Saleem and Saladin, Buddha and Goat-man

I mentioned, I think, in an earlier posting that "every epic needs its trip to the underworld," and somehow it seems as if there could be an interesting line of inquiry (final paper?) to be found in comparing the metamorphoses of Saleem Sinai and Saladin Chamcha. Each seems to suffer through periods of (forced) submission to the agents of purity (which maybe somehow reminds us of Bhabha's notion of the "pedagogical" in his "Dissemination" essay?), and thus create significant narrative subsections that link these two novels in very interesting ways. Saleem, moved to Pakistan, realizes that “in the land of the pure, purity became our ideal” (355). He understands the change in his life by virtue of a comparison between two cities: Karachi, in which he is “beset … by the knowledge that the name of the faith upon which the city stood meant ‘submission,’” is set against “the highly-spiced noncomformity of Bombay” (353). In a way, I wonder if Bombay finds a counterpart of sorts in pre-Islamic (even early-Islamic) Jahilia in The Satanic Verses, described as it is (at least initially) as a nexus for nomadicism and multiplicity, a space marked by the shiftiness of sand, "the very stuff of inconstancy" (96). In any event, as Saleem tells us, “I never forgave Karachi for not being Bombay” (352). Just as a more open-minded, tolerant, pluralist version of Islam is closed down in The Satanic Verses by the emphasis on “an all-rounder in an age of specialist statues” (SV 101), Saleem laments the divisions in the Midnight’s Children Conference and, subsequently, “the impossibility of a third principle” (MC 348). Before long, as Indo-Pakistani relations deteriorate, as Jamila Singer turns ever increasingly towards the service of “blinding devoutness” (359), as the “dizzying early days before categorization” (362) become a more distant dream, as Saleem suffers in his “mosque-shadowed house” (378), and, finally, after he’s “spittoon-brained” (397) and “stripped of past present memory time shame and love” (392), Saleem is lost within the Buddha. Now a citizen of Pakistan, he “learned the arts of submission” (403) and joins the cause of tracking down “the fleeing enemies of national unity” (411).

Purity, national unity, submission, categorization: these read like keywords, like hot links that connect Midnight’s Children with The Satanic Verses. So does, mercifully, the word “anger,” because it’s anger, right, that allows the Buddha to return to being Saleem (“But then I was angry…. I had begun once again, to feel” (MC 441)), and that reduces the horns and abjectness of the deviled Saladin, who is “humanized … by the fearsome concentration of his hate” (SV 304); it’s righteous anger that brings both back out of invisibility and into an engaged relationship with the problems and questions that face them. Maybe there’s even a strange kind of shared narrative role played by Deshmukh, the “vender of notions” (428) and the diverse inhabitants of the Shaandaar Café. Deshmukh enables the killing fields of Bangladesh to become, as the Shaandaar does as well, a kind of therapeutic zone, a zone of resuscitation. Maybe the logic of each story required that these characters needed to be purged and remade before they could be connected to potential change (change which I guess is a little less ambiguous in the case of Chamcha and the later novel).