The Politics Of Home In Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Salman Rushdie(1947-), one of the contemporary eminent writers of world literature, is recognized as the godfather of Post-colonial literature. The Bombay-born writer is marked by his keen observation towards a changing, sophisticated world landscape. Politics and history construct the core of Rushdie’s novels. Midnight’s Children, which was adjudged as the “Best of the Booker” and the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its thirty-four years history, has renowned the author with worldwide reputation. The fiction has drunk deeply from the well of India and has rebuilt a grandiose imaginary homeland to memorize the passing history of the writer’s forever motherland. It tends to be known as a fantasy in the west, and a realistic fiction in the eyes of India with a charm of kaleidoscope which provides different readers with distinct review.The aim of the thesis is to investigate the possibility of a combining engagement between Salman Rushdie’s texts and geographical landscape. The thesis argues that the writer challenges the public recognition of authentic identity and writing tradition by gleeful merging of western images and Indian tradition, realism and magic realism.Three main points of view build the backbone of this paper from perspectives of geography, history and the literary text so as to prove that home is the basic unit of the author’s imagined community in the contemporary globalized world.The paper starts with the systematic introduction of former studies to illustrate the background and essentiality of this topic. The first chapter presents alternative identities of the writer with the description of location. It reveals Rushdie’s experience of migration, dual roots and the spatial view in a sense of geographical themes. The non-existent homeland in Midnight’s Children provides an interlocutor space to hold this diasporic writer’s nostalgia in a globalized media-rich world. The writer chooses a specific angle to narrate a collapsing Indian society, associated with a particular environment of the western invasion. The politics of home is the writer’s solution to find the identity representation for those hybrid protagonists of British and Indian culture. The second chapter explores the relationship between the textual history andthe reality. The protagonists, the text and the reality covering Indian political, cultural,economic and social circumstance diachronically mirror the evolution of the comprehension of home. The concept of identity and home has different representations in diverse contexts with the author mapping the landscape of diaspora in the postcolonial era. The last chapter analyzes the writing style of Salam Rushdie.The literary modes that the writer adapts contribute to his uniqueness of been a diaspora writer. The western canons, traditional Indian ballads, movies themes and song elements deprive him of the right as a British or an Indian. An imaginary homeland is the appropriate solution for the ambivalence and contradiction of being a British Orientalist. A further conclusion could be drawn that homes, regions and places are significant components in Salman Rushdie’s writing. His exploration for identity in the location dilemma is an experiment and encouraging adventure of the identity for the rootless immigrants in the postmodern world.