Midnight’s Children, then, has a double view of what historical reality is and how we can access it, but it does not dismiss the possibility of such access. While narrativist historiography argues that the achievement of a unified form and coherent explanation generate a discourse of “realism” that devi- ates from the real, Rushdie’s inversion of the trajectories of the narratable and the nonnarratable suggests that a unified form can resist explanation and, in doing so, more closely reference the historical past. At the same time, how- ever, Midnight’s Children acknowledges White’s most essential critique: that adherence to a particular narrative will necessarily exclude important events and shape others. This brings us back to Saleem’s errata. Like Saleem’s inclu- sion of narratable leftovers in the final chapter, the errata are real episodes of history that do not fit the unified form of Saleem’s narrative. Because they are both important and factually true, however, they must be included in the attempt to accurately portray the past.
The errata themselves may be considered antinarrative leftovers or, as suggested earlier, “disnarrated.” They are not part of Saleem’s narrative, per- haps, but they are included. While Saleem’s narrative asserts that Gandhi
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died on the same date as the premiere of The Lovers of Kashmir, the correc- tion to this error occurs outside of that narrative, as a leftover made present in the text. In the errata, the real world’s events encroach upon and interject into the fiction’s narrative, as something approximating the real world begins to crack into the fictional world in The Ground Beneath Her Feet. They do so, however, without replacing the fictional world’s version of events. This cre- ates a shadow narrative that haunts the story, with the real world’s facts and dates threatening to invalidate the “entire fabric” of Saleem’s narrative. The tension between the world of literalized metaphor and the shadow narration of its real counterpart defines a dialectics of history in Midnight’s Children. The novel suggests that we need not abandon narrative or figuration in order to represent historical reality, as long as we acknowledge their limitations, supplementing them with their disnarrated elements.
It is no accident that the largest mistake in Midnight’s Children surrounds Gandhi, for it is on his personage that most histories of modern India linger and which Saleem virtually ignores. Kortenaar makes the provocative claim that Rushdie’s near exclusion of Gandhi is a political polemic against the Mahatma’s influence upon Indian politics. In doing so, he argues that Rushdie promotes a liberal secular democratic ideal by replacing Gandhi with Shiva, unfairly biasing readers towards Saleem’s own Nehruvian politics and away from “the Gandhian and the transcendental” (“Midnight’s Children” 60). Eric Strand similarly configures Rushdie as anti-Gandhi, particularly in his embrace of “bourgeois materialism” (976). Both critics are correct in labeling Rushdie as humanist, secular, and democratic in his political sympathies, explicitly advocating such classic liberal values as “liberty; equality; frater- nity” elsewhere in his work (Shame 267). However, the characterization of Midnight’s Children as anti-Gandhi largely misses the point.
While Saleem never seems to consider the Mahatma as relevant to the history of India, the novel does, particularly when it overtly points to the fact that his exclusion threatens the coherence of Saleem’s narrative. How- ever, it is not only at the moment of Gandhi’s death that his absent pres- ence haunts Saleem’s story. In addition, the Amritsar Massacre, presented through the eyes of Aziz, is committed in response to a Gandhi-inspired pro- test and strike. While Aziz is the central figure of the episode and is clearly associated with Nehru, Gandhi’s influence towers over the event even though he is mentioned only briefly. Similarly, when Saleem remarks that Indira Gandhi is no relation to the Mahatma, it seems to merely provide historical context for Western readers, while indicting Indira’s policies (484).36 What
the comparison emphasizes, however, is Rushdie’s view of the Mahatma as fundamentally opposed to the type of rule enacted in the Emergency, one administered by force and maintained through the manipulation of religious
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schism. The Mahatma, the novel suggests, is the furthest thing from Indira. In this context, it is important to recall that Indira is Nehru’s daughter, even if she abandons his principles, complicating the simplistic view of Rushdie as a Nehru disciple.
This common view of Rushdie is curious considering his strenuous objections to the consideration of Nehru as a Gandhi disciple in the essay, “Attenborough’s Gandhi.” Here Rushdie insists that India’s greatest conflict in defining itself is in the choice between “Nehru, the urban sophisticate who wanted to industrialize India . . . and the rural, handicraft-loving, sometimes medieval figure of Gandhi” (Imaginary Homelands 104). However, Rushdie does not choose this image of Nehru over and against this image of Gandhi. Rather, he rejects both images as reductive and, in so doing, clarifies his vision of historical reference.37
The venom unleashed in Rushdie’s review of Gandhi is in reaction to more than the film but is certainly not directed against Gandhi himself. Rather, Rushdie objects to the Western tendency to paint the East as a font only of spiritual wisdom as opposed to modern knowledge and political savvy. This facet of Orientalist discourse38 places the East in a position of economic and
political dependency, while removing its positive attributes into a fictional world of metaphysics and spirituality that is difficult to access and has little practical utility. By subjugating Nehru to Gandhi, Attenborough’s film, argues Rushdie, participates in Orientalism, and the film’s widespread critical and popular acclaim confirms the appeal of such discourse in the West. While it is true that Rushdie opposes the widespread application of Gandhi’s doctrine of nonviolence (Imaginary Homelands 105), what he principally opposes is the transformation of Gandhi into a Christ figure. Instead, Rushdie insists that Gandhi was a human being with complex motives whose killing “was a political, not a mystical act” (104).39 Once again, this leads Rushdie to assert
the crucial distinction between fiction/mythmaking and lies: “Attenborough’s distortions mythologize, but they also lie” (104). Rushdie does not object to mythologizing, per se, except to the degree that such myths come at the expense of referential accuracy.40
Likewise, Rushdie’s final attack on Attenborough’s film is based not only on the possibility, but also on the necessity, of accurate historical referen- tiality within a storytelling medium. Importantly, he argues that referenti- ality can be recovered in the inclusion of much of what Attenborough has excluded: the national debate between Nehruvian and Gandhian politics, the motivation behind Gandhi’s assassination, Gandhi’s secular and religious sides, and more rounded portrayals of other leaders of the independence struggle. What Rushdie objects to is an inaccurate portrayal of the past that allows only one side of a national debate to be seen.
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In this regard, Rushdie is not merely a proponent of Nehruvian poli- tics. If he were, he would be asserting only one side of the Nehru/Gandhi divide and be just as guilty of simplistic reduction as Attenborough. Instead, he insists that showing only one side of this debate and obscuring historical facts to do so is the kind of lie that cannot be tolerated. Similarly, in his cri- tique of contemporary film portrayals of the East, he notes how “Brits” are inevitably at the center of such depictions, while Indians are “bit-players in their own history.” His objection is that such films suggest that only West- erners matter “and that is so much less than the whole truth that it must be called a falsehood” (Imaginary Homelands 90). Here again, Rushdie exhibits an ethics of inclusion, insisting that only a wide-ranging, all-inclusive rep- resentation can hope to contain a measure of truth. It is for this reason that Rushdie writes and promotes a certain kind of novel: “novels in which you try to include everything, what Henry James would call the ‘loose, baggy monsters’ of fiction” (“Midnight’s Children” 10).41
Rushdie clearly does prefer a Nehruvian secular nation to a religious communalist one, but he is also committed to a historical sense that includes past events that do not necessarily fit easily into his own ideology. Rushdie’s policy of historical representation follows the lead of Saleem’s family who brings him home from the hospital and refuses to discard any of the evi- dence of his birth. “Nothing was thrown away; baby and afterbirth were both retained” (140). In this case, while it is possible that mistakes are made (the Sinai family brings home Saleem, not Shiva, after all), it is clear that an effort is made to retain as much as possible. As Midnight’s Children illustrates, his- tory may then take a narrative form, as long as that form is supplemented with the nonnarrative episodes not easily integrated to it.
In regard to Gandhi, Saleem does marginalize his presence, but his con- sistent reference to his various errors nevertheless places a significant focus on the Mahatma. In addition, by pointing overtly to his mistakes, Rushdie encourages readers to fill in the gaps of Saleem’s linear, exclusive narrative in order to more closely encounter the historical past. Although Rushdie focuses on twentieth-century political and social history, he also acknowl- edges the importance of a larger, more transcendental history, when he refers to his existence within the Kali-Yuga, the Maha Yuga cycle, and the Day of Brahma (223). Likewise, and perhaps more importantly, while critics like Kortenaar and Strand accuse Rushdie of excluding the “Gandhian and the transcendental” (Kortenaar, “Midnight’s Children” 60), they overlook the form of Rushdie’s novel in doing so. If the Mahatma, for some, represents an ideal of hope and promise for India through allusions to a world beyond our own and through the application of extreme political practice, the fic- tional world of literalized metaphor that lies at the heart of Midnight’s Chil-
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dren serves much the same function. Rushdie’s novel does not then exclude the transcendental element of Indian history but includes it as an integral part of its magical realist form. To accuse Rushdie of correlating Shiva and Gandhi is then absurd, for it is Saleem whose narrative powers provide the transcendental hope that Shiva refuses in his focus on the “world of things.” Through the literalization of metaphor and the nonnarratable presence of the errata, Rushdie insists on the inclusion of Gandhian ideals alongside Saleem’s secularism and Shiva’s materialism.42
I do not wish to suggest that Rushdie somehow succeeds in presenting an all-inclusive history, but rather that he is able to suggest what is accu- rate about his account, as well as what is excluded. So, while it is true that Saleem’s bourgeois history and perspective can only show one facet of sub- continental history, Rushdie’s emphasis on the contingent nature of what is important enough to receive historical representation also gestures to that which is excluded. In particular, the baby-switch of Shiva and Saleem makes the reader note precisely what is missing. It is, after all, at least an even proposition that Shiva should receive Nehru’s letter and, if that occurs, an alternative synecdochic “part” would have to be considered central to the nation as metaphoric “whole.” Instead, Shiva, the inarticulate adopted son of the beggar, Wee Willie Winkie, is kept silent. In this way, the novel invokes Spivak’s well-known question of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” pointing to the contingent and ideological nature of what is typically considered history.
Rushdie here makes an implicit argument that the traditional fare of nar- rative historiography is not sufficient in itself to represent the truth of the past. In particular, while Saleem’s life is a reflection of bourgeois historiog- raphy in its tracing over of easily identifiable national histories like Stanley Wolpert’s, it is also filled with irrelevant and occasionally inconsistent events that pinpoint Saleem’s life as merely one among many. While Saleem focuses on his heroic and representative status throughout most of the novel, he does finally retreat from this stance. In this, Rushdie suggests to his readers that the tracing of Shiva’s life might just as easily be a key to uncovering truths of the past. In fact, other alternatives also exist, as both Padma and Parvati, postcolonial working-class women, exemplify the voices that Gayatri Spivak suggests have been not only obscured in historical discourse, but perhaps completely lost.
While Shiva, Padma, and Parvati are never afforded the opportunity to present their own stories in Midnight’s Children, Saleem’s conclusion that the “small individual lives of men, are preferable to all this inflated macrocosmic activity” (500), suggests that all lives deserve greater attention, especially con- sidering the contingent and/or ideological manner in which certain types of lives are chosen to represent history, as such.43 Padma, too, helps to voice this
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point of view when she accuses Saleem of being “too intellectual, too skep- tical, too out of touch” (Brennan, “Cultural Politics” 123). Rushdie’s social and class proximity to his protagonist also positions him as a target of this accusation. Although Saleem accuses Padma of “ignorance and superstition,” he does acknowledge that she is a counterbalance to his own biased point of view (37–38). Likewise, it is significant that renewed hope comes from the working classes: Shiva, Durga, and the umbrella man. The novel’s deployment of a “provincialized history” of male bourgeois India is then supplemented by an injunction to, like the Subaltern Studies collective, recover the lost voices of the “other” India. It is for this reason that David Price asserts that often the “focus is on the common, everyday experience of average people,” which “comprises a more accurate history” (“Salman Rushdie’s” 104).44 While this is
only partially true, it is an important part.
Unlike Waterland and Between the Acts, however, Rushdie’s novel does not assert the historical irrelevance of traditional history and narrative in order to epistemologically value the nonnarrative, the lack of progress and action, and the working class as opposed to their bourgeois counterparts. Rather, in the lives of both Saleem and Shiva, we have the suggestion that the macrocosmic, the metaphorical, and the narrative may provide us with ideals of progress, universalism, and meaning that are essential not only to our accessing of the historical past but also to our movement towards the future. At the same time, Saleem has a quotidian, even nonnarratable, side that, when coupled with the exclusion of similar details in Shiva’s life, stands in metonymically for the individual lives not represented in narrative histo- ries. This quotidian side of Saleem must be included if historical “baby and afterbirth” are to be retained.
Midnight’s Children, then, suggests that a combination of literary tech- niques can help us represent the past accurately. While Rushdie plays with the forms used to present history, he also insists that there is a real to be accessed and that the cost of obscuring that real is substantial. Whether it is the Amritsar Massacre, the Emergency, the Indo-Pakistani conflict, or simply the lives of those not given the opportunity to represent themselves, Rushdie points to events and personages buried in history and in rhetoric that must be recovered if political and social progress in the present is to be gained. In “Outside the Whale,” Rushdie notes that complete objectivity is “an unat- tainable goal,” but it is one for which, he insists, we must struggle (Imaginary Homelands 101). Likewise, Rushdie insists upon an ethics based upon the possibility of truth: “It seems to me imperative that literature enter . . . argu- ments, because what is being disputed is nothing less than what is the case, what is truth and what untruth” (100). Far from being an exercise in his- torical relativism, Midnight’s Children is an effort to enter into that argument.
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The first volume of Art Spiegelman’s comic-book Holocaust (auto)biog- raphy/memoir, Maus, closes with an expression of anger and despair at a lost connection with the past. When Spiegelman’s textual surrogate, Artie, expresses an interest in recovering his mother’s diary, his father Vladek has to admit that such a recovery is now impossible: “These notebooks [ . . . ] one time I had a very bad day . . . and all of these things I destroyed [ . . . ] These papers had too many memories. So I burned them” (158–59). Artie is already attempting to recover and chronicle his father’s Holocaust memories through a series of interviews, but the loss of this additional document prompts an angry response, “God damn you! You—You Mur- derer! How the hell could you do such a thing!!” (159). Although Artie soon puts on an apologetic face, in the final panel, in which Artie walks away from Vladek, he mutters “murderer” again (159). Artie here sees documents as tantamount to the thing itself. Anja, who committed sui- cide years earlier, dies again through the burning of her diary, investing the textual with an intense materiality.1