MEG 7 Block- 5 Midnight’s children
MEG 7 Block- 5 Midnight’s children
Unit 1 to 6 - http://egyankosh.ac.in/handle/123456789/21700
Read - Online pdf and youtube audiobook
UNIT 1 BACKGROUND
Unit-1 -http://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/22846/1/Unit-1.pdf
publication of Midnight's Children in 1981.
1960 - Raja Rao's The Serpent and the Rope & Anita Desai.
However, the 1970s gave no major writers
It is a well-recognized fact today that words mean different things to different people. Everyone who reads a text, becomes its "author", as one of the contemporary critical theories goes i.e., each reader interprets a text from his own world view, value system, beliefs and perceptions so that the book is read very differently from the book written by the author himself! Thus, it was with Midnight's 'Children.
West noted it as the first book from a commonwealth writer that was written in style, English and sensibility that the West wanted.
In the West, Midnight's Children was read by the lay person for being a novel that was cosmopolitan in its outlook; in India, the focus was on the veracity of the historical, political realities that Rushdie had presented. So much so that Rushdie had to face a court case from Mrs. Indira Gandhi for defamation and was asked to expunge an entire chapter from the novel.
Some Indian readers also contested Rushdie's use of mythological references and found fault with his novel till he clarified that the "errors" were deliberate, and a part of his technique.
Salman Rushdie was born on 19 June 1947. He was born and educated in Bombay in St. Cathedral until the age of fourteen. Rushdie left Bombay at the age of fourteen to study at Rugby in England. It was here that he tasted his first bitter experience of racism when one of the boys with whom he shared his study, wrote "Wogs go home" on the wall over his chair (Glendenning 38). So hurt was Rushdie that he never wanted to return to England after that. But in 1967 his parents migrated to Pakistan. So, he spent some time there after the completion of his school education. His parents finally persuaded him to join King's College in Cambridge and he returned to England. He worked in Britain for sometime after completing his education.
Rushdie's first novel was not Midnight's Children but Grimus, a work of science fiction. It was written for a contest organized by Gollancz, a publishing house. Rushdie did not win the contest but Calder persuaded Rushdie to publish the book. The novel was ripped apart by critics and Rushdie felt deeply hurt by the rejection.
He soon recovered and decided to write an " epic" novel about India, embodying its past, present and future. He undertook an extended trip to India along with his wife in preparation.
When it was published in 1981, the novel was an immediate success. In the same year, he won the prestigious Booker McConnell prize. It made him a celebrity overnight. The 10,000 pounds award (it is 20,000 pounds now) gave him the freedom to write without worrying about earning a livelihood
Rushdie begin the trend of writing the Bombay novels but writers after him have been quick to write the metro-centric novel, with Delhi, Calcutta and Toronto as their setting. This has been a major departure from the earlier lndian English novels that were usually set in small towns or villages. Rushdie takes pride in locating the familiar landmarks of Bombay by name, thus striking an immediate and autobiographical sense of identification with the reader.
Born to Muslim parents, Rushdie did not create a pure Muslim character who reads the Koran daily or visits the mosque. His main character Saleem, is partly Hindu, partly Goan, partly Kashmiri, partly Muslim, partly British, suggesting thereby the intermingling of the different races which constitute the lndia that Rushdie adores.
Until Rushdie's Midnight's Children came on the scene, most writers including R. K. Narayan and Mulic Raj Anand had had great difficulties with getting their works published. The market wasn't just ready to accept them. Anand has put on record his dejection at not being able to publish his first novel, Untouchable , so much so that he even contemplated committing suicide! Until E.M Forster the author of Passage to Ida took the initiative to recommend the novel for publication. That this novel which was published in 1936 has gone on to be translated in over twenty world languages is another matter. Similar was Narayan's sad experience as no publisher wanted to buy his book Swami and Fried. Graham Greene the novelist helped him to publish it at last. But the experience repeated itself with Narayan's next novel, The English Teacher. Disgusted Narayan decided to set up his own publishing house, Indian Thought Publications and himself began to publish every single book of his. As a contrast, the publishing success of Rushdie's Midnight's Children and that of his successors have been phenomena difficult to understand. And to think that Rushdie. had to write his second novel to be able to experience this glory, his first Grimus having been totally rejected.
The book that got him into deep trouble was The Satanic Verses, his fourth novel. It was published in 1988. It became his most controversial! work. Even before the book hit the market, Rushdie caused a stir in the publishing world by receiving a very huge advance. While the book was well-received in the UK and the USA, it was banned in India since it hurt the religious sentiments of the Muslims and led to riots and killings in Bombay's Bhendi Bazaar. Soon it was banned in Pakistan, Egyptt, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, South Africa and countries with large Muslim populations. ~rushdie's' fate was sealed finally when on !4 February 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini announced his "fatwa" against Rushdic, exhorting "zealous Muslims" to execute him quickly. Rushdie went into hiding and lived so for over a decade, changing houses very often. He was living in England then.
But none of this support worked, nor did Rushdie's public apology to the Muslims. He won his freedom only rece~tly in the year 2000 when the "fatwa" was officially called off by Iran. That's how he was able to travel to India in April 2000 and enjoy the pleasurable experience of revisiting the country he was pining to return to agairr. After the lifting of the fatwa, he also decided to migrate to the U:S., feeling quiltbitter at the way the British government, he felt, had failed to stand up to Iran and get the fatwa annulled. The most amazing fact about Rushdie and his courageous spirit is that ever? In captivity he continued to make secret appearances and write books.
The book which he first wrote in hiding was Haroun and the sea of Stories ( l990), a delightful "children's" book written for his son, Zafar, but which also fictionalized his attack on the Ayatollah in the figure of Khatum Shud. The second book he wrote was Moor 's Last Sigh (1995). This book was banned first in lndia and then released from the ban a couple of months later. The cause of the ban was Rushdie's open attack on Bal Thakeray a well known politician and leader of the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra. His fictional character wanted to convert lndia into a fascist Hindu state and Rushdie wanted to resist the rise of such a leader. His last book to date, also written in captivity, is The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999). The book was shortlisted for the Booker but it did not make it. It also won the Eurasian Region Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best Book but lost the overall prize.
The prize was first awarded to Midnight's Children in 1981, and again for being selected in 1994 as the best book among all the Booker winners in the 25 years of the Booker Prize.
THE OTHER WORKS OF RUSHDIE
Since he published Midnight's Children in 1981 and The Ground Beneath Her Feet in 1999 , Rushdie has written ten works . These include five novels, one work of science fiction, one work of children's fiction , one a collection of short stories. a travelogue and one collection of essays. He has given a number of i~lterviews, written numerous articles, and made a documentary on Kashmir.
Rushdie won the Booker Prize for Midnight's Children. The Booker Prize (or The Booker McConnell Prize, as should be called) was founded in 1'969 by Booker McConnell, a multinational group of companies. Administered by Book Trust in the United Kingdom, this prestigious award is awarded to the best full length novel written in English by a citizen of the UK, the Commonwealth, Eire, Pakistan or South Africa. This literary prize is sponsored by Booker McConnell Ltd. and looked after by the National Book League in the United Kingdom.
The way it is awarded is in two phases. In the first, publishers are invited to submit entries with scheduled publication dates between January and November of the award year. Earlier they could submit any number of entries. This has changed in the past few years; a publisher can now submit not more than three entries for judging. The time frame has changed as well, with the prize shortlist now announced in late September or early October and the deadline for entries being moved back to June 30. The prize itself (currently valued at 20,000 pounds Sterling) is awarded in late October Since 1999, shortlisted novelists also receive I000 pounds Sterling. In the second phase, the judges read all the entries submitted by the publishers. It appears that the judges in 1995 were asked to read 140 novels, and decided that was too much of a good thing and limited the number of entries to two publishers. The publishers are not too happy it seems, claiming that their third entry was usually a long-shot.
Unit-2 Midnight's Children: The De-doxified English
http://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/22847/1/Unit-2.pdf
Indian English novelists have had two kinds of-predecessors.
The first set of novelists were those who began writing in the pre 1930s. They were those who wrote English with stiff correctness, always conscious that it was a foreign language. Their works and their English were imitative of the British novelists of the times. Eg. Walter Scott and W.W. Reynolds
The other group comprised novelists such as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Michael Madhusudan Dutt who began writing in English but who, influenced by the rising feeling of nationalism, later switched to writing in their mother tongue, Bengali.
However, the novelists who rose in the 1930s, such as Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao were those who made a conscious decision to write in English as if it were an Indian language
PROBLEMS AND CHALLENGES FACED BY THE POST 1930s NOVELISTS
RFB
1- Expressions of pain and grief are emotions. Most Indians won't use English to express their deepest emotions. So to use "English" for expressing the emotions of Indian characters was a major challenge
2- The second challenge was that English is not the language you encounter on the streets.The problem was accentuated when the novelist had to write dialogues or report the conversation among Indian characters belonging to different classes or castes of society.
Therefore, these three novelists - Rao, Anand and Narayan - experimented vigorously and tried to modify and invent new words and proverbs in English and make them "Indian" to represent the speech of their characters.
RUSHDIE ON ENGLISH AND englishes
Rushdie spoke of the English used by the British as the English written with a capital "E" and of the different englishes ( that were now being used in different parts of the world where once the British had ruled) as being written with the small letter 'e'. These 'englishes' were remains of the English inherited in the former colonial countries and societies by writers who aimed to use them for the purpose of writing about their own people and struggles in the aftermath of colonisation. He describes this as the phenomenon of the "Empire hitting back with a vengeance and says he finds these englishes to be more vibrant than English. He observes that the formerly colonised had re-fashioned English in a way that had decolonised the english language they had inherited from the British.
RUSHDIE AND THE HYBRIDIZED ENGLISH
Rao, Narayan and Anand draw upon their mother tongues - Kannada, Tamil and Punjabi to create the English they need in their novels. Rushdie entered the scene of the Indian English novel with his Midnight's Children, which is a book not about any one region but the whole subcontinent, uses English as a pan-Indian language and not as a regional language.
"Hinglish" is spoken and understood in different parts of the country. For one thing, the English-educated generations have overcome their colonial hang-up about using Hindi. For another, while people in the villages are trying to learn English those in the southern Indian states have picked up Hindi, possibly from TV serials! So, "Hinglish" is commonly used in the country today. It creates a sense of its being a pan-Indian language cutting across regional, religious and class barriers.
RFB - eg from MN’sC
ISRUSHDIE ANINDIAN ENGLIsH NOVELIST?
Usage of dots and dashes
Italics and bold
Adding na! And starve starve while english doesn’t use repetition of words
ENGLISH "DE-OXIFIED"
For example, the Indian belief that one is bom a sudra-or a woman because of one's karma, is an ideology which reasons that we are where we are because of our past actions. Becaye this ideology seems incontestable, once we believe in the Karma theory, then the power groups continue to exercise their dominance while the powerless passively accept their dominance over themselves.
When Barthes defined Poststructualist thought he was instrumental in challenging all such 'natural' constructions and exposing the political intentions of the powerful who were interested in keeping these ideologies and beliefs alive. He described these as the 'Doxa' or public opinion or the 'Voice of Nature' (Barthes 1977b) and questioned if in truth they were natural or were man made. Closely following Post structuralist thinking is Postmodernism in art and architecture which has given expression to upturning traditional, cultural public opinion or 'doxa' by consciously re-writing the same script in reverse.
RUSHDIE'S USE OF ENGLISH IN DESCRIPTIVE SCENES
Rushdie uses the English language to describe landscapes or actions so that these acquire a three dimensional cinematic quality. He draws on the visual, auditory, kinesthetic senses 2nd conveys images, feelings and sounds in a way that render them immediate and experienceable .
Unit-3 Themes in Midnight's Children - http://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/22848/1/Unit-3.pdf
HISTORY AND THE INDIVIDUAL
Being tied to history bcz of the birth date and time.
language riots of the 1950 that he played a pivotal role in the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971 and that in 1975 Indira Gandhi imprisoned political opponents and suspended the democratic rights of the people during the "Emergency".
JAllianwala Bagh Massacre
His parents, grandparents and an aunt were killed on 23 September 1%5, the day India's Airforce bombs Rawalpindi. Shiva his powerful and violent enemy moves in to live with Parvati-the-witch in May 1974 on the very day that lndia explodes its first nuclear test bomb; their son Aadam is born on 25 June 1975, the day Emergency is declared for the first time in India. The book is full of examples that demonstrate Saleem's belief that he is linked to history "both literally and metaphorically"
The history that he narrates is full of mistakes in dates, and this Saleem argues is because it is derived from recollection and memory . In other words, Saleem Rushdie seems to be writing history as Saleem's autobiography. TIie central rule is that the small errors in the text such as the wrong dates of important events including the date of Gandhi's assassiilation are clues indicating that Saleem is capable of consciously distorting facts.
In the novel Saleem cuts up seemingly important political newspaper articles at random and then rearranges them to constitute a new view of reality . He shows the power of re-made reality when he pieces together randomly cut out newspaper items, words, syllables and letters to form a message to Commander Sabarmati that his wife is unfaithful to him; the message leads the husband into murdering his wife's paramour and being jailed. His absurd action reflects the absurdity of the historian's claim of presenting history as an objective truth and to show that history can be bent to serve dangerous and individual designs.
Rushdie's growing child Saleem only grows older; he does not evolve. And as he grows older he gets more and more misshapen and ugly and closer to death. . He is emasculated and castrated during the Emergency, and he passively waits for death. He seems to have become a person who has lost all control over his life because of political circumstances and lack of will. Through this character Rushdie is trying to represent not a nation full of hope but a nation whose voice has been muzzled and which is in a hopeless state because of the historical-political events.
In Mihight's Children we are not reading about a Muslim character but about a character who is an Indian i.e., a product of mixed traditions and many races.
Frantz Fanon, the author of The Wretched of the Earth (1 963) has described the three Themes phases through which writers in the former colonies gradually mature.
In the first phase, their works are imitative of the colonizer's literature.
In the second phase, they attack the colonizer for the wrongs they have done to their country (Rao's Kanthapura belongs to this phase).
In the third phase, the writers address and attack the political events and politicians in the newly freed country. (Rushdie's Midnight's Children mainly
COLONIALISM AND NEO-COLONIALISM IN INDIA
Most Indian migrant writers - and Rushdie is one of them -are what I would like to call activist writers. They carry their political challenges to authority into their books and simultaneously connect the books with the world outside.
Perhaps the distance in years from their mother country gives them the detachment nECessary for writing about it as a theme. Moreover, their negative experiences with racism in the white host country have often triggered in them a desire to off it the strengths of their own country against those of the new country.
Thus most migract writers tend to write books which are political acts and constitute , in my view, true postcolonial works, if by postcolonialism one means the .'decolonisation of the mind". That's what freedom is and not just political independence
We all grew up sincerely believing that British rule was a good thing for India? Our educational system, our books. Our syllabus has been written from a Eurocentric perspective. So we have been subtly and gradually conditioned into accepting the superiority of the British, and appreciate their efforts to civilize us. Rushdie's Methwold is a caricature, a symbol of evil and moral degeneration rather than a fully fleshed out character. Rushdie uses hip to convey his views about colonialism. Methwold in the Midnight's Children is a descendant of Methwold who was the first officer of the East India Company, and he is the last European to rule India before India got its freedom. This first and last Englishman thus becomes the direct object of Rushdie's anger as he symbolizes for him the entire colonial adventure of exploitation and demoralization.
The myth of Britain's civilizational mission is easily exposed when having identified Methwold as a liar. the reader edits every statement of Methwold's from the new perspective of mistrust. When Methwold describes to Ahmd Sinai (Saleem's father) how much the Indians owe to the British, the leader sees it?
as yet another fiction written by a ruler : "you will admit we weren't all bad; built your roads, schools, railway trains, parliamentary system, all worthwhile things . . ."( 109- 1 10). .
Methwold, "we" Is necessarily restricted to the British; he views his people as the men who were the civilizing influence on the Indian subcontinent and would to remind the Indians about it on the eve of his departure. He is simply unable to acknowledge the existence of any culture rather than his own. There is nothing on the Estate where he lives that would suggest anything other than European culture.
Through the character and conditions set by Methwold, Rushdie is drawing our attention to this politics with a sharpness that has been common to most migrant writers from the former colonies. I want you to understand this point because Rushdie's choice of themes is very much influenced by his having lived in the former colonizer's country, Rushdie makes us aware that the game that Methwold plays concerns not only names but objects as well, The names of the houses on his Estate are of course the names of famous European palaces which were either built at the height of absolute monarchism.
Now, these names cany a history, an entire tradition of centralized authority and the rights of Kings. Thus, when Methwold seeks to preserve the traditions of the British Raj through the objects in his estate, his hope is that the objects will affect and influence the consciousness of the new occupants in such a way that the superiority of the traditions of the British will be permanently etched on the lndian psyche.
It is too big a price to buy a house to live in but as Rushdie shows it was the price that the country paid for getting its freedom. The Estate symbolizes India, earlier possessed by the British, now being handed over to Indian owners (rulers), intact with the colonizers political and economic systems.
Rushdie's Midnight's Children is an allegory where the individual's life and history are offered in a sustained parallel. Methwold, the Englishman is an extended metaphor for British colonization. His seduction of Vanita in the absence of her husband the street accordionist, Wee Willie Wonka. is a metaphor for appropriating and exploiting what rightfully belongs to another; which is also the meaning of colonialism. In every colony the ruling British officers had seduced and raped the wives of poor natives and left behind them the rflixed products of their irresponsible union
Rushdie is very much preoccupied with the theme of India's colonization and its lasting impact on the Indian mind as neocolonialism. He has used symbols and allegory to convey his strong feelings against this overwhelming phenomenon.
FRAGMENTATION, MIGRANCY AND MEMORY
Rushdie has always regarded himself as different from earlier migrant in the sense of being free from the idealization of nostalgia. But the fact is that beginning with MN;’sChildren, Rushaie has made Bombay or Kashmir the location of virtual} all his novels. He also ha.: chosen the method of satire to write about the political history of India and about colonialism, the two themes of ,MNs Children already discussed in this unit. - - Fragmentation, migrancy and memory his third theme can perhaps be called the central theme of not just Midnight's Children but all his novels.
When a migrant writer tries to unlock the gates of the past, as he has tried to do in Midnight's Childr-en, Rushdie found himself writing "a novel of memory and about memory," which is why perhaps, he made Saleem into an unreliable narrator.
Rushdie was saying that no matter how hard an Indian writer tries to write about India "authentically", he can't because he lives outside, and he is dealing with a reality "whose fragments have been irretrievably lost." However, on the positive side he feels it is exciting for t!e migrant writer as she tries to reconstruct the past from the "broken pots of antiquity-"
His first exile (of which he is unaware) is in losing the home of Vanita and Wee-Willie-Winkle from his very birth. The discovery that his blood group belongs to neither his father Ahmed nor his mother is responsible for another exile.Again when the family moves from ~omba~ to Karachi, Saleem is exiled from Bombay. He loses the voices of the Midnight's Children after a nasal operation he is tricked into undergoing by his own parents, under the pretext of being taken out on a picnic. Saleem's exile is forced and compounded with the dishonesty of others
Unit-4 Techniques in Midnight Children
http://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/22849/1/Unit-4.pdf
MN'sC is classified in a category of fiction that goes by the name of magic realism. El realismo mágico, or imgc realist, was born in Latiri America and has followers all over the world. Rushdie describes it as a development out of Surrealism that "expresses a gen~inely 'Third World' consciousness".
THE STRUCTURE OF MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN
Story within story - like ancient indian tales eg panchatantra or arabian nights
MN’sC is difficult to classifY because it recalls another fictional genre - of metafiction. Metafiction: is a form of fiction in which the process of writing fiction is the theme. This form developed to question the reality premise of 19' century fiction. It has largely been;+sed to investigate the relation between art and life. Salman Rushdie weds the two separate genres by filtering ancient narrative structures through the postmodern.
Where does Rushdie belong? To the postcolonial or to the postmodem? Rushdie has conveniently planted one fcot in each tradition.
BEGINNINGS WITHOUT ENDINGS: MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN & EPIC STRUCTURE
Novels, they say, must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But they don't always begin at the beginning.
The story works on the simple principle of "what-happened-nextism.
Besides digressing and breaking up the tight structure, Saleem also has the habit of jumbling up the sequence of events. Endings often precede begi~ings. Given that he spills the beans years in advance, is there any point in continuing with the story? This is again a feature that Rushdie has borrowed from oral narratives. Since oral narratives often narrate an already known story, t6ey need not worry either about sustaining suspense or maintaining sequence
Rushdie's aim is to show that fiction is not reality. Because it can be shaped the way its author wants it to be.
Repetition is the favourite device of the storyteller. Rushdie is equally fond of using the "once upon a time" formulae.
SUTRADHAR AND NATI: SALEEM AND PADMA
Padma is the nati to whom the sutradhar Salim narrates his story. Having Saleem tell Padma helps Rushdie simulate the storytelling situation he wishes to create. At the same time, it is very clear that Saleem is writing down the story, which Padma cannot read. The use of Padana is an excelIen? strategy. 1 Padma does several things at once. First of all, she is still rooted in the storytelling tradition from which Saleem has been uprooted. She naTUrally expects Saleern's 1 story to follow the NI~S of all other stories she has heard before. However, she has no clue as to now novels are written. This gives Saleem he perfect opening for giving her a lecture on how novels should be written. More importantly, Saleern is as much a babalog as Rushdie or the readers. The story Saleem is writing "in ar, Anglepoise pool of light" might stretch the credibility of his anglicized readers. Padma, however, fits totally in the miracle laden universe. Salem as well as Rushdie are always a bit hesitant in the presence of the incredible. Padma's love of superstitions, however, co-exists with "a down-to-earth very". Padrna stands for the view of the ordinary uneducated Indian people who do not question him marvellously the same way as anglicized Indians do.
SALEEM, UNRELIABLE NARRATOR
Saleem and his creator Rushdie have so much h common that they have been confused with one another. Both are Mdnight 's Children, having been born in the year of India's independence. Both share a KashmiiI ancestry and an upper class anglicized upbringing, Saleem follows Rushdie's mute from Peddar Road to Pakistan though the circumstances might have varied.
The use of a first person narrator was also part of Rushdie's narrative strategy. Authors often create a persona who is their mouthpiece. But this is not so with Saleem. Saleem's magniloquence and delusions are as much subject to the author's irony as the reader's ridicule. Rushdie came to the reader's rescue in "'Errata': Or. Unreliable Narration in Midnight's Children". He made a detailed reference to all the errors he is said to have made including getting his dates and statistics wrong. While he owned up to some of the unintentional errors he made in the novel. He warned the reader that "Saleem Sinai is an unreliable narrator".
Rushdie went on to explain his method. He began by feeling embarrassed and annoyed by his mistakes. But gradually he found that "the mistake feels more and more mere like Saleern's; irs wrongness feels right." Rushdie goes on to explain that he went to the trouble of introducing mistakes in originally error free passages. Why? Because during its writing the novel turned out tc be very different from what Rushdie had set out to write. Rushdie wanted ts wile a novel of memory, as I have mentioned in Unit 3. But somewhere along the way he got interested in the process of filtration. The role that filters play in remembering. "So my subject changed, was no longer a search for lost time, had become me way in which we re-make the past to suit our present purposes, using memory as our tool," he explained. Rushdie called attention to Saieem's filters that played a large role in the design of the novel. He links the pattern sf the novel to Saleem's need to write himself. to imbue his life with some meaning. Saleem shapes the mazeria'!, according to the author, to give himself a central role. There are several examples.. of Saleem "cutting history to suit himself '.
He says he wants to distinguish between truth and remembered truth. How certain facts favourable to certain groups are selected and passed off as the history of the entire community. Rushdie shows that unlike his novel which clearly reveals how history is made, official histories hide the fact that they are also stories. "History is always ambiguous. Facts are hard to establish and capable of being given many meanings." He concludes.Rushdie is trying to say that remembered truth is as valid as literate truth and that everyone has the right to their own version of truth.
INTERPLAY OF FANTASY AND REALISM
As Saleem puts it, even a "literate person in this India of ours" is not "immune from the type of information I am in the process of unveiling". The difference lies in that where a Padma or Mary might swallow marvellous happenings without the slightest hesitation, Saleem might be required to justify his position through philosophical argument. "Reality can have metaphorical content, that does not make it less real"
MYTH IN MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN
By now Rushdie's readers are familiar with his carefree manner, which spares no one. At the time of the novel's publication, however, his particular brand of irreverence irked many, particularly those who hold tradition in great awe. Rushdie's allusion to Hindu myths became a serious point of debate. Could a Muslim draw on Hindu tradition? If he did, wasn't it his moral duty to educate himself and use them accurately?
The central myth holding the novel together is the fine myth of Shiva. Wushdie evokes Shiva in his destructive avatar, born to banish evil from the world. Ilr, Rushdie's novel, Shiva gradually evolves into an evil force whose sole motive is to destroy the hero Saleem foi robbing him of his real parents. Only through some far fetched association can one link Shiva's actions as revenge for the evils of emergency. Rushdie reinterprets the Shiva myth like all others as it suits him: eternally playing on the meaning of words; referring to the original association of the myth; and turning it upside down. This has a nagging connection to postmodern irony and play. Salrnan Rushdie has become the darling of the postmodernists for his playful treatment of all he touches.
Unit-5 Characterization in Midnight's Children
http://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/22850/1/Unit-5.pdf
Characters are described as the persons presented in narrative or dramatic works that are interpreted by the reader as possessing certain moral, personality and emotional qualities that get communicated through what they speak (i.e. the dialogues) or what they do (i.e. their actions )or what other characters tell us about them. The reasons for the character's temperament, aspirations and moral values reflected in speech and actions lie in what is called motivation.
e. one simple expectation of a character whether in a realistic work or in a fantasy is that the characki is "consistent". That is to say, the character should not break off suddenly or act in a way *which is not convincingly founded in his or her nature or temperament ;as we have already come to know it.
. A Fkt character or a "type" is a "two - dimensional" or "cardboard" character, built around "a single idea or quality". It has no depth. It is presented without much individualizing detail and therefore such a character can be adequately described in a single phrase or sentence. For example, the accordionist Wee Willie Winkie or his wife, Vanita in ~idniiht 's Children is a flat character ; he is just an accordionist - we have no idea how hejhinks and feels, or what makes him act.
A Round character is complex in temperament and motivation. It is presented with subtle particularity. Such a character is therefore as difficult to describe:: with any adequacy as a person in real life, Like real persons, they also have the capacity to spring surprises on us. Saleem, for instance, is a Round character.
SALEEM AS INDIA AND INDIA AS SALEEM
right in the beginning of the novel, he identifies himself with India, its histories and its destinies. Indeed he is at pains to tell us that by being a midnight child. a special responsibility had been thrust upon him.
The discovery that he is not his parents' son is a turning point in Saleem's life and he feels shattered.. Again when these "parents" die in Pakistan he is really left on his own. Rushdie says he did it deliberately. He was poking fun at Saleem who believes he is India, that he is incharge of her history and destiny when in reality he is its victim ("he is castrated") and when he makes this discovery towards the end of the book, he just can't recover from this knowledge. Saleem can't outgrow the habit of seeing himself as the centre of the world, a stage which every child goes through and must outgrow in order to be taken seriously. Saleem is very well aware of his role in the novel : he knows there are two Indias, the actual India and his own personalized India which he refers to as 'my India' (198)' or the India discovered within his mind. He knows that he has placed himself at the centre of his story, and that his story is coloured accordingly. He also knows that his role is that of a storyteller and entertainer and no more. He wants us to believe that he is in control when in reality he is a non-entity. He is both a storyteller and a parody of one. And most certainly he is not a historian nor the great character destined to play a special role in India's destiny. He is just a person suffering from self-delusion, having lost his "family" moorings and roots
WHY?
Since Saleem's life is so insignificant, he has to make it seem to be "either very important or very interesting" or he will lose his reader's interest. Saleem is not a known figure in history or in any other sphere. He is onIy a fictional autobiographer having no claim to fame in "real life." So he tries to accomplish this fame in his narrative by linking events of his own life with those of his country's history and sensationalizing his own role in these events and in the lives of the people he knows.
PADMA : BELOVED NATI
Her companionship completes Saleem's life as a man and her
role as his narratee completes his narration.
Padma is the narratee or audience for Saleem as well as his beloved. As a beloved,
she is assertive and demanding and coming from the working class, her liaison with
Saleem symbolically represents the ideal of "marriage" of the classes. As one who
comes from the working class, Padma has few inhibitions and speaks openly on all
matters with Saleem, including taunting him about his "useless other pencil." Saleem
is attracted to her in spite of her emotional outbursts against his ineffectiveness as a
lover, and narrator.
She not only shows Saleem's successes and failures as an autobiography but also plays an important role in the deflation of his character and the creation of his story. Saleem himself recognizes this when he accepts inability to dispense with Padma though she is superstitious and ignorant. Saleem is constantly tailoring his narrative to retain Padma's interest. Padma represents a lively and spirited woman, a loyal friend with a carefree,untamed nature. She adds depth to the narrative by her queries and responses.
THE MIDNIGHT CHILDREN - SHIVA, PARVATI AND SALEEM
Although Saleem describes himself as the greatest talent of all the midnight children, he is replicated and multiplied in other midnight children, without whom he is also incomplete.
Saleem is "the greatest talent of all" ; he had been endowed with "the ability to look
into the hearts and minds of men.. Then there is Parvati-the-witch who is the
most powerful female midnight child, next only to Saleem and SRiva because she was
"Born a mere seven seconds after midnight on August 1 had been given the powers of the adept,the illuminatus, the genuine gifts of configuration and sorcery. The third is Shiva,who like Saleem was ''born on the stroke of midnight" and had been "given the gifts of war." He is Saleem's alter ego. Shiva is also his adversary. The reason for Shiva's resentment end enmity with Saleem originates in his having been exchanged at birth with Saleem without the knowledge of his parents. Though he was actually the son of Amina and Ahmed Sinai (while Saleem's parem were Vanita, a poor musician's wife and Methwold) he was condemned to a life of poverty and crime, These three children are closely linked to each other.
Saleem" power to communicate with all the midnight children makes his head "a
kind of forum in which they could talk to one another" though Saleem Only Shiva can close off from me any part of his thoughts he chose to keep to himself.Saleem with the help of Parvati becomes the leader of the midnight children, against Shiva’s wishes.
Saleem is convinced that the midnight children must be there for a special purpose
since each had been bestowed with supernatural or superhuman gift .But in the end
they are all destroyed ansf contribute to India's fragmentation, The children symbolizing India's potentiality to build her future for each of its citizens, to build ''the noble mansion of free India, where all her children may dwell.
Saleem is unable to retort to Shiva's cynical analysis of the world,he seeks refuge in the idea that
"If there is a third principle, it's name is childhood. But it - dies; or rather, it is murdered" His downfall sees the rise of Shiva who incidentally creates a new race of children who are bastard products of his illegitimate relations with numerous "society ladies."
Mrs. Gandhi as Kaali the avatar for destruction. And Parvati as the one who gives birth = creation. RFB
FAMILY AS CHARACTER
surprise elements in his story.
First there is the Bollywood style baby swop where the reader is shocked to discover
The family he had been reading about is not the family of the child, whose life history he had been engaged with, but somebody else's family .
The other lies in Rushdie killing off Saleem's family when there were still one hundred and fifty pages left to go. Just about every member of the family dies in the bomb that falls on their house in Pakistan.
The third is to bring in the Nehru-Gandhi family as characters in the book - a very daring act in itself, because they were very much around and in power.
Living during the emergency RFB - Professor’s experience
COMMON PEOPLE AS CHARACTERS
Saleem records the daily activities of different ""common" people and reproduces their wonderful language and unique qualities. One of the most fascinating commoners is Fai, the boatman, and another is Lifafa Das, even Mary Pereira. In creating common people as memorable characters in his novel, Rushdie has set off a new trend in Indian fiction writing.
Unit-6 Midnight's Children As a Literary Event
http://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/22851/1/Unit-6.pdf
Linda Hutcheon has coined the term historiographic metafiction to classify Rushdie's peculiar concoction of history and metafiction. What is historiographic metafiction? As the name suggests, it is a kind of fiction that has elements of both history and metafiction. The novel is generically differentiated from history through its dealing with events that are probable but not true. Historiographic metafiction violates this distinction by straying into traditional historical territory.
Metafiction is defined as the kind of fiction that is concerned with the process of its own making. Metafiction, unlike other fiction, that labours to establish the veracity of its referents, masks the "machinery" of fiction to show its referents to be made up In this manner, metafiction challenges the notion of mimetic realism that was often projected as the only mode of writing fiction. Metafiction shows that mimetic realism is only one mode of creating fiction. As fictional referents can never be real, it least matters which conventions it employs.
MNC’s a Postmodern Novel-
Saleem keeps referring to events that happen much later, your curiosity is suficie;ltly aroused to make you request him to go on. At the same time, as you already know the ending, a!l that leads up to it seems merely an explanation. You feel cheated out of the story. Giadualiy, you begin to realize that your interest ir, the story takes a back seat to the stcry making and its telling. The llamator lets you one by one into the tricks used by storytellers to tell stories. He tells you about beginnings, middles and endings proper to a novel, He tells you about Sheherezade's eternally delayed ending.
Midnight's Children 's strange juxtaposition of history and fiction where historical facts coincide with the life of the protagonist Saleem Sinai creates a unique combination. the postmodern crisis of reality. Having found out that both fiction and history are different kinds of stories, it is not difficult to grasp that reality also could be a made up thing. This idea of reality as being made up by the observer is called the "constructivist" view of the universe. The problem of postmodern fiction is not merely to challenge the view that art can accurately depict reality. Or that while selecting facts, the historian chooses to tell the stories that appeal to him or promote his interests. One is talking about a different understanding of reality that throws what we take to be the real world into doubt. Postmodern fiction, by calling attention to the made up nature of fiction and history, shows us that reality itself is of our own making. When reality itself is shown to be a made up thing, what can fiction possibly imitate? Postmodern fiction no longer has a story to tell. Instead, it unmasks the process of its making, constantly calling attention to its made up status.
MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN AS A POSTCOLONIAL NOVEL
Postcolonialism, like postmodernism, is a critique of modernism. But unlike postmodernism, it attacks modernism from a post-colonial angle. While postmodernism is a reaction against modernism, post-colonialism is an attempt to show the irrelevance of the western division of pre-modern, modern and postmodern to non-~estern societies. In every field, postmodernism attempts to reverse , extend or project the movement of modernism. This could be seen in the postmodern return to history, in its ethic of indeterminacy, or in the rediscovery of intuition and imagination in preference to modernity's techno rationalism. But the most important aspect of postmodernism is the collapse df universalizing claims of modernism. This opens a space view other than the western.
For example, to be modem was to move in the direction of the West. This has been rejected by postcolonialism, which shows that different people can become modern in different ways.
Helen Tiffm made a very important distinction between postmodernism and post-colonialism when she pointed out that unlike postmodernist fiction, post-colonial works have a strong political content. Postcolonial fiction is deeply embedded in the history and $%tics of its society.
Rushdie confronts Western fiction with eastern storytelling to show that Western literary structures are not universal. He apprises the Western reader of other narrative modes that might differ from those of the West. The difference in the style of Westem and non-Western narratives, according to Rushdie, might be due to their emerging from particular knowledge systems.
Magic realism is the most exciting thing that has happened to Western literature since the days of the Romance. But that is because of the West looking at realism as the only.relationship between life and literature. Like someone said, if this were so, we would have to leave out three fourths of the world's literature.
While an English speaking reader might find it difficult to accept the miraculous happenings in the novel, Rushdie shows you that these appear as perfectly natural to Padma or Mary. As with other differences, Rushdie contrasts Western and nonWestern perspectives on reality to expand the outlines of what the West takes to be the real.
MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN AS A HISTORICAL NOVEL
Rushdie does not merely employ a historical setting; he turns to history as a theme. Rushdie takes up the history of post independence India ending in the Emergency as his main theme. The history of India runs parallel to the life of the narrator Saleem resulting in a unique coupling of the private with the public. Readers of Midnight's Children have pointed out discrepancies and anachronisms in Rushdie's account. Rushdie, on his part, claims that he never intended to write the definitive history of India.
Comments
Post a Comment