Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie, in full Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie, (born June 19, 1947, Bombay [now Mumbai], India), Indian-born writer whose allegorical novels examine historical and philosophical issues by means of surreal characters, brooding humor, and an effusive and melodramatic prose style. His treatment of sensitive religious and political subjects made him a controversial figure.
In 1983, Rushdie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was appointed a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in 1999.Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him 13th on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Since 2000, Rushdie has lived in the United States. He was named Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University in 2015.[8] Earlier, he taught at Emory University. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he published Joseph Anton: A Memoir, an account of his life in the wake of the events following The Satanic Verses.
Midnight's Children
Midnight’s Children, allegorical novel by Salman Rushdie, published in 1981. It is a historical chronicle of modern India centring on the inextricably linked fates of two children who were born within the first hour of independence from Great Britain.
Exactly at midnight on Aug. 15, 1947, two boys are born in a Bombay (now Mumbai) hospital, where they are switched by a nurse. Saleem Sinai, who will be raised by a well-to-do Muslim couple, is actually the illegitimate son of a low-caste Hindu woman and a departing British colonist. Shiva, the son of the Muslim couple, is given to a poor Hindu street performer whose unfaithful wife has died.
Saleem represents modern India. When he was 30, he wrote his memoir, Midnight’s Children. Shiva is destined to be Saleem’s enemy as well as India’s most honored war hero. This multilayered novel places Saleem at every significant event that occurred on the Indian subcontinent in the 30 years after independence.Midnight’s Children was awarded the Booker McConnell Prize for fiction in 1981. In 1993 it was chosen as the best Booker Prize novel in 25 years.In 2008, the novel was selected as the best of Bookers in the past 40 years.
Cultural ,Gender and Religious Issues in Midnight’s Children
Midnight's Children presents the familial history of a Muslim family from pre-independence era to the period of emergency. The story of the novel covers three major countries of the Indian subcontinent.The novel throws light on the KashmiriMuslim culture in which religion plays a very crucial role. The foreign returned young doctor Aziz feels sad when returning to his native land and looks at the proximity of the horizon. He is hated by Tai because Aziz used an imported Heidelberg bag which in Tai‘s view is made from the skin of the pig.
When Naseem, the daughter of blind landowner falls ill, Aziz is summoned to provide treatment to her. But as a Kashmiri Muslim culture, women‘s body must not be seen by the other men even if he is a doctor. So Ghani finds a solution. He appoints four muscular women to hold a bed sheet which has at the center of it a hole of about seven inches diameter. And Aziz is allowed to see the portion of her body which has problems for her. The irony of the situation is that due to her frequent illness, Aziz is able to see the whole of her body except her face.
It also represents the upbringing of a Muslim girl in a traditional Muslim society where she has limited exposure to the publiclife. Her family is like everything for her. Aziz is not even allowed to see his patient even when she falls ill. This has a profound impact in the course of the novel.It is due to this kind of upbringing that Naseem is unable to come out of her veil throughout her life. For her, not covering her ankles and feet is nakedness. She does not endorse her husband‘s idea that the religious teachers‘ preaching her daughters to hate Hindus, Buddhists and other vegetarians is not a good idea. She is also less supportive to her husband on bed also. When India is divided into three parts, she wants to go to Pakistan quite against her husband‘s wish. In Pakistan she runs a profitable profession of running a petrol Bunk.Aziz‘s mother is also another notable character here. Though she never comes out of her veil throughout her life, when her husband has a stroke, she gains courage and runs a gemstone business for feeding both her husband and her son. Now it is her husband who ―sat hidden behind the veil which the stroke had dropped over his brain‖(Rushdie, 1995)When observing the Rushdianwomen characters in the novel, though they are bound by the religious and cultural conventions, they seem stronger than their male counterparts. It is Naseem who literally controls the whole of the family affairs and even all the servants and people are afraid of her.She stoically accepts the death of her husband Mrs. Briganza , the aaya in Salim‘s house, later sets up her own pickle factory where Saleem meets Padma.
Aziz's mother feeds the whole family. Amina Sinai on the one hand, secretly maintains an affair with Nadir Khan, the hummingbird but at the same time she remains committed to her husband. She begins loving her husband bit by bit. She carefully transforms her husband bit by bit to make him an exact replica of her ex-loverNadir Khan. At the time of need, her courage comes to the fore. When Lifafadas is nearly killed by the Muslim people, she protects him and challenges them that they should kill her before killing him and she has sheltered Lifafadas. Her secularism is commendable.
Jamila, Saleem's sister, becomes a famous singer in Pakistan. It is she who plans to send Saleem to the Cutia unit of the Pakistan‘s army to get rid of him. Mary Pierera in order to get admiration from her lover, changes the two babies and Saleem the baby born as a result of the relationship between Methold Vanita gets the advantage of the richness and Shiva, the son of the rich Sinais is doomed to the life of a poor. The conflict between secularism and fundamentalism is one of the major themes in the novel.
In Aziz‘s family there is always conflict between his liberal ideas and his wife‘s conservative ideas. He does not want the partition of India whereas she wants it. It is Naseem who finally wins in the war and takes control of the whole of the family. Mian Abdullah‘s murder is another notable event in the novel. He starts free Islam Convention and works to unite like minded people so as to prevent the nation from division. He also has the desire to unite both Hindus and Muslims. Dr Aziz, the Rani of Cooch Naheen are the members of the commission. Nadir Khan is the general secretary. However their aim of forming an alternative to the dogmatism of the Muslim Leaguers is considered a threat to Muslim Leguers. Hence he is murdered cruelly.
The views of the conservative Muslims towards Mian Abdullah is expressed through Naseem‘s hatred towards him as she says to her husband,
“You have your Hummingbird,‟...... „but I, what's its name, have the Call of God. A better noise, whatsitsname, than that man‟s hum".
On the other hand, the conflict is another kind in Agra. Ahmed Sinai, father of Saleem Sinai suffers a lot due to the religious hatred towards Muslims in India. The Ravana Gang is robbing the Muslim merchants in the name of religion.. Ravana is the name of many headed demons in Ramayana. But this name is used by a group of incendiary rogues. It is a fanatical anti-Muslim movement. They in order to provoke Muslims leave the pigs‘ heads in the courtyards of Friday mosques. They paint out slogans on the walls of the cities that Muslims are the Jews of Asia. It soon becomes a brilliantly conceived commercial enterprise. The members of the gang begin demanding money from the Muslim merchants to let their world unburnt.
Ahmed Sinai,the narrator‘s father, also demanded a sum of money to let his godown unburnt. Though Sinai takes the money to give it to the gang to save his world, he is unable to give it because the monkeys snatch his money bag and throws the money all over and thereby he becomes unable to pay the money demanded by the gang and as a result his reccine godown is burnt into ashes that makes him become anti-Hindu. Similarly Lifafa Das is a peep show street man who leads Amina to Shri Ramram Seth in gratitude after she saves his life from a Muslim mob. Shri Ramram Seth is a Hindu seer, a cousin of Lifafa Das. Amina visits him while pregnant and he makes prophecies on the future life of her yet unborn son, Saleem Sinai. As soon as the people come to know that he is a Hindu,they become angry and begin attacking him. They even try to kill him because he dares to enter into a Muslim area. However Amina saves him from their attack.The cultural conflict is the reason behind the fall of Saleem‘s Midnight Children‘s Conference.
Thus, Rushdie ironically depicts the cultural, religious gender issues in the novel 'Midnight Children‘s '.
Work Cited
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Salman Rushdie". Encyclopedia Britannica, 14 Aug. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Salman-Rushdie. Accessed 19 October 2022.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Midnight’s Children". Encyclopedia Britannica, 27 Jan. 2016, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Midnights-Children. Accessed 19 October 2022.
Gayatri, V, Shoba. C. “Identity crisis in select novels of Salman Rushdie” International Journal of English Language, Literature and Translation Study (IJELR). Vol.4, Issue 3. July-Sep-2017.Web.5.11.2018 ISSN 2349-9451/ 2395-2628 <http://www.ijelr.in<4.3.17
G. Vijayapraveena, R. S. P. N. (n.d.). A pragmatic portrayal of Indian culture, politics, history and magical realism in Salman Rushdie's Midnight Children – a critical study. Annals of the Romanian Society for Cell Biology. Retrieved October 19, 2022, from https://www.annalsofrscb.ro/index.php/journal/article/view/1701
Rushdie, Salman. Midnight's Children: A Novel. United States, Random House Publishing Group, 2010.
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