Deterritorialisations In Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Salman Rushdie is a world-renowned contemporary writer whose fictional explorations of issues such as postcolonialism,postmodernism,magic realism,and migrancy have elicited sustained critical attention.This thesis employs the concept of deterritorialisation proposed by Deleuze and Guattari,who conceive of deterritorialisation as the vector of transformation immanent to a fixed organisation,and examines Rushdie’s landmark novel,Midnight’s Children,from three perspectives:the novel’s destabilisation of arborescent thinking,its interrogation of stagnant and cramped creativity,and its subversion of the territorial lifestyle.The thesis consists of three parts.The first part is the Introduction,in which I briefly introduce Salman Rushdie and his fiction,review the published criticism and scholarship on Midnight’s Children,outline my theoretical framework,and describe the structure of this thesis.The second part,which is also the main body of this thesis,is composed of three chapters.Chapter One enquires into the novel’s materialist re-enactment of the Amritsar massacre,Saleem’s rhizomatic and antigenealogical pedigree,and Mumtaz’s premature devitalisation,and demonstrates how the novel,by highlighting the fact that the status quo is sustained by the closely regulated interactions of diverse bodies,argues for the necessity to deterritorialise the arborescent systems of thought.Chapter Two scrutinises the two distinct phases of Saleem’s life,during the first of which Saleem’s creative potential is found to be all but annihilated by his obsession with transcendent meaning,and during the second of which it is liberated with his disenchantment with the narrative of transcendence.In this manner,the novel dramatizes the need for deterritorialising the body’s creativity cramped by the dominant power relations.Chapter Three investigates the novel’s enactment of the antithesis between nostalgic migrants such as Jamila Singer and her father Ahmed Sinai and one-time pragmatically future-oriented nomads like Tai the boatman and Naseem,and argues that the novel,foregrounding the debilitating effects of nostalgia for transcendent fixity and the empowering force of nomadism as is characterised by pragmatic,sober optimism,identifies the nomadic lifestyle as the preferable way to inhabit the world.The third part is the Conclusion which sums up the main arguments of the thesis and contends that the novel,in consistently regarding deterritorialisation as the preferred mode of thinking,creation,and living,is dismissive of both imperialism and narrow-minded nationalism.Further,it suggests that this line of study may engender redefinitions of postmodernism and other cultural and literary movements.