The Imperial Archive

This essay will consider to what extent Salman Rushdie’s engagement with the idea of heroism relates to the post-colonial themes in Midnight’s Children.  What, if anything, does Rushdie’s presentation of heroism tell us about India and can the ‘hero’ be a site of post-colonial comment or resistance?  In a lecture given at the University of Aarhus in 1983, Rushdie stated that one of the major concerns of the book involved the question of:

the position of heroes in a society of such size, and a society which is simultaneously ancient and modern.

He was specifically referring to the incident in the novel involving the well-respected Commander Sabarmati’s shooting of his adulterous wife and her lover and the subsequent very public trial.  Rushdie tells us that this was inspired by the real-life murder trial that took place in the 1950s involving the naval officer Commander Nanavati which captured the imaginations of the nation: was he a hero for defending his honour as a husband or a murderer?  Rushdie relates this to a deeper critical sense of a changing Indian identity:

So it seemed to me what was happening was that in the 20^th century India was being asked to decide between two definitions of itself.  One was the definition which had dealt with the rule of heroes […] [a]nd the other was the rule of law.

I would suggest that this tension between the expectations of heroism and what the individual is actually capable (or incapable) of is rooted in the sense of fracture and injury caused by imperialism.  The state of impotence, which becomes a motif throughout the novel, is symptomatic of the impossibility of conventional heroism for the post-colonial society.

Sara Suleri has commented on the inherent “dynamics of powerlessness at the heart of the imperial configuration.”  For much of the novel, however, Saleem is at pains to convey his powerfulness.  His first person narration of his family history firstly casts himself as the hero of his own family saga and, secondly, the novel as an example of a bildungsroman.  But this will not be a conventional hero in a conventional genre.  The lengthy build-up to the moment of his birth further constructs Saleem as something of a Messiah figure, a powerful figure of redemption and action who will alter all that has come before him.  However, the almost immediate baby swap which occurs after his birth unsettles this entire process: the family history we have been meticulously reading about is in fact the true history of another child and as readers we feel outraged and misled.  Our hero Saleem is a stranger.  In fact, the very conditions for the swap undermine the idea of heroism:

“And when she was alone – two babies in her hands – two lives in her power – she did it for Joseph, her own private revolutionary act, thinking He will certainly love me for this” (117).

Mary’s misguided attempt to commit a heroic act which will win her the love of the communist Joseph results in a life haunted by guilt and ghosts.  Her act is imperial at root – an attempt to reorder people’s lives as she sees fit.  It is for this reason that Saleem can relate his experience beyond himself to comment on India’s subordination to imperialism and history despite the optimism of independence:

“In fact, all over the new India, the dream we all shared, children were being born who were only partially the offspring of their parents – the children of midnight were also the children of the time: fathered, you understand, by history.It can happen.  Especially in a country which is itself a sort of dream” (118).

Saleem’s identity confusion is the just the beginning of his falling short of the ideals of heroism.  His narrative is unreliable on many levels, from mixing up historical dates to stretching credibility with such hyperbole as suggesting that “the hidden purpose of the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965” was to eliminate his family.  He survives while the rest of his family dies; he moves pepperpots, not politics; he develops an incestuous love for his sister; and he surrenders the names of the Midnight’s Children during interrogation.  In short, Saleem is less the hero of his life than the victim of its many accidents, a fact he realises with increasing despair towards the novel’s climax:

“my dream of saving the country was a thing of smoke and mirrors; insubstantial, the maunderings of a fool” (413).

To add to this undermining of heroism, the baby swap incident has allowed the creation of the character, Shiva – Saleem’s notional prodigal brother who is set up as an apparently direct contrast.  Shiva is the typical incarnation of the imperial hero.  Unlike Saleem, Shiva is physically strong, sexually powerful, and confidently outspoken.  Yet his abuse of his strength leads to a violence, promiscuity, and corruption as ultimately worthless and impotent as Saleem’s lack of action.  He becomes a “warlord of tyranny” and a “birthright-denying war hero” who contributes to the killing and sterilising of his own people.  Yet where does it get him?  Rushdie suggests that the concept of heroism just cannot work in a society so imbued with the politics of imperialism.  Shiva’s certain kind of corrupt heroism is ultimately meaningless and empty, nothing but an illusion not unlike Saleem’s smoke and mirrors:

“[Shiva’s] glittering new life became, for him, a daily humiliation […] as he learned that a man may possess every manly attribute and still be despised for not knowing how to hold a spoon” (410).

The Midnight Children’s Conference is perhaps the epitome of this sense of impotence.  By virtue of the novel’s title, we expect the MCC to play a decisive and heroic role; even Saleem’s anticipatory suggestion that their purpose will be found in “annihilation,” that they “would have no meaning until [they] are destroyed” is provocative and exciting.  Yet the pervasive characteristic of the collection of magical children is one of passivity; they never become the powerful focus of either the nation or the novel that they are expected to be.  Their perhaps singular moment of heroic courage and unity whilst imprisoned (when many of them are already dead and the dissenting Shiva is firmly on the other side of the prison bars) becomes their most painful moment of loss: “Sperectomy: the draining-out of hope” (437).

This is all pretty disheartening stuff.  The imperial hero no longer has a function and the post-colonial is unable to function at all.  Yet, is Rushdie’s message really this despairing about the post-colonial narrative?  In his essay, “Imaginary Homelands,” Rushdie defends the novel against this charge of despair:

“The story of Saleem does indeed lead him to despair.  But the story is told in a manner designed to echo, as closely as my abilities allowed, the Indian talent for non-stop self-regeneration.  This is why the narrative constantly throws up new stories, why it ‘teems’.”

In this way, the constant digressions, minor characters, and the slum full of magicians and sorcerers suggests the hope and heroism that lies within the multifarious, multitudinous population of post-colonial India.  The MCC may not achieve many tangible things but their existence is an metaphor of a sort of mental diaspora – a collection of disparate people overcoming “physical alienation” to create “imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind” (“Imaginary Homelands”) which is an ultimately hopeful and redemptive achievement.  Throughout the text, Saleem’s narrative constructs images of heroism by utilising the language of cinema: trailers which pre-empt events; “Bombay-talkie-style close-up” images of events and people’s faces; sweeping panoramics of history.  I would argue that Rushdie at once grants us the heroic gestures of cinema and epic while undermining our perception of what a hero is to interrogate the Western notion of heroism.  The hero becomes a site of post-colonial resistance and historical sedition.  Edward Said describes this act as:

“The conscious effort to enter into the discourse of Europe and the West, to mix with it, transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalised or suppressed or forgotten histories.”