Midnight's Children: A Postmodern Writing Of Alternative History

Midnight's Children is the masterpiece of a contemporary Indian-English writer, Salman Rushdie. By depicting the vicissitudes of the protagonist's life, the novel mirrors the hardship encountered by Indian people during their transition from a British colony to a modern state of democracy. It also inveighs against the dictatorship of Mrs. Gandhi, especially during the period of Emergency. The highly personal account of alternative history reveals the constructedness of history, foregrounds its discursive and ideological embeddedness, and contests the conventional Western historiography based on realism and rationalism.Previous studies on the novel usually adopt the theory of post-colonialism and focus on the hybrid identity of both the protagonist and the nation. This thesis is guided by Linda Hutcheon's theory of historiographic metafiction. Intensive textual analysis is done to reveal that by adopting such techniques as parody, self-reflexivity and magical realism, the novel paradoxically installs and subverts history. Meanwhile, the use of above-mentioned postmodern writing techniques discloses subjectivity, constructedness, irrationality and non-linearity of history writing, thereby, deconstructing the grand narrative of conventional Western historiography.