Vol. 7 No. 1 Mowery • 49 fiction, which is why it falls apart, as bad novels do” (Bush 11). He further engages with these feelings about partition and Pakistan in Midnight’s Children and Shame before he published Haroun (Dingwaney 346). Shame specifically describes Pakistan as “the failure of the dreaming mind” and as a place “insufficiently imagined” (353). Thus, Rushdie’s public dissent towards the separation that led to Pakistan’s creation informs the reading of Haroun as a commentary on partition. Evidence of the Partition in Haroun Rushdie’s text and König’s analysis of it suggest that Gup and Chup shared some similarity in the past, but the Eggheads’ intervention in Kahani’s rotation led to the stark separation at the beginning of the book. König believes that “words in the phonetic minimal pair Gup and Chup sound very alike to English-speaking readers,” which “underlines the essential similarity of the two cultures and points to the fact that the perceived differences between worlds they signify are only arbitrary” (König 55). Rushdie also hints that the Ocean’s originmay lie in Chup (87), possibly implying that the Chupwalas used to value the Ocean as the Guppees do and that they did not seek to destroy what the Guppees loved until the rotation of Kahani led to a firm separation between the two. Butt the Hoopoe, who accompanies Haroun throughout his journey, explains how the Eggheads in Gup stopped Kahani’s rotation and created two spaces on the moon, and he describes that “‘the Land of Gup is bathed in Endless Sunshine, while over in Chup it’s always the middle of the night’” (80). Butt also tells Haroun that between Gup and Chup “‘lies the Twilight Strip, in which…the Guppees long ago constructed an unbreakable (and also invisible) Wall of Force’” (80). Although Gup and Chup now exist as separate lands, König’s analysis and the origin of the Ocean demonstrate that they may not have been as hostile towards one another in the past. If Gup and Chup were combined at one point or established around the same time, their connection would relate to the former union of India and Pakistan, emphasizing the opportunity to view the book through a historical lens. The geographical positioning and the religious differences of India and Pakistan relate to Gup and Chup and support describing Rushdie’s fictionalized countries as an analogy. Since Pakistan lies northwest of India, the countries then hold geographical similarity to the placement of Gup in the North and Chup in the South of Kahani (Rushdie 75). König believes the North and South comparison seems to point to the colonized and colonizer relationship (57), but the location also relates to India and Pakistan’s relationship with one another. Later in the book, Rushdie highlights the religious separation. Rashid explains that “the Land of Chup has fallen under the power of the ‘Mystery of Bezaban’, a Cult of Dumbness or Muteness, whose followers swear vows of lifelong silence to show their devotion” (101). Some of these followers have radically dedicated themselves to this cult so much so that they “work
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