Kripalini Pandey

Dr Siddhartha Singh

M.A. English, Semester III, 2018-2019

12 Dec 2018

History, Memory and Fantasy: An Analysis of Midnight’s Children

Midnight’s Children (1981), the second novel by Salman Rushdie won both

the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1981. As this novel went on to

be read in different quarters, it is clear that very different and original talent had indeed

arrived. The novel not only made an impact as a present but it also influence and number of

writers who followed Rushdie. Consequently, it has proved to be a seminal work which was

changed the very way in which Indian English novels had been written before its advent. It

was awarded the "Booker of Bookers" Prize and the best all-time prize winners in 1993 and

2008 to celebrate the Booker Prize 25th and 40th anniversary. What was so special about this

novel, or so unique about its author, is what the reader is being able to recognise at the end. A

mock autobiography in which personal farce (where memory plays a great role) and political

realism fuse, only to disintegrate into contingency and absurdity the novel is set in the context

of actual historical events which deals with India's transition from British colonialism to

independence, the partition of British India till the emergency period of the nation. A perfect

example of postcolonial, postmodern, and magical realist (it creates a world of fantasy in the

novel) literature the style of preserving history with fictional accounts is self-reflexive. The

present paper aims to analyse history, memory and fantasy in the novel.

When Rushdie first published this novel no one could have imagined what a turning

point it would prove to be for the Indian English Novel. The sheer energy, the innovations in

the English language, from, theme and range of this big novel had just an impact. It surprised
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every leaders across the world both in India and West. When it won the Booker prize it came

a bestseller anyway. What is regarded as one of the trendsetter because of influence it has had

on Indian English novels written ever since. It has also transform the way fiction is being

written in India now. It may be interesting to know that soon after Midnight’s Children was

published, it had been seen by some critics as very influential book; there were a large

number of scholars who still doubted its lasting value; they felt it was like a shining meteor

that had placed across the sky and would in time die. But that was disapproved when Rushdie

won the Booker of Booker’s prize for Midnight’s Children in 1994.

In the novel, Independence and Partition push a vast and varied human and

geographical territory into new identities and self-definitions. Its narrator, Saleem Sinai,

combines the story of his own childhood with that of India itself, having been born at

midnight on the day of India’s independence from British colonisation ‘Beyond the door,

history calls,’ Saleem reminds himself, although his (and everyone’s) version of history is

skewed by emotion and subjectivity. Saleem frequently breaks off to rebuke himself for an

error in his own chronology, lamenting, ‘although I have racked my brains, my memory

refuses, stubbornly, to alter the sequence of events’. Thus the linear structure of Midnight’s

Children suffers amusing hitches and hiccups as the narrator encounters the impossibility of

creating a definitive version of the past.

Salman Rushdie, in full Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (born June 19, 1947, Bombay,

India), Indian-born British writer whose allegorical novels examine historical and

philosophical issues by means of surreal characters, brooding humour, and an effusive and

melodramatic prose style. His treatment of sensitive religious and political subjects made him

a controversial figure. Throughout most of the 1970s he worked in London as an advertising

copywriter. His first published novel Grimus appeared in 1975. Rushdie’s next

novel Midnight’s Children (1981), a fable about modern India, was an unexpected critical
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and popular success that won him international recognition. A film adaptation, for which he

drafted the screenplay, was released in 2012. The novel Shame (1983), based on

contemporary politics in Pakistan was also popular but Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic

Verses encountered a different reception. Some of the adventures in this book depict a

character modelled on the Prophet Muhammad and portray both him and his transcription of

the Quran in a manner that, after the novel’s publication in the summer of 1988, it

drew criticism from Muslim leaders in Britain, who denounced the novel as blasphemous.

Public demonstrations against the book spread to Pakistan in January 1989. On February 14

the spiritual leader of revolutionary Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini (Sayyid Ruhollah Mūsavi

Khomein) publicly condemned the book and issued a fatwa (legal opinion) against Rushdie; a

bounty was offered to anyone who would execute him. He went into hiding under the

protection of Scotland Yard, and although he occasionally emerged unexpectedly, sometimes

in other countries—he was compelled to restrict his movements.

Midnight's Children is a loose allegory for events in India both before and, primarily,

after the independence and partition of India. The protagonist and narrator of the story

is Saleem Sinai, born at the exact moment when India became an independent country. He

was born with telepathic powers, as well as an enormous and constantly dripping nose with

an extremely sensitive sense of smell. The novel is divided into three books.

The book begins with the story of the Sinai family, particularly with events leading up

to India's Independence and Partition. Saleem is born precisely at midnight, 15 August 1947,

therefore, exactly as old as independent India. He later discovers that all children born in

India between 12 a.m. and 1 a.m. on that date are imbued with special powers. Saleem, using

his telepathic powers, assembles a Midnight Children's Conference, reflective of the issues

India faced in its early statehood concerning the cultural, linguistic, religious, and political

differences faced by a vastly diverse nation. Saleem acts as a telepathic conduit, bringing
 Pandey 4

hundreds of geographically disparate children into contact while also attempting to discover

the meaning of their gifts. In particular, those children born closest to the stroke of midnight

wield more powerful gifts than the others. Shiva "of the Knees", Saleem's nemesis, and

Parvati, called "Parvati-the-witch," are two of these children with notable gifts and roles in

Saleem's story.

Meanwhile, Saleem's family begin a number of migrations and endure the numerous

wars which plague the subcontinent. During this period he also suffers amnesia until he

enters a quasi-mythological exile in the jungle of Sundarban, where he is re-endowed with his

memory. In doing so, he reconnects with his childhood friends. Saleem later becomes

involved with the Indira Gandhi-proclaimed Emergency 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 over-reach during the Emergency as well 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 skeptical audience.

Saleem’s story begins in Kashmir, thirty-two years before his birth, in 1915. There,

Saleem’s grandfather, a doctor named Aadam Aziz, begins treating Naseem, the woman who

becomes Saleem’s grandmother. For the first three years Aadam Aziz treats her and she is

always covered by a sheet with a small hole in it that is moved to expose the part of her that

is sick. Aadam Azis sees his future wife’s face for the first time on the same day World War I
 Pandey 5

ends, in 1918. Aadam Aziz and Naseem marry, and the couple moves to Agra, where Aadam,

a doctor whose loss of religious faith has affected him deeply, sees how protests in the name

of independence get violently suppressed. Aadam and Naseem have three daughters, Alia,

Mumtaz, and Emerald, and two sons, Mustapha and Hanif. Aadam becomes a follower of the

optimistic activist Mian Abdullah, whose anti-Partition stance eventually leads to his

assassination. Following Abdullah’s death, Aadam hides Abdullah’s frightened assistant,

Nadir Khan, despite his wife’s opposition. While living in the basement, Nadir Khan falls in

love with Mumtaz, and the two are secretly married. However, after two years of marriage,

Aadam finds out that his daughter is still a virgin, as Nadir and Mumtaz have yet to

consummate their marriage. Nadir Khan is sent running for his life when Mumtaz’s sister,

Emerald, tells Major Zulfikar—an officer in the Pakistani army, soon to be Emerald’s

husband—about his hiding place in the house. Abandoned by her husband, Mumtaz agrees to

marry Ahmed Sinai, a young merchant who until then had been courting her sister, Alia.

Mumtaz changes her name to Amina and moves to Delhi with her new husband.

Pregnant, she goes to a fortune-teller who delivers a cryptic prophecy about her unborn son,

declaring that the boy will never be older or younger than his country and claiming that he

sees two heads, knees and a nose. After a terrorist organization burns down Ahmed’s factory,

Ahmed and Amina move to Bombay. They buy a house from a departing Englishman,

William Methwold, who owns an estate at the top of a hill. Wee Willie Winky, a poor man

who entertains the families of Methwold’s Estate, says that his wife, Vanita, is also expecting

a child soon. Unbeknownst to Wee Willie Winky, Vanita had an affair with William

Methwold, and he is the true father of her unborn child. Amina and Vanita both go into labor,

and, at exactly midnight, each woman delivers a son. Meanwhile, a midwife at the nursing

home, Mary Pereira, is preoccupied with thoughts of her radical socialist lover, Joseph

D’Costa, wanting to make him proud, switches the nametags of the two newborn babies,
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thereby giving the poor baby a life of privilege and the rich baby a life of poverty. Driven by

a sense of guilt afterward, she becomes an ayah, or nanny to Saleem.

Because it occurs at the exact moment India gains its independence, the press heralds

Saleem’s birth as hugely significant. Young Saleem has an enormous cucumber like nose and

blue eyes like those of his grandfather Aadam Aziz. His mischievous sister, nicknamed the

Brass Monkey, is born a few years later. Overwhelmed by the expectations laid on him by the

prophecy, and ridiculed by other children for his huge nose, Saleem takes to hiding in a

washing chest. While hiding one day, he sees his mother sitting down on the toilet; when

Amina discovers him, she punishes Saleem to one day of silence. Unable to speak, he hears,

for the first time, a babble of voices in his head. He realizes he has the magical power of

telepathy and can enter anyone’s thoughts. Eventually Saleem begins to hear the thoughts of

other children born during the first hour of independence. The 1,001 midnight’s children—a

number reduced to 581 by their tenth birthday—all have magical powers, which vary

according to how close to midnight they were born. Saleem discovers that Shiva, the boy

with whom he was switched at birth, was born with a pair of enormous, powerful knees and a

gift for combat.

One day, Saleem loses a portion of his finger in an accident and is rushed to the

hospital, where his parents learn that according to Saleem’s blood type, he couldn’t possibly

be their biological son. After he leaves the hospital Saleem is sent to live with his Uncle

Hanif and Aunt Pia for a while. Shortly after Saleem returns home to his parents, Hanif

commits suicide. While the family mourns Hanif’s death Mary confesses to having switched

Saleem and Shiva at birth. Ahmed, now an alcoholic, grows violent with Amina, prompting

her to take Saleem and the Brass Monkey to Pakistan, where she moves in with Emerald. In

Pakistan, Saleem watches as Emerald’s husband, General Zulfikar, stages a coup against the

Pakistani government and ushers in a period of martial law.

Four years later, after Ahmed suffers a heart failure, Amina and the children move

back to Bombay. India goes to war with China, while Saleem’s perpetually congested nose

undergoes a medical operation. As a result, he loses his telepathic powers but, in return gains

an incredible sense of smell, with which he can detect emotions.

Saleem’s entire family moves to Pakistan after India’s military loss to China. His

younger sister, now known as Jamila Singer, becomes the most famous singer in Pakistan.

Already on the brink of ruin, Saleem’s entire family—save Jamila and himself—dies in the

span of a single day during the war between India and Pakistan. During the air raids, Saleem

gets hit in the head by his grandfather’s silver spittoon, which erases his memory entirely.

Relieved of his memory Saleem is reduced to an animalistic state. He finds himself

conscripted into military service, as his keen sense of smell makes him an excellent tracker.

Though he doesn’t know exactly how he came to join the army, he suspects that Jamila sent

him there as a punishment for having fallen in love with her. While in the army, Saleem helps

quell the independence movement in Bangladesh. After witnessing a number of atrocities,

however, he flees into the jungle with three of his fellow soldiers. In the jungle of the

Sundarbans, he regains all of his memory except the knowledge of his name. After leaving

the jungle, Saleem finds Parvati-the-witch, one of midnight’s children, who reminds him of

his name and helps him escape back to India. He lives with her in the magician’s ghetto,

along with a snake charmer named Picture Singh.

Disappointed that Saleem will not marry her, Parvati-the-witch has an affair with

Shiva, now a famous war hero. Things between Parvati and Shiva quickly sour, and she

returns to the magicians’ ghetto, pregnant and still unmarried. There, the ghetto residents

shun Parvati until Saleem agrees to marry her. Meanwhile Indira Gandhi, the prime minister

of India, begins a sterilization campaign. Shortly after the birth of Parvati’s son, the

government destroys the magician’s ghetto. Parvati dies while Shiva captures Saleem and
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brings him to a forced sterilization camp. There Saleem divulges the names of the other

midnight’s children. One by one, the midnight’s children are rounded up and sterilized,

effectively destroying the powers that so threaten the prime minister. Later however Indira

Gandhi loses the first election she holds.

The midnight’s children, including Saleem, are all set free. Saleem goes in search of

Parvati’s son Aadam, who has been living with Picture Singh. The three take a trip to

Bombay, so Picture Singh can challenge a man who claims to be the world’s greatest snake

charmer. While in Bombay Saleem eats some chutney that tastes exactly like the ones his

ayah, Mary, used to make. He finds the chutney factory that Mary now owns, at which Padma

stands guarding the gate. With this meeting Saleem’s story comes full circle. His historical

account finally complete. Saleem decides to marry Padma, his steadfast lover and listener, on

his thirty-first birthday, which falls on the thirty-first anniversary of India’s independence.

Saleem prophesies that he will die on that day, disintegrating into millions of specks of dust.

We find it strange that in Midnight’s Children, Rushdie establishes a strong

connection between the history of India and the life of Saleem, his protagonist as if the two

were Siamese twins? Right from the moment of his birth, Saleem is described as being,

“mysteriously hand-cuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my

country . For the next three decades, there was no escape.”( 9) The connection that Rushdie

establishes between every personal event Saleem’s life and that of his family , and the

political and historical events that unfold in independent India is carefully maintained

throughout the novel, even though sometimes it can sound a bit forced as in the later part of

the novel. We read through Saleem’s account. We see among other things that Saleem was

responsible for the language riots of the 1950 is that he played the pivotal role in Indo-

Pakistani war in 1971 and that when in 1975 Indira Gandhi imprisoned the political opponent

and suspended the democratic rights of the people during the emergency that she had
 Pandey 9

proclaimed to save herself from going to prison over proven charges of corruption during the

election, he feels drained out and close to death.

Likewise, not only in free India but even before, a number of events are given an

individual as well as historical importance full stop for example, Saleem’s grandparent Aziz

and NaseemSinai on the way from Kashmir to Agra, stop over in Amritsar, where Aziz

experience at first hand, the JallianwalaBagh massacre .I should now quote a passage from

Midnight’s Children to demonstrate to you the manner in which Rushdie capture one of the

worst moment in India's colonial history the JallianwalaBagh massacre through the mock

heroic description of the chilling effect it has on individual, Adam Aziz who has lived

through it all:

… as the fifty one men March down the alley way ( to the Jallianwala Bagh)

tickle replaces the itch in my grandfather’s knows . The fifty one men enter

to the compound and take a position, twenty -five to Dyer’s right and twenty

five to his left... as brigadier Dyer issues a command the sneeze hits my

grandfather full in the face.yaaaahh-thooo! He sneezes and falls forward...

thereby why saving his time red stuff stains his shirt. There are screens now

and sobs and strain chatting continuous.More and more people seem to have

stumbled and fallen on top of my grandfather. (36)

Thus while General Dyer is firing and shooting ruthlessly at an arm’s Indians, Aziz sneezes

and falls forward. And when thousands of trapped Indians are shorted, it’s tough stains his

shirt. The massacre itself is heralded by an itch in his nose. The events are tragic and serious

but the effect is described in a comic and non serious absurd way. This is how Rushdie keeps

drawing parallels between the life of an ordinary individual and major historical events. The

day Salim is born, his parents acquired the house of the English Men, Mr. Methwold, (whose
 Pandey 10

parents had established British rule in India and India gains Independence) His parents,

grandfather and an aunt are killed in 23rd September 1965, that day India’s Air force bombs

Rawalpindi . Shiva his powerful and violent enemy moves to live with Parvati-the-witch on

May 1974, the very day that India exploded its first nuclear test bomb; their son Adam is born

on 25th June 1975, that demonstrates Saleem’s belief that he is linked to history “ both

literally and metaphorically”.

Rushdie’s method is very different from the way history books are written. If we word

to quote a passage from the book of Indian history on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre then the

narration would focus on dates and fats suggest number of people dead, impact of massacre

on British rule in India and so on. Or, if it were a passage on emergency in India, it would

focus on the reason- real and imaginary for its imposition, and its consequences for India and

Indira Gandhi. The way Rushdie does it to treat history as a fiction that is not to take it

seriously. So, nowhere does he retell history as fact. Indeed history that he narrates is full of

mistakes in dates and the Saleem argues is because it is derived from the recollection and

memory.

As a book represents the great grief and sorrow at the turn of the event in Indian

politics that lead to the imposition of Emergency at recommendation of the Prime Minister

Mrs Indira Gandhi in 1975 to save herself from going to prison. The emergency which lasted

from 1975 to 1977 had spelt the greatest threat to Indian democracy since Independence,

especially because of the version that Mrs Indira Gandhi had given to nation for its

imposition. The Emergency, she had persuaded the President of India, was necessary to save

the country from external threat, while there was none. The years of the Emergency will

therefore remain etched in Indian memory the darkest period in history of free India.

Characterized by the repression, censorship of the press ,the imprisonment of the leaders of

the opposition, the torch of activists including artist, dismissals from jobs, forced retirements
 Pandey 11

and untold brutalities on people of India, it was a time when the India had become the

totalitarian state . No wonder it was period marked by overriding feeling of impotence and

crippling despair for having lost to very powerful forces. By creating a non heroine character

and family through which the Rushdie gives us the history of India, especially the dark

period of emergency, he is trying to dramatically recreate the close brush with dictatorship

and the complete helplessness that almost every average. Indian of the times had experienced

a book which ends with imposition of emergency appropriately despair written because no

one at that time knew that Mr Gandhi would lift the emergency and call for election, all that

angry people of India would vote her out and replaced with the opposition . This kind of

personalization of history makes the events of India live in the psyche of the reader, and

achievement that is not possible in an ordinary book of history. Life from his birth to his near

death like condition is meant to parallel the journey of free India from optimistic Nation to

the comatose, submissive one. Like Saleem, Ralph Singh, the narrator of V. S. Naipaul’s The

Mimic Man, was convinced as a boy that he was tied to history and he felt that “a celestial

camera” tracked his movement. (1969 94) West Indian writers have created the characters of

a child who grows up from childhood into adulthood and established a connection between

the growing child and a new nation. For example George Lamming’s in the Castle of my Skin

(1953) shows the child gaining adulthood even as West Indian society is alongside evolving a

political consciousness of its own. He describes a similar self-consciousness amon Barbadian

schoolboys and teachers, who are surprised to learn they all feel that “there aint no other man

like yourself, that you is you, so to speak, an´ you think things nobody else think, an´ that sort

of thing can take you far, far, far”. (143) Lamming’s protagonist, like Ralph Singh and

Saleem, desires invisibility for his glorious individuality because “the eye of another was a

kind of cage. When it saw you the lid came down, and you were trapped” (73). Neil ten

Kortenaar makes a very significant observation about these protagonists:

Saleem and the heroes of these other Bildungsromans share a conviction of

their uniqueness, a fear that their worth will not be recognized, and a desire for

anonymity as preferable to being misrecognized. The desire for recognition

springs from a culture that values self-determinism and individuality. The

desire for anonymity derives from the equally strong tendency towards

normality and socialization. In these novels, identity is something inside and

in them future to be kept secret and protected from the eyes of other in the

present. (2004 74)

It is not surprising that Rushdie has concern himself with the “fear” of misrecognition which

is strongly rooted in the theme of colonialism, neo-colonialism and independent India’s

political history in Midnight’s Children. Thematic examination of this sort is typical of all

migrant novelist from the Third World, who have been migrating to the Metropolitan capital

of London, Paris and New York to find a market for their work because reader in the third

world would not support them. Thanks to the impact of colonization on the psyche, most

educated people in non white former colonies felt that the great tradition of culture and

Civilization (Many of us still think so even today! ) existed only in the West that its literature

and superior to their own. The writer similarly looks for intellectual stimulation and

encouragement in the “ideal” environment of West. Every migrant, who stays away from his

mother country, begins to experience an acute sense of homelessness and anxiety after initial

pleasure of being in the new land begin to fade away as Lamming opines

Their history has been similar, a sad and hopeful epic of Discovery and

migration. Columbus coaxing and bullying his crew to find India by western

route....

The indigenous Carib and Arwak Indians, living by their own lights

long before the European adventure, gradually disappeared in blind, wild

forest of blood. That mischievous gift the sugarcane, is introduced and a

fanatic human migration moves to the New World of the Caribbean; deported

crooks and criminals, defeated soldiers and royalist gentlemen fleeing from

Europe, slaves from the west coast of Africa, East Indians, Chinese, Corsicans,

and Portuguese. The list is always incomplete, but they all move and meet on

an unfamiliar soil, in a violent rhythm of race and religion. (1960 17)

George Lamming highlights with sensitivity, that terrible dilemma and divided feeling

that the migrants from third world experience in West, the dilemma is painful to say but it’s

difficult to return . The migrant belongs to both world and at the same time to none. Rushdie

express similar views in the character of Adam Aziz in Midnight Children. Fragmentation,

migration and memory his third theme can perhaps be called the central theme of not just

Midnight’s Children but all novels.

Rushdie writes “a novel of memory and about memory”, which made Saleem an

unreliable narrator. Saleem makes mistakes of memory, and his vision, which is affected by

his (personality and) circumstances are fragmentary. In other words what Rushdie was saying

was that no matter how hard an Indian writer tries to write about India “authentically”, he

can’t because he lives outside, and is dealing with reality “whose fragments have been

irretrievable lost.” However, on the positive side he feels it is exciting for the migrant writer

has she tries to reconstruct the past from the “broken parts” of antiquity because it’s very

much like what an archaeologist tries to do, this is, an act of imagination and creativity. As

expatriate, Rushdie’s concern is with “damaged reality” and reconstruction of whole reality

which has been lost. Saleem laments the loss of his clairvoyant powers and loss of his

security in childhood as a child of his parents. He laments the “disintegrations” of his family

in India and Pakistan after partition, and “everything which can sanely be called real.”
 Pandey 14

Saleem grows up viewing reality through a “perforated sheet,” one bit at a time and the

piecing together of suppress reality in his mission . Denied Information, Saleem resigns

himself to an alternative method- cognition or knowing through “memory’s truth”: will then

it must content itself which shreds and scraps: as it was written centuries ago, the tricks is to

fill the gaps guided by the few clues one is given... by other remaining shards of the past

lingering in my ransacked memory-vault... (507).

Saleem’s obsession with the tracing of an ancestry is attempt to come to terms with

problems of a “divided identity”, intellectually, he is drawing to the west while his emotion

being look for moorings in the Mother’s country. Saleem is apparently descended from the

ancestral line of Adam Aziz, himself and alienated “half and halfer” Kashmiri Muslim. His

being the child of William Methwold, one of the last Britishers in India, and Vinita,

compounds the Kashmiri alienation with colonials. Being a bastard is Saleem’s literal

situation. Metaphorically, it echoes the typical migrant condition of a lack of belonging. Exile

undoubtedly Shapes and colours Saleem’s perspective on life who is repeatedly confronted

with condition of exile. Saleem’s begins to ponder. It shocks and dents upon his personality.

His first exile is in losing the home of Vinita and Wee-Willie-Winkle from his very birth. The

discovery that his blood group belongs to neither his father Ahmed nor his mother is

responsible for another exiles.

Saleem’s exile is forced and compounded with the dishonesty of others. It’s not

difficult to see how it leads to his disintegration . Expatriate concerns figure important in the

novel. Memory is his guarantee against the loss of valued childhood being. It is the

expatriate’s guarantee against fragmentation and loss of touch with self and reality.

“Memory’s truth” teaches Saleem who he was and is. In the absence of any other

trustworthy member in the family, Saleem arrives at a position where through memory “it
 Pandey 15

select, eliminates, alters, exaggerate, minimises glorifies and vilifies also,” is more

dependable than “someone else version” (253).

Fantasy was often dismissed as being fit only for children. After centuries of

Darkness, fantasy is suddenly centre stage in the Western world. The new status of fantasy

has to do with the present crisis about the nature of reality. The crisis is set off by new

discoveries that show that reality cannot exist independently of the observer. The west, it

looks like, is having second thought about the Solitude of factual Universe it earlier wore by.

What to be facts are also shown to be stories. In the new thinking that goes by the name of

constructivism, science is also proving to be story. Eric Rabkin in The Fantastic in Literature

(1976) contends that the text itself own internal rules for what is natural and what is

unnatural. Rabkin says that

The ability of art to create its own interior set of ground rules is fundamental

to the aesthetic experience, an ability that Tolkien calls “sub creation” but

which more generally falls under the term “decorum” every work of art sets up

its own rules the perspective that are fantastic. (1976 4)

Rabkin tries to define fantasy. He called it as a in which the protagonist display a

hesitation in the presence of the Supernatural. He cited Alice in Wonderland as one of the

best examples of fantasy. The category left out tales like Arabian Nights because they did not

display the mandatory hesitation in the presence of marvellous. Instead, they look the

marvelous for granted?

Another suitable example is Padma. “Padma would believe it, Padma would know

whatimean”. (158) We need Padma to make the marvelous real. The birth of prodigious

children, blue skin Tubriwallahs and half snake-half human Doctor, strange prophecies, and

the central fantasy of Saleem’s gift for hearing voice are seen by Padma. What is true

according to Mary includes fortune tellers prophesying the birth of a two-headed son, sadhus
 Pandey 16

awaiting the arrival of the Blessed One, little girls speaking in the language of birds and cats.

This does not necessarily have to correspond with truth written in an “Anglo poised pool of

light”. One could dismiss these as superstitions of the illiterate. The problem comes when a

Prime Minister is spotted soliciting the help of astrologers in drafting the country’s First Five

Year Plan, or when a young woman with a consciously secular upbringing succumbs to the

prophecy of a Ramram Seth with the cobrawallah, monkey-man or bone-setter surrounding

him. Instead of hesitation, one finds a belief in supernatural that cuts across class, caste and

gender lines.

In the Western idea of fantasy, the supernatural is explained as a projection of human

fears. Saleem insists that he is “not preparing metaphorically; what have been just written and

(read aloud to stunned Padma) is not less than the literal, by-the-hairs-of-my-mother’s head

truth”. (200) Saleem might be skeptic like his creator Rushdie, but this does not make him

immune to the uncanny mysteries of marvellous. Along with Rushdie, Saleem holds out for

the village world over the urban. The difference lies in that where a Padma or a Mary might

swallow marvellous happenings without the slightest hesitation, Saleem might require

justifying his position through philosophical argument. But the entire thrust of Saleem’s

argument is to uphold and accentuate the existence of other perspective on what is, what

might violate secular notion of truth, “Reality can have metaphorical content that does not

make it less real”. (200) Rushdie cannot take the marvellous for granted. Saleem uses a

technique replete with “matter of fact descriptions of the bizarre, and its reverse, “namely

heightened, stylized version of everyday” to show the difference in “attitudes of mind” (218)

a technique and attitude that he confesses to have borrowed from Shiva his twin midnights

children. While he allows Padma and Marry to appreciate completely in the marvellous,

Saleem/Rushdie the remains at a distance.

The use of fantasy by magic realist is intended to question the place of reality in art.

Considering that three fourth of the world’s literature does not satisfy the reality requirements

of 19th century fiction, it can only be a period concept that needs to be discarded. Rushdie’s

magic realist mode is, by his own admission, a strategy to overcome the limitations of

historical testimony of young boys and unreliable memory. But his strange “comingling of

improbable and the mundane” can also be seen as an attempt to give us a glimpse into other

aesthetics in which art does not need to imitate life. Oriental narratives grow out of semi-

mythical Universe. Here the strange and improbable is not only the natural subject matter of

fiction but the bizarre and uncanny in also accepted as the ‘real’ Miracle and improbabilities

of the kind Midnight’s Children abound with the accepted, at certain level, without

skepticism.

Rushdie’s Methwold is a caricature, a symbol of evil and moral degeneration rather

than fully flushed out character. Rushdie uses him to convey his views about colonialism.

Methwold in the Midnight’s Children is said to be a direct descendant of William

Methwold (c 1590- 1653) the historical Englishman who planned the city of Bombay

(Wikipedia) and one of the first officer of East India Company. Here he is a symbol of the

last European to rule India before India got its freedom. This first and last Englishman thus

becomes the direct object of Rushdie’s anger as he symbolises for him the entire colonial

adventure of exploitation and demoralization. The small-scale property transfer at

Methwold’s Estate clearly corresponds to the larger political situation, as Great Britain

prepares itself to transfer sovereign power over India to the independent governments of

India and Pakistan. Neither transfer is complete or uncomplicated. Just as independent India

must now deal with the cultural legacy of British colonialism, which remains active long after

the British vacate the country, so too will the inhabitants of Methwold’s Estate have to live

with physical reminders of the estate’s former owner. The British continue to exert a
 Pandey 18

powerful influence over independent India, as symbolized by the unconscious ways the

Methwold residents begin conforming to Methwold’s customs. Methwold’s nostalgia for his

estate, in turn, echoes the wide-scale nostalgia felt by the British upon leaving the former

crown of their colonial empire.

To sum up what Rushdie has done is not easy because it is obvious that he is writing

anovel where the life of the individual is fused with that of nation, not as fictional gimmick

but as an attempt to create an emotional spot in the reader about the saddest and disturbing

event in the history of free India. Interestingly Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children triggered of a

new mode of fiction writing amongst Indian English novelist. There have been 20 novels

since the publication of Midnight’s Children, where in the life of individual runs parallel with

the life of the nation. The new trend highlights the contribution of Rushdie to the Indian

novel in English.

Rushdie is the first Indian English novelist who consciously uses history in fiction to

show its subjective and untruthful nature and its easy manipulation by modern-day

governments. He describes historical events through the emotion of his character. To reveal

the trivial role played by the individual in countering powerful modern day governments, he

does it in mock heroic, absurd. He makes postcolonial voices made themselves audible. He

stuffs “comic saga about the generation born as Indian independence dawned and

boisterously mingles material from Eastern fable, Hindu myth, Islamic lore, Bombay cinema,

cartoon strips, advertising billboards, and Latin American magic realism”. (The Literature

of World War II) The inventively mixing of fact and fantasy, reportage, art criticism,

autobiography, parable, and pastiche in its working of fictional variations makes it a perfect

postmodern text which celebrates every fragmentations of history and memory intermingled

with magic realism.

Work Cited

Kortenaar, Neil ten. Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Montreal

Kingston, London, Ithaca: McGill-Queens University Press, 2004.

Lamming, George In the Castle of My Skin. New York: Me Graw-Hill, 1953.

-The Pleasure of Exile. Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1960.

Rabkin, Eric S. The Fantastic in Literature. Princeton New: Jersey Princeton University

Press, 1977.

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Vintage, 1981.

-Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism (1981-1991). London: Granta Books 1992.

The Literature of World War II (1939–45) https://www.britannica.com/art/English-

literature/The-literature-of-World-War-II-1939-45#ref308850

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight’s_Children