YEDITEPE UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

IDEOLOGIES IN “Midnight’s Children” by Salman RUSHDIE

By

Ahmet Selçuk ISKENDEROĞLU

Submitted to the Graduate Institute of Social Sciences In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

English Language and Literature Thesis

İstanbul 2008

YEDITEPE UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

IDEOLOGIES IN “Midnight’s Children” by Salman RUSHDIE

By

Ahmet Selçuk ISKENDEROĞLU

Supervisor

Doç.Dr.Mediha GÖBENLİ

Submitted to the Graduate Institute of Social Sciences In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

English Language and Literature Thesis

İstanbul 2008

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İÇİNDEKİLER

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................. iv ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................... v ÖZET ................................................................................................................................... vii 1. INTRODUCTION.......................................................................................................... 1 2. CHAPTER I: CRITICAL & HISTORICAL APPROACH ............................................... 8

2.1. WHY POSTCOLONIALISM? .............................................................................. 8 2.2. UPON THE CONCEPT OF IDEOLOGY ........................................................... 17

CHAPTER II: “Midnight’s Children” By Salman RUSHDIE ........................................... 22 2.3. INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVEL .................................................................. 23

2.3.1 Magical Realism ........................................................................................... 30 2.4. ABOUT SALMAN RUSHDIE ............................................................................ 37

3. CHAPTER III MAIN IDEOLOGIES: ....................................................................... 45 3.1. NATIONALISM .................................................................................................. 45 3.2. SYMBOLISM ...................................................................................................... 47 3.3. ORIENT AND OCCIDENT RELATIONSHIP UNDER ORIENTALISM ........ 52 3.4. POST COLONIAL RULE AND BRITISH COLONIZATION .......................... 55

4. CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................ 64 REFERENCES ..................................................................................................................... 66

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of my

family under whose supervision I chose this topic and began the thesis. Doç. Dr. Mediha

GÖBENLİ my advisor in all stages of the work, has also been abundantly helpful, and has

assisted me in numerous ways, including summarizing the contents of documents which

were not available for me to examine.

I would like to thank to the following persons for their continued assistance and patience

during the research and compilation of this study: Prof. Dr. Cevat ÇAPAN, Prof. Dr.

Süheyla ARTEMEL, Doç.Dr.Mediha GÖBENLi, and Öğrt. Gör. Reyhan TURAN,

We would like to deeply thank the various people who, during the several months in which

this endeavor lasted, provided us with useful and helpful assistance. Without their care and

consideration, this work would likely not have matured. First, we would like to thank all

the chapter contributors stated in the bibliography for their dedication and interest. They

contributed with writings that reflect expertise we certainly do not fully have ourselves,

and for all their patience throughout the editing and cross-reviewing process which

constitutes a rather difficult balancing act.

Second, we would like to thank all the people who demonstrated interest in publishing this

project. I am deeply indebted to my supervisor Doç.Dr. Mediha Göbenli from Yeditepe

University, their help, stimulating suggestions and encouragement helped me throughout

the research for and the writing of this thesis.

We thank to the support of our institutions, the Departments of Social Sciences, and

English Literature at Yeditepe University. Lastly, and most importantly, to my family, for

their encouragement with this project.

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ABSTRACT

It can be easily said that geographical explorations and the initiation of the industry

revolution have caused a constant change on economic balance of the globe behalf towards

Europe. The rapid progressions and advancements in industrial revolution have brought a

great deal appetite to working power and raw material, Europe’s economical tendency was

established in a prevailing system which generalizes subaltern according to the images

created by westerner gaze.

In that situation literature plays a crucial role for people to express their thoughts through

representations or to re-create ideology within an indirect way. “Colonial Discourse”

simply concedes the superiority of Colonizer against the Colonized, “Post-Colonial

Discourse” concedes the subalterns to deconstruct and re-structure the ideology coming

from the Colonial image. In this globe west has brought euro-centric interpretations

towards east, the colonial aftermath has started when the subaltern people have started to

speak on their re-constructed ideologies.

The reason why ideology was examined through the post-colonial novel of “Midnight’s

Children” by Salman RUSHDIE is concerning the set of ideologies implemented

consciously in the novel. These ideologies represent transcending historical definitions,

political notions, colonialism, human exploitation, repression and dependency. “Midnight’s

Children” indicates us ideologies to examine the transformation from Colonialism and

Post-Colonialism.

Salman RUSHDIE has written a novel out of age and historical genres, major characters

have the major conflicts. Saleem Sinai has born at the moment of Inda’s independence

from British rule. Rushdie’s style of Magic Realism shows to represent things againts

realist conventions, it employs the features of realism in textual terms to subvert within

conventions. This invention presents the truth and subverts it with astounding events.

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“Nationalism” through Saleem’s identity, “Symbolism” over images in the novel, “East

and West relationship” through the “Post-Colonial discourse”, are examined in

“Midnight’s Children” with specific quotations and events. This novel is accepted as

Saleem’s autobiography which includes Post-Colonial and Postmodern discourse. Salman

Rushdie uses all features of ideology as the major character’s life goes parallel to Indian

history.

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ÖZET

Kolaylıkla söylenebilir ki; coğrafi keşifler ve sanayi devriminin başlaması dünya

üzerindeki batıya yönelik yararlı ve kalıcı değişimlere sebep olmuştur. Sanayi

devrimindeki hızlı ve ilerlemeci gelişmeler, Avrupa’nın hammaddeye ve ucuz insan

gücüne olan iştahını kabartmıştır. İşte Avrupa’nın bu ekonomik eğilimi tarihsel süreçte

yarattığı bu işleyen sistemle beraber, kendi gözlerinden azınlıklara karşı yeni imgeler ve

ideolojiler yaratmaya başlamasına sebep olmuştur.

Bu durumda Edebiyat insanları düşüncelerini özgürce ifade edebilmelerini ve onları

yeniden yapısallaştırabilmelerini sağlayan dolaylı iletişim yolu olarak hayati bir rol oynar.

“Kolonyal Söylem” Batının Doğuya üstünlüğünü vurgulasa da, “Post-Kolonyal Söylem”

ise azınlıkların Kolonyal söylem vasıtası ile üzerlerine oluşturulmuş ideolojilerin yıkılıp

yeniden yapılmasını öngören bir söylemdir. Sebebi ise dünyada Batının, Doğuya getirmiş

olduğu “Euro-Centric” yorumlamalardır. Neticede Kolonyal etkilerin devamı, ezilen

kesimin yada azınlığın kendi politik, kültürel ve tarihsel yapılarını yeniden söküp

oluşturmaya çalışmasıdır. Ideoloji kavramı da bu süreçte önemli bir rol oynamaktadır.

Salman RUSHDIE “Gece Yarısı Çocukları” romanındaki ele alınan ideolojilerin “Post

Kolonyal” söylemi de içerisine alarak irdelenmesinin amacı, bu ideolojilerin romanın

içerisine bilinçli bir şekilde yerleştirilmiş olmasından kaynaklanmaktadır. Yerleştirilen bu

fikirler tarihi tanımlamaları, politik nosyonları, insan sömürüsünü , baskı ve bağımlı

kalmayı (sömürge olmayı) sergilemektedir. “Gece Yarısı Çocukları” bize “Kolonyal

Söylemden” – “Post-Kolonyal söyleme” geçişteki ideolojileri vurgulasa da arkasındaki

niyet azınlığın kimliğini yeniden oluşturmasıdır.

Salman RUSHDIE eserini bir çağa veya tarihe bağlı kalarak yazmamıştır, eserdeki önemli

karakterlerin önemli çelişkileri olmuştur, Saleem Sinai’nin doğduğu gün Hindistan’ın

Büyük Britanya Sömürgesinden kurtuluşu ile aynı güne tesadüf etmektedir, bu da yaşadığı

karmaşıklıktan öte yeni bir yapılaşmayı göstermektedir. Salman RUSHDIE’ nin yazım stili

olarak kullandığı “Magical Realism” kavramı, gerçekliği okuyucuya gerçekçi söylemlerin

dışına aktararak göstermesi icadıdır. Bu kullanım onun, sözü edilen doğru kavramını

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şaşırtıcı hadiseler yardımı ile yıkmasıdır. Bu kullanım da Salman RUSHDIE’nin

romandaki “yeniden yapılandırma” kavramını gösterir.

“Ulusalcılık” Saleem’in kimliği doğrultusunda, “Sembolizm” romandaki imgeler vasıtası

ile, “Post-kolonyal söylemde Doğu-Batı ilişkisi” ise “Gece Yarısı Çocukları” romanındaki

belirli alıntılar ve olaylar ile desteklenerek açıklanmıştır. “Gece Yarısı Çocukları” Salman

RUSHDIE’nin Kolonyal ve Post Modern söylemi de içeren bir yapıda ana karakterin de

dahil olduğu otobiyografik bir romandır. Salman RUSHDIE belirli ideolojileri

karakterlerin hayatları ile beraber kullanır ve bunlar Hindistan’ın tarihi ile paralel gider.

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1. INTRODUCTION

In Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie has presented the world with certainly the most

talked about and the most incisive treatments in English fiction of the Indian subcontinent

since A Passage to India. It could also be considered from a postmodernist angle against

self-respecting contemporary novels. For the sake of general readership, the traditional

attributes of the fiction which Salman Rushdie also plans to incorporate are in danger of

being overlooked by his scholarly apologists. The principal claim of the novel is Rushdie's

political enthusiasm with which he grinds his political axes to combine his ingenuity with

materialism. Rushdie creates a structure, cohesion and unity.

The thing that strikes the reader of Midnight's Children is its length and scope. For over

four hundred crammed pages, the novel presents a cast of more than seventy, ranging from

Kashmir south to Bombay and from Karachi east to Dacca, and encompasses the history of

India from independence to the state of emergency decreed by Indra Gandhi.

Regarding the style of narration, Salman Rushdie's prose style shows both the effort

involved and the strains inherent in such a task. Rushdie's preference for running words

together, even adjectivally, shows the novel's syntactic expedient. Thus all syntactic efforts

have been used to hold things together; also, to imply the existence, presence and nature

under the centrifugal force of diversity that make them necessary. An equal number of

fore-shadowings and recapitulations apply to imagery and events regarding fragmentation

and reassembly.

Saleem Sinai's role of narrator is less important than his multiple personality and the

frequently asserted metaphoric equivalence of his life story to that of India that constitutes

itself. The extraordinary element of the novel is Saleem who is in the first place the

biological son of William and Vanita, then the adopted son of Ahmed and Amina.

It is clear that many non-Indian readers find the historical and cultural references in

Midnight's Children demanding; in the close reading of the novel, its ideological features,

and postcolonial literary strategies for understanding Midnight's Children also challenge

some of the prevailing interpretations of the novel.

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Using hybridity, mimicry, national allegory and cosmopolitanism, all key critical concepts

of post-colonial theory, and the concept of ideologies successfully constructed under

political history with allegorical narrative, it can be read as bildungsroman and

psychological study of a burgeoning national consciousness, and as a representation of the

nation, the novel shows that the hybridity of fictional India is not created by different

elements forming a whole but by the relationship between them.

Self, Nation and Text in Midnight's Children also make an original argument about how

nation states are imagined and how national consciousness is formed in the citizen. The

protagonist Saleem Sinai, heroically identifies himself with the state, but this identification

is beaten out of him until, in the end, he sees himself as the common man at the mercy of

the state. This clearly reveals Salman Rushdie’s India to be more self-conscious than many

communal identities based on language. Language constitutes itself to ideologies of

nationalism, patriarchy, mysticism, magic, realism and identity. They are in the India

haunted by a dark twin, Pakistan, a nation in the way England is a nation but imagined

against England. Mistrusting the openness of Tagore's Hindu India, it is both cosmopolitan

and a specific subjective location ideologically-derived.

The initiation of the industrial revolution caused constant change regarding the economic

balance in Europe. The rapid progressions and advancements in industry and economy, had

led most of the European economic appetite to be orientated towards the East, because raw

materials and labour-supply were extremely abundant. This movement was uprooted to the

eastern lands as colonialism, because under the idea of colonization, the imperialist powers

took possession of each eastern country. Furthermore they intended to assert their

sovereignty in various fields, literature being involved in that issue. Literature, the

philosophy, and the ideology were constructed from a European viewpoint, and a European

mentality in examining, commenting and determining they key concepts belonging to

eastern existence. According to this ideology, Europeans are superior to the people of the

East. By association, therefore, Eastern people are inferior, and they are depicted by

western writers and thinkers as “the other”: that simply verifies the “colonial discourse”.

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When the people of the East, disdained by the West, started to gain their independence,

they began to struggle for the ideas which were constructed by European generalization.

Their aim was to reinterprete or to renew the European ideology of colonization. They felt

the need to reorganize their history, literature and culture of their own form and they

reshaped their discourse – the “postcolonial” discourse: this was a total break from, and

response the colonial discourse. The aim of this discourse comprises the exemplifications

regarding the novel Midnight's Children.

Post-colonial studies undoubtedly open a new area of study in the criticism of literature;

when we look at Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back:

“More than three-quarters of the people living in the world today have had their lives shaped by the experience of colonialism. It is easy to see how important this has been in the political and economic spheres, but its general influence on the perpetual frameworks of contemporary peoples is less evident, literature offers one of the most important ways in which these new perceptions are expressed and it is in their writing, and through other arts... that the day to day realities experienced by colonized peoples have been most powerfully encoded and so profoundly influential” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 1995).

Art and literature are the representatives of people’s thoughts and they have a certain

contribution to express their beliefs.

On the contrary of this opinion above, many believe that postcolonial discourses are in

transition. In the first phase they have acquired the omnipotence of “European modality”.

Artists and writers have shown acceptance of the forms of European literary tradition

without any change. In the second phase they have started to figure out this modality to the

subject matter relationship of African life that can also be interpreted as mimicry:

Mimicry is an increasingly important term in postcolonial theory, because it has come to

describe the ambivalent relationship between colonizer and colonized. When colonial

discourse encourages the colonized subject to “mimic” the colonizer, by adopting the

colonizer's cultural habits, assumptions, institutions and values, the result is never a simple

reproduction of those traits. Rather, the result is a “blurred copy” of the colonizer that can

be quite threatening. This is because mimicry is never very far from mockery since it can

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appear to parody, whatever it mimics. Mimicry therefore locates a crack in the certainty in

its control of the behaviour of the colonized" (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 1995: 139)

In the last phase Eastern writers finally formed their own specification, without reference

to European norms. In other word they have avoided putting themselves in the position of

being mocked, as Homi Bhabha described that term; as a consequence of suggestions like

the process by which the colonized subject is reproduced as “almost the same but not

quite”. The copying of the colonizer's culture by means of certain manners, behavior, and

attitudes cover mockery: it is both resemblance and menace as well. Naipaul's “mimic

men” describes this ambivalent relationship, showing the description of the complexity of

mimicry when he describes his landlord:

“I paid Mr. Shylock three guineas a week for a tall, multi-mirrored, book shaped room with a coffin-like wardrobe and for Mr. Shylock, the recipient each week of fifteen times three guineas, the possessor of a mistress and of suits made of cloth so fine I felt I could eat it, I had nothing but admiration... I thought Mr. Shylock looked distinguished like a lawyer or businessman or politician. He had the habit of stroking the lobe of his ear inclining his head to listen, I thought the gesture was attractive; I copied it. I knew of recent events in Europe, they tormented me; and although I was trying to live on seven pound a week I offer Mr. Shylock my fullest, silent compassion” (Naipaul, 1967:7).

This ironic passage uncovers the way in which both hegemony and mimicry are organized.

The potential insurgency of mimicry emerges in this passage. The story- tellers copy the

habits of the landlord but mimic the guilt of a post-war Europe concerning the Jews. This

guilt is like that attached to a cultural familiarity, with the implications of the name

“Shylock” (The Jew who demanded payment of a pound of flesh in Shakespeare’s The

Merchant of Venice). He is encouraged to mimic compassion for those exploiting him.

Although some African novelists are struggling for acceptance in the European tradition,

Homi Bhabha and Chivna Achebe have been able to avoid imitating the English literary

norms. Homi Bhabha, in The Location of Culture talks about this “mimicry”:

“What I have called mimicry is not the familiar exercise of dependent colonial relations through narcissistic identification so that; as Fanon; has observed the blackman stops being an actional person for only the white man can represent his self-esteem. Mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask: it is not what Césaire describes as "colonization thingification" behind which there stands the essence, the “presence Africaine”. The

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meaning of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority! And it is a double vision that is a result of what I have described as the partial representation/recognition of the colonial object.” (Bhabha, 1994:126).

However when we compare Homi Bhabha with Achebe on expressing the ideas through art

Achebe has absorbed in the African of oral tradition, he rejects the European ideology that

the concept of art should be unaccountable. He strongly defends the idea that art should be

in service of man and works of art should have purpose as well as a message. Thus, in all

of his works, Achebe attempts to give a message.

The subject of postcolonial studies covers a very long period. Edward Said claims in

Culture and Imperialism that the division between “us” and “them” has its roots in Greek

thought and it has been the hallmark of the colonialist ideology. According to him, this

division is still valid in today's work. The first characteristic of postcolonial criticism is

being aware of this distinction between "we and they" and the fixation of the non-European

concerning the images of the immoral, the savage and the exotic in colonialist texts. In

most novels written from the viewpoint of European authors, the superiority of Western

culture is highlighted in order preserve the privileged status of the European. On the other

hand non-Europeans are put in a subordinate position in these novels. Moreover; the idea

of inferiority is also imposed upon “the other” through education.

Returning to the objectives of postcolonial criticism, its aim is to destroy and deconstruct

stereotypical images which have been attributed to indigenous people. Literature,

especially fiction, has been widely used to make native people conscious of their

marginalized positions and to subvert the colonialist discourse in the colonial novels. In

this respect the discourse of changing ideology has been eloquently narrated by Michel

Foucault and Ghayatri Spivak concerning the state of marginalized indigenous peoples of

Africa and India.

Ania Loomba discusses Foucault, indicating his three ideas to prove that the existence of

humankind is determined by their own rules of existence. Such thinkers as Marx, Engels

and Althusser influenced Foucault working on the impossibility of being a single entity of

the free subject. He totally rejected the ideological categorization. He defended the idea

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that all human ideologies and all information are the rules belonging to certain

predetermined laws. Therefore there is no free subject, so there is no utterance that had

been organized before. At this moment Foucault proclaims “the death of the author”. This

idea is close to Jackques Derrida’s philosophy of endless pursuit between the referent and

first meaning of the ideology. It is not static thus changeable through time. Michel

Foucault also indicates that anyone who challenges the false ideologies is considered

“mad”. In Birth of the Clinic, Ania Loomba describes Jacques Derrida in “Colonialism and

Post-colonialism” as;

“Derrida read Saussure more radically to suggest that no sign is identical with what it signifies, and there is always a gap between the two. The slippage between words or signs and their meaning is evident in every representation, every utterance. Accordingly, no utterance or text is capable of perfectly conveying its own meaning. But all texts, if analyzed closely enough, or de-constructed, reveal their own instability, and their contradictions”(Loomba,2000:56).

Furthermore, Spivak gives support to dismantling eurocentric ideas from the eastern

ideologies. Leela Ghandi in Postcolonial Theory constituted the ideologies of Foucault,

Derrida and Spivak; and Ghandi tells us from Spivak in accordance to Ghandi, Spivak’s

viewpoint is:

“Where I was first brought up – when I first read Derrida I did not know who he was and I was very interested to see that he was actually dismantling the philosophical tradition from inside, rather than from outside, because of course we were brought up in an education system in India, where the name of the hero of that philosophical system was the universal human being, and we were taught that if we could begin to approach an internationalization of that human beings, then, we could he human. When I saw in France someone was actually trying to dismantle the tradition which told us what would make us human, that seemed rather interesting too” (Gandhi,1998:26,27).

Despite the idea of internationalization for human beings as told by Ghandi, Ashcroft,

Griffiths and Tiffin state the opposite as they suggest on “margins and outside” matter:

“Being on the margin, marginal: the perception and description of experience as “marginal” is a consequence of the binaristic structure of various kinds of dominant discourses, such as patriarchy, imperialism and ethno centrium which imply that certain forms of experience are peripheral. Although the term carries a misleading geometric implication, marginal groups do not necessarily endorse the nation of fixed centre. Structures of power that are described in the terms of “centre” and “margin” operate, in reality, in a complex, diffuse and multifaceted way. The marginal therefore indicates a positionality that is best defined

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in terms of the limitations of a subject's access of power” (Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation, pages 135-136 ).

When we think of the idea of marginality having a relation with the verb “marginalize”

there is created an emotion which contains a trap for those interferences in resistance. It

means power is a branch of centrality, such as can become a progress of the function

belonging to centrality. Replacing the centre rather than de-constructing the binary

structure of centre and margin, which is a primary feature of postcolonial discourse. The

term marginality refers to centrality because it is the centre that creates the condition of

marginality. We may search for who or what the marginal is, we may give spontaneous

replies that imperialism marginalizes, and the colonized people become marginalized. The

fact is that they are neither all marginalized nor always marginalized. Therefore the term

imperialism can not be reduced into a structure because ideas are constantly changing and

reproducing themselves. Marginality reproduces itself within the idea of marginal.

As a conclusion, when we think “colonization” and “post-colonization” as ideological

discourses, it is surely attached to literature to fulfill its deed. Julia Kristeva discusses the

concept of “discourse”, suggesting:

“Each individual has their own malady of the soul which requires an individual discourse in order to articulate it. What analysts should do is help their analysts and, find his/her own discourses in which his/her own emptiness and his/her own out of place become essential elements of a work in progress (1987a: 3809). Discourse has become normalized and standardized and thus meaningless; it can not speak my own experience” (see Kristeva, 1995 a:8). So the analyst is in the business of providing a space of own ness that allows the psyche to reinflate, to be filled with individual meaning. The problem with modern man is his inability to represent himself which 'hinders sensory, sexual and intellectual life' and the psychoanalyst is then asked to restore psychic life and to the speaking entity to live life to its fullest'. The problem, it seems, comes down to emptiness or fullness. To be full is to be content; to be empty is to be hungry for something else. Our psyches are hungry and need nourishment.” (Lechte, 2003: 51).

As far as we can derive from Kristeva's utterance, the nourishment of our hunger seems to

reorganize the ideologies, cultures and history according to our appetite and the

unravelling of these ideologies was attempted by Derrida, Spivak and Foucault However

Salman Rushdie in his novel Midnight's Children tried to show us the main ideologies that

are going to be examined. In this study after the critical and historical approach to the

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reason of postcolonial discourse, comes the concept of ideology. Midnight's Children will

be examined in the first chapter. The target of this paper is to set different ideologies and

comments to construct a variety of expressions coming from different thinkers.

2. CHAPTER I: CRITICAL & HISTORICAL APPROACH

2.1. WHY POSTCOLONIALISM?

Post-Colonialism which is, in the meantime, known as postcolonial theory refers to a set of

theories in philosophy and literature which concerning the legacy of colonial rule. As a

literary theory or critical approach it deals with literature produced in countries that were

once, or are now, colonies of other countries. It may also deal with literature written in or

by citizens of colonizing countries that take colonies or their peoples as its subject matter.

Postcolonial theory became part of the critical canon in the 1970s and many theorists take

Edward Said’s Orientalism as the theory's foundational text.

Post-colonialism deals with many issues for societies that have undergone colonialism: the

dilemmas of developing a “national identity” in the wake of colonial rule; the ways in

which writers from colonized countries attempt to articulate and even celebrate their

cultural identities and reclaim them from the colonizers; the ways knowledge of colonized

people have served the interests of colonizers and how knowledge of subordinate people is

produced and used; and the ways in which the literature of the colonial powers is used to

justify colonialism through the perpetuation of images of the colonized as inferior. The

creation of binary oppositions structure the way we view “other”. In the case of

colonialism, distinctions are made between the, oriental and the westerner.

These distinctions between the oriental and the westerner have been brought to the “issue

of “subaltern” discussed by Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin:

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“The purpose of the Subaltern Studies project was to redress the imbalance created in academic work by a tendency to focus on elites culture in South Asian historiography. Recognizing that subordination can not be understood except in a binary relationship with dominance, the group aimed to examine the subaltern as an objective assessment of the role of the elite and as a critique of elitist interpretations of that role'. The goals of the group stemmed from the belief that the historiography of Indian nationalism” (Ashcroft, 1999: 216-217).

Therefore the problem of “sub-alternity” lies on the fact that subaltern people must

interprete their roles to recognize the imbalance, they must avoid elitist interpretations and

they must focus on the historiography of their own nationalism.

Then they continue to support their beliefs:

“The nation of the subaltern became an issue in post colonial theory when Gayatri Spivak critiqued the assumptions of the subaltern studies group in the essay 'Can Subaltern Speak?" This question, she claims is one that the group must ask. Her first criticism is directed as Gramscian for the autonomy of the subaltern group, which, she says - who concedes the diversity heterogeneity and overlapping nature of subaltern groups can save from its fundamentally essentialist premise. Secondly no methodology for determining or what might constitute this group can avoid this essentialism. The 'People' or ‘the subaltern' is a group defined by its difference from the elite” (Ashcroft, 1999: 218).

Arif Dirlik in Postcolonial Aura says:

“Spivak comments in passing in an interview that "in India people who can think of the three worlds explanation are totally passed off by not being recognized as the center of then on-aligned nations, rather than a "Third World" country. This state of "being pissed off" at categorization as just another third world country is not restricted to Indian intellectuals (and others in India), but could be found in any Third World country.” (Dirlik, 1997:62).

Colonized people responded to the colonial legacy by writing back to the center. This came

about as indigenous people become educated, and began to write their own histories, their

own legacy, using the colonizer's language (English) for their own purposes. Further

attempts at coming up with a single definition of postcolonial theory have proved

controversial, and some writers have strongly criticized the concept, which is embedded in

identity politics.

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As suggested by its name, post-colonialism is about dealing with the legacy of colonialism.

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the most prominent form to date in the cultural realm is

with respect to identity politics and literary studies. Thus, the most common way the term

has been used is in reference to a genre of writing and cultural politics, usually by the

authors from the countries which were previously colonized. All post-colonialist theorists

admit that colonialism continues to affect the former colonies after political independence.

Post-colonialism loosely designates a set of theoretical approaches which focus on the

direct effects and aftermaths of colonization. It also represents an attempt at transcending

the historical definition of its primary object of study toward an extension of the historic

and political notion of “colonizing” to other forms of human exploitation, normalization,

repression and dependency. Post-colonialism forms a composite but powerful intellectual

and critical movement which renews the perception and understanding of modern history,

cultural studies, literary criticism, and political economy.

The purpose of this work is to address the theoretical challenge of its diverse meanings and

uses, and to assess its epistemological significance in the context of the interdisciplinary

construction of contemporary knowledge. The work also will endeavour to examine and

discuss the relevance of the critical methods and strategies of post-colonialism to the praxis

of explanation, education and emancipation in the context of globalization and the notion

of power.

“Colonialism” is a term that critically refers to the political ideologies which legitimated

the invasion, occupation and exploitation of inhabited lands by overwhelming outside

military powers. For the local populations, it implied the forceful elimination of resistance,

the imposition of alien rules, and the parasitic utilization of natural resources including

manpower. This term appeared in the context of Marxism and became a cornerstone in the

discourse of resistance during the 20th century. It was meant to counter the positive

connotations attached to the use of “colonization” understood as a legitimate “civilizing

process” often reinforced by a religious agenda by calling attention to its actual economic

motivations and denouncing its ruthless oppression.

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“Post-colonialism” appeared in the context of decolonization that marked the second half

of the 20th century and has been appropriated by contemporary critical discourse in a wide

range of domains mapped by at least half a dozen disciplines. However, in spite of some

two decades of definitional debates, this term remains a nebulous concept stretching from a

strictly historical definition to the more encompassing and controversial sphere of its

contemporary kin – terms similarly prefixed by a morpheme that indicates temporal

succession while suggesting transcending perspectives (post-structuralism, postmodern and

the like).

Indeed, on the one hand, postcolonial may refer to the status of a land that is no longer

colonized and has regained its political independence (postcolonial India, for example). In

this sense, “post-colonialism” will pertain to the set of features (economic, political, social)

which characterizes these countries and the way in which they negotiate their colonial

heritage, being understood that long periods of forced dependency necessarily had a

profound impact on the social and cultural fabric of these societies (the postcolonial

condition). It may also apply to the former colonizers in as much that both extended

contacts with the alien societies they conquered, and the eventual loss of these profitable

possessions, deeply influenced the course of their economic and cultural evolution.

On the other hand, Post-colonialism may designate, and denounce, the new forms of

economic and cultural oppression that have succeeded modern colonialism, sometimes

called “neo-colonialism”. The term tends to point out that cooperation, assistance,

modernization and the like are in fact new forms of political and cultural domination as

pernicious as the former imperial colonialism or colonial imperialism were: the

devaluation of autochthonous ways of life and their displacement by the ethos of dominant

nations which are technologically more advanced. Obviously, these two senses are

intimately linked but foreground different aspects of a single process: the cultural

homogenization of ever larger areas of the globe.

This process raises several kinds of conceptual and pragmatic problems. One of the most

challenging is to understand the historical conditions in which this new analytical tool

emerged and how it’s epistemological impact transformed policies and practices not only

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in the academic agenda and beyond but also in the management of representation. Crucial

questions in this respect bear upon the source of the authoritative voices, whether they

originate among the former colonizers or the former colonized and using whose discourse,

whether they use the rhetoric of atonement or the rhetoric of resentment, whether they

promote strategies of true empowerment or opportunistic strategies of protracted control.

Another important issue is the extent to which the contemporary notions of colonialism

and post-colonialism can legitimately help to conceptualize all past colonization and their

political, economical and cultural consequences. Are these notions valid for the

epistemological tools to give a better understanding of the past? Do such conceptual

extensions result in defusing the ethical questioning of modern European colonization?

Does postcolonial discourse describe “normal” processes of cultural change through

conquest and domination or does it engage human responsibility in the novel context of

global awareness? Can multi-voiced reassessments of history impact upon the present or is

the critical discourse of post-colonialism a mere epiphenomenon that is a symptom of

broader and deeper interacting forces?

It is well known that the theories written upon deconstruction were firstly initiated by

Derrida, within his study Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.

In his works, structuralism approaches were questioned and post-structuralism foundations

were laid. The crucial fact regarding Derrida is he showed that all the structural elements

of the mind of the westerner created the “center”. This could be also explained as

transcendent structure. It simply means to be within the center or without the center. An

example: God created the world and its presence is called “omnipresence”. This is called

the universal transcendent category which has no physical existence. In this point Derrida

sets a rejection and he claims that the image of the center (it could be either God or

something else) is not subject to the rules of total area (I mean inside and outside).

Furthermore, Derrida showed the existence of binary oppositions where one term is being

promoted above but dependent on its opposite (day or night, bad or good) within these

different ideas and binary oppositions it would be very doubtful to judge by the absence of

meaning. Derrida pointed out the decent ring process which affected literature and the

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other critical theories. It can not be denied that postcolonial theory also belongs to such

theories.

Many critics have contended that postcolonial theory is as old as the term “colonization”

itself. Furthermore, its existence lasted a long period of time before its literary name was

attached to describe it. The name came into being when colonized people, having gained

their independence and having started to express their indignation and to show their

reflections upon the discouraging situations. These are those situations in which they have

been driven into solitude by the colonizers.

When discussing the implementations of the term “postcolonial” it should be kept in mind

that this term was put forward between the years 1980 and 2000 by academics from

universities of the eastern seaboard of the U.S.A. Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin remark:

“It is resonant with all the ambiguity and complexity of the many different cultural experiences it implicate and as the extracts in the reader demonstrate, it addresses all aspects of the colonial process from the beginning of colonial contact.” (Ashcroft,1999: 17).

A complicated and controversial side of postcolonial theory is its field in which certain

critics argue that it is encompassing a large number of ideologies including feminist

tendencies, nationalist structure, minority rights. Consequently, it carries a danger of being

too distant from the essence of the term postcolonial. However these ideologies construct

the fabric of the field of post-colonial theory.

Postcolonial studies are based on historical happenings of European colonial understanding

and actions. Other economic, political and social implications tend to lead post-colonialism

astray and bring complications in which the field of history is completely invisible.

Postcolonial theory is mainly discussed by western thinkers and the discussions held at

western universities. Postcolonial terms are used to represent the ongoing process of

imperial suppressions and change that have been reflected in the societies, their

institutions. It would not be correct to think and make discrimination in a term such as

“Third World”. To consent to such a thing would encourage the fallacy of making

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discrimination; being part of the “Third World” is directly related to the economics of the

underdeveloped.

It is certain that postcolonial theory became the source of many polemics; the main target

to reshuffle and reconstruct the knowledge taken for granted by the commanding mind of

western civilization's heart because its actions, thoughts and concepts are complicit with

the imperial enterprise.

In this respect an attempt has been made to de-construct and re-construct the ideology of

postcolonial terms imposed by western mind. It is simply meaning of marginalization and

dispossession. These opportunities granted for the marginalized ones to declare their

suppressed thoughts and to start most tense discussions in discourses of postcolonial fields.

Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) has proved its rise in the western literary fields with the

effective and sarcastic critical approaches upon the western mind’s constructions of the

Orient. Furthermore, postcolonial theory has been inspired by other thinkers such as the

aforementioned Bhabha and Spivak. As discussed in Said's Orientalism, it is likely the

milestone for the construction of this theory on Michel Foucault’s discourse “Birth of the

Clinic”. According to him the concept of “Orient-Orientalism” was perceived through

previous ideas before constructing the exact utterance. Thus western consciousness shaped

the eastern concept as a one-sided discourse, as Edward Said discusses.

“Western consciousness where flexible positional superiority puts the Western in a whole

series of possible relationship with the Orient without losing hem the relative upper hand”

(Said, 1991:6,7)

In the meantime, Bhabha's project simply contrasts with Said. He argues about the

subjectivities which are in effect as “real”. This contradicts Said’s emphasis on identities as

a result of Orientalism. Bhabha knows the absolute forces such as Orientalism; however he

suggests tools such as “ambivalence” and “hybridity” aiming to explain the heterogeneity

of modern subjectivities. For H. Bhabha’s “absolute forces” Frantz Fanon considers:

“It would seem indeed that for white and black represent the two poles of a world, two poles in perpetual conflict: a genuinely Manichean concept of the word; the

15

word has been spoken, it must be remembered-white or black, that is the question. I am white; that is to say that I possess beauty and virtue, which have never been black. I am the color of day light. I am black; I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment, of my ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he, may, be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo. If I am black, it is not the result of a curse, but it is because, having offered my skin, I have been able to absorb all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a ray of sunlight under the earth” (Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, 1967,44,45).

To this point; I have tried to indicate the influences in the field of study of other sources

and theorists on postcolonial theory, without explaining the reason why it has gained such

a considerable popularity. The formation of empire, the impact of the colonization on the

history of post-colonialism, economy individuality, ideology, subjectivity, identity,

nationalism, patriarchy and religious mysticism are the cultural production of colonized

societies, feminism and post-colonialism and the emergence of marginalized people and

also the state of post-colony in contemporary economic and cultural texts and contexts.

These are some of the topics of my field of thesis.

Displacement and wrong placement without taking into consideration the local traditions

or any ethnic values, poses a problem for a postcolonial critic. Understanding and giving

meaning to the world appropriate to Western values and interests have created an

embarrassing situation and a subordinate status to most postcolonial writers, including

Salman Rushdie, who gives an elaborate explanation of the story of Midnight’s Children as

a postcolonial discourse.

Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, published in 1980, is perhaps the seminal text in

conceiving opinions as to interplay of postmodern and postcolonial theory. The title of the

novel refers to the birth of Saleem Sinai, the novel’s principal narrator, who is born at

midnight, August 15th 1947, the precise date of Indian independence. From this

remarkable coincidence we are immediately drawn to the conclusion that the novel’s

concerns for the new India, and how someone born into this new state interacts with this

postcolonial state. To characterise the novel as one merely concerned with postcolonial

India, and its various machinations, is however a reductive practice. While the novel does

at various times deal with what it is to be Indian, both pre and post 1947, it is a much more

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layered and interesting piece of work. Midnight’s Children’s popularity is such that it was

to be voted twenty-fifth in a poll conducted by The Guardian, listing the hundred best

books of the last century, and was also to receive the Booker Prize in 1981 and the coveted

‘Booker of Bookers’ in 1993.

Why Midnight’s Children is much more than of interest to the reader interested in post-

colonialism, is possibly due to its strong elements of magic realism, a literary device that

goes hand in hand with postmodernism. Perhaps the most notable exponent of magical

realism in literature is the Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose One Hundred

Years of Solitude written in 1967 came to be seen as the standard bearer for the genre.

If we think of post-colonialism as the desire of decolonized communities to search for an

identity, then this appears as a distinctly political objective. The practice of magical

realism with its challenge to conventionally accepted distinctions of genre and its

questioning of reality is applicable to both movements. The element of regionalism in

magical realistic work contests the centrality of the metropolitan text, that is, texts which

are associated with magical realism are often on the periphery binary, as opposed to the

centrality of what are regarded as more conventional metropolitan texts.

Born into a rich Muslim family at midnight, August 15, 1947 – the very instant of India's

independence – Saleem Sinai grows up “handcuffed to history”, believing that the words

with which Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed the new nation’s existence have been especially

addressed to him. He too wants to “build the noble mansion of free India, where all her

children may dwell”; for has not Nehru himself suggested, in a commemorative letter to

“Dear Baby Saleem”, that the boy's life will be “the mirror” of the nation’s? So a

childhood accident to the fictional Saleem leads in Midnight's Children (1981) to the

historical 1957 language riots that ended with the partition of the state of Bombay. What

happens to him happens to his country; what happens to his country happens to him.

Rushdie presents the novel as Saleem's autobiography; the character has written while

working, at the age of thirty, in a Bombay pickle factory, as a defense against the

disintegration of his own body, written in despair at the way his “life has been transmuted

17

into grotesquery by the irruption into it of history”. The book’s title has come in popular

parlance to refer to the generation born around the time of Independence – Rushdie's own

generation and that of Rajiv Gandhi as well, a generation that has known only Indian and

not colonial rule.

2.2. UPON THE CONCEPT OF IDEOLOGY

Literally, ideology means “the science of ideas”. There is no single, universal definition of

that discourse, since it has a wide variety of meanings and is used in different senses by

different people. This concept of ideology was firstly invented and used by the

philosophers of the French Enlightenment.

Terry Eagleton helps us in defining ideology: there are certain contradictions and overlaps

among the definitions. This is not because of the in-adequacies of the definitions but

because ideologies genuinely have these kinds of contradictions and overlaps.

Regarding the process of the production of meanings sings and values in social life, Louis

Althusser's invention of the concept of “Ideological State Apparatuses” explains his theory

of ideology. His first thesis was that “ideology” has no history, since the epistemological

brake is a continuous process, and it is not a determined event. Science and Philosophy

must always struggle against ideology.

Ideology can be attached to particular social groups or classes, the ideas which help to

legitimate a dominant political power, false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant

political powers as well as that discussed by Foucault.

Ideology can be negative and positive or it can be neutral. Napoleon for example, used it in

a negative sense, He attacked the principles of the Enlightenment by calling them

ideologies. This pejorative sense continues in Marx and Engel's works: to them, ideology is

an upside-down version of reality. According to Ania Loomba: on the basis of that

ideology: the relationship of the people to their own worlds is illuminated as upside-down.

The reason for that thought is that the main settled ideologies for a certain society, were

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successfully constructed on purpose to secure some certain class-based advantages and the

reproduction of those ideologies enabled a continuation for workers to work for certain

classes.

Kristeva discusses the concept of idealism thus:

“Kristeva feels she has uncovered the more archaic, deeper, relationship that produces patient, and surfaces from time to time in cultural life: the desire for objection, the hidden voice of agape speaking the language of eros (1982 e:28). It is however, interesting to note that Kristeva's borderline patients almost all are members the lower, middle classes, emblematized by a weak father figure” (Lechte 2003 : 93).

Kristeva's approach to her cultural analysis, in terms of its' method, leaves class considerations aside, although she always mentions such class signs; there is no relevance to detail of the father's job. Beyond her showing the weakness of the paternal function it entails. Hers is genuinely an effort at a synchronic approach. But it is a synchronic of a certain sort: a reduction of historical to mythic time, an attempt to find the totum simul of vision Georges Poulet claim was desired by medieval man. Perhaps we should replay Levi Strauss debate with Sartre if we wish to move synchronic analysis into the world we inhabit, that of written history Barthes (1972) showed us that to reduce any modern phenomenon to myth is to be implicated in the process of ideology. Kristeva has captured, as powerfully and as horribly as it has ever been captured, the ideology of what may (unfortunately) be our rising political class: “the petite bourgeoisie. That she has done so in the belief that she is uncovering an universal psychic structure is only are of the tricks that the unconscious plays, from time to time, o the analyst"

(Lechte, 2003: 94).

Kristeva feels that instead of accepting consensual ideology and moralizing, people need to

know and believe in an “analytic, relentless position” that takes negativity into account.

Writers are her target because they reinvent the political realm, as Ghayatri Spivak points

out the same issue, starting with Walter Benjamin's ideas:

“What we require of the photographer is the ability to give his picture the caption that wrenches it from modish commerce and gives it a revolutionary use value [Gebraushswert] his implicity "bricoling" or tinkering with a continuist nation of use-value (I need not repeat my earlier argument even as he recommends bricolage as cultural practice. This recommendation can be traced from his earliest theory of allegory as the cathexis for (or occupation of) ruins and fragments by the irreducible alterity of time. This is to be found in Deleuze and Gauttari's bold nation of originality unworkable machines. It can be said for Derrida that by positioning citation as original, he has radicalized bricolage as the questioning of all "ideologies of ad equation and legitimacy". These positions are now trickling down into a reckoning with the emergent ideological possibilities of the modern cultural phenomenon within a post-modern political economy” (Spivak, page:128).

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In social studies, a political ideology is a certain ethical set of ideals, principles, doctrines,

myths or symbols of a social movement institution or a class group that explain how

society should work, and offer some political and cultural blueprint for a certain social

ideology.

Regarding the political ideology largely concerns itself with how to allocate power and to

what ends it should be used. It can be a construct of political thought, often defining

political parties and their policy. Studies of the concept of “ideology” itself (rather than

specific ideologies) have been carried out under the name of systematic ideology, that

power and knowledge are the concern of political ideology as Spivak continues:

“How can we use a critical philosophy ethically and politically? If de-construction cannot found a political program Foucault's analysis of power is not a blueprint for resistance, alternative lifestyles, or social justice of what use is a Derrida or a Foucault for doing ethico-political criticism?” (Spivak, The Spivak Reader-Selected works of Ghayatri Spivak, Routledge, page: 141 ).

Political ideologies regard polices of many different aspects of a society, as: economy,

education, criminal law, management of criminals, minors, animals, environment,

immigration, eugenics, race, use of the military, forced nationality and forced religion.

According to Louis Althusser, one might say about true or false descriptions, thoughts and

representations. Yet ideology represents the way a person lives in relation to society, which

is not a question of truth or falsehood. For Althusser, ideology is a system that considers

and constructs people as subjects. It is surely believed that ideology is not representative

reality but it strongly indicates a will, hope or a nostalgia. Concerning combination of itself

with postmodernism, Eagleton says:

“Those who bear the burden of running the system are aware that ideologies are in business

to legitimate what you do, not just to reflect it. They can not simply dispense, with these

high-sounding rationales, not least because a great many people still credit them, indeed

cling them ever more tenaciously as they feel the ground shifting beneath their feet.”

(Ashcroft, 2001:187).

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Furthermore; Bill Ashcroft talks about the interests of ideology, in "Post Colonial

Transformation as it continues:

“Although ideology serves the interests of the ruling classes, it is not static or

unchangeable, and its materiality means that it is also contradictory, fragmentary, and

inconsistent and does not necessary or inevitably blind fold the "interpellated" subject to a

perception of its operations. Ideology itself is rhizomic. The rhizomie explains the very

complex system of opposition and complicity which characterizes the relationship between

post-colonial subjects, and imperial discourse. This field is already fractured,

heterogeneous, ubiquitous. This is why a binary model of resistance can contend with no

more than the myth of power, the myth of the tap root of cultural identity and the "trunk" of

cultural control” (Ashcroft, 2001: 53).

It means that ideology works primarily at the level of the unconscious; its function is to

constitute people as historical subjects equipped for certain tasks in society. It does this by

drawing us into an imaginary relation with the social order, which persuades us that we and

it is centered on, and indispensable to, one another. Ideology is not there by mistake, since

first of all, this relation is more a matter of unconscious feelings and images than of

falsifiable propositions, and secondly, all of this goes on within certain material practices

and institutions, as stated below in “ideological state apparatuses” which are indubitably

true.

Furthermore, according to Gramsci, ideology is one of the elements covered by hegemony.

By ideology, “ruling classes want to secure the consent from their subordinates, to be

ruled.” It is very clear that ideology belongs to this process.

According to Adorno; ideology is a way of thinking, eliminating difference and otherness

at the level of the mind. It is a commodity and an exchange on the basis of materialism. For

Lukacs, ideology is an inheritance, which existed in the historical class.

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There are few words key to the discussion of ideologies: reality, truth and illusion. What

the truth or reality or illusion can change from person to person. There is no single truth

accepted by everybody. There is an interesting example in this regard: Marx and Hegel

defined the opposite of ideologies as the perceiving the truth or reality as it is. However

there should be some claims “to see things as they really are”.

These two definitions are very similar, but the problem is that nobody calls themselves

ideological since it is believed that what people live is the truth itself. Of course, this is

very much true for the negative connotation of the ideology.

Coming to the issue of how the ideology works, ideology is a process rather than a single

event. Its effects and results can be seen over a long period. The effects and results of

reforms have been seen in individuals, institutions and the whole of society.

Simply ideology means a system and thought which enables societies to function. It is

highly possible to make the ideology a discourse with three basic phases.

First of all, ideology is the totality of ideas, on thoughts derived from hegemonic classes,

for to colonize or to govern under the hegemony of subaltern societies, using that weapon,

the aim is to create a "false-consciousness", semi-true argumentative which pushes those

societies to obey those ideas.

In addition to this, the ideology is without a concern for truth or falsehood; it only works

for people to enable them to perceive the world from their own windows. This is the

description of ideology. Furthermore, ideology is the discourse to gather subalterns

together and enable them to collectively move against hegemonic criteria, or a system of

unwanted ideologies implemented by the hegemonic class. This could be described as

positive as well.

Ideology is a madman's dress having been designed for the cognitive power of humanity.

These ideologies are the toys derived from the universe of ideas. And we use them to have

a meaning in our world.

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Implementation of those ideologies, depends on its aim and power of usage upon

authorities. It is not true that every authority or power is oppressive or does not have the

capacity to realize its aims, but it is true that all or some people will only support a power

or authority if there is something in it for them. If the authority or the power in question

makes its subjects believe that it is going to do what it is supposed to do, they put up with

various kinds of difficulties; otherwise, they will question, try to turn it in the right

direction or eventually rebel against it. At this point, I am not in the position of questioning

whether the ideology is capable of doing what it offered; this is beyond the subject of this

thesis. What I will do is to follow Midnight’'s Children and several related topics

concerning ideology and how it has been received.

CHAPTER II: “Midnight’s Children” By Salman RUSHDIE

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2.3. INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVEL

Salman Rushdie's Midnight’s Children can be read as the unfolding of the history of

twentieth century India. There is present in the novel, virtually all of this historical, period

such as the Jallianwalla Buch tragedy, the freedom movement, Muslim belief and its role,

riots, the reorganization of Indian states and language riots, Chinese aggression, the theft of

the sacred relic from Hazratbal mosque, the war with Pakistan and the liberation of

Bangladesh. There are also typically Indian divisions, chaos and disillusionment besides

traditional values and modernizing efforts.

Rushdie places importance upon the constant link between the history of India and the

history of Saleem's family as the essence of the book. The form can also be read as a

family album. As it is clear when we find out that Saleem's uncle Zulfikar, is a Pakistani

general who helps General Ayub Khan with the pre-planned military takeover of 1958.

Saleem himself triggers off one of the worst language riots in Bombay; his mother was

first married Sheikh Abdullah's right-hand man; the disappearance of the Prophet's Heir is

related to his grandfather. Furthermore, Saleem belongs to an extremely peculiar group of

1,001 children born during the very first night of India's independence, on 15th August

1947. Thus Saleem becomes an authentic representative of India; he becomes an India.

Salman Rushdie wrote a novel out of the coming of age and historical genres, The novel’s

narrator is Saleem Sinai. And the point of view of the novel is from that of the first person,

and in a few instances, Saleem addresses himself in the third person. The novel’s tone is

ironic, satirical, and hallucinatorily fantastic. The setting is established as between 1915

and 1977, which is indicative of the places of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The major

conflict of the novel is Salem Sinai’s birth at the moment of India’s independence from

British rule, and his search for his true identity and home in a time when the nation is

largely divided along lines of religion, language and politics. The rising action is when

Saleem discovers his ability to hear “others” thoughts; Saleem forms the Midnight’s

Children’s Conference. As the climax, a silver spittoon hits Saleem on the back of the head

resulting in loss of memory represents the falling action. After traveling in the jungle for an

unknown period of time, Saleem eventually returns to India. In soothsaying, the general

24

theme is the relationship between personal life and history; and the fragmentations of

identity cover the concept of ideologies having been derived from the novel as well.

Rushdie is absolutely convinced that there is a very close connection between public

affairs and private lives that causes people to search the probable ideologies inside this

matter. These connections between private life and public “politic” affairs are

interpenetrated and that is how the writer needs to examine them; the one in the context of

the other. Does Rushdie view the historical process? Should this process be conceived?

What does he do with these narratives? Does he use history to serve any political purpose?

If yes, which purpose? Actually we don’t hear in the novel only Saleem's version of history

and his interpretation of it. We indirectly hear some others’ too. So each mode of history

belongs to a certain soil and only to that; in any other it grows into a devastating weed. In

Rushdie's novel he depicts Saleem's struggle to present his critical history as a counter-

narrative to, and a critical commentary on the “official” history of Indira Gandhi's

government and nostalgic histories of British Imperialism. And specifically, as Rushdie

never fails to remind us, is the establishment of an authoritarian structure which says is to

teach the rich Indians how to rule over a multitudinous Indian society, and to preserve the

structure of the ideology of authority. What Rushdie draws over Saleem's eyes is the state

of inability to acknowledge the existence of any culture other than his own. Everything

architecturally, including the names of the buildings, directs us to understand the

simultaneous desire to impose historical European paradigms on the Indian landscape and

consciousness.

Rushdie strongly criticizes the Widow - Indra Gandhi, who is the monumental mode of

history and her emergency policy in 1975, which led to brutal violations of human rights in

India. Saleem's narrative is one way of denying the official politicians’ version of truth. It

expresses the “new myth of freedom” and is an act of resistance. At the same time it is the

search for the validity of the Indo-British legacy in modern India. Where as all developing

nations have emerged from their colonial past, economics, religion and culture are all

consumed by the great law of polities. The novel shows the problem of culture and identity

constructed over ideology in terms of polities and morality, leading Saleem Sinai to seek

25

his identity in terms of connections and places outside the chronological framework of

Indo-British history; in the primeval time of India’s villages.

The relationship between personal life and history in Midnight’s Children explores the

ways in which the history is given meaning through the telling of the individual experience

of the main character, Saleem Sinai, born on the day on which India gained independence

from Britain. His life becomes directly linked to national, religious and political issues of

his time. It will be insufficient to say that Saleem is only experiencing and expressing his

observations by involvement in the actions themselves. Furthermore, he tells how his

private life has turned to public, from the beginning of his conception. Briefly, Rushdie has

related Saleem’s story to the generation of Indians with which he was born and raised.

Rushdie enables the reader to piece together from Saleem Sinai's narrative to derive the

meaning out of it, because the narrative turns back and forth in time. Though the

contribution of illusions is inevitable, it is a puzzle for the reader to solve to understand

Saleem's life, as there is a similarity between the characters in the novel, and their search

for self-definition in their attempts to solve the puzzle of their own identities.

For example, Aadam Aziz has familiarity with Naseem Ghani, who will one day become

his wife, through a white perforated sheet. Aadam might move the hole in the sheet to

observe any given area. In this way Aadam pieces together a puzzle of Naseem's

appearance.

The power of fragmentation of the structure of ideologies also applies to nations, especially

to India. The fragmentation of the large British colonial territory into Pakistan, India and

Bangladesh, whose cultural, religious, political and linguistic traditions, as it is presented,

is gigantically complex. So that India’s early days as an independent nation were fraught

with division and strife. Rushdie draws a comparison between India's struggles with its

neighboring peoples and Saleem's struggles with various family members and with the

other members of the Midnight’s Children club. He also shows Saleem's fragmentation

through his actual physical mutilations, both on the school playground and under the

doctor’s knife.

26

Rushdie is also using metaphorical allusions to fragmentation or deconstruction that show

the loss of a sense of identity. What constitutes the chief agent of “deconstruction” in the

novel, however, is its narrative mode and tone. Admittedly, the very fact that everything is

transmitted to us through a single narrator, omnipresent and obtrusive, makes for a kind of

unity. And even the a-chronological and fragmentary nature of what he tells us lends a kind

of authenticity to its disorderly inclusiveness. This effect is magnified, moreover, by the

presence of Padma, from whose naive existence on “what is going to be next”, all

sophisticated readers clearly dissociate.

But no one can say that Saleem is one of literature’s unreliable narrators. He openly

acknowledges misdating Gandhi's death and the election of 1957. Furthermore, for his

metaphorical allusions, Rushdie describes both Aadam Aziz and Saleem Sinai as

possessing a void or a hole in their centers as a result of their uncertainty of God's

existence. On their last day, Rushdie describes “cracking” and eventual deconstruction of

their exteriors.

Midnight’s Children actually constitutes the plot and the characters coherent with the

political chronicles of India. It can be clearly seen that the novel from the personal

perspective starts in 1915, thirty-two years before the birth of Saleem Sinai and ends just as

he is about to turn thirty-one. It actually spans about sixty-three years, with Saleem’s and

India’s birth as the center.

In addition, the national perspective gives us the novel from the end of the First World War

to the independence of India (15th August 1947), to the lifting of Emergency Rule (1977).

Furthermore, this situation is also seen as an allegorical heritage: the multiple heritages that

Saleem has many fathers, Methwold, Wee Willie Winkie, Ahmed Sinai, and mothers,

Amina, Mary, and all the nannies.

Actually in the political chronicles of the novel, it can not be denied, that the influence of

the colonizers are important, especially Methwold who is the actual father of Saleem.

When we closely examine the time line between the family history and the national

(politic) history the parallels and connections are indicated below.

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When the world war has ended, the time zone brings us upon the relationship between Aziz

and Naseem. In 1915, when the massacre at Jallianwalla Bagh in Amristar takes place, the

novel opens, and Saleem’s skin cracks when telling this story to the reader. In short, from

1942 to Mian Abdullah’s 1945 revelation and arrest constitute the cracks in the earth and

Saleem’s mother’s false marriage. In 1946, the story narrates the relation between Mumtaz

(Amina) and Ahmed. When politics interfere, as the transition of power from British

imperialism, we see in the novel that William Methwold’s residents have also changed.

When we come to independence from British rule, we see the birth of midnight’s children.

After that, there is the confusion of the 1956 elections and the language marchers, strongly

constituting confusion in Saleem Sinai's head. Also, the political aspect of the

businessman turned white, in 1956, and the linguistic reorganization of states started, it

constitutes the washing chest accident in the novel. In 1957, the language marchers

concoct the circus ring accident and Saleem Sinai triggers the violence that leads to state

partition. The 1957, election in which the communist party won a large number of seats, is

also important to the novel.

These are a combination of family and national history, because history, by cutting the

parts from the political chronicle of India as Rushdie tells, he adapts these parts to his

story. In fact the misguided concern for the past in Midnight’s Children is extremely

important regarding the overview of the novel.

Rushdie's invention, Saleem Sinai, has an absolutely self-proclaimed and overpowering

desire to tell his story. In bringing meaning to the reader coherent with family, political

events located in both the past and the future, Saleem approaches the project by ordering

everything in his past into neat, causal relationships, with each event a result of what

preceded it. While he is frequently skeptical of the true order of the past, he never doubts

its eminence; he is certain that everybody is hand-fed the history. As Saleem says:

“And the darkness engulfed us; she guided us through that nightmare pit in which light was

kept in shackles and bar-fetters that place outside time, that negation of history...”(Rushdie,

1995: 454).

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His belief in the preeminence of the past, though, is slightly different than the reality of

time for the Saleem who emerges from that part of the novel. It is truly called an event that

includes someone recounting something. Saleem is motivated to act not by the past, but

instead by the uncertainty and ambiguity of the future. Saleem's construction of his own

story is an effort to mitigate the lack of control he feels in looking toward the unknown

future. To pacify himself, he creates a world that is ordered but this world is contrary to his

own reality.

Saleem spends much of his energy in the story setting up neat causal relationships between

events in his past to demonstrate his place at the middle of things as he carefully narrates

his tumble into the middle of a parade for the partition of Bombay and then proceeds to

propose his feeling to be responsible for triggering off the violence that has ended with the

partition of the state of Bombay. At one point he asks himself to go so far as his need to be

prepared to distort everything to rewrite the whole history of his times to put himself in the

central role.

However, while he might doubt his most overt reordering of the past, he is never skeptical

of the past’s monolithic effect on its future. Saleem assembles the first book to demonstrate

the breadth of his inheritance. Because he believes the fact that the past is the vein of the

future: in order to understand the activity, you need to look no further than the past. His

belief and has him as “his answer1 rather than the answer itself, leads Saleem to write his

autobiography to demonstrate the way each event is the result of “everything that had gone

before”. As intended, we come to see characters as the product not of any forward moment,

but as a product of what has already come.

But Saleem indeed, being a creation of Rushdie, is explicable in very different terms; he is

undoubtedly shaped by the past, but the primary motivating factor is his actions regarding

the uncertainty of the future. This motivation falls into two broad categories: firstly, he

wants to impress Padma and his son with his life story, explaining the fact that this was

what kept him going – he had hold on to Padma, he admits, he needs to be loved and by

his ability, carefully impressed Padma with his worth. It can not be denied that he needs to

be loved, rather than the love attesting to the uncertainty of this venture.

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The uncertainty and anxiety are exaggerated when Padma leaves him for a spell shortly

after her departure, and he laments that he was feeling confusion in her absence and his

certainties were falling apart. The life, defined by numerous exiles forced by his parents,

and Saleem's uncertainty about any relationship is sorely felt.

Saleem's other motivation for acting and acting quickly is his desire to finish the story

before his life ends! In the first page he says:

“Now, however, time (having no further use for me) is running out. I will soon be thirty one years old. Perhaps if my crumbling, over-used body permits. But I have no hope saving my life, nor can I count on having even a thousand nights and a night. I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if am to end up meaning - yes, meaning - something. I admit it above all things, I fear absurdity” (Rushdie, 1995: 9).

The ambiguity and uncertainty of the future is also what forces him into his hopeful belief

about the importance of the past. He desires meaning in his life, it is a concordance, and its

combined meaning comes from an imaginatively recorded past and imaginatively predicted

future having been achieved on behalf of somebody who remains in the center. But Saleem

Sinai is too aware of the uncertainty of the future to predict anything but his own death,

and realizes when young that he can have no control over the India’s future, and finally

Saleem understands that he also cannot have control over his own. So instead of looking

backward with the understanding of even if everything is pre-planned, it is natural for him

to turn to that part of his life that he can control, rather than that which he cannot. The

construction of the story seems an effort to persuade everyone, including Saleem himself,

that things really planned, even his birthday really did endow him with meaning. While

there is a clue of incredulity toward the idea that everything is pre-planned in advance, he

never backs down from the idea that they are all “handcuffed to the past” rather than

dragged into an uncertain future as explained from the beginning of the novel:

“I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country for the next three decades, there was to be no escape, Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity I was left entirely without a say in the matter”(Rushdie, 1995: 9).

30

The author-created consciousness of Saleem, the only one that is visible from the inside,

shows Saleem’s efforts to his own suggestions this draws a portrayal of man looking

backward. It can not be denied that having contained signs pointing to what happened later

tends to eliminate side shadows, meaning the openness and the ambiguity of the future.

This is what we see through Saleem now. Side shadows are an integral element of the

texture as life itself. When creating Saleem now in this way, Rushdie indicates the idea that

person or ideas are like a coffee-cup whose bottom you don't see unless you have not

drunk. It is the uncertainty of the future that pushes man to act.

The meaning of “concordance” indicates to the reader the past and an imagining of the

future. On the other hand, Rushdie's work focuses on the portrayal of the future and the

idea of apocalypse. His emphasis on the future rather than the past seems an implicit

speech about the ease which order is found in the past. In his creation of Saleem Sinai,

Rushdie seems to agree with the vitality of the future in defining the individual, and by

juxtaposing this reality with the temporality that Saleem hopes for, Rushdie exposes the

temporal myth that a too-strong desire of reordering the past and imagining of the future

through the ideologies that will be examined in the third chapter of this work.

2.3.1 Magical Realism

Magical Realism is usually characterized by fantastic literature and it is remembered by its

magical functions. For a viewpoint magic realism is a creating power which bewitches the

human being and reality. This technique is used in many of the novels of Gabriel Garcia

Marques and fantastic literature. According to Marques; magic realism is formed by myths,

magic, extraordinary events, unique life habits of Latin America and also experiences

which are excluded by European reality (Gümüş, 2005).

The term Magical Realism was used for the first time in an essay by J.S. Alexis.

Alexis sought to reconcile the arguments of post war, radical intellectuals in favors of

social realism as a tool for revolutionary social representation with recognition that in many

post colonial societies a peasant, pre industrial population had its imaginative life rooted in

a living tradition of the mythic, the legendary and the magical. The term became

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popularized when it was employed to characterize the work of South Africa writers widely

translated into English and other languages such as Gabriel Garcia Marques (Ashcroft,

Griffiths and Tiffin, 1999: 132).

Since the groundbreaking study Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community edited by

Zamora and Wendy Faris, magical realism’s influences may be traced throughout the 20th

century and especially in German and Spanish modernism (http://www.janushead.org/5-

2/editorial.pdf, 20.12.2007).

Magical realism is also accepted as a fusion between physical and psychological human

reality.

As an international style magical realism has characterized the work of novelists writing

about nations in transition to modernization, such as Ngugi wa Th’iongo, Abdelkebir

Khatibi, Ben Okri; Salman Rushdie, the most prominent of these, has called them “half-

made” societies, in which the impossibly old struggles against the appallingly new.

According to Kamau Brathwaile; magical realism is

“Simply a legba or lemba or limbo experience: the sudden or apparently sudden discovery of threshold or Watergate into what seems ‘new’ because it is very ancient…where the ‘real’ since it has entered continuum, holding within its great whell all the tenses – past, present and future – no longer in so – call chronological tension, but like the computer, w/ ‘random’ access memory form all or any of the time compass, becomes magical because w/ this access of what I repeat is a kind of blindness, we found ourselves in a capacity of trans – limitless, erasure of expectant boundaries into mineral or plant or zemi or lwa or angel or other” (http://www.janushead.org/5-2/editorial.pdf, 20.12.2007).

In fact magical realist writers, thinking they could not represent the events in a discourse

of realism, invented the continuum to present the truth and subvert it with astounding

events. But in its challenge against the realist conventions magic realism does not totally

dent the power of realism; in textual terms it also employs features of realism in order to

subvert them from within the conventions.

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Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, which is one of the prominent examples of Eastern

literature, is one of the most illustrious of Rushdie’s works. The book includes magical and

mystical stories within the story in addition to its oral storytelling narration. Supernatural

incidents and heroes may be found in all tales within the book. On the other hand, the

protagonist of Midnight’s Children is an unreliable narrator. He makes mistakes

concerning the chronological order of events. This kind of story may be found in all the

tales within the book. Arabian Nights is, perhaps, the origin of the eastern fairy tales. With

a synchronized narration, Scheherazade tells a great number of enchanted events.

Midnight’s Children epitomize this kind of writing. There is no direct access to the reality:

it consists of other realities. The writer uses Hindu myths to question the truth about the

realities of India.

In fact the multiculturalism of India, Rushdie’s homeland, stands out as the main reason

why he was influenced by both eastern and western literatures. India, the cradle of many

different ethnic groups and cultural diversity is a profound inspiration for Rushdie, being

acquainted with Indian mythology, Sikhism, Buddhism and other religions. As

aforementioned, Eastern Literature’s fundamental example, Arabian Nights is, certainly,

one of the most illustrious books in Rushdie’s world and one of the most renowned

characteristics of this book is its many magical and mystical stories within the story, in

addition to its oral storytelling narration.

In Midnight’s Children, as previously indicated, there are many examples of magic

realism. In the novel there is no direct access to reality. It consists of other realities. The

writer uses cinema and Hindu myth to question the reality of the country. Patricia Merivale

also supports the view that Midnight’s Children has characteristics of magic realism.

According to her:

“In its multiplied fantasies, its introduction of the supernatural into the everyday, its hauntings and its traffic of the dead its characters fatally crushed by their obsessions and above all in its apocalyptic vision of the extinction of a family from the earth, it is indeed a most Marquesan book and its magic is largely a Marquesan magic.” (http://www.janushead.org/5-2/editorial.pdf, 20.12.2007)

The novel starts with Saleem’s introduction of himself:

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“I was born in the city of Bombay…once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there is no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No it’s important to be more…On the stroke of midnight as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence I tumbled forth into the world” (Merivale,1994: 77).

However, Saleem is actually born only after a considerable part of the narrative is over.

Until his birth, he narrates the story of his family, starting with the meeting of his

grandmother and his grandfather in 1915 and building up the events that follow until 1947,

continuing his narration thereafter until 1977. Therefore although Saleem is the

protagonist, his role as the narrator is also fore-grounded.

Derived from a history as it is remembered by the narrator, the story becomes only one

version of many possible versions of how the past is reconstructed in the present. This

process is likened by Saleem to the “chutnification of history; the grand hope of the

pickling of time”. As Saleem makes evident, each chapter in the novel is likened to a

pickle jar and the narrator tightly closes the lids one by one as he finishes the chapters,

each of which contains “special blends, each with its identifying label, neatly inscribed”

The novel creates an illusion of reality by representing people or places which are

historically verifiable. However what they do is displacement in the sense that they do not

present themselves as novels but as biography, autobiography or memoir, and above all as

documentary history. Midnight’s Children epitomizes such thought. Rushdie presents the

novel as Saleem’s autobiography: one the characters has written while working at the age

of thirty, in a Bombay pickle factory written as a defense against the disintegration of his

own body written in despair at the way his life has been transmuted into grotesquery by the

irruption into history.

Mythical allusions are included in Midnight’s Children too. For example, at the beginning

of the chapter entitled “Alpha and Omega”, Saleem thinks he has named this episode

“somewhat oddly” and considers alternative titles, although he ends up leaving it as it is.

His possible alternatives include “From Monkey to Rhesus” and “in a more allusive style-

“The Gander” a reference obviously to the mythical bird, the hamsa or parahamsa, symbol

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of the ability to live in two worlds, the physical and the spiritual, the worlds of air of

flight” (Merivale,1994: 223).

Even thought Saleem regards this mythical reference as obvious he feels the need to

explain the allusion he has made for purposes of clarification.

One of the most important areas in Midnight’s Children in the use of magic realism is that

only family members show the great supernatural incidents except midnight’s children.

Saleem’s grandmother, Naseem Aziz, the Reverend Mother symbolizing India, is

portrayed as a traditional Indian woman who dedicates her life to her family. Saleem

inherits his magical powers from his adopted grandparents. Her supernatural gift is to see

what somebody dreams. She understands what they think in their dreams:

“She eavesdropped on her daughter’s dreams, just to know what they were up to. Yes, there’s no other explanation, stranger things have been known to happen in this country of ours, just pick up any newspaper and see the daily titbits recounting miracles in this village or that - Reverend Mother began to dream her daughter’s dreams…She eavesdropped on her daughter’s dreams, just to know what they were up to” (Merivale,1994: 55).

As other example, it has to be explained that Dr. Aadam Aziz’s nose is characterized as

having magical powers. He has an ability to envisage what happens. For instance on a

pitch-black day for India, the Amritsar massacre on April 6th, 1919 when over three

hundred people were shot and thousands of people were badly injured, both of them feel

something;

“Naseem – now Naseem Aziz – had a sharp headache; it was the first time she’d ever repeated an illness, but life outside her quiet valley had come as something of a shock to her. There was a jug of fresh lime water by her bed, emptying rapidly. Aziz stood at the window, inhaling the city. The spire of the golden temple gleamed in the sun. But his nose itched: something was not right here” (Merivale,1994: 32).

Similarly, after both Saleem and independent India were born, the baby Saleem does not

blink for a while. This implies that this child will show unnatural incidents one day. His

mother says to Mary Pereira “look, baap-re-baap! Look, madam! See, Mary! The little

chap never blinks!” (Merivale,1994: 168,169). This not blinking symbolizes India,

resembling a child who wants to discover the real world for himself, because India gains

35

her independence in the year Saleem was born, and the country does not know who its

enemies or friends are. India, like Saleem, tries to find out.

Rushdie's principle use of magic realism in the text involves the telepathic abilities of

Saleem and the other children. We can also find magic realism in Saleem Sinai’s gift. His

gift occurs when he is ten years old. Saleem’s great gift is that he is able to communicate

with the other midnight’s children. He starts to listen to his family and friends to

understand what they think:

“But I mustn’t get ahead of myself. In the beginning, before I broke through to more-than-telepathy, I contented myself listening; and soon I was able to ‘tune’ my inner ear to those voices which I could understand; nor was it long before I picked out, from the throng, the voices of my own family; and of Mary Pereira; and of friends, classmates, teachers. In the street, I learned how to identify the midstream of passing strangers- the laws of Doppler shift continued to operate in these paranormal realms and the voices grew and dimished as the strangers passed” (Merivale,1994: 168,169).

Another important thing for Saleem is that he uses his nose to smell all kinds of things in

Pakistan without hesitating, instead of his telepathic ability. He loses his gift in Pakistan.

Being a soldier, he would be a man-dog. He finds the important soldiers by sniffing their

possessions.

“...as a result, I had a tendency not to feign innocence when someone broke wind – which landed me in a certain amount of parental trouble; more important, however, was my nasal freedom to inhale a very great deal more than the scents of purely physical origin with which the rest of he human race has chosen to be content” (Merivale,1994: 307).

“…only when I was sure of my mastery of physical scent did I move on to those other aromas which only I could smell: the perfumes of emotions and all the thousand and one drives which make us human” (Merivale,1994: 317).

The groups of midnight’s children include, for example, twin sisters who had “the ability

of making every man who saw them fall hopelessly and often suicidally in love with them”

(Merivale, 1994: 235). a boy “who had the ability of stepping into mirrors and reemerging

through any reflective surface in the land”, a girl “with the gift of multiplying fish”, others

with the ability to transform themselves, whether it be their size or their sex, a boy “who

36

could eat metal and a girl whose fingers were so green that she could grow prize

aubergines in the that desert” (Merivale,1994: 237).

There exists, however a hierarchy in the “Midnight Miracle”, because the children’s

abilities decline dramatically on the basis of distance of their time of birth from midnight.

According to this hierarchy, the most significant of all the magically gifted child Saleem

Sinai, who not only has an extra sensitive nose – a legacy from his grandfather – but also

telepathic powers and he is at times called Snotnosei Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and

Piece of the Moon. What makes him different from the other one thousand children is that

he was born precisely at the stroke of midnight and his birth was celebrated in the

newspaper as well as by a personal letters from Jawaharial Nehru, the first Prime Minister

of independent India.

One of the most important characters in Midnight’s Children is Brass Monkey, that is, the

singer Jamila whom Saleem adores. After Saleem discovers that Brass Monkey is not his

biological sister, he starts loving her and he will confess his love to her. In her childhood

she burns the shoes. Her magical gift is to communicate with the animals. According to

Saleem, he refuses to talk to dogs after a dog charged at her. “From birds she learned how

to sing; from cats she learned a form of dangerous independence”. (Merivale,1994: 151).

Learning how to sing from birds, Brass Monkey becomes Pakistan’s most popular singer

behind the sheet. There are five hundred and eighty-one midnight’s children left. Those

who were born on India’s Independence Day have the magical powers. These are some of

the examples below

“ (one of midnight’s children) in the town of Baud, on the Mahanadi river in Orissa, there was a pair of twin sisters who were already a legend in the region, because despite their impressive plainness they both possessed the ability of making every man who saw them fall hopelessly and often suicidally in love with them,..”(Merivale,1994: 196).

As aforementioned, one important focal point in Midnight’s Children is that Rushdie uses

the techniques of magical realism as a combination of magic and historical reality.

According to the book one thousand and one midnight’s children were born on August

15th 1947 on the stroke of midnight including Saleem and his alter ego Shiva. This is an

37

allegory which symbolizes that India’s independence is magical, because the Europeans

give the Indians an opportunity to present themselves as a country. However, the fact that

the midnight’s children’s magical gifts have been taken by Indian Prime Minister Indira

Gandhi is a symbol that India rejects the opportunity given by the British. Also Saleem’s

last visit to Mary Pereira proves that to be a developed country you have got to work

together with Europeans. Correspondingly, Rushdie refers to Arabian Nights in his non-

allegoric and magical passages. For example “Lila’s thousand and one infidelities …”

(Merivale,1994:30). and “Plenty of children invent imaginary friends; but a thousand and

one! That’s just crazy!” (Merivale,1994: 211).

These examples of magic realism in Midnight’s Children combine magic and reality. To

sum up, Saleem uses magic for his allegories. He uses magic realism for the symbols,

metaphors and satire. Magical events or incidents are the signs of Rushdie’s allegory.

“Thus Midnight’s Children is commonly read as a national allegory giving imaginative

form to India and its history. His imagination is so comprehensive that not only does it

contain Indian history but also it includes all Indian culture.” On the other hand, it is a

magic-realist novel in that the writer uses Magical Realism in order to undermine the

dominant Western paradigm that equated truth with fact and imagination with falsehood.

In so doing, Rushdie creates liminal spaces for the articulation of alternative visions.

2.4. ABOUT SALMAN RUSHDIE

Rushdie's ontological task, as a writer, is to find that middle ground, to mark one's own

position from which to address the forces of desire and seduction that are manifest in terms

like post coloniality and so on. The idea of post-colonialism is the product, I believe of

modernity and dropping the prefix “post”. It stems from man's need to systematize, in

order to apprehend the world.

This apprehension was shown by Ayatollah Khomeini who as the supreme leader of Iran

damned The Satanic Verses. However Rushdie's attempt was to reconstruct the logo of

religion. If it is argued that “on a different layer, it continues that post-colonialism is still

the product and the proof of that continuity, it merely suggests modern man, like Descartes

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has theorized reality into existence. The experience of the ordinary post-colonial man

transcends theory and describes as “un-articulately” and “un-nameable””. Homi Bhabha of

course, would agree that this is so called Hybrid Other, the being in liminal space, the

product of a confined space. The hybrid nature of the liminal man is subject to the

“technologies of domination and definition” to echo Foucault. Yet Frantz Fanon,

Martinician psychoanalyst and participant in the Algerian revolution, finds in this “defined

space an agency of empowerment.” He argues that the locale of hybridity is a creative

locale, one that tries to rise like the phoenix out of the flames of political categorization

(the post-coloniality). This is Rushdie's strength. He screams to be taken as a writer, as a

human being as a thinker, but we constantly push him back to fit our neat little systems.

Another of our systems is little literature, governed by liberal capital called “Neo

Liberalism” Paul Gilroy in “Black Atlantic” has made a statement on this issue by

advertising Rushdie:

“It seems especially significant that the cultural expressions which these music allow us to map out do not seek to exclude problems of inequality or to make the achievement of racial justice an exclusively abstract matter. Their grounded ethics offers, among other things, a continuous commentary on the systematic and pervasive relations of domination that supply its condition of existence. Their grounded aesthetics is never separated off, into an autonomous realm where familiar political rules cannot be applied and where, as Salman Rushdie memorably puts it “the little room of literature” can continue to enjoy its special privileges as a heroic resource for the well-heeled adversaries of liberal capitalism” (Gilroy, 1993: 38).

Salman Rushdie is an Anglo-Indian novelist who uses in his works tales from various

genres – fantasy, mythology, religion and the oral tradition. Rushdie's technique has

connected his books to magic realism. Salman Rushdie was condemned to death by the

former Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeini on February 14, 1989 after publishing

The Satanic Verses.

Rushdie was born in Bombay, India into a middle-class family. His paternal grandfather

was an Urdu poet, his father a Cambridge-educated businessman, At the age of fourteen

Rushdie was sent to rugby school to England. In 1964, Rushdie's family moved to

Pakistan, joining reluctantly the Muslim exodus-during the war years between India and

Pakistan, and choosing of sides and divided loyalties burdened Rushdie heavily.

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Rushdie continued his studies at King’s College, Cambridge, where he read history. As a

novelist, Salman Rushdie made his debut with Grimus in 1975. His next novel, my main

concern, Midnight's Children (1981) won the Booker Prize and brought him international

fame. It was written in exuberant style, the comic allegory of Indian history revolves

around the lives of the narrator Saleem Sinai and the one thousand other children born after

the declaration of independence. All of the children are given some magical properties.

Saleem has a very large nose which grants him the ability to see “into the hearts and minds

of men.” His chief rival is Shiva, who has the power of war. Saleem, dying in a pickle

factory near Bombay, tells his tragic stand with special interest in its comical aspects. The

work aroused a great deal of controversy in India, because of an unflattering campaign.

Midnight’s Children took its title from Nehru’s speech delivered at the stroke of midnight,

14th August 1947, as India gained its independence from Britain.

While most of Rushdie’s works have been generally admired for their fusion of myth,

history and politics, others have praised Rushdie’s exuberant narrative and his far-ranging

thematic development of alienation, exile, political strife, and the dehumanizing effects of

popular culture. His scathing indictment of American society has garnered a mixed critical

reaction, and some commentators have traced the further development of this attitude in

essays and fiction toward America after the terrorist attacks on September 11th 2001.

Bill Ashcroft in his book Post-Colonial Transformation states on Rushdie:

“In Salman Rushdie's other novels, alchemical symbolism and illusion, which may be more difficult to discern, might seem of minor importance. Explicit alchemical motifs are often peripheral. For example, it is of subordinate significance in Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children that one of the midnight children makes gold and that another one is said to be a true adept (a common term in alchemy), who has, furthermore, a therapeutical elixir that cures illness and rejuvenates the narrative. Of greater importance is the alchemical evolution of metals to which the narrator alludes in "Shame", where a medallion of gold, contrary to the alchemical development of metals, turns into lead. This process illuminates Rushdie's reversed use of traditions in the novel Implicit alchemical themes are totally integrated in the aesthetic structure of Midnight's Children” (Ashcroft, 2001: 187).

These alchemic and mythical senses are described by Leela Gandhi in Post Colonial

Theory as colonial aftermath:

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“The colonial aftermath is marked by the range of ambivalent cultural moods and formations which accompany periods of transition and translation. It is, in the first place, a celebrated moment of arrival-charged with the rhetoric of indipendance and the creative euphoria of self-invention. This is the spirit with which Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children' initially describes the almost mythical sense of incarnation which attaches to the coincidence of his birth and that of the new Indian nation on the momentous stroke of the midnight hour on 15 August 1947: 'For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity' (Rushdie 1982, p.9)Predictably and as Rushdie's Indian Everyman, Salee Sinai, ultimately recognizes, the colonial aftermath is also fraught by the anxieties and fears of failure which attend the need to satisfy the historical burden of expectation. In Sinai's words “I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning yes, meaning - something I admit it: above al things, I fear absurdity” (Rushdie 1982, p.9). To a large extent, Saleem Sinai's obsessive 'creativity' and semantic protrusion is fuelled by his apprehension that the heritors of the colonial aftermath must in some sense instantiate a totally new world. Saleem Sinai tumble into independent India is, after all, framed by the cropping optimism of Nehru's legendary narration of post-colonialism: “A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new; when an age ends; and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance...” (Ghandi, 1998: 5-6).

In the preceding chapter an attempt was made to postulate the colonial encounter as an

adversarial confrontation between two competing nationalisms. Colonialism was the

energy of European nationalism. The history of decolonization was articulated through the

resistant counter-energies of anti-colonial nationalism. Ghandi concedes the positive role

of anti-colonial nationalisms in mobilizing and organizing the aspirations of oppressed and

colonized peoples the world over.

Gandhi continues, on Salman Rushdie;

“Salman Rushdie sheds light on this necessity in a wonderful moment of betrayal and re-conciliation in Midnight's Children when the anti-hero and narrator, Saleem Sinai, reveals the cultural miscegenation and com misrecognition of his celebrated birth. Early in the nave and at the same time as Amina Sinai struggles to produce child in Dr. Narlikar's Nursing Home, a poor woman called Vanita suffers a neglected labour in the 'charity ward'. The child she is about to bear is the unexpected consequence of an affair with an Englishman, William Methwold, who boasts direct descent from a particularly imperialistic East India Company officer. Who the children are finally delivered, a somewhat crazed mid wife called Mary Pereira switches Amina's and Vanita's babies around. Thus, Saleem Sinai, hailed by Nehru himself as the child of independent India, is really the son of a reluctantly departing colonizer. But this accident, as the adult Saleem insists, is the allegorical condition of all those who inherit the colonial aftermath: 'In fact, all over the new India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were only partially the of spring of

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their parents (Rushdie, 1982, p.118). In his digressive self-narrative; Saleem Sinai simultaneously refuses the guilt of unauthenticated and the desire to withhold the knowledge of his flowed genealogy. The Sinai’s, we are told, eventually reconcile themselves to the fact of Methwold's bloodline, namely, to the hybrid inadequacy of their own post-colonial. As Saleem explains: When we eventually discovered the crime of Mary Pereira, we all found that it made no difference! I was still their son: they remained my parents. In a kind of collective failure of imagination, we learned that we simply could not think our way out of our pasts... (Rushdie, 1982, p.118). We might modify this narrative wisdom slightly to say that perhaps, the only way out is by thinking, rigorously, about our past.” (Ghandi, 1998: 8-9).

Through the parallelism between the political history and the events in Midnight's Children

was given again by Leela Ghandi as follows:

“We acquire a new perspective on Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" whereby the navel's textual plenitude compensates for its author's view of India's political and historical impoverishment. The novel, white concedes, offers an uncompromising and 'Pessimistic perspective about India' (p.237) - an account of nationalist failure and historical 'grotesquery". But, in his words, 'one other reality, the teeming inventiveness of consciousness and henced of narration, constantly lightens that burden, which would other wise be intolerable' (p.237). Not withstanding the stunted historicity of the Indian nation, we can still gain solace from the fact that India is 'equally embodied in ... the positive growth of the text' (p.237). So, where Bhabha permits writings to prefigure the 'social', white gives it the licence to disfigure political realities Rushdie's narration is volorised at the cost of the world he narrates. After Midnight's Children, we may rest assured that India is not solely (in the old cliche) a teeming begetter of people but, also a begetter of teeming narrative” (Ghandi, 1998: 157,158). Rushdie insists on cross-bending his analogues to untidy archetypal stories; Abraham for

instance, does time as God, as Lucifer, and as his son-sacrificing namesake.

However, Rushdie remains faithful to the structure of the archetypes. This is part of what

makes him great writer. If he simply contented himself with the easy pleasures of atheism

and mockery his subversions would amount to their own form of orthodoxy, a stance no

less stifling and lifeless than the religious fanaticism he habitually takes to his tragi-comic

woodshed But Rushdie's irrevence co-habits with genuinely religious (thought hardly

pious) cast of mind. If the religion is the source of fatwa and the bloodlettings and

hypocrisy, it is also the source of the planet's greatest stories. And Rushdie a story teller

above all else, can not resist their allure or deny their power. Accordingly, he appropriates

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the archetypes and tropes of sacred stories and renders them profare, and all of these

tropes, the most insistent is the idea of revelation.

Rushdie always combined high art with gaudy jags. He utilizes his linguistic brilliance to

cover a formidable allusive range that is likely to evoke Bugs Bunny as Othello, as willing

to plunder The Wizard of Oz as Paradise Lost.

He is capable of writing passages with the richness and density of Shakespeare, as Homi

Bhabha indicates as below;

“Handsworth Songs; Rushdie's tropicalized London, grotesquely renamed Ellowen Deeowen in the migrant's mimicry: it is the city that the migrants, the minorities, the diasporic come to change the history of the nation. If I have suggested that the people emerge in the finitude of the nation, making the liminary of cultural identity, producing the double-edged discourse a social territories and temporalities, then in the West, and increasingly else where, it is the city which provides the escape in which emergent identifications and new social movements of the people are played out. It is shared that, in our time, the perplexity of the living is most acutely experienced” (Bhabha,1994:243).

Rushdie is capable of writing passages with the richness and density of Shakespeare and

just as likely to plunge, suddenly and with a cackle, into the manic pleasures of a Looney

Toon.

Rushdie doesn't sell artistic purity, the clear water of Aristotelian drama or the seamless,

sustained psychological portraits of modernism. He throws in the kitchen sink. More than

in his previous novels, he has succeeded in wedding his many tongued method to a

passionate phrasing of his vision of a radical, chaotic pluralism in all things.

Furthermore, Elleke Boehmer discusses Rushdie and his novel as follows:

“As this might suggest, post independence narrative also has the capacity to establish new metaphors of nation hood: not only to re-write history, but to create and to frame defining symbols for the purposes of imagining the nation. For instance Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981) comprises a medley of images and stories drawn from Indian myth, legend, film, history, bazaar culture, and conventions of pickle making, images which separately and together are made to correlate with national self-perceptions. There are so many stories to tell comments the narrator and hero, Saleem Sinai "too many such an

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excess of inter twined, lives events miracles place rumours. India itself; as the novel makes clear, is an excess By implication therefore, almost without our realizing it a first, Midnight's Children itself develops into a complex figure for the plenitude of India.” (Boehmer, 1995: 198-199).

Due to the negotiations regarding the reality and the reality itself in Rushdie's novel, it can

be easily explained the it was partly a convention, formed to describe reality that no longer

exists because the world has changed, when we read nineteenth century realists, they seem

to be quite appropriate. They seem to be describing the world in which they live. When

you use the same techniques about the twentieth century they seem not to be appropriate.

The world has changed, so form must change too. One of the lessons of the twentieth

century seems to be that human beings are not discrete from each other. This is what Freud

started. We all know this and they, those of the nineteenth century, didn't know. And so

they could pretend that all human begins were apart from each other, interacted, and then

went their separate ways. For example, in Midnight's Children there is the image of people

leaking into each other like flavors when you cook. There are all kinds of leakages in that

book. One bit story leaks into other stories. I think that was an attempt to go some way

towards creating a post-Freudian form.

It is questionable that Midnight’s Children is deeply concerned with history yet it is a far

cry from traditional historical novels of the sort; the role or the conception of history in

Rushdie’s writings can be explained as he does not think of it as a particularly historical

novel. His view is that a country which has so many people in it also has a very large

number of versions of the truth in it has no use to insist on; the correct thing is to make a

coherent vision which is at the same time coherent but also suspect, which is what a

memoir would be.

Rushdie's view, as he stated is that he would be writing about history, to bring back the

past as if it had not been away. I think he believed that the filter of memory would be

removed, so one could get to what it was like if you did not have the distortions of the

filter, and then he became much more interested in the filter, and thought why try and

pretend there is something back there; this is what there is. So I think Midnight's Children

becomes a book about the nature of memory. History has been constructed in that way.

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In conclusion, regarding Rushdie's novel, one of the strange things about how personality

cults dominate is that they seem antithetical to Indian tradition. In fact it is being wondered

if this was a point that Salman Rushdie was making in Midnight's Children. One thing that

makes the widow really evil is that she sets herself up as Sole God, as monotheist deity and

challenges, of course, the whole pantheon in doing what of course it is true, as when

Saleem in the Widow's Hostel where he has a discussion. The trouble with Hindu

philosophy and why it is applicable to that is that although in theory there is a vast

pantheon, they are actually all one or two. She is Devi, she is also Lakshmi, Parvati and

Uma. She was the mother goodness. Also coming into the issue that what Saleem wants to

be, is striking. Writers and politicians are natural rivals because they fight for the same

territory, reality, to make it in their image. Writers do it by sitting at their desks and

scribbling, and politicians do it for real. But that is why they aver so bitterly, because they

are doing the anime things from Rushdie’s perspective.

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3. CHAPTER III MAIN IDEOLOGIES:

3.1. NATIONALISM

“Nationalism is a political creed that underlines the cohesion of modern societies and legitimizes their claim to authority. It centers the supreme loyalty of the overwhelming majority of the people upon the nation state; either existing or desired. The nation state is regarded not only as the ideal, natural or formal form of political organization, but also as the indispensable framework for all social, cultural and economic activities. Yet nationalism and the nation state are comparatively recent historical development.” (Kohn, 1978: 148).

“We and they”, is the oldest separation in the history of humanity, converted into

nationalism in the age of nation states and ideologies. Nationalism which became more

effective in the world during the last two centuries entered as a phenomenon in European

history. And it spread to the world with the French Revolution. The principle of self-

determination established the nation states, and they became state models of the modern

age. Also the influence of nationalism has been felt more and more in the whole world in

recent years. Even though the global economy or socio-cultural convergence is increasing,

the members of the nation, which is an “established” togetherness, are being obliged to

defend themselves more each day. While doing this, they may also exclude the different

groups among themselves.

A nation can be defined as a political and social unity formed by citizens who are tied to

each other by a common language, culture and ideas. In this sense nationalism can be

defined as a doctrine that holds a nation together in terms of ethnicity and culture. In

Midnight’s Children there are some nationalistic patterns.

The novel begins the protagonist Saleem’s and India’s story, which he insists are bound

together, with his grandfather Aadam Aziz. Aadam has studied in Germany and returns to

his country only to find his new knowledge and modern ways greeted with both skepticism

and contempt by the ancient boatman Tai, a historian who scorns the very idea of progress.

Aziz departs from Kashmir for Amritsar where after witnessing the massacre of peaceful

demonstrators protesting British occupation, Adam becomes an Indian. Thus Saleem

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begins his tale of the birth of the nation at the moment when the modern Aadam becomes

conscious that he is Indian. This beginning is complicated by Saleem’s discovery of both

his own, and his nation’s origin.

Sinai discovers his identity first of all during childhood. These ideas would be accepted as

the first signs of his nationalist opinions.

“In India, we’ve always been vulnerable to Europeans. Evie had only been with us a matter

of weeks and already I was being sucked into a grotesque mimicry of European literature.”

(Rushdie,1995: 185)

According to Schürer, the midnight children have some nationalistic elements. Our

protagonist is a nationalist in some ways. For him:

“In Midnight’s Children, Saleem’s loyalties are similarly divided as he moves from British colony to India and Pakistan to Bangladesh. It is never clear what really makes each nation distinct and why there should be any emotional connection between the individual and his or her place of residence. Right after independence, Saleem is particularly apply to any other country as well” (Schürer, 2005: 46–47).

On the other hand Su explains his ideas are as follows:

“Rushdie makes Saleem's unreliable, fragmentary narration a counter-narrative that contests the linear national narrative and “denies the official, politicians' version of the truth”, thereby destabilizing the authority of the national narrative. Saleem's unreliable narration, consequently, is not a mere mimetic representation of a childlike self-centredness. Instead, his distortion and re-imagination of the pre-colonial and post-Independence Indian history offer alternative interpretations. This “heteroglossia” creates a polyphony that subverts the arbitrariness of the official history and “disperse[s] the homogeneous, visual time of the horizontal society”. It implies an intentional deconstruction of a nationalist discourse that sees the many as one and justifies Said's observations on how secular interpretations reflect the composite formation of the modern nation” ( Su, 2000: 72).

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3.2. SYMBOLISM

Artists have always made use of symbols in their works to express what they want to say.

But the use of the symbols consciously as a way of expressing ideas has been seen

especially in the art and literature of the first half of the twentieth century. Then symbolism

began to be used as a way of expressing ideas.

Symbolism came into being gradually after having gained a certain structure and achieved

its maturity and then began to be called as a movement like all other movements in art. In

fact reasons which gave to symbolism are various. Symbolism was based on the concept of

reality of Romanticism. But by this time reality could not be only based on imagination

and human emotions, the artist should unite the visible facts with the products of his

imagination and intuition to create an imaginative inner reality in order to reach the

ultimate truth. Symbolists aimed at reflecting the ideal truth and beauty. Their main means

to reflect the ideal beauty were symbols, art, mythology and the spiritual beauty. Their

reality was the reality behind the visible facts which could be conceived by reason,

intellect and intuition. In other words the symbolists intend to transcend the visible

externals to reach the ultimate reality.

In the Wordsworth Companion to Literature, the symbol is defined as follows:

“The symbol…draws together different words usually tangible and intangible into a unity

that purports to be more real than either. It tends to be less precise than a sign and more pretentious than a simile…The symbol may be thought of as a metaphor that purports to be more than merely metaphorical. In practice this means that metaphors apparently having a number of referents and an indefinite reverberation having a number of referents and an indefinite reverberation of suggestions tend to be distinguished as symbols. Thus Blake’s “The Sick Rose” seems to be a rose, a vulva, jealous and corruption at least, but rather than inviting translation into any or all these, it offers itself as a complex unity of which they are all inseparable parts” (Ousby, 1992: 905).

Symbols are often classified as being traditional, original or private depending on the

source of associations that provide their meanings. Traditional symbols are those whose

associations are the common property of a society or a culture and are so widely

recognized and accepted that they can be said to be almost universal. The symbolic

associations that generally accompany the moon and the sun, night and day, the colors

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black, white and red are examples of traditional symbols. In fact the identifications and

understanding of literary symbols require a great deal from the reader. They demand

awareness and intelligence: an ability to detect when the emphasis an author places on

certain elements within the work can be legitimately said to carry those elements to larger,

symbolic overtones and when the author implies nothing beyond what is literally stated.

They also make demands on the reader’s maturity and sophistication for only when we are

sufficiently experienced with the world will the literal and concrete strike an appropriate

symbolic chord. If we have not had the occasion to think much about life, it is not likely

that we will able to detect the larger hidden meaning to which symbols point. What the

reader gets from a symbol depends not only upon what the author has put into it, but upon

the reader’s sensitivity and his consequent apprehension of what is there.

As a writer who believes in the potency of symbols and images, Rushdie has been turned

to account symbolism in his works. For this reason we can find many important patterns of

symbolism in Midnight’s Children.

Dr. Aadam Aziz is a “Europe-returned chappy” (Rushdie,1995: 23) “he was educated as a

doctor in Germany, but he could not have got there if not for the British Empire. He is a

product of empire as well as a witness to its break-up. As all characters in Midnight’s

Children, Aadam Aziz symbolizes the sub-continental India. He comes from a traditional

and poor Muslim family. Unlike Forster’s Dr. Aziz, he has a long and big nose evoking the

Hindu elephant-headed Ganesha. In addition to that, he has “a big hole in him”

(Rushdie,1995: 10) after hitting his nose on the ground. This weakens his beliefs. Blue-

eyed Aziz resembles the imperialist European Methwold, from whom his son-in-law

Ahmed Sinai bought Buckingham Villa. Methwold has also blue eyes and a long nose

which implies French nobility. Cyrano De Bergerac is the protagonist of Edmond Rostand

who has a big nose. These are all Dr. Aziz’s characteristics. On the other hand, Dr. Aadam

Aziz plays the male European role in Midnight’s Children. After marrying Naseem Aziz,

he wants her to wear a shorter dress or accompany him when he takes a breath of fresh air.

However, her objection or even her silent action against Dr. Aziz reminds the reader of

Mahatma Gandhi who declared war against Britain with nonviolent actions.

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I suppose the Reverend Mother’s cry “”deep deep shame!” is considerably important

because it is a revolt against the British. She also symbolizes the Bharat Mata, that is,

Mother India. Her silent strike against Dr. Aadam Aziz is, in fact, a strike against Europe.

When she stays in her daughter’s house, she never sits on the couch recounting that she

falls into it. She is against anything European. Saleem’s mothers are also important

characters in the novel. To fulfill the requirements of being Indian, Saleem has very

different mothers. Saleem’s biological mother is Wee Willie Winkie’s wife Vanita. As an

ordinary traditional Hindu woman, Vanita is abused by Methwold who is “irresistible to

women, who felt unable to prevent themselves wanting to rumple it up…” (Rushdie,1995:

95).

Saleem’s mother Vanita alludes to the people of that time who can not resist anything done

by the British. Similarly, another one of Saleem’s mothers is Mary Pereira. Rushdie

augments an English mother in order so that India cannot be thought of without the

colonialist English. Mary Pereira is the nurse of both Saleem and Shiva, the biological

child of Mr. and Mrs. Sinai in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home. When they are born, she

swaps these two children “giving the poor baby a life of privilege and condemning the

rich-born child to accordions and poverty…” (Rushdie, 1995: 117). She does the changing

for his beloved Joseph De Costa, “her own private revolutionary act”. (Rushdie, 1995:

117). However, she is filled with remorse for this action and stays with Sinai’s family to

look after him.

Pereira symbolizes an India which can not live without England. Another main character in

the novel is Mumtaz or Amina Sinai. After divorcing Nadir Khan, she marries divorced

Ahmed Sinai. In addition to Hindu and Christian mothers, Saleem also possesses a Muslim

mother. So she completes one of the most crowded ethnic groups in India. However, India

consisting of many ethnic groups has three major branches, Hindu, Muslim and Christian.

Rushdie’s characters allude to one of these ethnic groups.

Rushdie also uses this repeated type of narration in Midnight’s Children. For example, the

first character introduced to the reader is his supposed ancestor Dr. Aadam Sinai. Saleem’s

son’s name is Aadam Sinai as well. However, Dr. Aziz’s biological grandchild Shiva is the

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real father of Aadam Aziz. Saleem adopts this child by virtue of his debt to Shiva. This is a

commendable metaphor because Dr. Aziz’s big nose symbolizes India; Shiva, grown up in

a Muslim family, alludes to Pakistan. However, Rushdie needs a child that symbolizes

Bangladesh, which was founded on 16th December 1972. That child is, certainly, Aadam

Aziz, the son of Shiva and Parvati. He has long ears, completing the elephant-headed

Ganesha as well as Dr. Aziz and Saleem’s big noses. These leitmotifs allude to the

inseparability of India. As Saleem’s own life represents the history of his homeland India,

his family, certainly, shows the whole of the Indian subcontinent. For example, as

aforementioned, the fact that his grandfather sees his wife Naseem Aziz behind the

perforated sheet is a symbol India can not be understood by only one part. Another

example is Dr. Aziz’s nose like his grandchild Saleem’s nose symbolizing the god Ganesh.

Rushdie uses the Sinai family to represent sub continental India in its entirety as well as

Saleem.

One of the most important things in the novel is mothers’ names. Amina is the name of the

Islamic prophet Muhammad’s mother’s name. Correspondingly, Mary is the Christian

prophet Jesus’ mother’s name. Both look after Saleem. They share the responsibilities of

Saleem’s growing up. Saleem never sees the differences between them. These names are

religious leitmotifs of Midnight’s Children. I think Rushdie also wants to show the variety

of Indian society because India has a multi-religious society including Buddhism,

Christianity, Islam and Sikhism.

As aforementioned, like one thousand and one other children, Saleem was born at the

stroke of midnight when India gained her Independence on 15th August 1947. The

president Jawaharlal Nehru writes a letter to the Sinai family celebrating the birth of

Saleem concerning the fact that his growing up is just like his homeland India’s. His life

reflects the history of India from his birth to adulthood, his growing up shows what India is

and how Indian policies go.

On the other hand the cultural heritage of India and Saleem’s memory are represented by a

silver inkpot. Saleem provides his relationship to his past by this silver inkpot. Wherever

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he goes, he brings this inkpot with him. When Saleem loses this inkpot he loses a

connection to his country.

As a different symbolic factor, India is very positively portrayed by the effect of being

independent. As Saleem has been witness to his mother’s special behavior in a clothes

basket, he contacts the one thousand other children telepathically and becomes a radio. All

children have special abilities: they represent new ideas, new dreams of India. While

Saleem works for restructuring and programming for development in the country by the

midnight’s children, the war god Shiva opposes and pulls down. These two opposite ideas,

represented by Saleem and Shiva, continually fight.

Saleem and Shiva can be accepted as two Indian war gods – as Brahma and Shiva.

According to legend, Brahma created the world when Shiva rested. Shiva became angry as

Brahma created the world. Saleem represents a creative, founder and gathering

personality; Shiva represents a destructive personality. Saleem and Shiva represent the

fight between creative and destructive personalities in India.

On the other hand another important character in Midnight’s Children is Shiva. Saleem’s

alter ego Shiva represents India’s little brother Pakistan. The word “Pakistan” was put

forward by Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Viceroy Lord Mountbatten in June 1947. Pakistan

was founded on 14th August 1947 just one day before India’s Independence Day.

Shiva is a midnight’s child whose biological parents are Ahmed and Amina Sinai. Being

the son of a Muslim family, he grows up under Hindu culture. His ceaseless fight against

Saleem is between Pakistan and India. Moreover, in terms of Hindu beliefs, Shiva is the

god of Reproduction and Destruction. Both situations can be found in Shiva’s character.

The fact that Shiva murders prostitutes is his part of destruction and that he fathered many

children proves his reproductive ability. Shiva's child is brought up by Saleem. In fact,

Saleem adopts Shiva’s child as a token of his gratitude for Mary’s swapping. Also as

aforementioned, Shiva’s child is symbolic of Bangladesh while Shiva is Pakistan and

Saleem is India. Furthermore, Bangladesh was founded in 1974 in which Parvati gave

birth.

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According to Schürer Midnight’s Children symbolizes a part of the relationship between

reality and fiction. For Rushdie reality is not simply the hard facts visible in the world;

rather it is also the “metaphorical content” that can be found there (i.e., the ideas,

thoughts, concepts, theories, programs, hopes and dreams that human beings have).

Schürer explains that Saleem already tries to dissect the relationship between his life and

the nation – which might as well be fiction and reality – but he only comes up with a

schematic series of adjectives (Schürer,2005: 43–44).

To sum up, as aforementioned, Saleem’s own life represents the history of his homeland

India; his family certainly, shows the whole subcontinent of India. For example, the fact

that his grandfather sees his wife Naseem Aziz behind the perforated sheet is a symbol

that India can not be understood by only one part. Another example is Dr. Aziz’s nose like

his grandchild Saleem’s nose, symbolizing the god Ganesh. Rushdie uses the Sinai family

as representative of the entire subcontinent of India as well as Saleem.

3.3. ORIENT AND OCCIDENT RELATIONSHIP UNDER ORIENTALISM

Orientalism, which can be broadly defined as the body of practices, institutions and

manners destined to produce, circulate and disseminate knowledge of the Orient, had to

wait until Edward Said to receive its first extensive critical attention.

The hegemony of the West lay in its ability to control the means of communication and to

impose definitions of otherness on non-Europeans and to ensure that they perceived

themselves in the language of the dominant. Europe’s mastery over the non-European

rested very much on intellectual mastery by which the Orient in particular was constructed

as an abject of knowledge.

Said in his well known study examined the development of Orientalist discourse via his

meticulous analysis of primarily British and French scholarly studies and artworks on and

about the Orient from the seventeenth the nineteenth century, to the media images and area

studies of the twentieth. Despite numerous reworking, further contributions, important

reformulations and affirmative criticisms that follow the path his work has opened, his

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analysis still holds invaluable critical value and provides many starting points for any

further discussion of Orientalism. Three of them will be briefly mentioned, since they

actually constitute my starting point. First is the broad definition of Orientalism given by

Said in the introduction as “style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological

distinction made between the ‘Orient’ and ‘the Occident’” (Said,1991: 2). This ontological

and epistemological distinction brings the Orient as an object of knowledge and thereby

constitutes the identity of the West by this primary differentiation and objectification. This

clarifies what Said means by saying that “the Orient is Orientalized”:

“A group of people living on a few acres of land will set up boundaries between their land and its immediate surroundings and the territory beyond, which they call “the land of the barbarians.” In other words, this universal practice of designating in one’s mind a familiar space beyond “ours” which is “theirs” is a way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary. I use the word “arbitrary” here because imaginative geography of the “our land- barbarian land” variety does not require that the barbarians acknowledge the distinction. It is enough for “us” to set up these boundaries in our minds; “they” become “they” accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designates as different from “ours”.” (Said,1991: 54).

With this definition, we may also avoid the futile effort of distinguishing what the real

Orient is, since places called “Orient” only come into being by taking the proper form and

name. Briefly, the hegemony of the West consisted in its ability to control the means of

communication to impose definitions of otherness on non-Europeans and to ensure that

they perceived themselves in the language of the dominant. Thus in other words, the

innovation of the Orient offered Europe a means of finding its own identity in the world of

modernity. The West was what the Orient was not.

In fact, Said shows the distinction between the East and the West in the orientalist way of

thinking. In this context Orientalism could be read as an attempt to extend the geographical

and historical terrain for the poststructuralist discontent with Western epistemology. It

argues that in order to fully understand the emergence of the West as a structure and a

system we have to recognize that the colonized Orient has helped to define Europe as its

contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. (Said,1991: 1,2).

For Ania Loomba, orientalism can be said to inaugurate a new kind of study of

colonialism. He argues: representations of the orient in Europe literary texts, travelogues

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and other writings contributed to a creation of a dichotomy between Europe and it’s others,

a dichotomy that was central to the creation of European culture as well as to the

maintenance and extension of European hegemony over other lands. Said’s project is to

show how knowledge about non Europeans was part of the process of maintaining power

over them, thus the status of knowledge is demystified, and the lines between the

ideological and the objective blurred (Loomba, 2002: 44–45).

From another viewpoint Orientalism is a political process involving disclosed and secret

relations of domination. This may have occurred between two different geographies. In

addition to this, there are historical conditions which rather emerged as a result of domestic

social process. Thus it would be a necessity to investigate non- Western societies’

modernization processes. To facilitate this Midnight’s Children is a novel suitable for

approaching the reality of colonialism.

Viewed from this perspective, Saleem could be regarded as “othering” Shiva, a process

associated with the colonial period, during which the colonizers/Westerners defined their

colonized subjects/Easterners as Other; leading in turn to the application of Orientalism.

As Said argues, “the Orient has helped to define the West as its contrasting image, idea,

personality, experience” and therefore the Occident cannot be fully defined without its

other, the Orient.

When this approach is applied to the case of Saleem and Shiva, the interpretation become

problematic: does Saleem need Shiva, his “other” in order to come to terms with who he

is? Like the colonizer, then Saleem becomes dependent on his “arch-rival”, Shiva, if he is

to end up meaning – yes meaning – something. Inevitably then the process of “othering”

becomes a crucial element in the structuring of the colonial discourse, which in turn raises

the question of why Salman Rushdie through Saleem. Sinai would employ a colonial

discourse in a postcolonial context. The synthesis of Saleem and Shiva through their shared

son, Aadam, also builds on Said’s argument that the West needs its Eastern Other in order

to come a fuller more meaningful definition of itself.

55

In fact the problem of postcolonial identity, though most prominently represented through

Saleem and Shiva is also characterized through Saleem’s parents. His father Ahmed Sinai

is one of the first Indians to suffer from a “pigmentation disorder” afflicting “the nation’s

business community”. As Saleem describes it:

“All over India I stumbled across good Indian businessmen, (…) businessmen who had become or were becoming very, very pale indeed! It seems that the gargantuan (even heroic) efforts involved in taking over from the British and becoming masters of their own destined had drained the color from their cheeks…in which case, my father was a late victim of a widespread though generally unremarked phenomenon. The businessmen of India were turning white” (Rushdie, 1995: 179).

On the other hand, when Saleem’s grandmother Amina is examined by the doctor Aaadam

Aziz her father insists that she be examined under a sheet to protect her body from Aziz’s

eyes and when Aziz asks him how he is to examine her without looking at her, he says:

“You will kindly specify which portion of my daughter it is necessary to inspect. I will then issue her with my instructions to place the required segment against that hole which you see there. And so in this fashion the thing may be achieved.” (Rushdie, 1995: 23).

The idea that Amina has to be examined with a perforated sheet on her may seem

ridiculous. But it is important in scrutinizing the idea of how she is distorted and

fragmented to be let seen by Adaam Aziz. If her body is taken as a symbol for the East and

Aadam as the West, then it would be convenient to explain the situation as such that the

East can only be seen through a perforated sheet by the West. Just like Aadam’s vision is

controlled by the frame given to him, so the understanding of the East is distorted.

3.4. POST COLONIAL RULE AND BRITISH COLONIZATION

The experience of colonialism has shaped most of the today’s world. It has been effective

both in political and economic spheres. As Said points out, European imperialism in the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries has had an extraordinarily global reach which has a

continuing effect on almost the whole world and there is almost no North American,

African, European, Latin American, Indian, Caribbean, and Australian individual who was

56

not affected by the past empires (Said,1991: 6). This effect is carried over into perceptions

of the present and the future.

Colonization, which can be referred as colonialism too, means briefly the establishment of

a settler colony. The duty of the imperial power is to reproduce itself in the colonial

society, and to enhance the civilization of the colony in trade, administration, and cultural

and moral assets which came to be known as “the white man’s burden”. In fact colonialists

wanted to impose the will of one people on another and to use the resources of the imposed

people for the advantage of the imposers. Colonization means the political and economic

domination of one state over the territory and population of another. The colonist empires

changed not only the people but also the culture in which they lived and defined the world.

The changes and desires of the Empire have been dictated to the colonial mass through a

form of linguistic device named colonial discourse.

As the root of colonialism, it will be helpful to explain the meanings of colony and

colonial. Colony is to govern other countries or nations and force them to obey the rules of

the colonizing country. Colonial is anything that belongs to or concerns the colony. Here it

is not important to be the governor or the governed to be colonial; both colonizer and

colonized are regarded as colonials.

Colonialism in literature supports colonization. There have been many colonizing countries

and, as a result of this, many colonized countries. When we glance at the history of the

world, it is apparent that most of the colonizing countries are European countries such as

Britain, Spain, The Netherlands and France. Several African countries, Algeria, Kenya and

Somalia, and South Asian countries, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, are the main

colonized countries.

Colonialism and imperialism are often used interchangeably. The word colonialism,

according to the Oxford English Dictionary, comes from “colonia” which meant farm or

settlement and referred to Romans who settled in other lands but still retained their

citizenship. Accordingly the dictionary describes it as:

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“a settlement in a new country…a body of people who settle in a new locality, forming a community subject to or connected with their parent state, the community so formed, consisting of the original settlers and descendants and successors as long as the connection with the parent state is kept up” (Loomba, 2002: 1)

Loomba takes a stance on the contrary asserting that “the process of forming a community

in the new land necessarily meant unforming or re-forming the communities that existed

there already, and involved a wide range of practices including trade, plunder, negotiation,

warfare, genocide, enslavement and rebellions.” (Loomba, 2002: 2) That is to say, both the

colonizer and the colonized are affected by the act of colonization and gain new features as

a result of the colonial encounter and interaction.

“The term colonialism is important in defining the specific form of cultural exploitation that developed with the expansion of Europe over the last 400 years. Although many earlier civilizations had colonies and although they perceived their relations with them to be one of a central imperium in relation to a periphery of provincial, marginal and barbarian cultures, a number of crucial factors entered into the construction of the post-Renaissance practices of imperialism. Edward Said offers the following distinction: imperialism means the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory; colonialism which is almost a consequence of imperialism is the implanting of settlement on distant territory” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 1995: 46)

Indeed the West has always been certain that its presence overseas greatly affected the

“natives” even to the degree that common opinion came to be that the colonials

immediately tried to adopt Western ways and values. The idea has occupied the Western

mind for a long time, yet it was mostly disregarded that the colonizers might in their turn

be affected by the cultures they encountered. First of all, colonization of underdeveloped

countries caused a lot changes in life: governmental, linguistic, educational and farming

systems being the most important ones.

According to many critics, postcolonial theory is as old as colonization itself and it existed

a long time before this particular name was given to describe it. It came into being when

colonized people expressed their indignation and reflected upon the discouraging situation

they had been driven into by the colonizers.

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The meaning of the term “post colonial” is restrictive considering the variety of subject and

issues postcolonial theory undertakes to tackle. Judging from the problems that newly-

independent countries face such as development of new elites, neo-colonial institutions,

international division based on racial, linguistic or religious discriminations, the unequal

treatment of indigenous peoples in settler/invader societies, we may say that colonialism

and resistance didn’t only belong to the past – they still preoccupy us today.

Because of her colonial interest, Britain changed and shaped the life and history of the

colonized, and consequently colonial issues were introduced into English literature,

especially in the early twentieth century, and today there has emerged what is commonly

called colonial and postcolonial literature. The Empire provided English writers with a

variety of themes and topics such as unfamiliar people and places, different customs and

traditions and feelings of loneliness and dislocation in foreign land, and allowed the writers

to consider and examine their own countrymen and values. Colonial literature was mainly

produced during the time of the Empire by European writers, and it is about colonial

perceptions of experience, life and society. It only presented the point of view of the

colonizer and showed the colonized to be inferior to their master and incapable of

governing their land.

Edward Said’s Orientalism marked its rise in Western academia with the influential

critique of Western construction of the Orient in 1978. The appearance of The Empire

Writes Back by Bill Ashcroft et al (1989) consolidated the position of postcolonial studies

occupying the place of Commonwealth and Third World which were used to describe the

literature of Europe’s former colonies.

As pointed out by Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin; postcolonial literatures have developed

through several stages corresponding to two stages. The first one is regional or national

consciousness, while the second stage is the project of asserting difference from the

imperial center.

As I have already mentioned, Said’s Orientalism was perhaps the foundation stone in the

construction of postcolonial theory as a reworking of Foucault’s discourse analysis.

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Orientalism and the Orient were perceived through Western consciousness where flexible

positional superiority, puts the Western in a whole series of possible relationships with the

Orient without losing him the relative upper hand. Homi Bhabha too has played an

important role in changing perspective on colonial discourse. Principally influenced by

Lacanian psychoanalyses and Derrida’s methods of deconstruction, he has sought to

emphasize position of subjectivity in terms of location and psyche rather than for example,

class:

“My shift from the cultural as an epistemological object to culture as an enactive, enunciatory site opens up possibilities for other times of cultural meaning (retroactive, prefigurative) and other narrative spaces (phantasmic, metaphorical). My purpose is specifying the enunciative present in the articulation of culture is to provide a process by which objectified others may be turned into subjects of their history and experience” (Bhabha, 1994) p: 34.

This sets Bhabha’s project up in contrast to Said’s Orientalism. Bhabha argues that

subjectivities in effect are real as they are in contrast to Said’s emphasis on identities as the

result of orientalism. Bhabha recognizes the impact of forces such as orientalism but

highlights issues of ambivalence and hybridity in order to emphasize the heterogeneity of

contemporary subjectivities.

Postcolonial studies are growing because postcolonial critique allows for wide ranging

investigations into power relations in various contexts. The formation of empire, the

impact of colonization on postcolonial history, economy, science and culture; the cultural

productions of colonized societies, feminism and post colonialism, agency for

marginalized people and also the states of the post colony in contemporary economics and

cultural contexts are some of the topics in the field.

I would also like to mention some of the questions that may come up with while studying

this field: How did the experience of colonization affect those who were colonized while

also influencing the colonizers? How were colonial powers able to gain control over so

large a portion of the non-Western world? What traces have been left by colonial

education, science and technology in the post colonial societies? How do these traces affect

the decisions about development and modernization in post colonies? What were the forms

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of resistance against colonial control? How did colonial education and language influence

the culture and the identity of the colonized? How did western science, technology and

medicine change existing knowledge systems? What are the emergent forms of post

colonial identity after the departure of the colonizers? To what extent has decolonization or

reconstruction free from colonial influence been possible? How do gender, race and class

function in colonial and postcolonial discourse? Are new forms of imperialism replacing

colonization and how?

These are some questions that contain the essence of postcolonial theory and criticism in a

broad sense. Many postcolonial novelists in particular try to raise these issues and ponder

over the dilemmas of what they are and what they could be or wanted to be if the

colonization had not been taken place. The fact that most of these writers write in major

European languages and they live in European and American metropoles, because living in

metropole gives them better possibilities to judge from a different perspective by

witnessing colonial pressure both at home and abroad.

The term post colonial has been taken up not only by those who really come or originate

from ex-colonies or actually live there, but also by all the minorities and the suppressed all

over the world. Interestingly, identity and search for roots seem to comprise the bulk of

literature and literary theory written today. Postcolonial theory with its desire and tendency

to subvert subjectivity is contributing a great deal to the worldwide process of analyzing

and enlightening the unknown past left in darkness purposefully by post colonialism but

analyzing the processes of how identities were created surely worries every postcolonial

writer. We should accept the fact that the questioning and deconstructing process is not a

destabilizing factor in Western societies; in contrast, it creates an atmosphere of equality

and truthfulness by shedding away as unfounded all the prejudices and concepts we are

brought up with.

Literature in the language of the imperial center is produced by an élite which can be

identified with the colonizing power in the imperial period. Therefore in that period the

representatives of the colonizing power produces the first texts in the new language in the

colonies. The text produced at the first stage by the colonizing power could not form the

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basis for an indigenous culture although landscape, custom and language are given in detail

in them. The second stage is the writing produced by natives under imperial licence. The

literature produced by the Indian upper-class educated by the British can be given as an

example. In these early postcolonial texts the anti-imperial potential can not be fully

explored. This is due to the restrictions of the available discourse and the production

conditions for the literature in those societies. The licence for the publication and

distribution of the work is under the imperial power. Therefore those texts are constrained

by a patronage system which prevents them from asserting a different perspective. The

emergence and development of modern postcolonial literature depended upon the

abrogation of this constraining power and the appropriation of literature for new usages.

(Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 1995: 5-6). These literatures, bearing within them the effect

of imperial power, either support and privilege the colonizing power by emphasizing

“metropolitan” over colonial as mentioned above at the first stage, or can be regarded as a

call for resistance to dominance at the second stage.

The British colonized India and claimed that they took civilization to India and enabled

Indians to have a better life. In fact, they forced Indians to act how the British people –

especially the governors – wanted; but on the other hand, they built their own cafés, bars,

restaurants, and did not want Indians to enter those places to spend time with the British. In

short, they created a small Britain in India – together with Indians but far from them. But

later when they left India, they made sure to leave British governors or the Indians who

would support Britain and the British in nearly all parts of the country.

Being exposed to the existence of the post-colonial theory it urgently needs a definition to

provide a better understanding about its nature. So, a widely accepted and meanwhile

discussed definition of the term ‘post-colonial’ is found in the book The Empire Writes

Back. Colonial literature is a general term. As explained before, colonial is anything that

belongs to or about the colony so colonial literature involves both colonialist literature that

supports colonization and post colonialist literature that is against colonization. On the

other hand the post colonial term is used to cover all culture affected by the imperial

process from the moment of colonization to the present day (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin,

2002: 2). and post colonial studies developed as a way of addressing the cultural

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production of those societies affected by the historical phenomenon of colonialism

(Ashcroft, 2001:7).

Midnight’s Children, which can be accepted as a novel approaching the reality of

colonialism with the new adjustments of postcolonial India represents the problem between

the totality of a single authorial voice of British rule and the culture of India.

At this point we can explain postcolonial literature as the relationship between two

different cultures of the formerly dominant and the colonized and depict colonial people

who stand in between the two cultures and thus experience a cultural void.

In his text, Rushdie however uses the advantage of being Indian magnificently. He

naturally becomes both post colonial and postmodern writer. Spending his childhood in

India and Pakistan after Independence, he becomes a post colonial writer. Having

multicultural ethnicity, India is an inspiration for Rushdie. India endives cultures, one of

the characteristics of oral storytelling. Namely, Rushdie only cooks these ingredients in his

novel Midnight’s Children. The narrator Saleem Sinai who is representative of the

postcolonial subject living in postcolonial India is given voice through his attempts to write

his story.

In Saleem’s version of personal history, there appears a repetition in the birth patterns of

himself and his son: Saleem is actually not the true son of his parents, because at the time

of his birth, Miss Mary Preira, Saleem’s nanny, changes the name tags of two babies born

at the same time, “giving the poor baby a life of privilege and condemning the rich born

child to accordions and poverty” and through which “she made the last and most important

contribution to the entire history of twentieth century India”. The original poor baby, now

Saleem is the illegitimate offspring of Vanita, an Indian woman and William Methwold, an

English colonial property holder who with the independence of the nation declared, leaves

the country selling his estate to the Sinai family. So Saleem’s true parentage is actually a

mixture of Indian and English blood, which is a disappointment to Padma as she feels

“tricked” and asks Saleem: “An Anglo? (…) You are an Anglo Indian? (…) You are a

monster or what?” (Rushdie,1995: 140). Saleem’s mixed blood parentage also serves to

63

emphasize the idea that the catastrophic history of independent India is the result of the

British influence on the nation; hence the legacy of the colonial period as Saleem’s life is

the mirror of the nation.

After reading Rusdie’s work, it may be stated that he is a postcolonial in the sense that his

impulse is to always deconstruct the colonizer binary. Having two cases, identity with

India’s traditional heritage and English imperialism are considered metaphoric. Babies

who have been given to Mary Preira on Independence Day by their parents, as they are

changed in their beds by their mothers who want to curry favor to their darlings. The

characters are born through two parents and change their names. They have new names

and they are born again. Nesime Aziz is Holy Mother later on. Mumtaz Aziz changes her

name when she gets married and is renamed Emine Sina. Saleem’s sister Bakir Maymun

becomes the singer Cemile. At the end of the book Saleem gets married to Pervati. Pervati

becomes Leyla. When Saleem adopts his competitor Shiva’s son, the body again has two

parents.

Being parallel to the patched personality of the Indian people, the expression of the book is

presented as patched to the readers. For example:

- At the beginning of the book Dr. Aziz examined to his patient Nesim Ghani who was

going to be his wife later by a holed sheet with the help of her servants. Each time Dr

Aziz examined to Nesim he discovered a new part of Nesim. The hole in the sheet in

the days when the British colonial mentality was dominant is prevalent to Methwold

mansions in Bombay.

- Aziz who was educated in Germany mentioned about a big hole in his stomach. He

lost his belief in God as he faltered between his western and Indian identities.

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4. CONCLUSION

As a general assumption the Midnight’s Children which can be accepted as Saleem’s

autobiography is one of the best postcolonial novels of the 20th century and it contains

main characteristics of the postcolonial and postmodern discourse. In the novel we can find

historical happenings of European colonial understandings and actions. On the other hand

the Midnight’s Children is also pattern of magical realism, a literary device that goes hand

in hand with postmodernism. In his novel Salman Rushdie show us Saleem’s struggle to

present his critical history and official history of India. While telling them Rushdie uses

magical realism; thus there is no direct access to the reality in the events. So Rushdie used

the techniques of magical realism as a combination of magic and historical reality.

Literature aims to destroy and deconstruct stereotypical images have been attributed to

indigenous people. Literature, especially fiction has been widely used to make people

conscious of their marginalized positions and to subvert the colonialist discourse in

colonial novels. Changing ideologies have eloquently narrated by the thinkers, M.Foucault

and G.Spivak say that; the existence of humankind is determined by their own rules

existence. According to them all human ideologies and all informations are the rules

belonging to certain predetermined laws people who don’t obey this law. Considered

marginalized, it creates an emotion which contains a trap for those interferences in

resistance ,it means power is a branch of centrality and progress of function belonging to

centrality. Replacing the center rather than de-constructing the binary structure of center

and margin ,which is a primary feature of post-colonial discourse. The term marginality

refers to centrality because it is the center creates the condition of marginality. We may

search who and what the marginality is, it may have spontaneous replies that imperialism

marginalized, and the colonized people become marginalized. The fact is that ,they are

neither all marginalized nor always marginalized , the term colonialism and post -

colonialism can not be reduced into a structure because all ides are in a constant change

and reproducing themselves . Colonialism and post-colonialism are ideological

65

discourses attached to literature to fulfill it’s deed. The nourishment of people’s hunger

seems to reorganize the ideologies cultures and history according to our appetite.

Post-Colonialism deals with national identity, the other, subordinate people and subaltern.

It’s main target is to reshuffle and re-construct the knowledge taken for granted by the

commanding mind of western civilization’s heart because its actions, thoughts and

conceptions are complicit with the imperial enterprise. Displacement without consideration

of the local traditions or ethnic values, pose a problem for a post-colonial critic,

understanding and giving meaning to a world creates a situation.

In his novel Rushdie, uses the advantage of being Indian magnificently. He naturally

becomes both post colonial and postmodern writer. Spending his childhood in India and

Pakistan after Independence Day, he becomes post colonial writer. Having multicultural

ethnicity, India is an inspiration for Rushdie. India endives cultures, one of the

characteristics of oral storytelling. Namely, Rushdie only mixed these ingredients in his

novel Midnight’s Children.

As pointed out in the study Rushdie uses all features of postmodernism in his novel.

Saleem’s life parallels to Indian history. In the novel protagonist Saleem sees himself as

the centre of the world is the subjectivism, which is another characteristic of

postmodernism. On the other hand the Midnight Children has some ideologies depend on

both postcolonial and postmodern issues.

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