Midnight's Children and the Allegory of History

Article published in «ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature» — 1995 — v. 26 — n. 2, April — pp. 41-62.Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children is commonly read as a national allegory giving imaginative form to India and its history. As such, it has become the central text in Indian literature written in English: "it sounds like a continent finding its voice," reads the blurb from the New York Times on the cover of the Picador paperback. Indian critics, in particular, read the novel as a national allegory that can be criticized for the things it has left out or the things it has gotten wrong. Yet Timothy Brennan argues that Midnight's Children is a cosmopolitan text that exposes the false consciousness of nationalism, and many, such as Homi Bhabha and Gyan Prakash, celebrate Rushdie's transcendence of the nation-state. And other critics, such as David Birch, read the novel as a radically unstable postmodern allegory, a denial of the very possibility of meaning. Critical reception of the novel thus has accorded it a paradoxical status: by virtue of its exuberance and ambition it is a celebration (albeit a critical one) of India the modern nation; at the same time it exposes the ideological underpinnings of the nation, which stands revealed as a fiction manipulated by the classes that control the state.