50 Interdisiplinary Journal of Research and Development, Vol. 4, no.

4, 2017

Dr. Marsela TURKU1

SALMAN RUSHDIE’S POST-COLONIAL IMPULSES

AND POST-MODERN TECHNIQUES2

Abstract

Salman Rushdie is a British writer whose force and originality derives from
his strong and demanding voice. Rushdie turned his back on the Victorian and
Indian tradition, favouring the post-colonial impulses and attitudes, delightfully
employing the post-modern techniques such as discontinued narrative, cinematic
images and metaphors, mirror games, myths and legends. His novel Midnight
Children is surrealist fiction that deals with history of India from the year 1910to
the declaration of the emergency in 1976. The book is endowed with magical
powers of telepathy which allow the narrator to clearly review himself and
the world around him. The history is often mingled with unexpected and the
inexplicable events, real places are reintroduced in a distorted form; mythology
is combined with elements of fairy tale, dream and reality. The author explores
the boundaries of fiction and reality, whereas the book is characterized by a
wonderful mixture of languages by even creating a modern epic. The characters
are transformed into symbols and archetypes so that their stories are interpreted
at some levels in the same time: real and fantastic, metaphorical and symbolic.
Thus the paper aims to read and utterly analyze Midnight Children focusing on
the post-modern techniques and the “magical realism” used by Salman Rushdie.
The paper will briefly present the features of post-modern techniques and analyse
the originality in this novel.
Key Words: Post-modern, post-Victorian, magic realism, dream,
mythology etc.

1
[email protected]; “Aleksander Moisiu” University; Department of Foreign
Languages ‘ Durres, Albania
2
Paper presneted in “3 International Conference ‘Foreign Languages in a Global World,
Linguistics, Literature, Didactics” Durres, June 2017”
Interdisiplinary Journal of Research and Development, Vol. 4, no. 4, 2017 51

Introduction

The Anglo-Indian writer Salman Rushdie is recognized as one of the most

controversial authors of the 20th century literature, but he mainly stands out
among other writers who successfully integrate magic realism with post-colonial
device in their works. He is recognized as one of the most distinguished and
important representatives of magic realism outside Latin America and he is one
of the most notable postcolonial writers. Midnight’s Children is a text which is
based in the combination of two literary elements: the narrative technique of
magic realism to the post colonial elements.
The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms defines magic realism as a
“kind of modern fiction in which fabulous and fantastical elements are included in
a narrative that otherwise maintains the reliable tone of objective, realistic report”.
Magic realism mixes and disrupts ordinary everyday reality with strange and
miraculous powers by transforming the common and the everyday into the awesome
and the unreal. Where time exists in a kind of timeless fluidity and there is not a
clear cut between the present, the past and the future whereas the unreal seems an
integrated part of the reality. Magic realism aims to grasp the paradox of the union of
opposites like life and death and (the pre-colonial) past versus the (post-industrial)
present. Magic realism is set in a normal, modern world. Thus the magical elements
are intermingled into a realistic atmosphere in order to better understand reality.
These magical events/powers are explained like normal occurrences which allows
the real or reality and the fantastic or magic to be accepted in the same stream of
thought. Realistic elements, characters, setting merge with the unexpected and the
inexplicable and in which elements of fairy story, mythology or dreams, mingle
with the everyday reality, often in mosaic or kaleidoscopic pattern. Magic realism
is often connected to magical Indian mentality.
In 1981Salman Rushdiepublished his second novel Midnight’s Children
which is about India’s struggle for independence from British colonialism.
In this novel, he retraces the Bombay and India of his own childhood not as
autobiography but as cultural history and it is constructed around individuals
and their involvement in the historical process.He uses tales from various genres
– fantasy, mythology, religion, oral tradition etc. Midnight’s Children revolves
around Saleem Sinai, the narrator protagonist of the story and ten thousand
children born in the midnight of India’s independence. The success of this novel
made Rushdie a celebrity all over the world. This book was awarded with The
Man Booker Prize, itwon the James Tait Black Memorial prize in 1981 and it
was also awarded with the Booker of Bookers prize and the best of all time
winners in 1993 and 2008.
52 Interdisiplinary Journal of Research and Development, Vol. 4, no. 4, 2017

Magic Realism in Midnight’s Children

Magic realism entails an implied criticism of society and this is a mode

primarily about and for the geographically, socially and economically
marginalized people or countries. Therefore, magic realism’s creates an
alternative world to restore the reality and to challenge established viewpoints.
Thus, magic realist texts are dissident and rebellious texts, protesting against
socially dominant forces.
The first manifestation of magic realism in the novel is the character
of Tai, or more specifically, Tai’s claim to being fromancient times. Tai
stubbornlyemphasizes to being so old that he has “watched the mountains being
born” and “seen emperors die” (13). Theapparent reason why Rushdie had Tai
ostensiblyreveals impossible longevity is that he wanted Tai to represent the
India of old. This theory is supported well by Tai’s contempt for Aadam’s bag of
foreign medical supplies from Europe. Tai’s use of the word “now” implies that
he is making a comparison between the past with which he is familiar and which
he trusts and the present which is uncertain and he scorns. Tai symbolically
represents the traditions of pre-colonial India and because of this hecontinually
asserts ancient origin.
A second example of magic realism is the story of “The Hummingbird”
MianAbdullahs assassination. It is said of Abdullah that “His body was hard
and the long curved blades had trouble killing him; one broke on a rib” (58).
In this scenario, Abdullahs physical toughness would represent the difficulty
in suppressing the culture of an entire country. Furthermore, his humming
represents an urgent immediacy to take action, whereas the dogs symbolize the
action against the British colonizer that would eventually take place.
In Midnight’s Children, history is presented through Saleem Sinai, thus
reproduced mainly through individual experiences. For Saleem, born at the very
moment of India’s independence, his life becomes interlinked with the social,
political, national, and even religious events of his time. Reality and real events
are provided by the unique perspective of Sinai and his family members for the
readers to view and understand what have happened during the period of Indian
independence.
Another instance of magical realism is Saleem’s gift of having an incredible
sense of smell, allowing him to determine others emotions and thoughts,
inherited from his grandfather Adam, who also had the same large nose and
magical gift. It is Adam’s sensitive nose that saved him from being killed in the
JallianwalaBagh Massacre:
Interdisiplinary Journal of Research and Development, Vol. 4, no. 4, 2017 53

“As the fifty-one men march down the alleyway a tickle replaces the itch in
my grandfather’s nose… Adam Aziz ceases to concentrate on the events around
him as the tickle mounts to unbearable intensities. As Brigadier Dyer issues a
command the sneeze hits my grandfather full in the face. “Yaaaakh-thoooo!”
he sneezes and falls forward, losing his balance, following his nose and thereby
saving his life” (Rushdie, 41).The sneeze adds a sense of humourto the brutal
attack, distracting the reader from the massacre itself.
Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Midnight’s Children, opens the novel by
explaining that he was born at midnight on 15th August, 1947, at the exact
moment India gained its independence from British rule. He thinks that his
timed birth ties him to the fate of his country and he later discovers that all
children born in India between 12 AM and 1 AM on 15th August, 1947, are
gifted with special powers. Saleem thus attempts to use these powers to convene
the Midnight Childrens Conference. He acts as a telepathic conduit, bringing
hundreds of geographically disparate children into contact while also attempting
to discover the meaning of their gifts.
The incorporation of the elements of magical powers or events to the realty
not only gives beauty and meaning to Midnight’s Children but can be seen as
a device binding Indian culture of the past to the contemporary multicultural
interface. Whereas narrative technique of magic realism is appropriate to portray
the postcolonial life in this novel.

Post-Colonial narrative and elements in Midnight’s Children

Midnight’s Children serves as an allegory for events in India both before

and after the independence of India, which took place at midnight on 15 August
1947. In the temporal sense, Midnight’s Children is post-colonial as the main
narrative occurs after India becomes independent, thus after the colonial period.
Midnight’s Children’s is classified as a postcolonial text and it arises from
the novel’s ability to interweave three main axes of the story: the real history,
the recreated history based on perceptions, the recreation of a nation and the
individual’s identity. The novel combines these themes and at the same time
introduces the problems of postcolonial identity. According to Linda Hutcheon,
the postmodern technique of magic realism is linked to post colonialism because
they both deal with the oppressive force of colonial. With the usage of magic
realism narrative and devices the postcolonial writers can challenge the reality
and the realistic narrative, thus making possible for the creation and presentation
of an alternative reality.
The value of the world that blends fantasy with reality, the truth and the
54 Interdisiplinary Journal of Research and Development, Vol. 4, no. 4, 2017

fictitious with the images which emerge from what they read or listen to lies
in the fact that nothing is certain. What is real or unreal is often uncertain not
only to the reader but also to the narrator himself. The realty has so many facets
as to blur reality borders itself. The language of fantasy is not emblematic and
it does not place borders or clear cuts between facts, stories, perceptions or
realty; instead it fabricates the present, revives the past and foreshadows the
future. What is fact and reality is not important. At times the language becomes
metaphorical:
“Nobody could remember when Tai had been young. He had been playing
this same boat, standing in the same hunched position, across the Dal and
Nageen Lakes… forever” (10).
But as the narrator observes, “Reality can have metaphorical content; that
does not make it less real” and sometimes magic realism shows the truth more
faithfully, “Anima is a drift in a sea that consists of wave’s of excitement” and
“hollow of fear” (112).
Midnight’s Children as a postcolonial text is seen in the twofold model
of colonizer vs. colonized. Protagonists in postcolonial texts are often found
to be fighting with the questions of identity, facing the conflict while living
between two worlds and two different cultures. Postcolonial writings occur
in the process of re-writing and re-reading the past and constructing a new
paradigm of a decolonized identity. Thus, the novel remains a continuous and
delicate investigation of the relations between reality and fantasywhere the
narrator Saleem constantly relates his life to that of his country, even his birth,
growth, development and destruction are related to that, “I was born in the city
of Bombay … once upon a time” (9). This connection not only is a metaphorof
Saleem’s life as a representative of India, but also provides an alternative history
to the one written by the colonizers.
The other characters seem to wander through the pages of history,
bumpinginto with important development in India apparently by accident.
Jackson points out, “The fantastic traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture
that has been silenced, made invisible, covered over or made “absent” ”. So
through his novel, Rushdie traces and uncover the true identity of India.

Conclusions

At the surface level, Midnight’s Children is the story of Saleem Sinai and
the other children of India’s historic midnight of August 15, 1947. At a deeper
level, this book is the story of arising nation which has just gained independence
and trying to come into its own. The narrator implies that there is an essential
Interdisiplinary Journal of Research and Development, Vol. 4, no. 4, 2017 55

relation between the private destiny of an individualand the public destiny. Thus
Rushdie’s topic is identity, both national and personal. He tries to confine a
cultural identity by using literary techniques such as fragmentation, plurality
and magical realism to rebuild the post-colonial India.
Midnight’s Children is a typical example of a postcolonial novel that
integrates magic realism into it. by connecting and combining historical events,
mythological stories and fictional narratives, it is created a true picture of Indian
postcolonialism and India’s colonial past.
56 Interdisiplinary Journal of Research and Development, Vol. 4, no. 4, 2017

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