Post on 01-Mar-2021
transcript
India in a Broken Mirror: The Shattering of the Idea of
India in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s ChildrenIsaac K. McQuistion
Departments of History and English, Carthage College, 2001 Alford Park Drive, Kenosha, WI 53140
Celebration of Scholars 2011: Exposition of Student and Faculty Research, Scholarship and Creativity
NehruNehru’s Discovery of India was written between 1942 and 1946 during the Independence Movment as a way for the
future prime minister to both reconnect with his own land and posit an idea of who and what that land was
comprised of. Nehru believed in an Indian nation based not a single definition of Indianness, such as a common
religion or a common language, but on a collective definition. He believed there could be unity through diversity. It
was necessary to prove this unity if he was going to effectively counter the British. Nehru looked to history to
prove this unity, saying that there was a common Indian character and that it was the intermingling of these
distinctive cultures that formed it. India was diversity. To show this unity born from diversity, he presented an
alternative history to the one the British had formulated for India.
Saleem SinaiSalman Rushdie, in his quasi-allegorical novel Midnight’s Children on the first thirty years of independent India,
takes the Nehruvian idea of unity quite literally and follows it to what he sees as its logical conclusion and final
undoing. In his novel, India is quite literally presented as one unified body. Saleem Sinai, the narrator and self-
proclaimed embodiment of India, contains within him and his capacious history the major facets of Indian culture.
He is the son of a British colonial and a Hindu woman, but, due to being switched at birth, is raised by a wealthy
Muslim family. His face, featuring a perpetually leaky and grotesquely large nose, representing the Deccan
peninsula, and two stains roughly in the positions of East and West Pakistan, is the map of India. He is born at
midnight on August 15, 1947, at the exact moment of India’s independence. By virtue of his privileged date of
birth, he is endowed with extraordinary powers, the most significant of which is his ability to read minds, enabling
him to turn his own mind into a transistor radio of sorts, allowing all the voices of India to flow through him. In all
of this, he becomes, quite literally, the embodiment of the Nehruvian idea of India. He is the manifestation of unity
(one body) fashioned from diversity (his parentage and upbringing, his telepathic powers). He is democratic India.
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Aadam Sinai But she doesn’t quite succeed. Saleem has a son. Well, technically it’s not his, it’s
Shiva’s, Saleem’s twin in the eyes of midnight and ideological opposite, blessed by
midnight with huge knees and the arts of war. But his son seems to represent the
new India. He is the offspring of the midnight’s children. He, like his father, is born
into a climactic period of Indian history. This time, it’s the Emergency. But Aadam,
his son, cannot speak. He is born mute, with no voice to enter into the national
conversation. Indeed, all over India, replications of Sanjay Gandhi, Indira’s son,
have been appearing, who are also mute. The diversity of Saleem and the midnight’s
children has been replaced with endless replications of Sanjay Gandhi. There are no
longer any voices, and what is a democracy without voices? What is a polyglot
nation like India without a national dialogue? There is now one voice, and it is
Indira’s. Saleem ends the book when he disintegrates into 600 million pieces. There
can be no one India anymore, Rushdie seems to imply. With no one having the voice
to keep the imagined community of India alive, it dissolves into dust. Democracy
has died. Everything Nehru proposed in The Discovery of India has fallen apart and
been replaced by Indira. If Saleem is the mirror of the nation, then that mirror is
irreparably shattered.
AbstractWhy is India able to function as a nation when it is home to the most diverse collection of people on the planet?
What is the idea holding India together in the face of lingual, cultural, and relgious barriers? Jawaharlal Nehru,
India’s first Prime Minister, put forth the idea that Indians were united in their diversity. The history of India, Nehru
asserted, has always been one of synthesis, and that this amalgamation of cultures and identities has created the
Indian identity. With his 1981 novel, Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie tested this Nehruvian idea of India and
showed how it eventually will fail. This paper examines the idea of India as proposed by Nehru in his The
Discovery of India and how it is destroyed in Midnight’s Children by Indira Gandhi’s Emergency regime.
Figures 1 and 2: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children and Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery
of India.
Acknowledgements & ReferencesA special thanks goes to faculty advisors Seemee Ali, Maria Carrig, Eric Pullin, Pamela Smiley, and Stephen Udry.
All quotes taken from:
Guha, Ramachandra. India after Gandhi: the History of the World's Largest Democracy. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2008.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991. London: Granta, 1991.
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight's Children: a Novel. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006.
“India is no more a single country than the equator.”~Winston Churchill
“Your life will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.”~Nehru, in a letter
to Saleem Sinai, Midnight’s Children
Indira GandhiEventually, things begin to fall apart. Saleem begins to literally
tear apart at the seams. He is cracking, about to dissolve under
the weight of history. The end of the book comes after the
Emergency period, when Indira Gandhi , Nehru’s daughter and
also a Prime Minister of India, granted herself dictatorial powers
and had her political opponents imprisoned and the press
censored. Saleem has been castrated under her orders, and is
about to crack. The other midnight’s children, those born in the
hour after India’s independence and also granted magical
powers, have been hunted down and also sterilized. The new
future will not include them, not if Indira has any say in the
matter.
“The Widow’s arm is hunting see the children run and scream…”~
Midnight’s Children
Figure 3: A political cartoon depicting Indira Gandhi
bringing Emergency to the Indian people. At the time of
Emergency, Indira was a widow.
“We, the children of Independence, rushed wildly and
too fast into our future; he, Emergency-born, will be is
already more cautious.”~Saleem, describing his son
After Midnight’s Children, What?But where does this leave us? India obviously still exists, so where does the
idea of India stand? Neither Midnight’s Children nor Rushdie holds the
answer. Numerous writers since Rushdie have attempted to explain the
Indian state, some falling back on Nehru’s example, others modifying it or
abandoning it entirely. The same debate is still being held. The historian
Ramachandra Guha offers probably the best explanation of why India
persists. He points to an unfettered love of democracy and the democratic
process that has knit Indians together. Amartya Sen, an economist, and Sunil
Khilnani, a political theorist, point to much the same thing. These exemplify
the tenacity of Nehru’s idea of India and its enduring legacy. However,
problems still exist, and though India has stabilized, the strength of its
democracy is still perplexing. But perhaps it’s best to let the final words go
to Rushdie, who wrote the following in an essay published after the
destruction of the Babri Mosque in 1992 and the ensuing rioting that resulted
in the slaughter of thousands of Muslims. “India regularly confounds its
critics by its resilience, its survival in spite of everything. I don’t believe in
the Balkanization of India…It’s my guess that the old functioning anarchy
will, somehow or other, keep on functioning, for another forty years, and no
doubt another forty after that. But don’t ask me how.”
“India will survive”~
Ramachandra Guha, historian.
Figure 4: A political cartoon depicting the
plight of democracy in India in 1997.