The Satanic Verses

by

Salman Rushdie

Saladin Chamcha Character Analysis

Saladin Chamcha is an Indian expatriate and voice actor who rejects his cultural heritage in favor of assimilating into British society. Born Salahuddin Chamchawala, Saladin has a troubled relationship with his father, Changez, and grows up feeling overshadowed by his father’s authority and traditional values. This conflict drives Saladin to adopt a new identity in England, where he changes his name, accent, and demeanor to fit into his ideal of Britishness, distancing himself from his roots. Saladin’s defining characteristics include his deep-seated insecurity, resentment, and desire for acceptance. These traits become more prominent after he miraculously survives the plane explosion which begins the novel—only to find himself transformed into a devil-like creature with horns and hooves. This metamorphosis symbolizes his inner conflict and feelings of alienation, both from his adopted country, which treats him as an outsider, and from his native culture, which he has rejected. His transformation leads to a series of humiliations, such as being detained as an illegal immigrant and enduring racial abuse. As the novel progresses, Saladin grapples with his identity and sense of belonging. Eventually, he reconciles with his father and accepts his heritage, allowing him to return to human form.

Saladin Chamcha Quotes in The Satanic Verses

The The Satanic Verses quotes below are all either spoken by Saladin Chamcha or refer to Saladin Chamcha. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
The Fallibility of Prophets Theme Icon
).
Part 1, Chapter 1 Quotes

“Fly,” Chamcha shrieked at Gibreel. “Start flying, now.” And added, without knowing its source, the second command: “And sing.”

How does newness come into the world? How is it born?

Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?

How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine?

Is birth always a fall?

Do angels have wings? Can men fly?

Related Characters: Saladin Chamcha (speaker), Gibreel Farishta
Page Number: 8-9
Explanation and Analysis:

These were the first words Gibreel Farishta said when he awoke on the snowbound English beach with the improbability of a starfish by his ear: “Born again, Spoono, you and me. Happy birthday, mister; happy birthday to you.”

Whereupon Saladin Chamcha coughed, spluttered, opened his eyes, and, as befitted a new-born babe, burst into foolish tears.

Related Characters: Gibreel Farishta (speaker), Saladin Chamcha
Page Number: 10
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 2 Quotes

We are creatures of air, Our roots in dreams And clouds, reborn In flight. Goodbye. The enigmatic note discovered by the police in Gibreel Farishta’s penthouse, located on the top floor of the Everest Vilas skyscraper on Malabar Hill, the highest home in the highest building on the highest ground in the city, one of those double-vista apartments from which you could look this way across the evening necklace of Marine Drive or that way out to Scandal Point and the sea, permitted the newspaper headlines to prolong their cacophonies.

Related Characters: Gibreel Farishta, Saladin Chamcha
Page Number: 13-14
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 3 Quotes

Once upon a time—it was and it was not so, as the old stories used to say, it happened and it never did—maybe, then, or maybe not, a ten-year-old boy from Scandal Point in Bombay found a wallet lying in the Street outside his home […] when he saw the black leather billfold lying at his feet, the nausea vanished, and he bent down excitedly and grabbed,—opened,—and found, to his delight, that it was full of cash,—and not merely rupees, but real money, negotiable on black markets and international exchanges, — pounds! Pounds sterling, from Proper London in the fabled country of Vilayet across the black water and far away.

Related Characters: Saladin Chamcha
Page Number: 35-36
Explanation and Analysis:

The promise of the magic lamp infected Master Salahuddin with the notion that one day his troubles would end and his innermost desires would be gratified, and all he had to do was wait it out; but then there was the incident of the wallet, when the magic of a rainbow had worked for him, not for his father but for him, and Changez Chamchawala had stolen the crock of gold. After that the son became convinced that his father would smother all his hopes unless he got away, and from that moment he became desperate to leave, to escape, to place oceans between the great man and himself.

Related Characters: Saladin Chamcha, Changez Chamchawala
Related Symbols: The Magic Lamp
Page Number: 37
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3, Chapter 1 Quotes

One man’s breath was sweetened, while another’s, by an equal and opposite mystery, was soured. What did they expect? Falling like that out of the sky: did they imagine there would be no sideeffects? Higher Powers had taken an interest, it should have been obvious to them both, and such Powers (I am, of course, speaking of myself) have a mischievous, almost a wanton attitude to tumbling flies. And another thing, let’s be clear: great falls change people. You think they fell a long way? In the matter of tumbles, I yield pride of place to no personage, whether mortal or im—. From clouds to ashes, down the chimney you might say, from heavenlight to hellfire. . . under the stress of a long plunge, I was saying, mutations are to be expected, not all of them random. Unnatural selections. Not much of a price to pay for survival, for being reborn, for becoming new, and at their age at that.

Related Characters: Gibreel Farishta, Saladin Chamcha
Related Symbols: Bad Breath
Page Number: 137
Explanation and Analysis:

“Gibreel,” said Saladin Chamcha, “help.”

But Gibreel’s eye had been caught by Rosa Diamond. He looked at her, and could not look away. Then he nodded, and went back upstairs. No attempt was made to stop him.

When Chamcha reached the Black Maria, he saw the traitor, Gibreel Farishta, looking down at him from the little balcony outside Rosa’s bedroom, and there wasn’t any light shining around the bastard’s head.

Related Characters: Saladin Chamcha (speaker), Gibreel Farishta, Rosa Diamond
Page Number: 146
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3, Chapter 4 Quotes

Chamcha’s room struck the sleepless intruder as contrived, and therefore sad: the caricature of an actor’s room full of signed photographs of colleagues, handbills, framed programmes, production stills, citations, awards, volumes of movie--star memoirs, a room bought off the peg, by the yard, an imitation of life, a mask’s mask. Novelty items on every surface: ashtrays in the shape of pianos, china pierrots peeping out from behind a shelf of books. And everywhere, on the walls, in the movie posters, in the glow of the lamp borne by bronze Eros, in the mirror shaped like a heart, oozing up through the blood-red carpet, dripping from the ceiling, Saladin’s need for love. In the theatre everybody gets kissed and everybody is darling. The actor’s life offers, on a daily basis, the simulacrum of love; a mask can be satisfied, or at least consoled, by the echo of what it seeks.

Related Characters: Saladin Chamcha, Jumpy Joshi
Page Number: 180
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 5, Chapter 1 Quotes

Sufyan, taking his cue from his younger daughter, went up to where Chamcha, huddled in his blanket, was drinking enormous quantities of Hind’s unrivalled chicken yakhni, squatted down, and placed an arm around the still-shivering unfortunate. “Best place for you is here,” he said, speaking as if to a simpleton or small child. “Where else would you go to heal your disfigurements and recover your normal health? Where else but here, with us, among your own people, your own kind?”

Only when Saladin Chamcha was alone in the attic room at the very end of his strength did he answer Sufyan’s rhetorical question. “I’m not your kind,” he said distinctly into the night. “You’re not my people. I’ve spent half my life trying to get away from you.”

Related Characters: Saladin Chamcha (speaker), Mr. Sufyan (speaker)
Page Number: 261-262
Explanation and Analysis:

I am the incarnation of evil, he thought. He had to face it. However it had happened, it could not be denied. I am no longer myself, or not only. I am the embodiment of wrong, of what-we-hate, of sin.

Why? Why me?

What evil had he done -- what vile thing could he, would he do?

For what was he—he couldn’t avoid the notion—being punished? And, come to that, by whom? (I held my tongue.)

Related Characters: Saladin Chamcha (speaker)
Page Number: 265
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 7, Chapter 1 Quotes

Culture, city, wife; and a fourth and final love, of which he had spoken to nobody: the love of a dream. In the old days the dream had recurred about once a month; a simple dream, set in a city park, along an avenue of mature elms, whose overarching branches turned the avenue into a green tunnel into which the sky and the sunlight were dripping, here and there, through the perfect imperfections in the canopy of leaves. In this sylvan secrecy, Saladin saw himself, accompanied by a small boy of about five, whom he was teaching to ride a bicycle. The boy, wobbling alarmingly at first, made heroic efforts to gain and maintain his balance, with the ferocity of one who wishes his father to be proud of him. The dream-Chamcha ran along behind his imagined son, holding the bike upright by gripping the parcel-rack over the rear wheel.

Related Characters: Saladin Chamcha
Page Number: 414
Explanation and Analysis:

Chamcha recommended caution. Recalling Mishal Sufyan’s loathing for Simba, he said: “The fellow has—has he not?—a record of violence towards women . . .” Jumpy turned his palms outward. “In his personal life,” he owned, “the guy’s frankly a piece of shit. But that doesn’t mean he disembowels senior citizens; you don’t have to be an angel to be innocent. Unless, of course, you’re black.” Chamcha let this pass. “The point is, this isn’t personal, it’s political,” Jumpy emphasized, adding, as he got up to leave, “Um, there’s a public meeting about it tomorrow. Pamela and I have to go; please, I mean if you’d like, if you’d be interested, that is, come along if you want.”

Related Characters: Saladin Chamcha (speaker), Jumpy Joshi (speaker), Uhuru Simba, Mishal Sufyan
Page Number: 426
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 7, Chapter 2 Quotes

The moment Saladin Chamcha got close enough to Allie Cone to be transfixed, and somewhat chilled, by her eyes, he felt his reborn animosity towards Gibreel extending itself to her, with her degree-zero go-to-hell look, her air of being privy to some great, secret mystery of the universe; also, her quality of what he would afterwards think of as wilderness, a hard, sparse thing, antisocial, self-contained, an essence. Why did it annoy him so much? Why, before she’d even opened her mouth, had he characterized her as part of the enemy?

Related Characters: Gibreel Farishta, Saladin Chamcha, Alleluia Cone
Page Number: 442
Explanation and Analysis:

“‘Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan,’” Chamcha replied. “It means, ‘My darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty.’ Nabokov.”

“Him again,” Gibreel complained. “What bloody language?”

“He made it up. It’s what Kinbote’s Zemblan nurse tells him as a child. In Pale Fire.”

Perndirstan,” Farishta repeated. "Sounds like a country: Hell, maybe. I give up, anyway. How are you supposed to read a man who writes in a made-up lingo of his own?”

Related Characters: Gibreel Farishta (speaker), Saladin Chamcha (speaker)
Page Number: 456
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 9 Quotes

He stood at the window of his childhood and looked out at the Arabian Sea. The moon was almost full; moonlight, stretching from the rocks of Scandal Point out to the far horizon, created the illusion of a silver pathway, like a parting in the water’s shining hair, like a road to miraculous lands. He shook his head; could no longer believe in fairy-tales. Childhood was over, and the view from this window was no more than an old and sentimental echo. To the devil with it! Let the bulldozers come. If the old refused to die, the new could not be born.

“Come along,” Zeenat Vakil’s voice said at his shoulder. It seemed that in spite of all his wrong-doing, weakness, guilt—in spite of his humanity—he was getting another chance. There was no accounting for one’s good fortune, that was plain. There it simply was, taking his elbow in its hand. “My place,” Zeeny offered. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“I’m coming,” he answered her, and turned away from the view.

Related Characters: Saladin Chamcha (speaker), Zeeny Vakil (speaker), Gibreel Farishta
Page Number: 561
Explanation and Analysis:
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Saladin Chamcha Quotes in The Satanic Verses

The The Satanic Verses quotes below are all either spoken by Saladin Chamcha or refer to Saladin Chamcha. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
The Fallibility of Prophets Theme Icon
).
Part 1, Chapter 1 Quotes

“Fly,” Chamcha shrieked at Gibreel. “Start flying, now.” And added, without knowing its source, the second command: “And sing.”

How does newness come into the world? How is it born?

Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?

How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine?

Is birth always a fall?

Do angels have wings? Can men fly?

Related Characters: Saladin Chamcha (speaker), Gibreel Farishta
Page Number: 8-9
Explanation and Analysis:

These were the first words Gibreel Farishta said when he awoke on the snowbound English beach with the improbability of a starfish by his ear: “Born again, Spoono, you and me. Happy birthday, mister; happy birthday to you.”

Whereupon Saladin Chamcha coughed, spluttered, opened his eyes, and, as befitted a new-born babe, burst into foolish tears.

Related Characters: Gibreel Farishta (speaker), Saladin Chamcha
Page Number: 10
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 2 Quotes

We are creatures of air, Our roots in dreams And clouds, reborn In flight. Goodbye. The enigmatic note discovered by the police in Gibreel Farishta’s penthouse, located on the top floor of the Everest Vilas skyscraper on Malabar Hill, the highest home in the highest building on the highest ground in the city, one of those double-vista apartments from which you could look this way across the evening necklace of Marine Drive or that way out to Scandal Point and the sea, permitted the newspaper headlines to prolong their cacophonies.

Related Characters: Gibreel Farishta, Saladin Chamcha
Page Number: 13-14
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 3 Quotes

Once upon a time—it was and it was not so, as the old stories used to say, it happened and it never did—maybe, then, or maybe not, a ten-year-old boy from Scandal Point in Bombay found a wallet lying in the Street outside his home […] when he saw the black leather billfold lying at his feet, the nausea vanished, and he bent down excitedly and grabbed,—opened,—and found, to his delight, that it was full of cash,—and not merely rupees, but real money, negotiable on black markets and international exchanges, — pounds! Pounds sterling, from Proper London in the fabled country of Vilayet across the black water and far away.

Related Characters: Saladin Chamcha
Page Number: 35-36
Explanation and Analysis:

The promise of the magic lamp infected Master Salahuddin with the notion that one day his troubles would end and his innermost desires would be gratified, and all he had to do was wait it out; but then there was the incident of the wallet, when the magic of a rainbow had worked for him, not for his father but for him, and Changez Chamchawala had stolen the crock of gold. After that the son became convinced that his father would smother all his hopes unless he got away, and from that moment he became desperate to leave, to escape, to place oceans between the great man and himself.

Related Characters: Saladin Chamcha, Changez Chamchawala
Related Symbols: The Magic Lamp
Page Number: 37
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3, Chapter 1 Quotes

One man’s breath was sweetened, while another’s, by an equal and opposite mystery, was soured. What did they expect? Falling like that out of the sky: did they imagine there would be no sideeffects? Higher Powers had taken an interest, it should have been obvious to them both, and such Powers (I am, of course, speaking of myself) have a mischievous, almost a wanton attitude to tumbling flies. And another thing, let’s be clear: great falls change people. You think they fell a long way? In the matter of tumbles, I yield pride of place to no personage, whether mortal or im—. From clouds to ashes, down the chimney you might say, from heavenlight to hellfire. . . under the stress of a long plunge, I was saying, mutations are to be expected, not all of them random. Unnatural selections. Not much of a price to pay for survival, for being reborn, for becoming new, and at their age at that.

Related Characters: Gibreel Farishta, Saladin Chamcha
Related Symbols: Bad Breath
Page Number: 137
Explanation and Analysis:

“Gibreel,” said Saladin Chamcha, “help.”

But Gibreel’s eye had been caught by Rosa Diamond. He looked at her, and could not look away. Then he nodded, and went back upstairs. No attempt was made to stop him.

When Chamcha reached the Black Maria, he saw the traitor, Gibreel Farishta, looking down at him from the little balcony outside Rosa’s bedroom, and there wasn’t any light shining around the bastard’s head.

Related Characters: Saladin Chamcha (speaker), Gibreel Farishta, Rosa Diamond
Page Number: 146
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3, Chapter 4 Quotes

Chamcha’s room struck the sleepless intruder as contrived, and therefore sad: the caricature of an actor’s room full of signed photographs of colleagues, handbills, framed programmes, production stills, citations, awards, volumes of movie--star memoirs, a room bought off the peg, by the yard, an imitation of life, a mask’s mask. Novelty items on every surface: ashtrays in the shape of pianos, china pierrots peeping out from behind a shelf of books. And everywhere, on the walls, in the movie posters, in the glow of the lamp borne by bronze Eros, in the mirror shaped like a heart, oozing up through the blood-red carpet, dripping from the ceiling, Saladin’s need for love. In the theatre everybody gets kissed and everybody is darling. The actor’s life offers, on a daily basis, the simulacrum of love; a mask can be satisfied, or at least consoled, by the echo of what it seeks.

Related Characters: Saladin Chamcha, Jumpy Joshi
Page Number: 180
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 5, Chapter 1 Quotes

Sufyan, taking his cue from his younger daughter, went up to where Chamcha, huddled in his blanket, was drinking enormous quantities of Hind’s unrivalled chicken yakhni, squatted down, and placed an arm around the still-shivering unfortunate. “Best place for you is here,” he said, speaking as if to a simpleton or small child. “Where else would you go to heal your disfigurements and recover your normal health? Where else but here, with us, among your own people, your own kind?”

Only when Saladin Chamcha was alone in the attic room at the very end of his strength did he answer Sufyan’s rhetorical question. “I’m not your kind,” he said distinctly into the night. “You’re not my people. I’ve spent half my life trying to get away from you.”

Related Characters: Saladin Chamcha (speaker), Mr. Sufyan (speaker)
Page Number: 261-262
Explanation and Analysis:

I am the incarnation of evil, he thought. He had to face it. However it had happened, it could not be denied. I am no longer myself, or not only. I am the embodiment of wrong, of what-we-hate, of sin.

Why? Why me?

What evil had he done -- what vile thing could he, would he do?

For what was he—he couldn’t avoid the notion—being punished? And, come to that, by whom? (I held my tongue.)

Related Characters: Saladin Chamcha (speaker)
Page Number: 265
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 7, Chapter 1 Quotes

Culture, city, wife; and a fourth and final love, of which he had spoken to nobody: the love of a dream. In the old days the dream had recurred about once a month; a simple dream, set in a city park, along an avenue of mature elms, whose overarching branches turned the avenue into a green tunnel into which the sky and the sunlight were dripping, here and there, through the perfect imperfections in the canopy of leaves. In this sylvan secrecy, Saladin saw himself, accompanied by a small boy of about five, whom he was teaching to ride a bicycle. The boy, wobbling alarmingly at first, made heroic efforts to gain and maintain his balance, with the ferocity of one who wishes his father to be proud of him. The dream-Chamcha ran along behind his imagined son, holding the bike upright by gripping the parcel-rack over the rear wheel.

Related Characters: Saladin Chamcha
Page Number: 414
Explanation and Analysis:

Chamcha recommended caution. Recalling Mishal Sufyan’s loathing for Simba, he said: “The fellow has—has he not?—a record of violence towards women . . .” Jumpy turned his palms outward. “In his personal life,” he owned, “the guy’s frankly a piece of shit. But that doesn’t mean he disembowels senior citizens; you don’t have to be an angel to be innocent. Unless, of course, you’re black.” Chamcha let this pass. “The point is, this isn’t personal, it’s political,” Jumpy emphasized, adding, as he got up to leave, “Um, there’s a public meeting about it tomorrow. Pamela and I have to go; please, I mean if you’d like, if you’d be interested, that is, come along if you want.”

Related Characters: Saladin Chamcha (speaker), Jumpy Joshi (speaker), Uhuru Simba, Mishal Sufyan
Page Number: 426
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 7, Chapter 2 Quotes

The moment Saladin Chamcha got close enough to Allie Cone to be transfixed, and somewhat chilled, by her eyes, he felt his reborn animosity towards Gibreel extending itself to her, with her degree-zero go-to-hell look, her air of being privy to some great, secret mystery of the universe; also, her quality of what he would afterwards think of as wilderness, a hard, sparse thing, antisocial, self-contained, an essence. Why did it annoy him so much? Why, before she’d even opened her mouth, had he characterized her as part of the enemy?

Related Characters: Gibreel Farishta, Saladin Chamcha, Alleluia Cone
Page Number: 442
Explanation and Analysis:

“‘Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan,’” Chamcha replied. “It means, ‘My darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty.’ Nabokov.”

“Him again,” Gibreel complained. “What bloody language?”

“He made it up. It’s what Kinbote’s Zemblan nurse tells him as a child. In Pale Fire.”

Perndirstan,” Farishta repeated. "Sounds like a country: Hell, maybe. I give up, anyway. How are you supposed to read a man who writes in a made-up lingo of his own?”

Related Characters: Gibreel Farishta (speaker), Saladin Chamcha (speaker)
Page Number: 456
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 9 Quotes

He stood at the window of his childhood and looked out at the Arabian Sea. The moon was almost full; moonlight, stretching from the rocks of Scandal Point out to the far horizon, created the illusion of a silver pathway, like a parting in the water’s shining hair, like a road to miraculous lands. He shook his head; could no longer believe in fairy-tales. Childhood was over, and the view from this window was no more than an old and sentimental echo. To the devil with it! Let the bulldozers come. If the old refused to die, the new could not be born.

“Come along,” Zeenat Vakil’s voice said at his shoulder. It seemed that in spite of all his wrong-doing, weakness, guilt—in spite of his humanity—he was getting another chance. There was no accounting for one’s good fortune, that was plain. There it simply was, taking his elbow in its hand. “My place,” Zeeny offered. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“I’m coming,” he answered her, and turned away from the view.

Related Characters: Saladin Chamcha (speaker), Zeeny Vakil (speaker), Gibreel Farishta
Page Number: 561
Explanation and Analysis: