Self and Nation in Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Submitted by: Dr. Nidhi Sharma, Asst. Pro.f Dept.Of English, SKIT, Jaipur

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children analyses how the characters with specific ideologies form

the essence of a nation. It would be an interesting study to see how the ideology intercepts

with the growth of a nation. Talking about nation one may imagine the nation either as a male

self or a beautiful female who compliments the male nationalist. One may also on the other

hand fantasise it to be a mutilated version of the male self or a dangerous female threatening

the male identity. But the questions that arises is that how can a nation be two bodies? Neil

Kortenaar (2005) in his book titled Self, Nation, Text attempts to answer it by saying:

The answer is that the nation-state is not gendered absolutely, but always

involves two principles defined against each other, principles labelled

masculine and feminine, neither one , however, being limited to men or

women. We must keep in mind the hyphenated nature of the nation-state, at

once nation and state. The state is defined by a territory, and official history,

and institutions of administrative and control. (135)

Thus we can engender a conviction that a nation is a constitution united by brotherly bond and

identified by a common religion, language, peace or situations. State and nation can be

dissected but within the veil of sheer nationalist conception, cannot be thought apart from each

other. A collective can in real terms prove itself to be a nation only if it can profess a state in its

own image. In the absence of such a state a group formed by the combination of language,

religion and people delivers a sub-national identity and eventually paves its path on becoming

an enemy of the nation Similarly in order to legitimise itself, a state must summon a nation into

being by attracting its indulgence in the shared interests and expressing symbols and narratives

with which the inmates can identify. Until its metamorphosis into a nation the state’s legitimacy

rests on a challenging stature the two characteristics of nation and state formation are

symmetrical but their intersection may frequently beckon conflict, as can be witnessed in the

historical creation of India, where a colonial territory claimed to be a nation and thus

demanded sovereignty giving birth to Pakistan, where a self declared nation based on religion

carved a state in its own image.

One may not resist reading the varied roles played by state and nation in Midnight’s

Children in the contextual terms of gender, to read the Indian state as male and the nation that

it courts as female. As we have previously noted, the projected body that Adam Aziz falls in love

with through the bed sheet tickles his instincts because it is female body, unlike his own. When

the fledgling Dr. Aziz who is trying to think himself not as a Muslim but as an Indian falls in love

with a conventional Kashmiri Muslim, whom he glances only in fragments, he puts himself into

the shoes of the Western-educated nationalists who rediscovers and lays claim to a nation

untouched by colonialism. Anti-colonial nationalists like Dr. Aziz and Nehru for instance, seek

independence for a modern state in the name of the nation. The nation of-course, like the

“phantasm of partitioned women” (MC 26), is a projection of the male nationalist’s desire.

However, Rushdie’s Midnight Children doesn’t end in the amalgamation of the modern and

traditional, we trace the commencement in this portrayal. The male nationalists who

desperately desire a female tradition to complete him must also design the traditional nation to

the need for modern politics. The dichotomy is delineated when Aziz on one side falls in love

with the projected image of a traditional womanhood and on the other side he wants to

remake his bride into a modern lady just like “his Ingrid”, whom he met in Germany ( MC 13). In

the same mode we have Naseem Ghani’s purdah that aroused her suitor’s inclination, but her

husband now wants her to uncover her face. Burning his wife’s veils, Aziz urges his wife to

“forget about being a good Kashmiri girl” and “start thinking about being a modern Indian

woman” (MC 5). These sequences focus on the contradiction of modern nationalism; the

nationalists dream for a nation different from and at the same time like all others. We find

Saleem characterizing India as an ancient heritage that in its “five thousand years of history”

had “invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt” and as a new “nation

which had never previously existed” (MC 111).

Apparently the nationalism begotten by Aziz may project a form of ‘optimism’, a lost wager in

the direction of the future. And this intimidating future doesn’t associate with United India, but

with Partition and with sub-national allegiances. As “Prophets are not always falls simply

because they are over-taken, and swallowed up, by history” (MC 296). Amidst the jostling

between the state that seeks a nation and the nation that desire a state, Saleem’s and

Rushdie’s sympathies corner around the optimist Adam Aziz. As Neil Kortenaar(2005) relates in

Self, Nation, Text.

Saleem, like his grand-father before him, Identifies with the State that Nehru

and the congress party wrested from the British, conceived of in terms of a

mapping territory and an official history made by political leaders, and

imagined as a body like his own.... The Nehruvian State is best described as a

‘project’, with all the connotations that word has acquired in the twentieth

century of progress and mass participation. Midnight’s Children is a nationalist

manifesto by a Muslim who does not identify the particular minority but with

the totality. His India is a modern secular State, defined against Britain, the

imperial power, but also against Pakistan. It is intended to win the allegiance

of leaders, even, paradoxically, when these are not imagined as Indians. (138)

Midnight’s Children associates itself with a two-way process where a collectivization of people

takes place to constitute a nation and the personalization of the State as a nation-State. The

State defines a huge canvas of public action and exchange accommodated by organisations,

institutions; media, whose inhabitation by their mutual interaction couples with State

institutions build a civil society. The State delivers a civil society by introducing the people

within it as citizens and setting the limits of the arena in which people make their careers and

debate issues and in turn this cultured civil society demands accountability from a State created

on contract. Hence the State performs the stereotypical role of a male including providence and

dominance whereas the civil society confines itself within the domestic sphere proving to be a

feminine aspect, critically focussing in this novel it can be analysed that the State may not

always be male as it may also fall in hands of a Widow, a modern Durga-but the civil society

positively retains to be feminine. Further tracing the plot when the State becomes an enemy,

Saleem deftly adjusts with the nation, not, however the preconceived nation of conventions,

but the nations of civil society. The metamorphosis of the State into the nation and gradually

not nation-state rescues the state from insignificance. Saleem in the process learns that these

institutions of the state encompass a sheer violence. The victim of this violence in the first

instance is Shiva for whom the state apparently is irrelevant and an unmerited loss. Later on

their roles are reversed and Saleem falls in the clutches of state’s tyranny. Unlike Shiva, Saleem

neither rejects the State nor plans to assert its power but relies on the promise made by state

beforehand and calls it back to its better self. Saleem only strives to redeem the State by taking

it for granted.

Midnight’s Children somewhere hammers on the ideology of the supposed powerlessness of

abdicating power. Saleem has instilled an identification with the state of India, when he sits

down to write paving down the memory lane, it can be rightly observed that narcissistic child in

him had never adored his intimate link to history ; it is the adult memoirist who links up

autobiography and national history insisting on the grandiose meaning of life. It only when he

brings his writing to an end that he reaches to a conclusion that such a mania has no futuristic

way. By mocking and deliberately abjuring the masculine dominance of state power and joining

on all-female working class community, Saleem wins where his father lost, he wins in securing

his own and reader’s allegiance to the nation-state and makes it seem mandatory. When he

suffers at the hands of the widow, Saleem became one with all the other victims’ fallen prey to

the atrocities of the state. Positively they sum up collectively to be a nation. Thus at the end of

the novel the identity of India is not questioned as India is constituted of all those who have

suffered at the hands of Indira Gandhi. It might not be an exaggeration when Saleem the

memoirist is rated as the child of that second midnight, the hour when Indira Gandhi confined

the dictorial powers to herself with the declaration of a state of Emergency.

Also while analysing the varied aspects of Saleem’s character, we acknowledge an interesting

ideology, when Saleem, the subject’s desire is structured by philosophical pursuit, he wants to

know himself but within the confines of the self he desires to discover the entirety of the

external world. As long as Saleem resides in his clock-tower, telepathically roaming around the

nation, he can imagine himself as a whole. When, somehow he tries to come out of his home

into the outer space he supposedly gets in touch with others belonging to various other classes

and having different interests, those who are necessarily a part of India. And it’s an interesting

study to see how this middle class boy dumps himself with regular confrontations of bodies,

assertively the bodies of Hindus where he is barred from receiving the reflection of his own

image. The question that constantly strikes our minds as readers is that, what is he to do and

make of these many others who inhabit the same world as he does. ? There is one scene where

every individual, the concerned citizen has identical features proving to be a nightmare when

India is filled with gangs of Sanjay Gandhi clones, “all with plump stomachs , oily curls and

fleshy lips”(MC 382).

The ideology presented here is of Saleem who truly values the nation for providing

individuality. He would have never wished his fellow citizens to be individuals like him. Saleem

is keen to present the fact of his destiny coinciding with that of the nation. With the concluding

pages of his writings he defines himself as a unique individual made by his own private

experiences and his own made choices. His ideology is shown in the following words: “Who

what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything done to me. I am everyone everything

whose being-in-the world was affected by mine. I am everything that happens after I have gone

which would not have happened if I had not come” (MC 370).

Hence in this revelation we no longer find him to be a mirror of the nation, single and

sovereign, who resists his dissolution in the many but is now an identity self made by the

manifold experiences. He now introduces himself on the base of his literal connections rather

than on his metaphorical ones. Reality has been badly crushed and it demands “to put together

again” (MC 405). While studying the novel it was difficult to track all the relations that Saleem

had, the past and present, the conscious and unconscious. He was frequently found memorising

something else that he wanted to include and relate to. The confusing part of his personality

can be witnessed in the following lines:

How many things...we bring with us into the world, how many possibilities

and also restrictions of possibility. Because all of these were the parents of the

child born that mid-night, and for everyone of the midnight children there

were as many more. Among the parents of midnight: the failure of the cabinet

mission scheme; the determination of M.A. Jinnah, who was dying and

wanted to see Pakistan formed in this life-time, and would have done

anything to ensure it ....And my father’s dream of rearranging the Quran has

its place.....To understand one life you have to swallow the world (MC 108)

It appeared to be a daunting task to understand the ideologies that constituted Saleem. He

could only assume that he is made up of “six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous

and necessarily oblivious dust” (MC 38), not because he has worked out “ the sum-total of

everything that went before me, of all I have went before me , of all I have been seen done, of

everything done to me”. (MC 370), but he is aware that the number will collide with the

population figures of the national census. Relating all those with whom he never came in

contact, who have influenced him or been influenced by him, truly form up the nation seems to

conveniently discharge his experience with Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Englishmen, Eastern

Europeans and Americans- with whom he doesn’t share a bond. Moreover, people he has

affected and who have affected him, though certainly uncountable, are unlikely to number six-

hundred million, even when his telephonic rambles are included. Not only his body but also his

face projects an apparent replication to the nation in the following lines: “Fair skin curves

across my features- but birthmarks disfigured it; dark stains spread down my western hairline, a

dark patch coloured my eastern ear” (MC 123).

Closely studying the features we find that even his nose echoes the shape of the sub-continent.

No wonder Saleem strikes a resemblance with Lord Ganesh, whose nose is too big for his head

and whose head is out of proportion to his body. Further probing the plot we come across the

pickle factory in which Saleem holes up in order to write his memoirs which in turn resembles

an ant-hill in its division of labour. The division of labour in the pickle factory is understood in

terms of single human body in which Saleem performs the role of the organs and the women as

the labouring limbs and the ear. And the body of which Saleem is now the eyes, nose and

fingers is explicitly feminine.

The ideology inherited by Saleem focussing on the external and the physical somehow relates

with the inner spirituality of India in contrast to the western ideology of materialism. Through

the hole left in Aziz’s body , Rushdie attempts in highlighting the loss of religion assuming that

the inside is indeed more spiritual and intimate of the self but since it has emptied, the subject

must now seek for outside to fill the vacuum. Saleem beautifully compares reality to a cinema

screen: when seen from a distance, the projection convinces of its reality, but closer up, “the

stars’ faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions” (MC 164)

The nation as seen, sprouting from metonymic assembly, is best compared to many-

sided Ravana, “multi-limbed kali” (MC 355), “multi-limbed Devi” or skanda of the six heads. It

can well be ascertained that the dedication of villainous characters to a single limb or bodily

appendage clues on the absence of something significant. Autonomous body parts are to be

feared because they lack a rational self and merely obey their natures. The take over of the

characters by a single limb or organ deceives an un-swerving single-mindedness on their part.

Shiva is an eternal principle (MC 290). There is no reasoning with his knees, “Behind me, as I

run, come the pumping knees of my doom” (MC 415), nor with Indira Gandhi’s hand. The terror

of the widow is physically depicted as: “the widow’s hand comes hunting hunting the skin is

green the nails are black towards the corner our skin is green our fear is black and now the

Handcomes reaching reaching” (MC 204). The widow’s Hand is further exposed to be a female

lieutenant who executes Indira Gandhi’s orders. A literal phenomenon which makes the

unlikely sentence “the widow’s Hand hand rolling hips” (MC 424).

Mapping the thematic dimension of the novel, it can be said that Saleem’s self-conscious

thematization effectively burgeons the events of national history rendering them fantastic.

Although paradoxically it does so by making the literal as the common metaphor implicit in

national history of the nation as a person. Rushdie’s novel makes literal: the nation as a human

body, history as the detection of the original crime, and historical knowledge and national

consciousness as forms of omniscience that grant access to the thoughts of strangers. The

scene when a son is born to his wife Parvati during the same time when Indira Gandhi declared

a national emergency, Saleem explicitly relates the two events as follows:

While Parvati pushes in a ghetto, J.P.Narayan and Morarji Desai were also

goading Indira Gandhi, while triplets yelled push push push the leaders of the

Janta Morcha urged the police and Army to disobey the illegal orders of

disqualified prime Minister, so in a sense they were forcing Mrs. Gandhi to

push, and as the night darkened towards the midnight hour, because nothing

ever happens at any time, triplets began to screech its coming coming coming,

and elsewhere the Prime Minister was giving birth to a child of her own. (MC

404)

The blood that flows profusely in Midnight’s Children, in massacres, riots and wars as in school-

boy accidents, is, as one chapter title has it, ‘Mercurochrome’: it only looks like blood. It is like

the rumoured ‘real blood’ shed by flowers around the time of Gandhi’s assassination (MC 136),

and not get perplexed with the bloodshed on real human bodies. All these connotations

assume that the blood that is spilled by group resembles the one that flows through the veins

of those who suffered direct violence. The incident where Saleem badly needs an emergency

transfusion when he loses the top of his finger in a door followed by an analysis o his blood

performed on that occasion, in a chapter prominently addressed as ‘Alpha and Omega’ exposes

the brutal reality with sheer nakedness that he is no more the son of Ahmed and Amina Sinai

and also not the brother of his sister. All these implications seek to make readers identify

themselves with the metaphorical nature of all blood-lines not only of India’s but also of

Saleem’s. The reader’s participation is well noticed when Saleem initiates the story of his life

relating it with the story of his grandfather. We analyse how Adam Aziz resembles Nehru in

varied dimensions: both hail from Kashmiri families, have privileged education in Europe and

both were in Amritsar at the time of the massacre. Further we also see how Saleem is unable to

encapsulate any of Aziz’z genes. The revelation that Saleem is no longer the biological child of

Ahmed and Amina Sinai shocks the readers but it doesn’t invalidate the prior family history.

That history is a fiction but an invention as it lacks a biological base. Thus blood ties appear to

be metaphorical.

Hence it can be rightfully concluded that Rushdie’s novels neither pamper its cosmopolitan

audience nor gel with them in their perception of the worse but genuinely measure itself

against the world and, in posing itself with such a daunting task creates new discoveries about

the possibility of the world. As Kortenaar elaborates:

The true India is outside both cosmopolitan and nationalism. Any attempt to

transcend the divide between nationalism and cosmopolitan results, however,

in contradictions between inside and out along the lines of those we have

been exploring in Midnight’s Children. Nandy and Chatterjee rely on a

distinction between Western modernity and Indian authenticity that echoes

the distinction that they denounce as false. (253)

One can see that the historical development of nationalism and nation constitution in colonial

India thoroughly was considered as contestation and mutually shaped pressures between

political and social forces. As we may consent with the views of Priyamvada Gopal when she

argues:

Even a certain kind of bourgeois nationalism was eventually to triumph in its

manoeuvres, the birth of the Indian and Pakistani nation states was a far more

contestatory process than accounts such as Chatterjee’s would indicate...from

the early 1930s to the years immediately after independence made possible a

range of historical tasks or, at the vey least, a perception that it would be

possible- and necessary- to undertake certain kinds of radical endeavours. (22)

This paper studies the ideological frame of the characters within the national set-up. In juxta-

positioning the two would-be universals of nationalism and cosmopolitanism side-by-side and

discussing their limits and their symmetries attempt has been made to adopt a position that can

be best termed as cosmopolitan because it aims at standing outside and sees around

nationalism. The only thing that we can conclude from examining the ideologies of Saleem’s

narrative, however, is the quest for an outside sphere from which the whole can be clearly

observed. Hence we can say that the notion of cosmopolitanism and nationalism in a common

frame doesn’t escape the conflicts of inside and outside. The nation surmounts to the guilt,

insecurity and anxiety roused in the nationalist by the cosmopolitan and in the cosmopolitan by

the nationalist. Hence it can be rightfully concluded that nationalism effectively can be termed

as a rhetoric that implies a hermeneutics and cosmopolitanism, on the other hand as a

hermeneutics that is essentially rhetoric. Thus arriving at such a point one may reach to an

understanding that sees through and around the political ideologies of Saleem and recognises

one’s own imbrications in the world of the novel.

Thus, analysis of Rushdie’s fiction can be segregated roughly into two categories, highlighting,

respectively, its meta-fictional nature and its experimental endeavours to ‘de-colonize’ English,

and , also on the other hand its deliberate ‘political’ purposes of commenting on Islam and on

Indian, Pakistani and British societies and politics. It appears to be apt to decipher Rushdie’s

fiction in terms of his political stance generally and in terms of the more specific meta-fictional,

satiric and the other literal devices that he uses to comment on political history. As Harish

Trivedi (2000) deftly points out in Literature and Nation:

Salman Rushdie is perhaps the best-known contemporary writer in the world,

famous not only for his literary works but also for the controversy caused by

his novel The Satanic Verses. He has given a new turn to the Indian novel in

English and to the long literary relationship between India and Britain by

inaugurating a new ‘postcolonial’ phase of it, and by exercising a pervasive

influence on several younger Indian novelists. (154)

Saleem’s identification with the nation can be understood as a refracted form of national

consciousness fostered in the modern middle-class. It can also be noted that Saleem himself

identifies with the whole and not with the part, as though, like absolute monarchs in

Renaissance Europe , he was two bodies at once: a physical body and, in its image, the spiritual

collective body of the State.

The expansion of the self to the extent of nation implies not just centrality of the self but also

the personalisation of nation state. Young Saleem appears to be a sort of All-India Radio,

receiving the voices of strangers who seem to match with his own perceptions about the

national identity, at the moment when, at the age of nine, he gets a glimpse of his mother’s

nakedness. Hence this adolescent’s maturing national consciousness falls into the clutches of a

growing and confused sexuality. Again Saleem’s new-found telepathy gives him the first glance

of his discovered power. Thus it can finally be concluded that the ideologies of Saleem’s

character encompass sexuality and national consciousness both with identity and with desire,

flourishing in harmony, “in the heat”(MC 165).

Works Cited:

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Cape, 1981. Print

Kortenaar, Neil Tan. Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s

Children. Canada: McGill Queen’s UP, 2004. Google Book Search. Web.

11 Jan. 2010

Gopal, Priyamvada. Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and

the Transition to Independence. New York: MPG Books, 2005. Print.

Trivedi, Harish and Richard Allen. Eds. Literature and Nation.

London/New York: Routledge, 2000.Print.