Salman Rushdie’s Sea World: Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Abstract

As in works by other Indian writers, water as a symbol plays a crucial role in several novels by Salman Rushdie, the imagery being rooted in the Hindu worldview. Protagonists who find themselves immersed in bodies of water, be it in Midnight’s Children (1981) or The Satanic Verses (1988), are not the same people when they come out of them (if they do). This is true also for Rushdie’s two works for children, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1991) and Luka and the Fire of Life (2010). In the former, the author introduces different worlds that are nevertheless interconnected, each with a reality of its own. Haroun, the child protagonist, travels from the world of apparent everyday reality (represented by planet Earth) to a Moon world called Kahani. The journey to, and on, the sea waters that cover a large portion of Kahani depicts an entirely different dimension of reality. Stories and dreams occurring in this land of fiction symbolize the healing power of the imaginary. This article proposes an analysis of this literary material using the Hindu worldview as a point of departure and elaborating on the different aspects of Rushdie's representation of the sea.