MAGIC REALISM AS A POST COLONIAL DEVICE IN
SALMAN RUSHDIE'S MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN
By, Christy P Benny
Email: [email protected]
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGES
INTODUCTION………………………………………………………...……….01
CHAPTERS
I.
WHAT IS MAGIC REALISM, REALLY?
1.1
Meaning and Definition……………………………………....03
1.2
History and Development……………………………………04
1.3
Characteristics…………………………………………….….09
1.4
Major Magic Realists and Their Works……….…………...12
1.5
Salman Rushdie as a Magic Realist………….……………....14
1.5.1 About Rushdie‟s Novels………………………….….15
1.5.2 Magic Realism and Rushdie‟s Purpose for it………..17
II.
MAGIC REALISM IN SALMAN RUSHDIE’S
MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN
2.1
Magic Realism in Midnight’s Children…………….……..19
2.2
Midnight’s Children: Fantasy as Matrix………….............23
2.3
Narrative Techniques in Midnight’s Children……............27
2.4 Midnight’s Children: A Cocktail of History and
Fantasy……………………………………………………….30
III. MAGIC REALISM AS A POSTCOLONIAL DEVICE IN
SALMAN RUSHDIE’S MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN
3.1 Salman Rushdie’s ‘Stereoscopic Vision’:
Postcolonial Environments in Midnight’s Children…............34
3.2 Midnight's Children: The Link Between Magic
Realism and Postcolonialism…………………………............38
3.3 Magic Realism as a Postcolonial Device in Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children…………………………………………...42
CONCLUSION………………………………………………….…………….....48
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INTRODUCTION
The project entitled „Magic Realism as a Postcolonial Device in Salman Rushdie‟s
Midnight’s Children‟ deals with the literary term magic realism and how it gets applied to the
postcolonial work Midnight’s Children. Over the past few decades, magic realism has developed
into a truly international literary phenomenon. The Anglo-Indian writer Salman Rushdie stands
out among the few other writers who successfully incorporate magic realism in their works. Not
only is Rushdie one of the most distinguished postcolonial writers, he is also generally
recognized as one of the most important representatives of magic realism outside Latin America.
I have chosen Midnight's Children for several reasons. Firstly, Midnight's Children is a
typical example of a text which incorporates the narrative technique magic realism. Secondly,
Midnight's Children is considered as a post-colonial novel containing all aspects of post-colonial
literatures. And finally, Salman Rushdie is recognized as one of the most significant and
controversial authors of the 20th century literature.
My project runs into three chapters. The first chapter entitled „What is Magic Realism,
Really?‟ explains the literary term „magic realism‟. The first section of this chapter gives various
definitions of magic realism. Later the discussion focuses on the origin and development of
magic realism as a literary device from the Weimer Republic of Germany of the 1920s, to the
1940s and 1950s in Latin America and finally to the last decades of the twentieth century in the
English-speaking world. By explaining the developments of the term chronologically, this
chapter provides an elaborate understanding of the term. This chapter also provides some
important characteristics of magic realism. Later part of this chapter also discusses about major
magic realists and their works. Finally, the last section of this chapter speaks of Salman
Rushdie‟s importance as a magic realist. It also focuses on Rushdie‟s purpose for magic realism.
The second chapter entitled „Exploring the Magic and the Real in Midnight’s Children‟ is
divided into four sub topics. This chapter provides an explicit idea on how Rushdie incorporates
the narrative technique of magic realism in his magnum opus Midnight’s Children. This chapter
also deals with reality and fantasy, the two main aspects of magic realism and also speaks of how
Rushdie in Midnight's Children, mixes reality with fantasy. The final section of the chapter
shows how Rushdie blends history and fantasy.
The third chapter of the project entitled „Magic Realism as a Postcolonial Device in
Salman Rushdie‟s Midnight's Children’ is the core of my project. This chapter falls into three
sub topics. The first section deals with the postcolonial environments in Midnight's Children.
The second sub topic shows how Rushdie links the literary device magic realism and the literary
theory Postcolonialism. The last section of this chapter asserts the fact that magic realism is a
postcolonial device.
Through these three chapters, I try to assert that magic realism is the most effective
narrative technique for writing postcolonial novels. I also try to affirm that Salman Rushdie‟s
Midnight's Children is one of the best novels that apply the literary device magic realism.
1.1
Meaning and Definition
The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms defines magic realism as a “kind of
modern fiction in which fabulous and fantastical elements are included in a narrative that
otherwise maintains the reliable tone of objective, realistic report”. Magic realism mixes and
disrupts ordinary everyday reality with strange, „impossible‟ and miraculous episodes and
powers.
Magic realist novels and stories have, typically a strong narrative drive, in which the
recognizably realistic merges with the unexpected and the inexplicable and in which elements of
dreams, fairy story, or mythology combine with the everyday reality, often in mosaic or
kaleidoscopic pattern of refraction and recurrence.
In magic realism, we find the transformation of the common and the everyday into the
awesome and the unreal. It is predominantly an art of surprises. Time exists in a kind of timeless
fluidity and the unreal happens as part of reality. Once the reader accepts the fait accompli, the
rest follows with logical precision.
The term is broadly descriptive rather than critically rigorous: Professor Matthew
Strecher defines magic realism as "what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is
invaded by something too strange to believe." A literary mode rather than a distinguishable
genre, magic realism aims to seize the paradox of the union of opposites. For instance, it
challenges polar opposites like life and death and the pre-colonial past versus the post-industrial
present. Magic realism differs from pure fantasy primarily because it is set in a normal, modern
world with authentic descriptions of humans and society.
In magic realism, the magical elements are blended into a realistic atmosphere in order to
access a deeper understanding of reality. These magical elements are explained like normal
occurrences that are presented in a straightforward manner which allows the „real‟ and the
„fantastic‟ to be accepted in the same stream of thought. It has been widely considered a literary
and visual art genre; creative fields that exhibit less significant signs of magic realism include
film and music.
The presence of the supernatural in magic realism is often connected to the primeval or
„magical‟ Indian mentality, which exists in conjunction with European rationality.
1.2
History and Development
Magic realism is a term used to describe the commingling of everyday reality with
supernatural events. The two terms „magic‟ and „realism‟ have become so intertwined that
strange, unearthly happenings become almost an accepted, even normal part of daily life. The
term 'magic realism' (Magischer Realismus) was coined by the German art historian Franz Roh
in his essay Nach Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten Europäischen
Malerei (After expressionism: Magical Realism: Problems of the newest European painting)
written in 1925 to describe a type of painting called neue Sachlichkeit (the New Objectivity)
wave that flourished during the Weimar Republic in Germany, associated with artists like Otto
Dix, George Grosz, Carl Grossberg and Alexander Kanoldt. This type of painting was
characterized by clear, cool, static, thinly painted, sharp-focus images, frequently portraying the
imaginary the impossible, or the fantastic in a realistic manner. Roh believed magic realism is
related to, but distinctive from, surrealism, due to its focus on the material object and the actual
existence of things in the world, as opposed to the more cerebral, psychological and
subconscious reality that the surrealists explored. Alejo Carpentier was the first one to describe
its current usage in the prologue to his book: The Kingdom of This World (1949).
The term was adopted in the United States with the 1943 exhibition in which works by
Edward Hopper (1882-1967) and Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) were on show at the New York
Museum of Modern Art entitled, „American Realists and Magic Realists‟. Magic realism was
later used to describe the uncanny realism by American painters such as Ivan Albright, Paul
Cadmus, George Tooker and other artists during the 1940s and 1950s. During 1950s, the term
„magic realism‟ was changed to „magical realism‟. Even though, both „magic realism‟ and
„magic realism‟ are used nowadays with equal importance.
In contrast with its use in literature, magical realist art does not often include overtly
fantastic or magical content, but rather looks at the mundane, the everyday, through a hyperrealistic and often mysterious lens. Italian writer, Massimo Bontempelli, for instance, is
considered as the first magic realist creative writer who sought to present the "mysterious and
fantastic quality of reality." He claimed that literature could be a means to create a collective
consciousness by „opening new mythical and magical perspectives on reality‟, and used his
writings to inspire an Italian nation governed by Fascism.
During 1950s, magic realism became a major literary technique of Latin American
writers especially, Jorge Luis Borges and the Columbian novelist Gabriel García Márquez. In
fact, Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines magic realism as, “a literary genre or style
associated especially with Latin America that incorporates fantastic or mythical elements into
otherwise realistic fiction. In the 1970s and 1980s, the term gained a new application and usage
with the American and Latin American literary scholars employing it to define and describe
certain genre using „the marvellous in the real‟. During the same period, it was adopted in Britain
by several of the most original of the fiction writers, including, notably, Emma Tenant, Angela
Carter, and Salman Rushdie. The magic realism technique popularized by Salman Rushdie
attracted a large number of Indian novelists in 1990s such as Rukun Advani, Mukul Kesavan and
Makarand Paranjape.
Many people have been associated with the development of magic realism in its
recognized forms of post-expressionist painting from 1920s‟ Germany and modernist and
postmodernist modes of writing from Europe in the early twentieth century, and Latin America
and the English-speaking world in the second half of the twentieth century. Although, the key
figures in the development of the term are the German art critic Franz Roh best known for his
work in the 1920s, the mid-twentieth century Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, the Italian writer
Massimo Bontempelli from the 1920s and 1930s, the mid-twentieth-century Latin American
literary critic Angel Flores and the late twentieth century Latin American novelist Gabriel García
Márquez.
The concept of magic realism is a troubled one for literary theory. In none of its
applications to literature has the concept of magic realism ever successfully differentiated
between itself and neighbouring genres such as fabulation, metafiction, the baroque, the
fantastic, the uncanny, or the marvellous, and consequently it is not surprising that some critics
have chosen to abandon the term altogether. Magic realism is a contested term primarily because
the majority of critics increase the confusion surrounding its history by basing their consideration
of the term on one of its explanations rather than acknowledging the full complexity of its
origins. For this reason the critic Roberto González Echevarría finds it difficult to validate a „true
history‟ of the concept. The American critic Seymour Menton is one of the few who does
attempt to unravel its past. The Appendix to his book The True History of Magic Realism (1998)
is a chronology of the term, and its subtitle reveals the irony of the book‟s title: Menton heads
the Appendix with a series of queried dates that have all been claimed to be the original date of
the coining of the term: „1925, 1924, 1923, 1922?‟.
But the term retains enough of what Fredric Jameson calls a „strange seductiveness‟ to
keep it in critical currency, despite the „theoretical vacuum‟ in which it lies. In Latin America,
the badge of magic realism has signified a kind of uniqueness or difference from mainstream
culture - what in another context Alejo Carpentier has called lo real maravailloso or „marvellous
American reality‟ - and this gives the concept the stamp of cultural authority if not theoretical
soundness. And recently, the locus for critical studies on magic realism has been broadened
outward from Latin America and the Caribbean to include speculations on its place in the
literatures of India, Nigeria, and English Canada, this last being perhaps the most startling
development for magic realism in recent years, since Canada, unlike these other regions, is not
part of the third world, a condition long thought necessary to the currency of the term in regard
to literature, though not to art. Further, critics until very recently have been singularly
uninterested in applying the concept of magic realism to texts written in English.
The incompatibility of magic realism with the more established genre systems becomes
itself interesting, itself a focus for critical attention, when one considers the fact that it seems, in
a literary context, to be most obviously operative in cultures situated at the fringes of mainstream
literary traditions. As Robert Kroetsch and Linda Kenyon observe, magic realism as a literary
practice seems to be closely linked with a perception of „living on the margins‟, encoding within
it, perhaps, a concept of resistance to the massive imperial centre and its totalizing systems.
Magic realism was considered as an effective tool in the situation of those countries newly freed
from the colonial rule. It is in this regard that writers from Latin America, India, Canada, etc.
used magic realism in their works.
Magic realism‟s sudden rise in South American literature could be attributed to the fact
that the social reality of the countries in that continent made magic realism an appropriate
response it. The literary magic realism was originated in Latin America. Writers often traveled
between their home country and European cultural hubs, such as Paris or Berlin, and were
influenced by the art movement of the time. Carpentier and Uslar-Pietri, for example, were
strongly influenced by European artistic movements, such as Surrealism, during their stays in
Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. The Argentinean short story writer and essayist Jorge Luis Borges
inspired and encouraged other Latin American writers in the development of magical realism particularly with his first magical realist publication, Historia Universal de la Infamia (A
Universal History of Iniquity) in 1935. Between 1940 and 1950, magical realism in Latin
America reached its peak with Gabriel García Márquez and others.
In the words of Márquez, “You can get people to believe anything if you tell it
convincingly enough”. This is the basic principle of magic realist writing. In the works of
Márquez, one finds the realistic reportage mingling in the extravagant fantasy as when the author
one moment describes the construction of a banana-processing plant and the next moment shoes
a woman ascending to heaven. His Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) demonstrates that truth
can be best viewed „as a communal collaborative construct‟ rather than integrated perception.
The highlighting of the limitations of individual reading of truth, and the very
unpredictability inherent in it, tends to view realism as essentially comic. Magic realism fiction is
marked by a strong narrative force which draws into the discursive pattern recognizably realistic
that mingles with the fantastic, „the unpredictable and inexplicable‟. In it the a
uthors feel free to bring in elements of dream, mythology, fairy tale and day-to-day
living, creating a kind of „kaleidoscopic pattern of refraction and recurrence‟.
1.3 Characteristics
The extent to which characteristics get applied to magic realist texts varies. Every text is
different and employs a smattering of qualities. However, they accurately portray what one
might expect from a magic realist text. Some important characteristics of magic realist texts
include:
Hybridity:
Magic realists incorporate many techniques that have been linked to post-colonialism, with
hybridity being a primary feature. Specifically, magic realism is illustrated in the inharmonious
arenas of such opposites as urban and rural and Western and indigenous. The plots of magic
realist works involve issues of borders, mixing, and change. Authors establish these plots to
reveal a crucial purpose of magic realism: a more deep and true reality than conventional realist
techniques would illustrate.
Fantastical elements:
Magic realism in literature is defined as "a kind of modern fiction in which fabulous and
fantastical events are included in a narrative that otherwise maintains the 'reliable' tone of
objective realistic report, designating a tendency of the modern novel to reach beyond the
confines of realism and draw upon the energies of fable, folk tale, and myth while maintaining a
strong contemporary social relevance”. The fantastic attributes given to characters in such
novels, levitation, flight, telepathy, telekinesis, etc. are among the means that magic realism
adopts in order to encompass the often phantasmagorical political realities of the 20th century.
Sense of mystery:
Something that most critics agree on is this major theme. Magic realist literature tends to read at
an intensified level. Taking the seminal work of the style, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
by Gabriel García Márquez, the reader must let go of preexisting ties to conventional exposition,
plot advancement, linear time structure, scientific reason, etc., to strive for a state of heightened
awareness of life's connectedness or hidden meanings. Carpentier articulates this feeling as „to
seize the mystery that breathes behind things‟, and supports the claim by saying a writer must
heighten his senses to the point of „estado limite‟ (limit state) in order to realize all levels of
reality, most importantly that of mystery.
Irony Regarding Author’s Perspective:
The writer must have ironic distance from the magical world view for the realism not to be
compromised. Simultaneously, the writer must strongly respect the magic, or else the magic
dissolves into simple folk belief or complete fantasy, split from the real instead of synchronized
with it.
The Supernatural and Natural:
In magic realism, the supernatural is not displayed as questionable. While the reader realizes
that the rational and irrational are opposite and conflicting polarities, they are not disconcerted
because the supernatural is integrated within the norms of perception of the narrator and
characters in the fictional world.
Metafiction:
This trait centers on the reader's role in literature. With its multiple realities and specific
reference to the readers world, magic realism explores the impact fiction has on reality, reality on
fiction and the readers role in between; as such, it is well suited for drawing attention to social or
political criticism. Furthermore, it is the tool paramount in the execution of a related and major
magic realist phenomenon: textualization. This term defines two conditions first, where a
fictitious reader enters the story within a story while reading it, making us self-conscious of our
status as reader and secondly, where the textual world enters into the reader's world. Good sense
would negate this process but magic is the flexible topos that allows it.
Political critique:
Magic realism contains an „implicit criticism of society, particularly the elite‟. Especially with
regard to Latin America, the style breaks from the inarguable discourse of „privileged centers of
literature‟. This is a mode primarily about and for „ex-centrics‟: the geographically, socially and
economically marginalized. Therefore, magic realism's alternative world works to correct the
reality of established viewpoints (like realism, naturalism, modernism). Magic realist texts, under
this logic, are subversive texts, revolutionary against socially dominant forces. Alternatively, the
socially dominant may implement magic realism to disassociate themselves from their „power
discourse‟.
1.4 Major Magic Realists and their Works
Critics and writers debate which authors or works fall within the magic realism genre.
Within the Latin American world, the most iconic of magic realist novelist is Nobel Laureate
Gabriel García Márquez, whose novel One Hundred Years of Solitude was an instant worldwide
success. He is arguably the most influential writer within the magic realist movement. Márquez
confessed: "my most important problem was destroying the line of demarcation that separates
what seems real from what seems fantastic." The names of Latin American authors like Jorge
Luis Borges and Jorge Amado are worth noticing.
Isabel Allende was the first Latin American woman writer recognized outside the
continent. Her most well-known novel, The House of the Spirits (1982), is arguably similar to
García Márquez‟s style of magic realist writing. Another notable novelist is Laura Esquivel,
whose Like Water for Chocolate (1989) tells the story of the domestic life of women living on
the margins of their families and society. The novel's protagonist, Tita, is kept from happiness
and marriage by her mother. "Her unrequited love and ostracism from the family lead her to
harness her extraordinary powers of imbuing her emotions to the food she makes. In turn, people
who eat her food enact her emotions for her”. For example, after eating a wedding cake Tita
made while suffering from a forbidden love, the guests all suffer from a wave of longing.
A European tradition in magic realism is much advanced with the work of Kafka
(Metamorphosis), with later writers such as Günter Wilhelm Grass (The Tin Drum, 1959),
Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children, 1981), Angela Carter (Night’s at the Circus, 1984) John
Fowles (The Magus, 1966) and Graham Swift (Waterland, 1983).
Modern writers with whom magic realism is especially identified are the Czech novelist
Milan Kundera, the Italian Italo Calvino, and Salman Rushdie. One can see protest and the
restriction placed on information and truth in the wake of Prague Spring and the internal
emergency imposed in India in 1976, in such of their woks as Kundera‟s The Book of Laughter
and Forgetting (1982) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) and Salman Rushdie‟s
Midnight’s Children (1981) and Shame (1983). In Salman Rushdie‟s hands, political satire and
caricature easily manage with fairy-tale fights of imagination that weave a fine gossamer pattern
of subtle allusions, caprice and humour.
The magic realism popularized by Salman Rushdie influenced a large number of Indian
novels. According to Anita Desai, Rushdie showed English language novelists in India a way to
be „postcolonial‟. There is an entire generation of novelists who feel the weight of Rushdie‟s
influence as enabling their own talents. Quite apart from his idiosyncratic characters, he showed
Indians how the English language could be appropriated, bent in any way one wanted, to achieve
a sensational effect.
Beethoven Among the Cows (1984) by Rukun Advani, Looking Through Glass (1995) by
Makarand Paranjape, An Angel in Pyjamas (1996) by Tabish Khair, „Bombay Duck‟ (1990) by
Farukh Dhondy, The Memoir of Elephants (1998), and Asylum, U.S.A (2000) both by Boman
Desai are some of the important Indian novels written in the technique of magic realism.
1.5 Salman Rushdie as a Magic Realist
Salman Rushdie, one of the most renowned writers of Indian Diaspora, settled in
England, shot into fame through his magnum opus, Midnight’s Children. He was born to an
affluent Muslim family in Bombay on 19 June 1947. He grew up in Mumbai and graduated with
honours from King‟s College, Cambridge. Settled in England, Rushdie‟s literary career started
with his first novel, Grimus (1975), which was a poor seller. With the publication of his second
novel, Midnight’s Children, Rushdie‟s fame spread world-wide and the subsequent
novels Shame and The Satanic Verses (1988) made him one of the best contemporary novelists
in the world. The allegorical novel The Satanic Verses enraged Muslim fundamentalists
including Ayatollah Khomeini who issued a fatwā sentencing Rushdie to death. Midnight’s
Children won for him the Booker of Bookers prize in 1993. In 2008 it was selected as The Best
of Bookers. Midnight’s Children is also the only Indian novel on Times’s list of the hundred best
English-language novels since its founding in 1923.
Rushdie uses the narrative style of magic realism in which myth and fantasy are blended
with real life. He uses the narrative technique of magic realism to blur the distinction between
fantasy and reality. He gives an equal acceptance for the ordinary and the extraordinary. He fuses
lyrical and, at times, fantastic writing with an examination of the character of human existence
and an implicit criticism of society, particularly the elite. Rushdie can be considered as a writer
who plays with the narrative technique of magic realism. He has earned every right to be called
one of the greatest magic realists ever.
1.5.1 About Rushdie’s Novels
To uncover the life and times of Salman Rushdie one need only turn his fictional works
and then replenish these with details from his interviews and essays. Midnight’s Children,
Shame, and Satanic Verses, each a not-so-nearly bounded fiction about three different nations,
parallel the three national identifications of this author from three countries: England, where he
lives; India where he is born; and Pakistan, where his family lives. Writers often draw upon their
lives and expressions as raw material for their work; Rushdie more so than others. The acts of his
life, the incidents and characters that people it, are replayed in his fiction, but with their meaning
and significance drawn out, displayed, allegorized.
Salman Rushdie, uses in his works, tales from various genres – fantasy, mythology,
religion, oral tradition etc. Rushdie started off as a novelist with the work Grimus in 1975. This
was a fantastical science fiction. In 1981, he came up with his second novel Midnight’s Children.
In this novel, he writes about India‟s strive for independence from British colonialism.
Midnight’s Children shows how history revolves around Saleem Sinai, the narrator protagonist
of the story and ten thousand children born in the midnight of India‟s independence. Along with
The Man Booker Prize, Midnight’s Children won the James Tait Black Memorial prize in 1981.
This work was also awarded with the Booker of Bookers prize and the best of all time winners in
1993 and 2008. The success of this novel made Rushdie a celebrity lionized by the media the
world over.
Rushdie‟s third novel Shame was published in 1983. This novel is centered on a well-todo Pakistani family. Chronologically, Shame falls between Rushdie‟s most acclaimed novel
(Midnight's Children) and his most controversial (The Satanic Verses). In Shame, Rushdie uses
family history as a metaphor for the country. This story includes two historical characters –
Iskander Harappa and General Raza Hyder. Iskander, a playboy turned politician molded on the
former Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. General Raza Hyder was the associate of Iksander
and later his executioner. Shame deals with the themes of gender, identity and postcolonialism. It
seems to promote female activism towards gender equality.
In 1988, Rushdie came with his fourth novel The Satanic Verses inspired in part by the
life of Muhammed. As with his previous books, Rushdie used magic realism and relied on
contemporary events and people to create his characters. In the United Kingdom, The Satanic
Verses received positive reviews, was a 1988 Booker Prize Finalist and won the 1988 Whitbread
Award for novel of the year. However, a major controversy ensued as conservative Muslims
accused it of blasphemy and mocking their faith. The outrage among some Muslims resulted in
a fatwā calling for Rushdie's death issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader
of Iran, on 14 February 1989. Although Rushdie himself has never been attacked as a result of
the book's creation, extremists have attacked several connected individuals such as
translator Hitoshi Igarshi, leading to his death.
1.5.2 Magic Realism and Rushdie’s Purpose for It
Salman Rushdie describes magic realism as an alternative way of approaching the truth.
In Midnight’s Children, there are several instances of preternatural, surreal, or otherwise
„magical‟ happenings.
The first appearance of magic realism in the novel is the character of Tai, or more
specifically, Tai‟s claim to being of great antiquity. Tai adamantly asserts to being so old that he
has “watched the mountains being born” and “seen emperors die” (13). The reason why Rushdie
had Tai seemingly exhibit impossible longevity is that he wanted Tai to represent the India of
old. This theory is supported well by Tai‟s disdain for Aadam‟s bag of foreign medical supplies
from Europe. Tai says of the bag: “Now if a man breaks his arm that bag will not let the bonesetter bind it in leaves. Now a man must let his wife lie beside that bag and watch as knives come
and cut her open” (16). Tai‟s use of the word “now” implies that he is making a comparison
between the past which he trusts and the present which he scorns. Rushdie uses Tai for
symbolically representing the traditions of pre-colonial India. Because of this hence Tai claims
of seemingly ancient origin.
A second instance of magic realism that sticks out is the story of „The Hummingbird‟
Mian Abdullah‟s assassination. Not only was Abdullah able to hum at such a high pitch that
thousands of dogs across Agra came rushing to his aid, but he also seemed to be highly resistant
to the assailants‟ knives. It is said of Abdullah that “His body was hard and the long curved
blades had trouble killing him; one broke on a rib” (58).
Midnight's Children is a representative of the India‟s struggle to retain her culture in the
face of colonialism for a number of reasons. Abdullah‟s assassins are implied to be at least
affiliated with Great Britain. The story of his assassination is prefaced by saying of him that
“The British attitude to him was always ambiguous. Brigadier Dodson hadn‟t wanted him in
town” (57). In this scenario, Abdullah‟s physical resilience would represent the difficulty in
quelling the culture of an entire people. Furthermore, his humming represents the emerging sense
of urgency that compels the Indians to action, and the dogs symbolize the action against the
British that would eventually take place.
There are many such instances in his novels where Salman Rushdie uses magic realism.
His portrayal of characters and style of storytelling are purposeful. He uses magic realism as a
means for finding truth. The factors he uses to find the truth give an element of magic
throughout.
2.1 Magic Realism in Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie artistically incorporates the elements of magic realism in Midnight’s
Children. His use of magic realism as a narrative technique is intentional. Not only does he use
magic realism - the fantastic, the magical, the strange - as a useful technical tool, but he
transcends it to portray the almost unreal and surreal dimensions of the Indian subcontinent. And
much like the Latin American writers, he brings a magic and refreshing view of the effects of
colonialism.
At its first glance, the words „magic‟ and „realism‟ do not seem to be compatible with
each other. Realism is all about events that have happened, largely dealing with historical
settings. On the contrary, magic concerns with the use of fantastic or magical elements in the
narrative. Magic realism is, more than anything else, is an attitude towards reality that can be
expressed in popular or cultured forms.
Magic realism is primarily an art of creating surprises, giving people a new perspective
on what otherwise would be usual and monotonous. Events are endowed with a sense of mystery
by the way they are described. For example, in Midnight’s Children, a crowd celebrating India‟s
independence is called „the monster in the streets‟. This results in an amazement, of something
extraordinary even when the events considered normal have happened. The reader‟s attention is
drawn to these events in a way they might not otherwise be.
History itself can be quite dry. So the incorporation of „magic‟ tends to make it a bit more
interesting to read. It helps to relax the readers a bit. As a whole, magic and realism are
complemented as magic helps achieve the effect which realism barely does, and vice versa. And
indeed, realism or authenticity is true to every piece of history no matter it is in the form of
narrative or documentary.
Salman Rushdie‟s writing, and in particular Midnight’s Children, provides us with
perfectly illustrative examples of how magic realism can work with historical postmodernism. In
his essays on writing, Imaginary Homelands (1981-1991), Rushdie reflects the views of Jameson
and Tonkin, stating that “History is always ambiguous. Facts are hard to establish, and capable of
being given many meanings. Reality is built on prejudices, misconceptions and ignorance as well
as on our perceptiveness and knowledge” (Rushdie, 25).
Rushdie reached this point of understanding through the process of writing Midnight’s
Children. In this novel, he retraces the Bombay and India of his own childhood not as
autobiography but as cultural history. The history he provides is not that written in colonial
history books, but is one constructed around individuals and their involvement in the historical
process.
There are many instances in Midnight’s Children where Rushdie uses the framework of
magic realism. Saleem‟s gift of having an incredible sense of smell, allowing him to determine
others emotions and thoughts, stems from his grandfather Adam, who also had the same large
nose and magical gift. The novel explains how Adam‟s sensitive nose ultimately saved him from
being killed in the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre:
“As the fifty-one men march down the alleyway a tickle replaces the itch in my
grandfather‟s nose… Adam Aziz ceases to concentrate on the events around him
as the tickle mounts to unbearable intensities. As Brigadier Dyer issues a
command the sneeze hits my grandfather full in the face. “Yaaaakh-thoooo!” he
sneezes and falls forward, losing his balance, following his nose and thereby
saving his life” (Rushdie, 41).
The sneeze provides a sense of humour and levity to the brutal attack, distracting the reader from
the massacre itself. The author very beautifully plays with magic realism in such serious and
realistic incidents of history.
Midnight’s Children is a loose allegory for events in India both before and, primarily,
after the independence and partition of India, which took place at midnight on 15 August 1947.
In the temporal sense, Midnight’s Children is post-colonial as the main body of the narrative
occurs after India becomes independent.
In Midnight’s Children, history is seen through the eyes of Saleem Sinai, thus reflected
predominantly through individual experiences. For Saleem, born at the very moment of India‟s
independence, his life becomes inextricably interlinked with the political, national, and religious
events of his time. This gives him a strong desire to restore his past identity to himself. Realism
plays a big role here in terms of describing the significant events that have happened. It goes as
detailed as Sinai himself and his family members, especially the experiences of his grandfather,
provides a unique perspective for the readers to view what have happened during the period of
Indian independence. Without the „magic‟ elements, Midnight’s Children could have been ended
up as another historical documentary. Overall, the use of magic realism not only makes this
novel more appealing, it also exerts another level of importance in terms of the narrator himself
as well as the Indian history as a whole.
Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Midnight’s Children, opens the novel by explaining that he
was born at midnight on 15th August, 1947, at the exact moment India gained its independence
from British rule. He imagines that his miraculously timed birth ties him to the fate of his
country. He later discovers that all children born in India between 12 AM and 1 AM on 15th
August, 1947, are gifted with special powers. Saleem thus attempts to use these powers to
convene the Midnight Children‟s Conference. He acts as a telepathic conduit, bringing hundreds
of geographically disparate children into contact while also attempting to discover the meaning
of their gifts. In particular, those children who are born closest to the stroke of midnight possess
more powerful gifts than the others. Shiva of the Knees, Saleem‟s evil nemesis, and Parvati,
called „Parvati-the-witch‟, are two of these children with notable gifts and roles in Saleem‟s
story.
Saleem has to contend with his personal trajectory. His family is active in this, as they
begin a number of migrations and endure the numerous wars which plague the subcontinent.
During this period he also suffers from amnesia until he enters a quasi-mythological exile in the
jungle of Sundarbans, where he is re-endowed with his memory. In doing so, he reconnects with
his childhood friends. Saleem later becomes involved with the Emergency declared by Indira
Gandhi and her son Sanjay‟s „cleansing‟ of the Jama Masjid slum. For a time Saleem is held as a
political prisoner; these passages contain scathing criticisms of Indira Gandhi‟s overreach during
the Emergency as well as what Rushdie seems to see as a personal lust for power bordering on
godhood. The Emergency signals the end of the potency of the Midnight‟s Children, and there is
little left for Saleem to do but pick up the few pieces of his life he may still find and write the
chronicle that encompasses both his personal history and that of his still-young nation; a
chronicle written for his son, who, like his father, is both chained and supernaturally endowed by
history.
Now, nearing his thirty-first birthday, Saleem believes that his body is beginning to crack
and fall apart. Fearing that his death is imminent, he grows anxious to tell his life story. Padma,
his loyal and loving companion, serves as his patient, often sceptical listener.
The incorporation of the elements of „magic‟ and „realism‟ gives beauty and meaning to
Midnight’s Children. Rushdie‟s use of magic realism as a narrative technique is very apt as he
portrays the postcolonial life in his novel. The Magic realism can therefore be seen as a device
binding Indian culture of the past to the contemporary multicultural interface.
2.2 Midnight’s Children: Fantasy as Matrix
One of the various dictionary definitions of „fantasy‟ is that it is “a creation of the
unrestricted imagination whether expressed or conceived” (The New Penguin English
Dictionary). A literary work of fantasy is often seen to be characterized by strange and
unrealistic elements. The apparent „unrealistic‟ elements in a fictional work dominated by
fantasy may give the impression that fantasy is motivated by a desire to escape from reality.
However, fantasy may be deliberately used by the author not to escape but to transcend reality, to
subvert it to create a more encompassing vision of reality. So fantasy may be consciously used as
a device, as a method, as Salman Rushdie and so many postmodernist novelists do so often.
Rushdie used fantasy as a method of producing intensified images of reality. He uses this
„intensified images of reality‟ in Midnight’s Children so as to portray the happenings preceding
and following India‟s independence. The desperate materials pertaining to those times of
political upheaval, popular upsurge, growing optimism, and chaotic developments that often
bordered on the fantastic could not have been woven together by any other method but that of
fantasy.
It is obvious that Rushdie borrows the technique of storytelling from Indian folk tales and
the epics. But there is deliberate subversion of the purposes of folk tales and epics. Contrary to
the predominantly moral and didactic concern of the creators of folk tales and epics, Rushdie
appears to be amoral. Both folk tales and epics make liberal attempt to entertain and to present a
more complete and complicated vision of reality that merges out of the apparent unrealistic and
unbelievable, and often chaotic happenings. The truth value of incidents and characters of a
world that blends fantasy and reality is not the primary concern of either the storyteller or the
listener/reader. What becomes relevant is the underlying „truth‟ or „reality‟, the images of which
emerge from what they read or listen to. In Rushdie‟s novel, what is real, or, what is unreal is
often uncertain not only to the reader but also to the narrator himself. Or, the real may have so
many facets as to blur reality itself. In a vast country like India, with an immense variety of lifeexperiences and with constant mingling of „great‟ and „little‟ traditions that have their own
visions of reality, facts often get fictionalized, truth often seems incredible.
In Midnight’s Children, through the mixing and juxtaposition of the realistic and
fantastic, which are the features of magic realism, Rushdie makes an attempt to understand and
interpret the multi-layered and complex reality of the socio-political life of the Indian
subcontinent. At the same time, there is an attempt to relate the reality of the individual life to
that super-ordinate, all encompassing reality.
At the surface level, Midnight’s Children is the story of Saleem Sinai and the other
children of India‟s historic midnight of August 15, 1947. At a deeper level, it is the story of an
emerging nation, trying to come into its own. The narrator tries to convince us, the readers, that
there is an integral relation between the private destiny of an individual, Saleem Sinai, and the
public destiny.
The narrator-protagonist of Midnight’s Children admits that his history or a major part of
it „ends in fantasy‟ because in a situation where reality ceases to exist, or is subverted or made
invisible, where the truth is manufactured, fantasy is the only means of uncovering what is
hidden. Fantasy is a device of tracing and uncovering what is hidden, as Jackson points out, “The
fantastic traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture that has been silenced, made invisible,
covered over or made „absent‟ ”. So through his novel, Rushdie tries to uncover the hidden
identity of India.
The language of fantasy is not representational. Like any other postmodern fiction, the
language of Midnight’s Children is not representational. It does not represent facts or what is
real; instead it fabricates facts and the real. At times the language becomes metaphorical:
“Nobody could remember when Tai had been young. He had been plying this
same boat, standing in the same hunched position, across the Dal and Nageen
Lakes… forever” (10).
But as the narrator observes, “Reality can have metaphorical content; that does not make it less
real”.
Fantasy is marked by certain other features too. For example, there is a breach of
chronology in the story-telling, a breach of temporal and spatial unities. Rushdie‟s tale weaves
past and present. It begins with the mention of Saleem‟s birth in 1947, then it looks back to the
early years of the twentieth century, then briefly recalls Saleem‟s childhood experience, and then
goes back to 1919 and Jallianwala Bagh. In between, one notices self reflexivity in the narrator‟s
deliberate attempts to lay bare the process of constructing his own version of the reality.
Another element of fantasy found in Rushdie‟s novel is the overt violation of what is
accepted as possible or probable, true or fact. For example, like the Puranic characters, Tai the
eternal boatman is ageless: “Nobody could remember when Tai had been young. He had been
plying this same boat, standing in the same hunched position, across the Dal and Nageen
Lakes… forever” (10). In his poetic language, Rushdie describes the agelessness of and
something of the eternal in Tai: “His face was a sculpture of wind on water…” (10). At the same
time, incredulity is neutralized by exaggerating what could have been partially true or factual.
The boatman Tai gave up washing. “He took to drifting slowly past the Aziz household,
releasing the dreadful fumes of his body across the small garden and into the house. Flowers
died; birds fled from the ledge outside old Father Aziz‟s window” (29).
An inversion of the elements of this world is a marked feature of fantasy. Rushdie resorts
to this method in his novel very often. The midnight‟s children had mysterious magical powers.
A boy could step into mirrors and emerge from any reflecting surface, another could eat metal; a
girl could inflict physical wounds with words, another‟s finger was so green that she could prize
aubergines in the Thar desert. Saleem himself had a highly developed sense of smell. He had the
ability to “get inside grownups‟ thoughts”.
There is a deliberate attempt to subvert the conventions of realistic representation
throughout the novel. “It seems that the late summer of that year my grandfather, Doctor Aadam
Aziz, contracted a highly dangerous form of optimism… He was by no means alone, because
despite strenuous efforts by the authorities to stamp it out, this virulent disease had been breaking
out all over India that year” (39). This is obviously a reference to a real historical event, the Quit
India movement in 1942.
An attempt to reconstruct reality to produce strange and unfamiliar effect is made in the
novel. Mian Abdullah‟s hum “Could fall low enough to give you toothache‟ and when it rose to
the highest, more feverish pitch, it had the ability of inducing erections in anyone within its
vicinity” (46). When assassins came to kill hummingbird Abdullah, “…his humming became
higher and higher”, “out of the range of our human ears, and was heard by the dogs of the town”
(58).
Through all these the „unreality‟ of the confusing, amorphous reality of our times is fore
grounded. Fantasy serves as a time-tested device for doing so. In a tropical country like our
India, fantasy seems to be, as the narrator himself states, not an optional literary method, but an
inevitable natural psychic process, of grappling with the truth and reality that seem to be forever
fuzzy.
2.3 Narrative Techniques in Midnight’s Children
Rushdie‟s Midnight’s Children is divided into „three books‟. These three Books are
reminiscent of the Victorian three-decker novel. Book One covers the time from the Jallianwala
Bagh incident of April, 1919 to the birth of the protagonist, Saleem, on 15 August, 1947; Book
Two extends up to the end of the Indo-Pakistan war in September, 1965, and Book Three
envelops the period up to the end of the Emergency in March, 1977, and includes the Bangladesh
war as well.
Narration in Midnight's Children takes in the form of dialogues between two voices: that
of Saleem and Padma, who embodies the audience. Rushdie captures the reader‟s attention by
playing with pathos and emotions. The narrator starts the story saying:
"And there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined
lives events miracles places rumours, so dense, a commingling of the improbable
and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one
of me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well" (4).
Here, the narrator, Saleem Sinai insists on the reader's necessary good will for the rest of his
story.
Rushdie uses the elements of pity and fear in his narrative. “The succession of
mutilations, from the piece of hair pulled out to the eardrum pierced by a mighty blow dealt by
his father (194), from the cut finger to the sinus operation which brings about the loss of
telepathy (364)”, all of them arouse the two emotions Aristotle attributed to the genre of tragedy
in his Poetics, that is to say pity and terror.
The second element Rushdie uses is to do with efficiency. Saleem is very intent upon
delighting his listener. Thus he emphasizes how he strives "to recapture the rapt attention of my
revolted Padma Bibi" by "recount[ing] a fairy tale" (382). This concern with efficiency
frequently makes use of what Roman Jakobson termed the phatic function, in order to keep
contact with the addressee. Efficiency in a narrative is fundamental to Rushdie. In an interview,
he drew a comparison between his style and the technique used by Indian storytellers: "In India
the thing that I've taken most from, I think, apart from the fairytale tradition that we were talking
about, is oral narration. Because it is a country of still largely illiterate people [like Padma] the
power and the vitality still remain in the oral storytelling tradition”.
The Book One is full of bawdy puns and funny anecdotes. Purple patches are also an
important factor in order to please the reader. Instances of humour can be seen in the description
of Doctor Aziz before the massacre recounted in the chapter „Mercurochrome‟ or when the
reader realises that William Methwold's hair is in fact a wig.
The elements of time and space are also used in the novel. The title of Chapter Sixteen,
„Alpha and Omega‟, reminds the reader of this element. The narrator often refers to the time of
enunciation and cannot help mentioning what is going to happen or what has just happened. He
announces the mysterious birth of Saleem and Shiva ("Noses and knees and knees and noses")
and foresees the crucial moments of his life:
"Spittoons will brain him - doctors will drain him - jungle will claim him - wizards
reclaim him! Soldiers will try him - tyrants will fry him . . ." (115).
In this oracle, the poetic function of language is particularly emphasized. The effect generated is
that of an incantation, of a magic formula that predicts Saleem's cycle of destiny.
Time ceaselessly transforms itself: it stretches in Book One, which starts in 1915 (or even
at the beginning of mankind, with Tai the boatman) and finishes in 1947, it then considerably
settles between Chapters Nine and Twenty, in which a period of eighteen years elapses, until the
Indo-Pakistani war of 1965. It then retracts itself even more in Book Three, which lasts twelve
years, until the aftermath of Indira Gandhi's Emergency.
The constitutive eroticism used in the introductory scene which launches the paradigm of
the „perforated sheet‟ is a metaphor for Rushdie‟s narrative technique. The pleasure drawn from
the „strip-tease‟ is reminiscent of quite a few voyeuristic characters. Like the perforated sheet
which lets us peep through its holes to reveal the rest of the body, every page of the novel is
turned to uncover what is hidden in the rest of the story.
2.4 Midnight's Children: A Cocktail of History and Fantasy
Years back, at the dawn of twentieth century, a young doctor Adam Aziz, educated in
Germany bruises his giant nose while praying in Kashmir valley and decides to stop believing in
God, causing the occurrence of a hole in the place of his heart and thereby setting off a chain of
events that culminated in the chronicling of them more than sixty years by his grandson Saleem
Sinai.
Saleem Sinai, born at the exact stroke of midnight, along with a great nation of huge
diversity as his sibling, by a quirk of fate got swapped just after birth with another child who is
destined to be his arch rival. Saleem was destined to be the great Messiah of the nation. But he
was beaten by his own family, the history and even by his lovers.
In Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie weaves the magic realist tale of a newly born
nation, its expectations, failures, and ultimate downfall with the Emergency, like a master
weaver. The story works in many levels. It can be read as a fantasy, a commentary on politics of
the subcontinent or as an allegory of actual events. It is a bizarre mix, a cocktail of fantasy and
history, where lot of actual events and people are interwoven to the narrative. Saleem who
possess several supernatural abilities is never able to use them to the help of his nation, his
sibling due to the differences in opinion from other midnight's children. The story unfolds like an
avalanche where small incidences trigger bigger ones which in turn cause bigger impacts.
„Recurrence‟ is a major theme of the novel. Some objects or happenings recur throughout
the story, in different places, with different people which give the novel a unique flow. The name
changes of characters are a recurring theme. In the novel, several characters change their names,
usually after their marriage. Another incident recurring is the shouting of ticketless passengers outside trains when those with tickets close the doors to avoid them. Initially it is
Saleem's grand father and his bride. Then his father and mother and when Saleem's turn comes
he is outside the train with ticket-less men. Infidelity and impotence are two other themes that
recur. Many characters are not faithful to their partners, like Saleem's mother who visits her
former husband in a cafe, or Pia Aunt unfaithful to her husband Hanif. These also play much
important part in the numerous twists and turns in the novel.
In many instances in the novel, men when subjected to failure, become impotent. Like
Ahmad Sinai, when his assets are frozen by the government, or Hanif after the failure of his
movies. But impotency becomes a major part at the end of the novel when Indira Gandhi, with
her son Sanjay, decides mass vasectomy operations to the poor. It works in two levels: In literal
level, it becomes a method to sterilize the midnight's children who has power to upset the
politics. In a deeper level it works as an allegory about the sterilization of a whole nation by
emergency, where any opponents are oppressed and thereby turning the whole country impotent.
History of the subcontinent plays a major role in the novel as Saleem's life is entangled
with the nation with whom he was born. His grandfather is present in Delhi while Jallianwallah
Bagh massacre occurs, and after his birth, while they live in Bombay, his presence happens in
many noteworthy events, like he becomes the cause of a slogan against Gujarati by Marathas
when he accidentally falls into the procession. Later he becomes the indirect cause to the death
of Nehru. Then there is the Sabarmati case in which Saleem is said to have his hands. When his
family migrates to Pakistan, he is the one with Ayub Khan in the first coup. Again because of his
great olfactory skills he gets a chance to be part of the team that overthrows Mujib in
Bangladesh. He is present in Dhaka when Manek Shah marches with army to liberate
Bangladesh.
Moving through the novel is like entering a dark cave with thousands of paintings on the
walls equipped only with a dim torch light and taking hours to see and enjoy each of those
beautiful paintings part by part, like Dr Adam Aziz, in the novel, attends his most beautiful
patient and the wife-to-be, Naseema behind a perforated cloth examining one part at a time and
proposing finally when he sees her face.
3.1
Salman Rushdie’s ‘Sterioscopic Vision’: Postcolonial Environments
in
Midnight’s Children
“To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world,” says Saleem Sinai, the
autobiographical protagonist of Rushdie‟s Midnight’s Children. In order to make meaning out of
his life, Saleem first „swallows the world‟: he tries to understand his country‟s colonial past;
makes sense out of its burgeoning independent present; and comes to terms with his (and India‟s)
postcolonial identity.
Postcolonial discourse was born in response to the imperial expansion of Western
colonial empires during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Postcolonial writers like
Rushdie, therefore, emerged out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by
writing in response to the authority wielded by the imperial powers. The prose of African
countries, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Caribbean countries, India, Malaysia, New Zealand,
Pakistan, Singapore, South Pacific Island countries, and Sri Lanka are all examples of
postcolonial literatures.
The desire to reclaim the India of his past was the driving force behind Rushdie‟s
decision to write Midnight‟s Children – the novel was born when Rushdie realized how much he
wanted to restore his past identity to himself. Midnight’s Children was his first literary attempt to
recapture India. The novel explores the ways in which history is given meaning through the
retelling of individual experience. History is seen subjectively through the eyes of the protagonist
Saleem Sinai, therefore the retelling of history is fragmented and, at times, erroneous. Rushdie is
relating Saleem‟s generation of „midnight‟s children‟ to the generation of Indians with whom he
was born and raised. As a product of postcolonial India, Saleem pieces together the multifarious
fragments of his identity, just as India begins anew in rebuilding her identity in the wake of
colonialism. Saleem‟s story represents the plural identities of India and the fragmented search for
self through memory.
Saleem‟s attempt to reconcile his various multiple identities reflects India‟s struggle to
reunite its multiple nationhood after colonial rule. In a narrative build-up to the day of India‟s
independence, Saleem refers India as a nation which had previously never existed. Although it
had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with
Middle Kingdom Egypt, India would never exist. It can exist only by the efforts of a phenomenal
will - the will of its citizen. In order to break down the physical constraints of colonial rule, India
needs to come together as a nation; it needs to unite its multiple national identities to form a great
nation - a mythic land as Saleem calls it.
Saleem‟s struggle with self-identity parallels Rushdie‟s analogy of „multiple rooting‟.
One example of this is the role of multiple parentages in Saleem‟s life. Switched at birth by a
nurse in the hospital, Saleem is raised by parents that are not biologically his own. As a baby,
due to the opportunistic hour of his birth, he is coveted by all of his parent‟s neighbors and
assumes different roles when visiting each of them. He says:
“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 on the subject” (178).
Furthermore, when his parents discover they are not his true biological parents, they leave him
for an extended period of time with his Uncle Hanif and Aunt Pia who become his surrogate
parents. Saleem refers to this period of time as his „first exile‟ (the second being when he moves
with his parents to Pakistan). Like Rushdie, who is a product of multiple nations (India, Pakistan
and England), Saleem sorts through his own multiple identities to recognize his true self. These
references to multiple parentages relate to the feelings of homelessness and displacement as well
to the fragmentation of identity and memory that plague Saleem throughout the novel.
Multiplicity is also metaphorically represented by the Midnight‟s Children Conference.
At the age of nine, Saleem starts to hear voices in his head and realizes that he can telepathically
communicate with all of the other children born at the midnight hour of India‟s independence.
He speaks of his newfound telepathic powers thus:
“I am nine years old and lost in the confusion of other people‟s lives which are
blurring together in the heat” (237).
Through Saleem‟s gift of telepathy and his ability to communicate with all of the other children
born at midnight who are scattered throughout the nation, he is able to directly experience India‟s
diverse plurality. The diversity of their powers and backgrounds parallels Rushdie‟s point that
India is a nation that is much too complex and diverse to be defined by one homogenous culture.
One of Rushdie's most prominent themes is the fragmentary effects of displacement and
migration. He cites the fragmentation of memory and identity as one of the common attributes of
the displaced Indian writer. In Imaginary Homelands he states, “When the Indian writer who
writes from outside India tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some
of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost” (10). Because expatriates experience a physical
and mental displacement from their homeland, it is inevitable that their identities also become
fragmented and disjointed. Like Rushdie, the characters in the novel attempt to solve the puzzle
of their own identities. For example, during their courtship, Aadam Aziz gains familiarity with
his future wife, Naseem, through a white perforated sheet whose singular hole allows him to
examine her body. He becomes familiar with her body in fragments: “So gradually Doctor Aziz
came to have a picture of Naseem in his mind, a badly-fitting collage of her severally-inspected
parts. This phantasm of a partitioned woman began to haunt him…” (26). Aadam pieces together
the puzzle of Naseem‟s appearance. The perforated sheet is repeatedly mentioned throughout the
text and represents the fragmented identities that the novel‟s characters attempt to piece together.
Saleem refers to it as a „ghostly essence‟ which doomed his mother to love his father in segments
and condemned him to see his own life - its meanings, its structures - in fragments.
Just as the perforated sheet symbolizes the fragmented identities of Aadam and Naseem,
Amina [Saleem‟s mother] trains herself to love her husband in segments. In love with the
memory of another man, Amina assiduously falls in love with her husband piece by piece. To do
this, “she divided him mentally, into every single one of his component parts, physical as well as
behavioral…in short, she fell under the spell of the perforated sheet of her own parents, because
she resolved to fall in love with her husband bit by bit” (71). Her husband‟s identity is therefore,
in her eyes, a fragmented amalgamation of his various parts. She is unable to see him as a whole
person, just as the displaced postcolonial identity is often fragmented rather than a unified whole.
Rushdie also uses fragmentation and disintegration as a metaphor for the loss of identity.
Rushdie describes Aadam Aziz as possessing a void or hole in his center as a result of his
uncertainty of God‟s existence and newfound disillusion with his Kashmiri homeland. When
Aadam hits his nose on the ground while attempting to pray he resolves to never again kiss the
earth for any god or man. This decision, however, “made a hole in him, a vacancy in a vital inner
chamber, leaving him vulnerable to women and history” (4). Aadam is described throughout the
novel with reference to the image of the hole in his stomach – the disintegration of his body
parallels the rapid chaotic turmoil that besets India. Concurrently Saleem, throughout his
narrative, often refers to the „cracking‟ and disintegration of his exterior. He says, “I have begun
to crack all over like an old jug…I am literally disintegrating…” (36). Saleem intersperses his
narration of the past with present allusions to his rapidly disintegrating condition; a reflection of
his inability to cope with his multiple fragmented identities.
3.2
Midnight’s
Children:
The
Link
Between
Magic
Realism
and
Postcolonialism
Rushdie‟s Midnight’s Children is known for its brilliant use of magic realism, through the
use of which it has attained the status of a perfect postcolonial text. His writings deal with the
issue of split identity and conflict of immigration and exile. As a novelist from a country with a
colonial legacy, „the idea of nation‟ has always been the central concern in his fictional and nonfictional writing. The postcolonial concept of a nation differs from the general notion of nation
referring to „same people living in same place‟. Since Indians are different people living in the
same place, India remains pluralistic in its languages and cultures with different histories of
communities. With magical realism, postcolonial writers are able to challenge realistic narrative
and present an alternative reality. According to Linda Hutcheon, the postmodern technique of
magic realism is linked to postcolonialism in that they both deal with the oppressive force of
colonial history in relation to the past.
In a magic realist text, we can see a conflict between two oppositional systems and each
of them work towards the creation of a fictional world from the other. These two oppositional
systems are the world of fantasy and the world of reality and they can be seen to be present and
competing for the reader‟s attention. In Midnight's Children, through fantasy, realism makes its
voice heard. The narrative framework of Midnight’s Children consists of tale which Saleem
Sinai recounts orally to his wife-to-be Padma. This self-referential narrative recalls indigenous
Indian culture, particularly the similarly orally recounted Arabian Nights. The events in
Rushdie‟s text also parallel the magical nature of the narratives recounted in the Arabian Nights.
In this novel, the mingling of the fantastic and ordinary, which is an aspect of magical
realism, seems Indian as the characters involved in contemporary political and social upheavals
also possess the power of mythic heroes. In the beginning of the novel, there is a fine passage as
an example for this mingling of the real and fantastic. Grandfather Adam Aziz‟s blood solidifies
and turns into rubies and his tears too turn into diamonds. Mian Abdullah‟s humming without a
pause causes the window of the room to fall and causes one his enemy‟s eyes to crack and fall
out. Later in the novel we see Amina, who is Saleem‟s mother, having fears of getting a child
with a cauliflower in its head instead of brain (461). We also come across another strange
washerwoman Durga whose breasts are colossal and inexhaustible with a torrent of milk (622).
Such incidents in the novel give a kind of dream like quality due to the mixing up of the real life
with the fantastic elements.
The novel remains a continuous and subtle investigation of the relations between order,
reality and fantasy. The narrator Saleem constantly relates his life to that of his country India.
His birth, growth, development and destruction are related to that of India. The other characters
too seem to wander through the pages of history, colliding with important moments in the
development of India seemingly by accident. Thus, Saleem‟s grandfather is on his knees after a
mighty sneeze when Brigadier Dyer‟s fifty machine-gunners open fire in the Amritsar massacre
of 1919; it is Saleem‟s father who buys one of Methwold‟s villas; Saleem is born at the moment
India is; and almost all of the major events of his life, leading finally to the destruction of the
midnight‟s children and also India at the moment of declaration of Emergency are coincidental to
developments in the new country. Saleem and India must deal with genealogical confusion as
they struggle to construct their identities.
The loss of reference to the identity of the characters in the novel is clearly understood
when Saleem‟s grandfather finds it difficult in identifying himself after 1947 due to the fight
between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. The „crack‟ in the body of politics corresponds to the
„cracks‟ in Saleem, as he feels himself going to pieces. This conversion of metaphors into events
is another type of magic in the novel. When Saleem informs his family of his special gift of
hearing voices, his father hits him in the ear. His „stupid cracks‟ are literalised into physical
cracks. Thus, in this novel, magic realism is a way of showing „reality‟ more truly with the aid of
various magic of metaphor. Quite naturally, this novel significantly shaped the course of Indian
writing in English after its publication. Rushdie looks like a story-teller who tries to return the
English language to the tradition of magic realism which has a history from Cervantes through
Sterne to Milan Kundera and Marquez.
Midnight's Children is regarded as a postcolonial text and if postcolonial literature is
understood in the binary model of colonizer vs. colonized, then Rushdie‟s narrative fits in that
model. Since postcolonialism remains part of English Studies, critics who focus on colonialism
also endorse the view of Rushdie as a perfect postcolonial writer. Protagonists or narrators in
postcolonial writings are often found to be pressed with the questions of identity, conflicts of
living between two worlds and the forces of new cultures. Postcolonial writings take place
through the process of re-writing and re-reading the past. Rushdie wants his midnight‟s children
to question the colonial paradigms so that the constructed „Other‟ may give India and some such
colonized countries a decolonized identity.
Rushdie‟s view of the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down,
good against evil, finds parallel in the term magical realism. The search for the whole in Saleem
can be acknowledged as finding what will make up his identity which is a central concern in
postcolonial literature. Rushdie‟s subject is identity; both national and personal. His literature
discusses the themes of identity that breaks down colonial constructs of Western dominance over
Eastern culture. With this, he tries to establish himself as a prominent Anglo-Indian postcolonial
writer.
Besides using magic realism as a strategy to upturn the usual realism, the novel stands
against the colonial models too. As a political position, post colonialism provides the needed
space for resisting the Western realism. The metaphors and allegories in which the novel is
steeped, facilitate a politicized resistance against western paradigmatic inconsistencies like its
historical discourse of orders which is not only false but also derogatory from a postcolonial
perspective. For example, the strange connection between Saleem and India not only
metaphorizes Saleem‟s life as a microcosm of the nation but also sees it as an alternative to the
grand narrative in which the history of India is written by its Western conquerors.
Rushdie tries to subvert Western colonial constructs of identity and culture by employing
specific postcolonial literary techniques such as fragmentation, plurality and language along with
magical realism. Midnight’s Children can be considered as one such attempt of Rushdie to
recapture India. From this perspective, it can be concluded that Salman Rushdie‟s Midnight’s
Children successfully links magical realism with postcolonialism.
3.3 Magic Realism as a Postcolonial Device in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children
Salman Rushdie‟s Midnight’s Children, remains a central text in postcolonial literature.
Rushdie‟s ambitious novel rejects the British colonial versions of India and constructs a „new‟
world and a new depiction of Indian citizens and history in an attempt to provide greater truth to
Indian images and history. Midnight’s Children follows Saleem Sinai, as he self-consciously
explains his family history to the readers and to his listener, Padma. While describing his
grandfather and grandmother‟s personal history, Saleem intertwines Indian history within his
narrative. This combination of his own familial history and Indian history culminates in the
moment of his birth.
Midnight’s Children‟s importance and significance as a postcolonial text arises from the
novel‟s ability to intertwine three major themes: the creation and telling of history, the creation
and telling of a nation‟s and an individual‟s identity, and the creation and telling of stories. The
novel expresses these themes and simultaneously introduces the problems of postcolonial
identity through connected and dependent forms of hybridity.
The novel employs different levels of hybridization, each depending on each other to
exist and work within the text, through which the novel illustrates India‟s emerging postcolonial
identity. The ability of the narrator, Saleem Sinai, to wordlessly communicate with the other
Indian children born on the same day demonstrates how magic realism gives Indians the
opportunity to communicate the thoughts, desires, and dreams of a nation. Hence, these midnight
children literally give voice to an entire subcontinent.
The formal technique of magic realism becomes the framework of the novel, through
which the characters become able to communicate their individual perspectives and provide their
own, more accurate versions of history. In order to effectively illustrate a new and emerging
Indian postcoloniality, it becomes necessary to write in a new method to properly communicate
to the colonial and post-colonial citizens. Rushdie‟s use of magic realism in Midnight’s
Children becomes not only a new literary technique, but a necessary one, vital to communicate
the new problems and struggles associated with Indian postcoloniality.
Midnight’s Children uses the framework of magical realism to explore the problems of
postcolonialism. Through the novel‟s focus on the personal histories of its characters, along with
its use of humor, the text destabilizes the authority and power of major historical events. By
undercutting the power of these historical events, the novel grapples with both the Britain‟s
power over Indians, along with the Indian‟s attempts to reassert their own power, through
independence, and the consequences of this newly acquired independence.
The novel‟s creation of new and seemingly more accurate versions of Indian colonial
and post-colonial history stems from the text‟s explicit references to historical events. The
Indian characters in the novel attempt to displace and distort British colonial versions of Indian
history. Saleem melds Indian and his familial history and connects both histories to his own
present moment. Saleem‟s position as author, writer, and creator of his familial history brings up
the idea that history may be created, just as a family history may be embellished and
exaggerated. Saleem appears as a „symbol‟ for India; his birth and his ability to communicate
with his fellow midnight children associate him with a „mother-earth‟ figure, like „Mother India‟.
Through the formal framework of magic realism, the novel allows its multitude of
characters, belonging to different cultural backgrounds, to evaluate and formulate their own
versions of Indian history, thus subverting British colonial versions of history. Magic realism
becomes necessary to communicate the postcoloniality of India, and within its framework, the
novel explores and presents a postcolonial history of its own. The cultural and social hybridity,
along with the historical hybridity present within the novel allows the text to illustrate the major
themes of the novel and postcoloniality itself: the creation and telling of history, identity, and
narratives. The novel effectively and clearly depicts the problems of postcoloniality and seeks to
solve them.
In the novel, identity creation occurs at both the national level and the personal level.
Thus, while the novel describes the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre from the perspective of Indian
citizens in an attempt to accurately depict the event, the description of the event serves as a
means for Saleem to explain and understand his grandfather‟s past.
Humor remains one method the novel uses to grapple with the incredible violence
spawned by colonization. By focusing on Aadam‟s struggle to control his sneeze during the
Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, the novel seeks to solve a problem of postcoloniality: the difficulty
of creating and determining one‟s own personal and national identity. Through humor, Saleem
becomes able to focus on his own familial identity, allowing Saleem to gain a greater
understanding of his own identity. He becomes able to see the origins of his sense of smell and
telepathy, through his grandfather‟s actions. The creation and telling of a postcolonial citizen‟s
personal history remain inextricably linked to the creation and telling of a postcolonial
nation‟s history, due to the unavoidable presence of the colonizers in the citizen and nation‟s
past.
In an effort to solve the problems of postcolonialism, the difficulties of creating and
determining one‟s history, identity, and point of origin, the novel employs magic realism as its
formal technique. Although the novel‟s presence of magic realism illustrates another form of
hybridization (mixing fantasy and reality) within the novel, this formal technique is not merely
another example of hybridization in the text. Magic realism remains the framework of the novel
itself, and within magic realism, the entire novel explores postcolonial problems in an attempt to
solve them via connected forms of hybridity. This formal technique remains necessary to
express India‟s growing postcoloniality, and without its usage, the novel‟s attempts to adequately
illustrate varying Indian citizens and their more accurate versions of history would remain
difficult, if not impossible.
Midnight’s Children‟s formal technique of magical realism, then, becomes not only a
mere formal innovation, but the most adequate expression of the history of Indian colonialism
and the modern moment of Indian postcoloniality. The novel connects historical events,
mythological stories, and fictional narratives and combines them to form a true picture of Indian
postcoloniality. Through the varying character narratives and their myriad connections to each
other, the novel accurately depicts the problems of the colonial project. While the colonizers
categorized India and Indians as a monolithic place and people, the novel illustrates India‟s
multiplicity and diversity, in an attempt to overturn the colonial image of India.
By depicting a myriad of characters, Rushdie demonstrates the impossibility of
identifying a true authentic Indian identity or history. Instead, he shows that if a postcolonial
citizen remains able to create his or her own history and identity, as Saleem does, it becomes
possible to ignore questions of authenticity.
The novel, through Saleem‟s personal narration, understands the need to explore the
history and identity of one‟s nation in order to adequately express one‟s own personal history.
Thus, the ways in which the novel‟s characters interact and overlap allows for the combination of
fiction with myth and history. This mixing and melding of history, identity, and storytelling
occurs through the social interactions within the novel, mostly occurring relationally to Saleem.
Thus, the social and cultural hybridization occurring within the text directly influences Saleem‟s
narrative, and hence, allows new postcolonial narratives to become prominent, while
marginalizing colonial narratives.
Several moments within the novel, either the novel itself, demonstrates how Saleem and
the other midnight‟s children remain vital to India‟s future. Not only are these children
necessary for India‟s new future, but they remain a „mirror‟ for India‟s future, illuminating the
strengths and weaknesses of an independent India. The midnight‟s children, therefore represent
the multiplicity and diversity within postcolonial India.
CONCLUSION
Published in 1981, Salman Rushdie‟s Midnight's Children significantly shaped the course
of Indian writing in English. This great work of art gave Rushdie a prominent position in the
literary canon. He got a definite place in the readers‟ heart. Critics accepted Rushdie as a storyteller who returned English language to the tradition of magic realism. Rushdie began to be
widely accepted as a perfect postcolonial writer. Midnight's Children was truly a fate changing
novel for Rushdie.
Midnight's Children is a typical example of a postcolonial novel that integrates the
elements of magic realism into it. The author‟s intentional use of magic realism helps in bringing
out the surreal and unreal dimensions of the Indian subcontinent and thereby making it a
postcolonial work. By synchronizing the national history and the personal history, Rushdie
narrates India‟s colonial past and postcolonial present. His narration of the nation is subjective
and therefore history in the text is fragmented and, at times, erroneous.
Rushdie‟s use of magic realism makes Midnight's Children the more appealing. It gives a
fantastical element to the text. Fantasy is deliberately used so as to transcend the reality. Magic
realism helped the author to speak the unspeakable. Various themes and elements of magic
realism like the themes of multiplicity, displacement, migration, fragmentation and disintegration
are metaphorically used in various incidents in the text. The elements of pity and fear, time and
space, bawdy puns and funny anecdotes, eroticism, recurrence, all give an unrivalled beauty to
this novel. The use of poetic language too is worth noticing in this regard.
Rushdie assumes magic realism as an effective tool to solve the problems of
postcolonialism. So, by connecting and combining historical events, mythological stories and
fictional narratives, Rushdie tries to create and convey a true picture of Indian postcolonialism.
While the colonizers categorized India and Indians as a monolithic place and people, the novel
illustrates India‟s multiplicity and diversity, in an attempt to overturn the colonial image of India.
Midnight's Children is therefore an attempt to recapture India. All these attempts would have
been impossible without the inclusion of magic realism.
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