Assignment paper no 202 :“History as Narrative: Saleem Sinai’s Memory-Making and the Politics of Truth in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children”

  Assignment paper no 202 :“History as Narrative: Saleem Sinai’s Memory-Making and the Politics of Truth in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children”

Personal Information:-

Name:- Bhumi Mahida

Batch:-  M.A. Sem 3 (2024-2026)

Enrollment Number:- 51082240017

E-mail Address:- bhumimahida385@gmail.com

Roll Number:- 2

Assignment Details:-

Topic:- “History as Narrative: Saleem Sinai’s Memory-Making and the Politics of Truth in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children”

Paper & subject code:-Paper 202: Indian English Literature – Post-Independence

Submitted to:- Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, MKBU, Bhavnagar

Date of Submission:- 

Table of Contents :

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

History, Memory, and Postcolonial Context 

Saleem’s Storytelling and the Rewriting of History

Theoretical Framing: Memory, Narrative Authority, and Competing Histories

Conclusion: The Politics of Remembering

Abstract :

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) redefines history through the unreliable yet imaginative narrative of its protagonist, Saleem Sinai. The novel transforms India’s postcolonial history into a personal myth, challenging the authority of “official” national narratives. Through Saleem’s fragmented storytelling, Rushdie explores how memory constructs and contests truth. This paper argues that Midnight’s Children frames history not as a fixed record but as a dynamic narrative shaped by memory, identity, and imagination. Rushdie’s fusion of magical realism and historiography exposes the politics behind who gets to tell the story of the nation, suggesting that truth itself is plural and narrative-bound.

Keywords: 

Midnight’s Children

postcolonialism

historiography

memory

narrative

nation

truth

magical realism

Introduction :

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) stands as one of the most significant postcolonial novels of the twentieth century, redefining how history is written and remembered. Through the character of Saleem Sinai—born at the precise moment of India’s independence—Rushdie transforms the national history of India into a deeply personal narrative. The novel’s opening line, “I was born in the city of Bombay… on the stroke of midnight,” sets the stage for a symbolic relationship between individual life and collective history (Rushdie 3).

This paper argues that Rushdie deliberately frames national history as an act of storytelling. Saleem’s unreliable narration and his flawed memory expose how history, like fiction, is constructed rather than discovered. By transforming historical events—Partition, the Emergency, and post-Independence politics—into acts of personal remembrance, Rushdie questions the authority of state historiography. The novel reveals that personal memory, though fallible, can resist the homogenizing power of official truth.

History, Memory, and Postcolonial Context :

In postcolonial literature, history often becomes a site of contestation between colonial and indigenous voices. As Homi K. Bhabha notes, “the nation’s narrative is always the story of its difference” (Nation and Narration 1). Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children epitomizes this tension, blending myth, history, and memory to reclaim a fragmented national identity.

Postcolonial writers frequently view history as a colonized discourse—shaped by the language, perspective, and priorities of the imperial power. Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, argues that narrative is central to empire-building: “Empire requires narratives to justify itself” (Said xii). Rushdie reverses this by giving narrative power to the formerly colonized subject.

Saleem’s storytelling does not seek accuracy but authenticity. His errors, exaggerations, and revisions mirror the instability of collective memory itself. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back describe this as “writing back to the empire,” a form of cultural resistance that reclaims the power of narration (Ashcroft et al. 7). Thus, Rushdie’s historiography is postcolonial in method and purpose: it dismantles colonial archives and reconstructs them through memory and imagination.

In Midnight’s Children, history becomes a palimpsest—layered with voices, contradictions, and subjective recollections that reveal more about identity and power than about chronological fact.

Saleem’s Storytelling and the Rewriting of History :

Rushdie uses Saleem Sinai’s voice to dramatize how history is narrated rather than lived. Saleem serves simultaneously as participant, chronicler, and unreliable historian. His attempt to write the story of India through his own life demonstrates how the personal and national are inseparably entwined.

1. The Birth of Saleem and the Birth of a Nation

Saleem’s birth at midnight on August 15, 1947, directly links his body to the nation’s birth. This symbolic coincidence foregrounds the novel’s central conceit: the child’s life parallels the trajectory of postcolonial India. Saleem’s insistence that his “destiny is handcuffed to history” (Rushdie 9) suggests that history is an imaginative construct, not an objective record.

However, as Saleem’s narrative unfolds, his memory becomes increasingly unreliable—distorted by time, trauma, and personal desire. This unreliability functions not as a flaw but as a political statement: Rushdie asserts that all history, including that written by states, is subjective.

2. Partition and the Trauma of Memory

The Partition of India (1947) is one of the novel’s pivotal events. Saleem’s recounting of Partition blurs myth and history, memory and imagination. His descriptions of violence are filtered through his personal emotions and family conflicts. He admits, “I told myself stories about the stories I told” (Rushdie 231). This self-reflexivity shows that historical events become meaningful only when narrated.

The fragmentation of Saleem’s memory reflects the fragmentation of the subcontinent itself. As Neil ten Kortenaar observes, “Rushdie makes the nation itself a narrative construct, as fictional as Saleem’s autobiography” (Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie 57).

3. The Emergency and the Control of Narrative

The Emergency period (1975–77), under Indira Gandhi’s rule, represents the climax of Rushdie’s critique of historical control. Saleem’s sterilization symbolizes the state’s attempt to silence individual and reproductive power—metaphors for both creativity and dissent. The erasure of the “midnight’s children” parallels the government’s erasure of alternative histories.

Rushdie exposes the politics of truth: the state seeks to control how history is told, while Saleem’s chaotic storytelling resists that control. His fragmented memories, however inconsistent, preserve the multiplicity of Indian experience.

4. Memory as Survival

Saleem’s obsessive act of narration—writing down his story before he “cracks like an old pot”—is a struggle against oblivion (Rushdie 36). His “memory-making” becomes a moral act of survival. By re-telling and re-imagining the past, he ensures that marginalized experiences persist despite political erasure.

As critic Linda Hutcheon argues, postmodern historiographic metafiction like Midnight’s Children “problematizes the very possibility of historical knowledge” (A Poetics of Postmodernism 122). Rushdie’s technique—interweaving myth, fantasy, and fact—mirrors India’s pluralistic reality, rejecting the colonial idea of linear history.

Thus, Saleem’s unreliable storytelling becomes Rushdie’s means of democratizing history: every version of the past, no matter how flawed, deserves to be told.

Theoretical Framing: Memory, Narrative Authority, and Competing Histories :

Rushdie’s narrative engages with postmodern and postcolonial theories of history and truth. Michel Foucault’s idea that power and knowledge are intertwined resonates deeply with Rushdie’s portrayal of the Emergency. The control of archives, censorship, and propaganda all demonstrate how authority determines what counts as “truth.”

Similarly, Hayden White’s concept of “emplotment” in Metahistory (1973) reveals that historical writing is itself a form of narrative construction. By applying literary forms (tragedy, romance, comedy) to historical events, historians inevitably shape the reader’s perception of truth. Rushdie dramatizes this idea through Saleem, whose “errors” highlight the narrative nature of all historiography.

Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting (2004) also informs this reading. Ricoeur distinguishes between memory as personal recollection and history as collective documentation, arguing that both depend on interpretation. Saleem’s personal memory blurs these boundaries: his memories are collective and mythical, encompassing the nation’s joys and traumas.

Furthermore, Rushdie’s own essay “Imaginary Homelands” provides an authorial lens: “The past is a country from which we have all emigrated… its loss is part of our common humanity” (Rushdie Imaginary Homelands 12). Here, Rushdie suggests that memory is both creative and compensatory—it fills the gaps left by history’s silences.

By aligning Saleem’s storytelling with postmodern theories of narrative and postcolonial critiques of historiography, Midnight’s Children becomes a text that resists closure. It insists that there is no single “truth” of history, only a chorus of memories competing to be heard.

Conclusion: 

In Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie transforms the act of remembering into an act of resistance. Saleem’s fragmented, digressive narrative destabilizes the idea that national history is coherent or authoritative. Instead, history emerges as a mosaic of personal memories, myths, and interpretations.

Rushdie’s use of magical realism further emphasizes the blurred boundary between fact and fiction. The “midnight’s children,” each endowed with supernatural powers, symbolize India’s pluralism and its fractured identity. Their eventual disintegration reflects the nation’s lost potential but also underscores the fragility of collective memory.

By presenting Saleem as an unreliable narrator, Rushdie exposes how history depends on who tells it—and from where. His fallibility becomes a metaphor for the postcolonial condition: nations, like individuals, reconstruct their pasts through memory and imagination.

Ultimately, Rushdie’s novel suggests that truth is not discovered but narrated. In giving narrative power to the marginalized and the mistaken, Midnight’s Children restores humanity to the process of history-making. As a literary event, it challenges both the imperial archive and the nationalist myth, asserting that fiction can reveal deeper truths than historical documentation ever could.

Thus, the novel’s politics of truth lies not in accuracy but in plurality—in the coexistence of many stories, voices, and memories that together create the living fabric of postcolonial India.

Words : 1656

Images : 04

References :

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