India in a Broken Mirror: The Shattering of the Idea of

India in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s ChildrenIsaac K. McQuistion

Departments of History and English, Carthage College, 2001 Alford Park Drive, Kenosha, WI 53140

Celebration of Scholars 2011: Exposition of Student and Faculty Research, Scholarship and Creativity

NehruNehru’s Discovery of India was written between 1942 and 1946 during the Independence Movment as a way for the

future prime minister to both reconnect with his own land and posit an idea of who and what that land was

comprised of. Nehru believed in an Indian nation based not a single definition of Indianness, such as a common

religion or a common language, but on a collective definition. He believed there could be unity through diversity. It

was necessary to prove this unity if he was going to effectively counter the British. Nehru looked to history to

prove this unity, saying that there was a common Indian character and that it was the intermingling of these

distinctive cultures that formed it. India was diversity. To show this unity born from diversity, he presented an

alternative history to the one the British had formulated for India.

Saleem SinaiSalman Rushdie, in his quasi-allegorical novel Midnight’s Children on the first thirty years of independent India,

takes the Nehruvian idea of unity quite literally and follows it to what he sees as its logical conclusion and final

undoing. In his novel, India is quite literally presented as one unified body. Saleem Sinai, the narrator and self-

proclaimed embodiment of India, contains within him and his capacious history the major facets of Indian culture.

He is the son of a British colonial and a Hindu woman, but, due to being switched at birth, is raised by a wealthy

Muslim family. His face, featuring a perpetually leaky and grotesquely large nose, representing the Deccan

peninsula, and two stains roughly in the positions of East and West Pakistan, is the map of India. He is born at

midnight on August 15, 1947, at the exact moment of India’s independence. By virtue of his privileged date of

birth, he is endowed with extraordinary powers, the most significant of which is his ability to read minds, enabling

him to turn his own mind into a transistor radio of sorts, allowing all the voices of India to flow through him. In all

of this, he becomes, quite literally, the embodiment of the Nehruvian idea of India. He is the manifestation of unity

(one body) fashioned from diversity (his parentage and upbringing, his telepathic powers). He is democratic India.

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Aadam Sinai But she doesn’t quite succeed. Saleem has a son. Well, technically it’s not his, it’s

Shiva’s, Saleem’s twin in the eyes of midnight and ideological opposite, blessed by

midnight with huge knees and the arts of war. But his son seems to represent the

new India. He is the offspring of the midnight’s children. He, like his father, is born

into a climactic period of Indian history. This time, it’s the Emergency. But Aadam,

his son, cannot speak. He is born mute, with no voice to enter into the national

conversation. Indeed, all over India, replications of Sanjay Gandhi, Indira’s son,

have been appearing, who are also mute. The diversity of Saleem and the midnight’s

children has been replaced with endless replications of Sanjay Gandhi. There are no

longer any voices, and what is a democracy without voices? What is a polyglot

nation like India without a national dialogue? There is now one voice, and it is

Indira’s. Saleem ends the book when he disintegrates into 600 million pieces. There

can be no one India anymore, Rushdie seems to imply. With no one having the voice

to keep the imagined community of India alive, it dissolves into dust. Democracy

has died. Everything Nehru proposed in The Discovery of India has fallen apart and

been replaced by Indira. If Saleem is the mirror of the nation, then that mirror is

irreparably shattered.

AbstractWhy is India able to function as a nation when it is home to the most diverse collection of people on the planet?

What is the idea holding India together in the face of lingual, cultural, and relgious barriers? Jawaharlal Nehru,

India’s first Prime Minister, put forth the idea that Indians were united in their diversity. The history of India, Nehru

asserted, has always been one of synthesis, and that this amalgamation of cultures and identities has created the

Indian identity. With his 1981 novel, Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie tested this Nehruvian idea of India and

showed how it eventually will fail. This paper examines the idea of India as proposed by Nehru in his The

Discovery of India and how it is destroyed in Midnight’s Children by Indira Gandhi’s Emergency regime.

Figures 1 and 2: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s

Children and Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery

of India.

Acknowledgements & ReferencesA special thanks goes to faculty advisors Seemee Ali, Maria Carrig, Eric Pullin, Pamela Smiley, and Stephen Udry.

All quotes taken from:

Guha, Ramachandra. India after Gandhi: the History of the World's Largest Democracy. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2008.

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991. London: Granta, 1991.

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight's Children: a Novel. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2006.

“India is no more a single country than the equator.”~Winston Churchill

“Your life will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.”~Nehru, in a letter

to Saleem Sinai, Midnight’s Children

Indira GandhiEventually, things begin to fall apart. Saleem begins to literally

tear apart at the seams. He is cracking, about to dissolve under

the weight of history. The end of the book comes after the

Emergency period, when Indira Gandhi , Nehru’s daughter and

also a Prime Minister of India, granted herself dictatorial powers

and had her political opponents imprisoned and the press

censored. Saleem has been castrated under her orders, and is

about to crack. The other midnight’s children, those born in the

hour after India’s independence and also granted magical

powers, have been hunted down and also sterilized. The new

future will not include them, not if Indira has any say in the

matter.

“The Widow’s arm is hunting see the children run and scream…”~

Midnight’s Children

Figure 3: A political cartoon depicting Indira Gandhi

bringing Emergency to the Indian people. At the time of

Emergency, Indira was a widow.

“We, the children of Independence, rushed wildly and

too fast into our future; he, Emergency-born, will be is

already more cautious.”~Saleem, describing his son

After Midnight’s Children, What?But where does this leave us? India obviously still exists, so where does the

idea of India stand? Neither Midnight’s Children nor Rushdie holds the

answer. Numerous writers since Rushdie have attempted to explain the

Indian state, some falling back on Nehru’s example, others modifying it or

abandoning it entirely. The same debate is still being held. The historian

Ramachandra Guha offers probably the best explanation of why India

persists. He points to an unfettered love of democracy and the democratic

process that has knit Indians together. Amartya Sen, an economist, and Sunil

Khilnani, a political theorist, point to much the same thing. These exemplify

the tenacity of Nehru’s idea of India and its enduring legacy. However,

problems still exist, and though India has stabilized, the strength of its

democracy is still perplexing. But perhaps it’s best to let the final words go

to Rushdie, who wrote the following in an essay published after the

destruction of the Babri Mosque in 1992 and the ensuing rioting that resulted

in the slaughter of thousands of Muslims. “India regularly confounds its

critics by its resilience, its survival in spite of everything. I don’t believe in

the Balkanization of India…It’s my guess that the old functioning anarchy

will, somehow or other, keep on functioning, for another forty years, and no

doubt another forty after that. But don’t ask me how.”

“India will survive”~

Ramachandra Guha, historian.

Figure 4: A political cartoon depicting the

plight of democracy in India in 1997.