Moving Beyond Binaries - Book Report/Review Example

Moving Beyond Binaries: A Post-Colonial Analysis of Salman Rushdie’s Midgnight’s Children Post-colonial theory deals with the reading and analysis of discourses from once-colonized nations. However, the categorization cannot be restricted to the merely historical aspect. It is possible to detect post-colonial elements in works that appeared before the end of colonialism, and it is also possible to come across colonial views in works that have appeared after the official end of colonialism in many countries. It has also to be noted that there cannot be clear distinction between a ‘colonial’ and ‘post-colonial’ writer based on nationality and socio-politico-cultural affiliations. In brief, the term post-colonial is more about a spirit of contesting colonial values that had an oppressive agenda. Ania Loomba points out that on a broader, ideological sense of the prefix ‘post’, it supplants the colonial values. She points out that “[A] country may be both postcolonial (in the case of being formally independent) and neo-colonial (in the sense of remaining economically and/or culturally dependant) at the same time (Loomba 7). Post-colonial novels that deal with ideas of nation, identities and hybridity have surfaced in abundance in the past few decades. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children can be considered a pioneering work of Indian post-colonial fiction. Known for a dense plot and innovative narrative techniques that border on postmodernist and post-structural techniques, the novel has invited critical analyses from all possible quarters. This paper deals with the way Midnight’s Children presents the idea of post-colonial Indian nation, and the possible misreading that could destroy the spirit of a diversity of views professed by it. One has to acknowledge the post-colonial essentialism that has creeped into theoretical readings of texts like Midnight’s Children, often leading to the reductivism that post-colonial theory is all about distinguishing the binary opposites and judging books from the specific viewpoint of post-colonial values. A close analysis of such a view would reveal that it is not much different from the militant colonial project of establishing certain values as universal and expedient. Rushdie’s novel, with the help of multiple versions of history that questions the authenticity of a monolithic, scripture-like, official history of a nation, project’s his antagonism towards any sort of essentialism in the post-colonial context. The novel reminds one of Tristram Shandy in its description of the protagonist of Saleem Sinai’s life history. He is born at the midnight of August 1947, the exact time in which Indis gained Independence from the British. However, Rusdhie taken a sudden time-shift back to 1915 to describe Saleem’s family history with the arrival of his maternal grandfather Dr. Adam Aziz in India. Adam did his medical education in Germany. Adam’s meets Nazeem, his future wife, with the use of a sheet with a hole hrough which he could examine her body in fragments over a period of time, because the modesty of her high class Muslim family did not allow her body to be surveyed in full by the doctor. The perforated sheet serves as a symbol of the kind of Indian experiences Saleem describe – fragmentary and disconnected. Adam survives the Jallianwala Bagh massacre miraculously, because he sneezes and falls down because of its force at the crucial time when the firing started. The family history of Adam Aziz is presented through lengthy descriptions till page 116, where the birth of Saleem Sinai is at last described. Saleem’s mother Amina Sinai, who was originally called Mumtaz, is the second daughter of Adam Aziz. However, the family history Saleem describes is proven false as it is revealed that the midwife Mary Pereira,obeying to her socialist husband Joseph’s whim of social equality, had changed the nametags of two children. This resulted in the swapping of the Sinai child and their housemaid Vanita’s bastard child Shiva by the Englishman William Methwold, both of whom were born at the same time. Rusdhie describes that Saleem “became the chosen child of midnight, whose parents were not his parents, whose son would not be his own” (117).Saleem has a bike accident when he is nine, as he runs into agitated language marchers in 1956. This happens in a time when the borders of the Indian states were finally being determined, based on languages. The accident makes Saleem believe that he is an essential part of Indian history, or that he represents India after its Independence. He thinks he has telepathic powers and believes that he is the leader of one thousand and one children like him born at the midnight of India’s independence (195-200). The other prominent members among midnight’s children are Shiva, the real Sinai child, and Parvati-the-witch, born in Old Delhi in a slum and blessed with “the genuine gifts of conjuration and sorcery” (200). Saleem’s childhood years in the Bombay of the 1950s comes to an end when his Kashmiri parents are forced to immigrate to Pakistan in 1958. He returns to India in 1962 for a short stay but is back in Pakistan and becomes its citizen. In the Bangladesh war he works in the canine unit, as his legendary nose with its extraordinary powers qualifies him as a sniffing dog. He claims that he sniffed out Sheikh Mujib for the Pakistanis. He returns finally to India afterwards and becomes one among the many displaced and powerless Indian people who are tortured during the Emergency Rule from 1975 to 1977. His close association with Parvati-the-witch leads to their marriage and he is forced to become the father of Adam Sinai, the child of Shiva, who impregnated Parvati. The Indira Government tortures Saleem during the Emergency and gets the names of all the midnight’s children from him. In due course, “[T]est- and hysterectomized, the children of midnight were denied the possibility of reproducing themselves…” (439). Saleem writes his story and narrates it to the companion of his last days, Padma, who works at the Braganza Pickles owned by none other than Miss Mary Pereira, whom he managed to locate through the taste of her pickle that he happened to taste when he was in Bombay. Saleem finishes his story, leaves behind his son with Padma and merges, like a speck of dirt, with the Bombay crowds. Rusdhie’s novel is obviously a historiographic metafiction that deals with the idea of a post-colonial nation that struggles with colonial and internal power structures. My contention is that this novel acts as critique of colonialism and blind nativism/patriotism at the same time. Rushdie seems to be aware of the extremes of post-colonial assertions that takes on a militant zeal that may remind one of professional humanism, and his works could rather be seen as a critical response to such tendencies. Edward Said, in his Culture and Imperialism, has expressed the fear that, In our wish to make ourselves heard, we tend very often to forget that the world is a crowded place, and that if everyone were to insist on the radical purity or priority of one’s own voice, all we would have would be the awful din of unending strife, and a bloody political mess…. (xxi) Rushdie emphasizes the possibility of different versions of national history in post-colonial nations. He tries to depict the cultural polyvalence of India as a nation and fights monolithic cultural definitions. He dares to speak about the concept of nation, race, and gender from a liberated standpoint in the context of such multiculturalism. His unconventional narrative technique itself contests the reliable, authorial voice of state-employed historians. He also experiments with the colonizer’s language and creates an ‘english’ against the Standard English. Like many other post-colonial writers, he alters the form of the Eurocentric novel, which once served a colonial purpose. The post-colonial identity that he constructs through the novel is not a static one. The image of post-colonial nation that emerges through the novel is a unique one. Rushdie makes a deliberate attempt at subverting and questioning the official versions of history in his Midnight’s Children, in an attempt to show adherence to the concept of a nation from the perspective of its people. Though it is impossible to represent the concept of a nation from the viewpoint of millions of people in India, Rushdie succeeds in emphasizing the fact that it is a fallacy to define a nation for its multitudes of people through the official, authoritative version of history that its so-called democratic government, modeled on European fascist regimes, tries to establish. He is well aware of the political and theoretical implications of such attempts. In Imaginary Homelands, he reflects on this issue: …. at times when the State takes reality into its own hands, and sets about distorting it, altering the past to fit its present needs, then the making of the alternative realities of art, including the novel of memory, becomes politicized . . . Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory. And the novel is one way of denying the official, politician’s version of truth. (14) The historicity of Rushdie’s novel is thus interspersed with his polemical stance. It is no more a problem to be polemical in the post-colonial scenario. In fact many consider it a desirable attribute of post-colonial works to focus on concepts of nationhood from a polemical stance. A new aesthetics of political works has emerged with the decline of colonialism. However the idea of nationhood presented in such works may become controversial when elements of subjectivity take precedence over the problematisation of colonial concepts. One has to see whether Rushdie falls prey to such subjectivity as well. Since the publication of Midnight’s Children, there had been many attempts to read the book from a post-colonial perspective. Some were obviously done by those who were not sufficiently aware of the socio-politico-cultural ethos of India. Their assumption that the novel represented Indian history as a backdrop to its plot could have made the subsequent readings difficult. Rushdie observes, with regard to such readings of the novel, that “Many readers wanted it to be the history, even the guide-book, which it was never meant to be...” (Imaginary Homelands 25). Such readers might have failed to notice the way in which national history is intricately embedded in the plot, not just as a backdrop, but as an active force to be reckoned with and reflected upon in the lives of those ordinary men and women whose lives were being changed by it. Later on, there was another assumption that the novel represented a subjective interpretation of Indian history from a specific position. An example of such a view can be found in the work by T.N.Dhar: In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie views the history of India from a specific standpoint, because of which he gives a singularly new interpretation of India’s past. The novel also problematizes the nature of historical discourse and pays attention to the problems which are unique to historical reconstructions in India (168) But such an assumption could also be misleading if one tries to deal with the historicity of the text. In fact an insightful reader may find it clearly stated in the narrative that the idea itself of subjectivity is contested in the novel. might not be adequate to analyze the historicity of the text. One has to take into account the fact that the idea of subjectivity itself is contested in the text. Saleem Sinai’s recounting of family and national history is not presented as something that could be restricted to a single viewpoint. His idea and consciousness of the nation and its history is not stable, to stay the least. He flits from one strong point of view to another while he tries to narrate the nation’s history. He assumes multiple identities, thereby challenging any sort of subjectivity in his perspective. In Imaginary Homelands, Rushdie says that he has made Saleem “suspect in his narration” (10). This is to a major extent due to the fact that Saleem is never quite sure of his true identity, and lives with the many assumed identities that circumstances force upon him. Thus the reflections on history by Saleem are shaped by how he sees history from his position. And his position keeps on changing from a life in the Sinai’s house in Bombay to the Zulfikar’s in Pakistan, to the ghetto existence in the suburbs. Towards the end of the novel, there is even a role-reversal, as Shiva becomes a police inspector intent on carrying out the Emergency rule missions, and Saleem a tramp with a cracked body and memory. Saleem narrates events as he experiences/perceives them. Thus he assumes a very normal stance as he relates how the news of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination disrupted the screening of his uncle Hanif’s Bollywood dream project and when the radio gave out the name Nathuram Godse, Saleem’s mother Amina burst out, “Thank God…It’s not a Muslim name!”(143). Likewise, he describes the Emergency from the position of a person from the gutter who was a victim of the forced sterilization project (439). He does not try to see these events from multiple viewpoints, but his viewpoints keep on changing as destiny takes him to different spheres of life, thereby making it possible to comprehend that where one stands affects the way s/he perceives history. Moreover, the character of Padma who serves the purpose of a live listener, in contrast to a reader, becomes what could be called an intratextual critic, no matter how illiterate she is. D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke comments that “[H]er credo as a critic is ‘whatnextism’, conventional, yet not to be discounted” (41). Timothy Brennan considers her the inevitable “plebeian commentator” as “Saleem narrates the story from the painful and inaccurate distance of privilege” (100). Sudhendu Shekhar observes that “the use of Padma as a character, functional at both narrative and symbolic levels, marks his concern for the collective but average consciousness to be signified into the ever-present” (74). Thus the idea of a reader’s active contribution to the meaning of text is fulfilled through Padma. The meaning of the novel, with reference to the specific historical events not far removed from the time in which it was written, seems to have succeeded in creating more meanings than the author could ever imagine. This also forms part of the writer’s view of nationality that is forever contestable and to be remade. Saleem is not faced with the crisis of defending his nationality and Gandhian values against European culture or Western epistemological values. The protagonists of the novels of the earlier generation of Indian writers in English like R.K. Narayan, Raja Rao, and Mulk Raj Anand were in fact attempting this. On the other hand, Saleem is concerned with the task of defining himself and his nation from where he stands. He typifies the early phase of Independent India where expectations were unrealistically high and over-enthusiasm led to a multiplicity of views about its identity. According to Saleem, “Even a baby is faced with the problem of defining itself; and I’m bound to say that my early popularity had its problematic aspects, because I was bombarded with a confusing multiplicity of views…” (130). The multiplicity of his existence and of his views on the nation are what he tries to express in his story. In the words of Nila Shah, “[T]throughout the narrative, the protagonist is falling apart. He experiences a hole in his own body and his/story oozes out of it. He questions the homogeneity of history by questioning the wholeness of his own self” (41). Thus Rushdie contests the monolithic scripture-like histories presented in earlier discourses on India, which represent colonial values in some ways. Saleem does not limit the telling of his life to a specific moment or viewpoint. His responses take on the form of the ideas of his own self from different perspectives. This also includes the perspectives of the people and nations that he associates himself with in his constantly changing life experiences. His narration conforms to Rushdie’s theory of transcendence which he explains in Imaginary Homelands: What I mean by transcendence is that flight of the human spirit outside the confines of its material, physical existence which all of us, secular or religious, experience on at least a few occasions…The soaring quality of transcendence, the sense of being more than one self, of being in some way joined to the whole of life, is by its nature short-lived…It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith (421). The multifarious representations of history in post-colonial writings, especially novels, get special attention in Midnight’s Children. Saleem’s story does not try to represent a particular class or sect, not to mention the nation, and fails to represent a definable existence of even the narrator. This hints at the crossroads where post-colonial expressions meet a post-structuralist spirit. The existence of concepts like nationality, race, gender, religion, culture, and even individuality gets deconstructed. There cannot be any fixed standpoint, as none of these concepts is perennially linked to an identical situation. The multiple viewpoints of individuals may seem to form a pattern when they relate it to specific historical contexts, but the points of comparisons keep changing with the flow of time and ideas. Thus the representation of the nation from Saleem’s viewpoint is a critique of the militant-like, self-assertive re-writings/reclaimings of history by most writers and historians from both the colonising and once-colonised nations. He frees himself from the immense task of seeing things from the simple binary of the colonizer and the colonized, or ideologically, of the oppressor and the oppressed. Moreover, he is capable, in his insane manner, of moving beyond concepts that try to gain permanence. Bibliography Brennan, Timothy. Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation. London: Macmillan, 1989. Dhar, T. N. History-Fiction Interface: M. R. Anand, Nayantara Sahgal, Salman Rushdie, Shashi Tharoor and O.V. Vijayan. Delhi: Prestige Books, 1999. Goonetilleke, D.C.R.A. Salman Rushdie. London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1998. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 2005. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Vintage, 1995. ---. Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta Books in association with Penguin Books, 1991. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994. Shah, Nila. Novel as History: Salman Rushdie. New Delhi: Creative Books, 2003. Shekhar, Sudhendu. History and Fiction: A Postmodernist Approach to the Novels of Salman Rushdie, Shashi Tharoor, Khushwant Singh, Mukul Kesavan.New Delhi: Prestige Books, 2004. Read More