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

International audienceSimilarly to works by other Indian writers water as symbol plays a crucial role in a number of Salman Rushdie's novels or its parts, the imagery being rooted in the Hindu world view. Protagonists who find themselves immersed in water bodies, be it e.g. in Midnight's Children or The Satanic Verses, are not the same people when they come out (if they do). This is true also for both Rushdie's works for children, Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Luka and the Fire of Life. In the former the author introduces different worlds, worlds that are interconnected, nevertheless, each with a reality of its own. The child protagonist Haroun travels from the world of apparent everyday reality (represented by the planet Earth) to a Moon world called Kahani. The journey to and on the sea waters that cover a large majority of Kahani becomes, as symbolizing a healing force of the imaginary through story and dream, a representation of an entirely different dimension of reality. The paper purports to present an analysis of this literary material as departing from the Hindu world view, and of the ways in which Rushdie works with and develops different aspects of the representations of the sea