Unity And Fragmentation

Salman Rushdie's masterpiece,“Midnight's Children”,combines the colonial and postcolonial Indian history with India's colorful myths and legends,creating a half true modern Indian epic.Rushdie absorbed abundant nutrition from Hindu mythology.His novel “Midnights Children” is full of images of Hindu mythology,and even a figure consists of a mixture of many mythological characters.However,the author argues that Rushdie's selection of archetypal characters from Hindu mythology is thoughtful and systematic,and the protagonists of his novel are mainly the Metamorphosis of the three main deities of Hinduism-Vishnu,Shiva and Devi.Therefore,this thesis expects to investigate the deformations of the three major Hindu gods in the novel and the profound significances of the deformation in the context of postcolonial India.The dissertation consists of three chapters.Chapter one shall probe the relationship between Saleem and the Hindu Lord God Vishnu,and with Rushdie's identity and his “imaginary homeland” theory,discuss the meaning of reshaping Vishnu in the post-colonial Indian context.Chapter two shall study the deformation of Shiva in the novel from the two aspects of destruction and reproduction,and compare Saleem and Shiva's integration with the Great God Vishnu and Shiva's.The discussion shall resort to the modern national notion and Partha Chatterjee's theory of the post-colonial Indian elite political domain and the subaltern political domain,and reveal the political implications.Chapter three shall look into the recurrence of goddess Devi in the three women of the novel-Indira,Amina,Nassim,and with Partha Chatterjee's theory of the colonial and post-colonial Indian middle-class women,the political significances of the deformation are revealed.By contrasting the main characters of the novel with the three Hindu deities,it can be seen that Rushdie intends to envision the whole of India as a unified whole,intending to imagine the country that was born on the land of India as a nation.He reposed hope in his novel,and the India is his imaginary homeland which he would like to belong to.But the fragmentation that is contained in the unity of the imagination reflects his disappointment with postcolonial India.