Throughout Midnight’s Children, the private life of the protagonist coincides with the historical and religious life of India during the twentieth century. (Pascoe) To understand the life of the main character, one should swallow the religious, cultural and historical background of India, which is used by Salman Rushdie in creating the characters of Midnight’s Children. In Salman Rushdie 's first novel, Midnight 's Children, the protagonist 's very mixed parentage reflects India 's diverse cultural and religious heritage. Aadam Aziz, Amina, Shiva and William Methwold, all relatives of Saleem Sinai, mirror the different aspects of the religious and cultural heritage of India. This statement will be discussed by analyzing these characters and their importance referring to the cultural and religious heritage of
The Different Parents of a Complex Society In Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children, the reader is presented with the complexity of the newly independent, Indian society. This complexity includes India’s cultural and religious diversity. The character of Saleem Sinai is switched at birth, by Mary Pereira. This leaves him with a mixed parentage. Which on the one hand, consists of the relation to his biological parents: William Methwold and Vanita.
In the world of Midnight’s Children, the magical and the filthy are interconnected. As Amina encounters the poor people she had once ignored, Ahmed and his business partners carry huge bags of money for a terrorist ransom. When the Ravana members drop the money, Saleem describes Ahmed and his partners seeking through dirt and leftover to pick it up, just as starving men, women, and children beg in order to survive. The narrative deliberately oscillates back and forth between these two scenes, drawing attention to the drastic division that separates rich from poor in India (haves and
Similarities of “The Minister’s Black Veil” and “Young Goodman Brown” “The Minister’s Black Veil” and “Young Goodman Brown” are two short stories written by Nathaniel Hawthorne that share many similarities. In his writings, Hawthorne displays a fascination with the Puritanical beliefs and ideals associated with sin and wickedness. Such ideals serve as a common thread that weaves the stories together by using a religious base, symbolism, and a dark mood. First, Hawthorne’s meticulous usage of religion is the foundation of both stories. They are set during the Puritan time period in which people were very concerned with sin.
A lot of the missing parts will be remade but you brain, and what you remember will not be exactly what really happened. Salman Rushdie explains in his Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism –from which the original quote of this III question comes- what soon becomes obvious when reading Midnight Children: Saleem is an unreliable narrator and we should not interpret what he narrates as what exactly happened, but as his particular and changed version of it. In Saleem’s own
Relationship is an important aspect in the existence of every individual. If we look at the delineation of human relation in art and literature, we shall find that emphasis has been laid on changing roles and perspective of mothers and how the changed circumstances, changed the way they look at their children. Salman Rushdie, one of India’s eminent novelists, in the novel Shame (1983), focuses the attention on contemporary Pakistan, by embarking frivolously shrouded political personalities from the real life. In the novel, Rushdie provides an insight of societal and political life in Pakistan. He is mordant of the communal affairs of the nation which are the consequent of the tyrannical, oppressive and flagitious legislative proceedings of the rulers of Pakistan.
Discrimination amongst our own people, is something very difficult to understand. We have racial discrimination between the upper castes and the so called ‘lower castes’, especially Dalits. The scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and other backward classes are still being discriminated and boycott. An Example:- In some states and places of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and some other states as well, people belonging to various castes and sub-castessuch as Dalit’s, Harijan’s, Baniya’s are not even allowed to draw or drink water from the wells as the upper castes. Then we have the North-South divide .India is such a huge country where practices vary from Kashmir to Kanyakumari – with diverse languages, cuisines, clothes, custom, climate.
In the novel Midnight’s Children, the relationship between the characters Saleem and Shiva is a very important and recurring theme. The relationship affects the narrative in many different ways. To understand this influence on the narrative, the relationship between Saleem and Shiva has to be described and explained. Saleem and Shiva are both born at the exact moment of India’s independence and their future lives are strongly related to that of the independent India. The children, and thereby their identities, are switched when they are born.
It has always remained a problem of countless questions that either postmodernism is applicable to IWE or not! Even Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is seen as a cautious imitation of the western literary model by few critics. But on the other hand with the emergence of the nineties, the nature of Indian reality and society transformed due to drastic changes in cultural, political, social, and familial patterns. Post- Rushdie generation has
This article is an attempt to deal with the magnum opus, Midnight’s Children, by universally acclaimed and controversial author, Salman Rushide. Midnight’s Children has been considered as an epoch-making novel in Indian English realm of literature that is why this piece of writing pertains to the gamut of postmodern literature. The paper is a sojourn throughout which the butt is to divulge the postmodern features embedded in this novel. Rushdie found his metier in this novel which is the amalgamation of fact and fantasy with a linguistic extravaganza in Indian English literature. The novel has been translated into several languages.