Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
This blog is written on the ground as a task assigned by H.O.D Dilip Barad sir Department of English M.K.B.U. In this particular blog I am going to deal with two questions from this unit `Midnight's Children', and try to justify each question.
Midnight's Children
'Midnight's Children' is a 1981 novel written by Indian-British author Salman Rushdie. This novel is a postcolonial, postmodern and magical realist story told by its main protagonist, Saleem Sinai. It is set in the context of historical events.
The novel is set in India, and it tells the story of Saleem Sinai, who is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, that was the moment when India gained independence from British rule. Saleem is one of 1000 children who are born at this precise time, and he is granted special powers. He can telepathically communicate with the other children, and he can also control their actions.
Saleem's story is intertwined with the history of India. He witnesses the violence and chaos of the Partition, when India was divided into two separate countries, India and Pakistan. He also sees the rise and fall of Indian leaders, such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.
Midnight's Children is a complex and ambitious novel that explores the themes of colonialism, identity, and history. It is a powerful and moving story that has had a lasting impact on Indian literature.
Here are some of the key elements of the novel:
The use of magical realism: Midnight's Children is a magical realist novel, which means that this novel blends elements of fantasy and reality. This is evident in the way that Saleem Sinai is granted special powers.
The historical context: Midnight's Children is set against the backdrop of the Partition of India, which was a time of great violence and upheaval.
The narrator: The novel is narrated by Saleem Sinai, who is an unreliable narrator. Saleem's perspective is shaped by his own experiences and biases, and it is up to the reader to decide how much weight to give his words.
Midnight's Children is a challenging and rewarding novel that is essential reading for anyone interested in Indian literature or postcolonial studies.
Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British author of fiction, essays, and non-fiction. He is best known for his novels, which explore themes of history, religion, cultural identity, and magic realism. His most famous novel, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988 and led to a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, calling for Rushdie's death. The fatwa forced Rushdie into hiding for several years and made him a symbol of freedom of speech.
Rushdie was born in Bombay, India, in 1947. He studied history at King's College, Cambridge, and then worked as an advertising copywriter. His first novel, Grimus, was published in 1975. His second novel, Midnight's Children, was published in 1981 and won the Booker Prize. It is a magical realist novel that tells the story of India from the time of independence to the present day.
Rushdie's other novels include-
Shame (1983)
The Satanic Verses (1988)
Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)
The Moor's Last Sigh (1995)
The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999)
Shalimar the Clown (2005)
The Enchantress of Florence (2008)
-He has also written several works of non-fiction, including
Imaginary Homelands (1991)
The Satanic Verses: A Rushdie Reader (2005)
Rushdie is a controversial figure, but he is also one of the most important writers of our time. His work has been praised for its originality, humor, and insight. He is a recipient of the Booker Prize, the Whitbread Prize, the PEN/Nabokov Award, and the Knighthood of the Order of the British Empire.
In 2012, Rushdie was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his novels that teem with life, wit and the power of imagination." He is the first Indian-born writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Rushdie continues to write and speak out on issues of free speech and cultural identity. He is a powerful voice for the importance of literature and the need to challenge authority.
Q-1) Write an essay on Rushdie's use of English language in 'Midnight's Children'.
Hinglish Language
Salman Rushdie is one of the novelists who uses the hybrid, “Hinglish” language to communicate the readers and describe emotions of his characters. It is very effective because it is easily recognizable as the speaking voice of the common man or woman in India.
For example , in the novel 'Midnight's Children' Padma attempts to cajole Saleem from his desk: “Eat, na, food is spoiling”. He remained stubbornly hunched on paper….Padma snorts.
Wrist smacks across forehead.
“Okay, starve, starve, who cares two pieces” .
Here Rushdie uses British English for the educated male narrator, Saleem, and “Hinglish” for Padma, Saleem’s uneducated beloved. The Hinglish used here also suggests a number of things.
First, the effect of both the sentences, -
“eat na, food is spoiling”
“okay, starve, starve, who cares two pice”
This implies that Padma is not speaking English. The reason is the use of the word “na” in the first sentence and the grammatical “error” (“food is spoiling” rather than “the food is getting cold”) which are more likely to be used in the vernacular. Again, in the second sentence, the use of “starve” twice for emphasis definitely communicates that it is not an English utterance. In English, one never uses a word twice for emphasis.
Use of Vernacular words
In this novel Salman Rushdie makes use of a number of Hindi, Urdu and Hindustani words, phrases and expressions in Midnight’s Children.
Such words, phrases and expressions form a long list, including-
‘Ekdum’ - at once,
‘angrez’-Englishman,
‘phut-aphut’- in no time,
‘nasbandi’-sterilization,
‘dhoban’-washerwoman,
‘feringee’-the same as ‘angrez’,
‘baba’-grandfather,
‘garam masala’-hot spices,
‘rakshasas’-demons,
‘fauz’-army,
‘badmaas’-badmen,
‘jailkhana’-prison,
‘baap-re-baap’-o, my father,
‘jalebis’-a variety of sweet,
‘barfi’-a sweet,
‘bhel-puri’-a sort of tasty snack
The use of such expressions provides an amount of authenticity and credibility to the novel.
Unusual compound words
Sometimes Rushdie combines words and phrases to make compounds, a style later imitated by Arundhati Roy in her The God of Small Things (1997). Such compounds are galore in Midnight’s Children, such as-
‘overandover’,‘updownup’,‘downdowndown’, ‘suchandsuch’, ‘noseholes’, ‘birthanddeath’, ‘what do you mean how can you say that’, ‘blackasnight’, ‘nearlynine’,‘nearlynineyearold’, ‘almostseven’, and ‘godknowswhat’.
These compounds display the extent of Rushdie’s inventiveness and show his mastery of the English language. Rushdie uses slang – mostly Indian – very often in the text of Midnight’s Children; for example, ‘funtoosh’, ‘goo’, ‘gora’, ‘zenana’, ‘hubsee’, etc.
Misspellings of Words
Occasionally Salman Rushdie resorts to deliberate misspellings of words. Examples are:
‘unquestionabel’, ‘straaange’, ‘existance’, ‘ees’, etc. He also uses some incorrect words, from the grammatical viewpoint, such as ‘mens’, ‘lifeliness’, and ‘informations’. All these deliberate misspellings point to the use of English by Indians in their daily lives.
In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie tries “to destroy the notion of the purity or centrality of English by inventing new forms of existing English words or by effecting ‘creative hybridization”. Though one can find a number of examples of this in the text of the novel.
some of them are given here:
‘dislikeable’,
‘doctori’,
unbeautiful’,
‘sonship’,
‘memoryless’,
‘historyless’,
‘dupatta-less’,
‘chutnification’.
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 and conveys images, feelings and sounds in a way that renders them immediate and experience-able.
To conclude, Rushdie’s numerous experiments with the English language have made Midnight’s Children a highly challenging and complex work of fiction.
Q-2) Write an essay on "Hybridity and postcoloniality in Midnight's Children".
postcoloniality in 'Midnight's Children'
Midnight’s Children’s importance and significance as a postcolonial text arises from the novel’s ability to intertwine three major themes:
The creation and telling of history,
The creation and telling of a nation’s and an individual’s identity,
The creation and telling stories.
Within these three connected themes, the novel explores the problems of postcoloniality, depicted in the novel as the difficulties in assigning one’s point of personal or national origin, the problems in determining one’s personal and national history, and the impossibility of finding and achieving personal and national “authentic” identity.
This novel expresses these themes of the creation and telling of history, identity, and stories, and also introduces the problems of postcolonial identity, through connected and dependent forms of hybridity.
In this novel Saleem’s position as author, writer, and creator of his familial history brings up the idea that history may be created, just as a family history may be embellished and exaggerated. Saleem appears as a “symbol” for India; his birth and his ability to communicate with his fellow “midnight children” associate him with a “mother-earth” figure, like “Mother India.”
Midnight’s Children uses the framework of magical realism to explore the problems of postcoloniality, as the postcolonial citizens attempt to create and share their own histories, identities, and stories to others. The novel explores Indian historical events through Saleem’s familial and his own personal history. Through the novel’s focus on the personal histories of its characters, along with its use of humor, the text destabilizes the authority and power of major historical events.
One significant problem of postcoloniality remains the ability to create and tell one’s own, either personal or national, history; yet this history remains forever tainted with the actions of the postcolonial citizen or nation’s previous colonizers.
To conclude Midnight’s Children’s attempts to solve the problems of postcolonial writing, new postcolonial authors are now able to write without acknowledging the relationship between a postcolonial citizen and the struggle for independence. Midnight’s Children remains central to postcolonial literature because without its presence, it would remain impossible to write without discussing the historical implications.
Hybridity in 'midnight's Children'
Midnight's Children is Salman Rushdie’s novel. This novel tells that India is hybrid. First we had raised question that what is hybridity, here i put simple definition that-
Hybridity is a mixing and a blending of
two or more cultures as the effects of colonization on cultures in societies.
Midnight’s children shows the blend of perspectives from many postcolonial people. The characters in the novel live between two or more cultural identities without embracing a clearly particular identity. They are hybrid characters. These Hybrid characters show India’s hybridity. Rushdie seems aware of India’s hybridity represented by his characters.
Through the novel, he criticizes “an original India”characterized by its singularity. However,hybridity can be an effort to estrange and disavow colonial authority. Meanwhile, the concept of original India brought by IndiraGandhi traps India on the status of the colonized.
The hybrid identities give an image of India that does not always live in the shadow of the British's power since hybrid character cannot be determined as the original India.
The novel shows that India cannot be filled with a single idea and it is fixed. The consequence of hybridity is that there is no authentic identity. Rushdie in this novel rejects India in a fixed identity that regards there is only one culture or religious belief legalized in India.
This hybridity is able to release the ambivalence of cultural identity where the colonial power hardly determines or categorizes the position of native because of his half position. For Rushdie, hybridity is also a possibility to construct a new history of India and its cultural identity without being trapped in India 's exoticism and orthodoxy.
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