Aja’ib, Ghar’aib, Tilismi Qisse, and Salman Rushdie’s Tilismi Realism

Salman Rushdie’s writing has been appropriated in both postmodernism and postcolonialism and largely viewed as being influenced by the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Márquez. Despite Rushdie’s self-acknowledged debt to “oriental” storytelling traditions of Dastan-e-Amir Hamza, Dastane-Hatim Tai, Panchatantra, Kathasaritsagar, and Arabian Nights, his “Eastern literary ancestors” have not been examined in depth. Strongly opposing the perception of Rushdie as a “Third World cosmopolitan” or a “metropolitan intellectual,” Feroza Jussawalla views him as a product of “a post-Mughal Urdu high culture” and suggests that it is “in looking at the form of the dastan that one finally understands the origins of Rushdie’s fantastic and what he calls ‘fantabulous’” (1996). This essay focuses on tilism, a key element in qissa or dastan, to locate Rushdie’s magic realism within the ontological category of aja’ib wa ghar’ib and traces a continuity between Rushdie’s postcolonial English fiction, Urdu translations of dastans, and a new genre of tilismi fiction inaugurated by Rajab Ali Beg Suroor in the first original Urdu romance Fasana-e-Ajaib (1831) that reached its culmination in Devakinandan Khatri’s Hindi–Urdu fiction Chandrakanta (1888). It contests the widely held view of Rushdie’s fiction as magic realist by proposing that his mix of the real and the marvelous be viewed as “tilismi realism.”