This multicultural tenet of postcolonialism connects to the self-translation that Haroun and Rashid seek to create out of their landlessness. While both of the fictional ethnicities struggle with one another for their own cultural persistence, Haroun’s resolution of the conflict establishes that both cultures have the right to recognition and legitimacy.

Postcolonialism “claims the right of all people to the same material and cultural well-being” (Young 2). But, the equal and fair recognition of both Chup and Gup society in Haroun’s solution to the conflict is postcolonial multiculturalism. This is the very stasis that Rushdie establishes in the beginning of the novel, in that the Guppees initially manipulate Kahani so that the land of Gup is always in the light and the land of Chup in darkness, and in that Khattam Shud as the character in power over the land of Chup wishes to eliminate the Guppees (Rushdie 80). This is one of the reasons we still have this struggle’” (Grass in Teverson 449). This side only wants this reality, and the other only their own reality. This equal recognition contends with the idea that “‘we don’t accept that there are many realities. In the novel, Haroun’s resolution for the conflict is that both societies have “‘sensible days and nights (176).’” This metaphoric use of days and nights in Rushdie’s novel, intends to give equal recognition to both Chup and Gup society. This ethnic conflict composes the main conflict of the plot, and it represents a conflict between cultures that Rushdie’s novel resolves in favor of postcolonial multiculturalism.

On Kahani, there are two ethnic groups, the Guppees and the Chupwalas, who are in conflict (Rushdie 75). Rushdie’s multiculturalism in Haroun provides the setting of the novel. The underlying conflict of the novel is the reclamation of Rashid’s identity and the postcolonial conclusion that Haroun has about his father’s identity and his own, which reflects Rushdie’s own reconciliation of his identity from a New Historicism perspective. Their sense of identity within society reflects on the past but interprets that past from the perspective generated from their current condition. Haroun and the Sea of Stories portrays the postcolonial concept of landlessness, which is resolved for Haroun and his father, Rashid, through the deployment of postcolonial multiculturalism and self-translation, in that Rashid and Haroun define their own place in society. Rushdie and Reclaimed Identity: A Postcolonial Analysis of “Haroun and the Sea of Stories”

Haroun and the sea