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Call for Cultural Hybridity in Salman Rusdie's The Satanic Verses

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 TRIBHUVAN UNIVERSITY

Call for Cultural Hybridity in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses

A Thesis Submitted to

The faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree

of Master of Arts in English

By

Prafulla Kafle

Central Department of English

Kirtipur, Kathmandu

August, 2010
 TRIBHUVAN UNIVERSITY

Central Department of English

Letter of Recommendation

Mr. Prafulla Kafle has completed his thesis entitled “Call for Cultural Hybridity in

Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses” under my supervision. He carried out his

research from 2009 A. D. to August, 2010 A. D. I hereby recommend his thesis be

submitted for viva voce.

 Acknowledgements

First of all I would like to thank Pushpa Raj Acharya, Asst. Lecturer, Central

Department of English, without whom this thesis would not have been in this form.

I also like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to Dr. Amma Raj

Joshi, Head, Central Department of English, who was ever helpful and encouraging.

Besides my thanks also go to Dr. Sanjeev Uprety, Dr. Arun Gupto, Dr. Krishna

Chandra Sharma, Dr. Birendra Pandey, Mr. Saroj Ghimire, Mr. Ghanashyam

Bhandari including other teachers who were ever helpful.

I owe my sincerest level of gratitude to my parents Ratna and Poojan Kafle,

sisters Laxmi, Sarada, Ranjana, Sushila, brothers Prem, Santosh, Ananda, Prashanna ,

nephews Kushal and Bigyan, niece Kanchan and all my relatives who helped me

financially and emotionally to conduct my thesis.

I also take this moment to remember my friends Suraj, Subash, Bikram,

Nitesh, Rajendra, Rishi, Sanjay, Suman who offered me different kinds of help and

encouraged me during the period of my research.

August, 2010 Prafulla Kafle

 Abstract

In The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie manipulates the post colonial issues of

diaspora and cultural hybridity as a narrative tool to focus on the experiences of

diasporic lives of the imperial metropolis. As post colonial diasporic subjects face the

problems like identity crisis and formation, and cultural disorientation, Rushdie puts

privilege on and calls for cultural hybridity as most appropriate cultural option.

Hybridity is the combining or conjoining of disparate concepts to create the third state

of being. In The satanic Verses, the protagonists struggle to cope with the dramatic

differences between their adopted and native environment. The main protagonist

overcomes his cultural crises by making peace with his native culture, shading some

of his conformity, and becomes a hybrid being.

 Contents

Acknowledgement

Abstract

I. Introduction: Prescription of Hybridity in The Satanic Verses 1-11

II Hybridity and Diaspora 12-23

III Call for Cultural Hybridity in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses 24-45

Delineation of Diasporic Subjects in The Satanic Verses 25

Call for Hybridity 32

IV Conclusion 46-48

Works Cited
 I. Introduction: Prescription of Hybridity in The Satanic Verses

This research on Salman Rushdie’s most controversial novel The Satanic

Verses (1988) aims to analyze how the novel intends to prescribe the adoption of

hybridity as a means to create a new beings out of diaspora peoples’ divided,

disillusioned, disintegrated and rootless personalities. After the decolonization, the

people from previous British colonies migrated to the former colonial centers. After

then onwards, this trend perpetuated. They left their homeland in search of better

financial and educational opportunities. Some other reasons can also be found like

racial tussle etc. This trend of migrating to a foreign land for better opportunities is

still in practice. People from around the world leave their country for various reasons

and settle down in a foreign land. This process, from then to now, has made a great

many people diaspora, expatriate, exiles and immigrant. These people face different

kinds of cultural and identity related problems. Salman Rushdie, being a diaspora

writer himself, has discussed the same problems faced by the diaspora people and

how they can reduce the pain produced in the diasporic condition, by practising

hybridity, as the central thematic agenda in the novel The Satanic Verses .

Ahemad Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay, India in June 1947. Rushdie

was sent to Cathedral and John Canon School; a British administered primary school

with Anglican affiliation, located in Bombay. He read extensively on both serious and

popular literature in his childhood. In 1961, at the age of 13, he was sent to a

prestigious Rugby Public School in England. At Rugby, however, although the

masters were fair-minded, Rushdie felt alienated from his classmates, the ‘old boys’

from the British established families, who subjected him to cruel pranks. Rushdie

compensated from the pranks and racial taunts by excelling at debates, appearing on

theatrical productions and thriving at academic areas, winning the Queen’s Medal for
history and securing (but refusing) a scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford. He

continued his graduation in 1968, attempted to work in entertainment industry in

Pakistan, changed his mind, got back to London and resumed theatricals and involved

in advertising agency. By then, he had already begun to think himself as a writer,

however, and he completed a never published novel in 1971, The Book of Pir, which

he described as “post-Joycean and sub-Joycean.

Despite his earlier Joycean influences, he later on became a prominent post

colonial writer with a strong post-modern consciousness. His novels primarily deal

with postcolonial subject matters like race, identity, diaspora, cultural hybridity and so

on and he uses magic realistic and surrealistic images. He sees facts in fiction and

fiction in facts and sometimes fuses them both to create ‘faction’. Rushdie sometimes

fictionalizes the so-called historical facts. This act of him marks him as a post modern

writer but he is most often remarked as a postcolonial literary icon because of his

huge interest in colonial and postcolonial issues and subject matters.

Grimus was Rushdie’s first published novel written when he was still working

irregularly in advertising to provide an income. It was a commercial failure and never

was published in the United States, but it was favourably reviewed in London’s The

Literary Supplement (January 21, 1975), and it attracted notice and the beginning of

audience for Rushdie. It took several short stories and five years before he produced

Midnight’s Children.

Midnight’s Children got nice response from both eastern and western world,

but it also offended a great many people, among them the family of Indira Gandhi, the

then Prime minister of India. Midnight’s Children is primarily a post colonial text. In

it, colonizer and the colonized speak from different and conflicted cultural locations

that demonstrate the “radical incommensurability of translation” (Bhabha, Nation and

Narration, 317). The stability of identity that is necessary for subjectivity and

therefore for both inter-subjectivity and control if the narration of history is denied in

the Midnight’s Children.

Shame, Rushdie’s third published novel is, what he himself called, his

antisequel to Midnight’s Children. It has picaresque and serio-comic elements that

resemble those of the earlier novel. The title of Shame is derived from the Urdu word

‘sharam’ and it contains an encyclopaedia of nuance the English term barely suggests:

embarrassment, discomfiture, indecency, immodesty and the sense of unfulfilled

promises. Rushdie, thus, explores here the themes that are similar to those of his first

novel. All the characters experience shame in one or another of these forms, as well as

some, its reverse, shameless.

In his yet another novel The Moor’s Last Sigh, Rushdie as a kind of permanent

immigrant, a man who can neither return to a home country, nor can feel really at

home in any other land, has presented the vision of migrancy as the very condition of

cultural modernity. A crucial aspect of this aesthetic position, however, has been an

intense examination of the homelands that formed- and continued to inform- the

intellectual, spiritual and political components of Rushdie’s psychological being.

Wherever Midnight’s Children and Shame focused on India and Pakistan at specific,

contemporary moments in their postcolonial history, The Moor’s Last Sigh is an

attempt to account for and understand the origins and evolution of the complex

cultural matrix that Rushdie refers to as “Mother India.’ Its narrative combines the

overall structure of the classical nineteenth century novel, projecting the epic sweep

of history with an episodic linkage of individual incidents and characters akin to the

picaresque; it is also similar to the eastern story-cycles.

 Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is probably the most controversial and stirring

novel written by him. Possibly no other English novel has ever born such a great

controversy as this novel. This allegedly blasphemous novel is Rushdie’s strongest

documentation concerning the post colonial problems and issues. The Satanic Verses

is Rushdie’s strongest indictment of politicized religion, mixed cultural identity and

insensitive, arbitrary officialdom. The novel shows the diasporic Britons suffering

from persisting colonial mentality and racially discriminatory policy of British

authority, which satanifies the immigrant population solely for the reason of their

being culturally distinct. The novel suggests that cultural hybridity is an appropriate

tool to overcome the problems faced in the diasporic condition.

The Satanic Verses has been read and interpreted from various perspectives;

however, the approach of the present research is to look at Rushdie’s migrant’s-eye-

view on the postcolonial subject matters of diasporic condition and hybridity. Being

an exile, a diaspora writer himself, Rushdie has certainly experienced a diaspora’s

uprooted, culturally disillusioned state. Above it, he, like almost all immigrant settlers

in Britain, has felt the quecy-official racial discrimination which sees the immigrants

as Satan. In this situation, a diaspora can neither return to his/her original homeland

nor can be at ease in the host nation. This condition can be overcome and one can get

surety of their culture and identity, by adopting hybridity, according to Rushdie.

The Satanic Verses explores the possibility of cohesion, stable subjectivity and

cultural authenticity in the postcolonial diaspora that, Rushdie’s previous work

Midnight’s Children rejects as impossible. Midnight’s Children refuse the idea that,

between colonizer and colonized there is an unbridgeable gulf that produces

schizophrenia and fragmentation for the postcolonial subjects. In The Satanic Verses

Rushdie interrogates the cultural postmodernism of his previous work and extends his
questioning of cultural authenticity and the question of identity to a more

internationally complex frame.

Identities are now hybrid, always contingent, constructed in the process of

negotiation between the margin and the imperial center and thus inescapably multiple.

Rushdie always valorizes the hybrid condition as an in-between creative space.

Rushdie’s description of the process of composing The Satanic Verses serves as an

introduction to the novels obsession with the question of identity and hybridity:

In writing The Satanic Verses I think I was writing for the first time

from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of

me that loves London and the part of me that longs for Bombay. But

must of the time people will ask me, are you Indian, Pakistani,

English? What is being expressed is a discomfort with a plural identity.

And what I am saying in the novel is that we have got to come to terms

with this. We are increasingly becoming a world of immigrants, made

up of bits and fragments from here, there. We are here and we have

never really felt anywhere we have been. (Cohn-Sherbok 134)

By this, Rushdie denotes the plural and partial identity of the diaspora. They reside in

one place and belong partially to another. They are subject to the racial discrimination

and identity formation. Rushdie too, like his protagonist in The Satanic Verses, was a

victim of the British racism and xenophobia from his childhood stay in Britain. His

every experience became the raw material for his acclaimed novel The Satanic

Verses. The former colonial population was invited into Britain, in the early years

after decolonization to supply for cheap labour which was scarce within the former

imperial centre. Later on, they were charged of importing disease and crime into

Britain and the discriminatory law was passed. After that, pathos for the immigrants
started. Rushdie has called that dispersal of former colonial population, diapora, in his

essay entitled The New Empire Within Britain. As Rushdie explains, understanding

British racism and construction of identity for non-White Britons:

It sometimes seems that, the British authorities, no longer capable of

exporting governments, have chosen instead to import a new empire, a

new community of subject peoples of whom they can think and with

whom they can deal, in very much the same way as their predecessors

thought of and dealt with “the fluttered folks” and wild, the new

caught, sullen peoples, half devil and half child, who made up, for

Rudyard Kipling, the White Man’s Burden… four hundred years of

conquest and looting, four centuries of being told that you are superior

to the Fuzzy-Wuzzies and the wogs, leave their stain. This stain has

steeped into every part of the culture, the language and daily life.

(Rushdie 1991)

This emphasizes the still persisting colonial mentality and superiority complex of the

White Britons, who think only the Anglo-Saxon population as British and want to

construct and give some alien, satanic identities to the immigrant people. This identity

construction disillusions the diaspora and they become disoriented. This

disorientedness can be cured through hybridization, which is the assertion of The

Satanic Verses. If a society is constituted by culturally hybrid people, there comes no

question of racial and cultural differences and as a result, no racial/ cultural injustices

and discrimination, because, all share each other’s culture, therefore, cultural

hierarchy becomes blurred. This phenomenon is valorized by many post colonial

critics such as Homi K. Bhabha and Rushdie himself, who dubs this phenomenon as
union-by-hybridization. The Satanic Verses too, emphasizes on union-by-

hybridization.

The novel’s two protagonists are Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farista.

Chamcha is an Indian immigrant residing in Britain and Farista is a Bombay based

film actor. Chamcha once visits Bombay and while returning to London, he happens

to be in the same plane in which Farista is having a journey. Meanwhile the plane

crashes. When they fall from the blasted plane onto the English soil together, no one

but they can miraculously survive. Chamcha, despite being an Anglophile, ironically

gets physical and mental torture by English police. He is an English citizen but the

police does not accept him as an English man because of his brown complexion. Then

he gets an identity of a giant, odorous goat. On the other hand, Farista, a devout

Indian Muslim, goes through schizophrenia and several stages of physical and

spiritual metamorphoses. He gets a halo around his head, becomes mad and at last

commits suicide. The both characters lose their real identities as soon as they enter the

English land and get constructed identities, one gets an identity of a giant satanic goat

and the other, of Archangel Gabriel. Both suffer the disillusionment because of the

constructed identity. Farista dies, Chamcha survives at last.

Besides the racist and xenobhobic nature of British authority, there are other

causes of the characters’ sufferings. Saladin suffers because of his hatred for his

mother culture and excessive anglophilia, has a quarrelsome relationship with his

father with anti-mimicry attitudes who lives in India. After all his sufferings, when he

conforms to his father’s ideas and intermingles his past and present selves, his

situation improves. Farista’s sorry state is the result of his inability to transcend the

gap between cultures and inhabit this space as hybrid.

 By showing all this, Rushdie intends to elaborate that, neither mimicry nor

complete resistance is a right way. Hybridization of culture is a right way through the

diaspora’s suffering.

Homi K. Bhabha in his Nation and Narration views that The Satanic Verses

celebrates the hybrid condition as ability of self-creation for diaspora people in the

post colonial scenario. He opines:

[The Satanic Verses] attempts to redefine the boundaries of the western

nation, so that ‘the foreignness of language’ becomes the inescapable

cultural condition for the enunciation of the mother tongue…Rushdie

seems to suggest that it is only through the process of dissemination of

meaning, time, people, cultural boundaries and historical conditions

that the radical alertly of the nation cultural will create new forms of

living and writing. (317)

Rushdie’s contribution in the literary realm left great impact in the

postcolonial and postmodern era of the recent times. He applied different narrative

techniques like magical realism to bring ‘diasporic imagination’ that nourished

postcolonial consciousness in diaspora community. As a post colonial writer,

Rushdie, influenced by Bhabha, extends his attention from the ambivalent colonial

space to the creative, unstable hybrid position in The Satanic Verses. In the novel, he

delineates multicultural societies, multilingualism and many difficulties that arise in

such culture and situation. His concept of the ‘third space’ describes multiculturalism

as celebration of cultural diversity. In the novel, he uses mixed languages, a merge of

Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, and English to implicitly highlight hybridity.

 This novel has received a lot of criticism. Since its publication, various critics

have tried to analyze the novel from different perspectives like post colonialism, post

modernism, discourse analysis and historiographic meta-fiction.

One of the critics, Dick Hebdige, sees The Satanic Verses containing

decolonising power against the ever-spreading colonialism. According to him, the

novel contains diverse characters of different social origins who speak non-standard

English through which Rushdie parodies the subtle mode of resistance. He writes:

[T]he clotted language of Rastafarianism was deliberately opaque. It

had grown out of Patois, and Patois itself had been spoken for

centuries beneath the Master’s comprehension. This was a language

capable of piercing the most respectfully inclined white ear….made no

concession to the sensibilities of a white audience. It was an alien

essence, a foreign body which implicitly threatened mainstream British

culture from within. (64)

Another critic, Marlena Corcona sees Salman Rushdie as a postmodernist. In

The Satanic Verses, she finds the elements of post modern uncertainty that boldly

subverts the nature of good and evil. She writes:

At a time when we have all but lost faith in definite origins, Rushdie

writes us into a world of version that is nevertheless not a trivial world,

but a world suffused with the sacred. In its questioning of both the

transmission of the sacred text and contemporary representation of

writing, The Satanic Verses may well be the first post modern Islamic

novel. (158)

Likewise another critic David Bennet also sees the novel as post modern. He

opines:
 If we believe Rushdie himself, it is a work in the radically ironic and

self parodic mode of post modernist writing, which resists any attempt

to locate an authorial point of view, to frame its author with any

political intention, any religious belief or disbelief.(2)

Sten Pultz Moslund analyzes how this novel subverts the sacredness of Qur’an

by the construction of discourse, in an article entitled Literature as Discourse: an

Analysis of the Discursive Strategies in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses:

The Satanic Verses is extremely evanescent in its form and content and

not a single enunciation in the novel seems to be allowed to stand

unchallenged by machinations of contradiction, doubt and ambiguity.

It includes a heteroglossia of languages that are normally considered as

mutually exclusive: religious belief in sacred truth intersects with

profane doubt and blasphemy and material realism is crossed with

magical and fantastic events. Within this universe, the language of

literature serves to determine any discourse that seeks to exclude

alternative version of truth and reality. (293)

Another critic Subash Pathak opines that The Satanic Verses blurs the

boundary between history and fiction. It fictionalizes the Islamic history to give an

alternative version of Qur’an. He further opines:

For Rushdie, history is no longer a set of fixed, objective facts. The

facts do not exist unless they are interpreted so, history, like fiction,

needs to be interpreted and reinterpreted. Historian interprets the

events of history, presents them coherently, and makes the history

intelligible to us… since history is subjective phenomenon, there can

be many versions of history…Rushdie interrogates the validity of the

 official history by providing an alternative version of Muslim’s sacred

theological book Qur’an, through the novel, The Satanic Verses.(3)

Thus, this novel receives a plentitude of criticism, which shows the critical

richness of the novel itself. A novel can have multiple interpretations. Therefore, the

present research aims to analyze Rushdie’s views on postcolonial issues of identity,

diaspora, and how he celebrate and appeals for hybridity, in the novel.

This present work has been divided into four chapters. The first chapter

provides the introduction to this research, presents Rushdie’s ideas regarding diaspora

and hybridity, and how it is applicable to The Satanic Verses. The second chapter

discusses the theoretical modalities which are applied in this research. It consists the

discussions on the post colonial theoretical discourse and includes the ideas of M. H.

Abrams, Homi K. Bhabha, Rushdie, and Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen

Tiffin. The third chapter is the analyses of the applications of the theoretical tools to

the text under discussion, which leads the research work to the conclusion. Fourth

chapter concludes the research proving that The Satanic Verses really calls for

hybridity.
 II. Hybridity and Diaspora

One of the most disputed term in the postcolonial studies; 'hybridity' commonly

refers to the creation of new trans-cultural forms within the contact zone produced not

only by colonization but also by immigration and new cultural consciousness. In this

global world, hybridity becomes the viable cultural option. Hybridity means to mix

the culture of origin with other cultures. In other words, cultural hybridity is the

culture which is produced when a culture gets affected or gets influenced by another

culture(s). It becomes inevitable owing the globalization; the entire world becomes a

tiny village by the means of mass media, transportation and science.

Hybridization does not take only the cultural form, but takes many forms;

linguistic, social, racial, political, etc. It is the linguist and cultural critic/theorist

Mikhail Bakhtin who used hybridity to suggest the disruptive and transfiguring power

of multi-vocal language situation and by extension of multi-vocal narrative. The idea

of polyphony of voices in society is implied also in Bakhtin’s idea of carnivalesque.

Hybridity is frequently used in postcolonial discourse to depict the trans-cultural

form. It is cross cultural exchange.

The inhabitants of the post colonial society have three cultural options:

assimilation, indigenization and hybridization. Assimilation is totally assimilating to

the dominant culture. In this case, people mimic the language, borrow the ideas and

practices (usually of the colonizer and the west) and reject their own socio-cultural

structures. Indigenization means rejecting everything from the other’s culture by

adopting only own culture. Assimilation and indigenization seem theoretically

possible but in practice, are almost impossible and are impractical. Therefore,

adopting the hybridized form of culture is a practical and viable option.

 Hybridization is understood as a process in which colonized (or once

colonized) people borrow the language and socio-cultural patterns of colonizer (or

once colonizer) when they are forced or necessitated to do so. Bill Ashcroft, et. al.

write:

Hybridity in the post colonial society both as a result of conscious

moment of cultural oppression, as when the colonial power invades to

consolidate political and economic control, or when settler- invaders

dispossess indigenous peoples and force them to assimilate to new

social pattern.(137)

Hybridization is not concerned only with the colonized people, but it is

sometimes seen practised by the colonizers also. In the post colonial scenario, the

immigrants from one part of the world to another take it as a viable cultural option

where they can neither reject nor fully adopt the new culture.

Therefore, hybridity concerns various problems in which people are dislocated

and displaced from their familiar social environment and indigenous culture where

they are compelled to assimilate to a new social pattern.

In fact the concept of hybridity occupies a central place in post-colonial

discourse. It is celebrated and privileged as a kind of superior cultural intelligence

owing to the advantage of in-betweenness, the straddling of two cultures and the

consequent ability to negotiate the differences. This is particularly so in Bhabha's

discussion of hybridity.

The term hybridity has been most recently associated with the work of Homi

K. Bhabha, whose analysis of colonizer/ colonized relation stresses their

interdependence and mutual construction of their subjectivities. Bhabha writes:

 Hybridity is the revaluation of the assumption of colonial identity

through the repetition of discriminatory identity effects. It displays the

necessary deformation and displacement of all sites of discrimination

and domination. (42)

Bhabha has developed his concept of hybridity from literary and cultural

theory to antagonism and inequity. For Bhabha, hybridity is the process by which the

colonial governing authority undertakes to translate the identity of the colonized

within a singular universal framework but then fails producing something familiar but

new. Bhabha contends that a new hybrid identity or subject- position emerges from

the interweaving of elements of the colonizer and colonized challenging the validity

and authenticity of any essentialist cultural identity. In postcolonial discourse, the

notion that any culture or identity is pure or essential is disputed. Bhabha himself is

aware of the dangers of fixity of identities within colonial thinking arguing that all

forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity.

So, Bhabha wants to produce the equality between cultures through the

hybridization. It is hybridization where cultures get balance and rupture the cultural

hierarchy. There is no discrimination, no prejudice and no bias between cultures.

Bhabha further describes:

If the effect of the colonial power is seen to be the production of

hybridization rather than the noisy command of colonial authority or

the silent repression of native traditions, then an important change

occurs. It reveals the ambivalence at the source of the traditional

discourses on authority and enables a form of subversion, founded on

that uncertainty that turns the discursive conditions of dominations in

to the grounds of intervention. (43)

Thus, hybridity is the legacy of colonialism which presupposes the power relation

between the subjugated culture and the dominant one. So, hybridity occurs producing

new kind of sharing the ideas and beliefs of both cultures, but more under the pressure

of the dominant one.

Hybridization is making one of two distinct things, so that it becomes

impossible for the eye to detect the hybridity. Robert Young presents the hybridity in

the following ways:

Hybridization can also consist of the forcing of a single entity into

two or more parts, a serving of a single objects into two, turning

sameness in to difference.[…] hybridity thus makes difference in to

sameness and sameness in to difference, but in a way that makes the

same no longer the same, the difference no longer the difference. (158)

Hybridity simply means the cross-cultural exchange. It stresses on the mutilation of

cultures in the colonial and postcolonial process in the expression of trans-culturation.

Hybridity is associated with in-between spaces that carry the burden and meaning of

culture, therefore, postcolonial situation is not monolithic one way flow from the east

to west. Thus, the mutual cultural flow between the West and the East develops the

situations the cultural hybridity. Robert Young thinks that there is no clear cut idea

about hybridity. He holds that, “there is no single or correct concept of hybridity, it

changes as it repeats but it also repeats as it changes. It shows that we are still locked

into the parts of the ideological networks of the culture that we think surpassed”

(159). So, the culture has no fixity. While talking about the Fanon vision of the

revolutionary cultural and political changes, Homi K. Bhabha writes:

Cultural diversity and cultural difference says that the meaning and

symbol of culture have no primordial unity and fixity; that even the
 same sign can be appropriated, translated, re-historicized, interpreted

and read anew. (55)

Apart from the discussion on the hybrid in-between space, Bhabha also throws

light on the ambivalent colonial identity which is directly related to the hybrid

existence of post colonial subjects. Bill Ashcroft says that, "ambivalence describes the

complex mix of attraction and repulsion that characterizes the relationship between

colonizers and colonized. The relationship is ambivalent because the colonial subject

is never simply or completely opposed to the colonizer"(12). Rather than assuming

that some colonized and post colonial subjects are 'compliant' and some 'resistant',

ambivalence suggests that complicity and resistance exist in a fluctuating relation

within the post colonial subjects for it may be both exploitative and nurturing or

represent itself as nurturing, at the same time.

Robert Young has suggested that the theory of ambivalence is Bhabha's way

of turning the tables on imperial discourse. The colonial periphery, which is regarded

as 'the borderline, the marginal, the unclassifiable, the doubtful' by the center responds

by constituting the center as an 'equivocal, indefinite, indeterminate, ambivalence'.

But this is not a simple reversal of binary, for Bhabha shows that both colonizing and

colonized subjects are implicated in the ambivalence of colonial discourse. The

concept is related to hybridity because, just as ambivalence decentres colonial

authority from its position of power, so that authority may also become hybridized

when placed in a colonial context in which it finds itself dealing with other cultures.

Thus, in the colonial and post colonial scenario, the subjects are in an ambivalent

situation.

Bhabha in his Location of Culture tries to clarify about the mimicry and

ambivalence that function within colonial discourses. It has come to describe the
ambivalent relationship between colonizers and colonized when colonial discourse

encourages the colonial subjects to mimic the colonizer by adopting the colonizer's

cultural habits, assumption, institutions and values. Mimicry, therefore, locates crack

in the certainty of colonial dominance or uncertainty in its control of the behaviour of

the colonizer. Colonized mimic the colonizer by adopting ruler's languages, cultures

and values and become, as Bhabha says, "almost same but not quite" (140).

What Bhabha discusses about the colonial scenario is fit in the post colonial

scenario as well. As the colonized subjects, the post colonial diasporic subjects area

also on the ambivalent position who often tend to mimic the dominant culture to attain

special social position. This mimicry ultimately leads to a culturally hybrid in-

between space.

Postcolonial critics have been influenced by different issues like hybridity,

globalization and other. In the postcolonial society, as mentioned earlier too, there are

found mainly three cultural options- assimilation, indigenization or resistance and

hybridization. Among them, the third one, hybridization is taken to be the best viable,

cultural option in this post-modern society. The rest cultures are myopic in nature as

they tend to cultural seclusion.

Indigenization is rejecting everything from alien culture and adopting only the

native one. It is very good to revive own cultural originality and it may seem to be

possible, but it is very difficult to maintain it in this world of globalization, age of

science and technology and mass media. Total assimilation to the dominant culture,

especially the western, may be satisfactory for sometime to those who mimic, but

ultimately they encounter with the cultural alienation, dislocation, hollowness,

emptiness etc, because the adopted culture is not their root.

 So, regarding assimilation and indigenization, hybridization of culture

becomes more viable cultural option in this post modern flux. In hybridity one can

adopt some of the good and useful thing from others culture and eschew bad things

from the original culture. At the same time, one can preserve the uniqueness of own

cultural practices, in this way, one has to feel neither alienation nor any difficulty in

society.

World has become a global village. Globalization has, especially, economic

political consequences, but it has brought into light the power of culture.

Globalization does not only encourage to flourish national cultural beliefs and

contains and political boundaries but also uplifts global culture and broad areas in the

globe. Thus, it is not limited in the restriction of single culture.

Generally, culture is a vague and vast term which includes knowledge,

language, belief, art, morals, law, customs, behaviours, other capabilities and habits

acquired by man as a member of a society. Culture is not static; it grows out of a

systematically encouraged reverence for selected customs and habits. Culture also

changes with the time being. With the rise of colonization, immigration and

globalization, different cultures have come across with each other. As such, one

culture influences the other and gets influenced as well. So, no culture can remain

intact and pure. Commenting on the hybridized, translated postcolonial diaspora

people, Salman Rushdie, in his essay Imaginary Homelands writes:

We are Hindus who have crossed the Black Sea; we are Muslims who

eat pork. […] we are now partly of the west. Our identity is at once

plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures, at

other times that we fall between two stools. (15)

By saying this, Rushdie intends to elaborate the trans-cultural existence of the people

who are from the former European, especially, British colonies and who now dwell in

the colonial metropolises. Those people are the culturally transformed hybrid beings

called diasporas.

Diaspora is a word derived from Greek meaning - to disperse. This word was

first used to describe the dispersion of Jewish people from Palestine in the Babylonian

times and then after the great destruction of Jerusalem in the Roman times. Since

then, this word has been used to refer the group of people who settle abroad but

perpetuate their original cultural affiliations. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen

Tiffin write:

[T]he notion of the diasporas of peoples have become increasingly

common in describing the combination of migrancy and continued

cultural affiliation that characterizes many racial, ethnic and national

groups scattered throughout the world from one geographic

location.(425)

Diaspora is a term of growing relevance to the post colonialism. diaspora, the

voluntary or forcible movement of peoples from their homelands to new regions, is

central fact of colonization. Colonization itself is a radically diasporas movement

involving the temporary or permanent dispersion and settlement of million of

Europeans over the entire world. The most extreme consequences of empirical

dominance can be seen in the radical displacement of people through slavery,

indenture and settlement.

Diaspora does not simply refer to this movement but also to the vexed

question of identity, memory and home that such movement produces. Diasporic

writers address the complex issues of identity, subjectivity and exile. This issue is not
only one of cultural engagement but also the cultural circulation. There is a new world

order of mobility, of rootless histories, and the paradox of global culture is that it is at

home with this motion rather than in a particular place.

Diaspora distinguishes itself from the words immigration or immigrant and

migration and migrant. On this concern bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen

Tiffin write

These words focus on the movement, disruption and displacement

rather than the perpetuation of complex patterns of symbolic and

cultural collection that come to characterize the diasporic society. They

describe the diversity of strangers rather than the difference if the

relocated diasporic subject. (425)

That means a diaspora is different from an immigrant in some remarkable ways.

Where immigrant or migrant imply people shifted from one geographic location to

settle on another, diaspora connotes the migration of people along with their culture.

Making a connection of diaspora people and culture, Bill Ashcroft et. al. opine:

Diaspora highlights the global trend of creating, constructing,

reconstructing identity not by identifying with some ancestral place,

but through travelling itself. While the diasporic subject travels; so

does culture. A travelling culture means a culture that changes,

develops and transforms itself according to the various influences it

encounters in different places. (427)

So the diaspora does not concern a single and static culture, but more and dynamic

characteristic nature of the culture.

When people leave their homelands to settle on a new one, that leads them to a

sense of loss in terms of home and culture. They are connected to their original
culture and are located in a new socio-cultural region. This situation puts diaspora

people in a culturally ambivalent situation. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen

Tiffin write:

A two directions- towards an historical cultural identity on one hand,

and society of fundamental ambivalence is imbedded in the term

diaspora: a dual ontology in which the diaporic subject is seen to look

in relocation on the other. (45)

Old Testament contains a reference to the word diaspora which describes this

condition (diaspora) as a punishment given by the Lord. The word still bears its

characteristics partially, in that sense Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin

write:

It is useful to dwell on the seminal text (Old Testament) to see how the

characteristics of diaspora have persisted: diaspora is a scattering: it is

an exile, and in the original text, that exile is a punishment. In many

respects the experience of the diaspora retains these characteristics.

(425)

When Said ponders on the state of exile in The Mind of Winter, he dwells of

the sense of loss, “the un- healable rift force between a human being and a native

place, between the self and its true home.”

Besides feeling that sense of loss, diaspora people often tend to feel identity

crisis in the alien world. The society, where they live does not accept them as its

constituents. When they see very few people of their kind in that society, they feel

themselves alien. Above that, they have already forgotten about their own history,

their root of culture. This phenomenon fills in them a kind of inferiority complex vis-

à-vis the native inhabitants of that land. The people of their new socio-cultural
surroundings behave with them as unidentified beings. They often dehumanize them

(the diasporas). Sometimes, the diasporas try to mimic the dominant culture. While

trying this, they gradually forget their cultural root. They can belong neither to their

originality nor to the new one. All this leads to feel their identity in crisis.

The co-existence with the hostile, xenophobic natives and other culturally

different subjects may put diaspora in a psychologically traumatic state. Diasporas are

usually in the social minority. Therefore, they are frequently victims of the

construction of their identity. The dominant culture constructs their identity and

sometimes satanifies them as it does to the protagonist of Rushdie’s The Satanic

Verses, Saladin Chamcha. South Asian people become “Pakis” or sometimes "brown

Uncle Tom”. In this phenomenon of identity formation Salman Rushdie through one

of his characters, says, “They describe us…. They have the power of description, and

we succumb to the pictures they construct” (The Satanic Verses 168). This statement

underscores the fact of diasporas’ identity crisis and the substitution of the real

identity with a constructed demonic identity.

This kind of constructed identity displaces the real one and the diasporas feel

disorientation in terms of culture and identity. They, being culturally distinct, have to

bear a strong hatred from the host culture and other hostile immigrant cultures. This

often leads them to hate their own existence and mimic other’s cultural practices. This

way, they become more and more uprooted, dislocated, disoriented and excluded.

All the above mentioned traumatic situations justify that the state of a diaspora

or an exile or an immigrant is a state like punishment. To reduce the pathetic

punishment-like condition of dispora, one can get him/herself adapted to a hybridized

form of culture. By so doing, they enter into the periphery of other’s (especially the

host) culture, albeit partially, which can heal the pain of identity crisis and other
diasporic disadvantages. In a hybrid culture, no one has to feel cultural disorientation

because all the members of that society share each other’s culture and the distinction

between self and other is blurred. In a society like this, no cultural discrimination can

be seen. Thus, hybridization is a perfect solution for diaspora to overcome different

problems that they face in postcolonial society. Hybrid culture is suitable not only for

diasporas, exiles, expatriates or immigrants, rather it can be an appropriate cultural

option for all the people of different cultural contact zones in this post modern flux,

which can create a discrimination-free world.

 III. Call for Cultural Hybridity in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses

The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie’s master-work on the post colonial

subject matter of diasporas, identity, and hybridity. The novel appeals for the cultural

hybridity by delineating the pathetic diasporic condition in the western metropolis.

The novel’s protagonists undergo different sorry states in the xenophobic and racially

discriminatory society of London. They experience cultural uprootedness and their

identities are constructed in the Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. Rushdie shows the

diasporic subjects suffer from culture and identity related problems and shows the

need to adopt hybridity to conquer such problems. He initially jeopardises his major

characters Gibreel Farista and Saladin Chamcha in the troublesome immigrant state

ultimately to suggest the inevitability of adopting cultural hybridity, in The Satanic

Verses.

The subject- matter that The Satanic Verses fictionalizes is the wave of

immigrants from Britain’s former colonies to the former imperial center. The struggle

of these immigrants and largely the working class communities in Britain locate the

construction of subjectivity in a culture in which this construction revolves around

membership in the national community. The reaction from the xenophobic British

authorities to agitation for the rights of working people and people of colour indicates,

however, that the nation is defined precisely as that entity that does not include these

people. In Margaret Thatcher’s (the prime minister of Britain of the time of The

Satanic Verses) Britain, the nation is the white nation, with the proud imperial past to

be recaptured, or replayed in jingoistic military interventions and a nostalgic call to

past glory when “they ruled half the world”. Due to the superiority complex of British

authority and nationals, the diasporic community gets inferiorized. They feel their
identity in crisis, cultural disillusionment and get various kinds of violence. In this

situation, as The Satanic Verses suggests, hybridity plays a positive role to reduce

their pain.

Delineation of Diasporic Subjects in The Satanic Verses

As the novel opens the central protagonists, Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel

Farista, tumble out of the sky into the English Channel. In this scene, newness and

resurrection are presented as elemental to the diasporic experience. Rushdie sets the

stage for the development of these characters, as they seek to define who they are

without having a stable ground on which to stand. The sense of dislocation instigated

by the immigration is just the one of the symbolic associations with their fall into the

sea.

These characters are having difficulties navigating between memories of their

native India and the reality of their adult lives on England. In Saladin’s case, India

seems reproachable. England, with its dignity and restraint, appears far superior to

him. He moves to London as a schoolboy and although, he initially finds his life

nothing but embarrassing and frustrating, he still attempts mightily to fit in. later, he

marries an upper class British beauty, Pamela Lovelace. For him, she represents the

jolly England, ‘stinking of Yorkshire pudding’. She in return marries him because of

her interests in third world causes. Their relationship is built on a foundation of

misunderstanding and leaves both feeling unsatisfied. Saladin’s career, like his

marriage, is in an attempt to subsume his Indianness. He is a voice-over artist,

providing the personality to household cleaners and frozen peas in the radio

advertisements. Although Saladin trains his flexible tongue to forget his Bombay tilt,

he feels that he can never truly fit into British society and fears that he will always be
different despite his best efforts. Saladin’s unsuccessfulness and incomplete transition

to the British life is deeply traumatic.

Gibreel Farista was born into a family of poor lunch deliverers in Bombay.

After the death of both of his parents, he is fortunately adopted by a powerful family

who paves the way for his future acting career. Primarily, he plays leading roles in

Bollywood ‘theologicals’ as Hindu gods such as Vishnu, Ganesh etc. His fame is

unparalleled as Gibreel attains the same god-like state as the characters he portrays on

screen. The tensions of his public life are too much to bear; his personal chaos

culminates in eating the forbidden pork, thereby rebelling his Muslim heritage. At this

point of crisis he rejects his life, career, and lover Rekha Merchant. At the moment

swallows the fateful pork, he notices Alleluia Cone, intrepid Everest climber and

beautiful ‘Ice Queen’. They commence a torrid and short-lived romance before Allie

drives Gibreel to make a journey to England. He leaves India for England. But what

he does not know is that the eating of the pig meat will soon trigger the start of a

series of epic nightmares. Ultimately, Gibreel’s presence throughout most of the novel

is in reference to these dreams. These nightly visions occur in a serial form and

frighten him with their startling realism. While on plane to England, with Saladin as

fellow passenger, the plane explodes on the sky.

Shortly after they, Saladin and Gibreel, drop out of the sky from the blasted

plane simultaneously into the English Channel, they both find their identities changed.

Saladin Chamcha finds himself changed into a giant goat with cloven hooves, hairy

body, two horns emerging out of his head and a severe odour from his mouth. Due to

his satanic goatish appearance, he becomes the victims of police brutality later on.

Gibreel Farista, on the other hand, finds a halo around his head. After that, his serial

dreaming becomes even more nightmarish. He avoids sleep out of the fear of the
nightmare, in which he presumes his identity as of the Archangel Gabriel. Both of

these characters start deeply embarrassing and dehumanizing experiences, as soon as

they enter into the English land.

Saladin and Gibreel both suffer from the racist and xenophobic ideology of

contemporary British society. The contemporary society, Margaret Thatcher’s

England, considers nationalism in a very narrow sense. Only the white Anglo-Saxons

are thought to be British nationals .The British administration sees the immigrant

subjects as a threaten to the British nationalism. Thatcherism’s search for ‘the

enemies within’, its operations across the different lines of divisions and

identifications in social life; its rooting of itself inside a particularly narrow

ethnocentric and exclusivist conception of national identity; and its constant attempt

to expel symbolically one sector of society after another from the ‘imagined

community’ of the nation; these are central to the Thatcherism’s hegemonic project as

the privatisation programme or the assault on local democracy. The Satanic Verses

elaborates the imagined communities, that are the diasporas, become the victim of this

discriminatory and oppressive situation.

Due to this oppressive and racially discriminatory condition in Britain, Saladin

Chamcha becomes victim of police brutality. The way in which the narrator

represents the attitude that his captors take against him in a way reflects the position

of a foreigner when he is initially confronted by the ruling class; “he crouched down

in his little world trying to make himself smaller than smaller in a hope that he might

eventually disappear altogether and so regain his freedom” (162). In the eyes of the

immigration officers, his transformation is not fantastic. It is a simple case of a

foreigner showing his true self. Even though Chamcha has a British nationality, he is

considered as a foreigner by the officers, “you’re all the same. Can’t expect animals to
observe civilized standards” (159). The police officers further humiliate Chamcha by

forcing to consume his own excrement. These kinds of humiliations and identity

construction are common for the diasporic community.

Thus, the dominant white culture gives different constructed identities to the

coloured immigrant communities. Saladin’s brief internment at the mental institution

reveals to him that there are many members of the diasporic communities with new

constructed identities, like his own. There he saw a sight in which he-

“glimpses beings he could have never imagined, men and women who

are partially plants, or giant insects, or even on occasions, built partly

of bricks and stones, there are men with rhinoceros horns instead of

noses and women with neck as long as of any giraffe.(171)

Those people were all from immigrant community and were subject to the identity

formation. Overwhelmed by this sight, Chamcha asks one such creature among them

called manticore, half lion and half human, that how the creatures like them are

created. Despite the overwhelming evidence that identities are not constructed and

reconstructed at will, Chamcha does not fully grasp the institutional and political

boundaries of subjectivities between the natives and the diasporas, the self and the

other, nor does he fully understand the power of representation to produce the subject.

He comes to know about their identity formation after his conversation with the very

manticore:

“But how do they it?” Chamcha wanted to know. “They describe us”,

the other whispered solemnly. “That’s all. They have the power of

description, and we succumb to the pictures they

construct.”(168)
The ‘us’ in the above excerpt refers to the diasporic communities and ‘they’ refers to

the dominant British society which represents and satanifies them (the diaspora). The

society gives the diasporic communities identities of whatever it fancies, a satanic

goat, a manticore, a giant insect, plant rhinoceros-man and so on and they succumb to

the created pictures. The immigrants become what they don’t wish to be. That’s how

they lose their real identities and begin feeling identity crises. Saladin, like other

immigrant communities, faces the same problem.

Apart from the problems mentioned above, Saladin, as a disporic subject, feels

cultural disorientation too. He is in a culturally ambivalent situation. This situation

occurs when the diasporic subjects are encouraged by the colonial discourse to mimic

the dominant culture. They mimic the dominant culture to gain a superior social

position. They sometimes tend to have a reproachful feeling towards their culture of

origin. Saladin Chancha is a such character in the novel. He, being an anglophile, has

a reproachful attitude towards India, Indian culture, and Indian people. He nearly

hates everything Indian. He does so in a hope to get a full assimilation in the English

society, by detaching himself from his root. We can see a clue to this point from the

beginning of the novel. At the beginning of the novel, Chamcha detests his root. He is

a privileged immigrant with a recognized position and prestige; he rejects his root to

the extent that of shortening his name from Chamchawalla to a more acceptable (or

western) Chamcha. As Michael Gora states to Chamcha as, “an Indian-born

professional mimic, a man of a thousand voices, who in private life has remade

himself as an Englishman- accent, bowler hat, member of the Garrick club”(87). His

self effort to alter his cultural identity is meant to get himself fully adapted into the

British society. Later on when he is enjoying the hospitality in the Shandar Café, he

angrily retorts,” I am not tour kind, you are not my people. I’ve spent half of my life
trying to get away from the people like you” (129). Chamcha is not pleased when he

is linked to the Indian community living in England but when pressed by police to

reveal his true name, he is confronted with a terrible reality that destroys his idea of

his English self. The police say to him, "what kind of name is that foe an English

man?”(163).

As much Saladin wants his inclusion into the English society, it rejects him as

its constituent. He is not welcome into his host culture. As he is excluded from the

London society and the Indian cultural root is rejected by him, he belongs to neither

side. He is neither fully Indian, nor English. He is trapped between these two cultures

as every mimic-man is. This kind of culturally disillusioned state puts him in cultural

disorientation. Chamcha is oriented towards neither of the both cultures.

On the other hand, Gibreel Farista, as Saladin Chamcha, becomes captive of

Rosa Diamond. She is a white lady eight years of age. She tells him exotic stories of

when she was in Argentina with her husband Martin De la Cruz. Gibreel is made to

hear many stories of her life, without his (Gibreel’s) will. She paid no attention to his

words. She makes him listen to her boring past stories not caring about whether he

wants it or not. This can be linked to the instance of a man made captive.

In the novel Rosa Diamond stands for the old glorious colonial Great Britain,

who seems to Gibreel as a sorceress, from who, despite his will, cannot escape easily.

While he is with her, he is made to act on her will:

Gibreel Farista often wondered about his own behaviour. In that

dreamlike moment when he had been trapped by the eyes of the old

English woman it had seemed to him that his will was no longer his

own to command, that somebody else’s need was in charge.(143)

Gibreel loses his mental health. His strong personality and mental weakness form an

image of a man who seems not changed outwardly but due to cultural shift, his ideas

of self and reality has been profoundly affected, in many ways Gibreel seems to

remain ‘at bottom an un-translated man’(442). But his inability to live in a sane and

productive way develops from the shame of losing himself in an oppressive culture.

As long as Rosa Diamond lives, he remains in a state of captivity. She seems to be an

enchantress:

.... “What the hell am I doing here?” But stayed, held by unseen chains.

While she (Rosa Diamond), at every opportunity sang an old song,

in Spanish, he couldn’t understand a word. “Some sorcery there?”

(144)

Rosa has a hold him. She, like the old colonial England, colonizes him and develops

in him a self perception of a divine figure. As soon as Rosa dies, Gibreel becomes

physically free.

The central protagonists in the novel face similar situations in the London

society. Saladin Chamcha becomes satanified and Gibreel Farista, with his self-

perception of the archangel Gabriel, turns schizophrenic and kills himself at the end.

Whether as satanic goat or as archangel Gabriel, their identities are not real, but

constructed by the contemporary racist British society. All the problems they face are

due to their circumstantial, societal, and cultural shift and the hostile and oppressive

environment of their new social surroundings. Chamcha has an aversion for his own

Indian culture and heritage and mimics the British. Gibreel has a confused attitude

towards religion and culture. When he shifts to foreign culture he fails to bridge

between the two cultures and faces problems. Like this, Rushdie puts his protagonists

in a difficult diasporic condition as a background for his suggestion that no other

cultural option rather than hybridity can cure the cultural wound, that hybridity is the

perfect option for the disillusioned, disoriented diasporic states.

Call for hybridity

“How does newness enter the world? Of what fusions and conjoining is it

made? (8) With these questions the novel starts its discussion on hybridity. Salman

Rushdie valorizes the hybrid state of being as a creative and productive space. In

terms of cultural identity there is nothing absolutely new in the world: newness then

enters the world as a process of combination or as in Rushdie’s own words, when “a

bit of this and a bit of that meet and mingle, melange, hotchpotch.” (Imaginary

Homelands 394)

In his essay “In Good Faith”, published in his collection Imaginary

Homelands, Rushdie states that:

“The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, and

the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combination

of human being's cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices on

mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the pure. (The Imaginary

Homelands398)

This is Rushdie’s definition of hybrid; one he embraces in his novels. Although the

theme is present throughout his works, only The Satanic Verses can be read as a

master manual in which Rushdie inscribes his theories about the necessity and role of

hybridity in the post colonial and post modern societies.

The narrative structure of the novel is based on a series of events narrated in

various forms thus forming a wave of references: dreams and film like scenes that

dissolve any straightforward attempt to read the novel. The main characters are
Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farista, but by no means does the narrative focus

exclusively on these two characters. The text effectively distributes the narrative voice

and elements among several secondary characters that usurp the main storyline and

provide different reading and interpretations of the events. In more than one way these

characters work as mirror images of each other. Saladin and Gibreel are also one

character in a sense, the immigrants. And as we see later on, they are the faces of the

hybrid.

The novel contains more than one story line, dream sequences and film like

scenes at last to contribute a harmonious whole of the novel. It’s containing of ‘a bit

of this and a bit of that’ events intermingled together makes the narrative structure of

the novel hybrid itself.

Hybridity refers to more than one thing fused together producing a new one.

Hybridity does not take only the cultural form but many forms such as linguistic

form. From the beginning of the novel, we can see words fused together to form a

new one as in the following excerpt:

…but for whatever reason, the two men Gibreelsaladin

Faristachamcha; condemned to this endless but also ending

angeldevelish fall, did not become aware of the moment at which the

process of their transmutation began.

Mutation?

Yesssir……… (5)

In the above passage we see word combined together; yessir, angeldevilish,

Gribreelsaladin, Faristachamcha. The two men’s names and surnames are fused to

imply that the two men have one common personality, sharing the similar

circumstances. Saladin and Gibreel are merging melding their characteristics to

become Gibreelsaladin Faristachamcha, a new hybrid form. Their names are

conjoined just as their bodies are, when tumbling together through the sky, and their

personal attributes become dislodged and flow freely between themselves. In this

flagrantly allegorical passage, Rushdie is positing that the extreme immigration

experience that theses two undergo is forceful enough to change them fundamentally.

Putting their names together is a creative way to underscore this severe process of

transmutation.

The fall is ‘angeldevilish’, being a fall from grace and also at the same time

presenting them as a new concept. In the above passage, Rushdie sticks other words

together as well. ‘wayupthere’ expresses what ‘way up there’ cannot. This type of

word fusion can be seen throughout the text. This semantic uniqueness indicates the

novel’s valorization of novelty produced by hybridity.

Besides the hybrid word formation, Rushdie uses different hybrid metaphors.

In one moment when Saladin and Gibreel are falling from the sky embracing each

other, they pass through a scene full of such hybrid cloud forms:

While passing their way out of the white, came a succession of cloud

forms, ceaselessly metamorphosing, gods into bulls, women into

spiders, men into wolves. Hybrid cloud creatures pressed in upon

them, gigantic flowers with human breasts dangling from flesh stalks,

winged cats, centaurs and Chamcha in his semi consciousness was

seized by the notion that he, too, had acquired the quality of

cloudiness, becoming metamorphic, hybrid as if growing onto the

person whose grad nestled now between his legs and whose legs were

wrapped around his long, patrician neck. (6-7)

The above surrealistic images of different cloud forms seeming like god turning into

bulls, women into spiders, men into wolves, gigantic flowers with human breast,

winged cats are all used to indicate the hybrid forms. Meanwhile, Saladin feels

himself turning into a cloud form, perpetually changing its shape and

metamorphosing. Later in the novel, he actually gains a form like that; he turns into a

creature with features of goat and man, over all a seemingly satan. After this

metamorphosis from human to a satanic goat, and when captured by the police, his

metamorphosis is described as follows:

When they pulled pyjamas down in the windowless police van and he

saw the thick, tightly curled dark hair covering his thighs…his thighs

had grown uncommonly wide and powerful, as legs narrowed into

tough bony, almost fleshless calves, cloven hooves, phallus, greatly

enlarged and embarrassingly erect. (157)

When Saladin is sent briefly into a sanatorium, there he sees and meets

different creatures with hybrid forms. One of them is a ‘manticore’ which “had an

entirely human body, but its head was that of a ferocious tiger with three rows of

teeth” (167). Besides this manticore, there are several other hybrid creatures that

Saladin sees in the sanatorium and nearby ‘detenus’, a detention center.

There were many shadowy figures running through the glowing night,

and Chamcha glimpsed beings he could never have imagined, men and

women who were also partially plants, or giant insects, or even on

occasions, built partly of bricks or stone; there were men with

rhinoceros horns instead of noses and women with necks as long as

any giraffe.(171)
The creatures delineated in the above passages are not found in the real world. So,

they are imaginary creatures created for a symbolic motive. They are transformed

beings. Earlier, they were something and now they have metamorphosed into

something different. They are half human and half non-human, “a bit of this and a bit

of that”, hybrid forms. They are the images intended for the suggestion of hybridity.

Hybridity, as valorized by the novelist, allows a new understanding of perceived

binaries. Hybridity or the creation of a synthesized whole out of different elements, is

a state of expanded possibilities. In The Satanic Verses, just as language passes from

metaphorical rendering into metamorphic one, hybridity is also created out of

intercultural shift. Hybridity used in their context can be problematic to define. It is,

however, an interesting model for understanding the creation of newness resulting

from the experience of immigration and diaspora.

This novel contains the author’s own experiences about migration, diasporic

condition and hybridity. Rushdie is an expatriate from India, dwelling in the city of

London. From childhood, he experienced the condition of diaspora and the necessity

of hybridization of diaspora’s cultural behaviours. In an article, the post colonial

scholar Vijaya Mishra comments on Rushdie’s filiations towards diapora and

hybridity connecting the author’s pre and post fatwa life:

The cause of Rushdie’s second exile, of course, was a book about

migrancy, dispossession, hybridity and the absence of center in the

diasporic lives. To give his theme an intertext, a frame, a narrative

template, they were hosted on another moment in history when

newness entered the world. (66)

Hybridity is most often rooted in the multicultural societies. The Satanic Verses has a

culturally heterogeneous mixture of characters. Britain is the cultural contact zone in

the novel. Characters from different cultural background meet. Muslims like Saladin

Chamcha, Gibreel Farista, Muhammad Sufyan; Jews like Mimi Mamoulian, Alleluia

Cone, peoples from Hindu and Christian background meet and mingle. Peoples from

different national background like Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, polish, British,

Caribbean and so on live in the same society. In this kind of multicultural society,

there exists the borrowing and offering of each others cultural practices and therefore

cultural hybridity occurs.

One character Muhammad Sufyan, a former Bangladeshi schoolteacher and

his family can be taken as an example. Being a member of the Muslim origin, often

thought to be fundamentalist, Sufyan can be assumed as having a rigid religious

belief. Of course he is a devout Muslim but not a fundamentalist kind. He has a

secular view towards all religions practices. His religious secularism can be seen on

his reading of Hindu, Muslim, and Christian religious scriptures:

Hind as a wife of schoolteacher of Dhaka(Sufyan), ingratiating herself

with the school principal at the termly Staff Family Outings, struggling

with the novels of Bibhutibhusan Banerji and metaphysics of Tagore in

an attempt to be more worthy of a spouse who could quote effortlessly

from Rig-Veda as well as Quran-Sharif …..as well as the revelations of

St. John the Divine.(249)

Younger members of his family are also shedding their original rigid religious

patterns. Mishal Sufyan, his elder daughter, does not hesitate to borrow exclamation

from Christian mannerism. One instance can be this- “Mishal Sufyan lost patience,

‘Jesus, mom.’, ‘Jesus?’(252)

Another character Gibreel Farista, though being Muslim, has transcended his

religious limits. Although being a member of a closed and rigid culture, he leaps out
of that narrow barrier of Muslim religiosity. He begins his filmy career by playing the

roles of Hindu deities in the popular movie genre called ‘theologicals’. The following

extract will clear this statement:

Gibreel had spent the greater part of his unique career incarnating the

countless deities of the subcontinent in the popular genre movies

known as the theologicals. It was part of the magic of his great persona

that he succeeded in crossing religious boundaries without giving

offence. Blue-skinned as Krishna he danced, flute in hand, amongst the

beauteous gopis and their udder-heavy cows; with unturned palms,

serene, he mediated (as Gautama) upon humanities suffering beneath a

studio-rickety bodhi-tree. (16)

Being a Muslim from largely Hindu society, he must have assimilated to the dominant

Hindu culture. He has cultivated within himself a part of Hinduness. So, he does not

hesitate to play the roles of Hindu gods:

That was his first hit Ganapati Baba, and suddenly he was a superstar,

but only with the trunk and the year on. After six movies playing the

elephant headed god he was permitted to remove the thick pendulous

grey mask and put on instead a long hairy tail, in order to play

Hanuman the monkey king … from the Ramayana. (24)

Apart from these role-playings of Hindu deities, Gibreel goes further to eat the

forbidden thing. He was once a devout Muslim. But when he fees that his Allah does

not support him in crisis, he becomes angry and revolts against Him:

Ya Allah, just be there, damn it, just be. But he felt nothing, nothing,

nothing and then one day he found that he no longer needed there to be

anything to feel. On that day of metamorphosis the illness changed and

 recovery began. And to prove to himself the non-existence of God, he

now stood in the dinning hall of the city’s most famous hotel, with pigs

falling out of his face. (30)

Gibreel Farista is obviously a hybrid character. He begins his hybrid existence from

role playing of Hindu deities and later on crossing the rigid religious boundary. When

he ate pig, then he began to see wonderful nightmarish serial dreams in which he saw

himself as archangel Gabriel. In the chapters of the novel describing his dream

sequences, Rushdie questions the authenticity of the foundation of Islamic religion

and the unquestionability of the revelations of prophet Muhammad. On this concern

Vijay Mishra, a well known post colonial scholar says:

In this retelling, Indian Islam (always contaminated by the

autochthonous gods, dervishes, the figures of the ascetic, and other

borrowings from Hinduism) is seen as a hybrid, contradictory

phenomenon that conjures strange dreams about the founding text and

prophet of that religion. Thus the central theme of the novel how

‘newness enters the world’ gets written in the hybrid discourse. (65)

Thus, a multicultural and diasporic society is bound to be culturally hybrid. The

novel, The Satanic Verses, is set in such society to show the inevitability of this form

of the cultural practice.

The novel's call for cultural hybridity can be even clearer when we analyze the

character of Saladin Chamcha. He has a reproachful attitude towards his cultural root.

He mimics the English culture. When rejected by the host culture, and getting

culturally disoriented, he gets satanified and suffers identity crisis. Then only he starts

to realize the importance of embracing his native culture. After his realization he

gains his real self. At the end of the novel, Saladin returns to Bombay, his place of
origin. His return to Bombay can be taken as his assimilation to his root, shedding

some of his anglophilia. His realization that he should come at ease with his root takes

place in Muhammad Sufyan’s Shandar café.

When Saladin escapes from the sanatorium, he receives shelter from the

Indian restaurant, the Shandaar. It is fascinating to see how Chamcha, a proud

Englishman in his own eyes, has to escape from his own fellow-citizens and can only

find refuge with the people he rejects (Indians). Even there his physical

metamorphosis does not stop. He keeps on growing so much that his figure transcends

the world of physical reality and starts invading the world of dreams. This is

essentially how “newness enters the world”. The hybrid consciously or unconsciously,

starts absorbing characteristics from the surrounding cultures, growing to such an

extent that no single culture can contain the cross-references that inhabits this new

being. This rupture not only habilitates the hybrid but also enables him/ her to inhabit

the time/ space zone that is created; similar to what Homi K. Bhabha called the third

space.

While at Shandaar one day, Chamcha, for the first time realizes the need of

reconciling with his past life. He remembers his ex-girlfriend Zeenat Vakil (Zeeny)

living in Bombay, who frequently used to urge him to give up his excessive

anglophilia and return to Bombay, his home city and to reconcile himself to his Indian

root. At that moment in the Shandaar café, while hiding at the attic, and when he was

still growing gradually, he remembers his old friend Zeeny and her ideas about

hybridity and newness produced by it:

He thought of Zeeny Vakil on that other planet, Bombay, at the far rim

of the galaxy: Zeeny, eclecticism, hybridity. The optimism of those

ideas. The certainty on which they rested: of will, of choice! But Zeeny
 mine, life just happens to you as a result of your condition. Not choice

but-at-best process and total change. Newness (288)

Zeeny, although a minor character, is an important character who believes in the

process of hybridity to bring newness in life and world. She has enormous faith in the

ability to coalesce disparate thing and ideas:

She was an art critic whose book on confining myth of authenticity,

that folklorist straightjacket which she sought to replace by an ethic

historical validated eclecticism, for was not the entire national culture

based on the principle of borrowing-best-ad-leave-the-rest? – had

created a predictable stink, especially because of its title. She had

called it ‘The Only Good Indian’.

Zeeny’s ability to think creatively about inter-culturality and to take risks inspired

Saladin. In particular, she is able to exteriorize notion of difference. Chamcha’s

remembrance of Zeeny hints his beginning of making peace with his past.

One of the most challenging moments for the establishment of Chamcha’s

new identity occurs when he finds out about the success of Gibreel in England. A

powerful hatred consumes him. He finds an outlet for releasing his anger in the

destruction of the wax figures in the hot wax club, a local discotheque. These effigies

of English political leaders are burnt anyway by the Indian Pinkwalla during disco

nights. As Frantz Fanon asserted in The Wretched of the Earth, violence is sometimes

an effective method used to release the frustration of the colonized mind but the type

of violence presented in the Rushdie’s text does not exactly fit the form. Chamcha’s

hatred is repressed and only released against wax figures, not only against the political

effigies mentioned before but surprisingly against the figures of important immigrant

leaders too. The result of this melting in one solid mass formed out of the remains of
the different set of bodies. Once again this incident is an appropriate metaphor for the

hybrid condition.

Hybridity in The Satanic Verses is the major thematic element and the

possibility and necessity of hybridity is frequently emphasized. Saladin and Gibreel

are only two of the many characters who examine their intercultural life in this way.

Saladin in particular, struggles over the conflicting elements of his past. While

watching television one day, he sees multiple references to hybrid forms; one in

particular is striking, allowing Saladin to find reprieve:

On Gardener’s world he was shown how to achieve something called

the chimeran graft… and although his inattention caused him to miss

the names of the two trees which has been bred into one, the tree itself

made him sit up and take notice. There it palpably was, a chimera with

roots, firmly planted in and growing vigorously out of a piece of earth;

a tree, he thought, capable of taking the metaphoric place of the one his

father had chopped down in a distant garden in another, incompatible

world. If such a tree were possible, then so was he; he, too, could

cohere, send down roots, survive. (406)

The tree is a successful combination of disparate forms, of which Saladin himself is

incapable of achieving. The tree provides Saladin with an image of hope for creating a

successful life out of his difficult past. This is not the first time that he recognizes

hybridity as a viable life pattern- his friend Zeeny Vakil, as mentioned earlier, places

great importance on this concept. When he first realizes the effectiveness of her way

of living, he rejoices: “Zeeny, eclecticism, hybridity. The optimism of those ideas!”

(288). It is not until the end of the novel, however, that Saladin is able to create peace

within himself.
 After the Hot Wax club episode, Saladin’s bestial transformation stops and he

returns into human form. But a different metamorphosis ensues. He starts re-

evaluating his cultural context. He relinquishes his rejection of his cultural

background and his love of the imperial center. He reaches ground zero. Or the

narrator explains: “he would have to construct everything from scratch would have to

invent the ground beneath his feet before he could take a step” (132). This is the

station of the hybrid, this new cultural being builds an innovative time/ space

continuum because after the transformation he or she can no longer inhabit a

traditional discourse. He or she sets out to rebuilt his/ her self and along the way,

write a new history quite removed from the precious models of history. Now that he

knows who he in, Chamcha can make peace with his past and face his future.

In order to lay to rest the ghost of his traumatic history, Chamcha must make

peace with his dying father. Chamcha returns to Bombay at the end of the book. At

first he believes he is returning to all the ‘ old, rejected selves’ that his dying father

seems to embody- to a ‘world solid and real’, where he ‘ can stop acting at last’

(534).he decides to return ‘home’ although the whole way he questions where the

‘home’ is supposed to be. “What strange meanings words were taking on? Only a few

days ago the idea of back home had rung false” (514). He also finds the sounds that

his words were supposed to have and that he meticulously hid away while living in

England. Among the words that savours again the sounds of his original unabridged

name leaves him a confusing yet satisfying sensation: “began to find the sounds of his

full un-Englished name (Salahuddin Chamchawalla) pleasing.”

In Bombay, Salahuddin Chamchawalla ends his quarrelsome relationship with

his dying father. When he reaches, his father is on deathbed, suffering from cancer. In

the past, they both were the opposite poles on terms of cultural ideologies. Chamcha
rejected Indian ness to embrace and mimic Englishness while his father had anti-

mimicry thoughts. Chamcha, tired of mimicking other’s culture, sheds tensions with

his father and embraces him at last. This following passage elaborates Chamcha’s

reunion with his father Changez, which points his reunion with is cultural root:

Now, as Saladin quietly entered the room, the effect of those open grey

eyes (Changez’s) staring blindly at the ceiling was positively

unnerving. For a moment, Saladin thought he was too late. Then the

old man on the bed emitted a series of small coughs, turned his head,

and extended an uncertain arm. Saladin Chamcha went towards hiss

father and bowed his head beneath the old man’s caressing palm. (523)

Chamcha’s reunion with his father Changez marks his (Chamcha’s) reunion with his

root. The end of his angry relationship with Changez connotes his re-embracing his

culture of origin. While caretaking of his ill father one night, Saladin Chamcha, now

Salahuddin Chamchawalla again, reconciles with his father:

[A]t the least of appropriate of moments, (he did) an appeal for

reconciliation. “Abba, I came back because I didn’t want there to be

trouble between us any more.” Changez continued to shuffle along; his

grip on his son’s arm tightened very slightly. “That does not matter ay

more”, he said, “it’s forgotten, whatever it was.” (526)

Besides his reconciliation with and the death of his father, he meets his old friend,

Zeenat Vakil, who offers the death blow to his English-self to reconstruct in him the

Indian-self. Zeeny says to Salahuddin Chamchawalla:

If you are serious about shaking your foreignness…then don’t fall into

some kind of rootless limbo instead you should really try and make an

adult acquaintance with this place, this time try and embrace this city
 (Bombay), the actual existing place. Make its faults your own. Become

its creature. (541)

As Zeeny suggests, Salahuddin really embraces the city. He soon becomes quickly

embroiled in a politics of contemporary Indian communalism, sectarian tension, class

struggle, and sexual difference as fragmenting and violent as any in Thatcher’s

Britain. By indulging himself into the argument of Indian politics, he “makes his

place’s fault his own, becomes his place’s creature”, at last. He at last roots himself on

his own culture after the long run of mimicry of foreignness. By reconciling his past

and present life, he makes peace with his life and lives a hybrid existence.

The hybrid state is, as Zeeny Vakil states, not a ‘rootless limbo’ and the hybrid

does not lack roots. It is the other way around. The hybrid selects his roots. In order to

do so, he or she must make peace with his or her origins and select what he or she

wants to use as materials for his/ her new being. Chamcha’s final turn around is exact

opposite of Gibreel who, even when he flirts with his angelic powers could not find

enough elements to construct a solid suicide-proof personality; he commits suicide at

last.

Two men, Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farista, fall from the London sky

together. One of them, Gibreel Farista, flirts with his personal history and confuses his

path along the endless forest of symbols, acting out on order to achieve acceptance.

The other, Saladin Chamcha, rejects his roots but through a series of painful

experiences is able to come through as a different version of his old self. Both

represent stations of hybrid, because both choose similar ways to try to adapt but they

are caught in the machine and in the end only one of them is able to see the light.

Chamchawalla’s last thoughts define the closure of The Satanic Verses: “if the

old refuses to die, the new could not be born” (547). This statement right at the end of
the novel connects with the first “to be born again, first you have to die” (3). Saladin

died and was reborn in Salahuddin, the hybrid citizen, the symbol of cultural

hybridity.
 IV. conclusion

Salman Rushdie, in The Satanic Verses, appeals for cultural hybridity in the post-

colonial diasporic society. His novel suggests the hybridized form of culture for the

diasporic communities which, as the novel suggests, can minimize the pathos faced by

them in the difficult diasporic condition.

The Satanic Verses is a post colonial fiction about the condition of diaspora

people, struggling to protect their identity in foreign land because the racial

discrimination and the xenophobia offered by the local culture and authority that takes

them as alien and do not accept them as the host society's constituents. By delineating

the events and traumatic experiences experienced by Indian diasporas residing in

London, the novel calls for the adoption of hybridized form of culture, which can

minimize the distance between the native and host culture and ultimately helps to

cope with diasporic difficulties like identity crisis and cultural disillusionment.

Post-colonial thinkers, like Bhabha, take the ‘in-between’ hybrid space as a

productive phenomenon. Hybridity is created through multiculturalism and cultural

translation. Beyond cultural identities, hybridity is formed by discontinuous

translation and cultural negotiation. Thus, former colonial societies tend to translate

their traditional identities into the former imperial forms. The former colonial

identities residing in the imperial centers find themselves in a culturally ambivalent

position. This ambivalence leads them to mimic the host culture which often

culminates into culturally hybrid identities. Jonathan Rtherford says, “ hybridity to me

is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge” (211).

Rushdie, influenced by Bhabha’s notion of hybridity and its creative qualities,

privileges cultural hybridity, in The Satanic Verses. He puts his protagonists in

difficult diasporic condition and shows the inevitability of their cultural translation.

The diasporic subjects have to face different problems which are related to their

culture and identity. Their cultural shift and the hostility and xenophobic treatment

offered by the host culture put them into cultural disillusionment and ambivalence;

they tend to or are forced to assimilate to the dominant culture.

In The Satanic Verses, the protagonists, Indian diasporas living in England

undergo such haphazard situation. As soon as they step onto the English soil after

their plane explosion , their pathos begin. The main protagonist Saladin Chamcha gets

his physical metamorphosis begun and becomes victim of police brutality. Despite

being English national, he is accused of being illegal immigrant. His mutation into a

satanic goat is nothing but the perception of him as ‘other’ in the eyes of the British

authority.

This instance in Saladin’s life of being victim of dominant British racism and

xenophobia is applicable to the whole diasporic communities. They frequently are

subject to this kind of mal-treatment and identity formation solely for the reason of

their being different, no matter how much they want to assimilate themselves to the

dominant culture. The diasporic communities mimic the dominant culture in the hope

of getting assimilation to the society. This mimicry ultimately leads them to become

plural identities, hybrid beings, as The Satanic Verses suggests. The Satanic Verses

suggests that neither total conformity to the foreign culture or indigeneity is the

proper cultural option in today’s global world but the ‘in-between’ space is the

appropriate option.

The Satanic Verses delineates hybrid condition by the depiction of

multicultural societies. Culture obviously religion and language. People from different

religious and cultural background meet and mingle. The use of different language
such as English, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Spanish etc makes the novel linguistically

hybrid. Many hybrid metaphors are used in the novel. The main characters like

Saladin Chamcha are the symbols of hybridity.

The Satanic Verses celebrates the hybrid condition as a creative space for the

diasporic people. This form of culture is a tool to overcome the disordered, divided

personalities of the protagonists in the novel. Saladin Chamcha suffers different

difficult condition such as identity crisis. But later on when he inter-mingles his past

and present selves, his situation improves and he becomes able to make peace with his

life. On the other hand, Geebril suffers a series of metamorphosis and kills himself at

last. His sorry state is the result of his inability to transcend the gap between cultures

and inhabit this space as hybrid.

Hybridity is the process of negotiation between cultural polarities. Saladin has

a reproachful attitude towards his root, in the earlier portion of the novel. But his

father denounces his conformist nature. There is a quarrelsome relationship between

these two, regarding Saladin’s anglophile nature. But at the end of the novel, Saladin

negotiates with his dying father. This instance denotes the negotiation between two

cultural extremities. When Saladin negotiated with his father, he negotiates with his

cultural root, shading few of his anglophilia. Now, he comes at the ‘in-between’ space

of two opposite cultural poles- conformity and rejection, and becomes the symbol of

cultural hybridity, which the novel under discussion calls for.

All the above discussion proves that The Satanic Verses is a novel about diasporic

people and their cultural behaviour. It shows the culturally disoriented, uprooted,

disillusioned condition of diasporic subjects and urges them to negotiate between the

cultural extremities. This negotiation makes them the hybrid beings which can cure
their cultural wounds that they got in the foreign land. This way it becomes clear that

The Satanic Verses really calls for cultural hybridity.

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