An Analysis Of Salman Rushdie's Midnights Children

The concept of orientalism refers to the western perceptions of the eastern cultures and social practices. It is a specific expose of the eurocentric universalism which takes for granted both, the superiority of what is European or western and the inferiority of what is not. Salman Rushdie's Booker of the Bookers prize winning novel Midnights Children is full of remarks and incidents that show the orientalist perception of India and its people. It is Rushdie's interpretation of a period of about 70 years in India's modern history dealing with the events leading to the partition and beyond. Rushdie is a fantasist and a creator of alternate realities, the poet and prophet of a generation born at the degree zero of national history. The present

Instead of the beauty of the tiny valley circled by giant teeth, he noticed the narrowness, the proximity of the horizon; and felt sad, to be at home and feel so utterly enclosed. He also felt in - inexplicably - as though the old place resented his educated stethoscope return. Beneath the winner ice, it had been coldly neutral, but now there was no doubt; the years in Germany had returned him to a hostile environment. Many years later, when the hole inside him had been clogged up with hate, and he came to sacrifice himself at the shrine of the black stone god in the temple on the hill, he would try and recall his childhood springs in Paradise, the way it was before travel and tussocks and army tanks messed everything

Salman Rushdie has used these generalized perceptions of India without examining their reasonability. He sometimes presents India and its people as a collective noun and ascribes general qualities and characteristics to them, without considering their individual merits and demerits. As he writes in the novel: "I permit myself this one generalization; Americans have mastered the universe, but have no domination over their mouths; whereas India is impotent , but her children tend to have excellent teeth” (181). He writes at a different place: "We are a nation of forgetters” (37). At another place, he writes: "We are not like Indians, always making battles (33).

It is evident by these remarks that Salman Rushdie was influenced by the generalizing concept of orientalism. His descriptions of India as an impotent, battle - making nation of forgetters is not based on any real observation but is based on the orientalist perceptions of India in the western world. These observations have no reality at all and these are used only to attract western