collection at Scandal Point. What Changez Chamchawala says about Amir Hamza is also significant — “I like these pictures […] because the hero is permitted to fail. See how often he has to be rescued from his troubles” (Rushdie, 1988: 75). Later in the passage, the eclectic nature of the Hamzanama paintings is celebrated, “In the Hamza-nama you could see the Persian miniature fusing with Kannada and Keralan painting styles, you could see Hindu and Muslim philosophy forming their characteristically late-Mughal synthesis” (1988: 76). Hamza, Mohammed’s uncle, also makes his appearance as a fallible but admirable hero in Jahilia. The narratorial voice introduces him by saying that the tall stories about his innumerable feats are not always true and that he uses his wealth to keep them afloat (1988: 109). However, a short Hamza adventure in which he kills Hind’s brothers and saves the lives of Bilal, Khalid, and Salman is inserted in the text (1988: 123−4). Finally, Hamza is killed in the battle of Uhud and his heart and liver devoured by Hind in accordance with the legend (1988: 380). The Enchantress of Florence and The Satanic Verses also contain passages which remarkably sum up Rushdie’s detailed knowledge of the strange and terrifying adventures of Amir Hamza. ¹⁰

Therefore, it is not surprising that several thematic similarities between the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza and Rushdie’s children’s stories are conspicuous. Like the trinity of the Hamza tales comprising the hero Hamza and his trusted and loyal friends Amar Ayyar and Muqbil the faithful, Haroun’s trusted friends include Iff the Water Genie and Butt the Mechanical Hoopoe, who help him in every possible way to achieve his goal. Similarly, Dog the bear and Bear the dog are loyal allies in Luka’s adventure.

However, it must be noted that Haroun and Luka are unable to replicate the epic dimension of Hamza’s odyssey across the imaginary geographies of the medieval Islamic world and beyond or the abundance of characters, combats, and love liaisons and innumerable adventures. Although several dastan tropes are equally visible in the Haroun and Luka, the strongest resemblance between Rushdie’s children’s stories and the Amir Hamza tales is evident in the Qaf episode in Dastan-e-Amir Hamza. Qaf is a magic land ruled by the king of the Peri clan — Shahpal. Hamza is destined to travel to Qaf with Shahpal’s vazir, Abdur Rahman, to rescue the magic kingdom from the monsters called Devs, especially the brutal and dastardly Ifrit. Even though Pritchett believes “Qaf is at the heart of the story” (1992: 30), the Qaf episode, in which Hamza is initially destined to spend 18 days but ends up spending 18 years, is a major digression in the plot. He is also forced to marry Asman Peri, the daughter of Shahpal and betray his earthly fiancé and true love Mehr Nigar, the daughter of the mighty Emperor of the Seven Climes, Naushervan. Hamza’s encounter with magical creatures such as Devs, Peris, Perizads and Jinns takes place in Qaf. Similarly, Haroun’s and Luka’s travels involve movements from the real world to the magical where they encounter fantastical creatures. However their journeys are not digressions but are central to the plot. In Haroun, Haroun travels to Kahani, the earth’s second moon, to renew Rashid’s subscription to the waters of the Sea of Stories and comes across Iff the Water Genie, Butt the Mechanical Hoopoe, the Floating Gardener Mali, the plentimaw fishes Goopy and Bagha who speak with their many mouths, the shadowy realm of Chup city that can exist on its own, and other such marvellous elements. Luka’s magic world, which includes the journey across the River of Time to the Mountain of Knowledge and the Fire of Life, is even more densely populated with fantastical creatures. Talking pets, the spectre of the father (or not) called Nobodaddy, memory birds with elephant heads, Rats with inflated egos, their arch enemies the flying Otters and their Queen, Solomon’s flying carpet and a host of other mythological creatures and discarded gods in the Heart of Magic inhabit Rashid Khalifa’s dream world. Incredibly, one of the places Luka notices in the World of Magic while flying on Solomon’s carpet is “the large Country of Imaginary Beings, Peristan, in which the peris, or fairies, endlessly did battle with malevolent ogres known as devs or bhoots” (96−7). This shows that the world of the dastan is an integral part of Rashid’s imagination and is the “most exciting of all” (96) storyworlds, as Luka rightly observes.

The form and the content of the dastan

The dastan was primarily transmitted orally throughout the Islamic world from where it travelled to the Indian subcontinent and flourished in colonial India as dastangoi. But since the dastan as an oral art form gradually became extinct, the Hamza stories became available to readers largely through the written editions of Ghalib Lakhnavi and Abdullah Bilgrami, which also constitute the source texts of Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s recent (2007/2012) translation in English. ¹¹ Calling attention to the failure of the written dastan to replicate the virtuosity of the dastangos in stretching, modifying, and adapting the Hamza tales according to their own whims or their audience’s moods, Farooqi ascribes it to the gap between the psychodynamics of orality and literacy:

In its early days, when the dastan “tradition” was alive, the dastan “genre” had both components — “form” and “content.” Its form was the delivery or narration, and its content was the story and adventures of the character of Hamza and his companions. But the form of the dastan was embedded in the tradition of dastan-goi. And when the tradition ended, so did the form. And besides sparse, fragmentary records of what that form was, we are left with nothing to comment on its structure. What remains now is the outlined section (RHS in the diagram); the “text” of the dastan’s content — a relic of the dastan tradition. (2000: 128−30)

Although Rushdie’s children’s stories, unlike his major works like Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, are unable to replicate the dastan’s meandering structure, they betray a wistful longing for the oral dexterities of the dastan and the lost tradition of dastangoi. The legendary dastango is recalled in the figure of Rashid Khalifa, Haroun and Luka’s father, who is a professional storyteller known as “The Ocean of Notions” and “The Shah of Blah”. Like the dastan, his stories are a “never-ending stream of tall, short and winding tales” (15) about “sorcery, love-interest, princesses […] fantastic locations, cowards, heroes, fights, and half a dozen catchy hummable tunes” (17). At the end of the novel, Rushdie has Rashid narrate Haroun and the Sea of Stories to a spell-bound audience in the Valley of K (205−7) when his power of storytelling is restored, thereby situating his children’s tale in the heritage of the dastan.

Despite being relatively straightforward quest narratives, Rushdie’s children’s stories engage with the complexities of Rashid Khalifa’s art. Haroun finds his father’s storytelling similar to juggling, “because his stories were really lots of different tales juggled together, and Rashid kept them going in a sort of dizzy whirl, and never made a mistake” (16). Similarly, the magic world in Luka that strongly resembles video game topography is part of Rashid’s protracted dream. As Luka manages to restore Rashid’s life, the audience learns that the storyteller was dreaming the incidents of Luka and the Fire of Life in his long sleep (210). In Luka, the open-endedness of Rashid’s storyworld comes to the surface when the River of Time becomes “the Trillion and One Forking Paths” and turns into “a labyrinth” (92) at one point. Here, allusions to works as spatially and temporally dispersed as Jorge Luis Borges’ postmodern short story The Garden of Forking Paths (1941/1964) and the medieval One Thousand and One Nights (Anonymous, 1973) recognize the presence of parallel realities and the possibilities of multiple endings. Both the oral narrative tradition and the simulacrum of the video games may be viewed as actualizing the potential of an open-ended text, which can only suggest instead of precisely describing the “Trillion and One Forking Paths” because of the limitations of the written medium. In this manner, the video game setting in Luka, although similar to Rashid Khalifa’s storytelling in its being subjected to the logic of textuality, becomes a useful trope for Rushdie for repeating the dastan’s oral aesthetics with a difference for Milan and children of his age.

In Haroun, Rashid fails to respond to the printed text of The Ocean of the Streams of Story in Snooty Buttoo’s library (51), which represents the diminished existence of the written dastan that Farooqi has appropriately named as the “relic” of the dastan tradition (Farooqi, 2000: 130). Rashid’s magical storytelling is inspired by the Sea of Stories in Kahani, which is “alive” (72), mirroring the stage when “the dastan tradition was alive” (Farooqi, 2000: 128) as the art of the skillful dastango. Through this, Rushdie appears to suggest that the written versions of Haroun and Luka are fixed texts that freeze Rashid Khalifa’s infinite versions of Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Luka and the Fire of Life that he would have narrated on different occasions to different audiences.

The dastan tropes in Haroun and Luka

Razm (war), bazm (court), husn o ishq (love for a beautiful woman), and ayyari (magic and trickery), believed to be the four pillars of the dastan along with tilism (Khan, 2010: 4−5; Orsini, 2009: 202), are also present in Rushdie’s children stories. Razm or war is the key strategy used to resolve conflict in both. Gup city and Chup city fight the war of righteousness to save the Sea of Stories in Haroun, and Luka battles time both to save Rashid’s life and his storyworld. Rushdie’s craft appears to have been inspired by multiple, and often competing, sources but the elements of “fantasy, humor, and gore” have been specifically traced back to the dastan (La Force, 2008:n.p.). While the violence in his novels has often been attributed to his adaptation of the Gothic (Lange, 2001; Teverson, 2002), the gory elements in his children’s stories may also be attributed to the trope of razm. As Saladin observes on seeing the Hamzanama paintings in The Satanic Verses, there is an overriding presence of violence in the Hamza tales (Rushdie, 1988: 76), ¹² with soldiers being slaughtered in thousands, champion warriors beheaded, cut in two halves, pierced, diced, evil plotters such as Bakhtakh cooked and eaten up, and so on. The Hamza cycle ends with not only Amir Hamza, but also his wife Mehr Nigar, all his sons, and many of his friends dying a violent death at different points in the narrative. Due to their being classified as children’s stories, Rushdie would be required to tone down violence in Haroun and Luka. However, the video game setting allows Rushdie to aestheticize violence in the manner of Hamzanama paintings, particularly in Luka. The bodies of Luka and his friends Dog the bear and Bear the dog disintegrate into various particles as they are hit by The Old Man of the River’s Terminator (52). They become whole immediately, courtesy of the “multi-life and temporary death” (12) logic of the game world. However, this depthless and bloodless violence generates the same affect as the large number of decapitation scenes, including that featuring Hamza’s gory death, in the Hamzanama paintings and the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza. The incident about the nasty Rats of the Respectorate of We scratching themselves to death (87−8) or dragon breath burning Captain Aag to ashes (125) resonate with the violence common in video games, but the dastan, which chronicles endless warfare, also treats death and violence with similar nonchalance. In this context, the reference to the legend of Titan Prometheus — the original fire thief, whom Zeus imprisoned in the Caucasus Mountains with an eagle munching at his liver as punishment in Luka — is particularly significant. The instance of the hero and the organ-chewing bird mirrors the heart-chewing crow of Akbar’s dream in The Enchantress of Florence and Hind’s devouring Hamza’s liver and heart in the battle of Uhud. These stories and myths that leak harmoniously into one another testify to Rushdie’s hybrid and multicultural imagination.

In Haroun, the element of bazm or courtly splendour can be found in the description of King Chatterjee’s court and palace. While Luka does not contain elaborate descriptions of courtly life, it is populated by the three Aalim, the ultimate guardians of time appropriately named Jo-Hua (What Was), Jo-Hai (What Is) and Jo-Aiga (What Will Come) and by several mighty kings in the shape of fallen gods. The young protagonists’ pre-pubescent crushes on Blabbermouth, the sprightly young page in Haroun, and Queen Soraya, the Insultana of Ott in Luka, fulfil the criteria of husn o ishq or the trope of beautiful women who serve as the hero’s romantic interest. Incidentally, the Fairy Queen Soraya, who remains a sky-bound creature during the larger part of the text, may literally be viewed as the Asman Peri or the sky fairy. Also, Soraya and Blabbermouth’s feisty temper is oddly similar to the aggressive Asman Peri in the first half of Dastan-e-Amir Hamza.

As Farooqi points out, the components of “enchantment”, “trickery”, and “warfare” might initiate the action but dastan rokna (stalling), an interruption in the action in which the dastango digresses to elaborate on the splendours of the court or romantic love, serves as an equally important narrative device in the dastan (Farooqi, 2000: 132). Although the necessity for closure in the written adventure story of Luka lacks the oral tale’s inherent flexibility and capacity for infinite expansion, the trace of dastan rokna is clearly visible in Luka’s first conversation with the beautiful and resourceful Queen Soraya. To allow their first meeting, “time stopped” literally and the action involving the warfare between the Respecto-Rats and the Otters froze (84−7). Similarly, Haroun’s labyrinthine tour, with Blabbermouth his guide, searching King Chatterjee’s palace for his room, might be interpreted as mirroring the digressive elements of the dastan, namely, those that deal with details of descriptions of courts, palaces, and romance (106−9).

In Dastan-e-Amir Hamza, Amar ayyar and the likes of him use both magic and trickery to get themselves and Hamza out of trouble, but ayyari, as Kamlapati Tripathi, Devakinandan Khatri’s grandson pointed out, is not “jadoo” or plain magic. ¹³ The trickster figure of Amar ayyar stands in sharp contrast to Hamza’s chivalry in the Hamza tales. Amir Hamza is a generous leader and devout follower of Islam who forgives enemies if they convert to the True Faith, never chases a retreating enemy in adherence to the chivalric code and rescues Naushervan from captivity despite his betrayal. On the other hand, Amar uses all forms of deceit and caprice in conformity with the religion of the ayyar both for his self-aggrandizement and when he offers assistance to Hamza in his adventures, especially while preventing Mehr Nigar from being taken away by Naushervan during Hamza’s stay in Qaf. Amar’s unambiguous delight in tormenting his own and Hamza’s enemies in ingenious ways from their childhood are also the primary source of humour in these stories.

However, Rushdie’s boy heroes are a combination of chivalry and fun. While the obstinate chivalry of Prince Bolo is ridiculed in Haroun, Haroun and Luka, like Amir Hamza, might be viewed as quester figures. They have all the qualities such as leadership, bravery, willingness to take risks, as well as generosity and kindness towards compatriots that befit a warrior prince. However, at the same time, Haroun employs a slightly underhand way of finding his way to Kahani by stealing Iff the Water Genie’s Disconnecting Tool and holding it as ransom (55−60). Luka’s mastery over riddles is equally evident as he manages to defeat even the legendary riddler — The Old Man of the River — the gatekeeper of The World of Magic (52−7). Further, Luka not only successfully uses Itching-powder bombs on the school bully Ratshit but also recommends them as weapons to Queen Soraya for overpowering the Respecto-Rats (86), actions that are reminiscent of the shrewd Amar ayyar rather than of the gallant Amir Hamza.

The tilismic space in Dastan-e-Salman Rushdie

In true dastan tradition, tilism is represented as a space of enchantment and illusion in the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza. However, the tilismic world of the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza in the Lakhnavi and Bilgrami edition is not as elaborate, phantasmagoric, and well-crafted as the one created by the evil magician Afrasiyab in the Tilism-e-Hoshruba that must be destroyed by Prince Asad, Amir Hamza’s grandson. ¹⁴ The space of tilism as well as that of the storyworld of dastan in general is a fetishized space that exists outside any temporal order. In the timeless space of fantasy, in which every stranger — magical or otherwise — merely adds to the element of enchantment, neither Hamza’s infidel enemies nor “a platoon of European soldiers marching up and down with drawn sabers, and the Brigadier installed in a chair” (Farooqi, 2000: 140) evoke any context. Therefore, as Farooqi rightly observes, the dastan “could transport not only Alice, but also her surroundings, into Wonderland” (2000: 140). However, the magical space in Haroun and Luka does not “shut out” but defamiliarizes reality. ¹⁵

Although the art of dastangoi appeared to have become extinct with the demise of the last dastango Mir Baqar Ali in 1928, it has been revived by Mahmood Farooqui and Danish Husain who, in addition to narrating tales from the Hamza cycle, adapt the traditional dastan to address contemporary socio-political issues. ¹⁶ Similarly, Rushdie argues his own case in relation to “the Rushdie affair” through appropriating the tilismic space in producing his “fearsome” fairyland. This emplaced and historicized locale is “handcuffed” to the postlapsarian world of The Satanic Verses. Haroun may be read as an unambiguous allegory of the controversies surrounding the publication of The Satanic Verses and Rashid viewed as an alter ego of Rushdie and Khattam-Shud, the despotic ruler of the dark Chup city, as a caricature of the Ayatollah Khomeini. The beguiling tilism designed by Khattam-Shud is an elaborate shadowy realm in which his shadow-self plots various ways of destroying the Wellspring of the Sea of Stories, and, like Khomeini, threatens the existence of both stories and storytellers. However, Khattam-Shud perishes at the end along with his black magic due to the machinations of boy hero Haroun, who takes back home the greatest treasure of all — his father’s stories. And yet, not only the Ayatollah, but perhaps also Rushdie’s patrons in the West, who positioned him as an apostle of Western Enlightenment values of secularism and free speech in opposition to apparent Eastern regressive and atavistic strains of religious fundamentalism, are satirized in Rushdie’s first post-fatwa novel. The enchanted space of Kahani that is divided into the land of perpetual light (Gup), symbolizing a progressive and egalitarian state and the land of perpetual darkness (Chup), standing for a repressive regime headed by a massively egoist autocrat, unmistakably recalls the polarities in “the Rushdie affair”. The innocent world of the children’s story requires an uncomplicated conflict of good and evil that runs the risk of oversimplifying Rushdie’s prolonged conflict with Iranian clerics. Moreover, complicating this neat allegory of the cautionary tale, prompting critics such as Srinivas Aravamudan to consider Haroun as “a banal didactic fiction” (1995: 327), is the effort on the part of the Egg Heads of the Gup City to keep their foes in permanent darkness, which perhaps symbolizes their intention of “othering” the Chupwallas and indirectly fuels the reactionary designs of opportunistic leaders such as Khattam-Shud. No wonder, then, that the leader of the Eggheads — the Walrus — looks to Haroun as sleek as Snooty Buttoo, the evil politician of the Valley of K (89). Therefore, the breaking of the tilism in Haroun, despite the Gup city and its real life counterpart in the liberal democracies and free societies of the West that stand for Rashid and Rushdie’s patrons respectively, involves destroying the static nature of Kahani. This advances the decolonizing project of deconstructing the light (West) versus dark (East) binary of the discourse of Orientalism (Said, 1978).

The sequel Luka, published twenty years later, appears to steer clear of these issues and overtly reads as the expression of an older father’s remorse at not being able to see his young son grow up. However, the text needs to be read beyond the existential concerns of life and death. The Heart of Rashid Khalifa’s dream world is populated by “badly behaved” discarded gods — including “the ancient gods of North, the gods of Greece and Rome, the South American gods, and the gods of Sumeria and Egypt” (127) — in whom “nobody believed any longer, except as stories that people once liked to tell” (127). ¹⁷ These gods, powerless in the real world, still retain their “superpowers” in the Heart of Magic. This leads Luka rightly to point out to the army of gods cornering him for attempting to steal the Fire of Life that if he does not get it to Rashid “before it’s too late, he isn’t the only one who will come to an end. Everything here will vanish, too” (181). This implies that if the storyteller dies, the gods, who have already lost their divinity but still survive majestically as fallible heroes (not unlike Hamza) in the colourful stories of Rashid Khalifa, would also be lost forever. No wonder that the gods eventually rise in revolt against the Aalim, who are Rashid’s “mortal enemies” in serving not only as the guardians of time, but also of time-honoured “Knowledge”. As Rashid enlightens Luka, “dreams are the Aalim’s enemies, because in dreams the Laws of Time disappear” (156−7); his dream world provides a subversive access to knowledge of “badly behaved” yet magical gods, which have been lost not only to the inhabitants of Kahani but also to the extradiegetic audience in the normal course of (linear) time. Thus, the plot concerning the discarded gods articulates Luka to “the Rushdie affair” signifying, among other things, the importance of keeping the exciting stories of forgotten gods in circulation. Ultimately, Luka’s breaking of the “trap” of time set by the Aalim (who perhaps resemble Afrasiyab in majesty and villainy) not only saves Rashid’s life but also the magical stories of discarded gods inside his head and the Aalim disappear once Luka breaks the tilism created by them in true dastan tradition (200−1).

At one point in Haroun, Iff the Water Genie laments their criminal negligence in leaving the “oldest stories ever made” unattended — “we lost touch with our beginnings, our roots, our Wellspring, our Source. Boring, we said, not in demand, surplus to requirements. And now, look, just look! No colour, no life, no nothing, Spoilt!” (146). In Haroun, Rushdie urges his son and also his young readers to “read, and bring me home to you”. Although Rushdie’s recovery of the colourful “oldest” stories of the dastan cannot restore the “pure” tradition and his homecoming through incorporating dastan elements in Haroun and Luka is uncanny, it enables children to believe in their elders’ Indo−Islamic heritage “not in a worshipping way, but in the way people believe in stories — happily, excitedly, wishing they wouldn’t end” (Rushdie, 2010: 182).