Rushdie’s Domain

Abstract

In this project, I explore the topic of cultural hybridity in relation to identity and nation formation in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. I focus on characters Saleem, Tai, Shiva, the Widow, and others as figures of either resistance, plurality, or fragmentation. Ultimately, I articulate the positive and inevitable aspects of hybridity of both nation and identity in a post-colonial context and explore the definition of autonomy within this framework. In his novel Midnight’s Children, Rushdie writes a personal, subjective account of his experience with nation, a story in which the outer or political domain is pushed to the margins in order to make space for a true post-colonial nation, the story by and of its own people. Saleem and his experiences are constantly placed at the center of the text, while historical dates and facts are faulty and subject to misremembering. After colonialism manages to destroy and fragment entire cultures and their own living histories, Rushdie arrives to pick up the pieces and work them into a coherent pluralized existence. Saleem can be read as a figure of hybridity, in that he represents the multiple aspects of nation, all of which occur in conjunction with national happenings of the political domain. Tai the boatman can stand as a figure of resistance to this notion of hybridity by refusing to be stabilized or acclimate to a post-colonial nation, preferring the pre-colonial. Shiva, similarly lacking in English blood, represents the refusal to hybridize and the unavoidable fragmentation that exists as a result of the colonizer’s presence. In which of these cases in the novel is identity presented as positive and necessary? Why are both Tai and Shiva presented as negative, or unwilling to hybridize and adapt? What is the novel’s value regarding identity? What does Saleem represent? Like Midnight’s Children, Rushdie’s novel The Enchantress of Florence centers around Emperor Akbar, a character who like Saleem is “born into plurality” (Enchantress 31). Akbar, like Saleem, is a “swallower of worlds, this many-headed monster” (Enchantress 30). Just as Saleem identifies himself as “mysteriously handcuffed to history” (Rushdie, Midnight 3), Akbar considers himself “the apogee of his people’s past and present, and the engine of their future” (Enchantress 31). Metaphorically, both of them are representative of Rushdie’s own sense of identity in their support of the “culture of inclusion” he longs for by contributing to the “grand syncretization of the earth, its sciences, its arts, its loves, its differences, its problems, its varieties, its philosophies, its sports, its whims” (Enchantress 317). In this project, I use various essays written by post-colonial theorists to help define the phenomenon of nation formation and its effects on identity. I first refer to Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities in order to point out the problematic notion of confining any national identity to Eurocentric standards. I then refer to Partha Chatterjee’s responding essay “Whose Imagined Community?” in order to set up the distinction between the inner, personal domain and the outer, political domain. Rushdie seems to figure a way to situate himself somewhere in the middle of these two domains, ultimately leading to the creation of his own personal identity of many-ness and hybridity. Other theoretical sources that I turn to for articulation and framing include Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and The Empire Writes Back by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. I also elaborate on the historical context of the novel and study the parallels between events in the text and real-life events in the political sphere (such as Partition, state of Emergency, etc.).