Theme of Postcolonial Betrayal in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Abstract:
The concept of nationalism is a bit perplexing especially in the case of India, which is a symbol of variegated colours, diverse regions and cultures. The question then arises as to what type of nation is India, when its basic constituents are relentlessly struggling against each other. In India also, the situation was the same. In the post-Independence period, the nationalistic fervour gradually lost its sway as corruption and failures of government and its bureaucracies became overwhelming. The ‘nation-in-the-making’ with all its pre-independence possibilities and hopes came to be challenged by a degenerated form of politics interested in the immediate electoral gains, especially after the death of Nehru in 1964. The Nehruvian secular nation-state was seriously challenged by revived communalism. The forces of religious and communal identification were weakening the ideals of secularism enshrined in anti-colonial nationalism. As the most iconic text of the period, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, instead of depicting a celebratory picture of nationhood, tend to depict an elegiac picture of nation and nationalism. The picture of the nation that comes out in this novel is ironic, subversive, fragmentary, riddled with cracks and fissures. Instead of celebrating a utopia of a successful nationhood, Salman Rushdie’s novel highlights the failure of the promises shown by the anti-colonial struggles, and it presents a bleak picture of the failure of those promises and expectations.
Key Words: Nation, Nationalism, Rushdie, Postcolonial, Betrayal, Promise, Failure.
Anti-colonial nationalism has always been marked by internal contradictions, and postcolonial nations were and still remains, in the words of Szeman, “zones of instability” (the title of her book. In her book Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Nation, Imre Szeman argues that the birth of the postcolonial nation was a historical necessity, and while its relation to modernity was equally inevitable, the process of definition began rather than ended at that moment. Independence and the transfer of power to the new 'nation' were at best a compromise, and no sooner was that achieved than cracks and fissures began to appear everywhere. In spite of his defense of nationalsim in his book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson highlights the “opposition between the spontaneous dynamism of resisting peoples and their institutional capture by the techne of reactionary class and state apparatuses” (Cheah 232).
The concept of nationalism is a bit perplexing especially in the case of India, which is a symbol of variegated colours, diverse regions and cultures. The theories of nation and nationalism fail to some extent when applied to India. Deep-seated communal antipathy, fostered by British imperialism, frequent regional and communal clashes, and differences of history, language and culture in different regions have kept the denizens divided. The question then arises as to what type of nation is India, when its basic constituents are relentlessly struggling against each other. The failure to efface the past on the parts of the Indians is still at best demonstrated in its political affairs where “present politics are shaped by conceptions of the past” (Khilnani xi). From the earliest stage of its career, representation of the nation in Indian English writings has always been “predicated on the simultaneous exposure and emasculation of religious, cultural and ethnic differences” (Morey 165).
The years since 1947, when India led the way for other colonial states into post-colonial independence, has been marked by the simultaneous deferral of pre-independence nationalist utopias. This is a case not unique to India alone. The sense of “anticlimactic betrayal of the promise of freedom in decolonization” and the consequent subordination of the nation-people “to particularistic state imperatives” (Cheah 231) has been experienced by most of the decolonized nations, and a great deal has been written about it.
According to Ashcroft, “The nation-state has been critiqued in post-colonial analysis largely because the post-independence, postcolonized nation, that wonderful utopian idea, proved to be a focus of exclusion and division rather than unity; perpetuating the class divisions of the colonial state rather than liberating national subjects” (12). In India also, the situation was the same. The nationalistic fervour gradually lost its sway as corruption and failures of government and its bureaucracies became overwhelming. The ‘nation-in-the-making’ with all its pre-independence possibilities and hopes came to be challenged by a degenerated form of politics interested in the immediate electoral gains, especially after the death of Nehru in 1964. The Nehruvian secular nation-state was seriously challenged by revived communalism. The forces of religious and communal identification were weakening the ideals of secularism enshrined in anti-colonial nationalism.
Another dangerous tendency that contributed to the disillusion to the nationalist narratives of the nation is the attempt of this narrative to curtail the proliferation of those voices and histories that problematize the imagining of a homogenous nation. In the name of unity and solid marker of the nation, certain class, cultural and gender identities are taken to be representative of some essential Indianness, and made to stand for the whole nation, and those outside such an imaginary risk marginalization and, in extreme cases, victimization. This exclusive narrative of the nation came to be challenged by a more inclusive one since the 1980s, with both historiography and in fiction trying to represent the fragmentary vision of the nation. Both historiography and imaginative writings were mourning the loss of the secular ideals and degeneration in the democratic structures of the nation under those forces which were threatening its plural, polyglot, identity. Adopting this fragmentary point of view involves excavating and recuperating previously unheard or suppressed voices and histories of people and communities, and providing them political and discursive space in the narratives of the nation.
The biggest blow to the social-democratic ideals of the nation came in the guise of the Emergency imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975. This was undoubtedly the lowest point in the history of postcolonial India. This state of Emergency, which was declared by Mrs. Gandhi solely to protect her political position, resulted in the mass arrest of opposition leaders, the cancellation of elections, a ban on strikes and the suspension of press freedom. It led to brutal violations of human rights which culminated in the infamous policies of indiscriminate slum-clearance and enforced sterilization. This nightmarish period in Indian history has been the focus of many novels written in the 1980s and 90s.
All this undesirable and degrading happenings caused in the minds of the national intelligentsia a general sense of disenchantment with the lofty idealism of the anti-colonial moment and disillusionment about the nation’s political destiny. At this historical juncture, for the Indian English writer, the imaginative possibilities for the construction of a homogenous national community were rather meagre. Instead an engagement with the socio-political travails of the young nation as well as a re-evaluation of the failing ideals of nationalism appeared to be the more desirable alternative.
It is in this scenario that writers like Rushdie, Sealy, Tharoor, Kesavan, Mistry, Chandra and others emerged. It is during this volatile historical period that the anxiety of nationalism and the idea of a solid, homogeneous nation came to be subjected to scrutiny and rejection by some IE writers. The 1980s witnessed a boom in what Priya Joshi terms as “nationsroman” (260). While Midnight’s Children remain the seminal work of the national allegory, there have been several novels since then which evince, to various degrees, an interest in the idea and the structure of the national narrative – significant among them are I. Allan Sealy’s The Trotter-Nama, Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel, Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth, Pouring Rain, and Mukul Kesavan’s Looking through Glass. Joshi, however, points out that “the most striking feature of this wave of ‘nationsroman’ is exactly how unnationalistic they are. Unlike Bankim’s unmistakable albeit contradictory nationalism or Tagore’s more probing version of almost a century later, the English novelists of the 1980s seem more elegiac over than celebratory of the nation. These are national novels, yes; but hardly nationalist ones” (260).
The unnationalistic stance of the writings of the last two decades reflect the suspicion and at times, outright disavowal of nationalism because of its exclusivist, hegemonic, statist, bourgeois nature. The picture that comes out is ironic, subversive, fragmentary, riddled with cracks and fissures and fast disintegrating like Saleem's body; it is an India which is unruly and beyond simplistic categorization like the unruly, hybrid bodies in Sealy’s novel; it is an India that is made up not of one single piece but of numerous fragments like the shards of memories and strands of stories. Finally, the image of India in that these writers paint is not celebratory but elegiac; it is a nation that has squandered its potential and possibilities, sometimes wantonly and sometimes accidentally.
The idea of India as it transpires in Midnight's Children is completely different from what was trumpeted to be at the moment of its birth. It is an India riddled with many maladies and tottering towards disintegration. The erosion of the secular, public sphere, the troubled legacies of colonialism, the rise of internal dissents regarding religion, language, history, the rise of Mrs. Gandhi and the sense of betrayal of all the utopian dreams and possibilities of nationalism—all of these have been charted by Rushdie in the novel.
For Saleem, born at the instance of India’s independence from Britain, life becomes inextricably linked with the political, national, and religious events of his time; his life parallels that of postcolonial India. Due to the coincidental hour of his birth, Saleem is able to telepathically communicate with other gifted children born during the same hour of India’s Independence. Rushdie is relating Saleem’s generation of “midnight’s children” to the generation of Indians with whom he was born and raised. As a product of postcolonial India, Saleem must piece together the multifarious fragments of his identity, just as India must begin anew in rebuilding her identity in the wake of colonialism. His story represents the plural identities of India and the fragmented search for self through memory.
Nationalism was the most potent force in providing the energy in anti-colonial national agitation. In the words of Leela Gandhi, nationalism is the “political vector through which disparate anti-colonial movements acquire a cohesive revolutionary shape and form” (111). It is through the vocabulary of nationalism that colonized peoples learnt to challenge and overcome colonial oppression and racism. Anti-colonial counter-narratives, in the words of Benita Parry, “did challenge, subvert and undermine the ruling ideologies, and nowhere more so than in overthrowing the hierarchy of coloniser/colonised, the speech and stance of the colonised refusing a position of subjugation and dispensing with the terms of the coloniser’s definitions” (176).
But postcolonial theorists and thinkers have come to acknowledge that there is a “paradox at the heart of anticolonial nationalism” (Gandhi: 113). It is generally agreed that nation-ness and nationalism are European inventions which came into existence toward the end of the eighteenth century. Anderson, among others, persuasively argues that nation-ness as a European invention immediately acquired a modular character and “It became available for pirating by widely different and sometimes unexpected hands” (67). Calling all subsequent nationalisms as pirated versions of the original, Anderson implies that they lose their creative potential and remain “at best, surreptitious and vaguely unlawful enterprises posing or masquerading as the real thing” (Gandhi 114).
The continuation of the colonial legacy in state affairs of the newly independent state and the capture of power by an elite section, which puts a big question mark in the legitimacy of postcolonial nation-state, is shown by Rushdie symbolically in the transfer of the Methwold estate. William Methwold, a reluctantly departing colonial who is projected as a representative of the Raj, sells his estate in Bombay to a select group of the city’s Indian elite (one of whom is Saleem’s father Ahmed) before finally leaving India’s shores. He explains to Ahmed: “My notion is to stage my own transfer of assets…. Select suitable persons… hand everything over absolutely intact: in tiptop working order” (97). He sells his Estate, consisting of four identical houses named after palaces in Europe, on two conditions: that the houses be bought with the entire contents which were to be retained by the new owners; and that the actual transfer takes place at midnight on 15 August 1947, the moment of Independence for India. The transfer of assets at Methwold’s estate is thus both a metaphor for and a parody of the political transfer of power that was happening in India at the time.
The question of legitimacy and appropriateness or validity of the nation-state is put to question by Rushdie and Tharoor through the ways in which the nation is shown to be born of illegitimate or mixed parentage. This highlights the fact that has been argued by various postcolonial critics who speak of the derivativeness of postcolonial nation-state or its complicity with colonial legacy and European origin.
The legitimacy of the nation-state in India is also put to question because the very foundational moment, that is, the independence on the sub-continent begins with the appalling slaughter that accompanied the partitioning of India and Pakistan. The old Empire disintegrated in a tide of blood. Even though this tragedy has its origins in the British policy of divide and rule, as well as in the squabbles and ambitions of pre-independence politicians, they nevertheless cast doubt on the legitimacy of the successor governments at the very moment of their origin. Although this moment was determined by the act of renunciation of the British government, its proclamation was by local politicians whose legitimacy came jointly from their long struggle and from the institutions they inherited.
If, as Adorno argues, "Peace is the state of distinctness without domination, with the distinct participating in each other" (500), the Partition of India destroyed not merely a state and its peace, but the possibility of a postcolonial nation state that could go beyond the hierarchical relations of subjugation that had denied the colonial subjects their freedom. It represents the failure of imagination of people who, reacting against imperialism, base their opposition on an exclusive construction of nationalism that denies the real strength they had drawn from their diversity. The utopian hopes and possibilities at the moment of the birth of the nation were stained and maimed by mass migration, misery and bloodshed. There is a long tradition of writing in the Indian subcontinent that speaks to both the utopian expectations and the tragedy of partition that marked the era of Independence.
While the partition shattered the dream of a secular, peaceful state, the consequent growth of the nation brought in further disappointments and discontents in the national life. There was a perceptible decay of political ethos which was aggravated by rampant corruption and weakness of the later politicians. By the 1970s, this feeling of discontent and disillusionment reached its peak. It was felt that the promise of Independence and participatory, secular, democratic, welfare governance was betrayed by the postcolonial elite who inherited power from the Raj. Sinister growth of regional conflicts and religious intolerance, unequal economic development, various secessionist movements, and above all the rise of the authoritarian, repressive state under Indira Gandhi fuelled this sense of betrayal and disillusionment among the people and the intelligentsia. The themes of betrayal by the postcolonial leaders and the deterioration of the democratic ethos of the nation are the main focus in many novels produced in the 1980s and 90s.
Through Saleem, Rushdie ignores India’s past before 1947, because he thinks that it was mythical and imaginary. But to counter this, he invents another India, which is also imaginary. While the first one is so bad that it had better be forgotten, the second one is a country of hope and promise. It is a new nation which deserves an epic written on it of which Saleem and the specially gifted children of the midnight hour could be the heroes. But what ultimately results out of all the hopes, dreams and gifts is failure, and Rushdie could write only “an epic of failure” (Su).
The true significance of this epic failure can be better understood if we take into account the things Rushdie associates with the new nation. This is where the midnight’s children play a crucial part in Rushdie’s schema. He invests them with extraordinary powers and loads them with metaphoric meanings. They are special, because more than anything else, they are the products of history. In this respect they truly represent the promise of a new future. Rushdie writes that the children suggested the new direction the country was supposed to take. The point that Rushdie wants to make is that in 1947, India got a chance to come out from the shadows of myth and legend, to embrace the notion of modernity by accepting the democratic, secular ideal and thus turn into a land of promise and new dreams. He does not want the children of promise to turn into “the bizarre creation of a rambling, diseased mind.” They have to stand for the new qualities, though the task is risky and hazardous. But the danger of the remote past overtaking the present, which has already turned into a more recent past, was already there.
The high expectations at the moment of birth, both of Saleem and the new nation, were undermined by disappointments and disasters. The personal tragedies and injuries of Saleem find their parallel in the problems and disasters in India’s march towards the building of a secular democracy. Independence gave rise to the “many-headed monster” which suggests the rising tide of communalism, regional hatred, language riots, Hindu fundamentalism, poverty etc. Rushdie’s uneasiness regarding the fissiparous tendencies in India, noted at Independence, has reason to deepen after it. For example, the language wars made him realize that the problems of hatred and divisions were not over yet.
Rushdie condemns the regional hatred that this division unleashed, by showing how the midnight’s children started taking after the adults as dissensions set in. This hatred led to other hatreds, based on religion and class. Finally, the Midnight’s Children’s Conference began to disintegrate; the younger generation succumbs to the divisions characteristic of India; instead of forging a unity, it becomes a victim of the fissiparous tendencies of the nation. Only three of the children are sufficiently individualized to become characters as such—Saleem, Shiva and Parvati. The rest remain, in Rushdie’s words, “a kind of vague collective entity… a kind of metaphor of hope and possibility, which, one day, was destroyed. A metaphor of hope betrayed and possibility denied (6).”
This betrayal is shown to be the work of both the elite power structure which inherited the colonial legacy and the wanton destruction of democratic ideals by Mrs. Indira Gandhi in the 1970s. Both of these two aspects of the postcolonial nation are among the main focus in some of the novels discussed in this study. Rushdie provides a large space to Emergency which, in his view, signalled the total collapse of the dream of new India. Metaphorically, if the birth of Saleem’s son is equated with the birth of Mrs. Gandhi’s Emergency; his sickness symbolizes the sickness of the entire nation. Here, we can contrast the lives of the father and the son, Saleem and Aadam: there is too much of euphoria and optimism about Saleem’s birth that takes place when the Independent India is born. But in contrast, his son, Aadam is born disease-ridden, who suffers from ‘metaphorical illness’ because of which he never grows (Midnight’s Children 504).
During the 1970s and 80s, Rushdie repeatedly attacked Indira Gandhi and the ruling Congress Party in essays and interviews; Midnight's Children was his first major attempt in fiction to address the "betrayal" of India by its government. Indira sought to impose a very particular and homogeneous religious nationalism upon one of the largest and most diverse collectives in the world. Indira Gandhi and the Congress Party, in particular, employed this myth to impose a unitary and homogeneous vision of nation upon its people. Where the fictionalized communities in the novel espouse ideals of tolerance, Indira, according to Rushdie, ruthlessly exploits ethnic divisions between Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims (Imaginary Homelands 43). Rushdie finds the equation of leader and nation dangerous because it removes social agency from individuals; the leader or epic hero becomes the sole force for effecting positive social change. And the repeated failures of such communities in the novel point to the inevitable disappointments to which they lead. Within the post-Independence Indian context, the hero brings not progress but failure. Indeed, we see here Rushdie's own frustration with the political realities of India: opposition movements fail to provide a legitimate alternative because they do not differ from the Congress Party on the fundamental point of leadership. The history of the nation itself is marked by contrasting promise and disappointment.
The themes of betrayal by the postcolonial leaders and the deterioration of the democratic ethos of the nation are the main focus in many novels produced in the 1980s and 90s. Apart from Rushdie, this theme has been treated by writers like Tharoor, Mistry and Sahagal. Neelam Srivastava says: “The period of the National Emergency (1975-77) can be identified as a crucial historical watershed that marked the beginning of Indian intellectuals’ reassessment of the meaning of Indian democracy and the ‘achievements’ of the postcolonial state” (4). The development of the nascent republic and its constitutional ideals, wars and crises in the cabinet government, the rampant corruption and gradual collapse of democratic ethos in the country are some of the common motifs in these novels.
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