Rushdie’s novel is about the birth of the nation of India, as told through the fictional autobiography of Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of midnight, August 15, 1947, the day of Indian independence. In fact, Saleem often switches between first and third person narration when recounting his tale, as much as he switches back and forth between the history of his family and the history of India. “Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes the stories less juicy; so I am about to become the first and only member of my family to flout the laws of halal. Letting no blood escape from the body of the tale.” In Rushdie’s novel, one man’s history is used as a lens to chronicle the birth-pangs of a new nation, ever-shaped by its colonial past. ““Bad business, Mr. Sinai,” Methwold, sips his Scotch amid cacti and roses, “Never seen the like. Hundreds of years of decent government, then suddenly, up and off. You’ll admit we weren’t all bad: built your roads. Schools, railway trains, parliamentary system, all worthwhile things. Taj Mahal was falling down until an Englishman bothered to see it. And now, suddenly, independence. Seventy days to get out. I’m dead against it myself, but what’s to be done?”” The narrator, Saleem, looks back on the day of his birth as well. “A nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will—except in a dream we all agreed to dream; it was a mass fantasy shared in varying degrees by Bengali and Punjabi, Madrasi and Jat, and would periodically need the sanctification and renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood. 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.”
Throughout the tale, Rushdie seamlessly weaves together historical truth with mystical fantasy. “So among the midnight children were infants with powers of transmutation, flight, prophecy and wizardry … but two of us were born on the stroke of midnight. Saleem and Shiva, Shiva and Saleem, nose and knees and knees and nose … to Shiva, the hour had given the gifts of war (of Rama, who could draw the undrawable bow; of Arjuna and Bhima; the ancient prowess of Kurus and Pandavas united, unstoppably, in him!) … and to me, the greatest talent of all—the ability to look into the hearts and minds of men.” Islam and Hinduism also play indispensable roles in the story’s telling. “But Saleem was forever tainted with Bombayness, his head was full of all sorts of religions apart from Allah’s (like India’s first Muslims, the mercantile Moplas of Malabar, I had lived in a country whose population of deities rivaled the numbers of its people, so that, in unconscious revolt against the claustrophobic throng of deities, my family had espoused the ethics of business, not faith); and his body was to show a marked preference for the impure. Mopla-like, I was doomed to be a misfit; but, in the end, purity found me out, and even I, Saleem, was cleansed of my misdeeds.”
In Rushdie’s telling, it is impossible to separate the single life of Saleem with that of the life of India writ large. “Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each “I,” every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.” As the narrator, Saleem, looks back on his past, now the manager of a chutney factory in Bombay, he realizes that it all might not make much sense after all. “Sometimes, in the pickles’ version of history, Saleem appears to have known too little, at other times, too much … yes, I should revise and revise, improve and improve; but there is neither the time nor the energy. I am obliged to offer no more than this stubborn sentence: It happened that way because that’s how it happened.”
No comments:
Post a Comment