＂Chutnificating＂ National Allegory: Rushdie's Midnignt's Children

Abstract

This essay examines Fredric Jameson’s argument of “Third-World literatures as national allegories” by investigating Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children, which has often been interpreted as an allegory of national history of post-colonial India. As the Indian Subaltern Studies Group’s example indicates perfectly, in the era of post-colonialism, narrations of histories from the perspective of Third-World countries themselves often contest Eurocentric historiographies and call for a revision/reinterpretation of history/historicism itself. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children can be read as an attempt to write a history for post-colonial India from the perspective of post-colonial India. More importantly, however, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children as an alternative historiography critiques Eurocentric concept of not only individual identity but also national identity/history, based on the mirage of monism, homogeneity, and authenticity. On the one hand, Rushdie provides an alternative historicism by endowing his writing with a trope of “pickling” or “chutnification” of history. This “chutnification of history” is a process of writing history from the perspective of the post-colonial Third World outside the Eurocentric historicism as an alternative historiography. One of the most outstanding tropes of Rushdie’s peculiar history-writing can be found in his entwining of personal story with national history. Throughout the novel, history is personalized or individualized; individual’s lives are historicized. On the other hand, Rushdie’s alternative historiography becomes more significant through its blatant questioning of essence, homogeneity, and authenticity. Transcending the myth of authenticity and homogeneity along with the binary oppositions of white/black, men/women, and authentic/ inauthentic, Rushdie presents “multiplicity” as the potential discourse for post-independence India. After all, Rushdie’s project in Midnight’s Children does not just provide a tidy historiography for India as a national allegory. Rather, it disrupts all forms of orthodoxy, authenticity, and homogeneity in historicism and identity politics beyond the question of First World or Third World.