Rushdie's Midnight Research Articles

Coriolanus, and: The Merry Wives of Windsor (review)

The Royal Shakespeare Company presented Coriolanus and The Merry Wives of Windsor in repertory at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor as the second installment of a five-year residency. The company also performed the U.S. premiere of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children—adapted by Rushdie from his novel, with the help of Simon Reade, and the director, Tim Supple. Various RSC insights, roundtables, lectures, and study groups complemented the performances.

Methodical Worlds: Partition, Secularism, and Communalism in India

Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, was the bastard offspring of a one-shot encounter between a departing Britisher, William Methwold (last of a line of angrezi robber barons), and Vanita, wife of a poor Maharashtrian accordionist--a proletarian Mumbaikar given to singing maudlin Broadway hits in the homes of the rich to earn his supper. seductive allure of Methwold rose largely from the clean-cut parting that ran through the middle of his brilliantined hair. Hypnotized by its clarity and metric precision, Vanita, like many another Indian in Methwold's circle, succumbed to his charm. As the sun set on August 14, 1947, over Methwold's estate on Malabar Hills, Bombay, and Vanita went into an excruciating labor that would produce Saleem Sinai/Modern India but that she herself would not survive, Methwold stood in the center of the courtyard and his long tapering white fingers twitched towards centre-parting, and the . . . secret was revealed, because fingers curled, an d seized hair; drawing away from his head, they failed to release their prey; and in the moment after the disappearance of the sun Mr Methwold stood in the afterglow of his Estate with his hairpiece in his hand. (1) Rushdie may be read as suggesting that the whole enterprise of British colonialism in India was, ultimately, a con job--in the real sense that it was a confidence trick resting as much on the willingness to believe deeply on the side of the duped as it did on the machinations of the trickster. Just as the clarity and precision of Methwold's parting proved illusory, the methodical world that was to arise from the Indian subcontinent's entry into postcolonial modernity has turned out to be a promise belied, full of false solutions and con jobs, most propelled by a desire for neat and precise solutions to the vexing, but ultimately unresolvable, problem of human difference. Rushdie may also be read as suggesting that the business of nation building is the endless effort to colonize all forms of belonging into conformity with a simulacrum called the nation, an idealized copy based on an original that does not exist anywhere. Ultimately, the seduction of Partition lay in the belief entertained by many in the sub continent that the enormity of this rupture may bring us into conformity with an ideal and normalized original called the nation that exists ever elsewhere--an elsewhere whose coordinates can never be precisely established because it is more a statement of desire than of reality. In this article, I engage in a series of ruminations that seek to dislodge the solidity of mainstream narratives about partition in South Asia. My reasons for doing so stem from a realization that mainstream narratives have energized and sustained the animosity and violence between communities in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and are, even as I write this, preparing the ground for yet another war fought by antagonists convinced of the historical and ethical correctness of their actions and choices. There is something about the ways in which history has been narrated in South Asia that has corralled our entire future into a box labeled The Unfinished Business of Partition, and this article is an effort to escape its confines. Displacing the Assumed Singularity of Partition In an influential essay written a decade ago now, Gyanendra Pandey noted the assiduousness and energy with which Partition was not talked about in mainstream histories of the subcontinent. It is variously elided as the price to pay for national independence, as an irrational and inexplicable event remarkable for its suddenness, naturalized by metaphors that removed it from the realm of human agency and seen as an aberration in the story of the coming-to-being of an immanent destiny called India. In all these ways the actual details of the events themselves have escaped sustained or frontal attention. …

Borderline fiction: Writing the nation in Salman Rushdie's midnight's children

Summary This paper attempts to indicate that Salman Rushdie creates a postcolonial discourse in Midnight's Children (1995) that seeks to replace the traditional structures of the nation and history with new constructs suitable to the conditions of the diaspora: a new condition of homelessness and lack of history. This is done through the creation of an anti‐mimetic method of writing that reveals the nation and its history as artificial entities.

The Migrant Intellectual and the Body of History: Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children"

tW ~ s hen a tussock of earth strikes the prayerful Aadam Aziz at the beginning of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1980), the doctor's nose releases not only three drops of blood but also a stream of

“Myth De-Bunked: GENRE and IDEOLOGY in Rushdie's Midnight's Children & Shame”

“Myth De-Bunked: GENRE and IDEOLOGY in Rushdie's Midnight's Children & Shame”

The Last Rogue of History: Picaresque Elements in Sasha Sokolov’sPalisandriia

Sokolov wrote Palisandriia (1985) with the intention of producing novel that would end the novel as a genie.1 If the assault mounted by Shkola dlia durakov (1976) and Mezhdu sobakoi i volkom (1980) aimed too high, this, his third sortie lowers the guns. Pseudo-literature, 'sub-literary genres'2 the detective, science-fiction and pornographic novels, the thriller and adventure tale, sensationalist political satire and memoirs aie mustered as parodie ammunition. Modernism, autonomous self-referential art, confronts its true enemy, history/*3 and the lines of battle are drawn, contrary to Utopian practice, not on history's claims to extra-textual reality or objective truth-value, but rather on the historian's encroachment into literary territory itself. The reader is being wooed away by nothing more than outmoded narrativity. Solzhenitsyn's more recent incursions notwithstanding, history and the novel have long fought for aesthetic authority, especially on Russian soil. The natural affinities between the two, exploited and 'problematized' in Western postmodern efforts such as Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, are those revealed through their narrative common denominators [of] teleology, causality [and] continguity.4 A product of the Russian 1980s, of what then called itself the Russian avant-garde and felt itself marginalized by the ideological obsessions of an exhausted, indeed false aesthetic,5 Palisandriia attacks the historical or extra-referential narrative headon, and it does so by zeroing in on these affinities, these fundamentals of narrative syntagmatics, anathemas all to the earlier, pre-Palisandriia Sokolov. Narrative common denominators become common grounds of indictment, and the postmodern presence of the past6 takes a unique twist when history and the

Multiple Forms of (National) Belonging: Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column

Multiple Forms of (National) Belonging:Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column Anuradha Dingwaney Needham (bio) A nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will—except in a dream we all agreed to dream. —Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (129-130) Ila has no right to live there [in England] she [my grandmother] said hoarsely. She doesn't belong there. It took those people time to build that country; hundreds of years, years and years of war and bloodshed. Everyone who lives there has earned the right to be there with blood: with their brother's blood and their father's blood and [End Page 93] their son's blood. . . . War is their religion. That's what it takes to make a country. Once that happens people forget they were born this or that, Muslim or Hindu or Bengali or Punjabi: they become a family born of the same pool of blood. That is what you have to achieve for India, don't you see? —Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (76) In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community. . . . Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined. —Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (15) The one narrative about India to capture the West's imagination is, of course, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Clarke Blaise's comment, "Midnight's Children sounds like a continent finding its voice" (19), is only a somewhat more hyperbolic variation on Tariq Ali's "no other novel about India has had such an impact" (91). Despite the novel's insistence on its own fictionality, despite its explicit awareness that it offers only one version of India ("There are as many versions of India as Indians" [323]), Midnight's Children has nevertheless often been read as a definitive account of the birth and development of the Indian nation. A mere two decades before the publication of Midnight's Children (1980), Attia Hosain published Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), also a narrative about the emerging Indian nation and about emerging national identities. Yet no one that I am aware of has remarked on this.1 Indeed, the recent reissue of the novel in 1988 by Virago Press, a subsidiary of Penguin Books, says something about its credentials as a book by an Indian woman about an Indian woman's experiences while growing up in the years preceding India's independence from the British—credentials, that is, accruing from the recent enthusiasm for women's narratives and from the West's appetite for books about India stimulated by what Rushdie has called "the popularity of Raj fictions" ("Outside the Whale," 129). Nor has Sunlight received the kind of media or critical attention that Rushdie's novel has garnered. But my purpose in this essay is not to argue the relative "merits" of one text over another; rather, I wish to explore something quite [End Page 94] different for which the reception of Rushdie's work as the account of India serves only as a point of departure. When we see any one work as embodying the definitive exploration of a nation, we do so by ignoring, even suppressing, other works, like Sunlight for example, that attempt to do the same, albeit by different means. As readers, then, we consciously or unconsciously repeat the processes by which "official" nationalism constructs itself as the singular, homogeneous "truth" about what constitutes national identity and experience.2 Narratives of nation/ nationalism are, as several recent critiques point out, narratives about political power whereby an author claims the authority to speak on behalf of the entire nation and its diverse inhabitants. The particular power that mobilizes these narratives is male power, for nationalism has most often focused on, and itself issues from, what is constructed...

Caught in a Strange Middle Ground: Contesting History in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Diaspora 1:2 1991 Caught in a Strange Middle Ground: Contesting History in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children David Lipscomb Trinity School, New York City So if I am to speak for Indian writers in England I would say this, paraphrasing G. V. Desani's H. Hatterr: the migrations of the 1950s and 1960s happened. "We are. We are here."And we are not willing to be excluded from any part of our heritage: which heritage includes . . . the right ofany member ofthis post-diaspora community to draw on its roots for its art, just as the world's community of displaced writers has always done. Salman Rushdie, "Imaginary Homelands" Salman Rushdie wrote these words in 1982, and the defensive tone makes clear that his position as an "Indian" writer was less than secure long before the "Rushdie Affair" and the infamous fatwa1 complicated the issue of his location. An Indian Muslim, born in Bombay, Rushdie has made his home in England since he left India for Rugby School at the age offourteen. His parents gave him a third homeland when they moved to Pakistan while he was at Rugby. Becoming a British citizen, earning a Cambridge degree, marrying a British woman, and later marrying an American have further complicated his expatriate status. That his right to draw on his Indian roots is not universally appreciated is made clear by looking at a few of the names his critics have recently called him, such as "a selfhating Indo-Anglian,"2 or "the overrated Eurasian writer,"3 or "a hireling of Indian origin,"4 or even "the totally assimilated and assimilable , Westernized, British-educated Asian intellectual" (Jussawalla 114). Rushdie, who in no way considers himself "self-hating" or deracinated , has, in fact, continually chosen to celebrate the very position of cultural hybridity and impurity that others now use against him. Insults are not the only things a migrant's position can produce: "Our identity [that of the Indian writer in England] is at once partial and plural. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools . . . but however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not infertile territory for a writer to occupy" ("Imaginary Homelands" 18). One ofthe products Diaspora 1:2 1991 of this territory, Rushdie believes, is a doubt that enables the migrant writer to resist the control of those who speak the discourses of cultural purity and absolute "truth." Rushdie sees this doubt springing not only from the postdiasporan territory of an Indian writer in England, but also from the position of dislocation common to all migrants. His most complete articulation of what this doubt is and how it is produced is found in his article on Gunter Grass, a writer who, as Rushdie says, "grew up ... in a house and a milieu in which the Nazi view of the world was treated quite simply as objective reality" ("On Gunter" 182). Rushdie considers Grass a migrant because his travel "across the frontiers of history" to a post-Nazi view of reality is comparable to a migrant's dislocation from place, language, and social conventions. This is what the triple disruption of reality teaches migrants: that reality is an artefact, that it does not exist until it is made, and that, like any other artefact, it can be made well or badly, and that it can also, of course, be unmade. What Grass learned on his journey across the frontiers of history was Doubt. Now he distrusts all those who claim to possess absolute forms of knowledge; he suspects all total explanations, all systems of thought which purport to be complete. ("On Gunter" 183-84) The migrant's position lacks the comforts of certitude and settlement , but it is fertile territory upon which the writer can remake reality. And unmake it. As I hope to show in this essay, unmaking a discourse that claims absolute forms of knowledge, the discourse of western historiography, is a central project of Rushdie's Midnight's Children, a novel that draws frequently on Indian roots. And as Rushdie expands the definition of a migrant to include Gunter Grass, I would like to expand...

Interview with Gayatri Spivak

Afsaneh Najmabadi: Let me start by posing two issues that I have heard raised by some students from the Subcontinent. The first: Prior to the publication of The Satanic Verses, these intellectuals had related to Rushdie's previous novels, Shame and Midnight's Children, as something that belonged to their culture, that they could identify with, be proud of. They could relate to the kinds of issues and criticisms that were expressed in these novels. But with The Satanic Verses they felt betrayed. What in The Satanic Verses could have engendered this sensation of betrayal? My immediate reaction is that it's the critique of religious sensibilities embedded in this book. So what I want to investigate is this: Why was it that when he was criticizing all kinds of other issues, such as male-female relations, political structures, even the partition and the anti-colonial struggle, all that did not feel like betrayal, but when he touched religion, it felt like betrayal?

History and the individual in Anita Desai'sclear light of dayand Salman Rushdie'smidnight children

(1984). History and the individual in Anita Desai's clear light of day and Salman Rushdie's midnight children. World Literature Written in English: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 196-207.