Whose history, which narrator?
This page last revised 9 June 2001.
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children can be read,
inter alia, as the unfolding of the twentieth-century India’s
history. There is in the novel, virtually all of the twentieth century Indian
history: the Jallianwalla Buch tragedy, Quit India movement, Cabinet Mission,
freedom movement, Muslim League and its role, riots and bloodshed subsequent to
the independence, Five Years Plans, reorganization of Indian states and
language riots, Chinese aggression, the theft of the sacred relic from the
Hazratbal mosque, Pakistan War, liberation of Bangladesh, the Emergency, the
military coup in Pakistan in 1958, and various other historically important
events. There are also typically Indian divisions and dissents, chaos and
disillusion, communal tensions, religious fanaticism besides traditional values
and modernizing efforts.
One aspect Rushdie places emphasis on, is the close link between the
history of India and the history of Saleem’s family. In the end, the
former can be read as a family album. Saleem’s uncle, Zulfikar, is a
Pakistani general who helps General Ayub Khan to plan the military takeover of
1958; his aunt is a mistress of Homi Catrak, who is shot by the husband of Lila
Sabarmati, another of his mistresses (Commander and Mrs. Nanavati in real
life); his classmate Cyrus Dubash becomes the founder of a religious cult that
seems to be an amalgam of Guru Maharaj and Hatha-yogi Lakshman Rao who claimed
he could walk on water; Saleem himself triggers off one of the worst language
riots in Bombay; his mother was first married to Shcikh Abdullah’s
right-hand man; the disappearance of the Prophet’s Hair is linked to his
grandfather. In addition, Saleem belongs to an extremely peculiar group of
1,001 children born within the very first hour of India’s independence, on
the 15th of August 1947, and capable of performing paranormal
phenomena. Saleem, thus becomes an authentic representative of India, he is
India.
Rushdie is convinced that there is a connection between public affairs
and private lives. They interpenetrate and that is how the writer needs to
examine them, the one in the context of the other. In the light of this
consideration we can read the passage in which Saleem declares:
Who what am I? My answer: I am the
sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have seen done, of
everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world
affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone
which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly
exceptional in this matter; each "I", every one of the
now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for
the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world. (p. 370)
If then, this is the way, to Rushdie’s view, the historical process
should be conceived, what does he do with his narrative? Does he use history to
serve any political purpose? If yes, which purpose? To start with, we do not
hear in the novel only Saleem’s version of history, his interpretation of
it. We indirectly hear some others too. Price in his dealing with the same
questions offers a suggestive analysis. He reads the novel along with
Nietzsche’s essay Untimely Meditation where three modes of history
are specified: the antiquarian, the monumental and the critical. These modes
are practiced by three characters in the novel. William Methwold employs a form
of antiquarian history; the Widow is a proponent of monumental history; and
Saleem Sinai is a critical historian. Nietzsche believes that each of the three
modes of history belongs to a certain soil and only to that; in any other it
grows into a devastating weed. In his novel, Rushdie depicts both the
antiquarian and the monumental modes as devastating weeds. In India only the
third mode, critical history, appears to have the potential to contribute to
life. Midnight’s Children records Saleem’s struggle to present
his critical history as a counter-narrative to, and a critical commentary on
the "official" history of Indira Gandhi’s government and the nostalgic
histories of apologists for British imperialism. William Methwold is an
antiquarian historian as well as a representative of the white colonizer. He
expresses the desire to preserve for those who shall come into existence after
him the conditions under which he himself came into existence. He sells his
estate to upper-class Indian families on condition "that the houses be bought
complete with every last thing in them, that the entire contents be retained by
the new owners; and that the actual transfer should not take place until
midnight on August 15th." (p. 95) Meanwhile, Methwold has set out to
"educate" his successors. His goal is clear and straightforward: to teach the
rich Indians how to rule over a multitudinous Indian society, to preserve the
very structure, ideology of an authoritarian society to which he himself
belongs. And Rushdie does not fail to alarm us: "…so they have all failed
to notice what is happening: the Estate, Methwold’s Estate, is changing
them… and Methwold, supervising their transformation, is mumbling under
his breath. Listen carefully: what’s he saying? Yes, that’s it.
"Sabkuch ticktock hai", mumbles William Methwold. All is well." (p. 99)
Methwold views the British as the quintessentially civilizing influence on the
Indian subcontinent. He is unable to acknowledge the existence of any culture
other than his own. Everything in the estate, architecture, the names of the
buildings signal simultaneously a desire to superimpose historical European
paradigms on the Indian landscape and consciousness.
Rushdie also strongly criticizes the Widow-Indira Gandhi, that is the
monumental mode of history, and her Emergency policy in 1975, which led to
brutal violations of human rights in India. Saleem’s narrative is one way
of denying the official, politician’s version of truth. It expresses the
"new myth of freedom", it is an action of resistance. At the same time it is
the search for the validity of the Indo-British legacy in modern India, where,
as in all developing countries which have emerged from their colonial past,
economics, religion and culture are all consumed by the great maw of politics.
The novel poses the problem of culture and identity in terms of politics and
morality, leading Saleem to seek his identity in terms of connections and
places outside the chronological framework of Indo-British history, in the
primeval time of India’s villages.
Useful Links:
www.trill-home.com
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Acknowledgements
The first image is a painting by Major Edward Molyneaux The Banks of
the Ganges at Benares, London, ca. 1890. The second image is a map of
Bombay drawn in 1846. Both images are taken from the
www.trill-home.com web site.
This page was written by Nikos
Karkavelias. E-mail me 
with your
suggestions.
This project was completed under the
direction of Dr Leon Litvack as a requirement for the MA degree in Modern Literary Studies in the School of
English at the Queen's
University of Belfast. The site is
evolving and will include contributions from future generations of MA students
on other writers and themes.
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