HarounandLuka: 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.