1Salman Rushdies Magical Journey Through Kashmir: Haroun and the

Sea of Stories, (Post-)coloniality, and the Fairy Tale1

Eric K.W. Yu

Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) holds a unique place in Salman

Rushdies oeuvre. Created initially for his young sonZafar and read, in an earlier

form, to him as serialized bedtime stories, Harounis the only piece of childrens

fiction Rushdie has ever published. Conceived while Rushdie was working on The

Satanic Verses (1988) and completed shortly after the imposition of the fatwa by

Ayatollah Khomeini, Harounhas been received in the shadow of the Rushdie

Affair.Reviewers were quick to draw our attention to Harounsallegorical

dimension concerning Rushdies predicaments as a writer prosecuted by Islamic

fundamentalism. The relatively simple plot begins when Rashid the Shah of Blah

loses his storytelling talent after his wifes elopement, leading to his and his son

Harouns magical journey to the wonderland Kahani (story), climaxing with the

defeat of the enemies of speech and closing with Rashids recovery and happy family

reunion. To critics like Jean-Pierre Durix, Rushdies desire to resist religious and

political oppressions and to reaffirm his value as a professional writer is clear enough.

Yet there is arguably nothing postcolonial, one must add, about Haroun as

Rushdies literary reaction against the fatwa and Muslim fanaticism, if the post-

here means transcending or going beyond coloniality, to use Kwame Appiahs

expressions (63). With reference to the apparent lack of postcolonial concerns in

Haroun, one might suspect that Rushdie, obsessed with his personal difficulties while

finishing the book after the fatwa, did not give much thought to such issues as

contemporary political problems of the Indian subcontinent or of migration. But this

facile explanation utterly fails to account for the books curious treatment of Kashmir,

2the ancestral home of Rushdie as well as Jawaharlal Nuhru, the greatest spokesman of

Indian nationalism.

As is typical of the fairytale, places in Haroun lack geographical specificity,

all except the Valley of K, which is readily identified as Kashmir.2 Apart from

foregrounding the identity of Kashmir in an otherwise ahistorical fairytale, Rushdie

also tells us that there are heavily armed soldiers, that people in the street [wear]

extremely hostile expressions (42), and further explains through Rashids mouth that

Kosh-mar means nightmare. In fact, around mid-1988, less than a year before

Rushdie began working on the final drafts of the book, Kashmir witnessed the

outbreak of the insurgency. In response India began to deploy various kinds of

security personnel to the valley, which, by 1995, reached the number of almost four

hundred thousand. The blame could no longer be put on Pakistani infiltration, for

the separatist movement has, since the late 1980s, earned widespread popular

support (Ganguly 1), and what many military groups want is a completely

independent state, not joining Pakistan instead. In other words, Nehrus dream that

Kashmir, with a Muslim majority, would willingly stay in the Indian Union to prove

that the secular sovereign nation triumphs over religious sectarianism has broken into

pieces. And to the embarrassment of Rushdie himself, whoseMidnights Children

(1981) contains sympathetic statements about the Kashmiri cause, in January 1989 his

Satanic Verses provoked week-long demonstrations and violence in the valley,

causing more than sixty casualties. The Rushdie Affair, in this respect, has turned

into a peculiar (post-) colonial issue, having to do not so much with religious

fanaticism pure and simple as with a formerly independent states desperate

struggle for independence from India, who, having thrown off Britannias yoke, is not

entirely free of her own colonial desire. More recent events in Kashmir can hardly

3be understood in terms of what Rushdie dismisses as partition foolishness in

Midnights Children and Shame (1983). Given the importance of Kashmir in the

Indian Political imaginary and its symbolic and affective meanings for Rushdie

himself, it is a great pity that most critics, Indian and Western alike, remain silent on

Harouns allusions to traumatic Kashmiri history, whether out of uneasiness or mere

oversight.

This paper is about travel in literal as well as metaphorical senses. Based

on Haroun and his fathers trip from the imaginary country Alifbay to Kahani via

Kashmir, I wish to examine how some postcolonial issues travel from Rushdies

earlier novels to afairytale for children, and further investigate the genres own

complicity with coloniality. In the first part, I shall focus on Rushdies problematic

treatment of Kashmir in Haroun in relation to his migrant sensibility and political

ambivalence. In the second, I turn from thematic analysis to an as yet unplowed

area of genre criticism. Tracing the historicity of the fairytale for children with

respect to the bourgeois mystification of childhood and to the domestication of the

exotic, I shall examine, having recourse to Fredric Jamesons notion of formal

sedimentation, the genres burdens of the past. I shall attend particularly to what

will be called the modality of exoticism and innocence, exploring its relations to

imperialism and colonialism.

It must be pointed out at the outset that Rushdie need not have alluded to

Kashmir in Haroun, and its unusual presence intimates something of an obsession,

the return of the repressed. Without the reference, Haroun as a fairytale is fully

intelligible, complete in itself. Geographic specification is superfluous. K serves

two main narrative functions. First, the place is a passageway to the wonderland

Kahani. The scenic DullLake in the valley provides Haroun with a fitting

4environment to test the incredible MoodyLandtheory (49) so as to convince him

that the real world was full of magic, [and] so magical worlds could easily be real

(50). This prepares for Harouns encounter with the Water Genie on the fanciful

houseboat Arabian Nights Plus One at night, inaugurating his miraculous journey

on the Hoopoe to Kahani in search of the Ocean of Stories, the magical source of

narrative power. K, as a metonym of exoticism and magic, makes possible a smooth

transition from the mimetic to the fantastic modes of writing. Second, with respect

to political allegory, K is a miniature society where democracy has been corrupted by

political propaganda and autocratic measures. Harouns father Rashid is hired by

Snooty Buttoo, the powerful leader there, to tell people happy stories so as to rally

support in the election campaign. On Rashid and Harouns return trip, having saved

the Ocean of Stories on Kahani, Rashid recounts to people of K how the Chupwalas,

foes of speech, are defeated, inciting them to expel Buttoo and reinstall true

democracy in K. The political message is obvious:Oppressive rulers can be

overthrown by the sheer power of fiction, because it is capable of telling the truth

about, exposing, oppression. (Kuortti 31)

Obsessed with the themes of storytelling and of freedom of speech, most critics

simply pass by the Kashmiri allusion. But it will be fruitful to relate Haroun to

some of Rushdies notable adult concerns manifested in his earlier works, and

interpret it symptomatically in terms of his own ambivalence and obsessions

associated with Kashmir, a place lying at the periphery of his imaginary homeland

and an apt metaphor for the border conditions which define subjectivity, to use

Samir Dayals words (39). Of Ks many names, Rashid remembers only two:

Kache-mer (cache-mer),the place that hides a Sea, and Kosh-mar (cauchemar)

nightmare (40). These two names, supposedly derived from the ancient tongue

5of Franj (40), invite us to go beyond the thin air of magic. Let us begin with the

Seaof Stories in the title, and inquire why Kashmirhides a Sea.One road we

can take is to follow Nehrus example in his The Discovery of India(1945), to dig

deep for foundations (28), recuperating the mythic past, but inour case of Kashmir

rather than of Bharata Mata, or Mother India. For Nehru, Kashmir is

unquestionably a part of the great country, and its membership in the Indian Union

testifies to the cultural and religious diversity of the nascent secular state. Rushdies

migrant sensibility, on the contrary, has denied him a comforting sense of belonging

exclusively to any one place. This is especially the case after the Rushdie Affair.

Roots, writes Rushdie in Shame,are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in

our places (86). He also confesses, nevertheless, that he has not been able to do

away with the roots idea completely (88). In The Wizard of Oz he claims that he

found the right voice for Haroun in the 1939 Hollywood adaptation of Frank

Baums fairytale, which, in his own analysis, is marked precisely by a great tension

between the human dream of leaving[] [and] its countervailing dream of roots

(23). The Kachemer allusion in Haroun,in this light, betrays Rushdies vague

longing for his Indian roots, though rather different from Nehrus move to ground

modern Indian nationhood in group memory of past [] tradition(Discovery of

India391). Kashmir, writes Nehru, has been one of the biggest seats of Indian

culture and learning throughout history for about 2,000 years (Qtd in Sharma 7). In

an old Hindu legend, the valley used to be a lake, though not exactly a sea, where the

demon Jalodbhava, after the lake was drained, fell prey to Vishnu (Sharma 8). If

this reference is not close enough, the Seaof Stories in the title offers a better hint.

On the luxurious houseboat where Rashid and Haroun spent their night in K, there

was on a bookshelf The Ocean of the Sea of Story, or Kathasaritsagara, a collection

of stories written in Sanskrit, compiled by a Kashmiri Brahmin in the eleventh

6century. In the sense that this treasured ancient collection, with the word sea in its

title, originated in Kashmir, a fact not particularly well known, Kashmir is precisely

Kache-mer, the place that hides a Sea.Kathasaritsagara, having influences on

The Arabian Nightsand Grimms fairytales, represents the cultural accomplishment

of the old Kashmir (Sattar xv). More importantly, the ethos of the world in

Kathasaritsagara is characterized by its multiculturalism, where Hindus, Buddhists,

Brahmins, Ksatriyas, merchants, Sudras, tribals, fringe sects and ungodly beings

co-existed relatively harmoniously (Sattar xxvi), offering Rushdie a picture of

pre-Islamic cultural diversity and religious tolerance.

Apart from that mythic time of Kashmir, Haroun also evokes another golden old

age. Rashids warm descriptions of the pleasure gardens built by the ancient

Emperors in Srinagar, where the spirits of ancient kings still flew about in the guise

of hoopoe birds (25), allude to the splendor of the Muslim emperors.3 Ironically,

the careless juxtaposition of these two different times undermines the myth of a long,

continuous and unified tradition. The advent of Islam in the valley, as Mohan Lal

Koul has taken pains to demonstrate in his recent book, is anything but a peaceful

movement. Rushdie, of course, is not entirely ignorant of this irony. At a more

critical moment inMidnights Children, he reminds us of the legend of Sikandar

But-Shikan, the Iconoclast of Kashmir, who at the end of the fourteenth century

destroyed every Hindu temple in the Valley [...], traveled down from the hills to the

river-plains; and five hundred years later the mujahideen movement of Syed Ahmad

Barilwi followed the well-trodden trail (310). Rashids thought about Guppee

Pages being burned, one can say, alludes not only to the burning of The Satanic

Verses by angry Muslims in the heat of the Rushdie Affair, but also to the record that

Sikandar burnt all books the same [way] as fire burns hay (Koul 15). The

7Kashmiri Muslims own more recent grievances, on the other hand, have much to do

with Indias reluctance to grant Kashmirindependence.4 In the late 1980s, the

conflicts between the Muslim majority and the Hindu minority in Kashmir escalated,

resulting in the mass exodus of Hindus out of the valley in March 1990. Since 1992,

allegations of human fights violations by the [Indian] security forces [have increased]

as do charges of corruption [in the state bureaucracy] (Singh 245). The closer we

look at Kashmiri history, the nearer we will get to Kosh-mar.

To better understand Rushdies curious treatment of Kashmirin Haroun, we

must examine the multiple and conflicting meanings of this palimpsest state in

Midnights Children. Readers of the book may still remember that the family saga

of Saleem Sinai begins with his grandfather Dr. Azizs return from Germany to

Kashmir, seeing his homeland through traveled eyes (11) and having renounced

Islam, turned into a hollow man vulnerable to women and history (10). In the

boatman Tai and Reverend Mother, Azizs wife, Kashmirseems to stand for

cultural stagnancy and religious conservatism, antithetical to secular modernism.

Heidelberg-returned, Aziz feels sad, to be at home and feel so utterly enclosed, and

finds the environment hostile (11), while Tai finds him foreign and threatening.

The trope of alienation, surprisingly, further develops in other directions. The

Westernized elites spiritual emptiness, as captured by the recurrent hole metaphor

about Aziz, eventually turns into indiscriminate anti-religious fervor: having gone

mad after his sons death, Aziz goes back to Kashmir after his almost life-long exile,

allegedly steals Muhammads hair from the Hazratbal shrine and dies while trying to

destroy an old Hindu temple. Much more ironically, Saleem, illegitimate son of the

English colonist William Methwold and a low-caste Indian woman, has eyes as blue

as Kashmiri sky -- which were also eyes as blue as Methwolds -- and a nose as

8dramatic as a Kashmiri grandfathers -- which was also the nose of a grandmother

from France (117), Rushdie stresses. The pure High-Aryan blood in Aziz,

Saleems false grandfather, which might well be taken as a signof authentic

Indianness, is playfully confused with the heritage of European colonialism.

Inevitable cultural bastardization of Saleem, and by extension, of all midnights

children, is dramatized. At another place, Saleem regrets that although his family

throw [their] lot in with India[rather than Pakistan], the alienness of blue eyes

remains (107), seemingly confusing the Kashmiri identity with his familys religious

background. Elsewhere, however, Rushdie is exceptionally sensitive to Kashmirs

political uniqueness. He reminds us that Kashmiris not strictly speaking a part of

the Empire, but an independent princely state and allows Tai to declare that

Kashmiris are different (33). He even writes that, according to rumors, Tai was

infuriated by India and Pakistans struggle over his valley, and walked to Chhamb

with the express purpose of standing between the opposing forces and give them a

piece of mind, shouting Kashmiri for the Kashmiris (37). A noticeable mention

of Kashmiri politicsis also found in the description of how Sheikh Abdullah, the

Lion of Kashmir, was campaigning for a plebiscite in his state to determine its future

(260). While the headline in a newspaper reads Abdullah Incitement Cause of

his Re-Arrest, Saleem speaks of Abdullahs courage.Considering the political

climate in the subcontinent, Rushdies expression of sympathy for the Kashmiri cause

is glaringly subversive. For Indians, if an inch of Kashmirwas conceded then India

itself would be at risk, because it would incite other separatist movements within the

nation, as Akbar Ahmed explains (257).

It would be wrong, though, to claim that Rushdie is committed to the Kashmiri

cause, for elsewhere inMidnights Children and in Shame, he seems to treat Kashmir

9rather casually as just a part of India. Coming from a middle-class, Urdu-speaking

Muslim family, growing up in Bombay and having spent most of his adult life in

England, Rushdie has no intimate knowledge of Kashmir. Besides, as is

appropriately represented by the alienness felt by Dr Aziz, Rushdies cosmopolitan

outlook and secular, democratic leanings are at odds with the supposedly cultural

backwardness and religious conservatism embodied in Kashmir. His postcolonial

diasporic experience, nonetheless, must have alerted him to the subaltern, in-between

status of the Kashmiris, while his sympathy for their cause is in line with his Leftish

liberalism. Explaining his relatively easy ride in England, Rushdie asserts bitterly

that it is not the result of the dream-Englands famous sense of tolerance and fair

play, but of [his] freak fair skin and [his] English English accent (Imaginary

Homelands18). We should note that his freak light complexion comes from his

Kashmiri ancestors. While his whiteness, middle-class background, Western

education and cosmopolitan taste must have afforded him a feeling of superiority in

his country of origin, among Westerners he is inevitably white but not quite. The

fact that Haroun finds The Ocean of Sea of Story written in a language [he] could not

read (51) is quite telling: whatever affective connection Rushdie may findin

Kache-mer, it is tainted by a sense of Otherness, a mediated vision of traveled

eyes. And his double awareness of Kashmirs marginality vis--vis India and

Pakistan as well as the inner religious conflicts must have undermined any rosy

portrait of Kashmiryat. To Rushdie, then, Kashmir functions as a powerful trope of

alienation, liminality and fragmentation, resonating with his own cultural

in-betweenness and his fractured national identity, heightened after the Affair.

Given Rushdies emotive and symbolic investments in Kashmir, it is not

surprising that he alludes, so explicitly, to Kashmir in Haroun. But for him to speak

10

of recent Kosh-mar, or Kashmirs nightmarish history, since the late 1980s amounts

to sheer embarrassment. It is not to say that Rushdie must be ignorant of the

Farooq-Rajiv accord, how the son of the Lion of Kashmir allegedly sold out his

state to the Center and met Muslim oppositions, followed by the outbreak of

anti-Indian riots and terrorism. It is quite likely that Rushdie, before he finished

Haroun, had heard of the news about the violent demonstrations in the valley against

his Satanic Verses. Besides, incomplete local knowledge, the inevitability of the

missing bits, as Rushdie demonstrates masterfully in Shame (69), does not hinder

him from detailing the vices of a fictional country [...] at a slight angle to reality

(29). What I venture to suggest to account for Rushdies simultaneous naming and

evasion of more recent Kashmiri history is that, under the deep impact of the

insurgence, often misunderstood by non-sympathizers as mere fundamentalist

uprisings,5 Kashmir has become too alien to Rushdies cosmopolitan sensibility.

The demonic figure of armed mujahideen,who would take Rushdies head if given

the chance, might well have replaced, in Rushdies imagination, Tai the boatman and

the Reverend Mother, inscrutable but relatively benign natives of his ancestral home.

Besides, Rushdie might have found himself much more at home with the

England-returned Farooq Abdullah, a medical practitioner like Dr. Aziz inMidnights

Children and having a dandy side not entirely unlike Isky Harapa in Shame, than

many of the faceless antigovernment Muslim fighters.

The treatment of Kosh-mar in Haroun is disappointing if taken realistically,

not so much because it simplifies, as a fairytale for children is expected to do, but

because it misleads. Ks unbearable sadness, which can even be smelled [...] on the

night air (47), along with the haunting depiction of heavily armed soldiers and

peoples extreme hostile expressions (42), while alluding to recent political turmoil

11

in the valley, is explained away in terms of Buttoos manipulation of democratic

procedures and magically resolved by Rashids recounting of his journey to Kahani.

A more pertinent account, one may contend, should at least refer to the National

Conferences inability, after Farooqs pro-Indian turn, to represent Kashmiri

aspirations any longer, and to the subsequent rise of armed militancy out of wide and

deep discontent. Buttoos obvious allusion to the former Pakistani leader Zulfikar

Ali Bhutto, painted as the world champion of shamelessness in Shame through the

figure of Isky Harappa (108), may be considered a trope of displacement. Sensitive

to but unable to come to terms with recent Kashmiri tragedies, Rushdie is compelled,

on this reading, to speak of another time andspace. And as Kosh-mar in Haroun

is being flattened by post-Affair criticism into primarily a global issue of artistic

freedom and censorship, the local and the specific utterly pass into oblivion.

It will not be easy to locate postcolonial issues in the contents of Haroun.

However, with reference to the historicity of the genre adopted and certain

tropological peculiarities in the text, we can exploreHarounsrelation to coloniality

and see if there is anything truly postcolonial. In an insightful article on genre

criticism, Fredric Jameson proposes that in its emergent, strong form a genre is

essentially a socio-symbolic message, or in other terms, that form is immanently and

intrinsically an ideology in its own right (140-41). The ideologyof form itself [...]

sedimented, Jameson further elaborates, persists into the later, more complex

structure as a generic message which coexists-either as a contradiction or [] as a

mediatory or harmonizing mechanism-with elements from later stages (141). In the

following analysis, I shall adhere to a much weaker notion of formal sedimentation.

While stressing that even a deceptively simple genre like the fairytale for children

consists of heterogenous if not contradictory elements from different periods, I

12

concede that ideological orientations of the formal elements concerned cannot always

be unambiguously pinned down. As far as generic identify is concerned, leaving

aside the political allegory about artistic freedom already expounded, Haroun is

basically a fairytale for children, with a sci-fi touch. Tracing the history of the

fairytale as a genre, Jack Zipes points out that the fairytale emerges as a product of

the higher-class European literary appropriation, since the fifteenth century, of the

kind of oral folktales known as the wonder tale (When Dreams Came True 2).

Some of the prominent features of the oral wonder tale which survive in later literary

fairytales include the lack of concrete, real temporal and geographical references, the

presence of supernatural powers and magical agents, relatively straightforward

characterization in diametrical opposition of good versus evil, and above all, the

happy ending. All four characteristics listed here, though modified to some degrees,

can be detected in Haroun.

The fairytale, with its predictably simple magic to guarantee an unlikely happy

end and the tendency to dehistoricize, is not a particularly promising genre for

expressing complicated postcolonial concerns. Nonetheless, it would be utterly

wrong to claim that generic constraints of the fairytale must have disallowed adequate

treatment of political issues, postcolonial or otherwise, in Haroun. Let me explain

with respect to a concrete example. The social relations in Gup City on Kahani,

with its king, a prince and a general, follow a kind of fairytale convention, residual of

the medieval world of the folktale. However, in order to make the Guppees

representatives of free speech in his allegory, Rushdie grants them absolute freedom

to air their opinions while on the way to attack the Chupwalas. This enviable

freedom, embarrassingly, can hardly be reconciled with the general description of

power relations in the story. For instance, when the crowd find themselves in

13

conflict with the prince on an important decision whether to save the Ocean or the

princess first, they concede at once: save both. Other parts of the story show that the

Guppee society is strictly hierarchical and patriarchal. Absolute freedom of speech,

ironically, does not entail political rights, not least true equality. Such glaring

contradictions, however, could have been avoided, had Rushdie thoughtfully

developed the sci-fi dimension, a modern generic convention already experimented

by Rushdie in Grimus (1975), if unremarkably, to introduce more innovative forms of

social structure.6 In fact, the literary fairytale, institutionalized in France during

the eighteenth century first in literary salons, at court and then in print,7 with a large

repertoire of conventions, motifs, topoi, characters, and plots (Zipes, When Dreams

3), has proven, in the course of time, to be a much more plastic form than the oral

wonder tale. During the first half of the twentieth century, according to Zipess

erudite survey, the literary fairytale became much more politicized. Of course, it

must be pointed out that the fairytales containing sophisticated social messages of

contemporary relevance are not necessarily intended for children mainly, not to say

exclusively. If Rushdie is unable, even if willing, to deal with the postcolonial in

Haroun, the blame falls not so much on the fairytale as such, but on the very genre of

the fairytale for children.

Significantly, Zipes stresses with reference to the historicity of the genre, it

was from 1830 to 1900, during the rise of the middle classes, that the fairy tale came

into its own for children (20). That Haroun belongs to the fairytale for children is

not hard to ascertain. Apart from its relatively simple and somewhat repetitious

English, the story is marked by its cleanliness - no bawdy expression, relatively

little violence, no eroticism, not even romance (the Haroun-Blabbermouth

relationship does not go beyond mutual liking and ends abruptly), and no trace of

14

(pagan) religion save some conventional magical elements, partly rationalized by

pseudo-science. At first sight, there is nothing unusual about the necessity to

cleanse all such forms of corruption for the well-being of the child reader. What

may be of interest to the postcolonial critic, as we shall see, lies in the underlying

mystification of childhood. Examining bourgeois conceptions of childhood in

relation to modem Western stories intended for children, Jacqueline Rose argues that

childrens fiction has never completely severed its links with a philosophy which

sets up the child as a pure point of origin in relation to language, sexuality and the

state (8). Since the discovery of childhood by Europe around the sixteenth

century (Aris 33) and the institution of childrens literature in the nineteenth century,

it has come to be a commonplace assumption in the West that childhood is a distinct,

privileged stage of life, having unmediated assess to a sort of ideal primitive world

untainted by adult social and sexual corruptions. But the fetish of childhood,

analyzed symptomatically, reveals adults own psychic investments. There is a

continuity in childrens fiction, observes Rose, from Rousseau up to and beyond

Peter Pan to Alan Garner, in which the child is constantly set up as the site of a lost

truth and/or moment in history (43). Childrens fiction is to prolong and preserve

innocence, not only for the child but also for [adults] [...] values which are

constantly on the verge of collapse (44). Put in more vicious terms, the

mystification of childhood concerned implies disavowals not only of inevitable

linguistic impurity and indeterminacy but of various forms of oppressions and

repressions. While childhood is privileged as a superior moral and aesthetic vantage

point, the child, paradoxically, becomes the fitting object of bourgeois pedagogy and

surveillance, in the name of rescue or protection. Childrens literature, in fact, sets

up the child as an outsider to its own process, and then aims, unashamedly, to take the

child in(2). Wherever childhood purity [...] is being promoted in one type of

15

discourse, Rose argues from a deconstructive perspective, the excluded term of the

opposition will be operating somewhere very close at hand (50). Following this

hint, I wish to explore in Haroun a much neglected connection between the fairytale

for children and an aspect of Orientalism, or what I shall call, for want of a better

name, the modality of exoticism and innocence. By Orientalism Ihave in mind

the aspect of fantasy,or what Edward Said calls a kind of second-order knowledge

on top of exact positive knowledge about the Orient (52), governed by a battery of

desires, repressions, investments, and projections (8).

What we see in Haroun, as in some other fairytales for children, especially

Oriental tales, is an eye for the marvelous, which strikes us as a hunger for the exotic

at times. In what may be considered a travelogue part of the story, Haroun craves

for the most spectacular view on earth, a vista of the Valley of K with its golden

fields and silver mountains and with the Dull Lake at its heart a view spread out

like a magic carpet, waiting for someone to come and take a ride (34). The virgin

beauty of the legendary Vale of Kashmir, as is typical in earlier descriptions of the

mysterious Orient, invites the innocent young traveler, in a manner not too remote

from the ultimate imperialist fantasy: come hither and possess me. But this way of

seeing through the childs innocent eyes, purged of any reference to characteristic

Western indulgence in Oriental sensuality, is couched in a discourse of childhood

innocence, where the exotic is already domesticated and associated with an innocuous

conventional fairytale motif, the magic carpet. It is also noteworthy that The Ocean

of the Sea of Story,an indigenous literary product of Rushdies ancestral home, is

presented in an unmistakably exotic perspective: it is written in a language [Haroun]

could not read, and illustrated with the strangest pictures he had ever seen (51).

Furthermore, the mysterious Oriental storybook is found on the houseboat called

16

Arabian Nights Plus One, each of its windows [has] been cut out in the shape of a

fabulous bird, fish or beat: the Roc of Sinbad the Sailor, the Whale Tat Swallowed

Men, a Fire-Breathing Dragon, and so on. And light blazed out through the

windows, so that the fantastic monsters were visible from some distance, and seemed

to be glowing in the dark. (51)The many allusions to The Arabian Nights, at K and

on Kahani, go well with Harouns innocent delight in the magical world of the

fairytale. The occasional use of weird Hindustani expressions and of Indian

English only adds a further exotic coloring. Harouns apparently benign exotic

mode, associated with childhood innocence, is incompatible with the kind of

monarch-of-all-I-survey vision one finds in Richard Burtons African discoveries

(Mary Louise Pratt 201), and is even more remote from the various modalities of

systematic knowledge examined by Bernard Cohn regarding empire building and

colonial administration since the eighteenth century (3-11). Nevertheless, if the

modality of exoticism and innocence is placed in the wider context of the discursive

formation of the fairytale in Europe, its kinship to what Pratt calls the anti-quest,

the strategies of representation whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure

their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony (7), is

inevitably suspected.

Let it be remembered that Antoine Galland and Burton, the most famous

European translators and popularizers of The Arabian Nights, were famed Orientalists,

criticized by scholars like Ziauddin Sardar for perpetuating all the ideas about

sensuality, licentiousness, cruelty, fanaticism, treachery, despotism and barbarism of

the Orient (43). Western reception and literary imitation of Oriental tales in the

eighteenth century and their subsequent transformation into fairytales for children

traversing cultural confines, is an unabashed history of appropriation, concurrent with

17

the rise of the West as a global power, politically, economically and culturally. In

her detailed study of the reception of The Arabian Nights, Eva Sallis instructively

points out that its translation into European languages means being reborn into an

alien environment [...] in which its signs were received in a radically different way

from their accepted meanings in their culture of birth (1). The eighteenth-century

European reception was marked by the craze for the exotic, which made the text

more strange than it in fact was (69). Often the exotic was largely a product of the

scene setting and vivid background of the tales (70). Western rewrites and

imitations were to further consolidate the exotic mode. When tales and motifs from

The Nights, since the early twentieth century, have already been amply appropriated

by Western childrens literature, Sallis Orientalist charges, curiously, appear to be

much less compelling. It is not to say that because of cleansing, we can no longer

find negative images about the Orient in The Nights or in its countless fairytale

adaptations and imitations. Rather, the hard fact is that Oriental tales assimilated by

childrens literature, with the accompanying modality of exoticism and innocence,

have become part and partial of Western, and increasingly global, childrens culture,

as indispensable family fare. Childhood innocence, a mystified bourgeois discursive

construct, is all the more cherished because it is supposed that adulthood always

threatens to annihilate its fragile existence. Thriving in a wonder world protected by

the familiar aura of childhood innocence, the exotic in contemporary fairytale

discourse appears to be harmless, natural, eternal, ahistorical, therapeutic, to

borrow Zipess words (Fairy Tale as Myth 7). The modality of exoticism and

innocence is thus Otherness domesticated, as though utterly irrelevant to centuries of

real contacts between the West and its Other.

18

The modality of exoticism and innocence, as a generic sediment, is historically

closely related to Orientalism, which, to Said, is unquestionably an aspect of both

imperialism and colonialism (123). Yet the exotic mode in itself is not necessarily

implicated in imperial fantasy or colonial desire. If exoticism is ravishment in the

marvelous, or the experience of wonder, then it is naturally linked to the fairytale, for

Zipes tells us that a prominent generic feature of the fairytale, remnant of the oral

wonder tale, is to induce wonder (When Dreams5). In Zipess account, the

fairytale is escapist but potentially emancipatory, because it [seeks] to awaken our

regard for the miraculous condition of life and to evoke in a religious sense profound

feelings of awe and respect for life as a miraculous process, which can be altered and

changed to compensate for the lack of power, wealth, and pleasure that most people

experience(5). The marvelous studied by Greenblatt as a central feature [...] in the

whole complex system of [European] representation [...] through which people in the

late Middle Ages and the Renaissance apprehended and thence possessed or

discarded the unfamiliar, the alien, the terrible, the desirable (Greenblatt 22),

however, is much more ambivalent ideologically. The marvelous Columbus saw in

the New Worlddenotes some departure, displacement, or surpassing of the normal

or the probable, but in the direction of delicious variety and loveliness (76), and was

invoked in his formal legal ritual of naming and taking possession of the Indies (80).

Jean de Lrys account of his marvelous experience at a Brazilian witches sabbath,

on the other hand, registers an ecstatic joy (16), a mysterious lack of meaning,

having nothing to do with demonizing or conquering the Other. The marvelous

produces wonder, which is thrilling, potentially dangerous, momentarily

immobilizing, charged at once with desire, ignorance, and fear in Greenblatts words,

and is the quintessential human response to what Descartes calls a first

encounter(20). What we find in the most fanciful exotic parts of Haroun, be it the

19

descriptions of K, the Ocean of Stories on Kahani, or the strange otherworldly

creatures like Mali the flying gardener, seen through Harouns eyes, however, is a

remarkable lack of fear. Also noticeable are the self-confidence and knowingness in

this young hero, who may have derived from the strong-willed child-protagonist one

sees in the tradition of fairytale parodies intended for both children and adult (Zipes,

When Dreams21) as exemplified by Lewis Carrolls Alices Adventures in

Wonderland (1865). Well versed in fairytales and mildly cynical, Haroun

nevertheless chooses to firmly believe in magic and takes great delight in it.

Although he constantly ravishes in wonders, he never feels being threatened. At

times he consciously makes sense of his fantastical experience in terms of fairytale

conventions, and seeks for what he, through his familiarity with the fairytale

discourse, always already knows. Although Haroun is empowered with a stronger

will and given a greater role than his fathers in the adventure, his superior knowledge

about the magical world, supposedly a gift of his uncorrupted childhood innocence,

paradoxically, comes from the favorite stories he heard from his father. Harouns

propensity to see the Other as the dj-vu and his craze for the homely exotic,

actually, is dangerously close to Sardars definition of Orientalism in terms of a

constructed ignorance, a deliberate self-deception, or a narcissistic pursuit of

something aesthetically pleasing (4). If the chief aim of postcolonial childrens

literature, as some critics believe, is sensitivity training, enabling the child-reader to

forego his or her habitual self and to hear voices of the Other, then Harouns

self-assured indulgence is particularly alarming.

As is evident in The Wizard of Oz (1992), Rushdie is keenly aware of the utopian

impulse in the fairytale and tries to relate it to his diasporic experience. He states

that Over the Rainbow, the theme song of the 1939 MGM musical in his study, is,

20

or ought to be, the anthem of all the worlds migrants, for it is a celebration of

Escape, a grand paean to the Uprooted Self, a hymn the hymn to Elsewhere

(23). He reminds us that Harouns companions [...] are clear echoes of the friends

who danced with Dorothy down the Yellow Brick Road (18). In his analysis ofOz,

Rushdie ponders on home and migrancy, confesses his childhood admiration of

England, and compares, if rather superficially, the differences between Hollywood

and Bollywood.Regrettably, nowhere can we detect any overt critique of

colonialism and its aftermath. Likewise, even if we can see allusions to social and

political problems such as Islamic fundamentalism, corruption of democracy, political

and commercial exploitations of stories, and even environmental pollution featuring

prominently in Haroun,we do not see anything unmistakably postcolonial there

except through a symptomatic reading. On the contrary, Rushdies professed aim to

tailor Harounfor children from seven to seventy (18) has obscured the fact that this

book is written in a dominant Western language and in a genre which, despite its

recent globalization, has a peculiar institutional history, thus blinding us to any

colonial or neo-colonial relations implicated. What concerns us here is not only the

historicity of the literary fairytale for children and its complicity with Orientalism, but

also the more recent rise of the fairytale film in the transnational culture industry,

which, observes Zipes, [tends] to use the fairy tale to induce a sense of happy end

and ideological consent and to mute its subversive potential for the benefit of those

social groups controlling power in the public sphere (When Dreams 27-28). If the

post- in postcolonial fairytales for children is taken to mean, not just

ex-colonial or migrant, but actively challenging coloniality, then it requires a

great deal more courage and imagination in wrestling with the formal and ideological

sediments of the genre. Yet even if Rushdie decides to take up this challenge, a

big question remains: will his young Western readers, long nourished by such Disney

21

classics as The Lion King and Aladdin, be willing to abandon their familiar world

of Arabian Nights entertainments?

Notes

1 A slightly shorter version of this article appears in Rudolphus Teeuwen ed.,

Crossings: Travel, Art, Literature, Politics. Taipei: Bookman, 2001. 277-96.

2 Apart from the names Kache-mer and Kosh-mar, the story alludes to such

real places as Dal Lake, National Highway NHIA, and the Jawahar Tunnel in the

district. In the glossary appended to the book, Rushdie clearly tells us that the Dull

Lake gets its name from the Dal Lake in Kashmir (217).

3 Hoopoe birds alludes to Sufism, for in the twelfth-century Sufi text The

Conference of the Birds, the hoopoe guides other birds to spiritual perfection. The

Sufis, renowned for their gentleness and otherworldliness, were early founders of

Islam in the valley. Unfortunately, not all early Muslim settlers and rulers were

non-violent, as will be seen in the case of Sikandar.

4 It might be helpful to offer the reader a very brief historical note here. The

independent princely state of Jammu and Kashmir was established in 1846, when

Gulab Singh bought Kashmir from the East India Company under the Treaty of

Amristar, inaugurating the Dogra rule. In 1947, as Pakistani military tribesmen

entered Kashmir, Maharajah Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession, with the

effect that Kashmir joined the Indian Union. In 1948, the United Nations Security

Council ruled that the Kashmiris should decide their future by a plebiscite. However,

partly because of the wars between Pakistan and India, the plebiscite never

materializes. In 1949, the Indian Constituent Assembly granted the State of Jammu

and Kashmir a special status, under Article 370. However, Kashmirs special status

within India has been eroded gradually; full autonomy never comes into being.

5 Ganguly has probed into the social background of the recent insurgency and

offered a lucid, if crude, account: In the background of [the] political scene,

Kashmiris were becoming better educated and more politically aware. Younger

Kashmiris, no longer as politically quiescent as their parents, began to chafe against

the steady suppression of political dissent. Finding virtually all institutional channels

22

of expressing their discontent closed, they mobilized and resorted to other, more

violent methods of protest. Since secular politics, as represented by the National

Conference [headed by Farooq Abdullah], was corrupt and undemocratic, it is not

surprising that the movement took on an ethnoreligious dimension. (91)

6 Although some people claim that science fiction could be traced back to the

ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (written perhaps in 2000 BC) (Roberts 47), if

not Mary Shelleys Frankenstein (1818), often critics see Jules Verne (1818-1905) and

H.G. Wells (1866-1946) as founders of the genre. In serious modern writers like Isaac

Asimov and Doris Lessing, human and human-machine relations are explored in

depth. The first reader of works like Lessings Canopus In Argos: Archives would be

surprised by the fact that the sci-fi plot could be much less formulaic as is found in its

popular forms. Despite some haunting scenes and its general appeal to sensationalism

(as in the portrait of the incestuous relationship between Flapping Eagle and his sister),

Rushdies Grimus is not particularly successful in studying social relations, and is

often considered an immature work of his.

7 By institutionalization, Zipes wishes to emphasize Peter Burgers argument

that works of art are not received as single entities, but within institutional

frameworks and conditions that largely determine the function of the works (Qtd in

Zipes, Fairy Tale as Myth 19). In other words, the production and reception of

fairytales are mediated by framing conditions, the diachronic development of which

determines the historicity of the genre.

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Cohn, Bernard S. Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge. New Jersey:

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Dayal, Samir. The Liminalities of Nation and Gender: Salman Rushdies

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