Language, Voice, and Power

Language, Voice, and Power in The Satanic Verses is not simply a theme of eloquence or persuasion: it concerns who gets heard, whose voice is believed, and how speech can make identities and political realities seem true. The novel sets the craft of vocal performance beside the return of an accent Saladin Chamcha had tried to erase, a revolutionary message spoken through a chosen intermediary, and telephone voices used to undermine trust. Across these scenes, voice is at once bodily, technical, commercial, and political.

Saladin Chamcha: voice as a made identity

Saladin has deliberately fashioned both his public face and his voice. His voice, with languid vowels set against abruptly clipped consonants, was shaped to suit an identity he came to regard as his own; he had even forgotten his earlier appearance. That constructed self is unsettled after his first visit home in fifteen years. On his flight back to London, the Bombay lilt he had worked to unmake returns before his face does. When a flight attendant offers him a drink, his reply slips into the vocabulary and cadence of his past. He reacts to the change as a humiliating regression and fears that returning home has undone the distance he tried to put between himself and his origins.

The episode makes accent more than a surface marker. Saladin hears it as evidence that his self-invention may not be secure, while the narrative places the voice’s return alongside the destabilization of his carefully fashioned appearance. His question of whether he is still himself becomes inseparable from the sound through which others recognize him. The scene also prepares a recurring tension: a voice can be expertly controlled in performance yet escape the speaker’s control in ordinary life.

Performance, broadcasting, and commercial speech

In Britain, Saladin’s talent has made him the Man of a Thousand Voices and a Voice. He supplies voices for advertising, making carpets and food products speak, impersonates public figures and nationalities on radio, and once performs all thirty-seven roles in a radio play without listeners identifying that one actor has played them all. Alongside Mimi Mamoulian, his female equivalent, he commands a large share of Britain’s voiceover work. His profession demonstrates how a voice can be detached from a visible body and assigned to almost any product or persona; vocal range is both an artistic skill and a commercial resource.

The apparent freedom of that range has limits. Hal Valance tells Saladin that his services are no longer wanted on The Aliens Show because his presence makes the programme seem too racial. Valance presents this as a market calculation: audience surveys supposedly show that ethnic viewers prefer mainstream entertainment, and the show is too large an idea to be confined by its racial dimension. The decision exposes the unequal terms behind commercial representation. Saladin can perform many voices, but the industry still categorizes his own presence as a problem to be managed.

The contradiction is sharpened by Valance’s account of advertising practices. He describes campaigns altered to remove a Black child, a singer perceived as Black, or Black airline employees, and says he had refused to grant special treatment to a Black actor wearing a racial-equality badge. Saladin replies that he has never felt he belonged to a race. His response helps explain why Valance once included him on a favored list and why he later became Maxim Alien, but it does not protect him from racialized judgments. Black radicals call him Brown Uncle Tom because of his private-school education and closeness to Valance. His voice career therefore places him between access to commercial power and criticism of the compromises that accompany it.

The Imam’s message and the authority of a borrowed voice

In the Imam’s revolutionary campaign, voice carries authority across distance and between bodies. Bilal’s singing travels by ham radio from Kensington into the dreamed-of Desh, where it emerges as the Imam’s thunderous speech. The Imam is presented as physically still and apparently silent, yet his message reaches listeners through Bilal. The apparent paradox is resolved by mediation: the Imam’s political presence depends on another person’s audible voice.

The Imam chooses Bilal because of the beauty and authority of his voice, which had previously reached the top of the hit parade twelve times. Bilal initially resists the suggestion that his sound represents the power of America: he identifies himself with an oppressed people, not with the imperial force the Imam opposes. The Imam answers that growing up within power teaches its habits—its timbre, posture, and manner of relating to others—and that oppression does not prevent such habits from being absorbed. The exchange treats voice as socially formed, not politically innocent. A speaker’s sound can carry traces of institutions and power relations even when the speaker contests the interpretation placed upon it.

Through Bilal, the Imam calls for a revolution against the Empress Ayesha and against history itself. His message rejects progress, science, and rights as forms of historical deception, and contrasts the timelessness of God with the movement of time. It urges listeners to burn books and trust the Book, and to turn from written papers toward the Word. The force of these claims depends not only on their content but on their delivery: Bilal’s trained, confident voice makes the Imam’s distant authority audible. The scene also makes that authority dependent on a human instrument, revealing the channel through which power speaks even as the message denies the value of ordinary historical knowledge.

Voice, race, and the struggle to be believed

When the transformed Saladin is discovered at Rosa Diamond’s house, police and immigration officers interpret him through appearance and suspicion rather than accepting his explanation. He says that he is a British resident and that the Bostan has exploded, but, without a passport or other identifying document, he cannot establish the identity he claims. His attempt to explain is met with ridicule. Even his appeal to television—where he is known as Maxim Alien—fails to make his voice credible to the officers.

Later, Saladin gives his full name, Salahuddin Chamchawala, identifies himself professionally as Saladin Chamcha, and lists memberships and a car registration number that he asks the authorities to verify. One officer instead treats his name and altered body as proof that he cannot be English. Saladin turns the scrutiny back on the immigration officers, pointing out that their own voices do not sound Anglo-Saxon. The exchange exposes the selective way accent and name are used to test belonging: the officers’ voices do not disqualify them, while Saladin’s claimed identity is doubted despite his professional and civic credentials.

Language as action—and as a point of fracture

The novel also links language to the capacity to imagine and act. Jumpy Joshi’s reflections on Hanif Johnson begin with resentment about Hanif’s command of political and social vocabularies. Jumpy recognizes that his jealousy concerns not only Hanif’s fluency in public language but also his confidence in the language of desire. He contrasts that command with his own struggle to shape words into a form of freedom and sees speech as an act that can give a thought force in the world. Language is not merely a possession or a polished style here; it is a means of making claims that others may hear and answer.

Saladin later uses his vocal skill for a very different purpose. Over three and a half weeks, he makes a series of calls to Gibreel Farishta and Alleluia Cone, selecting no more than thirty-nine voices from his repertoire. The callers are numerous enough to seem like different people, and the calls are timed so that police cannot trace them. By withholding the voice he considers most potent until later, Saladin turns performance into a sustained deception. The calls gradually weaken Gibreel’s hold on reality and estrange him from Alleluia. His mastery of voices, once a source of professional success, becomes a way to exert power in private and to bring about the Unforgivable Thing.

A fragment associated with Gibreel’s sickness gives voice another, more unstable form. Its speaker cannot be certain of the account and describes part of himself as standing outside while the sickness takes hold; he identifies himself with an avenging angel. The passage makes speech sound divided against its own speaker: a claim of supernatural authority emerges alongside uncertainty and helplessness. Set beside Saladin’s deliberate impersonations and Bilal’s mediated political address, the fragment shows how unstable the relation between voice and identity can become. Speech may construct a public self, transmit someone else’s authority, or expose a self that can no longer speak from a single, secure position.