Self and Nation in Rushdie'sMidnight's Children
Submitted by: Dr. Nidhi Sharma, Asst. Pro.fDept.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 NaseemGhani’spurdah 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 pushpush the leaders of the JantaMorcha 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 comingcoming, and elsewhere the Prime Minister was giving birth to a child of her own. (MC 404)