Fragmented Nation, Fragmented Self: Postcolonial Identity in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
This blog is a part of the assignment of Paper 107: Literary Theory & Criticism and Indian Aesthetics
Academic Details:
Name : Jay P. Vaghani
Roll No. : 06
Sem. : 3
Batch : 2024-26
E-mail : vaghanijay77@gmail.com
Assignment Details:
Paper Name :Indian English Literature – Post-Independence
Paper No. : 202
Paper Code : 22407
Unit : 2: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Topic :Fragmented Nation, Fragmented Self: Postcolonial Identity in Salman Rushdie’s 'Midnight’s Children'
Submitted To : Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Submitted Date : November 8, 2025
The following information—numbers are counted using QuillBot:
Words : 1548
Characters : 11369
Characters without spaces : 9884
Paragraphs :79
Sentences : 132
Reading time :6 m 12 s
Table of Contents
Personal Information
Assignment Details
Abstract
Introduction
The Nation as Narrative: Homi Bhabha’s Perspective
Dualism and Despotism: The Rushdiean Irony
Alternate Genesis: Rewriting History and Myth
Imaginary Homelands: Memory, Exile, and Identity
Hybridity and the Postcolonial Condition
Conclusion
Abstract
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) redefines the boundaries of postcolonial literature by merging personal history with the birth of a nation. This paper explores how Rushdie employs magic realism and narrative fragmentation to symbolize the fractured identity of postcolonial India. Drawing on Homi K. Bhabha’s ideas of hybridity and narration, Edward Said’s notion of exile, and Joanne Sharp’s geographical reading of “imaginary homelands,” the assignment examines how Saleem Sinai’s story becomes a metaphor for India’s struggle with memory, modernity, and multiplicity. Through the use of allegory, Rushdie portrays the “nation” as an unstable narrative—constantly rewritten by its storytellers.
Introduction
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is one of the most influential postcolonial novels of the twentieth century, blending personal memory, political history, and mythical storytelling into a richly layered narrative. Published in 1981, the novel follows the life of Saleem Sinai, who is born at the exact moment of India’s independence on August 15, 1947. Saleem’s telepathic powers connect him to the other “midnight’s children,” each endowed with unique abilities, symbolizing the hopes, chaos, and multiplicity of a newly independent nation. Through Saleem’s personal story, Rushdie transforms the history of India into a metaphorical and imaginative journey that captures the birth pains of a postcolonial identity.
The novel reimagines Indian history through Saleem’s fragmented and unreliable narration, reflecting Rushdie’s belief that nations themselves are “constructed fictions,” shaped by competing memories and subjective interpretations. His storytelling style—filled with digressions, magical realism, and irony—mirrors the disorder and hybridity of modern India. As Homi K. Bhabha (1994) observes, postcolonial identity emerges “in-between” fixed categories—neither wholly colonial nor completely independent. Rushdie’s work embodies this liminal “third space,” where identity is constantly negotiated through language, history, and imagination.
By merging myth with memory, and the personal with the political, Midnight’s Children becomes more than just a historical novel—it becomes an allegory of postcolonial nationhood. Rushdie’s narrative asserts that the story of India cannot be told through a single, unified perspective but through a chorus of fragmented voices, contradictions, and memories that together create the texture of a living, evolving nation.
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Hypothesis
This paper hypothesizes that Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children redefines the idea of nationhood through the lens of hybridity, fragmentation, and narrative self-reflexivity. By intertwining personal memory with political history, Rushdie portrays the postcolonial nation as a dynamic, imagined construct rather than a fixed entity. The novel suggests that identity—both individual and collective—is continuously negotiated within the “in-between” spaces described by Homi K. Bhabha. Thus, Rushdie’s work challenges colonial and nationalist ideologies by presenting storytelling itself as a form of resistance and reconstruction.
Research Questions
How does Salman Rushdie use Saleem Sinai’s fragmented narrative to represent the construction of postcolonial national identity?
In what ways does Midnight’s Children illustrate Homi K. Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity and the “nation as narration”?
How does Rushdie employ irony and magical realism to critique both colonial authority and nationalist absolutism?
What role do memory, exile, and storytelling play in shaping Rushdie’s vision of “imaginary homelands”?
How does the novel transform history into myth, and what does this reveal about the relationship between personal and political identity in postcolonial India?
The Nation as Narrative: Homi Bhabha’s Perspective
In The Location of Culture (1994), Homi K. Bhabha conceptualizes the “nation” as a narration—a story that is continuously told, retold, and revised to construct a sense of collective identity. This idea challenges the traditional notion of the nation as a fixed or homogeneous entity and instead views it as a cultural performance shaped through discourse and representation. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children vividly embodies this concept through its self-conscious and unreliable narrator, Saleem Sinai, who persistently questions the accuracy and purpose of his own storytelling. Saleem’s act of narration—part confession, part history—reveals how both personal and national identities are constructed through narrative acts rather than objective truth.
The novel’s structure, oscillating between autobiography and national chronicle, deliberately blurs the boundaries between history and fiction, suggesting that the story of India’s independence cannot be separated from the stories of its people. Saleem becomes a metaphor for the nation itself—fragmented, contradictory, and constantly reconstructing its own identity. His repeated attempts to organize his chaotic memories reflect the instability of postcolonial identity, where the self is always caught between the inherited past and the uncertain present.
Saleem’s fragmented storytelling perfectly mirrors Bhabha’s notion of the “in-between” or liminal space, a zone where hybrid identities are not fixed but continuously negotiated. By rejecting linear chronology and embracing a circular, digressive narrative, Rushdie subverts the colonial model of history that privileges order and progress. Instead, he presents an alternative historiography—one that values plurality, contradiction, and hybridity over a singular vision of truth. Through this postmodern narrative strategy, Midnight’s Children becomes both a story of India and a commentary on how nations are imagined, narrated, and reimagined through time.
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Dualism and Despotism: The Rushdiean Irony
M. Keith Booker (1990) interprets Rushdie’s fiction as a critique of dualistic thought—especially the binaries of East/West, self/other, and good/evil. In Midnight’s Children, this dualism manifests through Saleem’s physical and psychological disintegration, representing the fragmentation of postcolonial India.
Rushdie exposes how rigid categories—religious, cultural, or political—become tools of despotism. Saleem’s body, constantly breaking down, becomes a metaphor for the nation’s vulnerability to division and authoritarian control. Booker argues that Rushdie transforms dualism into irony: rather than seeking synthesis, he celebrates contradiction as the essence of postcolonial identity.
Alternate Genesis: Rewriting History and Myth
Indira Karamcheti (1986) reads Midnight’s Children as an “alternate Genesis,” where Rushdie reconstructs the origin of the Indian nation not as divine creation but as human invention. Saleem’s claim to be “handcuffed to history” redefines the relationship between individual destiny and national history.
The novel’s mythic framework—Saleem’s miraculous birth, his prophetic powers, and his eventual disintegration—invokes the biblical, Quranic, and Hindu cosmologies, blending them into a secular myth of nationhood. Through this intertextual play, Rushdie asserts the right of postcolonial writers to reimagine the past through hybrid narrative forms.
Imaginary Homelands: Memory, Exile, and Identity
Joanne Sharp (1996) extends Rushdie’s own concept of “imaginary homelands” by linking literature and geography. She argues that Midnight’s Children transforms the nation into a space of imagination rather than a fixed territory. Saleem’s storytelling becomes an act of mapping emotional and historical landscapes, where memory fills the gaps left by exile and loss.
Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile (2008) similarly describes exile as a “restless state of being,” marked by nostalgia and creativity. For Rushdie, exile is both physical and psychological—a condition that allows critical distance from nationalist dogma. Thus, Saleem’s fragmented narrative is not a failure but a creative re-claiming of belonging through storytelling.
Hybridity and the Postcolonial Condition
Rushdie’s characters exist in a hybrid world where colonial and indigenous elements merge. His playful use of English, infused with Indian idioms and rhythms, exemplifies linguistic hybridity. As Dr. Prabha Parmar (2021) observes, Rushdie “Indianizes” the English language, turning it into a vehicle for postcolonial self-expression.
The novel’s hybridity extends to its structure—mixing political satire, autobiography, and myth. This narrative multiplicity reflects Bhabha’s “third space” of enunciation, where meaning is continuously negotiated. In Rushdie’s India, no identity remains pure; everything is contaminated, layered, and alive.
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Conclusion
Midnight’s Children transforms the history of a nation into the history of a self. Through Saleem Sinai, Rushdie reveals that identity—personal or national—is never whole but always in flux. By merging magic realism with postcolonial theory, Rushdie challenges the grand narratives of colonial and nationalist history, offering instead a fragmented yet deeply human vision of belonging.
In the words of Bhabha, nations “emerge from the act of narration.” Rushdie’s narrative thus becomes both an artistic and political act—an affirmation that the stories we tell shape the worlds we inhabit.
References
Bhabha, Homi K. "The Novel as Narration." The Location of Culture, 1994.
Booker, M. Keith. “Beauty and the Beast: Dualism as Despotism in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie.” ELH, vol. 57, no. 4, 1990, pp. 977–97. JSTOR,
Karamcheti, Indira. “Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’ and an Alternate
Genesis.” Pacific Coast Philology, vol. 21, no. 1/2, 1986, pp. 81–84. JSTOR,
Parmar , Dr. Prabha. “Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal.”
The-Criterion, 2021, www.the-criterion.com/V12/n2/IN11.pdf. Accessed 30 Oct. 2025.
Sharp, Joanne P. “Locating Imaginary Homelands: Literature, Geography, and
Salman Rushdie.” GeoJournal, vol. 38, no. 1, 1996, pp. 119–27. JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/41146709. 4. Accessed 30 Oct. 2025.
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