The Organic brew; London, pakistan, photography, travel, poetry & a general acerbic sentiment.

Of Rushdie and his Midnight’s Children

// November 26th, 2005 // All

As I have discovered, actually making the effort to go to your brick-and-mortar bookshop can pay such rich dividends. The bespeckled shop assitant suggested I read Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’ Children, and on an impulse I went ahead and bought it.

I’m so glad I did, because its been one of the most interesting and captivating books I’ve ever read. I also felt that for a book as famous as it is, it is remarkably misunderstood; but more on that later.

I found Rushdie’s prose to be very eclectically styled, it had great range of stylistic variance and while his detractors perhaps rightly point to his overuse of adjectives, I felt it had a very Indian credence somehow. Which isn’t a mean achievement, not least because the Indian/desi flavour of English is so universally mocked, but also perhaps just the fact that the character of Urdu/Hindi idiomatic ways don’t translate well into the no-nonsense ways of English. With all the perfectly useless double positives and more, Rushdie manages to bring Urdu into his fluent English with a great flourish.

It’s also exceptionally creative, and seems to teem with the sheer variety of characters, colours and indeed vagaries that define the way of life in the sub-continent. In that, both the style and the content really do seem to befit a book that’s been called the literary map of India. This much is evident to anybody who can appreciate the overriding theme of chutney (which can, I will concur, sometimes to carried to inanity by Rushdie).

But my own personal perspective is that the book and its characters are really more about the great tragedy of Kashmir and her people than meet the eye at first. This is of necessity placed in the cultural milieu of India, but to confuse the two would be to under appreciate this seminal work.

Ordnarily I am very wary of attaching great meaning to the novels and most literary works; it seems to me that with enough exposte rationalisation, anything that seem intelligent and deeply profound. In the elegant language of finance they call it ‘data sniping’, seek hard enough and thou shalt find.
In my opinion however, this seems to be an occasion where the significance of the characters and the novel itself is justified, Rushdie’s aware writing always seems to suggest that he recognizes the deeper importance of the story that he weaves so coherently.

Choosing a Muslim protagonist (afterall in the sub-contienent this is still the basic division in society) for a story of India of seems incongruous. To me then, the story of Saleem Sinai is really more about the Kashmiri people. Their muslim identity is what alienates them from their land, following partition. As Saleem finds out his religion is more an identity than anything else, in the India of the story, as indeed in reality, being non-practising doesn’t shrug off this mantle.
At its simplest (but not simplistic) the story is then about how the Kashmiri people—and particularly the educated—found themselves cut adrift after the excitement of partition waned.
Pakistan, the country ostensibly made in their name drove itself headfirst into the self-feeding vortex of religious extremism and criminally negligent (or non existent?) leadership.
This much he sees on the trip to Pakistan; ill at easy in what was supposed to be the land of and for, the pure; a now sounds like a mocking, hollow and cruel jest.
The India that he now returns to with great expectations sees him disenfranchisement and lost, dwelling in the ever moving, hunted slums of what was supposed to a great socialist dream. The Bombay of his childhood too, the last throwback to the early days, the optimism saturated times of childhood isn’t the same either; the streets renamed, the candy story gone. Rejected, and now also ill at easy with what was always home.
More ominously, the new generation of malignant midnight’s children is the personification of the crumbling edifice of innocence and the innocent optimisms of early post-colonialism.

This story resounds with the very real lives of the pre-independence intelligentsia. I think no other book, and certainly no history book has ever been able to tell the story of the progressive movement, the stories of the Faizs, the Ahmed Alis, and the Kaifi Azmis quit like Midnights Children, these men and women too were born with great talents and great ambitions for their countries, but died, almost to the man left impotent, powerless and spurned.

Not ultimately a happy note, but then perhaps such is life and certainly, such is history of India and Pakistan.

Related posts:

1. A wet afternoon – Saadat Hassan Manto
2. On threads unsaid and the great desi self delusion
3. Kashmir belongs to the US
4. On hydrogenated cooking oils and desi colas
5. Ghalib: still breaking boundaries?