Abstract
41 DCL
CLAI 2012
Dr.
M.Ibrahim Khalilulla
Minority
Community/History and Nation: A study of Salaman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Abstract
The intense ongoing debate on the idea and the reality of the
Nation has proved to be of central concern not only in the disciplines of
political science and history but equally in postcolonial theory and
literature.
The word “nation” takes its origin from the French word nasci,
which means, “to be born”. More than any other single work perhaps, Bendict
Anderson’s seminal book on ‘the Origin and Spread of Nationalism’ has set the
terms of contemporary discourse on the subject, and its title, Imagined Communities, has prompted many
readers (and non-readers) of that book to believe that the nation is, somehow,
a less than real entity.
During the nationalist, anti-colonial struggles, the presence of
the European Other united the various tribes, clans, and minorities in the
‘Third World’ country. With political independence came the task of
nation-building Resistance and anti-colonial struggles in African and Asian
nations were not simply movements against imperialism. They were also supposed
to liberate the native culture from its own oppressive structures. That is,
revolutionary struggles were also movements for social transformation of the
native space. This was hardly an easy job since, in most case, the country was
made up of innumerable fragments. The birth of the Indian nation, writes
Rushdie, is ‘an extra festival on the calendar, a new myth to celebrate…. a
country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal
collective will expect in a dream we all agreed to dream…India, the new myth-a
collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivaled only by the
two other mighty fantasies-money and God.
While most postcolonial writers are keen on discovering the limits
and extent of their ‘nation’, several of them are aware of the constructedness
of the very idea of nation. What Rushdie
does in his cult text, Midnight’s
Children, is to refuse any unitary and monolithic notion of India. Salman
Rushidie’s Midnight’s Children is a
remarkable work in post-colonial fiction, which has undertaken the task of
exposing the misrepresentation of events in the works of acknowledged
historiographers.
Present paper focus on how Salman Rushidie’s Midnight’s Children deals with the question of minority identity in
its representation of the nation.
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