The Unsaturated Reader

Tag: salman rushdie

  • Rushdie, ‘Haroun’ and ‘the Sea of Stories’

    Rushdie, ‘Haroun’ and ‘the Sea of Stories’

    ‘Haroun and the Sea of Stories’ is a fantastical tale — a tale we wish to revel in, the tale we wish, someday, would be our own. On the way we meet a storyteller Rashid who can spurn stores out of thin air, his wife who has a beautiful voice, and his only son Haroun. Rashid is renowned for his ability to transpose people to another realm through his invective tales. Politicians often hire him to woo voters because of his ability to keep people hooked through his marvellous storytelling. It is said none but he alone can have such a grasp over listeners’ attention. But one day all goes awry as Rashid’s wife leaves him for an unpleasant neighbour who keeps asking a question that seems to have struck a chord with Rashid’s wife, “what is the point of stories that aren’t even true?”. Soon afterwards, Rashid finds himself bereaved of that magical superpower that had rendered him invulnerable for long – the power to create stories. Haroun is devastated and Rashid becomes literally speechless. Every time Rashid attempts to narrate a story to the crowd all that comes out is a croak, much to his embarrassment and disappointment. Moreover Rashid and Co., live in a ‘sad’ city, “a city so ruinously sad that it has forgotten its name.”  

    Wherefrom does Rashid’s magic to create stories out of nowhere emanate? The sea of stories. But Rashid’s downturn of sorts is speculated to be the result of a despotic tyrant in the ‘Land of Chup (Silence)’ Khattam-Shud who wants the sea of stories to be poisoned (quite a devilish bloke!). As the name suggests, the inhabitants of the Land of Chup glorify silence and darkness; just a streak of light would blind them. 

    The story takes may turns hereupon; leapfrogging our way through, we find Haroun and his father at a politician’s chuckhole. During the night, when everybody’s sleeping, Haroun encounters the water genie who is responsible for the story tap through which tales metaphorically gush out enabling Rashid to tell stories. Haroun wants to cure his father’s ailment, and so he embarks on an adventure with the water genie. On the way, he meets a magical bird ‘Hoopoe’, ‘Plentimaw fishes’ and many wholesome characters. Towards the close of the mysterious journey they end up at a kingdom. To his surprise Haroun meets his father there. Fables of wisdom, betrayal, friendship, and the usual feuds, yarn along the corridors of the kingdom. In the end, Haroun manages to finish off ‘Khattam-Shud’ whose name means “completely finished” (as it ought to be). Rashid regains his voice and power of making stories. The father and the son return home, and the city in which they’ve been dwelling secures a fitting name for itself, ‘Kahani’. Miraculously, Rashid’s long-lost wife is home too.

    Haroun is perhaps one of us. Just as the son of the story-teller Rashid — who finds more pleasure in pumping blahs into the ears of unsuspecting denizens than staring at his wife throughout the day — the reader too is transposed into a realm of limitless imagination. From birds that can read your mind, to princesses that sing with their unpleasant voices, ‘Haroun and the Sea of Stories’ is a complete fantasy, and a humorous one at that. 

    Rashid has indescribable powers for conjuring up stories out of thin air.  In a land of unforgiving agony, it is stories that enliven the spirit of the townsfolk. But one day everything goes topsy-turvy. Salman Rushdie manages to transpose the gloom that impregnates the situation into one of enervating joy with an Arabian Nights-esque candour giving the reader plenty to revel in. The brilliance of Rushdie is marked by his ability to pull off this feat — of mixing a formidable threesome: magic, humour, adventure — a feat so incredible few in the literary world would be able, and willing, to emulate. To Rushdie the master storyteller here’s a fellow Haroun’s love. 

  • This amorphous ‘self’

    This amorphous ‘self’

    The gloomy verdures, the hodgepodge in rooms that barely fit the description of a nook, the painting on the wall tilted almost to take the form of a rhombus, the beetle crawling atop the foot of the bed, the bland fields that lie scorched – these are the scenes that dot Don Palathara’s frames. A breakaway from the mainstream anthropocentric focus on the supposedly autarchic ‘self’ with its endless conflicting passions, to an archaic canvas of a socially constructed self, placed within surroundings that intimidate one of undulating terrains, matte and dull homes, is what best characterises Palathara’s takes in his films – to quote an exceptional one, ‘Central Travancore, 1956’, – and this to some extent also surfaces a mirage resplendent in a post-modernistic evanescent lustre, a reminder of its looming influence which could metastasise to many popular culture arenas before long. 

    The ’subject’ and not the self, was the postmodernist’s reply to Kantian notions of individualist rationalism. A fluid subject that rills through the turbulent sea that replenishes waters with changing discourses of power. Doused by the muddy waters of the larger patriarchal discourse is the unbeknown male they say, who is nothing but a mere epiphenomenon of everything that girdles him, the plaits of which he hesitantly hopes to untangle. The postmodernist fiction too reflects these sentiments – the deconstruction of the ‘unified self’  that lays bare-chest much of the humanisms, the Panglossian teleologies, larger-than-life autonomies and unbreakable homogeneities we took for granted. In its own right, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is a prescient archetype of the post-modernist novel. As Peter Currie writes in Contemporary American Fiction (1987), ‘the focus of attention has shifted from the psychology of character..to a recognition of subjectivity as the trace of plural and intersecting discourses’. The protagonist herein is nestled in a blank cosmos that is perpetually expanding, without the knowledge of the character or the writer. The reader too glissades through cascading glaciers of linguistic constructs, that melt, metamorphose, and solidify, all at the same time. 

    At the stroke of the midnight hour, India woke to freedom, and so did Saleem and other children of this petite midnight hour (Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children). In fact, Saleem purports to be a marginal figure, more so a human – if an anthropocentric view is what you wish – yet the peripheral significance of his, to use a popular terminology, ‘angst’ in the grand scheme of things that were to engulf India at the time is so emblematic of the travails of that infant nation. The illogicalities of his sometimes insipid sometimes ornery emotions, that criss-cross discordantly, the existential quandaries – to use an overblown pop-philosophy chestnut – is a mirror to the identity crises the decolonised nation grappled with. So does Saleem share his fate with all who had born alongside him at numerous nooks and crevices of India – but temporally they were all suspended in the same plane; their minds were forged in one whole, their bodies mere contoured forms, at best misrepresentations of that unified hope that was India. Now that we are armed with the persepectives of a post-modernist, we discern a subtlety in their identities, a curious amalgam of the expressions of the time, shuttling between miscibility and immiscibility in the anxious discourse of power that bubbled all over the country. For the post-modernist novel, the action takes place in the fluid backdrop, or in the unidentified minds of the sometimes nameless discourses that surround us, or in the psyche of the protagonist, in a catch-22 herself, struggling to write the story that is before us, or to put it rather abstrusely, in everything we were so blind as to catch a sight of it. 

    How much ever gendered, racist, classist (and so on) we may be, the semantic, generic sobriquets we bequeath our-selves and to the other ‘selfs’ we interact with assumes an identity which nevertheless is the most unfathomable, phantasmal entity ever. Much of our politics of difference, antagonisms, superficial alliances are moulded on fragile foundations, which the sooner we become cognisant of, the earlier it crumbles. Saleem Sinai was a compounded obscurity, stuck together by irreconcilable atoms, that lend no electrons to each other, but unified by dint of the inviolable force that swirled around the floating discourses of the time. And to that extent, I, this amorphous self feels it benign to say, no less are we.