A Vision For The Indian Nation

Salman Rushdie is one of the most outstanding Anglo-Indian novelists of contemporary English literature. Famous for his fantastical novels about the postcolonial relationship between cultures of the East and West, Rushdie is deemed as the godfather of postcolonial literature. On the one hand, he rejects the Western power discourse and cultural hegemony which the former empires attempt to continue imposing on the independent countries in the postcolonial context; on the other hand, he disagrees with the radical nationalism which the former colonies employ to counter the Western discourse.Midnight's Children is Rushdie's masterpiece, which won him the Booker Prize and then the"Booker of Bookers". By depicting the life of the protagonist and his family, the novel demonstrates the 60-year political and social reality of the Indian subcontinent during its transition from a British colony to a modern state of democracy. Since its publication in 1981, it has been decoded from the perspective of postcolonialism. This paper is also guided by the postcolonial theory, but in the aspect of multiculturalism stated in Edward Said's Orientalism. Intensive analysis is done to reveal that Midnight's Children is a novel which reflects a vision for the Indian nation. By mixing the Eastern and Western narratives, mishmashing the Indian dialects into the Standard English, and adopting the intertextuality of the Eastern and Western texts, the novel destabilizes the Western way of thinking which proposes the binary opposition structure, creates space for the former colonies to speak, and produces alternatives to the dominant discourse. Thus it deconstructs the Occidental power discourse. Then the paper reveals that multiculturalism instead of the radical nationalism should be reconstructed as a postcolonial discourse to fight against the power discourse through analyzing Midnight's Children Conference as a multicultural existence and the Indira Congress as an authoritarian organization. By analyzing the hybridity of the characters, the paper further strengthens the fact that the Orient and Occident are interactive and interdependent with each other; neither western hegemony nor radical nationalism is a way out, thus reinforcing that in the national path explorations, cultural tolerance should be one possible solution.