Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children : A Postcolonial Epic of Identity and Nationhood in India (2024)

Unraveling the Interplay of Postcolonial Perspectives and Socio-Political Realities in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL FOR INNOVATIVE RESEARCH IN MULTIDISCIPLINARY FIELD (IJIRMF), 2023

This research paper explores Salman Rushdie’s novel, Midnight’s Children, as a significant work of postcolonial literature that delves into the intricate relationship between postcolonial perspectives and socio- political realities in India. Employing a postcolonial lens, the paper aims to unravel the complex web of colonial legacies, national identity formation, and the socio-political landscape of post-independent India. It provides an overview of the novel’s historical context, set against the backdrop of India’s struggle for independence, partition, communal tensions, and the subsequent challenges of nation-building. Through an in-depth analysis of the characters’ experiences, the paper examines themes such as hybridity, identity negotiation, and the impact of colonialism on individual and collective consciousness. Furthermore, it investigates the portrayal of political leaders and their ideologies, highlighting their influence on the country’s socio-political trajectory. The paper also explores the role of magical realism as a narrative technique, employed to challenge dominant colonial discourses, reimagine historical narratives, and offer alternative perspectives on postcolonial experiences and socio-political realities. By critically examining Rushdie’s novel, this paper contributes to the broader discourse on postcolonial literature, shedding light on the intricate connection between personal narratives, collective memory, and the formation of a postcolonial society.

ANALYSING THE POST COLONIAL ASPECTS OF MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN BY SALMAN RUSHDIE Sanjana Parisaboina

Salman Rushdie, a prominent Indian writer through his magnum opus Midnight's Children, recounts the modern colonial history that culminates at the protagonist Saleem's birth, when India has gained independence from its British masters. Midnight's Children is a perfect example of a postcolonial novel that integrates magical realism elements into it to dig out the truth that has been swept under the carpet due to selfish motives. The paper attempts to examine the deployment of the book's postcolonial aspects as one cannot help but notice the dominant theme of intermingling of the public and personal histories between India and the three generations of Saleem Sinai's family. This paper attempts to analyse the characteristics of a postcolonial novel and also find out why the authors of the postcolonial era deployed such metanarratives.

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: Re-visiting India’s Past

This paper explores the ways in which Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980) re-visits the political history of post independence from the British Empire in 1947 including significant moments such as the Partition of Pakistan India and Indira Ghandi’s state of Emergency. What is significant in the literary text is Rushdie’s ability to fictionalise history, fantasize his depiction of historical reality and combine history with politics through the portrayal of the individual, Saleem Sinai the narrator, in relation to the larger historical context that fashions the Indian society. Midnight’s Children creates a history of India that is extremely heterogeneous and diverse, replete with stories, images and ideas- a multifarious hybrid history. By re-visiting the past of India, and re-writing one’s own history, one which allows for the infinite variety of experiences, cultures and perspectives that make up our world, Rushdie’s novel clears up a place in the historical record for those the suppressed and the silent voices of history. Keywords: History, Rewriting the past, Hybridity, India.

Contextualizing postcolonial problematics of identity and self: Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children'

2022

The overwhelming questions pertaining to the quest for identity as well as self, quite intricate and polemical by nature, always occupy a prime spot in the postcolonial history of the South and Southeast Asian countries such as India and Pakistan, because the politico-historical transition from colonial to postcolonial situations in these countries had to find itself thrown into such a whirlwind of crises where the anxiety associated with the identity of a newly liberated nation spawned additional anxieties about more spheres of identity at the level of community, group and individual. In case of India, we see that in its fractured state of the postcolonial history, the nation exhibited a kind of fluidity in respect of the questions of identity and self, where the individual self found itself lost in a severe historical turmoil. In our paper, we will try to have a keen look at how Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children', an effort to accommodate the 'other' perspectives of the history of Independent India, could raise the complicated issues of identity and self in the postcolonial context. In this novel, the narrator and protagonist Saleem Sinai identifies himself with the identity of a newly emerging nation, and in this process, the history of the individual self appears parallel to the history of the nation's self. The identity that Saleem bears, along with the individual history that his own identity stands for, is in fact not acquired by him through the normal process of his birth, but through some cunning design of a woman, who, in spite of her overt insignificance, plays a decisive role in shaping the individual history of two individuals-Saleem and Shiva-who consequently have to exchange their histories with each other quite unknowingly. With his metaphorical presence in the novel as well as the history of the nation, Saleem's disintegration leads the readers to a porous history of the nation as well as the questions of porous identity. In this context, what we cannot overlook is the East-West dichotomy, which makes the questions of identity and self particularly for the South and Southeast Asian countries more problematic and polemical.

Nation, History and Memory: A Critical Study of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

2019

The concept of nation is one of the prominent themes of post-colonial fictions. The post-colonial writers try to resist the western construction of the ‘other’ by redefining nation in their fictions. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie is considered as a classical national allegory that deals with the events of India, before and after India’s independence from the colonial rule. Rushdie, here, longs for the India of pre-colonial era. But, in the Post-colonial era, a nation is not a homogenous entity but fragmented by diverse culture, religion and traditions. The nation is an abstract concept which exists in the minds of its members. Therefore , the history of a nation, which is produced by memory, is also not united. There are multiple histories of a nation. In the novel, Rushdie deconstructs the notion of a nation as a homogenous entity and also debunks the great narratives of the national history. The aim of this paper is to study how Rushdie tries to recapture and restore the p...

In Search of Self: the Pangs of Identity in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Though the contemporary world is being looked at as a post-racial, post-national, and post-colonial world, there are moments from the history of the Indian subcontinent that are coming back to haunt us. Memory is no more an individual's psychic visit to the past; rather, it is from a collective memory that the nation is made out of a geographical space. In India, as in many other countries of the world, the rise of the fascist, fundamentalist, and rightist forces are creating major upheavals in the contemporary society. On the contrary, the advocates of globalization and multiculturalism are hailing the contemporary world as the best human history has witnessed yet. In such a bi-polar world, the " self " is suffering from a continuous pang of identity or the lack of it. Identities, like maps of the day, are becoming more and more elastic and lucid. How does such a perspective impact the literature of the age, especially literature that deals with a collective trauma from the past and is yet burdened with revealing the contemporary self's dilemma of belonging? Salman Rushdie, brought up with the memories of a fractured nation, deals with this search of the self in his fictional art. This paper is an attempt to look at Rushdie's fiction in general and his masterpiece Midnight's Children in particular to analyze the pangs of identity in a post-partition scenario. Towards the said purpose, this paper would make use of a postcolonial, postmodernist approach. As the all-pervading postcolonial narrator of the text, Saleem the " swallower of lives " (MNC 9) warns us that " Midnight's children can be made to represent many things, according to your point of view: " (MNC 200). The phrase " midnight's children " in the aforementioned sentence refers both to the children of midnight Salim is talking about as well as the author's conscious concern with the text itself. Drawing from the postmodern tradition of " disjunction, simultaneity, irrationalism, anti-illusionism and self-reflexiveness " (Woods 67) Rushdie concocts a heady mix of history and narrative technique to bring on the table a plethora of issues concerning the postcolonial identity of the Indian born after partition. By challenging the conservative comprehension of post-British India and simultaneously mocking at the utopian dreams of absolute freedom, the author creates an India in the text that resonates with alternative versions of history and narrative. As Saleem, confused with the intent of his presence in a particularly fragile point in the history of the nation, would ask himself in the self-reflexive pattern of a postmodern narrator:

A Transnational Approach to Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children

International Journal of Social, Political and Economic Research

Colonialism and post-colonialism have led to the development of transnationalism that is the interconnectivity between people and the economic and social significance of boundaries among nation states. When transnational approach is applied to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), it allows researchers to analyse how transnationalism impacts on gender, class, culture and race both in host and home countries. The traditional cultural heritage of India and British imperialism’s impact on Indian society are told through dual identities of the narrator Saleem Sinai who has double parents. Saleem’s grandfather, Aadam Aziz, a Western-trained physician, scorns his wife Naseem who could not notice the difference between mercurochrome and blood stains. As a traditional Indian wife Naseem’s response to the immoral sexual desires of her husband who has adopted the Western culture is a reaction to British cultural environment in India. Saleem’s mother Amina’s cultural conflict caused by ...

A Postcolonial Analysis of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas

2021

Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British writer whose works combining magical realism with historical fiction, is primarily concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, with much of his fiction being set on the Indian subcontinent. On the other hand, V.S Naipaul is a Trinidadian writer of Indian descent known for his pessimistic novels set in developing countries. Postcolonial literature is a body of literary writings that reacts to the discourse of colonization. Post-colonial literature often involves writings that deal with issues of de-colonization or the political and cultural independence of people formerly subjugated to colonial rule. The present study attempts to apply a postcolonial approach to V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Both these novels draw the reader’s attention to various traits of Postcolonial literature such as appropriation of colonial languages, col...

Writing History, Narrating Nation: A Postcolonial Reading Of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

This paper intends to examine the interface between history and fiction

THE PAST IS THE PRESENT IN SALMAN RUSHDIE’S MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN

The present paper entitled ‘The Past is the Present in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children’ is an attempt to revisit the past through Salman Rushdie’s fictional autobiography and to link it with the present upheavals in the Indian subcontinent. The analysis has been made with the help of some of the very important post-colonial key terms. Salman’s Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is celebrated as the best post-colonial material by many post-colonial critics. The present paper tries to apply some of the parameters of post-colonial theory on the selected text in the light of the scars of the past that are not completely healed in the present. The selected post-colonial parameters are orientalism, subaltern, nationalism, hybridity, mimicry, neocolonialism and globalism. Some other terms can also be applicable to the selected text but due to words limit the author has decided to go with the selected terms. The paper ends on an optimistic note that the past has taught us not to divide in the name of class, caste, religion and race. Salman Rushdie tries to give voice to the voiceless. He has made a successful attempt to bring the margins to the center and to raise their voices on international fronts. He has given dignity to the migrants who are living as foreigners by setting his own example of not to compromise with one’s thoughts and principles. The past or the history has always played a crucial role of a hard task master who tries to warn us of the pitfalls in the present. Let us learn from the past experiences and make the present a happy living.