October 2013, Volume: II, Issue: X
HOPE AND DESPAIR IN SALMAN RUSHDIE’S MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN
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D. Shanthi, Ph.D Research Scholar, Department of English, Annamalai University
Dr. G. Arputhavel Raja, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Annamalai University
Indian-born British author Salman Rushdie is a well known as a leading novelist
among the writers of Indian English Literature. Ahmed Salman Rushdie is one of the
most popular novelists of the twentieth century was born to wealthy Muslim parents,
just two months before the Partition of British India. Rushdie was educated at a Bombay
private school and at the age of fourteen he was sent to attend Rugby School, a leading
boarding school in Warwickshire, England. He later studied history at King‟s College,
Cambridge. Rushdie‟s novels bring out the events of history, myth, legends, fable,
comedy, political satire, and magic elements within an imaginative and linguistic frame
work. Magic Realism is one of the predominant styles of Rushdie which is a blend of
religion, fantasy, and mythology into a more grounded reality. One of his major novels
Midnight’s Children has this distinctive style of writing.
“Magic Realism” or “Magical Realism” is a genre where magic elements appear
to be natural in a realist environment. One must understand first the history of magical
realism in order to understand the genre. The meaning giving by Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia for Magical Realism is:
A literary mode rather than a distinguishable genre, magical realism is
characterized by two conflicting perspectives, one based on a so-called rational view of
reality and the other on the acceptance of the supernatural as prosaic reality. Magical
realism differs from pure fantasy primarily because it is set in a normal, modern world
with authentic descriptions of humans and society. It aims to seize the paradox of the
union of opposites; for instance, it challenges binary oppositions like life and death and
the pre-colonial past versus the post-industrial present. (1)
For example, the author gives every details of the period such as date of birth,
events of the time, experience of the character etc. But such facts help him define a
fantastic character of the story which is abnormal, like someone living beyond the
normal length of life and being present throughout many generations, such as living for
two hundred years and more. On the surface, the story has no direct or clear magical
attributes and everything is conveyed in real setting, but such a character breaks the
rules of our real world.
Magical realism is a broadly descriptive term for a movement in fiction
originally brought to prominence by a North American writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924).
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Since Kafka, it came to be associated with South American writers, Jorge Luis Borges
(1899-1986) of Argentina and Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia (1927). In 1940s, the
Latin American writers used mythology to express the real American mentality towards
life whereas Anglo-American writers used natural or physical laws to explain the
reality of life.
Magical realism migrated for six decades from South American writers to
North American writers like John Barth, Bernard Malamud, Thomas Pynchon,
W.P.Kinsella and Toni Morrison. There are few more authors who belong to this style
of writing like Salman Rushdie the British Indian, Gloria Naylor, African American;
Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie of North America, and the English author Louis de
Bernieres and feminist English writer Angela Carter.
Perhaps the best known magical realist is Salman Rushdie whose language
form of magical realism straddles both the surrealist tradition of magic realism as it
developed in Europe and the mythic tradition of magical realism as it developed in
Latin America. We find similar technique in Rushdie‟s Midnight’s Children where the
destiny of the characters mirrors the developments in Indian and Pakistani society. In
1993 Salman Rushdie‟s Midnight’s Children was judged the best novel among all the
winners of the prestigious Booker Prize in the twenty-five years of the prize's history. In
the estimation of the Booker judges Midnight’s Children is the best novel published in the
English-speaking world outside the United States in the last quarter of the twentieth
century.
In the interview with Max Miller, recorded on November 29, 2010 for the
program Today‟s Big think Edge directed and produced by Jonathan Fowler entitled
“Magical Realism is Still Realism- Transcript”, Salman Rushdie answers the question
“How do magic and fantasy help you arrive at realism?”
The question is: „What does truth mean in fiction?‟ Because of course the first
premise of fiction is that it‟s not true, that the story does not record events that took
place. These people didn‟t exist. These things did not happen. - - -. But then so what do
we mean then by „truth in literature?‟ And clearly what we mean is human truth, not
photographic, journalistic, recorded truth, but the truth we recognize as human beings.
About how we are with each other, how we deal with each other, what are our
strengths and our weaknesses, how we interact and what is the meaning of our lives? I
mean this is what we look at. (1)
Salman Rushdie‟s novels in general and Midnight Children in particular often
associate with several categories of literary fiction, including magical realism,
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postcolonial fiction, and postmodern literature. His works are compared with Gunter
Grass‟s Tin Drum and Gabriel Garcia Marquez‟s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Rushdie‟s fiction incorporates of traditional mythical and fantastical elements of Indian
English language and hums with an eclectic mix of prose style, which echoes the
rhythm and slang of English as it is colloquially spoken in India. English words get
combined in new and unusual ways. He uses long and unbroken sentence freely
spanning more a page at times.
Salman Rushdie‟s narrator, Saleem Sinai asserts in a manner that whatever he is
saying seems to be real at first, but he reveals the truth that it is unreal towards the end.
The very first line of the story of Saleem Sinai begins with a fairy tale narration “I was
born in the city of Bombay... once upon a time” (1), at midnight in Doctor Narlikar‟s
Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947, on the precise moment at which India received its
independence from Britain. It seems that Rushdie wishes to establish it as a true account
of the nation‟s history and feels that he has placed chunks of historical facts in the
novel. But at the same time the novel abounds in phrases like “I am flying across the
city... I am winging towards the Old Fort” (103), “inside the basket of invisibility, I
Saleem Sinai... Vanished... Disappeared. Dematerialised. Like a djinn” (381), which
established it as a fantasy. Similar technique has been used by Rushdie in his previous
novel Shame where the destiny of the characters mirrors the developments of Indian
and Pakistani society but in real it is a fantasy.
The story of Saleem is about the interrelatedness of the personal and the public
life of his own with the history of modern India. The elements of marvelous and the
supernatural events help resolve the immigrant‟s dilemma and this strategy used by the
postcolonial migrant writer to re-create history. Rushdie uses levitation, flights,
telepathy, dreams, memories, magic potions, invisibility, and transformation of matter
into mind to depict the phantasmagoric realities of post-independent India.
Hallucination, insanity, extraordinary situations become the norm of the novel.
In Rushdie‟s books many characters face the problems of identity. For example,
characters do not know who their parents are. In Midnight’s Children the two main
characters Saleem and Shiva both were born at the stroke of the midnight when India
got its independence. As the novel begins Saleem is the son of Ahmed Sinai and Amina
belonging to a traditional Muslim family. Shiva is the son of Vanita and Wee Willie
Winkie a street singer and a beggar of a Hindu family. Vanita dies in labour revealing
the truth that she got impregnated by an Englishman William Methwold. Towards the
middle, Saleem is revealed with the truth that he was switched after his birth by a
midwife Mary Pereira at Doctor Narlikar Nursing Home in order to impress her lover, a
Marxist rebel Joseph D‟ Costa. Saleem is in search of his identity, whether he is the son
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of Amina and Ahmed or of Vanita and Wee Willie Winkie or William Methwold. In the
same way, Aadam Sinai the son of Saleem Sinai also do not know who is his father,
whether he is the son of Saleem or Shiva as his mother Parvati had an affair with Shiva.
So is Saleem “became the chosen child of midnight, whose parents were not his parents,
whose son would not be his own” (117).
Saleem and Shiva share some common characteristics, such as a big nose and
knees or the minute of their birth, but in most respects they are complete opposites. As
a child Shiva is a leader of the children gang where many boys are older than him.
Saleem gets often pulled out by other children, when Evie Burns fights with his sister
Brass Monkey (Jamila Singer). Evie ostracizes Saleem from their crowd for trying to
support his sister. Shiva is ambitious, ruthless and he makes excellent career from a son
of a beggar to a favourite general of Prime Minister Indira Ghandi. Saleem loses his
magical gift, his parents, love of his sister, his memory and finally his wife Parvati. He is
a fatalistic kind of person who makes no attempt to control his life actively; he just takes
the disasters as they come.
The battle between Saleem and Shiva reflects the ancient mythological battle
between the creative and destructive forces in the world. Shiva is responsible for the
destruction of the Midnight’s Children. It reflects the Hindu myth, God of both Creation
and Destruction. Saleem as the narrator of Midnight’s Children is responsible for creating
the fiction; therefore he is represented as Brahma, the God of Creation. Padma is
represented as Dung goddess who is a devoted caretaker and future wife of Saleem.
And Parvati symbolizes the divine consort of the Hindu God Shiva. She is the wife of
Saleem, but she was unable to make Saleem fall in love with her. Therefore, she had an
affair with Shiva. Durga, symbolizes the Hindu Goddess Durga. Mary Pereira
symbolizes Virgin Mother Mary and Joseph to Jesus Christ. In these characters reality
touches the myth and the myth with reality.
Rushdie has ambiguity or hesitation in his own life as he is a migrant who
suffers triple disruption of culture such as Indian, British, and Pakistan and
simultaneously he writes about the physical alienation of the insider and outsider
society of the country. It is reflected in his characters as Saleem says: “Consumed
multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me” (300). Rushdie‟s characters in Midnight’s
Children fall into neat categories as the grotesque ones, the symbolic one and fantasy
and fable. The story has as an informing hypothesis that the potential of an individual
human being to exist simultaneously in a multiplicity of different dimensions.
Rushdie‟s characters represent the diversity of India both in its singularity
and plurality besides the postcolonial hybridization. Aadam Aziz, Saleem Sinai‟s
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grandfather is a typical Indian Muslim who becomes Westernized after his medical
education in Germany and thereby an atheist. And Saleem himself belong to the
postcolonial character as a half Hindu, half Muslim and towards the end a Christian as
he is looked after by ayah Mary Pereira.
Alienation is one the staple features of Magic Realism. Saleem suffers from
alienation and deprivation towards the end as all the members of his family are killed in
Indo-Pakistan war for liberating Bangladesh.
Authorial reticence is also a feature of magical realism as Rushdie gives the
clear detail of the event of the mutiny of Jallianwala Bagh on 13th April 1919 through the
character Saleem, which appears to be real but later Saleem has the confusion in the
date.
The Supernatural and natural elements also appear to be real in magic realism
stories as Saleem has the power of telepathy to listen to all Indian voices and discovers
the other one thousand midnight children, who were born on 15 august 1947. Saleem
loses the power after having undergone a medical operation when he cuts his finger.
Saleem Sinai manages to represent the whole of India within his
individual self. The dynamitic relationship between Saleem‟s individual life and the life
of the public are inter-relative. Throughout the novel, Saleem struggles to bring out an
India within himself, to dovetail his personal story with the themes and stories of his
country.
The novel concludes in two modes of both hopeful and despairing. On the
one hand, Saleem‟s son has started to speak after three years and on the other hand, he
finds the cracks in his body and claiming that he is falling apart. Having told it has
apparently drained all energy and hope and he can look forward now to a future in
which the cracks will spread finally reducing him to specks of voiceless dust.
Midnight’s Children follows the tradition of Sterne, Gogol, Gunter Grass,
Marquez and Joyce techniques of Magic Realism. Rushdie has unique way to blend
fantasy, the events of history, and myths with reality in his novels. Thus Midnight’s
Children fits squarely into the model of postmodern and magical realist fantasy.
Works - citied
1. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s children . Vintage: 1995.
2. Vaidyanathan.G. ed. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s children. Lakshmi Narain
garwal:Agra.& nbsp;
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3. Jain, Jasbir, and Singh, Veena. ed. Contesting Postcolonialism. Rawat Publication:
Jaipur and New Delhi
4. Magical
Realism
is
Still
Realism-
Transcript.
November.
29.
2010
<http://bigthink.com/videos/magical-realism-is-still-realism. htm.>
5. Sethi, Anita., Salman Rushdie : My family values The Guardian. Saturday 15.
December.
2012.
<http://www.the
guardian.com/life
and
style/2012/dec/15/Salman-rushdie-my-family-values>
6. Magic realism as post-colonial device in Midnight’s Children. 21. June. 1999. <Q
http://www.qub.ac.uk /imperial/india/rushdie.htm >
7. Magic
realism
from
Wikipedia,
the
free
encyclopedia.
<W
http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/magic-realism#mw-navigation>.
8. Naik M.K, and Narayan,shyamala. Indian English Literature 1980-2000. A Critical
Survery. Pencraft International: Delhi.
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