Demons and devils

Demons and devils in The Satanic Verses belong to a world in which supernatural beings can seem as matter-of-fact as everyday objects, yet their names also become weapons for describing people feared as alien or changed. A shattered glass leaves an impression on the young Gibreel Farishta; decades later, his father’s letters cast Saladin Chamcha as devil-possessed, while Gibreel’s illness makes the boundary between an external supernatural agency and a divided self difficult to settle.

A childhood encounter with the unseen

Babasaheb Mhatre, who had taken the orphaned Gibreel Farishta into his care, entertained him with talk of spirits and rebirth. Mhatre recounted an episode from his amateur experiments with spirit communication: when he asked a spirit whether God existed, the glass stopped moving; when he asked whether the Devil existed, it shook, leapt into the air, and broke into pieces. Mhatre presented the incident as a warning against meddling with what he did not understand. The story’s force for his young listener lay less in proof than in the lasting possibility it opened.

Gibreel Farishta consequently grew up accepting angels and demons, among other supernatural beings, as ordinary features of existence. In the heated air, the visible world could seem like only a surface, with most of reality hidden beneath it. He imagined that special spectacles might let him see that concealed world, and regretted that he had never seen a ghost. The demonic belongs here to a larger unseen order that he trusts is real, even when his own sight cannot confirm it.

A father’s language of possession

When Saladin Chamcha announced that he meant to settle in London and become an actor, Changez Chamchawala answered with accusations that a devil had entered him and turned him into a demon. The insult fused filial disappointment with supernatural explanation: Saladin’s chosen life appeared to his father not simply mistaken, but evidence that his son had been taken over and made unrecognizable.

The image recurred in Changez Chamchawala’s later letters. He described Saladin as a man split between a body held by the devil and a soul kept safe in a walnut tree, awaiting his return. The letters’ handwriting gradually lost its former ornamental confidence, and eventually stopped; Saladin nevertheless heard that his father’s supernatural preoccupations had deepened until he became a recluse. The language of possession thus registered not only the father’s fear of losing his son, but the distance between them: Changez Chamchawala interpreted estrangement through demons, while Saladin found his father’s increasingly religious life difficult to accept.

The demonic body and public credibility

After Saladin Chamcha’s arrest and beating, he woke in hospital coughing green slime from his lungs. His physiotherapist, Hyacinth Phillips, insisted that she did not judge by appearances and treated him with brisk, practical care. When Stein later appeared to him, he referred to Saladin’s horns and hooves in warning him that he would not look like a credible witness. The exchange makes the demonic image bodily and consequential: what marks Saladin as transformed also undermines his standing when he might complain about his treatment. Stein then disappears from Saladin’s new life, and the scene shifts back to Hyacinth Phillips, leaving the encounter entangled with Saladin’s uncertain perception.

Possession, illness, and divided identity

Gibreel Farishta’s later mental illness gives the language of possession another, more intimate form. After Sisodia returned him to Allie Cone’s care, Gibreel faced his illness without pretending it was not real. At Maudsley Hospital he received specialist medication and treatment, while Allie tried to help him recover. He feared that the self he called his possessed, angelic self might take control again, and described it as another person rather than himself.

For a time, the distinction seemed to help. Gibreel’s serial dreams continued, and he spoke Arabic verses in his sleep, but he and his doctors thought he was rebuilding a boundary between dreaming and waking life. The apparent separation, however, also preserved and strengthened the division he was trying to suppress. The demonic and angelic vocabularies do not provide a simple answer to what is happening: they are part of Gibreel’s own account of an alarming change, while the narrative also names his illness and shows its treatment.

That uncertainty carries into Saladin Chamcha’s later contact with Gibreel. Saladin does not know that Gibreel is under close medical supervision for paranoid schizophrenia, takes daily medication, and has been kept away from film associates at Allie Cone’s insistence. Allie tells Saladin that Gibreel recently stole car keys and drove the wrong way up a motorway exit, shouting about damnation and threatening to summon Azraeel. His words make a supernatural enemy and avenger part of the crisis as he experiences it; the medical context, meanwhile, makes clear that others are also trying to understand and contain a dangerous recurrence of illness. Across these episodes, demons and devils remain more than a fixed species of creature: they are figures through which the novel tests how invisible forces, bodily change, fear, and illness can be named without making them identical.