Post on 01-Mar-2023
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The Nehru Dynasty and Biopolitical Control: Riots, Sterilization and Slum Clearances in
Midnight’s Children
Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first post-Independence Prime Minister, wrote of the Mughal
Emperor Akbar that ‘Akbar became the great representative of the old Indian ideal of a
synthesis of differing elements and their fusion into a common nationality[...]so long as his
successors kept in line with this policy and with the genius of the nation, their empire
endured.’1 Here, he associates national stability and worth with a pluralist acceptance of
diversity, an idea which permeates Salman Rushdie’s politics and fiction, as demonstrated
vividly by his 1981 novel Midnight’s Children. In this text, Rushdie contrasts Nehru’s tenure
as India’s leader (though by no means leaves its shortcomings unexamined) with that of his
more autocratic daughter Indira Gandhi. He also posits his protagonist Saleem Sinai, and
the diverse collective of magical children that Saleem finds himself leading, as an (albeit
imperfect) symbol of a desirable pluralist India, and suggests by the children’s persecution
by Indira that true pluralism and tolerance may be inimical with the Indian nation-state.
However, despite the Indian state’s failure to actualize a creed of equality and diversity,
and its eventual turn towards oppression, Rushdie cannot help but inscribe within the novel
the possibility of hope for an inclusive, pluralistic Indian nation, while critiquing the related
but distinct formulation of the nation-state, which often engages in realpolitik and worse.
He is aware that the state is not the only way of imagining the nation. Thus, there are not
simply two approaches (Nehru’s and Indira’s) to ‘the idea of India’ but three. Rushdie may
provide a temporal sweep of Indian history, charting the decline from Nehru to Indira, but
uses Saleem’s own non-spatial, telepathic conception of the Indian nation – his collective
that ‘meets’ inside his head – as a counterpart to both. However, the ‘Midnight Children’s
Conference’ (MC, p. 331), or MCC, despite its ostensible status as a body with no physical
centre or regions, falls prey to communalism, hierarchy and exclusion, thus showing that
diverse communities inevitably fail to cohere in an egalitarian manner. Yet this is not the
primary function of Saleem’s group within the novel. Rushdie is more concerned with
asserting hybridity, pluralism and diversity than with critiquing these ideals and as such, the
overriding effect of the children’s multiplicity serves to denounce the anti-pluralist politics
of Indira Gandhi. The idea that Saleem’s conception of the nation is utopian, and as such ‘by
[its] very essence fundamentally unreal’,2 while present, is subsumed beneath Rushdie’s
assertion that this conception is preferable to the nation-state as headed by Indira Gandhi,
and even by Nehru. Rushdie’s attachment to his pluralist idea of India, in the end, will not
allow him to give up on the idea that its constituent elements may coalesce into a sum total
of accepted difference under the umbrella of ‘India’, even in the face of governmental
oppression, and the failure of Saleem’s conference to adequately provide a forum for the
representation of the sum of the nation’s diversity. 1 Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1969), p. 145. 2 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’, Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural
Theory, ed. Neil Leach (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 350-6, at p. 352.
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This paper will examine key events in India’s history as represented in Midnight’s Children,
namely, the language riots in Bombay in the late 1950s, and the autocratic and extra-
juridical State of Emergency, instituted by Indira Gandhi between 1975 and 1977 in the face
of widespread opposition to her rule. It will also use the theory of biopolitics as a lens
through which to examine the leadership of these two members of the Nehru dynasty, and
the relationship between central government and India’s outlying regions and spaces under
these two epochs. Foucault conceived of biopolitics as a set of political technologies,
including categorization, the use of statistics, and mapping. These sought to ‘optimize’
human life by improving housing, medicine, education, and so on (on the basis that ‘with
government it is a question not of imposing law on men but of disposing things: that is, of
employing tactics rather than laws’3), in order to engender the optimization of economic
production and the orderly running of society. The corollary of these apparent benefits
comes, as Michael Dillon puts it in an essay on Foucault, from the paradigm that ‘where life
is improvable, biopolitics specifies continuous revision and reform. Where life is however
obdurately resistant to biopolitical revision, biopolitics specifies correction and
punishment.’4 If certain people endanger this new political paradigm, they can be sacrificed
for the greater good. Indira Gandhi, in Midnight’s Children, appears as a frequent user and
abuser of biopolitics, which Rushdie contrasts with Nehru’s pluralistic benevolence.
In Paul Brass’ summary,
[T]he Constitution of independent India is federal, but contains strong
unitary features, including a strong central government which retains
not only extensive emergency powers but the residuary powers of the
Union as well. The states are normally supposed to function autonomously,
but the Centre retains the ultimate power to control, even take over the
direct administration, of the states under certain conditions.5
With this federal system in mind, how pluralist a government is with regard to regional and
individual freedoms depends on the attitude of the central government and its Prime
Minister. Rushdie expounds upon this in Imaginary Homelands, where he writes,
‘Jawaharlal Nehru represents the dream’s noblest part, its most idealistic phase. Indira
Gandhi, always the pragmatist, often unscrupulously so, becomes a figure of decline’.6 The
first post-independence Indian government is headed by Nehru, whose famous ‘Tryst with
Destiny’ speech conceives of the nation as ‘the noble mansion of free India, where all her
children may dwell’ (MC, p. 158), a pluralist formulation with which both Rushdie and
3 Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Volume Three, ed. James
D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002), pp. 201-222, at p. 211. 4 Michael Dillon, ‘Security, Race and War’, Foucault on Politics, Security and War, eds. Michael Dillon and
Andrew W. Neal (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 166-196, at p. 168. 5 Paul R. Brass, The Politics of India since Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 2. 6 Salman Rushdie, ‘Dynasty’, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-91 (London: Granta, 1992), pp.
47-52, at p. 48.
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Saleem have a clear affinity. This affinity is demonstrated by the letter sent by Nehru to the
newborn Saleem. In The Idea of India, Sunil Khilnani argues that ‘Nehru once described [his]
Congress [Party] as “the mirror of the nation”, and it is indeed best seen as a screen on
which the nation has projected its shifting politics rather than as itself a coherent agent with
a unified will.’7 The phrase ‘mirror of the nation’ is particularly important, as the letter
reads, ‘My belated congratulations on the happy accident of your moment of birth![...]We
shall be watching over your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of
our own.’ (MC, p. 167) This missive has the unfortunate side effect of making Saleem
believe that he is ‘mysteriously handcuffed to history’ (MC, p. 3) to the point of narcissism,
but also helps Rushdie to portray Nehru as a leader who welcomes the extraordinary and
the different in his nation. The ‘exotic multiplicity of [the children’s] gifts’ (MC, p. 275)
represents a Nehruvian plurality of India and Indians, a sense of supernatural and diverse
possibility that Indira Gandhi largely extinguishes when she has the children sterilized during
her biopolitical Emergency. Nehru’s avowed political ideology is based on socialism,
secularism, and democracy. It is egalitarian and, what is more, inclusive. As Khilnani writes,
‘Nehru’s idea of Indianness emerged through improvised responses to constrained
circumstances: its strength was not its ideological intensity, but its ability to steer towards
an Indianness seen as layered, adjustable, imagined, not as a fixed property’,8 and this tallies
with Rushdie’s preferred hybrid national ideal. This incorporative, pluralist and nebulous
conception of what it is to be Indian imagines a nation to which many different ethnic and
religious groups can affiliate themselves, as shown at the beginning of Midnight’s Children
by the attitude of Aadam Aziz, the patriarch of Saleem’s family, whose character is used by
Rushdie as an exemplar of the figure who makes a conscious choice to ‘be Indian’ within the
Nehruvian framework.
Neil ten Kortenaar’s study of Rushdie’s novel is aware of the affiliative nature of Indian
nationality, stating that ‘[o]nly someone inside India is free to choose the nation; yet, for the
choice to be meaningful, it must be possible for him or her not to be Indian.’9 As the post-
Independence political situation in Kashmir makes plain, the region’s status as ‘Indian’ is
hotly contested, but Midnight’s Children, through its focus on Saleem’s family, has much
more to say about the ways in which Kashmiris voluntarily embrace the Indian nation, than
it does about the often violent biopolitical methods by which the Indian nation-state retains
possession of this outlying province, a form of centralized oppression that is powerfully
emphasized in Rushdie’s later novel Shalimar the Clown. Midnight’s Children, in keeping
with its championing of an inclusive Indian nation, charts Aadam Aziz’s progression from
Kashmiri to Kashmiri Indian. His experiences and injuries at the Amritsar Massacre in 1919
7 Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 26. This, evidently, is a different conception of
the party to that of his daughter. 8 Khilnani, p. 167. 9 Neil ten Kortenaar, Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’ (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2004), p. 60.
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produce an allegiance to the multiplicitous Indian nation attempting to resist British rule.
He says, ‘I started off as a Kashmiri and not much of a Muslim. Then I got a bruise on the
chest that turned me into an Indian.’ (MC, p. 47) He perceives ‘the narrowness, the
proximity of the horizon’ (MC, p. 5), and in a Nehruvian fashion, prizes a diverse, hybrid
community that incorporates many regions, including Kashmir. Aadam’s belief in Nehru’s
political project shows how even people from India’s most contentiously held region can
affiliate themselves with the post-Independence nation, and this is an affiliation that Saleem
shares. He is ‘infected with the alienness of Kashmiri blood, with the icy reserve of Kashmiri
sky’ (MC, p. 121), and is of the Muslim minority, but Indian nonetheless. However, political
events in late 1950s Bombay show how the Nehruvian ideal is often compromised in
practice, through having to deal with subnational forms of identity. This compromise is not
amenable to Saleem, who despite his belief in a plural nation is shown by Rushdie to be
overly idealistic in his reaction to the partition of the State of Bombay into Maharashtra and
Gujarat in 1960.
This event is one of the most significant examples of central government’s relation to its
constituent regions within Midnight’s Children, and stands as an indictment of the
limitations of an idealized version of Nehruvian pluralism. Bombay, in Rushdie’s early
fiction, is an exemplary site of the diversity and cultural hybridity cherished by the author
who once wrote that ‘[t]he selfhood of India is so capacious, so elastic, that it manages to
accommodate one billion kinds of difference.’10 Saleem calls Bombay ‘a mouth, always
open, always hungry, swallowing food and talent from everywhere else in India’ (MC, p.
172), and his descriptions of the city of his childhood are filled with exhilaration at the
vividness and diversity of life and sensations to be found there, but (as Rushdie’s later
novels powerfully remind us) the city is also a site for communal rivalries. Appadurai may
write that ‘all modern nation-states have subscribed to and contributed to the idea that
legitimate polities must be the outgrowth of natural affinities of some sort,’11 but in India,
not everybody’s ‘natural affinity’ is with nation over region, as with Aziz. While India’s
external borders remained almost exactly fixed after Independence, the redrawing of
internal borders was an ongoing process. We learn from Saleem that in 1956 ‘India had
been divided anew, into fourteen states and six centrally-administered “territories”. But the
boundaries of these states were not formed by rivers, or mountains, or any natural features
of the terrain; they were, instead, walls of words.’ (MC, p. 261) Nehru’s government
generally accepted majority languages within regions (such as Malayalam in Kerala, or Tamil
in Tamil Nadu) as a basis for the division of India into states, and Benedict Anderson writes
10 Salman Rushdie, ‘India’s Fiftieth Anniversary’, Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction 1992-2002
(London: Vintage, 2003),.................., at p. 179. 11 Appadurai, p. 157.
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in Imagined Communities that ‘there is a particular kind of contemporaneous community
which language alone suggests’.12 But Bombay’s status at this point is undecided:
The State was to be partitioned; then not to be partitioned; then partition
reared its head again. And as for the city itself – it was to be the capital of
Maharashtra; or of both Maharashtra and Gujarat; or an independent state
of its own...while the government tried to work out what on earth to do, the
city’s inhabitants decided to encourage it to be quick. (MC, pp. 309-10)
Hence, a good portion of Saleem’s childhood is set against a backdrop of ‘language riots’
(MC, p. 265) between Marathi and Gujarati speakers, each demanding a state of their own.
He is even at the centre of one in which ‘fifteen [were] killed, [and] over three hundred
wounded.’ (MC, p. 265) These riots present a challenge to Nehruvian political pluralism. If
even the State of Bombay, at the centre of which stands the nation’s most diverse city,
cannot maintain its spatial political form, then what hope is there for the nation as a whole,
which contains an even greater plethora of racial and religious affinities? Despite an early
sympathy with the idea of ‘keeping Bombay out of the control of a single language group’,13
the riots forced Nehru’s hand, and he saw that compromising on the issue of Bombay State
would benefit its people in the long run. Nehru did not insist upon a dogmatic pluralism in
the face of social unrest, but accepted the partition in order to avert further violence, by
mediating between the demands of both Maharashtrians and Gujaratis. Pluralism, almost
paradoxically, is manifested in this case by an acceptance of the wish for a plural region to
be partitioned into more monocultural entities.
This does not appear acceptable to Saleem, whose conception of India is more of an
abstracted nation than of a nation-state. His belief is in a pluralism and multiplicity that is
able, somehow, to resist the vagaries of compromise politics, and as such, his reaction to
the creation of Maharashtra and Gujarat is an adverse one; ‘we resigned ourselves to the
partition of the state of Bombay.’ (MC, p. 308) He regrets that the vibrant, diverse city of his
childhood could not sustain a multilingual State of Bombay, describing the Marathi-Gujarati
linguistic rivalry as ‘old dead struggles’ (MC, p. 262), and calling one procession ‘a stream of
chanting humanity[...]of which it was said that the statue of Sivaji [the Hindu king revered by
right-wing Maharashtrian Hindu nationalists] had come to life to ride stonily at its head’
(MC, p. 262). Saleem appears to regard the demands for Maharashtra and Gujarat as
undesirable pipedreams. It is true that elsewhere in the novel dreams shared by individuals,
leading to tangible political and spatial formations, can have desirable effects for Rushdie, as
with India, ‘a country which would never exist[...]except in a dream we all agreed to
dream[...]India, the new myth – a collective fiction in which anything was possible’ (MC, p.
150). However, dreams can also have adverse consequences in some cases; Saleem says
12 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London:
Verso, 2006), p. 145. 13 Guha, p. 191.
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that in 1965 ‘the war happened because I dreamed Kashmir into the fantasies of our rulers’
(MC, p. 471). Neil ten Kortenaar argues that ‘[t]he novel makes a distinction between lies
and fictions[...]it would seem that fictions are what he himself believes, while lies are the
unbelievable things that other people declare they believe’,14 and we can certainly
appreciate this dynamic with regard to the issue of ‘dreams’. Saleem recognizes that these
collective fictions have power within the political world, but decries those that go against his
vision of what India should be. He describes the marchers’ dreams as fevered, almost
primal, and, crucially, insubstantial compared with the more desirable ‘collective fiction’ of
pluralistic India:
the dream of Maharashtra was at the head of some processions, the
mirage of Gujarat led the others forward. Heat, gnawing at the mind’s
divisions between fantasy and reality, made anything seem possible[...]
the air was filled with the stickiness of aroused desires.
What grows best in the heat: fantasy; unreason; lust. (MC, p. 231)
Overall, where Nehru’s government is concerned, historians generally accept that ‘this
legacy of what may be called constructive pluralism was transformed by an iconoclastic
ideological position into a mere division. The new Indian state, constrained by political
exigencies, was forced to acknowledge such divisions’.15 Rushdie, in Imaginary Homelands,
does the same: ‘For a nation of seven hundred millions to make sense, it must base itself
firmly on the concept of multiplicity, of plurality and tolerance, of devolution and
decentralization wherever possible’.16 The more idealistic Saleem, however, accepts these
spatial compromises under sufferance.
The reason can be found – literally – in Saleem’s mind. Rushdie juxtaposes the language
riots with the flowering of Saleem’s telepathy: ‘In 1956, then, languages marched militantly
through the daytime streets; by night, they rioted in my head.[...]The voices babbled in
everything from Malayalam to Naga dialects, from the purity of Lucknow Urdu to the
Southern slurrings of Tamil.’ (MC, p. 231, 232) Eventually, he learns to communicate on a
mental rather than verbal plane: ‘Only later, when I began to probe, did I learn that below
the surface transmissions[...]language faded away, and was replaced by universally
intelligible thought-forms which far transcended words’ (MC, p. 233). Saleem intends for his
MCC to represent the nation rather than the nation-state, and as such to transcend
communal and linguistic considerations such as those which caused the partition of the
State of Bombay. Nehru called Saleem ‘the mirror of the nation’, but his group is not the
mirror of the nation-state. It has nothing to govern, and despite Saleem’s ‘dream[s] of
14 ten Kortenaar, pp. 41-2. 15 Amedeo Maiello, ‘Ethnic Conflict in Post-Colonial India’, The Post-colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided
Horizons, eds. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 99-114, at p. 101. 16 Salman Rushdie, ‘The Assassination of Indira Gandhi’, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-91
(London: Granta, 1992), pp. 41-6, at p. 44, my italics.
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purpose’ (MC, p. 608) for the group, attains no formal political power, and therefore is not
forced, as Nehru was, to deal with the harsh realities and compromises of federal politics.
The regional and religious differences within the ‘lok sabha or parliament of [Saleem’s]
brain’ (MC, p. 314) are purely philosophical. However, while Saleem’s head is a parliament
with nothing to run, this abstract microcosm of the Indian nation still falls victim to
disintegration due to Saleem being unable to live up to his promise of creating a ‘loose
federation of equals’ (MC, p. 305). Even such a profoundly pluralistic conception of the
nation – a ‘loose federalism’ (MC, p. 306) unencumbered by spatial considerations of
national and regional boundaries – necessarily falls victim to elements that are hierarchical
and totalizing. Rushdie may celebrate diversity and multiplicity in his novels, but the failure
of the MCC to cohere suggests an acknowledgement that his celebration of a hybrid (rather
than monocultural) conception of the nation is at odds with the reality of what happens
when people of such diverse creeds and backgrounds attempt to exist in harmony.
Firstly, the fact that Saleem becomes the leader of the MCC shows the inevitability of
stratification of power, even within a group which fails to find a political raison d’être.
Saleem, despite professing equality between the diverse members of his collective, finds he
is ‘not immune to the lure of leadership’ (MC, p. 315), on the grounds that his head is their
meeting place; ‘didn’t the one who provided the club-house run the club?’ (MC, p. 315)
Henri Lefebvre writes that ‘abstract space is not homogeneous; it simply has homogeneity
as its goal’,17 but the abstract space of Saleem’s mind only partially attains this goal. The
children may not have to engage with spatial territories like Maharashtra and Gujarat, but
there is still a centre (Saleem’s head) and regions (the consciousnesses of all the others). As
Catherine Cundy puts it, ‘like the Indian storyteller, Saleem is not merely a “transmitter” but
a creative artist who imposes his personality on the form of communication, which
eventually comes to reflect rather than negate the author/creator’s centrality.’18
Furthermore, Saleem’s leadership shows how purportedly inclusive bodies can still operate
under an exclusionary logic. Once a figure rises to the top of a community, they eventually
are forced to take actions to maintain their position. Just as Indira Gandhi (as we shall see)
uses biopolitics to remove a perceived threat to her political dominance, Saleem, in the
name of his own power, bars his rival Shiva from his brain. It may be true that ‘Saleem’s
notion of the nation[...]as a collection of representative minorities appears more democratic
and more respectful of difference than are the subnational groupings that make it up’,19 but
he is not respectful of the differences of Shiva, who is eventually excluded from the
collective because Saleem hates ‘the roughness of his tongue [and] the crudity of his ideas’
(MC, p. 314), and because Saleem fears such a violent, non-pluralistically-minded person
learning of his true birthright, the two babies, one rich, one poor, having been swapped at
17 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p.
287. 18 Cundy, p. 40. 19 ten Kortenaar, p. 152.
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birth. This action precipitates the final collapse of the MCC, with the remaining members
accusing Saleem of ‘secrecy, prevarication, high-handedness [and] egotism’ (MC, p. 414).
Once a body built on pluralism picks and chooses which members it wants to retain, it is no
longer truly plural. Nehru may have compromised in order to resolve the Bombay dispute,
but Saleem acts in a much more autocratic manner, and his exclusionary logic cannot be
said to be Nehruvian. If the MCC is a microcosm of the ideal plural nation, then it is surely
an imperfect one, and Rushdie is at pains to point this out.
The MCC is not only imperfect in its leadership, but also because of its divisions. Despite
the collective’s non-corporeal nature meaning that there can be no physical violence akin to
the language riots, there are verbal battles, as ‘children are the vessels into which adults
pour their poison’ (MC, p. 355). Saleem laments, ‘I found children from Maharashtra
loathing Gujaratis, and fair-skinned northerners reviling Dravidian “blackies”; there were
religious rivalries; and class entered our councils.’ (MC, p. 353) What is more disturbing
than ‘the endless duality of masses-and-classes, capital-and-labour, them-and-us’ (MC, p.
354), however, is that while the MCC contains all these differences, rivalries and prejudices,
they are not all that India is. Even this group, numbering 1001, cannot represent the vast
diversity of India. The MCC is not a true ‘mirror of the nation’ but a pocket-mirror (what is
visible is limited), and even 1001 is a number that ‘refuses to be understood.’ (MC, p. 498)
Saleem tells us, ‘my narrative could not cope with five hundred and eighty-one fully-
rounded personalities[...]they were the very essence of multiplicity’ (MC, p. 317), which
challenges the idea that a pluralistic, (mostly) incorporative body like the MCC can recognize
the interests and personalities of every single member. It certainly cannot encapsulate and
individuate every type of person to be found in India, and neither can Saleem’s tale. He may
claim, ‘I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have seen done, of
everything done to me[...]to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world,’ (MC, p. 535)
but as ten Kortenaar responds, ‘[T]he people he has affected and who have affected him,
though certainly too numerous to count, are unlikely to number six hundred million’.20
Midnight’s Children may celebrate multiplicity on one hand, but without political
manoeuvring such as Nehru’s policy of linguistic states, the novel brings into question how
such a regionally, religiously and culturally diverse nation such as India can cohere, without
central governmental leadership to mediate between groups.
However, the Midnight’s Children remain a source of hope for pluralism within the Indian
nation. While Nehru and Saleem reach a parting of the ways with regard to the State of
Bombay, they both broadly espouse a political inclusivity that (only for the most part in
Saleem’s case) accepts varying viewpoints, and attempts to synthesize them into a plan of
action under the leadership of a paternalistic ‘big brother’ (MC, p. 316). The major
philosophical opposition in the novel is not between Nehru and Saleem, but between Indira
Gandhi and the pluralism of the other two. The abstracted MCC, insufficiently plural to
20 ten Kortenaar, p. 82.
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symbolize the nation and yet too plural to function, is still represented as infinitely
preferable to the biopolitical government of Nehru’s daughter, which concentrates power in
the hands of the leader to a much greater degree than Saleem does, and which will happily
sacrifice, exclude and disenfranchise its citizens for the good of the nation-state. Saleem’s
running of his collective may not have been perfect, but in the second half of the novel,
Rushdie utilises the diversity and multiplicity of the extraordinary children not to suggest
the difficulty of representative government, but as a powerful symbol of pluralism that
stands against an increasingly autocratic and biopolitical nation-state.
In Midnight’s Children, the nation-state (as opposed to the apolitical, inclusive nation) is
seen to be a potential site for autocracy. Inherent within its structure are mechanisms that
can turn sinisterly biopolitical in the wrong hands, such as ‘the power to declare a national
emergency that, in effect, may convert the country into a unitary state’,21 which was written
into the Constitution under Nehru’s watch. This is not to say that Nehru is condemned in
the novel. Although Saleem criticizes Congress for hiring Shiva’s gang of toughs to
‘encourag[e] the electorate to use its vote with wisdom and care’ (MC, p. 308) in 1957, and
makes a note of the Nehru government’s patchy record of economic production and social
reform, we have seen that Nehru’s political career is marked by a willingness to compromise
and his tenure as Prime Minister is favourably contrasted with that of Indira. Saleem,
speaking of Sanjay Gandhi, says that ‘the sons of the great unmake their parents’ (MC, p.
463), and to this we may add the daughters of the great. Nevertheless, despite Nehru’s
advocating ‘equal opportunities for all and no political, economic, or social barrier in the
way of any individual or group’,22 he saw the state as the vehicle for implementing these
opportunities, writing that ‘[t]he idea of planning and a planned society is accepted now in
varying degrees by almost everyone.’23 His politics were marked by pluralism and
inclusivity, but also by bureaucracy and central planning. The second half of Midnight’s
Children shows what happens when central power over regions and peoples is used for
nefarious biopolitical means, rather than to effect compromises like the partition of the
State of Bombay, thus bearing out Nehru’s prescient warning that ‘planning by itself has
little meaning and need not necessarily lead to good results.’24 In the end, the Midnight’s
Children, by virtue of their victimization and sterilization by Indira’s government, are more
vividly rendered by Rushdie as symbols of a pluralistic nation as opposed to an autocratic
nation-state, than they are as symbols of the difficulties of a community coalescing under
the aegis of Nehruvian pluralism. Rushdie’s lionizing of India’s diversity effaces a more
probing critique of the idea of the nation. Instead, his ire is directed at the nation-state.
The sterilization of the Midnight’s Children provides an exemplary manifestation of the
autocracy and lack of pluralism of the Indira government. An explicitly biopolitical analysis
21 Brass, p. 63. 22 Nehru, p. 521. 23 Ibid., p. 501. 24 Ibid., p. 501.
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of the State of Emergency will provide a clear view of the distinction Rushdie makes
between the pluralist nation, as symbolized by the children, and the governmental nation-
state that he is so keen to critique. Midnight’s Children is by no means Rushdie’s only
engagement with India’s sterilization campaign, but it is here that his examination of
population control focuses most sharply on its effect on the bios of the public at large. It is
this dynamic which makes the episode of the sterilization of the children ideal for the
exploration of governmental biopolitics, and how it is used in order to crystallize central
state authority over areas that, spatially, lie away from the centre.
In a rare linkage of Rushdie’s work with the idea of biopower, Stephen Morton writes that
‘the biopolitical power of the state during India’s state of emergency is foregrounded in
Sanjay Gandhi’s population control programme, the slum clearances in Delhi and in the
forced sterilization of the midnight’s children’.25 Nevertheless, much of India’s family
planning policy in the 1970s proceeded on the basis of incentivizing its citizens to be
sterilized, rather than coercing them. In The Satanic Verses, a toymaker produces ‘the
Family Planning doll, a socially responsible variant of the old Russian-doll notion. Inside a
suited-and-booted Abba-doll was a demure, sari-clad Amma, and inside her a daughter
containing a son. Two children are plenty: that was the message of the dolls.’ (SV, pp. 224-
5) This toy, with its anatomical incorrectness, functions as a comedic example of the
relatively benign acts of public-spirited Indian citizens dedicated to raising awareness of the
problem of exponential population growth from a non-governmental platform. But
measures to prevent overpopulation become more sinister when the biopolitical state is
involved.
History books are full of examples of the psychologically coercive nature of ‘family
planning’ during the Emergency. Often, ‘getting sterilized or paying someone else to do so
became[...]the only way displaced people could obtain small plots of land in resettlement
colonies’.26 Not only did the state authorities demolish homes (of which more later), they
expected their former residents to sacrifice their fertility for the privilege. There are also
stories of schoolchildren being told that they would be automatically failed in their exams if
their parents were not sterilized.27 We see here the twisting of linguistic meaning during
the Emergency. Many Indians, officially ‘voluntarily’ sterilized, in fact had no choice,
whereas Shiva in Midnight’s Children undergoes an apparently sincere ‘voluntary
vasectomy’ (MC, p. 615) for the good of the nation, but only after siring ‘legions of bastards
swelling in the unectomied bellies of great ladies and whores’ (MC, p. 615). He thus
contributes much more to the population problem than the vast majority of people who
were psychologically coerced into being sterilized. However, to assert that coercion does
not necessarily have to be physical is not to say that there was not physical coercion during
the Emergency’s campaign. Forced sterilizations were fairly common in India’s northern 25 Morton, p. 48. 26 Tarlo, p. 11. 27 Ibid., p. 148.
11
states (the so-called ‘vasectomy belt’) and in the west. According to Ramachandra Guha, in
one district ‘[l]ocal officials prepared lists of “eligible men”, that is, of those who already had
three or more children. Police vans would come and take them off to the nearest health
centre. Some men fled into the hills to escape the marauders.’28 In Midnight’s Children, the
use of force by the state to compel its citizens to undergo sterilization can be seen in the use
of ‘socialist rifles’ (MC, p. 600) against Saleem and the Magicians’ Ghetto. The most vivid act
of Emergency repression depicted by the novel is not, for example, the imprisonment of
high-profile political opponents such as Morarji Desai or J.P. Narayan, but the destruction of
‘the colony or ghetto of the magicians’ (MC, p. 594) with whom Saleem makes his home in
what he calls his ‘true inheritance of poverty and destitution’ (MC, p. 553). Despite the fact
that (if it were a factual event) it would barely merit a footnote in the history of the
‘continuous midnight’ (MC, p. 585) of the Emergency, the move against the ghetto by ‘The
Sanjay Youth’ (MC, p. 588) – the forces of Mrs Gandhi’s son and closest advisor – is an
excellent example of Indira’s (bio)politics. The episode is illuminating with regard to the
assertion of state control over the diverse spaces of Delhi, and ‘state racism’, as
philosophers of biopolitics term biopolitical discrimination against certain groups.
Paul Brass informs us that during the Emergency, ‘government employees with more than
three children were expected to have vasectomies or be denied perquisites such as
government housing. In some states, they were also given quotas to fulfil to have ordinary
members of the public sterilized.’29 Not only is this further evidence of non-physical
government coercion, the reference to quotas points to the biopolitical nature of the
sterilization campaign, considering that a major aspect of biopolitical practice is the
categorization and organization of human beings through statistics. Government control
over the reproductive systems – the very biology – of its people is profoundly biopolitical.
Furthermore, the Indian state’s ‘family planning’ is biopolitical in another way, when we
consider the sterilization of the midnight’s children as a form of state racism.
Nicole Weickgennant Thiara is suspicious of the status of Midnight’s Children as an
indictment of central government’s treatment of people such as the magicians. For her, ‘[i]t
is after all not so much the actual sterilizations which count in Midnight’s Children but the
destruction of an idea of India, which was embodied by the midnight’s children.30 The ‘idea
of India’, as we have seen, is indeed important in the novel, but the actual sterilizations and
the state’s reasoning for them are actually very useful in a discussion of Indian
governmental biopolitics, when we consider the issue of state racism. Hardt and Negri
define state racism as the idea that
[m]ost discussions of demographic explosions and population crises
[...]are not really oriented toward either bettering the lives of the poor
28 Guha, p. 516. 29 Brass, p. 42. 30 Thiara, p. 52.
12
or maintaining a sustainable total global population[...]but are rather
concerned primarily with which social groups reproduce and which do
not.31
This particular technology is closely associated with biopower; ‘When, as the nineteenth
century advanced, bio-politics was deployed throughout the population, state racism was
born. The life of the species became a political issue, giving rise to projects for the eugenic
ordering of society’.32 The existence of ‘a black leather folder labelled TOP SECRET, and
titled PROJECT M.C.C.’ (MC, p. 547) convinces Saleem that ‘the truest, deepest motive
behind the declaration of a State of Emergency was the smashing, the pulverizing, the
irreversible discombobulation of the children of midnight.’ (MC, p. 597) Like the police raids
on the un-vasectomied, the attack on the midnight’s children is a targeted forced
sterilization which fits Hardt and Negri’s definition. As for why Indira Gandhi targets the
children in this way, the answer lies in the fact that ‘the drives toward centralization of
power in Delhi[...]intensified markedly since the death of Nehru’.33 Rushdie contrasts
Nehru’s conception of the pluralist, multiplicitous nation, and his pragmatic ideology of
political compromise, with Indira’s attempt to portray herself as the living avatar of the
nation, as exemplified by the election slogan, ‘India is Indira and Indira is India’ (MC, p. 587),
and her absorption of political power in her own hands and those of the state. Rushdie
defines the Emergency as an attempt by Indira Gandhi to remove any challengers to her
place as ‘not only Prime Minister of India but[...]possessor of the shakti of the gods’ (MC, p.
612).
As we have seen, the children’s debates in ‘the lok sabha or parliament of [Saleem’s] brain’
(MC, p. 314) – Rushdie’s choice of words here is telling – set the children up as a symbol of a
pluralist politics that (largely) welcomes free and frank discussion, and a wide range of
viewpoints. However, as Saleem laments, the MCC fractures without having accomplished
anything tangible. Indira’s sterilization of her perceived rivals, ‘the very essence of
multiplicity’ (MC, p. 317) with their ‘thousand and one possibilities’ (MC, p. 278), operates
more on the biopolitical axis than that of practical party politics. The children have no
realistic hope of usurping her political power. For Foucault, ‘[i]n the biopower
system,[...]killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over
political adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement
of the species or race.’34 If Indira merely perceived in the children the risk of political
dissent, then she would have simply imprisoned them as she did Desai and Narayan.
Sterilization demonstrates that the main aim was their removal from the gene pool. The
idea that this removal would improve the species from an objective, purely biological
standpoint is debatable, as while the supernaturally-gifted MCC contains those who ‘were
31 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, p. 166. 32 Jon Simons, Foucault and the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 34. 33 Brass, p. 33. 34 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p. 256.
13
(to be frank) little more than circus freaks’ (MC, p. 275), there are figures like Saleem who
receive ‘the highest talents of which men had ever dreamed’ (MC, p. 276). Nevertheless, it
is clear that the Prime Minister cannot countenance the presence of magical, multiplicitous
powers of any sort within her nation’s populace. The MCC ‘can be seen as the last throw of
everything antiquated and retrogressive in our myth-ridden nation, whose defeat was
entirely desirable in the context of a modernizing, twentieth-century economy; or as the
true hope of freedom’ (MC, p. 278), and neither of these interpretations are amenable to a
woman who wishes to rule from the centre as ‘the Mother-goddess in her most terrible
aspect’ (MC, p. 612).
Furthermore, it seems that Indira wishes to ‘improve the species’ not only by eliminating
the children of midnight, but by replicating her own children, specifically Sanjay. This
replication is, crucially, juxtaposed with the raid on the ghetto and the sterilization of the
midnight’s children. ‘The Sanjay Youth Movement [which] was particularly effective in the
sterilization campaign’ (MC, p, 588) lives up to its name in a literal sense, as it is populated
entirely by clones of Sanjay and his wife Menaka. Jean Baudrillard posits that ‘the relation
between [objects] is no longer that of an original to its counterfeit – neither analogy nor
reflection – but equivalence, indifference. In a series, objects become undefined simulacra
one of the other.’35 Rather than promising pluralism and multiplicity, as the MCC does, the
identical beings carry the authority of the ‘signifier of reference’.36 However, this is not a
Baudrillardian ‘subtle way of murdering the original’,37 but quite the opposite; an
affirmation of the disenfranchising biopolitical power of a dynastic elite. Saleem tells us that
‘all the men had the same curly hair and lips-like-women’s-labia, and the elegant ladies were
all identical, too, their features corresponding precisely to those of Sanjay’s Menaka[...]I was
shown once again that the ruling dynasty of India had learned how to replicate itself.’ (MC,
p. 599) Not only do we see the simulacral nature of those involved in the ‘civic-
beautification and vasectomy programmes’ (MC, p. 603), the presence of Menaka
emphasizes the fertility of Indira’s family as opposed to the sterility of the children.
Madelena Gonzalez states that ‘the authority of the family [is] a frequent metaphor in
Rushdie’s fiction for political oppression’,38 but they are one and the same here, and by
ensuring that ‘the children of midnight [are] denied the possibility of reproducing
themselves’ (MC, p. 613), Indira is making sure that their (potential) political agency can be
superseded by that of manifestations of her dynasty. Saleem is acutely aware that the
counterpart of the state project to ‘improve the species’ by sterilizing the magical and
multiplicitous is the cloning of the family of the ruler in order to effect the same. He states,
35 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e],
1983), p. 97. 36 Ibid., p. 101. 37 Ibid., p. 144. 38 Madelena Gonzalez, ‘The Moor’s Last Sigh: Marginal Alternatives, the Reconstruction of Identity through the
Carnival of Indetermination’, Subverting Masculinity: Hegemonic and Alternative Versions of Masculinity in
Contemporary Culture, eds. Russell West and Frank Lay (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000).............at p. 130.
14
‘certain high-ups in that extraordinary government (and also certain unelected sons of
prime ministers) had acquired the power of replicating themselves[...]No wonder that
incredible dynasty wanted to impose birth control on the rest of us’ (MC, p. 551).
We have seen how Rushdie uses ‘family planning’ as a vivid indictment of Indira’s
biopolitical project, but he also uses the parallel slum clearance campaign as an intensifying
corollary, to strengthen his critique. Not only were Saleem and the magicians sterilized, but
their slum home was destroyed, which leads us to the spatial dimension of biopower. We
have seen how the central government deals with large regions such as Kashmir,
Maharashtra and Gujarat, but Upstone’s conception of ‘the often-undermined smaller-than-
national spatial location’39 extends to much smaller spaces than the Indian states within the
federal system. So does Indira’s conception. It is not enough that she rules India. Every
single space within Delhi must fall under the rubric of her power. Rushdie tells us in The
Enchantress of Florence that ‘[n]o city is all palaces’ (EF, p. 35), but Indira’s government is
intolerant of slums, partially because of their squalor and ugliness, but also because they
resist biopolitical categorization, many being illegally built and ‘off the grid’ as far as
administration is concerned. They can be seen biopolitically as an impediment to the
improvement and effective governance of the city and a symptom of what the geographer
Edward Soja has called the ‘postmetropolis’, in which ‘[t]he boundaries of our city are
becoming more porous, confusing our ability to draw neat lines separating what is inside as
opposed to outside the city’.40 700,000 slum-dwellers, representing 15 per cent of Delhi’s
population, were displaced to ‘marginal spaces beyond the borders of the city’41 between
1975 and 1977. The Emergency government, rather than countenance them being in the
city but not of it, moved them to government-run ‘resettlement camps’. Just as Indira’s
warped logic determines that the midnight’s children must be sterilized for the good of the
species, the slums must be destroyed for the good of the city, even if (in a truly biopolitical
sense) this means the sacrifice of so-called ‘bare life’; ‘life [which] is inimical to life and has
to be exterminated if it cannot be corrected and reformed’.42 ‘The city was being
beautified, and if there were a few deaths,[...]well, what of it, an eyesore was being
removed from the face of the ancient capital’ (MC, p. 602). Additionally, Indira’s
imprisoning of the MCC asserts her power over her nation’s heterogeneous regions, in that
the multiplicity of the children is not just ideological and magical but geographical/spatial.
Shiva and Saleem may be Bombayites, but there is within the group ‘a Goanese girl with the
gift of multiplying fish’ (MC, p. 274), ‘a werewolf from the Nilgiri Hills’ (MC, p. 274), and a
‘Benarsi silversmith’s son’ (MC, p. 276) who can travel through time, to name but a few.
Saleem could never physically bring the MCC together, and even within the non-physical
parliament of his mind the group eventually falls victim to ‘gradual disintegration’ (MC, p.
39 Upstone, p. 23. 40 Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis, p. 150. 41 Tarlo, p. 4. 42 Dillon, p. 177.
15
352). But Indira, with her state institutions, has the power to convene them in one place;
the disciplinary space of ‘the Widow’s Hostel in Benares’ (MC, p. 603), the old imperial
centre of Delhi. When Saleem finally gets to address his counterparts verbally, the situation
is beyond hope. Not only has Indira asserted her authority over her capital, and her
contempt for the idea of the postmetropolis as shown by her destruction of the spatially
uncategorized slums, but she has shown how the tentacles of her biopower reach
throughout all of India.
On the other hand, despite the fact that central political (bio)power has become more
tangible than in Nehru’s time, it is by no means total. Not everyone targeted by biopower is
necessarily brought under its aegis. In Giorgio Agamben’s formulation,
the realm of bare life – which is originally situated at the margins of
the political order – gradually begins to coincide with the political realm,
and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside[...]enter into a zone of
irreducible indistinction.[...]When its borders begin to be blurred, the
bare life that dwelt there frees itself in the city and becomes both
subject and object of the conflicts of the political order, the one place
for both the organization of State power and emancipation from it.43
This idea that bare life within the biopolitical urban area is a permanent, immanent, and
potentially assertive presence is, despite the slum clearances, present in Midnight’s
Children. Although the Magicians’ Ghetto is destroyed, ‘not all the magicians were
captured’ (MC, p. 602), and rather than conform to Indira’s concept of a well-ordered Delhi,
they take their provisional and nebulous spatiality even further, as ‘the moving slum of the
escaped illusionists’ (MC, p. 602) continually evades the ‘wreckers[...]vasectomists and
troops’ (MC, p. 603) that are the symbolic triptych of government biopower. In her book on
spatial politics, Upstone argues that ‘to see fluidity functioning only in the service of western
capital and its neo-colonial interests is too simplistic’,44 and that ‘the inventive ways in
which fluidity may be utilized to foster disruptive actions’45 should be recognized, and the
moving slum is an excellent example of such a disruption. The magicians may be
‘Communists, almost to a man’ (MC, p. 554), but what produces their most effective
resistance to state power is not a political ideology, but the simple act of movement.
However, this movement is not a truly powerful example of a revolutionary, reactive
biopolitics. Hardt and Negri may conceive that ‘[t]he struggles of the poor against their
conditions of poverty are not only powerful political protests but also affirmations of
biopolitical power – the revelation of a common “being” that is more powerful than their
miserable “having”’,46 but in this case the conditions of poverty and rootlessness are
43 Agamben, p. 9. 44 Upstone, p. 8. 45 Ibid., p. 9. 46 Hardt and Negri, Multitude, p. 135
16
precisely the tools of resistance that are being used. The moving slum can only ever be a
temporary measure, a spatial water-treading, and when Saleem locates the remaining
magicians, he finds that ‘[s]omewhere in the many moves of the peripatetic slum, they had
mislaid their powers of retention, so now they had become incapable of judgement’ (MC, p.
621). This shows that spatial autonomy without consciousness is a self-defeating form of
resistance to biopower, and as such offers no hope for a pluralist, Nehruvian Indian future.
The hope in the novel comes from other sources.
These sources, naturally, are symbols of pluralism, both political and magical. The political
situation at the end of Midnight’s Children has Indira losing power via the ballot box – the
symbol of democratic procedure treasured by Nehru – to the Janata Morcha, a multifarious
coalition of parties which ‘grew in all kinds of bizarre directions, until it embraced Maoist
Communists[...]and extreme right-wing members of the Ananda Marg; until Left-Socialists
and conservative Swatantra members joined its ranks’ (MC, p. 582). Saleem doesn’t hold
the front ‘to represent a new dawn’ (MC, p. 616), but acknowledges that ‘others[...]felt
otherwise’ (MC, p. 616), and its victory in the 1977 election near the end of the novel does
seem to promise an Indian nation-state governed along more pluralistic lines (even if history
– and Rushdie’s later writing – shows us that the Janata government soon fell apart). In
addition, the symbols of the pluralist apolitical conception of the nation are not completely
defeated. Just as the biopolitical state lacks the power to completely eradicate the ghetto,
it fails also to completely eradicate the Midnight’s Children. Saleem’s cry – ‘Good news,
children! They cannot get us all’ (MC, p. 608) – shows that hope remains. Indira’s
spokeswoman tells Saleem that ‘they would be satisfied with four hundred and twenty, they
had verified one hundred and thirty-nine dead’ (MC, p. 612), which makes 559 captured or
dead out of the 581 that did not die in infancy of ‘[m]alnutrition, disease and the
misfortunes of everyday life’ (MC, p. 271). Twenty-two remain at large, and the power of
‘Soumitra the time-traveller’ (MC, p. 608) presumably makes him impossible to capture. It is
true that this is not a great proportion of the original sample, and Saleem and his cohorts
experience ‘a draining-out of hope’ (MC, p. 611) at their sterilization; as he puts it, ‘the
children of midnight were denied the possibility of reproducing themselves’ (MC, p. 613).
Yet this is not the full story. Shockingly, it is scarcely remarked upon in Rushdie criticism
that the ‘legions of bastards’ (MC, p. 615) fathered by ‘midnight’s darkest child’ (MC, p. 616)
Shiva are not the only offspring of the magical collective. They are sterilized, but at the age
of 28, and it is scarcely believable that there was not significant procreation occurring
before Indira took them to Benares. Considering India’s birth rate (a birth rate that Indira’s
biopolitical sterilization campaign did little to stymie) it is probable that this second
generation is more numerous than the first.
In the end, the inability of Rushdie’s protagonist to ‘bear the burden of history’ (MC, p.
534) and his eventual disintegration does not invalidate the idea that India, whatever its
problems of practical politics, can accommodate diversity and multiplicity. It is enough that
Indira loses power, and that the limits of (bio)power – as shown by the existence of the
17
second generation of children – are made clear, as is its sinister and autocratic nature.
Pranav Jani’s pessimistic reading of the novel – ‘Forced to read Saleem’s beginnings through
his end, the implied audience is trained to read all instances of hope and promise as signs of
future defeat’47 – rings false. India, as an ‘annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes’ (MC, p.
647), remains. Ultimately, it is not that ‘the decline of the nation-state is[...]a structural and
irreversible process’,48 but that its existence cannot quash the natural multiplicity of India,
which the end of the novel suggests will live on ‘until the thousand and first generation’
(MC, p. 647). The MCC are a symbol of hope more than of failure, and the end of Midnight’s
Children suggests that despite Indira’s attempts at centralization and biopolitical autocracy,
a Nehruvian pluralism is forever inherent within the Indian nation, if not the nation-state.
47 Jani, p. 152. 48 Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 336.