Critical Analysis Of Midnight's Children Rushdie

The novel addresses Indian independence from colonial rule, and Partition.

I chose Rushdie as a study case for this paper because he is a postcolonial writer who has unusual varied lexis, and especially in his 1981 novel Midnight’s Children. Rushdie’s novel is enriched by an Indian cultural foundation.

The novel’s thirty-year-old narrator Saleem Sinai, who is writing the story of his life, which is also the story of India from 1915 to 1978, and he is reading it aloud to the pickle-maker Padma.

In Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice (1999), Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi argue that translation and colonialism are connected. If translation is the activity of carrying across, then postcolonial writing can be pictured as a form

The frequency of words in South Asian languages and the large number of specifically Indian allusions are highly significant features of Midnight’s Children. References that no one without local knowledge

Another example is that at one point in the novel where a rhyme in Gujarati is gets translated into an English rhyme: When the pro-Marathi language marchers ask the young Saleem whether he knows Gujarati, he recites ‘‘a rhyme designed to make fun of the speech rhythms of the language,’’ and this rhyme ‘‘Soo ché? Saru ché! / Danda lé ké maru ché!’’ is directly followed by an English translation, ‘‘How are you?—I am well!—I’ll take a stick and thrash you to hell!’’ (188). Saleem here takes care to reproduce in English a feature of the sound of the Gujarati message— the fact that it rhymes.

Rustom Barcucha (1994: 160) claims that Rushdie has created a language of his own that “transcends any English that has been spiced with Indian words and

In post-colonial writing, much of the cultural material is explained in a clear way. The amount of explicit material indicates that a text is aimed at the former colonizers.

In such case, Bassnett and Trivedi assert that cultural backgrounds are “explicitly frontloaded” for the readers. The act of frontloading cultural information results in producing a “more highly explicit quality of both post-colonial literature and translation.” (28)

In postcolonial literature, the suppression of the qualities of the writer’s culture and language goes against the very reasons of the act of writing. This case is just like when questions of fidelity are raised about translated works.

Bassnett and Trivedi mention a problem relating to the lexis, which is shared by translations and postcolonial writing. This problem is that of proper names, if they are made-up of unfamiliar phonemes, it can cause problems for the reading audience of both literature and literary translations. Transposing proverbs and metaphors is also problematic to postcolonial writers and translators alike. They will find it difficult to naturalise material in a way that is receivable from the reading audience. Many dilemmas can occur and influence the representation of the