Changing Textual Identities and Magic Realism 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. Midnight’s Children is a loose allegory for events in India both before and primarily, after the independence and partition of India. The protagonist and narrator of the story is Saleem Sinai, born at the exact moment when Indian became an independent country. He was born with telepathic powers, as well as an enormous and constantly dripping nose with an extremely sensitive sense of small. 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 the 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. The aim of the paper is to show that in Midnight’s Children, magical realism and textual identities are used within the post-colonial structure to handle post-colonial issues