DIASPORIC PERSPECTIVE ON SALMAN RUSHDIE’S MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN Veronika Mondal, Research Scholar, Department of English Sri Satya Sai University of Technology and Medical sciences Sehore,Madhya Pradesh. Midnight 's Children is a fictional historical account of 20th century India. It is a novel about Indian independence, the partition and its aftermath. In the present paper an attempt has been made to study this fictional history of India in the light of the writing of diaspora. This paper tries
of modern life. Western attitudes toward India and Indian Literary came when Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children was published in 1981. In the novel, Rushdie conjures up a generation of Indian born at midnight’s the August 1947. Arundhati Roy is one such talented writer of post- Midnight’s Children era who shows the real psychological depth while conveying the realities of culture and history. As with Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai’s works also manages to explores the flaws and despair
Midnight’s Children: Understanding the Dream of a Nation Nelber Bonifacio History and nation are the two main themes brought up by Salman Rushdie in the novel Midnight’s Children (1981). As the main character, Saleem Sinai, reflects extensively upon these themes, in the 80’ the novel was considered a post-colonial and a post-modern novel. In order to reflect upon these categorizations, I intend to explore the notion of history in which the novel takes place and the narrator’s claim of being materially
stage. This period is also called as third generation of Indo-English novelists. In the words of Jon Mee: The 1980s witnessed a second coming for the Indian novel in English. Its messiah seems to have been Salman Rushdie. The appearance of Midnight’s Children in1981 brought about a renaissance in Indian writing in English which has outdone that of the 1930s. Its influence, acknowledged by critics and novelists alike, has been apparent in numerous ways.9 (Jon Mee.:2008, 318). Women novelists
spread all over the world and covered various literary works from different cultural background, such as Asia, Africa, and Australia. Some representative literary works from around the world whose theme is magic realism are Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, Illywhacker by Peter Carey and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez; even British young adult novel Howl 's Moving Castle also used magic realism as its theme. Howl’s Moving Castle is a 1986-released novel
feature of his work that women are invoked to prove a point about social injustices and inequities, and then effectively demeaned … by the writing itself.” (17) This is how, Catherine Cundy concludes about the delineation of woman characters in Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses and Shame and this forms the base for their dual, split-personalities in Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh too. The dual roles played by Aurora Zogoiby in this novel can also be aptly equated with Mahmoud’s (Bilquis Hyder’s
culture, their language but simultaneously maintains the Indian traditional social hierarchy. Though she considers Rahel and Estha as ‘Half-Hindu Hybrids’ (Roy 22), she is unaware of the fact that she too is a subject of hybrid culture. Thus the children of a divorcee woman, that is also after an inter-community marriage are considered ‘doomed, fatherless wail’ (Roy 22) and made to realize that they really have no right to live in their maternal grandmother’s house. In that way Estha and Rahel are