Changing Textual Identities in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Abstract

Salman Rushdie's novel, Midnight's Children, connects the destiny of one family, and of one character-narrator in particular, with the destiny of India, by symbolically associating Saleem Sinai's birth with that of the new nation. The textual journey that follows plays with concepts such as: margin and centre, identity and otherness, unity and division etc. While witnessing Saleem's changing sense of self, India is also revealed as a stage for the inter-change of multiple perspectives on the idea of nation. Thus, ‘the myth of the nation’ becomes the pretext for the display of postcolonial attitudes and fallacies, due, in part, to its focus on establishing a compact and well-defined sense of identity.