Written Assignment Paper - 2

 Department of English,M. K. Bhavnagar University     

Name :-  Niyati Vyas

Roll No :- 14

Department :-M. A.English department

Semester :-  3

Paper No :-  202 Indian English Literature (Post-Independence )

UNIT - 2 Midnight's Children 

ASSIGNMENT TOPIC - Theme of Colonialism in Midnight's Children.                   

                                         This blog is a part of my academic written assignments.                                

                                 Midnight's Children is a 1981novel by author Salman Rushdie. It portrays India's transition from British colonial rule to independence and the partition of India. It is considered an example of postcolonial, postmodern, and magical realist literature. The story is told by its chief protagonist, Saleem Sinai, and is set in the context of actual historical events. The style of preserving history with fictional accounts is self-reflexive.

                                  Midnight's Children won both the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1981.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. In 2003, the novel was listed on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's "best-loved novels".It was also added to the list of Great Books of the 20th Century, published by Penguin Books.

                                      Midnight's Children has been called "a watershed in the post-independence development of the Indian English novel", to the extent that the decade after its 1981 publication has been called "post-Rushdie". During that decade, many novels inspired by Midnight's Children were written by both established and young Indian writers.

                                        Midnight’s Children is an allegory on the events that occurred since India gained independence. Several controversial issues are discussed in the novel, as it describes the life story of Salim Sinai and the experiences Salim had in a post-colonial independent India and shows the hidden fear of indigenous Indians as a result of the colonial period which was full of slavery and deceit. This essay is going to analyse the characteristics of post-colonial identity in Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. 

                                    Post-colonial identity is the way a person or group of people affected by colonization defines itself. Characteristics of post-colonial identity include being dehumanised, marginalised, voiceless, hybrid, and being classed as ‘other’ or ‘subaltern’.

                                     another characteristic of post-colonial identity is that people were marginalised. Marginalisation is a word that is used to describe ‘the process of making a group or class of people less important or relegated to a secondary position’. An example of this is when a group of people are all segregated into being ‘second class citizens’ as if they are lower as humans than ‘upper class citizens’. 

                                    Throughout the novel, Mumtaz is always referred to as ‘blackie’ because of her skin. In the novel, there are various characters that regard her skin tone as a deficiency. Even her mother disapproved of her daughter’s skin colour: “She entered the dreams of her daughter Mumtaz, the blackie whom she had never been able to love because of her skin of a South Indian fisherwoman and realized the trouble would not stop there”. This shows that in India, white skin is considered beautiful and clean, but people with darker complexion are considered lower class. 

                                     This point that white complexion was considered attractive, natural and holy is also reaffirmed when Padma criticises Mumtaz, pitying her for being black instead of matching everybody including her own family’s expectations and dreams; “’Poor girl, ‘ Padma concludes, “Kashmir are normally fair like mountain snow, but she turned out black.” 

                                          Through the prescribed framework of magic realism, the novel allows its multitude of characters, belonging to diverse cultural backgrounds, to appraise and originate their own versions of Indian history, thus subverting British colonial versions of history.  Magic realism becomes obligatory to communicate the postcoloniality of India, and within its framework, the novel explores and presents a postcolonial history of its own. The cultural and social hybridity, along with the historical hybridity present within the novel allows the text to exemplify the major themes of the novel  and postcoloniality itself: the formation and telling of history, self, and narratives. 

                                    Not only are these children obligatory for India’s new future, but they remain a “mirror” for India’s future, illuminating the strengths and weaknesses of an independent India. The Midnight’s Children therefore symbolize the multiplicity and miscellany within postcolonial India.

                                        Rushdie assumes magic realism as an efficient tool to resolve the problems of post colonialism.So, by linking and combining historical events, mythological stories and fictional narratives, Rushdie tries to generate and convey a true picture of Indian post colonialism while the colonizers considered India and Indians as a colossal place and  people, the novel illustrates India’s multiplicity and diversity, in an effort to overturn the colonial representation of India. Midnight's Children is therefore an attempt to evoke India. All these attempts would have been impossible without the insertion of magic realism.